Marcia L. Fudge Quotes

Voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on groups that lean democratic - including blacks, hispanics and students.

You can turn on Fox News almost any day and see some fictional story about voter fraud, the whole purpose of which is to limit voting by the poor, the elderly, college students and minorities.

An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world's leading democracy.

That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it, despite claims to the contrary by Mr. Holder and his allies. As more states adopt such laws, the left has railed against them with increasing fury, even invoking the specter of the Jim Crow era to describe electoral safeguards common to most nations, including in the Third World.

I try hard to convince them it's important - but there's a history of discomfort with minorities voting in some parts of this country, so most especially the older people have to get accustomed to it.

Negro suffrage is political arsenic. If it is not, why do not the free States open wide their throats and gulp down the graceful and invigorating draught?

I was quite upset because the political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping Blacks from voting. They talked about not letting Blacks vote.

… we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African American voter-turnout machine.

Minority candidates continue to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. As long as that is the case, the Republican National Committee, and other Republican groups, may be tempted to keep minority voters from casting their ballots, especially in light of the razor thin margins of victory by which many elections have been decided in recent years.

Without Section 5 Preclearance, Section 2 [normal lawsuits] of the Civil Rights Act, it is open hunting season for those who want to use discriminatory voting practices.

Officials who wish to deny minorities the right to vote adopt one tactic. When a lawsuit finally gets decided that the tactic is unconstitutional or otherwise illegal, the official just switches tactics…. Election enforcement lawsuits are different and demand more [than typical lawsuits.]

The 3rd leg of the strategy for GOP political supremacy has been to suppress the vote of the Democrat’s most loyal base: African Americans. On the fallacious pretext of addressing voter fraud, Republican officials in more than two dozen states introduced and passed new voting laws that that restrict voting. The most immediate impact of these laws has been to disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Latino and young voters.

When public access to voting is impaired or when public confidence in voting is diluted, democracy suffers and our freedom is less secure.

I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.

I don't think everyone should vote. If you have to be dragged into the polls, carried into the polls and smelling salts have to be used, you probably shouldn't be voting. However, we shouldn't be putting up barriers to voting that target certain groups.

In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.

The failure in Ohio to have adequate voting capacity for the people who were registered and eligible to vote was an absolute denial of their right to vote.

Strong efforts have been made in Ohio to curb the authoritarianism of our Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, as he has purged people from lists in our State in particular precincts where voters are heavily minority.

I have a very personal interest. I am a Miami-Dade voter. One of the issues is that my vote and so many other votes of women and African Americans in Florida are being discounted or discarded. I want my vote to count.

What we say is that democracy means that you have the right to vote without intimidation and undue burdens. But if you stand in line for six hours, technically, today there is no document, no standard, no law that says that that's wrong.

Voting is a Constitutional right. Absent any evidence of fraud, all Americans have a protected right to vote, be they rich or poor, black, Hispanic or white, people who live in a big city or in remote rural areas.

The Voting Rights Act is a voter protection act, not a candidate or incumbent protection act.

The evidence in hand and accessible will show beyond peradventure that in many parts of the State corrupt and violent influences were brought to bear upon the registrars of voters, thus materially affecting the character of the voting or poll lists; upon the inspectors of election, prejudicially and unfairly thereby changing the number of votes cast; and, finally, threats and violence were practiced directly upon the masses of voters in such measures and strength as to produce grave apprehensions for their personal safety and as to deter them from the exercise of their political franchises.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

Voting discrimination still exists. Nobody doubts that.