Obama Mocks Voter Fraud Concerns: ‘Not Happening’

He discussed the law at a national teleconference with Representative John Lewis of Georgia and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, both voting rights advocates.

He said voters have to do their part, and Americans need to focus not only on the laws but also on the “habits of citizenship”. In 2013, the Supreme Court threw out a portion of the 1965 law, saying enough progress had been made that it was no longer necessary.

Americans owe a great debt, Obama said, to the “thousands, many of them unnamed, who were courageous enough to walk up and try to register time and time again”.

The teleconference takes place as Republican presidential candidates gather in Cleveland for their first primary debate. Police beatings of those protesters aired on the nightly news shows stirred outrage that helped President Lyndon Johnson push the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

Because of the Voting Rights Act, millions of minorities have exercised their right to vote in states that previously hindered them through tactics such as poll taxes, literacy tests, civics quizzes or violence.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest wouldn’t say exactly what changes Obama would make to the law.

Netzer added that local league members are concerned by attempts in states elsewhere to put up barriers to voting and limit voter registration events, including decreasing the number of voting days or limiting types of voter identification.

The Texas law is just one of many battles the Voting Rights Act has faced in recent years.

“The Voting Rights Act has had a transformative impact on the political landscape of our country”, said state Sen.

Earlier, Obama wrote an op-ed for the website Medium, in which he called voting “one of the most fundamental rights of any democracy”.

Louisville NAACP president Raoul Cunningham lamented a 2013 Supreme Court decision striking down a key portion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

However, in 2014, Texas District Court Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos ruled that the Texas Legislature had passed its ID law for the goal of suppressing the voting rights of poor and minorities and that the law “creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote”. But despite that success, today the Voting Rights Act does not offer the same protections it did in 1965. The state’s sole Democratic federal lawmaker said there was an effort to “stack” African-American votes in his district.