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February 22 - March 1, 2021
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.
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.
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.
Our nation’s core narrative can be summed up in the disconnect between the Constitution’s pledge of equality and the rampant disregard for that ambition that has plagued the United States of America ever since.
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.
In a democracy, where the state refuses to fix either the problem or the solution, voters are well and truly suppressed.
citizenship requires constant action, which includes voting, protesting, and participating; and without the combination, we are all in jeopardy.
The United States must no longer be a patchwork of good, bad, and worst states for voters, a degradation of democracy based on state lines and zip codes.
Change must begin at the federal level, where Congress establishes a bottom line for democracy rather than relegating the quality of access to the states.
The United States is one of only a few industrialized, democratized systems that compels citizens to undergo such rigor to be eligible to participate in voting.
When the right to vote is left to the states, implementation is fragmented, racist, and plain suppressive.
Use social media, traditional outreach, and good old-fashioned protests to raise awareness and push for action.
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.
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.
for the twenty-first century, we cannot create progressive policy-making unless we understand and reverse engineer how conservatives secured electoral dominance in the mid- to late twentieth century.
Elections matter, but voters matter more if they are the targets of engagement and education, not quick contacts or disregard.
fear has always been a part of how we navigate America, especially as minority communities. Fear is a given, but fear is not a reason to vote. Hope is a reason to vote: a visible, visceral compassion for those who worry for the future and fret about the now.
We must also anticipate the next populist leader’s emergence, which means we must strengthen our democratic institutions, we must fortify our voting rights with permanent fixes in law and the constitution, and we have to live our values and hold leaders accountable when they fail to behave.
The suppression of minority rights is the first hallmark of the end of liberal democracy and a grave danger to those communities.
We cannot demand that others value minority rights elsewhere when we fail to demand it of ourselves.
What we have seen play out in the last twenty years has been an aggressive attempt at voter suppression that is directly targeted to communities that have long been outside the body politic, and it began when they started to enter and affect elections in real and tangible ways.
Americans like to think that we’re invulnerable, but we are not. Our systems are not. Our democracy may be resilient, but it is also fragile. And that fragility is what is at stake now.
