Bill Clinton’s Quotes About Voting on The West Wing Special
"With the passage of the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments, we knocked down voting restrictions based on race and sex. Then some of the states pushed back and found new ways to keep some people from voting — poll taxes, literacy tests, naming all 54 county commissioners, guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. We still had a long way to go."
"In the '50s and '60s, we marched, we protested, and a lot of people had to put their lives on the line, and many gave their lives before we could pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. That landmark law swept away a century of shameful efforts to suppress the vote and mandated that states and counties with a history of voter suppression couldn't make any changes to their voting laws without running them by the justice department first."
"But two centuries of progress just came to a halt 7 years ago when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting rights act, and said even states and counties with long histories of voter suppression no longer had to submit changes in their election laws to the justice department for review . . . Voter ID laws, cuts in voting hours and early voting, purges of voter rolls, and eliminating polling places and voting machines so that you're standing in line for hours, and now even crippling the Postal Service in the midst of a pandemic so that your vote might not be counted at all."
"So ask yourself this — If your vote really doesn't matter, why are people working so very hard to make sure you don't cast it? Because it does matter. There's real power in your vote, the power to make our Union more perfect. And there's only one response to people who are trying to suppress your vote — make sure they fail. It's our turn to push the boulder up the hill, our turn to use our power to make a more perfect."