Tag: Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Occasion Demanded Respect

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How to respond to President Trump’s phone call with the Secretary of State of Georgia?

The voters of Georgia will speak on Tuesday.  The Republican members of Congress will speak the next day.

I am cautiously optimistic about the former, given the turnout numbers.  I have scant hope for the dozen Senators and 140+ House members, given their complicity over the last four years.

This thought also occurs to me: If President Trump is counting to 270, the number of votes needed in the Electoral College, did he make similar calls to officials in other states?

Is there anything I can do as a state legislator?

I’ve asked for legal advice: If an individual had such a conversation with an election official in Maryland, would it violate existing law?  If it would not, how could the law be strengthened, consistent with the First Amendment?

I have already introduced the Voters’ Rights Protection Act of 2021.

This bill would require public notice about a decision to open or close a polling location; if a signature is missing from an absentee ballot or an application for an absentee ballot, give a voter an opportunity to sign the document no later than the last day of canvass; and  provide that a ballot shall be considered to be returned timely, if it is postmarked the day after the election.

http://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2021RS/bills/hb/hb0057F.pdf

Yesterday, before news broke about President Trump’s telephone call, I read about how two Alabamans exercised their right to vote in the first election after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

As a 6-year-old in Mobile, Ala., in 1976, [Georgia grassroots organizer Latosha] Brown went with her grandmother to vote at a library. Her grandmother, born in 1910 and prevented from voting much of her life, dressed in her Sunday best and carried her “good pocketbook,” because the occasion demanded respect. “It was the way she would hold my hand,” Brown said. “I knew it was special, but I was too young to know why. When she walked in that booth and closed the curtain, it was like it was her moment. She had complete agency.” Brown’s grandfather carried an old poll-tax receipt in his wallet — a reminder that such agency had not come easily and was not guaranteed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/magazine/georgia-senate-runoff-election.html

Hopefully, the new Congress will enact the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.  We can do our part in Maryland by enacting the Voters’ Rights Protection Act of 2021.

Do You Want To Honor John Lewis?

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“When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.”

Those are among the last words of John Lewis. They are excerpted from an op-ed he asked to be published on the day of his funeral.

I first learned of John Lewis on Bloody Sunday.

I was a high school freshman and watched the footage of his beating in our den on Wallis Avenue.

A few nights later, I was in the same place to watch Lyndon Johnson declare to a joint session of Congress, “We shall overcome.”

I now work the polls at the elementary school I attended. I was outside Cross Country School the late afternoon of Election Day when I learned of the robo call urging people to stay home and not come out to vote.

I had sponsored the law that made it a crime to use deception to influence a person’s decision whether to vote. This was voter suppression.

I have asked that legislation be drafted for next year’s session to provide additional protections of the right to vote.

What we do in Annapolis can set an example for the rest of the country.

What the Congress does will set the standard for the nation.

“Do you want to honor John?” Barack Obama counseled in his eulogy today. “Revitalize the [voting rights] law he was willing to die for.”

Voting Rights

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Like many of you, I watched Sunday as Congressman John Lewis, ill with cancer, joined in the commemoration of the 55th anniversary of the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, when a 25 year-old Lewis almost lost his life after his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers.

I remember seeing the frightful video of that march later that day on tv. I also recall watching President Johnson give his speech to the joint session of Congress a few days later when he introduced the Voting Rights Act. He ended his speech by declaring, in his Texas twang, “We shall overcome.”

I thought about reading more about those events the old fashioned way – in my copy of Taylor Branch’s Pillar of Fire, but I didn’t.

A few hours later, I went to the Meadowbrook Swim Club.

Whom did I run into? Taylor Branch.

He added these details.

The only network to air film of the assault on the marchers was ABC. That night, it cut into a movie, Judgment at Nuremberg.

Spencer Taylor, as one of the judges at the Nazi war crimes trial, had just speculated about how the little guy could stand up to the Nazi government.

That day in Alabama, hundreds of African-Americans had done just that.

Both of us knew that President Johnson, while walking up the aisle of the House of Representatives chamber after giving his speech, had spoken to Congressman Emanuel Celler, chair of the committee that would consider the bill LBJ had just introduced. “Hold hearings on my bill at night and pass it sooner,” LBJ urged Celler.

Taylor told me that four months later, at the signing of the Voting Rights Act, Johnson told Celler, “Now you need to pass my immigration bill.”

I told Taylor that one of my proudest accomplishments as a legislator is that I have introduced and enacted legislation protecting the right to vote.

A Fundamental Right

| by delsandy | Sandy's 2018 Legislative Diary | No Comments

We were debating the Secure and Accessible Registration Act on the House floor.

Under current law, when you renew your driver’s license or file for benefits, you’re asked if you want to register to vote.

Under this bill, you would be registered to vote when you renew your license or seek benefits but asked if you did not want to be a voter.

In both instances, you would have to demonstrate your eligibility to be a voter..

One of my Republican colleagues said that one of our most cherished rights as an American is the right to be left alone, citing Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

This is what I said in response:

We are indeed talking about one of our most cherished rights in this debate, the fundamental right to vote. What Lyndon Johnson and many others said is the most important right, the most important civil right.

We have had a steady progression in opening up the ballot since the Voting Rights Act of ‘65. Early voting, absentee ballot. This is just the next step. There are those who’ve tried to make it more difficult to vote, but I would hope that a majority of this body believes that the fundamental right to vote is furthered by this legislation. Thank you.

I was the last person who spoke on the bill.

It passed, 93-46.

This is why I run for office: to protect the right to vote and the other rights secured to each of us in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

New Generations of Tech Interns and Voters

| by delsandy | Sandy's 2017 Legislative Diary | No Comments

I’ll be working with Governor Hogan on behalf of one of his work force development initiatives next year.

The governor announced this week that he will “fund the Maryland Technology Internship Program [MTIP] for the first time in state history, which provides matching funds to companies for internship stipends.”

I introduced the bill that created MTIP in 2014. It authorizes a state payment for college students interning with a high tech company.

This fall, I met with the Governor’s staff to lobby for funding for the program as part of the incentive package presented to Amazon on behalf of Port Covington as a site for the company’s new headquarters.

This won’t be the first time that I’ve worked with a Republican administration on legislation. I introduced the William Donald Schaefer Scholarship, which provides a one-year college scholarship in return for a one-year commitment to a public service job.

Governor Ehrlich funded the program from the outset. Future State Senator Bill Ferguson was one of the recipients.

– – –

“We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

President Johnson said that after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

LBJ knew how to count votes, but in this instance he was wrong.

The Solid South for the Democrats did become Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the transformation of the South into a solid bloc of Republican states.

But it took 53 years, from July 2, 1964, until this past Tuesday, more than a generation, for a Democrat to win the Senate election in Alabama.

It also took the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 for African-Americans to be able to register to vote in the South.

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