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00:00It used to be that we worried about voter purges where there was the state or the government
00:04trying to suppress votes. And we saw a lot of voter suppression bills from 2021 in particular,
00:10after the summer of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But now what we have is the surge of
00:16not just state actors, but private actors. So individual organizations that make up tricky names
00:22or political party, like in the case of the Republican National Committee in North Carolina.
00:26In North Carolina, the RNC filed a lawsuit in state court trying to claim that 225,000 people
00:34should be kicked off the voter rolls because there was some defect allegedly with their
00:38registration. 22% of the people who will be impacted are black folks. And so they are really
00:44going after as many people as they can, but targeting particular communities as much as
00:49they possibly can as well. And so the numbers are massive and potentially huge. That lawsuit
00:56is being duked out in court right now. At the Lawyers' Committee, we filed briefs in that case.
01:00And so we're taking calls from the hotline of people who are wondering, asking questions,
01:05hey, will I be impacted by this? But we're also litigating these cases in court as well,
01:10even as we're pushing in the halls of Congress and in state legislatures as well. So it takes
01:14all three facets, directly touching voters, fighting in the courts, and also fighting the
01:20policy battles as well, because you're seeing this in multiple states. We're litigating this
01:24in North Carolina, in Virginia, DOJ filed in, Department of Justice filed in Alabama. We're
01:30also litigating a similar issue in Texas as well. And what we can't do is leave it to these states
01:36to defend the voters, because this is an era where we see states that war with their own people
01:42because they're willing to disenfranchise people, take away their fundamental rights,
01:46while partisan folks have a heyday. We can't have that, not for our people and not for our community.