Original article from: CNN
A federal judge late Friday blocked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive that limited ballot drop boxes to one per county.
Several groups had filed suit over the controversial directive, issued last week, because they felt it would suppress voters — particularly in larger counties.
Judge Robert Pitman agreed, writing, “By limiting ballot return centers to one per county, older and disabled voters living in Texas’s largest and most populous counties must travel further distances to more crowded ballot return centers where they would be at an increased risk of being infected by the coronavirus in order to exercise their right to vote and have it counted.”
LEFT VIEWPOINTS
Voter fraud isn’t a problem. Voter suppression is.
- When slavery ended, the fight for equal voting rights began. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln put Andrew Johnson (a racist southern Democrat) in the White House. Johnson. Johns would veto two the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, empowering black voter suppression that we still experience today.
- Today, it’s the conservative Republicans who attempt to suppress African-American and Latino voters. The Parties shifted, but the issues are the same; the Party that fears the majority actively attempts to suppress democracy.
- Voter suppression is always disguised as something legitimate. Common voter suppression tactics today include: purging voter records, requiring difficult registration laws, understaffing polling locations in certain districts, restricting absentee or vote early ballots, and limiting places where people can vote.
- In addition to being safer during a pandemic, mail-in and drop-off voting are more convenient for people who work during the day. Mail-in voting and drop-off voting give people more flexibility to vote and research the issues as they fill in their ballots.
Why is Voter Suppression still an issue?
The Voting Rights Act of 1865 helped to prevent voter suppression in the south. In 2013, the conservative Supreme Court ruled against Section 5 of the Voter Rights Act in Shelby vs Holder.