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December 8, 2004 Let me first congratulate all of the organizations who have continued to work fervently to focus a very necessary spotlight of exposure on the continuing incompetent and sloppy pattern of disenfranchisement of our nation's voters. This democracy continues to suffer from a tradition of deliberate neglect of the mechanics and procedures for the conduct of honest elections. As a former Southerner I am very much aware of the practice of planned voter suppression. It often spilled into outright criminal actions and violence. But the crude and obvious practices in the South before Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation was passed have been refined and made more subtle and systematic by the Republican Permanent Political War Machine. Beginning with the Southern strategies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan the Republicans have developed a professionalized dirty tricks, voter intimidation and voter suppression industry. Our present day indignation is long overdue. An overhaul of the American electoral system should have been made a priority of progressive organizations and the general public decades ago. To compensate for our tardiness we must escalate the scope and intensity of our efforts. The disenfranchisement of voters in America is an international disgrace. As the father of democracy in the world we cannot continue this present course of action rigged against the guarantee of one vote for every person. If we proposed an Electoral College arrangement to the political leaders of Iraq the election efforts in that war torn nation would be doomed immediately and forever. The question before us today is how shall we unite to keep the pressure on. We have a case which deserves to be heard by the United Nations. Perhaps we should humble ourselves and piggyback off the precedents being set today by the citizens in the streets of Ukraine. In America we consider democracy so precious that we should never surrender our leadership. The cutting edge for democracy should not be Afghanistan or Iraq or the Ukraine. We
must unite to keep the pressure on. The constitutional amendment proposed
by my colleague Jesse Jackson Jr. represents the only credible way to move
at this critical point in history. Unequivocally the right of all
Americans to vote must be clarified and the mechanism for guaranteeing the
right to vote must be federalized. We must destroy all vestiges of
political hypocrisy. We must place our case before the whole world. To
guarantee the right to vote we must keep the pressure on.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/index.html
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