Hillary: Fight Efforts to ‘Disenfranchise’ Minorities, Poor and Young

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton urged people to fight “efforts to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, and poor people, and young people” on Thursday’s broadcast of “Keeping It Real with Al Sharpton.”

Hillary stated, “There is doubt that the voting rights of Americans are under attack. Our Constitution guarantees the right to vote. So, we need to focus on repairing the Voting Rights Act and fighting efforts to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, and poor people, and young people. We should be doing everything we can to make voting easier, not harder.”

She then touted ideas such as universal, automatic voter registration, creating at least 20 days of “early in-person voting, including weekends and evenings in every state.” She also urged Congress to pass legislation to “repair the damage to the Voting Rights Act done by the Supreme Court in 2013, and to implement the recommendation of President Obama’s bipartisan commission to improve voting.”

Hillary was also asked if she expected the issue of voting to come up in that night’s GOP presidential debate. She answered, “I don’t think I need to watch it. Nearly everybody standing on that stage, in the first or the second debate, has either actively sought to limit the right to vote in their states, or supported the efforts to limit the right to vote, if they were not governors, but were in the Congress. I personally think that it is so nakedly partisan to try to limit the electorate, to try to pick and choose who among our fellow citizens should be encouraged or discouraged from voting. It is part of their electoral strategy. We are seeing in state after state. And in both the 2012 and 2014 elections, we have evidence about how the aggressive efforts to discourage voting, to make it really difficult for groups of our fellow citizens to exercise their rights, really did have an impact. So, I expect them all to give lip service to the idea that has been disproved repeatedly, but which they use to justify their partisan goals, namely, that there is this massive amount of voter fraud going on. Every independent group that has ever looked at this issue has concluded the same way, which is that is just not true. But it doesn’t stop them from trotting it out and trying to justify the unjustifiable.”

Hillary also vowed to “appoint Supreme Court justices who care more about protecting an individual’s right to vote than a billionaire’s right to buy an election.”

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