Read the PDF of our statement here.
Falsehoods on Voting Have Disastrous Consequences
Statement of Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
“This administration continues to perpetuate a falsehood, a falsehood with disastrous consequences for both communities who fought and continue to face systemic disenfranchisement and widespread faith in our democratic institutions. These statements ignore history, they ignore facts, and they ignore the empirical studies that have disproven this claim. The truth and the facts are the same: there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud; rather, millions of minority votes were suppressed around the country by laws designed to keep voters, especially Black and Latino voters, from being able to access the ballot.
“Just two weeks ago, the President’s Attorney General nominee said that he was “unfamiliar” with a federal appeals court decision striking down voter suppression efforts in North Carolina which were designed to suppress the votes of African American voters. We encourage the President’s team to familiarize themselves with the decisions of multiple federal circuit courts (including the Fourth and Fifth Circuit Courts of Appeals) and district courts, finding the very real existence of racially discriminatory voting laws, and we call on the President to cease repeating the false and unsubstantiated claims that millions of votes were illegally cast in the November election.”
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Founded in 1940, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is the nation’s first civil and human rights law organization and has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957—although LDF was originally founded by the NAACP and shares its commitment to equal rights. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative. In media attributions, please refer to us as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or LDF.
