Missouri voter protection advocates Wednesday condemned Governor Michael Parson’s signing of H.B. 1878, the elections bill passed by the General Assembly last month.
“We are disappointed that Governor Parson did not consider the voters of Missouri who will be harmed by H.B. 1878,” said Denise Lieberman, director and general counsel of the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition.
She said her organization is considering a legal challenge to some of the bill’s provisions.
“H.B. 1878 is breathtaking in the ways it undermines our elections – hampering voter registration drives, making it illegal to help people get absentee ballot applications, enshrining an unconstitutional strict photo ID provision, allowing the Secretary of State to order voters removed from the rolls at his discretion, allowing partisan lawmakers to be part of challenges to voting laws, opening the door to sham audits and more,” she said.
Nimrod Chapel, Jr., president of the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP, said the battle is just beginning.
“We will work with the community to make sure the rights of Missouri voters are restored and everyone can have their vote counted,” he said.
“The NAACP has long raised concerns about Missouri’s efforts to implement a discriminatory voter ID law, and it is one of the reasons we have issued a travel advisory for the state. Democracy in Missouri is not a safe place for Black voters.”
The NAACP was a plaintiff in a 2017 challenging a prior iteration of Missouri’s photo ID law.
Marilyn McLeod, President of the League of Women Voters of Missouri, which was also a plaintiff in the prior legal challenge, said: “The right to vote is our most basic right and is the cornerstone of all of our rights,” said Marilyn McLeod, president of the League of Women Voters of Missouri,.
“This legislation provides unnecessary roadblocks to our most basic right. Among its many provisions, it requires an extremely limited form of ID to be able to vote which will disenfranchise thousands of citizens who are fully qualified to vote.”
The Rev. Darryl Gray, Missouri Faith Voices executive director, called the bill “a blatant attack on Black Missourians.”
“[It] is an attack against our basic rights and freedom. Black people and our allies will not sit idle while our basic human rights are threatened, we will meet this threat in the courts, the ballot box, and the streets if necessary.”
“We have fought long and hard for the right to vote; to see the clock turning back now is devastating,” said Patricia Jones-Macklin of the Greater Kansas City Chapter of A. Philip Randolph Institute.
“We cannot stop now. We must fight for our right to vote, and we must exercise our right to vote!”
Jennifer Slavik Lohman, who chairs MOVPC’s Anti-Disinformation Working Group said “lawmakers leveraged disinformation about our elections to manufacture a pretext for unnecessary, suppressive legislation. Their brazen manipulation of irrational fears about fictional problems is an outrageous attack on our freedom to vote, and is nothing short of election sabotage.
“Missourians everywhere should be shocked and angry at this attack on our free and fair elections.”
