Opinion by Eugene Robinson: Biden is right about voting rights — they’re still under assault
Biden was speaking at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where civil rights marchers led by John Lewis were savagely beaten on March 7, 1965. That atrocity spurred Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law later that year. Until his deathThis was not the first time Biden participated in marking the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” but it was his first time doing so as president.
that without the right to vote, “nothing is possible,” and he warned that “this fundamental right remains under assault.”And that is true. In 1965, Southern Democrats, or “Dixiecrats,” used the power they held in Alabama and other Southern states to bar African Americans from voting. Today, it is the Republican Party that seeks — and finds — ways to weaken Black political power, not just in the South but elsewhere as well.
It is obvious why this routine inequality is important. Many of our peer democracies hold their elections on Sundays, when most voters do not have to go to work. We have our elections on Tuesdays, when many people do not have the luxury of time. Some potential voters are not able to wait in long, slow-moving lines and have to give up. Proportionally more of these frustrated would-be voters are Black and Latino.
This would be an easy problem to fix, if officials wanted to fix it: Put more poll workers and voting stations in Black and Latino neighborhoods. Yet it doesn’t happen.Republicans point the finger at Democratic mayors and city councils, but the distribution of election resources — such as early-voting drop boxes, for example — is often controlled by GOP governors, secretaries of state and legislatures.
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