Open Letter to Congress on Voting Rights
We urge your strong support for the Freedom to Vote Act. We think it does four vital things to preserve and protect our American Democracy: 1) it assures and guarantees voting rights for all American citizens above the age of 18 and facilitates their rights to exercise their franchise by voting in person or by mail; 2) it protects state and local election officials from intimidation and coercion when administering elections and tabulating the vote; 3) it assures a fair and accurate count and audits of election results, and 4) it bars partisan gerrymandering.
Tom Paine best captured the spirit of our nation’s founding principles – “The true and only basis of representative government is equality of rights. Every man has a right to one vote, and no more in the choice of representatives.” Thomas Paine, Dissertation on the First Principles of Government (1795) https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch13s40.html Our founding documents and our Constitution enshrines the right to vote as the pillar of our democracy. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Declaration of Independence 1776
In the aftermath of many of our nation’s wars (both civil and foreign) to protect American democracy, we added amendments to the US Constitution to secure, advance and protect the rights of our nation’s citizens to vote in our elections – the 14th, the 15th, the 16th, the 24th and the 26th Amendments. The Supreme Court spoke eloquently of the Constitutional protections of the right to vote and the principle of one man one vote in its 8-1 decision in Reynolds v. Sims 377 US 533 (1964). “Undoubtedly, the right of suffrage is a fundamental matter in a free and democratic society. Especially since the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized.”
“The right to vote freely for the candidate of one's choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government. And the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.”
“Undeniably, the Constitution of the United States protects the right of all qualified citizens to vote, in state as well as in federal, elections. A consistent line of decisions by this Court in cases involving attempts to deny or restrict the right of suffrage has made this indelibly clear. It has been repeatedly recognized that all qualified voters have a constitutionally protected right to vote, Ex parte Yarbrough, 110 U. S. 651, and to have their votes counted, United States v. Mosley, 238 U. S. 383. In Mosley, the Court stated that it is "as equally unquestionable that the right to have one's vote counted is as open to protection . . . as the right to put a ballot in a box." 238 U.S. Page 377 U. S. 555 at 238 U. S. 386. The right to vote can neither be denied outright, Guinn v. United States, 238 U. S. 347, Lane v. Wilson, 307 U. S. 268, nor destroyed by alteration of ballots, see United States v. Classic, 313 U. S. 299, 313 U. S. 315, nor diluted by ballot box stuffing, Ex parte Siebold, 100 U. S. 371, United States v. Saylor, 322 U. S. 385. As the Court stated in Classic, Obviously included within the right to choose, secured by the Constitution, is the right of qualified voters within a state to cast their ballots and have them counted. . . ."
Vital protections of the right to vote are proposed to be codified and implemented in the Freedom to Vote Act due to two important recent developments. The first involves controversial state legislation in Texas, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere to suppress, roll back and deny US citizens their rights to vote and to have their votes fairly counted. The second involves a series of recent Supreme Court decisions such as Shelby County v. Holder 570 US 529 (2013) and Brnovich v. DNC 594 US __ (2021) that weaken Sections 2 and 5 of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1965 and its protections of the rights of US citizens to vote for the candidates of their choice. Recently in Ruchco v. Common Cause , 139 S. Ct. 2484 (2019), both the majority and the dissenting Supreme Court justices agreed that partisan gerrymandering by Democrats and Republicans was a pernicious practice that needed to be stopped; the Court’s majority justices, however, said that partisan gerrymandering was a “political question”, and it was therefore the responsibility of Congress acting under Art.1, Sec. 4 of the US Constitution, not the Supreme Court to fix it.
In the past, Congress has acted to secure and protect US citizens rights to vote under Art.1, Sec. 4 of the US Constitution – the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the federal Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984, the Motor Voter Act of 1993, and the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
We urge you to act now at a time when citizens’ participation in voting is at an all-time high, and yet their distrust in the voting process and results have also reached historic highs. Two thirds of voters are concerned about voter suppression, and 38% lack confidence in the fairness of American elections. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/12/38-of-americans-lack-confidence-in-election-fairness/ Thank you for your consideration of our views on the Freedom to Vote Act; we urge you to act promptly to secure its passage.
Lucien Wulsin,