(This caricature of Hillary Clinton is by DonkeyHotey.)As Hillary Clinton slowly builds up to her official announcement that she is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination (expected about June 13th), she has been laying out her progressive agenda for this country. She has already affirmed she supports an effort to fix the growing income inequality in our economy, supports a woman's right to control her own body, supports equal pay for men and women, supports criminal justice reform and an end to mass incarcerations, supports marriage equality and equal rights for the LGBT community, supports equal rights for minorities, and supports raising the minimum wage.
On Thursday, speaking at Texas Southern University, she added another plank to that agenda. She declared her solid support for protecting the voting rights of all Americans -- and even went so far as to propose automatic voter registration for all citizens at the age of 18. I agree with her. No citizen should have to ask the state for permission to vote. We have the capability to automatically grant every citizen is registered, and we should do it. In a democracy, there is no more important right than the right to vote -- a right that is currently denied to far too many Americans.
Here is what Clinton had to say about voting rights:
First, Congress should move quickly to pass legislation to repair that damage and restore the full protections that American voters need and deserve.
I was in the Senate in 2006 when we voted 98 to zero to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act after an exhaustive review process. There had been more than 20 hearings in the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Testimony from expert witnesses. Investigative reports documenting continuing discrimination in covered jurisdictions. There were more than 15,000 pages of legislative record. Now that is how the system is supposed to work. You gather the evidence, you weigh it and you decide. And we did 98 to nothing. We put principle ahead of politics. That is what Congress needs to do again. Second, we should implement the recommendations of the bipartisan presidential commission to improve voting. That commission was chaired by President Obama’s campaign lawyer and by Governor Mitt Romney campaign’s lawyer. And they actually agreed. And they set forth common sense reforms, including expanding early, absentee, and mail voting. Providing online voter registration. Establishing the principle that no one should ever have to wait more than 30 minutes to cast your vote. Third, we should set a standard across our country of at least 20 days of early in-person voting everywhere—including opportunities for weekend and evening voting. If families coming out of church on Sunday before an election are inspired to go vote, they should be free to do just that. And we know that early in-person voting will reduce those long lines and give more citizens the chance to participate, especially those who have work or family obligations that make it difficult to get to the polls on Election Day. It’s not just convenient—it’s also more secure, more reliable, and more affordable than absentee voting. So let’s get this done. And I believe we should go even further to strengthen voting rights in America. So today I am calling for universal, automatic voter registration. Every citizen, every state in the Union. Everyone, every young man or young woman should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18—unless they actively choose to opt out. But I believe this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy. Between a quarter and a third of all eligible Americans remain unregistered and therefore unable to vote. And we should modernize our entire approach to registration. The current system is a relic from an earlier age. It relies on a blizzard of paper records and it’s full of errors. We can do better. We can make sure that registration rolls are secure, up to date, and complete. When you move, your registration should move with you. If you are an eligible vote and want to be registered, you should be a registered voter—period.
