Hillary Clinton won’t be watching the Republican presidential primary debate Thursday to find out the candidates views on voting rights, she said Thursday in an interview with Al Sharpton on his daily radio show, “Keepin’ It Real.”
“I don’t think I need to watch it,” Clinton told Sharpton, whose show for the day focused on the Civil Rights Act, which was passed 50 years ago today.
“Nearly everybody standing on that stage in the first or the second debate has either actively fought to limit to right to vote in their state or supported the efforts to limit the right to vote.”
Thursday’s interview was Sharpton’s first with Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Leading up to the interview he had promised to ask Clinton tough questions but largely avoided doing so. Instead, he gave Clinton a platform to rehash her stance on voting rights and on criminal justice reform and to tee off on the GOP field.
She reviewed a plan she’s already unveiled to automatically enroll everyone to vote when they turn 18. She also called for a 20-day window to allow voters to vote in person before elections.
On the criminal justice reform front, she repeated her call for closing the disparity between the arrest rates between white men and black men.
But most of her remarks in the short interview were aimed at the Republican candidates and what she says is their general efforts to fight voting fraud.
“I personally think it is so nakedly partisan to try to limit the electorate to try pick and choose who among our fellow citizens should be encouraged or discouraged from voting. It is part of their electoral strategy,” Clinton said, adding that she does not believe that voting rights issues will come up in Thursday’s debate.
She asserted that “every independent group that has ever looked at [the voting fraud] issue has concluded the same way, which is it’s not true.”
“But it doesn’t stop them from trotting it out and trying to justify the justifiable.”