Dear Editor:
Your readers deserve to know that efforts in Michigan and across the nation by Republicans to strengthen practices around the ballot box will not create roadblocks for voters.
As I read the March 21 letter to the Detroit News and Free Press editor written by an attorney making such claims, I was shocked he also said Republicans “were yearning for the good old days of Jim Crow politics.” I guess he failed his history classes; otherwise, he would know Jim Crow Laws which suppressed the vote of African Americans came from Southern Democrats.
Democrats such as Alabama Governor George Wallace, Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor, and U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, who in his youth was a Kleagle – a Ku Klux Klan recruiter — actively enforced those terrible laws. His Democrat Party led and protected racism for over 100 years but today wants you to think they care about protecting your vote. His party kept women from voting for a similar period. While only one Republican senator voted against the Voting Right Act of 1965, seventeen Democrats also did so.
From my perspective, Republicans like John Reilly (House District 46) and Patrick Colbeck (Senate District 7) are only looking to ensure that your vote is not canceled out by someone who does not have the right to vote. Many people don’t know about Federal legislation proposed by Democrats known as HR-1 – it is dangerous and takes away the local control we’ve had since 1789. This bill, if passed, will take us back to policies in the old Democrat South that dilute each vote and give Washington DC our power.
We cannot let this happen.
Instead of HR-1, we need laws and policies that assure only those eligible to vote can do so — and can only vote once. Why were this attorney and his Democrat followers against that? Why are Democrats including our Secretary of State working so hard to stop this movement to clean up voter rolls?
Jay R. Taylor
Oxford, MI