A Universal Right to Vote
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/opinion/a-universal-right-to-vote.html?_r=0
These more recent battles over ballot access show how important it is to build new legislative protections for participation in democracy. Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires areas with a history of discrimination to pre-clear any electoral changes with the Justice Department, remains a significant tool to prevent abuses in areas spread across 15 states, and it should be upheld by the court. But no matter what happens to the act, it’s imperative that Congress take action to prevent these kinds of abuses across the rest of the country.
...
What’s really needed is a new act that makes access to the polls a universal American right. The Voting Rights Act remains necessary to prevent continuing racial discrimination, but bringing lawsuits under Section 2 of the act (which applies to the entire country and is not being challenged) is enormously difficult and costly. Preliminary injunctions to stop discriminatory election practices outside covered areas are rarely granted.
Racial prejudice was the principal target of the 1965 act, but the partisans who control so many state election systems have often gone beyond race in their attempts to rig voting to their advantage. Voter ID laws that impose a burden on students, the elderly or the poor, for example, should become as presumptively illegal as racial burdens are now. So should registration systems that make it harder for immigrants or non-English speakers to get on the rolls, or districts gerrymandered for political gain.
A country that takes pride in its democratic system should provide all voters with basic voting standards. Though Ms. Miller and other Republicans seem to think that federal mandates “would disrupt our already well-run system of elections” in the states, millions of voters have experienced something very different. Solving that problem is as urgent now as it was 50 years ago.
