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. 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. And we are willing to go to war to defend the sacred.

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.

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. I will make a case for that fact here. Choices are based on personal needs—end of story.

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.

What made the Voting Rights Act real, what forced desegregation, were the local political leaders who made it so. They were often normal men and women who saw modest progress as less harmful than obstinacy.

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.

According to the Brennan Center, “Between 2014 and 2016, states removed almost 16 million voters from the rolls—a 33 percent increase over the period between 2006 and 2008. The increase was highest in states with a history of voting discrimination.”

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.

Fraud is a crime of intent. Most accusations of voter fraud are best described as misunderstandings.

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.

Once, during a heated debate in the legislature, a colleague who disagreed with my position pulled me aside. In what seemed like genuine confusion, he asked why I supported increasing government investment in an education program. “You didn’t have this stuff, and you’re doing well. Aren’t you proof that government should get out of the way? Let people do what your parents did.” After a beat, I responded, “Yes, I did fine, but most people don’t have Robert and Carolyn Abrams as their parents. My job is to look out for the rest of them.”

identity is real and necessary and intertwined in our politics in such a way that there is no going back.

More important, we must acknowledge and accept that we all practice our own form of identity politics. Every person comes into the public discourse with histories and challenges. The worst political spaces are the ones where voters are told that everyone has the exact same narrative and everyone faces the exact same obstacles.

When America is at its best, we acknowledge the complexity of our societies and the complicating reality of how we experience this country—and its obstacles.

For 75 percent of the country, candidates for the nation’s top job do not bother to show up and campaign, narrowing their pitch and their obligations to the states considered relevant for the next four-year cycle. According to the National Popular Vote campaign, which is trying to undo the Electoral College, statistics show how few of us actually get to participate in the process. Nearly 70 percent of all the general-election campaign events in the 2016 presidential race occurred in six states and 94 percent took place in twelve states. 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.

Over the course of decades, conservatives learned to connect voters’ ambitions to the level of government that could make it so. Want to block sex education? Take over school boards. Oppose taxpayer dollars funding public transit? Win legislative offices. Strip workers’ rights? Elect union-busting governors in industrial states. Putting our money where our votes are means going beyond presidential and federal contests to also battle for state legislatures, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and governors. Key ammunition in the fight will be ensuring our armies of voters know the issues, know who has the control, and know how to agitate for quality leadership.

Despite our sanguine belief in the permanence of the U.S. system of governance, according to the annual Democracy Index, we have fallen to number 25 on the list of functional democracies, below Canada, Mauritius, and Uruguay, to name a few.