Mary Frances Berry Quotes
Voting in Florida is like there’s some kind of goody in a box and you want to get it, but you’ve got to be persistent to get it.
Mary Frances Berry, Chair, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Assistant Secretary of Education (Democrat), 2000 Florida Election Civil Rights Commission Hearing on Voter Disenfranchisement, January 12, 2001
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Historically, there has been a tendency to make it difficult for the poor to vote and having election day during working hours on a weekday was a very effective day of doing that. In modern times voting hours have been extended to 9 PM in some states so that working people could more easily vote. However, in modern times calls for weekend voting or Internet voting has been difficult to produce bipartisan support as increasing turnout tends to favor one party—the Democrats—over the other.
Comparing America's voter registration procedures with those of other industrialized democracies:
The voting problems we have had are managerially and technology solvable but politically each solution is perceived as favoring one of the political parties in the particular jurisdiction and therefore there is resistance to the change.
Opposing national attempts to give Blacks the vote in the South:
Mary Frances Berry is an American historian, writer, lawyer, activist and professor who focuses on U.S. constitutional and legal, African-American history. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought where she teaches American legal history at the Department of History, School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Previously, Berry was provost of the College of Behavioral and Social Science at University of Maryland, College Park, and was the first African American chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
