“The latest attack on voting rights in America is well underway.”
That’s how John Oliver begins his latest Last Week Tonight segment, taking a grim look at voting rights in the U.S. and the 18 States that have passed laws so far this year to restrict people’s access to voting via the likes of mail-in and early voting crackdowns.
Unsurprisingly, many of these efforts have been concentrated in the States that were closest in last year’s election — Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin — and (also unsurprisingly) many of these efforts target voting methods favoured by people of colour.
“Local election supervisors themselves will tell you that these bills make no sense,” Oliver concludes. “The Florida Supervisors of Elections strongly opposed their State’s new bill, with one Republican supervisor telling a reporter, ‘It’s stupid, ok? […] It was a solution looking for a problem.’
“But it’s actually one step worse than that. Because these are solutions to problems that have been deliberately and strategically manufactured. And the game is pretty obvious here: Use bullshit claims to stir up baseless fear to pass unnecessary restrictions targeting particular groups.”
Want to find out more about how to combat voter suppression? Here’s a guide.
