AFGE Joins Moral Monday Rally for Voting Rights in North Carolina
July 16, 2015
AFGE activists from the national office and Local 1738 participated in a Moral Monday march in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to protest the state’s anti-democracy voting law.
Thousands turned out Monday to protest North Carolina’s voting law that eliminates same-day voter registration, limits what identification can be used to vote, curtails early voting, prohibits out-of-county precinct voting, and eliminates preregistration of those nearing voting age.
“The reason the haters hate voting rights is that people of color, the poor, the elderly, the young – when they exercise the right to vote, they elect representatives who do good things with government resources,” AFGE President J. David Cox Sr. said during the march. “We vote people in who make our country a better place for racial minorities, women, and the working class. And that’s why they want to take the vote away.”
These restrictions attack the democratic process by preventing more people from voting – especially those at lower rungs of the economic ladder. As a result, lawmakers who are elected oppose basic quality of life improvements that most Americans support: raising the minimum wage, funding clean air and water research, providing public schools with additional resources, and creating good-paying jobs.
The crowd marched down the 4th street before gathering in front of the federal courthouse where a trial challenging North Carolina’s election law started Monday. North Carolina’s law is the first and the worst since the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The outcome of this historic case in North Carolina will have an impact on voting rights across the nation. AFGE believes in the constitutional right of every American citizen to vote and will fight any effort to take away that right.
“We cannot lose voting rights. This is the foundation of everything we stand for, and what so many courageous souls sacrificed everything for,” Cox said.
For more information on what AFGE is doing to protect voting rights, visit www.afge.org/VoterProtection.
