While it’s no secret progressives aren’t crazy about voter identification laws, panelists at Generation Progress’ 2013 Make Progress Summit in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday did little to hide their discontent, even going so far as to call the laws “crazy f**king barriers” and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act “trash.”
“If you’re able to start the conversation [about voting] earlier, you’re able to change the culture around what it means to be a citizen, what it means to vote, and really empower people from an earlier age so that even when they’re facing these crazy f***ing barriers, they have all the will and desire to go out and vote anyway,” Christina Sanders, the state director for the Texas League of Young Voters Education Fund, said.
Sanders and the rest of the panelists participating in the “Expanding Democracy: The War on Voting and the Fight to be Heard” session were up in arms over the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, believing that it will just lead to further voter suppression throughout the U.S.
“Let me tell you, that Supreme Court ruling was trash. It was absolute trash. Let’s just be real. That was trash,” Sanders said.
“It’s a hard story to tell in the sense that, you know, people want to say we’ve moved beyond Jim Crow,” Amanda Brown, national political director of Rock the Vote, added. “Yeah, totally, that’s awesome that we’ve made that progress, but like, a voter ID bill is still a modern-day poll tax. It still costs money to go get it.”
“In Texas, this voter ID law was not just a voter ID law — in fact, they called it a voter ID law so that the first thing you’re going to think is, ‘everybody should have an ID, right? You need an ID to get on a plane,’” Sanders also said. “Well, getting on a plane is not in the United States Constitution!”
Although Texas passed legislation in 2011 requiring a state-issued photo ID to vote, it required approval from the federal government before its implementation. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last month lifted this requirement, enacting the Lone Star state’s election law immediately.
Sanders proceeded to imply that the sinister intent behind Texas’ voter ID law is to impede students from voting, while favoring gun owners.
“They said you could not use a student ID issued by a state institution. And if you’re from another state, you couldn’t even use that — you could have your birth certificate, your other state ID, you could have your social security card,” she said. “You couldn’t use any of that to prove you were who you said you were. They cherry-picked and said you couldn’t use your student ID from a state university, but you can use a gun license, and it can be expired.”
The room filled with boos and horrified gasps.
“It’s increasingly bald-faced, not even pretending to be anti-fraud,” lamented Henry Kraemer, program director of the Bus Federation. “It’s just, ‘I don’t like you very much, so you don’t get to vote this year.’ And it’s trash.”
Sanders’ advice to young voters seeking to fight back against all of these “crazy f***ing barriers,” however, was to remain “authentic.”
“When you’re communicating, you’ve just got to be extremely authentic … the key thing is to tell them it’s really not about party,” she said. “It really is about what you want, and here are the tools, here’s a better understanding of how you can get that.”
