By Annisa Karim
Collier County Democratic Party Chairwoman
On August 26, 1920, the US Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution granting women full and equal voting rights.
As we celebrate the 99th anniversary of women winning the right to vote this month, let’s acknowledge that not all women won the right to vote in 1920. Indeed, there were men who still could not vote either.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, southern states passed Jim Crow laws to segregate people based on color and suppress poor and racial minority voters. At the same time, gerrymandering allowed elected officials to put the final nail in the coffin of African-American suffrage efforts. Most of these voter suppression tactics were made illegal after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But while the Voting Rights Act was a huge step forward, we know that 1965 was not the end of voter suppression. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case (Shelby vs. Holder) regarding some provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The ruling effectively ended the practice requiring certain jurisdictions to ask for pre-approval before making changes to voting practices. Pre-approval was supposed to make sure that changes did not discriminate against protected minorities. Six years after the pre-approval provision was nixed, nearly 1,000 polling places have been closed in the U.S., with many of them in predominantly African-American counties.
After this 2103 ruling, virtually all the barriers to voting were erected by Republicans (according to The New York Times). It doesn’t end there. Recently, the Republican controlled legislature and our very own Republican governor in Florida, enacted measures making it harder for people to vote.
Tucked away in a larger election bill, they inserted language that said that all early voting sites must have “sufficient non-permitted parking.” That sounds harmless, right? Except think about which early voting sites would be most affected… every campus of a large university in Florida.
This is essentially just like the defeated measure that attempted to remove universities as early voting locations. Then again, some voter suppression legislation wasn’t sneaky at all.
Amendment 4 – Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative – passed by 64.55 percent in November 2018 yet the Republican stranglehold in our Legislature resulted in SB 7066. This measure enacted in 2019, will prevent hundreds of thousands of these returning citizens from voting.
According to the ACLU, “The bill’s definitions of murder and felony sexual offenses are so broad that they improperly exclude individuals for unrelated or inapplicable crimes far beyond what is required by the language of Amendment 4. Further, if implemented, the language will exclude too many individuals with outstanding financial obligations because it requires those individuals to pay despite their financial obligations no longer being part of their criminal sentence.”
In response to Florida Republicans’ long history of voter suppression — underlined by the recent passage of SB 7066, that created a poll tax on ex-felons and would have invalidated 53,929 mail-in ballots if it were law in 2018 — the Florida Democratic Party announced a year-round voter protection program to tackle this growing threat to Floridians right to vote.
As part of the program launch, the Florida Democratic Party named Brandon Peters as its new Voter Protection Director. Peters is the first person to fill this role for the Party in a year-round capacity. Florida is the second state party in nation to hire full-time voter protection director.
Remember this: EQUALITY THREATENS PRIVILEGE. As we continue to work towards making sure that every eligible person is registered to vote and every registered voter gets to the polls, we are faced with barriers.
That’s why we work hard every day to overcome those barriers. We cannot do this alone. We need your help. Getting involved in the Democratic Party or with a club or caucus is essential to making sure that we are successful in the next election and in years to come.