Summer Lecture Series: Voting Rights

Speaker: Debo Adegbile
Partner, Wilmer Hale Law Firm
Speaker: Bradley Smith
Professor of Law, Capital University Law School
Moderator: John Greabe
Professor of Law, UNH Law School

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed all discriminatory voting practices that denied people the right to vote. But some states have enacted practices that can suppress voter rights – literacy tests, ID cards, residency requirements, purges of voter rolls, and gerrymandering. Are these suppressions legal? And, in 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and special interest groups have a free speech right to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. This can drown out other voices and diminish the ability of many voters to hear other views and thus make reasoned decisions.