Brentin Mock covers national politics for Colorlines. He previously served as lead reporter for Voting Rights Watch 2012, covering the challenges presented by new voter ID laws, suppression of voter registration drives and other attempts to limit electoral power of people of color.
Brentin is also a contributor for Demos’ blog PolicyShop, where he covers voting rights and civil rights; and also a blogger for Grist.org, where he writes about environmental justice. You can read some of his other work at Next American City, Facing South, The Root, In These Times, American Prospect and The Washington Post.
The Voting Rights Act is, in some ways, living on borrowed time.
Those long, snaking lines were about more than a vote. The people most battered and excluded from the nation's politics and economy refuse to be ignored.
Forty-six people in Miami-Dade County have had their votes challenged.
A Tampa group has filed dozens of last-minute voter challenges, in a troubling indication of ramped up suppression efforts. Meanwhile, as record turnout forced long lines, poll watchers have cried foul over bottled water.
For two years, Florida’s Tea Party Republicans have been working to undo the huge turnout of black voters on the Sunday before Election Day. It didn’t work.
Republican Governor Bob McDonnell is restoring the voting rights of more formerly incarcerated residents than any previous administration. And it’s still a drop in the bucket.
DOJ, Congress, state senators, election protection lawyers and civil rights advocates—all eyes are on True the Vote.
The battered group’s poll watching “army” is on the retreat, but is it now trying to cash in through harassing state election officials?
Voter ID laws have been blocked in South Carolina and Mississippi, the latter where a Tea Party leader says women don’t deserve to vote.
Representative Elijah Cummings and law experts say if they are targeting people of color, a court could find True the Vote operations unlawful.