Can someone explain what the "Voting rights" issue is all about?"?

The Republicans want to make it difficult for many people to vote. As Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell said yesterday, “Black people vote almost as much as Americans”.

He doesn’t like that beause they genrally don’t vote for Republicans.

A lot of “red” states have passed laws rsrticting access to polling places, such as reducing the number of places, reducing the hours the polls ar open, and requiring a limited form of ID to be shown to cast a ballot. And they have done their best to restrict absentee or mail in ballots.

It’s about bringing about a one-party fascist (Read Republican) dictatorship.

Also, the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. Before its passage in 1965, Black people were virtually banned from voting in much of the South. In Mississippi, for example, Black voter registration was 6.7% beforehand, and 59.8% two years later.

With removal of the restrictions in 2013, Republican-led legislatures immediately began working to reduce opportunities to vote as described by @zenvelo. with bad-faith arguments about “election integrity”.

Their efforts were supercharged by Trump and his ilk ramping up hysteria with their lies about election fraud.

2020 and Jan 6th were just a warm-up for Republican efforts in 2024. Without a new voting rights act, they will do all they can to keep conservative whites’ disproportionate control of our lives.

Among other strategies, Repubs want photo ID. However, certain (usually POC-majority) communities have very few places to get them. People would have to lose work hours to do it, and many would not be able to afford the income reduction.

You will learn all about it if the Democrats lose the midterms.
Democracy will be a thing of the past.

@SQUEEKY2 You can take that to the bank. The Republican party has changed radically since the Ike years, even since the Reagan years. It is something completely new and bizarre to the American political scene.

I had to show photo ID when I registered, but not when I vote.

@zenvelo McConnell said yesterday, “Black people vote almost as much as Americans”. Does that mean he doesn’t consider black people Americans?

@chyna McConnell considers anyone that doesn’t vote Republican, American.
That guy is truly a scary dude.

You know the answer lol.
It’s not beneficial for certain kinds of people to vote.
Not sure why this country has a hard time accepting the truth about itself.

@Nomore_Tantrums It is something completely new and bizarre to the American political scene.

Bizarre, yes. New, no. It’s been going on for as long as I can remember, and a lot longer than that. (I campaigned for JFK!)

In 1983 a guy by the name of Paul Weyrich, in an address to a meeting of the “Religious Right” stated:

_ I don’t want everybody to vote…(O)ur leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down._

You can read the full text of his address here, and the video here is a video.