Hillary Clinton called for national automatic voter registration Thursday and lashed out at Republicans whom she accused of waging a "crusade" against voting rights.
“It is just wrong to try to prevent, undermine, inhibit Americans' right to vote,” Clinton said at Texas Southern University in Houston. She added, “Unfortunately today, there are people who offer themselves up to be leaders, whose actions have undercut this fundamental American principle.”
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Playing to the local crowd, she first named former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who announced earlier Thursday he was joining the 2016 Republican presidential field.
“Here in Texas, former Governor Rick Perry signed a law that a federal court said was actually written with the purpose of discriminating against minority voters,” Clinton said at TSU, a historically black university. “He applauded when the Voting Rights Act was gutted, and said the law’s protections were outdated and unnecessary. But Governor Perry is hardly alone in his crusade against voting rights.”
“In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker cut back early voting and signed legislation that would make it harder for college students to vote,” Clinton said. “In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie vetoed legislation to extend early voting, and in Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state authorities conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election in 2000.”
Clinton then pitched her biggest policy proposal at the event.
“I’m calling for universal automatic voter registration,” Clinton said. “Every citizen in every state in the union should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 – unless they choose to opt out.”
Clinton was at TSU to accept the Barbara Jordan Gold Medallion for Leadership, named for Jordan, a former congresswoman from Texas.
“What is happening is a sweeping effort to disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people,” Clinton said. She said in a message to Republicans, “Stop fear-mongering about the phantom threat of election fraud."
She pledged that as president she would protect the Voting Rights Act with her nominations to the Supreme Court.
"We need a Supreme Court who cares more about the right to vote of a person than the right to buy an election of a corporation."
More than 30 states have enacted some type of voter ID laws. The Supreme Court in 2013 struck certain provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of preventing blacks from voting to get approval from the Justice Department before changing their election laws.
The case, Shelby County vs. Holder, came after the Justice Department took numerous actions to block state voter ID laws. The decision left in place bans on such things as literacy tests, but determined some of the four-decade-old law is not applicable today, in which states were judged based on black voter turnout.
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