Engraved on the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. is the phrase “What’s Past Is Prologue,” lifted from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. While it is sometimes easier, and certainly more encouraging, to focus on the future of voting rights in the U.S., this engraving serves as a reminder that we must learn from the mistakes of the past to set the context for the present.
If you weren’t paying attention (and we can’t blame you—not everyone is as obsessed with this stuff as we are), today marks the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision on Shelby v. Holder – a landmark voting rights case that has had some serious implications over the past year.
Let’s take a step back. In 1964, civil rights activists launched a grassroots campaign to register minority voters in the south in what became known as Freedom Summer. When volunteers were met with violence, national outrage sparked a movement in Washington to protect voting rights for minorities, resulting in the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).
The law basically prohibits states from passing discriminatory voting laws and keeps an eye on states with a history of discrimination. These states have to get preclearance from the Justice Department before they pass any new voting laws to ensure that there are no discriminatory effects. The law needs to be re-authorized every ten years, but has never faced any problems… until last year.
Shelby County, Alabama, wasn’t happy with the Department of Justice looking over its shoulder, and took its case to the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision last June, the Court struck down a portion of the VRA, a shining monument to the Civil Rights movement, which received support from a near unanimous Congress in 2006. As of today, no state, even those with a history of discriminatory election practices, must obtain preclearance before changing their election laws and policies.
There has been a little bit of a tug of war since then. On one side, you have people like Congressmen Sensenbrenner, Conyers, and Leahy, who proposed the Voting Rights Amendment Act to fix the gaping hole in the Voting Rights Act after the Shelby case. On the other, you have states like Texas and North Carolina that jumped on the opportunity to pass new, restrictive voting laws in the absence of federal oversight.
But as Shakespeare says, what’s past is prologue. The messy history of discrimination and disenfranchisement in the U.S. has to come to an end at some point, and we have a pretty optimistic view of the future.
One of the strongest barriers to voting in the U.S. is registration. Most states require you to register to vote at least three weeks before the election, and each state has its own rules and deadlines. These rules are constantly changing and it’s a huge challenge to stay on top of these updates. Over the past 25 years, Rock the Vote has been making noise at music festivals and on TV, and we’ve registered more than 6 million voters. But there’s never an end: every year, 12% of people in the U.S. move to a new residence. Every day, nearly 12,000 people turn 18. We’ve been running full speed ahead just trying to keep up.
Fortunately, there are some people who are working to make voting easier.
On Sunday, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York announced a new bill to require states to implement online voter registration. So far, 20 states use online voter registration, three have limited online registration in place, and four have online voter registration on the way. This bill would bring the remaining 23 online so that anyone in the United States could register to vote from a phone, tablet, or computer.
Not bad.
At a press conference on Sunday, Sen Gillbrand said, “If a bank can figure out how to allow you to do your baking online, we can figure out how to register to vote online.” That sounds like reasonable logic to us. This is the kind of change that would have a lasting impact on voting in the U.S.—particularly for web-native Millennials. We can’t help but get excited.
On the other side of the aisle, Republican Senator Rand Paul announced this week that he is introducing a bill to restore voting rights to nonviolent felons in federal elections. It is old news that our prison population has a disproportionate number of minorities—many of whom are convicted for minor offenses. As Paul said, “Some of the leaders in the African-American community … can’t vote. It is something that is consistent with my religious beliefs as well as my lawmaking that you should get a second chance.”
We’ve come a long way since 1964, when civil rights workers were killed trying to register black voters, but we still have a lot to learn from the past. The Carnegie Foundation of New York just launched a campaign this summer called Freedom Now to commemorate the lives lost in the fight for voting rights 50 years ago.
While there is certainly cause for optimism in the fight for voting rights, we would be amiss to march forward without recognizing or appreciating the groundwork that thousands of activists laid before us. As Shakespeare said, “What’s Past Is Prologue.” It’s up to us to write the next chapter.