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

by Stacey Abrams

Voter suppression works its might by first tripping and causing to stumble the unwanted voter, then by convincing those who see the obstacle course to forfeit the race without even starting to run.

By undermining confidence in the system, modern-day suppression has swapped rabid dogs and cops with billy clubs for restrictive voter ID and tangled rules for participation. And those who are most vulnerable to suppression become the most susceptible to passing on that reluctance to others.

Because I learned long ago that winning doesn’t always mean you get the prize. Sometimes you get progress, and that counts.

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

Full citizenship rights are the bare minimum one should expect from the government. Yet, for two-thirds of our history, full citizenship was denied to those who built this country from theory to life. African slaves and Chinese workers and Native American environmentalists and Latino gauchos and Irish farmers—and half the population: women.

For those who cling to the days of monochromatic American identity, the sweep of change strikes a fundamental fear of not being a part of an America that is multicultural and multicolored. In their minds, the way of life that has sustained them faces an existential crisis, and the response has been vicious, calculated, and effective.

The examples of this abound: 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 Mississippi, impoverished elderly folks who needed an absentee ballot had to pay for a notary public to submit the ballot—resulting in a new-fashioned poll tax. 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.

Today, the ones barring access have shifted from using billy clubs and hoses to using convoluted rules to make it harder to register and stay on the rolls, cast a ballot, or have that ballot counted.

We are strongest when we see the most vulnerable in our society, bear witness to their struggles, and then work to create systems to make it better.

This is one of the persistent problems of our ideal of democracy: grand, sweeping national laws or legal decisions announce a new way of behavior. Yet, our fifty separate states have little reason to fully adhere to the rules without being compelled to by threats from those higher powers in the federal system.

Let me be clear here: the codification of racism and disenfranchisement is a feature of our lawmaking—not an oversight. And the original sin of the U.S. Constitution began by identifying blacks in America as three-fifths human: counting black bodies as property and their souls as nonexistent.

Literacy tests were a favored tool borrowed from the Northeast, and they were particularly popular because both immigrants and freed black Americans often had limited education. Connecticut pioneered literacy tests in 1855 to limit access to the ballot and exclude Irish immigrants. Under these tests, voters would have to prove their command of language by reading a passage aloud and then answering questions showing their reading comprehension to the satisfaction of the examiner. Of course, the tests were administered in a fashion that made it harder for those whom the establishment wanted to disenfranchise. In Alabama, for example, white voters would be asked to read and discuss an eight-word passage from Section 20 of the state’s constitution, which simply states, “That no person shall be imprisoned for debt.” The black voter, however, would be asked to read and explain the entirety of Section 260, 187 words of convoluted language that established laws of taxation and state bonds.2

The Civil Rights Act of 1957, weakened by the actions of then Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, held that the federal government has the right to enforce laws prohibiting the denial of voting rights and establishes the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Three years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1960 restored key portions of the 1957 proposal, including empowering the federal government to enforce court orders regarding desegregation and other civil rights legislation, along with the ability to file civil rights lawsuits on behalf of the public. Prior to this provision, an aggrieved black citizen had to personally file, and few had the resources or capacity to seek redress. Among the most famous is the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” in employment practices and public accommodations.

Despite glacial gains, the crowning achievement for bedrock democracy came in the form of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which restored and protected voting rights at the federal level and held certain states and jurisdictions, referred to as “covered jurisdictions,” accountable for discrimination. The most effective provision of the law would be found in the preclearance mechanism of Section 5, which mandated that any time a covered jurisdiction—be it city, county, or state—attempted to change any election law, practice, or procedure, the U.S. Justice Department had to agree that it did not have a discriminatory purpose or effect.

Then, in 2008, the Voting Rights Act ushered in the most diverse voting electorate in American history, and a coalition convened to elect the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama.

To fight voter suppression, we must understand what things look like post-Shelby. 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. The fight to defend the right to vote begins with understanding where we’ve been and knowing where we are now. Only then can we demand a fair fight and make it so.

He’d heard about the new health care law and was eager to sign up. But his salary fell below the threshold to participate in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. The federal law anticipated this and, instead of ignoring him, made provisions for people like him to gain coverage under the existing Medicaid program. In theory, Medicaid expansion would guarantee him coverage as well. But not in Georgia. As our teams made contact, we heard a constant question: why didn’t President Obama want Georgians to have Medicaid? The canvassers had been trained to answer that Medicaid expansion was a state decision, not federal. The governor and conservative state legislators had refused the funding, not President Obama. Then came the blank stares or silence on the phone. Most of those we contacted had no idea who their state representatives were—these men and some women who had argued against health insurance for the poor and vital investment in hospitals and clinics were strangers to them.

I met Diamond in 2014, after I converted the New Georgia Project from an Affordable Care Act sign-up program to one of the largest voter registration efforts in Georgia since the civil rights movement. At the time, she was a freshman at Columbus State University, a college a few hours west of Fayetteville, Georgia, where she’d been born and raised. She celebrated her eighteenth birthday while in high school, and she registered to vote at a high school registration drive. Once she got to college, she realized that getting home for her first election presented a logistical challenge. Diamond, like so many young people, didn’t have a car at school, so getting back to Fayetteville to vote would be nearly impossible. Worse, she’d have to miss class to try to make it work. Instead, she opted to change her address from Fayetteville to her new college domicile. Like a conscientious citizen, she updated her registration with a New Georgia Project canvasser in late August, her neat handwriting clear and easy to read. Months later, though, NGP reached out to her because, as of October 2, she had not appeared on the voter file. When we spoke to her, she still hadn’t heard from Muscogee County confirming her registration or noting a deficiency in her application. NGP kept a copy of her application—as we did for nearly every applicant—and we confirmed that her application was complete and legible. We also looked her up using the state’s online system. She wasn’t on the list and she wasn...

Worse, state law in Georgia does not require timely processing of applications before an election. In fact, it set no deadline at all. Potential voters had to register twenty-nine days before an election, but the state had no legal obligation to get the name on the rolls in time for an election. According to the judge, state law set deadlines for voters but not for the people in charge of the election, even if their delay meant a person would be prohibited from voting or not receive confirmation that their registration was accepted and the address of their polling location.

Our attorneys secured a promise to halt the practice in 2016, but it returned with a vengeance during the special election for a congressional race in 2017, the first of the Trump presidency. Once again, eligible citizens eager to participate in the election’s process had their applications held hostage by the state’s secret rule. However, because of our experience and that of others, attorneys filed a federal lawsuit. The federal court agreed with concerns about the delay, and the judge ruled that the policy violated the law. While we were grateful for the federal fix after three years, citizens lost their right to vote. In the end, 18,000 of New Georgia Project “missing” applications were processed in early 2015, after the 2014 election.

However, in the following state legislative session in early 2017, Kemp asked for and received a state-sanctioned version of exact match in defiance of his 2016 federal court settlement. This use of exact match this time led to 53,000 voter registrations being held hostage in 2018, 80 percent of whom were people of color and 70 percent of whom were black voters, who comprise roughly 30 percent of Georgia’s eligible voters. In 2018, Georgia officials lost another lawsuit pertaining to exact match.

Voting is a constitutional right in the United States, a right that has been reiterated three separate times via constitutional amendment.

I met Desmond in 2017, as he traveled the country raising money for Amendment 4, a ballot initiative to restore voting rights to felons in his state. Desmond served his sentence and earned a law degree; however, state law did not allow him to sit for a bar license or to vote in any election. Undeterred, he launched the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, secured more than 760,000 signatures, and got the amendment placed on the ballot. Amendment 4 passed by an overwhelming majority in 2018, and it should have placed Florida in the category of automatic restoration after completion of a sentence. In 2019, however, a hyper-partisan GOP-led state legislature passed and DeSantis signed SB 7066.11 The bill reverses the amendment’s language, using the “completion of sentence” clause to undermine the clear intent of the 64.5 percent of voters who approved the change.12 Under the new law, completing a sentence means not only release, but the completion of probation, parole, the fulfillment of any terms ordered by the courts, the termination of any ordered supervision, and full payment of any ordered fines, fees, costs, or restitution.

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.13

No other right guaranteed by our constitution permits the loss of a right for failure to use it—to wit, I don’t lose my Second Amendment right if I choose not to go hunting and I still have freedom of religion if I skip church now and then.

Another barrier is securing the appropriate documents themselves. Mrs. Smith, a native of Missouri, had lived and voted in Milwaukee since 2003. After Wisconsin adopted its restrictive voter ID laws, Mrs. Smith attempted to get the required photo identification. To do so, she had to produce a birth certificate that would prove her date and place of birth. But Mrs. Smith, an African American woman born during segregation in 1916, does not have a birth certificate because, like many blacks of her era, she was born at home due to lack of access to a hospital. She attempted to use the ID Petition Process at the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles, ostensibly designed to help citizens like her get an ID. Although they found a record of Mrs. Smith in the 1930 census, they could not connect her to a qualified Missouri birth record. Denied a restricted voter ID, Mrs. Smith could not vote in the 2016 election because, at the age of one hundred, she could not prove her identity to the state of Wisconsin.12

When the ACLU warned the Ford County clerk, Deborah Cox, about the potential harms and asked her to publicize a local hotline to aid stranded voters, she forwarded the email to Secretary of State Kris Kobach with the message, “LOL.” Kobach, a disgraced elections superintendent dedicated to voter suppression, has himself been sued and cited for acts of malice toward voters of color. Like Brian Kemp of Georgia, Kobach and other Republican secretaries of state have waged war on voter access, their targets uniformly being people of color, naturalized citizens, and students—all populations more likely to vote Democratic.

This is perfectly illustrated by what occurred in Hancock County, Georgia, when the Board of Elections and Registration dispatched deputy sheriffs to challenge the voting rights of black voters in the county ahead of a key municipal election in 2015. Hancock sits in central Georgia, where law enforcement arrested blacks at 3.3 times the rate of nonblacks.2 In the weeks ahead of the vote, deputies pulled up alongside black men as they walked on public streets or knocked on their doors to demand proof of residency. Barry Fleming, a Republican state representative and author of several bills to restrict access to voting, serves as the county attorney for Hancock. In an interview with the New York Times about the challenges to black voters, he dismissed the process as “more about politics and power than race.”

Arizona had been a strong proponent of literacy tests to block Latino and Native American voters from accessing the ballot. The state also allowed for “voter challenges” where others could question whether a person should be allowed to cast a vote. This behavior, which functioned as legalized harassment, discouraged Latino and Native American voters from trying to participate until the VRA banned most of the egregious practices. In 2005, Arizona had four hundred polling locations; as of 2019, the number had dropped to sixty.

In 2018, states with a history of voter suppression had high rejection rates of provisional ballots. Arizona rejected 14,902 provisional ballots. Florida canceled the votes of 8,345 provisional voters and Georgia refused 9,699 provisional ballots. North Carolina rejected 17,578 ballots, and Texas tossed out 40,834 votes. The rejection rate ranged from a low of 28.64 percent in Arizona to a high of 75.37 percent in Texas. For voters who are handed provisional ballots, the intent may seem benign, but when used improperly, these ballots are a legal way to deny the right to vote.

Jobie Crawford, a Spelman student, recounted standing in hours-long lines only to be told when she made it to the front that she wasn’t registered, despite having received a letter confirming her registration days before. When she asked for a provisional ballot, the clerk told her that she only had a few left, and she wanted to save them for “real voters.”

After the issues of election security raised in 2016, Americans rightfully expected action from the federal government to address how we protect access to the vote. Instead, the U.S. Senate leadership, under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has blocked funding and the adoption of new standards to protect machines against hacking and tampering.

Nearly 1.4 million ex-felons in Florida regained voting rights, only to have those rights snatched away by a gerrymandered state legislature. In Tennessee, Republicans passed a state law to criminalize voter registration groups like Black Votes Matter, after the organization turned in more than 90,000 registration forms in a single year.1 New Hampshire imposed new residency requirements to disenfranchise college students studying in the state. In Michigan, state law makes it a crime to hire drivers to transport voters to polling locations unless they are physically unable to walk, even if the polling location is miles away.

(Statistically, the possession of a gun raises the risk of homicide in domestic violence cases by 500 percent.3)

President Andrew Jackson commanded the removal and effective genocide of thousands of Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Seminole via a 5,043-mile-long march over nine states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. President Martin Van Buren completed the “Indian Removal” campaign, and in the northern states, the Sauk, the Fox, and other native tribes faced war or removal.

Out in California, Chinese immigration hit a peak in the mid-1800s, particularly after the gold rush of 1849. Chinese laborers took on work in mines, on railroads, and along the waterfronts. They represented less than 0.2 percent of the nation’s population; yet, in response to demands for “racial purity” from white laborers and others, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act became the first federal law to prohibit an entire class of migrants. No Chinese person would be permitted to immigrate for ten years; and because of the Naturalization Act, no Chinese migrant living in America could be naturalized as a citizen.

During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover oversaw the mass deportation of more than one million people of Mexican descent, an estimated 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens.

Like blacks in the South, the Latinos in the West also faced lynchings, segregation, and expulsion, including Operation Wetback authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower, which purports to have forcibly deported more than 1.3 million Hispanics living in the United States.

According to the Federal Communications Commission report on broadband progress, “In rural areas, nearly one-fourth of the population—14.5 million people—lack access to [broadband] service. In tribal areas, nearly one-third of the population lacks access. Even in areas where broadband is available, approximately 100 million Americans still do not subscribe.”9

That means explaining the consequences for breaking the privacy of the census. Under Title 13 of the U.S. Code, anyone who uses confidential information from a person’s response commits a federal crime. A respondent’s private information will never be published, including the name, address (including GPS coordinates), social security numbers, or telephone numbers of household members. The law also states that personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court of law. Any identifying data is restricted for seventy-two years, and the consequences for violation include five years of imprisonment, a fine of up to $250,000, or both. As I like to explain to skeptics, if a person owns a phone or pays a utility bill, the government already knows how to find you. By completing the census, you can get the money for your community and power in your politics, but trust will continue to be an issue until our national leadership proves its best intentions.

That morning, my phone pinged with a text message at 9:59 a.m. The sender, an immigrant rights leader, wrote, “Sorry to bother u on Sunday morning but we have an Iranian student detained at the airport. She goes to [a Georgia university] on a student visa. She’s going to be deported today.” Again, I quickly acknowledged the message and began calling Democrats in Georgia’s congressional delegation, and they agreed to help. Before they could intervene, though, the young woman was deported back to Iran, away from her studies and her friends. In Boston, in New York, across the country, similar deportations sent students, doctors, and others away from the lives they’d built here. All on the orders of an American president in the twenty-first century.

Before we’d gone our separate ways, I’d authorized a series of television ads to encourage voters to cure their provisional ballots and call our hotline if they experienced voter suppression. When Lauren arrived, a little past eight, she was livid. Thousands of calls had poured in already, and by the end of the process, the hotline would log more than 80,000 calls.