From today’s Daily Kos:
Republicans’ ongoing voter suppression campaign made headlines this week after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the state must immediately restore voting rights to former felons. While the court’s ruling is a major civil rights victory, it’s also a drop in the bucket compared to the GOP’s professionalized, nationwide efforts to keep certain Americans away from the ballot box.
Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen’s plan to strip voting rights from over 7,000 Nebraskans is a slap in the face to democracy. It’s also a shockingly common form of election interference. Republicans have spent decades and millions of dollars crafting state laws designed to ensure permanent GOP majorities, even if that means overriding their own citizens’ wishes and steamrolling legally binding ballot measures. So far, they’ve faced almost no legal resistance.
The end result is a broken system that prevents nearly 6 million Americans from casting a ballot, while millions more are subjected to the equivalent of an unconstitutional poll tax. That’s just fine with Republicans—and things will get even worse if GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump wins a second term in November.
Republican efforts to keep former felons from voting are aided by a patchwork of laws that make the process of restoring voting rights confusing, costly, or even impossible. Take Virginia, where in 2021 Gov. Ralph Northam signed an executive order automatically restoring voting rights to all nonincarcerated Virginians. Not even a year later, newly elected Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin quietly reversed that order, instead requiring former felons to submit a request for voting rights restoration to the state.
The result was widespread confusion and a near-total dropoff in former felons regaining their voting rights. Midway through Youngkin’s first year in office, only about 800 Virginians had regained their voting rights. Earlier this year, a federal court dismissed a challenge to Youngkin’s restrictive new approach on a technicality, meaning the process remains in place ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
Read the complete story here.