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Following the turbulent elections in Wisconsin earlier this month, there have been growing concerns that many US voters will struggle to cast their ballots in November due to targeted attempts to curtail their voting rights during the pandemic. Nicole Austin-Hillery, head of the US Program at Human Rights Watch, is leveraging her experience as a voting rights expert to offer a warning as well as a path forward. In an op-ed for CNN.com on Sunday, she discusses the need to remove barriers to the ballot box before Election Day and highlights strategies for securing “the fate of our right to vote.”

Austin-Hillery offers a reminder that the recent rollbacks, although alarming, are part of a larger trend that came to life in the past decade:

Unfortunately, voter suppression has threatened that right for thousands of historically disfranchised Americans with tactical precision since the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a 2013 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, which found unconstitutional sections of the act that required states with long histories of discriminatory voting practices to get Justice Department approval before changing voting laws.

Since that decision, numerous states have changed laws to require voters to show photo IDs, have purged their voter rolls, or have shortened or ended early voting. Court challenges in TexasNorth Carolina and other states have shown that these changes make it harder for black, Latino, poor and older communities to vote. 

Austin-Hillery came to Human Rights Watch as a civil rights leader leader who'd worked for many years to address disenfranchisement. “I spent more than a decade as a voting rights advocate working with Congress to ensure that the rights of all voters are protected, and with legal and community partners around the country to help ensure access to free and fair elections,” she wrote on Sunday. Based on her experience fighting for voting rights, Austin-Hillery writes that “the scale of the more recent changes, coupled with concerns that suppression will rise in the age of Covid-19” requires a multifaceted approach rather than a single policy reform such as vote-by-mail. “It has to entail a full-fledged, comprehensive plan to stamp out suppression at every turn.”

The strategies Austin-Hillery supports for expanding access to the ballot box include, among other efforts, increasing states’ capacity for mail-in voting, making sure in-person voting is safe, expanding the window for early voting, investing in widespread voter education, eliminating felony disenfranchisement, and recognizing the electoral rights of people with disabilities.

Read Austin-Hillery’s full op-ed on CNN.com, and continue following Human Rights Watch for more coverage of the 2020 US elections.

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