Attacks on Voting Rights Are Intolerable, Must Be Condemned
Washington – Following reports that Donald Trump is using falsehoods to disguise a push to keep people of color from the ballot, Advancement Project, a national civil rights and racial justice organization, released the following statement:
“Much of the country is literally fighting to shake off the remnants of the Jim Crow era, when voting was reserved for a select few and off limits to Black people and other communities of color,” said Tram Nguyen, Co-Executive Director of New Virginia Majority. “To stoke the flames of fear based on falsehoods can only drive us closer to a time when segregation was explicitly the law of the land. In Virginia we will not yield an inch on the progress we’ve made recently. We will resist every attempt to move us back.”
“Buttressed on a lie, Trump is looking to make it harder to vote by questioning the integrity of our election system,” said Judith Browne Dianis, Executive Director of Advancement Project’s national office. “This harkens back to some of the ugliest periods in our history, when people of color, especially Black people, had to fight our way to the ballot with our own bodies and our very lives. Although there are no facts, no evidence to support his claims, we can only expect that legislatures will take queues from Trump and use this as their excuse to make it to limit access to the ballot for some Americans.”
“In this presidency of ‘alternative facts,’ we must stay vigilant and move beyond shock. The evidence is clear; the recent statements about voter fraud have no basis in fact, but instead are touted to cast a narrative to further restrict voting rights. While this distraction is conjured up, there is a broader threat looming, Trump’s efforts to build an exclusionary America. His constant verbal and Twitter attacks on communities of color are now being pushed into policy through wrongheaded immigration policies. As the case was before Trump and in generations prior, the hard work of expanding access to the ballot continues boldly through resistance in the streets, the courts, the legislatures and in the media – Advancement Project is proud to support those efforts.
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Advancement Project is a multi-racial civil rights organization. Founded by a team of veteran civil rights lawyers in 1999, Advancement Project was created to develop and inspire community-based solutions based on the same high quality legal analysis and public education campaigns that produced the landmark civil rights victories of earlier eras.
