INDIVISIBLE Lambertville NJ / New Hope PA

Category: Voting Rights

  • Voting Rights Watch

    Contributed by Deb Kline.

    Four months after the 2020 election which saw the biggest voter turnout in history, 43 states have introduced 250 new laws aimed at restricting voting. With 14 bills before the state legislature, Pennsylvania is second only to Arizona in seeking to limit access, followed by Georgia and New Hampshire. A wide range of constraints include limits to mail-in balloting, early voting, voter ID and Election Day. For those who are pushing such measures, the claim is that the proposals will protect the integrity of elections. We know differently. 

    On the other hand, Democrats are pushing federal legislation to expand access across the country that could override state limitations. The For the People act, which passed in the House earlier this month, seeks to protect and expand voting rights, increase transparency and security in the electoral process, and get big money out of politics. Now in the Senate, the Skopos Labs prognosis gives the bill an 83% chance of passage. 

    The likelihood of voter restriction bills becoming law depends on the political make-up of each state, and those with a solid red three-way bloc have a better chance of success than those with mixed legislature and governors. Currently, Governor Wolf is likely to veto any bills that pass Pennsylvania’s GOP-heavy legislature, and the legislature is unlikely to be able to override his veto based on its current make-up. In Pennsylvania, an override requires ⅔ of those elected to vote against the veto and the Republicans do not hold that much of a majority. 

    While it’s easy to point to THE BIG LIE as the instigator of the growing number of anti-voting access proposals, the truth is that limiting voting has long been part of the conservative strategy. The belief that only certain people should participate in the electoral process and the running of the country goes back to the dawn of the country and has been a battle fought repeatedly. For every gain, there’s been a step or two or three backwards. 

    For those of us who believe in equality, the battle goes on and it’s incumbent on us to shine a light on those attempts to roll back voting access. Election lawyer Marc Elias expects to continue being busy as these proposals become law and subsequently end up in court. He urges citizens and media to be alert: 

     “I am begging America and the media to pay attention to this. Right now we are facing an avalanche of voter suppression that we have not seen before, at least not since Jim Crow. In state after state—it’s not just Iowa; it’s not just Georgia; it’s not just Arizona… It’s also Montana. It’s also Missouri. It’s also Florida. It’s also Texas. The list goes on and on. Donald Trump told a Big Lie that led to an assault on democracy in the Capitol on January 6. The assaults we’re seeing going on now in state capitols with the legislatures may be less deadly, and be less violent, but they are every bit as damaging to our democracy.” 

    ACTIONS: 

    • Contact your U.S. Senators and demand they support S1: The For The People Act of 2021
    • Contact your Pennsylvania legislators to reject changes to Act 77 that rollback voting access
    • Build power: Use your “Truth Sandwich” create awareness about the need to expand voting access and counter arguments that the proposals will support election integrity

    Sources:

    https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-february-2021

    https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/pennsylvania-republican-legislators-repeal-voting-by-mail-20210203.html

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/voting-restrictions-republicans-states/

    https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/hr1

    Know the Opposition: Read what the Conservatives are saying about HR1

  • Just the Facts:  Expanded and Contracted Voting Rights in NJ

    Contributed by Olga Vanucci.

    • Year in which New Jersey gave the right to vote to women and free Blacks:  1776
    • Number of other states that did the same at the time:  Zero
    • Minimum value of property owned that allowed someone to vote:  50 pounds
    • Typical value of property owned by married women:  Zero
    • Number of women who were found to have voted based on poll records:  At least 163
    • Number of free Black men who voted based on poll records:  At least 4, including 2 from the Hopewell Valley
    • Number of free Black women who voted as identified in poll records:  None
    • Year in which New Jersey revoked the right to vote to all but white male taxpayers, following, according to the New York Times, “charges of rampant fraud and corruption, as newspapers filled with tales of elections thrown into chaos by incompetent and easily manipulated ‘petticoat electors,’ to say nothing of men who put on dresses to vote five, six, seven times:”  1807  [It’s unclear why men couldn’t vote five, six, seven times wearing trousers.]

     

    Sources:  When Women Lost the Vote: A Revolutionary Story, 1776 – 1807 – Museum of the American Revolution (amrevmuseum.org) and

    On the Trail of America’s First Women to Vote – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and

    Uncovering a Cemetery’s Lost Black History, Stone by Stone – The New York Times (nytimes.com) – article about Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills, from Hopewell, who spoke to ILNH about their research

  • Celebrating the 19th Amendment, And the Long Road to Equality in Voting

    Contributed by Sharon M. Hallanan.

    Imagine working on a project that you care about so deeply that you devote your entire life to it. You dive into it with great passion, and even get arrested for breaking rules that are demonstrably unjust and unfair.  

    If you tuned in to last month’s Indivisible Zoom Community Gathering, you heard me speak with deep admiration and respect for Congressman John Lewis, who died on July 17, after a lifetime of fighting for voting rights, among other important civil rights and progressive causes.

    But although that opening paragraph well describes the life led by Congressman John Lewis, it also describes the fierce fighters for women’s suffrage. Women whose names you may know, and many, many, many others, worked tirelessly for many long years to try to secure women’s right to vote.  

    This year, and this month particularly, we’re celebrating a significant milestone in that fight – the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states simply that regarding the citizen’s right to vote, the United States and each of the individual States are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sex.

    That amendment became officially part of the Constitution on August 26. 1920, so certainly on August 26 this year, we should celebrate! But to truly appreciate that milestone, let’s realize how very hard fought a victory it was.

    You’ve all heard of Susan B. Anthony, right? Did you know that she, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, all worked for decades to advocate for women’s right to vote, and yet none of them lived long enough to ever legally vote?  They each tried anyway, but were turned away, and Anthony was arrested for her attempt. She adamantly refused to ever pay the fine!  Stanton and Anthony worked together on suffrage issues for 50 years – would you have persevered that long? It’s a sad truth regarding the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY, that of the 68 women attendees who signed that Convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, only Charlotte Woodward was alive on Election Day 1920, and at age 91, she was ill that day, bedridden and unable to vote.

    Not surprisingly, when Alice Paul of New Jersey began working in the U.S. women’s suffrage movement in 1910, after having worked in the suffrage movement in England, she took a single-minded approach to the task. Recognizing the many important social issues that the suffragists before her had tackled simultaneously, Paul was committed to focus solely on voting, and to seek to amend the Constitution to secure that right for women.  She organized the massive 1913 suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., and led the Silent Sentinels, the group of women who in 1917 picketed daily in front of the White House to demand the right to vote. These women faced arrests and imprisonment, and went on hunger strikes, to keep the suffrage issue in the forefront of public attention and demand change.

    As in so many things, the suffrage issue was much more difficult and complex for African American women.  They wanted equal voting rights, but had many other fundamental issues to address too.  With life-or-death battles against slavery and lynching, they could not afford limiting their energies solely to voting rights, but they did work hard on that issue, despite facing racist attitudes, including from other suffragists.  They were aware that the 19th Amendment’s ratification would be only a beginning to securing voting equality. They saw that Black men, who should have had secure voting rights since the 15th Amendment’s ratification in 1870, were instead denied full voting rights with poll taxes, reading tests, and other racist challenges.  Therefore, through the National Association of Colored Women and other such Black women’s clubs, which had been formed as early as 1793, Black women fought for voting equality from long before 1920, and continued through the adoption of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and beyond.

    So much struggle, so many setbacks, over so many decades.  But, nevertheless, women persisted. And slowly but steadily, it has made a profound impact, with currently more than 100 women in Congress, a woman serving as Speaker of the House, and a woman nominee for Vice President on the Democratic ticket in 2020. If you agree that this representation makes a big difference in how public policies are crafted and in how society views the potential of women and girls, please help spread the word that August 26, officially designated by Congress as “Women’s Equality Day,” is a wonderful day worthy of celebration. And I think that the best way to truly celebrate this achievement is to VOTE, VOTE, VOTE – in every election, every year!