The right to vote is reasonably considered to be the most direct way for a citizen to affect tangible change within the governmental system under which they reside. The Constitution emphasizes the importance of voting rights, as there exist three amendments — the 15th, 19th and 26th — concerned with expanding voting rights to every American citizen.

Given the extreme and necessary power the vote endows upon a citizen, it should go without saying that voter suppression should never be up for debate, yet it’s exactly the present subject of Congressional debate at this moment.

Along with an abundance of other typically abnormal occurrences, the suppression of voting rights became normalized during former President Donald Trump’s tenure. Trump’s unorthodox nature numbed the American population to obscene occurrences, such as the president himself patently declaring he’s withholding federal postal service funds to mitigate mail-in voting.

The Brennan Center for Justice has found that 33 states have introduced, pre-filed or carried over a total of 165 bills aimed at restricting voter access since the beginning of 2021. This egregious number is more than quadruple the amount of election-related bills introduced in the first two months of 2020. Trump’s assault on voting rights has caused a ripple effect in the GOP.

These GOP-sponsored voting restrictions include shortening and limiting early voting periods, enforcing even stricter photo ID requirements that would render tens of millions of eligible voters disenfranchised and limit or wholly terminate mail-in voting. This concentrated assault on mail-in voting is unquestionably an attempt to repress Democratic ballots.

“I don’t get why now, if it’s been working,” Democratic Senator Randolph Bracy says about his GOP-run state of Florida’s efforts to castrate its functional mail-in voting system. Bracy continues to say, “it looks like there’s an effort to try to get a strategic advantage. Knowing that Democrats overwhelmingly vote by mail, the motivation of the measure is partisan.”

For some, the GOP’s sweeping effort to hamper voting rights is about more than just securing a partisan advantage. Recently proposed legislation in Georgia would heavily restrict one’s ability to vote on a Sunday, a move blatantly targeted at stifling the influence the state’s multitude of Black churches has in elections. 

Georgia Bishop Reginald T. Jackson powerfully declares, “there is no other way you can describe this other than racism, and we just need to call it what it is.”

There is no room in the American governmental system for the suppression of voting rights with the goal of unjustly favoring a single party — and there’s certainly no room for systemic racism to be perpetuated through the process.

In what NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson called “a huge moment” that “goes to the core question of how we define citizenship, and whether or not all citizens actually will have access to fully engage and participate,” the House of Representatives recently passed a massive voting rights bill to combat the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Divided strictly down party lines and entitled “House Resolution 1,” or H.R. 1, the bill would strike down a plethora of voting obstacles recently proposed by GOP state legislatures, prohibit the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts and aim to bring transparency to what many consider to be shady campaign finance privileges allowed to uber-wealthy anonymous donors.

While H.R. 1 marks a potential turning point in the fight for voting rights, “potential” is the keyword.

The battle against voter suppression is far from over. Since history has dictated that the sitting president’s party will almost inevitably lose seats in both the House and Senate when midterm elections come around, Washington Democrats must make efficient and expeditious use of their united Congress. 

The Senate’s approval of both H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — a bill that perished in 2020’s Republican Senate and is aimed toward restoring the original protections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — are crucial in the fight for ensuring voting rights for all American citizens.

Although abysmally neglected by GOP officials, each elected government official possesses a civic duty to ensure the equal application of voting rights to the citizens they serve. The American people must make their voices heard and hold their leaders to this standard — plenty of absurdities have been normalized in D.C. over the last four years, but this cannot be one of them.

Nick is a sophomore in LAS.

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