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

by Stacey Abrams

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.

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.

Scott sued for his family’s emancipation; but Justice Taney, rather than reviewing the law, went to the fundamental question of whether Scott had the right to sue in a court of law, a perquisite of citizenship. Justice Taney rejected Scott’s bid for freedom because he did not see in Dred Scott the markers of privilege that would entitle him to redress. That is to say that because Scott was not a white male, one whom the Founding Fathers had deemed worthy of citizenship when the Constitution was written, Justice Taney and the majority of the Supreme Court held that Scott and all descendants of African slavery were permanently barred from citizenship.

From the mundane decision of taxation to the sale of human chattel, the Constitution envisioned the narrowest class of power brokers, and constraints on citizenship are the most effective means to filter out the interlopers.

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 For most of us born after the end of literacy tests, we have a vague grasp on what hurdles our parents and grandparents faced to vote, let alone their grandparents. Black voters had to unravel complex laws that trained lawyers would have trouble deciphering. All in a bid to cast a vote.

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. As proof, his team cited the number of applications with false or inaccurate information. However, as a protection against actual fraud or cherry-picking voters, Georgia law requires the submission of all collected forms, even if Mickey Mouse filled it out. His team refused to explain why nearly half our applications were never processed. Rather, he announced to a GOP gathering about New Georgia Project and other groups, “Democrats are working hard, and all these stories about them, you know, registering all these minority voters that are out there and others that are sitting on the sidelines, if they can do that, they can win these elections in November.”6 Our ambitious project began the tough work of bringing hundreds of thousands out of the shadows and into the electorate. In response, we faced attacks from the secretary of state, who refused to put our eligible applicants on the rolls by Election Day 2014.

From April to August 2019, at the urging of its Republican governor, the state of Kentucky purged 175,000 voters from its rolls, including thousands flagged for failure to vote.16 The Democratic secretary of state cried foul, but the GOP appointees on the state’s election board ignored her objections. In response, a coalition of groups brought suit against the purge, and a federal judge agreed that the state failed to follow its own protocols. A month later, the Republican governor lost by just over 5,000 votes, an outcome that might have been vastly different if the illegal purge had stood.

In predominantly white Ford County, Kansas, the 28,000 voters in Dodge City lost their sole polling location in the city’s civic arena. The decision by the white county elections official had a direct effect on the majority Latino town. Voters in the community received notice that they would have to find their way to the outskirts of town to a new polling location, despite the lack of public transportation. Any voter who used the bus would have to walk a full mile to reach the location. For a community comprised largely of workers at local meatpacking plants, the issue of transportation had serious consequences. Worse, Dodge City already experienced a disproportionate voter load at its one precinct: 13,000 voters as compared to the average of 1,200 for other Kansas precincts.

Research from North Carolina and Ohio painted a clear picture of the trend the GOP was anxious to avoid. In the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012, 70 percent of black voters cast their ballots early. In Ohio, black voters used early voting twice as much as white voters in 2012. Even today, the issue of early access has become a weapon of choice for voter suppression.

In early October, the Associated Press had broken a story declaring that Secretary of State Kemp suspended the voter registrations for more than 53,000 Georgians.1 As he was also my opponent for governor, the media swarmed over the story’s details, at last asking the question of how the person in charge of the election could also be a candidate.

At an event for Supermajority, a group dedicated to enlisting women in the 2020 elections, 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.”

The legislation barely passed and won only because of gerrymandering in 2011. The process of assigning legislative districts had drawn a map that allotted 68 percent of the state’s seats to Republicans, although the Republican statewide candidates only received 55 percent of the vote in 2010.

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.

This ethos of going deep into communities to transform their political participation has also driven BLOC, an organizing and mobilization group in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that engages black voters to understand their electoral power and prepare for the 2020 elections. One of their novel tools is the silent canvass, where candidates and elected officials are taken on a tour of Milwaukee but cannot speak. They are encouraged to experience the city with their full senses, but also to encounter the everyday lives of voters without the filter of their position or power.

In 2018, Senator Sinema benefited from heavy national investment that generated increased turnout by voters of color and Democratic-leaning white voters, given that she lost white votes but prevailed by 54,000 votes.

Sinema needs to recognize where hwr votes come from and be honest about her politics.