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

by Stacey Abrams

One evening, I went to the master bedroom my parents had ceded to my grandmother when she could no longer live alone. She sat in her favorite recliner, watching the news on MSNBC, cell phone in her lap. I perched on the edge of her bed. Grandma turned down the volume and she asked about my election. By then, national attention had been fixed on the voter suppression allegations against Brian Kemp and on the tight numbers in our contest. I explained the latest developments to her and vented about the worries I had carried from Georgia. When I finished, she patted my hand. Then she told me about the first time she’d ever voted. Like my grandfather, she had been incensed at the strictures of Jim Crow since childhood. Smart and quick, she had seen lesser minds advance because of racial discrimination. But she understood how the systems worked, and when her children became agitators in the civil rights movement, she warily supported their activism. Both she and my grandfather had been quieter in the movement because they understood the consequences if they got caught. Putting food on the table and keeping their house kept both of them primarily on the sidelines.

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.

THE MECHANISMS OF voter suppression have transformed access to democracy in ways that continue to reshape not only our partisan politics but the way we live our daily lives.

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. Over the course of our history, these men and women, these patriots and defenders of liberty, have been denied the most profound currency of citizenship: power. Because, let’s be honest, that is the core of this fight. The right to be seen, the right to be heard, the right to direct the course of history are markers of power. In the United States, democracy makes politics one of the key levers to exercising power. So, it should shock none of us that the struggle for dominion over our nation’s future and who will participate is simply a battle for American power.

Those who see their relative influence shrinking are using every tool possible to limit access to political power. 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. However, they are not using new tools. At its inception, our nation served as a refuge to those whose difference placed them in danger; but the same newcomers stole land from and murdered the original inhabitants, enslaved blacks and stripped them of their humanity, and denied basic rights to women and nonwhites from abroad. This history means we understand what is at stake, how our opponents will try to block change, and, most important, our obligation to realize our destiny. At its core, America’s challenge is a question of who we are. Some on the right will dismiss this as absurd identity politics, but identity is politics.

Most of us can recite the preamble to the Constitution (or sing it if we learned the words from Schoolhouse Rock!). The promises of justice and liberty come with the responsibility for electing leaders to protect and make them real. Yet, from limiting original voting rights to white men, to the elitist and racist origins of the Electoral College, American democracy has always left people out of participation, by design. Any lasting solutions come solely from the U.S. Constitution, the highest legal bar imaginable; and over the centuries, we clawed out access to the ballot for people of color through the Fifteenth Amendment, women in the Nineteenth Amendment, and young voters in the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. But each of those amendments contained a loophole for suppression: leaving implementation to the states, particularly the ones most hostile to inclusion. Add to that the generational underfunding of the basic mechanics of elections, where incompetence and malfeasance operate in tandem, and the sheer complexity of the national voting apparatus smooths suppression into a nearly seamless operation.

Voter suppression—from getting on the rolls to being allowed to vote to having those votes count—is real. But Americans need a robust understanding of what suppression looks like today. 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. To move forward, we must understand the extent to which the shrinking conservative minority will go to create barriers to democracy.

Beyond Congress, there are the unmentioned corridors of power we too often cede: state and local elections, from school boards and county commissions to boards of elections and secretaries of state. These elections matter because the architecture of our rights begins closest to home.

Demography is not destiny; it is opportunity.

I have two siblings who missed out on most of my campaign for governor: a brother who watched my race from a television in a state prison and a sister who is forbidden to engage in partisan politics as a federal judge. My vision for America isn’t one where Leslie is the star and Walter is simply a cautionary tale. My America sees my brother and my sister as the promise of what our nation can and must become—a place of extraordinary success that transcends barriers and a place of redemption that defies the cynicism of our politics. This is a vision that only comes into being when everyone has a true voice in our futures. America, for all its faults, has always been a place of promise and renewal, of mistakes made and the constant pursuit of atonement. This is a new manifesto for our progressive future, one emboldened by understanding that our time of waiting is over. The fight for our future has already begun. And guess what? We won.

The contours and tactics of voter suppression have changed since the days of Jim Crow, Black Codes, or suffragettes, but the mission remains steady and immovable: keep power concentrated in the hands of the few by disenfranchising the votes of the undesirable.

We have been taught to expect concessions not only to the outcome of an electoral contest but to the system that undergirds it. But we forget that the system is not simply constructed for picking politicians. The vast, invasive, and complex electoral system controls everything—from determining the quality of our drinking water to the lawfulness of abortion rights to the wages stolen from a domestic worker. The voting system is not just political; it is economic and social and educational. It is omnipresent and omniscient. And it is fallible. Yet, when a structure is broken, we are fools if we simply ignore the defect in favor of pretending that our democracy isn’t cracking at the seams. Our obligation is to understand where the problem is, find a solution, and make the broken whole again.

The stripping away of rights comes through racial and sexist animus, incompetence, willful ignorance, and malfeasance. Sometimes, these occur all in the same action. Since our nation’s inception, the brokers of power have sought to aggregate authority to themselves.

They wrote the Constitution with a grandiose and seductive ideal of freedom at its core, one that embedded hypocrisy in its three-fifths compromise for slavery and the omission of women altogether. But the appeal of freedom and the moments of courage and valor that have made up the American story means we still hold that aspiration today. But we sell the story to other nations without fully confronting the internal conflict our actions demonstrate to those who look to America as a model of behavior. In order to tell the whole truth—which we must do if we have any chance of moving forward—we must understand how the story of America’s democracy yielded so many terrible examples of its complicated promise.

Though the Voting Rights Act would come the next year, like Brown v. Board of Education, the act of Congress would be slow to penetrate and create real change. We often see these historical moments as flash points with instant gratification; however, with most movements, the new laws, the new rules, only herald possibility. More must be done to make it so.

Brown, like the freedom promised in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, meant little in real life. Blacks did not have the right to desegregated schools or integrated voting. They could only recite the myth of civil rights progress that they read about in the newspapers or saw on television. Without a state system forced to accept the federal edicts, racial oppression continued for years after change had supposedly come. 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. Without the ability to demand obedience to the moral victories, what my parents and others experienced in the wake of civil rights victories was often just more of the same, executed quietly and without consequence. What made the Voting Rights Act real, what forced desegregation, were the local political leaders who made it so.

Though the Founding Fathers gave a nod to universal equality in the Declaration of Independence, they abandoned the aspiration by the time they penned the country’s organizing documents. 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.

But the right to vote is not simply a request for voice in the conduct of the affairs of state. People have sacrificed their lives in pursuit of the most profound currency of citizenship: power. Because, let’s be honest, that is the core of this fight. Power is the right to be seen, the right to be heard, the right to direct the course of history and benefit from the future. In the United States, democracy makes politics one of the key levers to exercising power. Simply put, the struggle for dominion over our nation’s future and who will participate is a battle royal for America’s power, full stop.

What is so damning about Dred Scott is the absolute denial of citizenship—of participation in power—to an American who had every reason to believe he was entitled to the protection of membership. With the decision in Scott’s case, states continued to deny the rights to citizenship. Slavery flourished until the Civil War, and even in the free states, blacks were allowed to be state citizens but had no say in federal laws or decision making. Each time the most effective marker of citizenship—the right to vote—is suppressed, there are echoes of Justice Taney’s edict. Those who cannot vote have no say in the operation of government, which creates a permanent state of powerlessness.

At the onset of the Post-Reconstruction era in 1877, the infamous Jim Crow laws took hold when rights granted by Reconstruction were swiftly taken away. The eleven Confederate states plus two sympathizer states that formed the core of the Jim Crow region were: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. We’ve all heard of the stark inequities in access at one time in these states, from segregated bathrooms to no-admittance hospitals to isolated burial plots. Despite the fact that black Americans now held nominal citizenship after the Thirteenth Amendment, the courts refused to enforce the privileges of belonging for them, deferring instead to the right of states to inculcate their racist dogmas into the laws that governed the most basic actions.

En masse, nonwhites were denied the right to own land, the right to education, the right to free and full enjoyment of their lives in America—by virtue of not having a right to vote to gain the representation to create change.

The only barrier to wholesale decimation of the rights and protections won through the Voting Rights Act, though, were the states and jurisdictions subject to federal oversight. Enter Shelby County v. Holder, an Alabama case that argued that racial animus in voting rights had been vanquished and preclearance was no longer necessary. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Shelby County v. Holder decision, finding agreement with Alabama. The results have dramatically undermined access to full participation in our democracy.

However, no assault on democracy will ever be limited to its targets. As the franchise is weakened, all citizens feel the effects and even the perpetrators eventually face the consequences of collateral damage—an erosion of our democracy writ large. Without Shelby, politicians are free to restrict the right to vote virtually anywhere, and while they may start a few neighborhoods away, there’s no telling who is next.

Immediately after Shelby, election officials in covered jurisdictions began picking at the low-hanging fruit and moving to close polling places in minority communities and to limit early voting opportunities that allowed working-class citizens to vote without missing work. The long game included actions ranging from voter purges to restrictive voter ID requirements to polling place closures. States facing more voters of color or younger voters have changed the rules so that, while facially neutral, the new laws result in a disturbingly predictable adverse effect: it’s harder to vote.

The core value of the Voting Rights Act was to create equal access to the ballot, regardless of race, class, or partisanship. Yet, the Shelby decision and its aftermath deny the real and present danger posed by those who see voters of color as a threat to be neutralized rather than as fellow citizens to be engaged. Justice Taney refused to see Dred Scott as a citizen and, in the process, stripped him of his right to participate in the direction of his future and that of his progeny. Without a Voting Rights Act–style oversight, voters of color once again face the specter of being outside the protections of our Constitution. Without a protected right to vote, the Shelby decision and the proliferation of anti-voting laws have destabilized the whole of our democratic experiment. Rather than a Justice Department that prevents discriminatory voting policies from taking effect in the first place, the Supreme Court created a system of disproportionate impact, one in which justice could prevail in select instances and only after multiple federal courts intervened. 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...

Like a golden ticket, the act of voter registration opens the process of democracy, and without it, citizens are just aspirants at the gate.

With the management of elections left to individual states, the fractured, disjointed process is key to voter suppression. Where registration is easier, voters are more likely to participate.2

I met a middle-aged man who worked in a chicken processing plant. 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. As the Democratic Leader of the House, my instinct was to explain whose fault it was, to direct these underserved populations to the wrongdoers who denied them health care. I wanted to help them vote these ne’er-do-wells out of office. But, as I did the all-important work of educating and engaging, the fundamental problem became clear. It wasn’t that the affected populations needed to vote to throw the scoundrels out, they needed to reg...

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. Recognizing these ingredients are key to comprehending and fighting the scourge and efficacy of voter suppression.

Criminalizing and fining third-party registration proved to be an effective quiver in the arsenal of voter registration suppression. Several states play hide-and-go-seek with the administrative voter registration process and in how voters actually get on the rolls by creating a maze of bureaucratic hurdles.

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.

This continued investigation led to our second discovery: secret agency rules. With our legal counsel from the invaluable Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in 2015, we uncovered unpublished internal rules such as the ninety-day blackout period during which no voter registration forms were processed.

Before Kemp installed the exact match system, he knew that the process would disproportionately affect voters of color. Back in 2009, his predecessor Karen Handel sought permission to use the system. In response, the Obama Justice Department summarily rejected exact match as presenting “real,” “substantial,” and “retrogressive” burdens on voters of color—warning that it would have a racially discriminatory effect. With the Shelby decision eliminating the need for the state to get permission to use exact match, Kemp resurrected the discredited policy.

“VOTING IS A privilege,” declared Republican governor Ron DeSantis of Florida on January 16, 2020.7 He issued the statement in celebration of a state court victory that partially reversed a 2018 state ballot initiative restoring voting rights to felons. A few days later, he attempted to walk back the statement, but his sentiments were crystal clear. And wholly wrong. Voting is a constitutional right in the United States, a right that has been reiterated three separate times via constitutional amendment.

A 2017 National Association of Secretaries of State report found that “in forty-four states, voters who fail to respond to a notice will be removed from the registration list if they do not vote, update their registration, or take some other action specified by law from the time of the notice through two federal general elections.” 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.

Our system of participatory democracy begins with the license to vote, and without it, a citizen will not be heard. But assuming a voter makes it onto the list of eligible voters, the next question is: will they be allowed to cast their vote?

Confounded by the success of the absentee ballot strategy and the second routing in a year, the rejected incumbents and their cronies reached out to Secretary Kemp. He responded aggressively to the false accusations of voter fraud, the only excuse opponents could come up with to explain their defeat. Black voters didn’t vote absentee, and certainly not in Brooks County. Kemp, newly installed in his office, took up the cause of the losers and the conspiracy theories. He authorized the Georgia Bureau of Investigation—the state’s version of the FBI—to pursue the matter on the department’s behalf. Agents raided their homes and offices and arrested the duly elected school board members and their supporters. The governor removed them from office, and several lost their regular employment, their reputations smeared. Years passed before their criminal trials commenced; and in the end, not a single person was convicted. No voter fraud had occurred, just clever use of a process rarely leveraged by black voters. But the damage was done, the goal accomplished: black voters had been punished for utilizing rules white voters had enjoyed for years. Access to the ballot had severe limits; and despite doing nothing wrong, the consequences of full engagement could be devastating.2

If a voter has survived the gauntlet of challenges to staying on the rolls, the next issue is the ability to access a ballot and vote.

While Kemp’s attack on the black voters of Quitman occurred before the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, his actions simply previewed what would follow. State legislators, secretaries of state, and governors—almost entirely Republican—returned to their greatest hits in voter suppression. Limits on absentee ballots and restrictive voter ID laws came first, followed by an increase in closed or consolidated precincts, reductions in early voting, vulnerable or inadequate equipment, and lax oversight of county application of state laws. Separately and together, these actions block voters from accessing the ballots that make voting real. In state after state, incompetence and malfeasance operate in tandem, and the sheer complexity of the nation’s voting apparatus transforms voter suppression into a nearly seamless system. These hurdles have had their desired effect of hampering voters, making it harder to cast a ballot. Federal court systems have aided bad state actors by allowing more and more rules to limit access or stop voters from getting a remedy.

Voter fraud refers typically to one of two occurrences: (1) impersonating another voter or (2) a noncitizen, nonresident, or ineligible voter effectively casting a ballot. The former almost never happens; in fact, an American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate a voter.3 To be more specific, according to analysis, out of 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014, only 31 instances of voter impersonation occurred.4 As to noncitizen or nonresident voting, the almost universal explanation is voter confusion. In the United States, we have fifty-one different democracies in operation between individual state laws and federal laws. For example, if a person moves from Maine to Oklahoma, the rules change dramatically with regard to registration timing, eligibility, and remedies. National experts barely understand the complexity of local voting laws—how would the average person? Fraud is a crime of intent. Most accusations of voter fraud are best described as misunderstandings.5

Voter suppression begins with barriers to registration, and it continues by limiting access to the ballot. But beyond these measures, the enemies of fully participatory democracy have a final weapon to get their way: making sure certain votes never count.

Voters who try to use the flexibility of absentee ballots do not always have the ability to cure the problem.

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.

Representative democracy is a brute force exercise, where who counts matters. Rigging the game affects all the players on the team, even those who are not targeted.

When the most vulnerable communities become isolated from public discourse, especially from voting, their ills might appear to be contained as well. But like any dangerous contagion, the symptom of voter suppression serves as a warning for a more virulent and deadly disorder. When democracy is broken, the effects are national and even international. Recent elections prove again and again that our democracy is fragile. Here at home, we hear about Russian interference, hacked machines, and more and more people who doubt the system. Abroad, authoritarians and dictators win elections and reshape democracies into parodies of freedom. The same world leaders who once feared disappointing American leaders now use our compromised elections to justify their own behavior. When disinformation campaigns target black and brown voters to scare them away from the polls, the source might as easily be Russian as Republican. Saving democracy is not an overblown call to action—we are in trouble.

We are in trouble. But we do know what to do. America has always been a crucible for democratic innovation, and our hallmark is our willingness to learn and grow. Fixing our broken democracy stands as a foundational prerequisite to progress. Our work to achieve universal health care access, education parity, social and economic justice, and more—they each depend on the fundamental obligation that undergirds them all, eradicating voter suppression and ensuring that our elections are fair fights. Whether through supporting the Voting Rights Advancement Act in Congress, or advocating for ballot security on the local level, or holding every state-level candidate accountable for putting forth a plan to end this repugnant practice, together we can establish an electoral system that is truly democratic, where policies of, by, and for the people truly flourish. And, in the process, we can repair democracy itself.

Those of us who believe in the promise of democracy must become outraged about even a single act of suppression. In an honorable system, the loss of a single voter’s right to participate is a wrong that cannot be tolerated—and as Americans, we should know that a failure in the system weakens us all.