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.

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. Through the vote, the poor can access financial means, the infirm can find health care supports, and the burdened and heavy-laden can receive a measure of relief from a social safety net that serves all.

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.

Diversity, which we can admit is an incomplete descriptor of this transformation, has altered how we engage and interact, from the Black Lives Matter movement to marriage equality to Dreamers pressing for action on immigration to women challenging the silence of sexual harassment and assault.

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.

As the first black woman ever to win a primary for governor for a major political party in American history, one who ran against one of the worst purveyors of voter suppression and xenophobia since George Wallace, I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression—and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia’s history.

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.

Whether it’s the stories of police brutality against blacks or the invisibility of the disabled community, who we say we are as a country is not currently held up by how our systems behave.

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. Whether it’s the civil rights acts of the early ’60s or the advance of women’s rights or marriage equality, we are a better country when we defend the weakest among us and then empower them to choose their own futures.

But the threat is also coming from inside the coalition itself: citizens grappling with racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty are the least likely to vote. They have come to expect suppression from the opposition and inaction from the winners. Worse, the candidates who should engage them are afraid to reach out. We need active and relentless participation in our elections and government. Unfortunately, candidates and their consultants tend to view these groups as the hardest and most expensive to reach, so campaigns typically decide to hunt elsewhere for votes.

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.

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.

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.

Securing the right to register did not mean someone had the right to vote. Casting a ballot sometimes bore no relationship to whether that vote got counted. As my election experience proved, the vestiges of Jim Crow laws to legally block access to the right to vote have been replaced by voter purges, shuttered precincts, and broken voting machines in black neighborhoods.

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.

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.

In the United States, groups with historical disenfranchisement either have limited access to the voter registration process or do not trust the process. 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. 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.

Tennessee lawmakers added a criminal penalty for incentivizing registrars to sign up voters. The proponents of the law argued that these registration efforts increased the likelihood of voter fraud, without any evidence.

For the elderly, those with limited financial resources, people of color, the transgender community, and others, restrictive ID has the direct effect of limiting access to the ballot, not making voting more secure.

Traditionally, I cast my ballot on Election Day, like millions of others, and I’d grown up with it as a sort of civic holiday—a day where you show up, do your part, and, before midnight, a winner is declared.

Experts on voter suppression often caution against amplifying the issue because calling out the problem may convince low-propensity voters to not risk disappointment. That is to say, if unlikely voters believe their votes won’t count, they may opt not to participate in the first place.

In towns where everybody knows your name and where you live, a paycheck every two weeks or the rent on a house might come at the cost of not getting into trouble at the polls. When the decision to vote puts a person’s livelihood and family on the line, the safest option can be deciding not to participate at all, which is what happened in Hancock County after law enforcement began challenging black electors.

However, when those well-intentioned laws can be manipulated by people in power, the consequences reach beyond a single election. Worse, because the rules differ from state to state, and the implementation changes from county to county, access to democracy becomes a lottery of location. With more than 116,000 polling locations across the country, each election is filtered through the best practices and worst impulses of poll workers who may use individual prejudices to determine the eligibility and access of voters.

In 2014, President Obama’s Presidential Commission on Election Administration found that no voter should have to wait longer than thirty minutes to cast a ballot. For the majority of Americans, this timing holds true. But for those who are infrequent voters or have inflexible jobs or have family commitments, the effect of a longer wait time can easily suppress their vote.

Benign neglect as much as malevolent intent harms voters facing obstacles to participation.

In defiance of desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education, Georgia leaders had added the Confederate battle emblem to the state seal on the flag of Georgia in 1956. This was now our state’s calling card to the world. For years debate raged about why African Americans and people of good conscience had to confront the racist emblem simply to do business as citizens.

Much like suppression itself, increases in participation are nothing new. Surges in minority voting and voter suppression are not separate and independent phenomena. They are tightly linked by a 150-year history, where trying to block the right to vote has almost always triggered its increase.

Suppression may target a select group, but when the process breaks down, we are all at risk.

Conservative desperation to hold on to power will increase with each campaign, and as the law permits more and more egregious action, our responsibility is to do whatever we can to defeat suppression at its source.

Federal law must prohibit restrictive voter ID laws, which serve no one except those seeking to curtail voter participation. Unnecessary restrictions do nothing to protect voters and instead create irreparable harm to the victims of these laws, namely people of color, low-income Americans, young people, and the elderly. The requirement of identification does not necessitate screening out otherwise eligible voters.

Americans may have grown used to instant results by 11:00 p.m., but we can learn to wait if a slight delay increases the legitimacy of the outcome.

The banal term “redistricting” has been added to the general American political diet in recent years, but how and why it happens remains murky. Indeed, most people have never heard of the conservative Thomas Hofeller or his daughter, Stephanie, the political independent. Fewer have visited the website she set up, known as The Hofeller Files, where she has published thousands of pages and spreadsheets of her father’s work despite legal threats and accusations of theft. The documents she uncovered in her father’s records, compiled over several years, tell the story of how the GOP has fixed itself on a singular goal: aggregating and maintaining Republican dominance in state and federal politics regardless of the will of the people.

For every person who does not participate in the census, Georgia loses $2,300. Across the country, there is a notable correlation that shows that when sharp increases in people of color occur in GOP-led states, those same states have seen voting become harder.

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.”

Today, the use of the Electoral College continues to dramatically undermine the outcomes of elections. In the past twenty years, two presidents have been elected despite losing the popular vote: George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. For blacks in the South, the terrible twisting of voter intent continues, and in areas where blacks comprise 25 percent of the population, five of the six states have voted against the will of Democratic-leaning black voters in the recent elections. Those voters have no chance of aggregating their will with like-minded voters across the fifty states because votes only count for the state where they live. Thus, although 80 to 90 percent of black voters tend to vote Democratic, until they all move to the same state, their votes will be drowned out in Republican states and amplified in Democratic ones.

The Electoral College was never designed to protect small states against the tyranny of larger states—not at its inception and not today. Instead, it served to protect slaveholders from a loss of power then and to advantage a small coterie of states deemed competitive today.

In our campaign, as in contests around the country, the changing landscape of who is running and who is voting does not change the basics of how to win. The formula for winning is clear: (1) reject the myths of who votes and why, (2) make early and sustained investment in outreach to an expanded voter pool, and (3) recruit and support candidates who demonstrate authentic and consistent beliefs.

Swing voters do exist, but in modern politics, garnering their support has often come at the expense of an equally elusive but important group: the unlikely voter. Depending on the political scientist you’re listening to, these voters fall along a spectrum of behaviors, for example, unlisted, inactive, nonvoter, sporadic, low-propensity, or low-scoring.

In a time of changing demography, the problem with this approach to voting is that the low-propensity voters shunned by politicians share fairly common characteristics. They are usually people of color, young people, or unmarried women, otherwise known as the Rising American Electorate or the New American Majority.

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Democrats do themselves and the progressive cause a major disservice by trading efficacy for efficiency—by skipping over entire troves of potential voters, we unilaterally block ourselves from victories. Republicans are losing the demographic game, so instead they are rigging the system. But Democrats are forfeiting elections by refusing to reach out to all of the voters who could even the score or tip the balance.

Our campaign was encouraged by many to focus on the white swing voters and de-emphasize the unlikely voters, and we were chastised by pundits for wasting resources reaching out to both people of color and white voters.

Democrats would do well to remember, however, that 86 percent of black voters and 64 percent of Latino voters identify with us.

Imagine, for example, an Obama presidency where Democrats maintained control of the House and the Senate, which would have saved thousands of state legislative seats—thus protecting the Supreme Court at the federal level and forestalling the current assaults on reproductive rights generated by recalcitrant states. Immigration reform, climate action, and the progressive agenda would have still generated rancor and division, but the fights would have focused on scale rather than existential questions about who we are.

Would it, really?

I didn’t have black answers or white answers or Catholic answers. I refused to hide my own story because issues of debt, incarceration, and mental illness in a family affect everyone. I ran the kind of campaign I thought would convince my nonvoting cousins to go to the polls.

In addition to our rejection of myth and our investment in voters, what voters responded to can be practiced by any candidate standing for office. All they need is an authentic communication of values that is strong, clear, and unafraid, backed up by an aggressive and strategic campaign.

Voters will never agree with everything you say, but they get excited to know that a politician is willing to tell them the truth.

Democratic traditionalists did not trust our methods or our math. They feared we would lose a winnable race by bucking the regular rules. Other pushback included anxious advice when we rejected targeting recommendations from experts to trim low-turnout-scoring Democrats from our universes; repeated befuddled questioning about why we weren’t saving every dime for TV advertising; general strategy questions from opinion leaders in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., asking, “How do you know talking to voters will work?” and the list goes on.