Voting Rights are Human Rights
Kudos to the ACLU for filing suit on behalf of Annette McWashington Pruitt, an Alabama woman who can't register to vote because of outstanding court expenses.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, are working to make sure the right now vote is protected for all Americans. Just last week, Amnesty International USA helped register hundreds of voters. When you get down to it, voting rights are human rights.
Or as Amnesty International USA director Larry Cox put it, "There is no better time to rock the vote for human rights than now."
Alabama state law allows a person convicted of a crime involving "moral turpitude" to apply for voting rights restoration from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, but the applicant must have paid all fines, court fees, costs, and restitution associated with his or her sentence before becoming eligible to vote. Voting rights defenders say denying the right to vote based on one's inability to pay these fees amounts to income-based discrimination.Pruitt has two sons serving in the US military. But she can't vote in an election that will certainly affect their future. It's not because she committed a crime, but because she couldn't afford to pay to have her rights restored.
Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, are working to make sure the right now vote is protected for all Americans. Just last week, Amnesty International USA helped register hundreds of voters. When you get down to it, voting rights are human rights.
Or as Amnesty International USA director Larry Cox put it, "There is no better time to rock the vote for human rights than now."
Labels: aclu, amnesty international, Iraq, voting rights
posted by Julia at 9:20 AM
3 Comments:
Hi,
I wanted to drop a line here since this post is focusing on getting everyone involved in voting.
I have been meeting with college groups locally in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina to bring young politically minded individuals together on a site called AllBallots.
You can checkout candidates like Obama - here on the site.
Robert Touchton
I made the voter registration form accessible to the blind and the American Foundation for the Blind tested it, it works, and they are presenting it to the Secretary of State of West Virginia for me. I contacted the EAC the Elections Assistance Commission and they said to go ahead and send them the forms and I did and then they said, oh our webmaster is charged with making the website accessible so we do not need this.
What I have done is a breakthrough in communicating with the blind and their webmaster hasn't made an accessible site yet. So I sent the forms to the ACLU.
The thing is that 70% of the blind do not vote and there are 1.8 million legally blind people in the US. And there are 10 million people who are visually impaired and to fill out the current form is a real problem because it is not accessible, it has a literacy test and a poll tax. And the government is spending a fortune on voting machines but they are not making voter registration accessible, so I fixed it. I sent these to the states only 18 of them responded. The are required by law to be accessible.
The campaigns are not directing any of their efforts to the blind, in fact the Obama campaigns' website is capable of inducing seizures in 100,000 Americans and what they are doing is expressly against the law in Section 508 of the Disability Act. They need to learn to communicate with the blind. The RNC website is the textbook example of how not to be accessible to the blind. So both parties are equally at fault.
This is just one of the many reasons why we need to pull together this fall and do everything we can to expose efforts to keep qualified American citizens from registering and voting.
Progressive Future has an Election Watchdog program that helps everyone get involved in that process. Check it out at: http://www.progressivefuture.org/voting/election-watchdog
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