Progress 2025: Protecting Voting Rights and Democracy
For years, Donald Trump and the GOP have made wild, unsubstantiated claims about widespread voter fraud as cover for stripping people of their voting rights and engaging in voter intimidation. From Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election police arresting Black voters, to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s recent raids on Latino civil rights activists, conservatives continue to aggressively attack voting rights.
The ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 takes this further, and promotes targeting election workers in multiple states, casts doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, and continues the right wing’s decades-long quest to undo the civil rights movement’s voting gains, including eliminating the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which has been at the forefront of bringing lawsuits against counties and states that violate voting rights statutes.
What would a progressive vision of voting rights look like instead? As part of a new initiative at YES! called Progress 2025, Cliff Albright, cofounder of Black Voters Matter Fund, answers that question in conversation with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.
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