32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, once said, “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”
As it was then, so it is now.
For the past few years, some individuals in Congress and state legislatures have been hostile to expanded voting rights. In some times, and some places, these individuals have been the majority.
This has, in turn, resulted in unnecessarily stringent laws and rules, all under the guise of preventing what, as Trump Administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows put it, any “coordinated national voter fraud effort.”
The only problem is, there is little to no evidence for any effort at widespread voter fraud.
Correspondingly, these rules and laws have accomplished nothing but restricted the people’s free power to vote with their minds.
House Resolution 1 (H.R. 1), more commonly referred to as the “For the People Act,” will counter this suppression of the vox populi. Its chief goal is to protect the immortal right to vote and save the Republic’s spark for a generation more.
The For the People Act pushes not one, but many, of the goals advocates have long argued will accomplish this goal of protecting the vote.
For example, the For the People Act attempts to end Gerrymandering, which for centuries has resulted in hyper-partisan races for the House of Representatives. It does this by requiring states to redistrict their federal elections using an independent board rather than partisan committees or legislatures.
Furthermore, it acts to directly defend what so many of these voter suppression bills attempt to attack. Specifically, those being the right to vote-by-mail, to easily register to vote and to easily vote. All items in which this act is specifically designed to protect and further, rather than limit.
Moreover, the For the People Act would even work to fight against problems that we don’t even have just yet, but experts insist we will increasingly have in the future. While there are several of these included, the biggest and most notable of which is the banning of so-called “deepfakes” in political campaigns.
Deepfakes are computer-generated videos that can make it look like anyone is saying anything. These have already been used to affect social relations and situations negatively, and experts say that it could be hugely damaging in political manipulation. This bill stops them from being used as such full and outright.
While many of these efforts can be widely agreed upon, this bill faces strict scrutiny as it enters the Senate. Though passage through the House of Representatives was relatively swift, H.R. 1 faces the filibuster and needlessly aggressive Republican opposition in the Senate.
Therefore, more so than almost any other bill, it is critically important to contact our representatives and senators regarding our support of this movement, lest we let the next generation of our Republic fall to increasing suppression and authoritarian troubles.