WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 -- Sixty-three years after Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and spoke of a dream yet to be realized, tens of thousands of people returned to that same ground on Thursday - not to celebrate but to defend what remains of the democratic machinery that made his vision legally enforceable.

The March on Washington 2026, anchored at the Lincoln Memorial and organized under the banner "Defend the Vote," drew crowds from across the country to the National Mall. The immediate targets were a federal proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration that the Trump administration pushed into law earlier this year, a Supreme Court ruling issued last April that stripped key enforcement provisions from t...