Rachel Maddow Slams Alabama For Stripping Voting Rights From Over 100,000 Minorities

Rachel Maddow slammed Alabama policymakers on Tuesday night for making it harder for minority voters in the state to cast their ballot.

According to the MSNBC star, more than 100,000 voters in the state – many of them Democratic-leaning minorities – will not have the proper identification to vote due to a new photo ID law in the state.

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Maddow slammed the voter suppression effort:

One of the wild cards in this race that makes it particularly hard to extrapolate, to get a beat on what might happen tonight, one of the wild cards, Alabama put into place a new photo ID law that went into effect after the Supreme Court could no longer stop them from doing things like this. It’s estimated that over 100,000 registered voters in Alabama now no longer have the kind of documentation they legally have to show in order to vote because of that photo I.D. law.

This is nothing new, of course. Republicans have long realized that when more people vote, they have a smaller chance of winning. So instead of competing to win the votes of their minority constituents, they are doing their darndest to prevent them from voting altogether.

That was true in 2016 when voter ID laws prevented hundreds of thousands of Americans – mostly Democratic-leaning – from casting their ballots, and it’s true tonight, as voters in Alabama choose their next U.S. Senator.

In a race as close as the special election in Alabama between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones, it is voter suppression maneuvers like this that could make all the difference.

Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.