NAACP President Cornell William Brooks
WASHINGTON — NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said Thursday that Donald Trump’s electoral victory benefited from voter suppression.
“It’s absolutely not a free and fair election. Not when you have court after court after court literally catching voter suppressors red-handed,” Brooks told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.”
Brooks spoke out after tens of thousands of people filled the streets in at least 25 US cities overnight to protest Trump’s victory.
“We have a President-elect who was elected literally with two thumbs and eight fingers on the scale in terms of depressed, suppressed votes in communities all across the country,” he continued. “Within days of this election, we had 4,000 voter registrations purged in North Carolina, a state held to have engaged in intentional racial discrimination with respect to the vote.”
He told Blitzer that the NAACP has seen no less than 10 cases of voter suppression.
“The election system that delivered Trump to the White House, however, is broken and needs to be fixed, and that means fixing the Voting Rights Act.”
When Blitzer pressed Brooks if he thought the election was rigged, he said, “Absolutely not. I’m not suggesting the system is rigged, what I am suggesting is we had those in state legislatures all across the country who have engaged in voter suppression.”
“It’s not so much that the system is rigged, it’s that the Voting Rights Act is broken,” Brooks concluded.
