Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

Voting is an act of faith. It is profound. In a democracy, it is the ultimate power.

Native Americans living on reservations in North Dakota were told that in order to vote, they had to have street addresses—where none existed.

In Georgia, tens of thousands of people of color had their applications for registration held up because of typographical errors in government databases and a failed system called “exact match.” Of the 53,000 applications blocked by this process, 80 percent were from people of color.

Voter suppression no longer announces itself with a document clearly labeled LITERACY TEST or POLL TAX. Instead, the attacks on voting rights feel like user error—and that’s intentional. When the system fails us, we can rail and try to force change. But if the problem is individual, we are trained to hide our mistakes and ignore the concerns.

In other nations, voter registration is automatic and the responsibility of the government, a system followed by most European democracies as well as countries like Peru and Indonesia. The United States is one of the few democratized, industrialized nations that uses the piecemeal, inconsistent, state-by-state method of registration—and that puts the onus on the citizen to get on the rolls.

The toolbox for effective disenfranchisement includes demonizing and blocking third-party registration of new voters. Major monkey wrenches are obstructing the ability to process the applications of new voters in a timely manner and creating a system that is opaque and confusing. Disenfranchisement based on status is a key tool to impede the rights of certain classes of people—primarily the disabled and ex-felons. And for the boldest, there is the increasingly used tactic of the voter purge.

In Georgia, the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, accused me and New Georgia Project of committing fraud due to the sheer volume of people of color who registered through our statewide effort.

Criminalizing and fining third-party registration proved to be an effective quiver in the arsenal of voter registration suppression.

Research shows that when people released from correctional control are able to vote, they are more invested in community and are less likely to commit new crimes and return to prison.