Update: Kerry heading to Nevada

[ProSense]

I have to fly to Nevada in a bit here, but I wanted to answer this question. I see a lot of the others have been answered pretty well by other commenters.

First off, thank you for the kind words.

Now to your question, in this case, of course, it's state law. That's one of the under-appreciated aspects of the voting problem; our Constitution gives great leeway to each state to set their own voting procedures. The main check on these states is the Supreme Court, which, unfortunately, now has people like Sam Alito on it (a person Barack and I and others tried to block with a filibuster, by the way).

So the number one thing we need to do is restore the balance of the judiciary away from the reactionary judges we currently have. We also need to ensure that no citizen who is registered to vote is stipped from exercising their rights. Dangerous voter ID laws that disenfranchise low income voters are being considered by the court as we speak – I hope they will chose the right path but all signs point to a disastrous decision. Keeping people from the polls is simply Unamerican.

In the Senate Barack introduced a bill, which I am an original co-sponsor, to criminalize voter intimidation. We can’t go back to the days of poll taxes and road blocks. I also support abolishing the disgraceful practice of “voter caging” where voter rolls are purged of registered voters simply because correspondence is returned from their address. This is a back handed way of trying to disenfranchise voters and that is why I am a co-sponsor of the Caging Prohibition Act which Sheldon Whitehouse has introduced (a great freshman Senator by the way.)

I am also proud to stand with Barack in placing holds on the nomination of Hans Van Spakovsky – an unacceptable nominee to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Spakovsky was the head of the inept Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department and was the architect of several voter suppression efforts. He is another example of how politicized the Justice Department has become and is unfit to serve on the FEC. It is my hope that we will be able to vote on the other commission nominees separately and have an up or down vote on his nomination. However, Republicans refuse to allow us to confirm the other nominees, even one of their own – instead they insist that the pending nominations be voted en mass because they know Spakovsky would not be supported by the full Senate. This essentially renders the FEC powerless at the beginning of the election year because they need 4 confirmed commissioners to vote for any regulations to be passed. It is vitally important that we have a functioning FEC during this election and I hope that the leadership on both sides can come to an agreement.

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