Bill Nelson: “in the years before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson, discrimination and brutal force were…”

“in the years before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson, discrimination and brutal force were used to deny African Americans the right to vote as guaranteed by the 15th amendment. There are stories of local election officials requiring Black residents to pass arbitrary tests, like correctly guessing the number of bubbles that a bar of soap would produce, before being allowed to register to vote. And, of course, there were the more insidious forms of intimidation, which is a very sad chapter in the history of this country, with African Americans being lynched and murdered for attempting to vote or registering others to vote. In the 41 years since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, America has inched closer to its promise of an inclusive society, where everyone, regardless of race, regardless of religion, regardless of economic class or regardless of gender, has an equal opportunity to succeed. We are not there yet. Sadly, I can point to modern day attempts to deny the right to vote to citizens in my own State. During the 2004 election, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement created a list of 48,000 convicted felons. This list was then sent to the 67 supervisors of election in Florida, who were given the instructions to strike those 48,000 convicted felons from the rolls. The public was denied meaningful access to the lists to verify its accuracy because of a law passed by the legislature in the previous few years.…”