Page 43 - Preclearance News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

This piece is essential. >> so this is the provision of the voting rights act called plea -- preclearance and let me give you an example that i've actually dealt with. say you get to be a couple of weeks out from election and all of a sudden, a municipality or a state start closing polling places and a majority minority neighborhood, making it much more difficult for people and their neighborhood to go out and vote while maybe it's justified by voting numbers or maybe it's the result of racial animus and an effort to suppress those votes under preclearance, the state and alabama, a great examp...

Under pre-clearance the state of bament alabama bam couldn't do that without the doj or a court in d.c. now they can make any changes they want to, they can prune people off of voter rolls, they can close polling places and the i.d. requirements that are so restrictive for voting rights so we need a return to preclearance if we're going to keep people -- texas is a great example, the courts found there was intentional discrimination as some of the new rules were passed if we're going to keep those states out of the business of suppressing the rights of legitimate voters to vote. >> here is the...

Happen across the country. >> thank you for having, me all. you're exactly right. that was part of the purpose of the 1965 voting act to begin with, especially section five doubles gutted several years ago. but the part of the purpose was to avoid exactly what we are seeing. avoiding that states would be able to take away our rights, or counties would be able to take away our rights and would have to find it county by county, and the justice department would have to correct the wrong. part of the purpose of the voting rights act was to give that preclearance power so that before these changes ...

But it really is up to congress to legislate, make things like going on in texas can't happen across the country. >> yes, ali. thanks for having me, and you're exactly right. that was actually part of the big purpose of the 1965 voting rights act to begin with, particularly section 5 which was eventually gutted several years ago. but part of the purpose was to avoid exactly what you're seeing, avoiding states would be able to take away our rights or localities would take away our rights and we'd have to fight it state by state, county by county. part of the purpose of the voting rights act was...

Pre1965. in many ways you've gone back to a jim crow republic where the states can enact all of these efforts to deny and dilute the rights of african-americans and other voters of color and the department of justice is now in a position of trying to seek them out and seek out the injustices. it's costly, time-consuming, and relies on witnesses to bring information forward. that's why it's so important that these federal bills be enacted, this that we see h.r. 1 pass, we see hr 4 passed. because although the john lewis voting rights advancement act would look back and look at the states' histo...