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voter suppression

  • The Blame Game Has Already Started: The Myth of the Depressed Black Turnout

    Apparently, the fate of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, if not the American republic, falls on the shoulders of African-American voters. This week, CNN rang the alarm bells with an article stating that the black vote was declining, with 24 million early votes cast. Politico followed suit with a story about how weak African-American turnout in Florida…

    By

    Jason Johnson

    Published

  • All That 'Rigged' Talk Overshadows the Very Real and Active Suppression of Black Votes

    Frantically saving himself from the rat-a-tat of queries from skeptical black journalists at a rushed “off record” session at the GOP headquarters months ago, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus dropped the only mic he could think of to shut up the crowd: “I used to work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.” Many in…

    By

    Charles D. Ellison

    Published

  • Civil Rights Groups Ready to Stand Up to Voter Intimidation

    Gabrielle Gray is a little busy these days. The 26-year-old doctoral student in political science at Howard University is coordinating the school’s 2016 Presidential General Election Voter Protection Project. It involves putting together teams of students from HBCUs around the nation to keep voters of color from being intimidated at the polls on Election Day.…

    By

    Allison Keyes

    Published

  • 94-Year-Old Black Judge Writes Scathing Dissent in Ohio’s Longest-Running Civil Rights Case

    Federal appeals judge Damon Keith is one of several black judges involved in Ohio’s longest-running voting lawsuit, one that strikes at the heart of voter suppression in one of the most significant of the “battleground states.” And he’s not the only one. In the decade-old case, Judge Keith said he was “deeply saddened and distraught”…

    By

    The Root Staff

    Published

  • In Missouri, Everywhere: Voting Matters

    Ever since this country was founded, access to the ballot has been intentionally restricted in order to keep people of color from voting. From North Carolina to Texas and Georgia, politicians are trying every trick in the book to stay in power. Rarely, however, does the attack on voting rights become as starkly illustrative of…

    By

    The Root Staff

    Published

  • 8 Ways They'll Try to Stop You From Voting and How to Fight Back

    It started in 2000, right after one of the narrowest presidential elections in history, and it surged again, right after President Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008: voter suppression. (Humph, wonder why.) From limited voting access, stringent ID requirements and gerrymandering to criminal disenfranchisement, voter suppression is on the rise. Why? Because one group of…

    By

    Chanté Griffin

    Published

  • Va. Gov. to Restore Voting Rights to 200,000 Ex-Offenders 

    In what some will surely call “executive advocacy” (or abuse), the governor of Virginia will sign a staggering number of individual clemency grants to restore the voting rights of thousands of ex-offenders in the state after a court decision Friday threatened to take them away, reports ThinkProgress. In a 4-3 decision late Friday, the Supreme…

    By

    The Root Staff

    Published