<snip> the right wing vote stealers are well-practiced, in many jurisdictions, in tactics like sending the most broken down voting machines to the poorest areas, ruling millions of would-be voters off the rolls with felony-conviction restructions. Lazy pundits like Michael Eric Dyson lean on the discredited myth that Ralph Nader's Green vote in 2000 cost Al Gore the election. But Gore's home state of Tennessee alone, which George Bush carried, ruled half a million ex-felons, most of them black and all of them poor, off the ballot, and more than a dozen other states where his margin was thin did the same. There's vote caging, in which categories of voters are identified and targeted with misleading information about their eligibility to vote or selectively challenged. And in addition to all these, voter ID laws have been enacted in twenty or thirty states specifically aimed at lowering the number of eligible voters among the demographic groups least likely to vote Republican.
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Instead of leaving it to the officials of two thousand independent counties and cities, a constitutional right to vote amendment would require the same federal standards applied across the country for how voting machines are tested, purchased and operated, and a uniform standard for how votes cast are counted. It would establish the legal grounds for lawsuits against electronic voting regimes that don't contain paper trails and cannot be audited.
A constitutional right to vote would establish the same standards across the country for who can vote, and require that whatever measures officials undertake to positively identify voters do not measurably infringe on the rights of legitimate voters who might lack photo ID, and make almost inevitable the end of felony disenfranchisement as well as opening the way to federal interference in the currently widespread practice of legislative gerrymandering.
The courts will not overrule the blizzard of assaults in dozens of states and local jurisdictions against the right to vote. There are really no other legal remedies. Call it unrealistic for the next two or four or ten years, a campaign to amend the US Constitution and include the right to vote is the only way to address the many-sided drive to bar millions of left-leaning voters from the polls.
The idea was spelled out in an insightful 2001 book by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and Frank Watkins, titled
Toward A More Perfect Union, Advancing New American Rights. Jackson and Watkins note that the fact the US Constitution does NOT award the right to vote, the right to an education, the right to a job, a clean environment, the right to organize unions and strike and so on, makes all these basic human rights contingent on the whims of courts and legislators at any given moment.
http://blackagendareport.com/conten...-what-real-“protect-vote”-movement-would-look
