Ultimately, the Supreme Court's decision took away federal oversight of state voting laws.
While the decision mostly applied to southern states with a history of racist voter suppression,
it also encouraged other states to pass discriminatory laws. And oh my goodness, did they! Over the
last decade, we've seen an alarming increase in GOP-backed state laws that disenfranchise
minorities through tried and true voter suppression tactics, one of the most insidious of these
being voter ID laws. They're terrible for so many reasons, one of them being whenever
I have to show my ID to anyone, they always ask, "Oh no, what happened?" Republicans insist
that America has a huge problem with people going to the polls and impersonating other
voters. But multiple studies have shown that this type of voter fraud barely exists in
the United States. And there are tons of totally valid reasons why someone might be registered
to vote but not have photo ID. - Passports are expensive and less than half
of Americans have one. A driver's license—well, if you don't drive or you don't have a car,
you're not going to have one of those. That leaves us with Non-Driver's ID, and there
are several barriers to getting one of those. One of them is your birth certificate, which
you need in order to get this ID. Not everyone has a birth certificate. Sometimes those records
have been lost or destroyed. Sometimes they're in other states.
And sometimes they're just too painful to look at, because instead of Samantha, your
parents legally named you Mistake. I wasn't a mistake. I was named after my grandmother.
She was the mistake. And it's not just voter ID laws. Republicans also attempted to suppress
the vote by closing polling places, sabotaging the restoration of voting rights for former
convicted felons, gerrymandering, and purging voter rolls, often not telling minority voters
that they couldn't vote until they showed up at the polls! And to make matters worse,
they made them wear a sticker that says "I (did not) voted." Why did they use a small
sticker to correct the bigger sticker instead of making a whole new sticker? This year,
multiple states have seen irregularities in their primaries that disenfranchise voters
and seriously threaten our democracy. - To come here and you think that you're taking
an active part in bringing about some change, and you get here, and it's like, I can't vote.
You don't know if this is just negligence or if this is deliberate. And you don't know
where it's coming from. - In Texas, where I live, alone, 750 polling
locations have closed, shut down since at least 2013. The voter ID in Texas effectively
strips 600,000 people of access to the voting polls. And the fact that university students
can't use their student ID to vote, but if you have a gun license, you can use a gun
license to vote. Even worse, in Texas, the voting booths are
set up like shooting ranges. Since the Shelby County v. Holder decision, Mississippi, Alabama,
Texas, and North Carolina tried to enforce photo ID laws. VICE found that in certain
counties across 13 states, many of the closed polling sites were in minority communities.
In North Carolina alone, officials worked to cut back on early voting, eliminate same-day
registration, restrict pre-registration, get rid of annual voting registration drives,
and take away the authority of county boards of elections to extend voting hours. Come
on, North Carolina! If you don't knock it off, Petey Pablo is going to have to re-record
“Raise Up” about a less problematic state. And I'm sorry, but no other state would take
their shirts off, twist it 'round their hands, or spin it like a helicopter. All of this
is made worse by the fact that we're still in the middle of a pandemic. In April, the
number of new registered voters across 11 states went down by 70% compared to 2016.
And in some swing states, voter registration is down at least 50%. That's the most something
has gone down since Michael Douglas. And yes, I know I’ve turned off the majority of my
audience, but that was on purpose. That was a test. Those of you still with me are the
ones who really care about voter suppression. Or… you’re gross. Either way, we can and
should do better, and voter registration is just the beginning. Many people are understandably
scared to vote in person due to COVID-19. And poll workers, who are often elderly, are
afraid to go into work. The best way to address these concerns is by offering mail-in voting!
Most states already have no-excuse absentee voting, but Trump is working overtime to plant
seeds of doubt in the system. - We don't want them to do mail-in ballots
because it's going to lead to total election fraud. So we don't want them to do mail-in
ballots. We don't want anyone to do mail-in ballots. Now, if somebody has to mail it in
because they are sick or, by the way, because they live in the White House and they have
to vote in Florida and they won't be in Florida. If there's a reason for it, that's okay. If
there's a reason. The reason is so that thousands more people
don't die! And there's no evidence that mail-in voting causes widespread fraud. Except for
that time voters in the city of Chicago accidentally mixed up their mail-in ballots with cereal
box tops and got Cap'n Crunch elected comptroller. He ended up being surprisingly effective at
comptrolling. It's more important than ever to mobilize voters. But it's not enough to
just mobilize them, we also need to keep them safe. Maybe, to some people, waiting in line
isn't that big of a deal. I, myself, waited four hours in line to audition for Ontario
Idol. It's just like American Idol, only your judges are Wayne Gretzky, Martin Short, and
somehow, still Paula Abdul. I deserved to wait then, but no one should have to wait
to cast their ballots. It will always be a part of the modern Republican platform to
suppress voters, which is why we can't wait until November to fix it. We have to do the
work now that enables us to elect officials who care about ensuring everyone has the right
to vote. It's a lot easier to say "go vote" than it is to do it. Just like how it's a
lot easier to audition for Ontario Idol than it is to win that star-making trip to Kitchener,
Waterloo. But in both cases that are equally important, we have to try.