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

by Stacey Abrams

We will stay and stand up for what belongs to us as American citizens, because they can’t say that we haven’t had patience. —FANNIE LOU HAMER

Civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis often refers to the right to vote as “almost sacred.” As the child of ministers, I understand his hesitation to label a simple, secular act as sacred. 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.

I am not calling for violent revolt here. We’ve done that twice in our nation’s history—to claim our freedom from tyranny and when we fought a civil war to recognize (at least a little) the humanity of Blacks held in bondage. Yet, as millions are stripped of their rights, we live out the policy consequences, from lethal pollution running through poor communities to kindergartners practicing active shooter drills taught with nursery rhymes. I question what remedy remains. The questions that confront me every day are how to defend this sacred right and our democracy, and who will do so.

As it stands now, on one side, we have a Republican Party in power that believes that it has complied with the letter of the law, having twisted the rules to barely reflect its spirit. On the other hand, the Democrats—the party to which I hold allegiance—talk about full civic engagement but take inconsistent steps to meaningfully expand the electorate and build infrastructure. Embedded in this duality is a fundamental concern: Who is entitled to full citizenship? Based on our national story, and from where we stand now, the list is far shorter than it should be. 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...

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 th...

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.

Since 2008’s election of the first Black president, we have achieved extraordinary victories. Millions of Americans, too used to seeing themselves only on the margins or not at all, have participated in historic and hopeful wins in the House and hard-fought victories for the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races. However, across the country, we witnessed a “power grab” from the minority desperate to hold on to power. The examples of this abound: Native Americans living on reservations in North Dakota were told that in order to vote, they had to have street addresses—where none existed. In Mississippi, impoverished elderly folks who needed an absentee ballot had to pay for a notary public to submit the ballot—resulting in a new-fashioned poll tax. In Georgia, tens of thousands of people of color had their applications for registration held up because of typographical errors in government databases and a failed system called “exact match.” Of the 53,000 applications blocked by this process, 80 percent were from people of color.

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. Citing voting rights experts and my own wo...

Voter suppression is not a new phenomenon, and, truth be told, it isn’t entirely partisan. Suppression began before the advent of political parties and became a favored tool of the party in power. Democratic-Republicans, Know-Nothings, Democrats, and Republicans have all leveraged the power of suppression to win elections and deny votes to the other side. 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. At first, that meant old white men who denied a political voice to their wives, their slaves, their indentured servants, and the native landholders. These white men—and they were all white men—relied upon women, slaves, servants, and Native Americans to build the commerce and physical structures of the colonies, and then all were conscripted in some fashion into the Revolutionary War. 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 ...

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. The school boards afraid of lawsuits began to experiment with integration, and the county elections boards eventually caved in to the demands of the federal Department of Justice. But the most compelling reason for change was often the desire to garner the additional ballots represented by a new cadre of eligible voters: Blacks who could finally influence elections.

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. 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.

Voting rights are the most basic tenet of our democracy, and the bare minimum one should expect from the government. Our presidents can send our neighbors to war. Local elected officials decide the mundane questions of trash pickup and the weightier issues of hospital closures. At every level of our lives in this republic, we choose men and women to speak for us, yes, but also to determine the direction of our daily lives. And all it takes is a teachers’ strike or a government shutdown to remind us how vital elections can be to the daily rhythms of life.

Over the course of our history, the right to vote had to be purchased by blood and protest in each generation. The Revolutionary War included enslaved patriots and Native Americans who would be denied citizenship once the nation became official. The savagery of the Civil War had no clearer argument than whether Blacks were property or human beings capable of self-governance. Even the suffrage movement tangled with complex issues of gender and race, where white women would benefit from obtaining suffrage while working to deny the same to the Black women who helped power the movement. 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 fr...

However, the battle has long targeted the marginalized and the dispossessed, cordoning off the right to vote for a select group, from the beginning. In the first full year of our nation’s founding, the Naturalization Act of 1790 passed to prevent anyone except former slaves and “free white persons” from becoming citizens. This targeted the Native Americans who had occupied the nation long before the Mayflower reached American shores. Having dispatched with the potential of too many freed slaves by enshrining slavery into the founding documents, the U.S. Supreme Court cemented this position in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), deciding that Blacks could not be considered American citizens and had no standing to challenge slavery. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote, “A negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves” was permanently disenfranchised because a Black person inherently was “[not] a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution.” The notion of “political community” lay at the heart of this denunciation of Black participation in American democracy, creating a private club where the only accepted members had t...

After the Civil War, from 1865 to 1877, the United States made a brief, aborted attempt at meeting the basic premise of democracy by enforcing, for the first time, the rights of Black Americans. This period was known as Reconstruction. The opening salvo came in the form of the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, a critical prerequisite for expanded Black participation in the decisions of their communities. However, even the abolition of slavery carried a wicked reprisal, allowing for involuntary servitude as punishment for the commission of a crime, a feature exploited eagerly by not only former Confederates but their Northern and Western white compatriots in power. With newly freed slaves mostly living in the South (there were more than four million enslaved at the time of the Civil War), the fight to prevent full citizenship was waged for more than a decade. The Black Codes, formalized by Southern states in the 1860s, had counterparts in Northern states, some dating back to the colonial era. In the South, a newly freed Black man had no right to vote. In the lawless towns that existed after the war, Blacks could not own weapons to defend themselves, even though organized law enforcement might not exist. Even the act of walking down a city street carried peril. Vagrancy laws made it illegal for Blacks to move about without proof of a job. A Black man waiting on a street corner to meet his wife could be arrested and jai...

During Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, as well as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, began the painful reassertion of our nation’s core principles of equal protection under the law. The little-known Civil Rights Act of 1866 followed the end of slavery, and it transformed the lives of Blacks in America. For the first time, federal law guaranteed legal rights, allowed for labor rights, and permitted access to education and freedom of religion. Black churches, often maintained in secret, flourished. Historically Black colleges and universities educated teachers, doctors, and businessmen, and other Black students gained acceptance to historically white institutions. Economic opportunity opened up for hundreds of thousands grappling with the terrible transition from slavery into the putative free market economy. But the act had its fiercest opponent in Democrat Andrew Johnson, serving his turn as president in the wake of Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson vetoed the act, but a Republican Congress overrode his veto. In 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States, which overturned the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. Black men and women finally held a status they had been historically denied—but Native Americans did not benefit from this change. No persons considered visitors to the United States, or Native Americans living on reservations, as mos...

Literacy tests were a favored tool borrowed from the Northeast, and they were particularly popular because both immigrants and freed Black Americans often had limited education. Connecticut pioneered literacy tests in 1855 to limit access to the ballot and exclude Irish immigrants. Under these tests, voters would have to prove their command of language by reading a passage aloud and then answering questions showing their reading comprehension to the satisfaction of the examiner. Of course, the tests were administered in a fashion that made it harder for those whom the establishment wanted to disenfranchise. 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 comple...

The hope that the Civil War amendments carried—that the states would enact the same principles of freedom that the federal laws demanded—proved to be a fiction. When the Democrats regained power in Congress and the Republicans lost interest, the former Confederate states set upon a scheme of permanent disenfranchisement for Blacks, reversing the gains of Reconstruction and punishing those who dared treat Black citizenship as whole and real. At the core of this seizure and denial of rights lay a devious scheme of passing the buck. Federal laws granted rights in theory but left to the states the responsibility of implementation. States took full advantage of this, perfecting their craft by invoking the Tenth Amendment, the last addition to the Bill of Rights, which granted to the states an independence from responsibility to those who lived within its borders. Heralded as “states’ rights” to all who would listen, the Tenth Amendment became an unscalable barrier against civil rights for millions. In the former Confederate and sympathizing states, slavery may have ended, but nothing bound the white men in charge from imposing new forms of degradation on the Black Americans who conti...

Blacks and others chafed under the loss of freedoms that had been briefly won during Reconstruction. Over time, they began to organize protests and agitate elected officials to restore what the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments promised in the Constitution. In 1948, with Executive Order 9981, Truman integrated the armed forces. Though heralded for its progress, the act simply enshrined that which should have been instinctive: that those who risked their lives for our democracy shouldn’t be discriminated against while doing so. In 1951, the civil rights movement began in earnest. Under the leadership of a newly emboldened Supreme Court and determined jurists like Thurgood Marshall, a litany of cases and new laws began to construct our modern understanding of civil rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, weakened by the actions of then Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, held that the federal government has the right to enforce laws prohibiting the denial of voting rights and establishes the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Three years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1960 restored key portions of the 1957 proposal, including empowering the federal government to enforce court orders regarding desegregation and other civil rights legislation, along with the ability to file civil rights lawsuits on behalf of the public. Prior to this provision, an aggrieved Black citizen had to personally file, and few had the resources or capacity to seek redr...

Despite glacial gains, the crowning achievement for bedrock democracy came in the form of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which restored and protected voting rights at the federal level and held certain states and jurisdictions, referred to as “covered jurisdictions,” accountable for discrimination. The most effective provision of the law would be found in the preclearance mechanism of Section 5, which mandated that any time a covered jurisdiction—be it city, county, or state—attempted to change any election law, practice, or procedure, the U.S. Justice Department had to agree that it did not have a discriminatory purpose or effect.

My favorite speech by Dr. Martin Luther King is not his extraordinary “I Have a Dream” delivered at the 1963 March on Washington. I actually prefer his lesser-known 1966 speech delivered in Kingstree, South Carolina, where his audience gathered in folding chairs and he addressed listeners from a makeshift podium, asking them to “March on Ballot Boxes.” On a damp Mother’s Day morning, the almost entirely Black gathering heard him lay out his case, arguing that the ability to change the legislative agenda—and by extension their very lives—began with registering to vote. Like a golden ticket, the act of voter registration opens the process of democracy, and without it, citizens are just aspirants at the gate. His rhetorical flourish hammered home an essential truth: regardless of the constitutional amendments ratified and the electoral laws passed, the point of entry into the process of participation rests solely on being among those allowed to write their names on the rolls. Dr. King understood this and he challenged the audience to register at least ten other people before the upcoming primary.

While it has been at the forefront of my mind for most of my life, for most Americans, the issue of voter registration—the point of entry into our electoral process—rarely crosses their minds. Communities with a history of easy participation often take for granted the civic system’s accessibility and relative ease. In seventeen states plus the District of Columbia, voter registration occurs automatically, typically through the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). In almost every other state, registration when you get your license is an option because of the Voter Registration Act. More commonly referred to as the Motor Voter Act, Congress passed this law in 1993, as my efforts to register voters in the AUC were under way. The Motor Voter Act required states to offer eligible citizens the option to register to vote when applying for or renewing a license at the DMV or when interacting with other state agencies.

Georgia is one of the states that use felonies to rescind voting rights, a law born out of Jim Crow and exacerbated by the state’s unique history of incarceration. This type of disenfranchisement was added to Georgia’s constitution in 1868, and its inclusion reinforced the “Black Codes” and poll taxes intended to suppress Black votes after the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were ratified. Today, nearly 60 percent of Georgians disqualified because of a felony conviction are Black. Georgia has the tenth-highest rate of felony disenfranchisement in the country8 and the state has removed more people from the voter list (nearly 147,000) because of a felony conviction than any other state in the country.9 Under a joint effort by the previous governor and legislators like myself, Georgia attempted to tackle our legacy as a state of mass incarceration, but two-strikes laws (mandatory sentencing after two convictions) and aggressive use of post-release conditions like parole and probation continue to affect potential voters who served time. As of 2016, Georgia had 410,964 people on probation, more than any other state. Although California is the most populous state, with nearly forty million residents, and four times the population of Georgia, the probation numbers are reversed. In 2016, California had 288,911 probationers, half the number of those in Georgia.10 The most restrictive states (Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska...

Whenever I raise the issue of voter suppression, I can be certain proponents of more restrictive rules will respond with two standard retorts. The first is the specter of voter fraud, the rationale frequently used by conservatives to justify the implementation of several forms of suppression. As the argument goes, the rules are required to stop a horde from skewing the outcomes of elections. However, voter fraud has been debunked as exceptionally rare by multiple reputable organizations, not to mention the ersatz voting commission established by Donald Trump.

For most Americans, providing a valid street address would hardly be an issue. After all, we must use that address for pizza delivery, Amazon Prime packages, and emergencies. But for the several tribes who inhabit the vast lands of North Dakota, a verifiable residential address is a luxury and, for thousands, an impossibility. Among the casualties of the law were Leslie and Clark Peltier, members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. A professor, Leslie taught at the local college, and Clark served as foreman for the maintenance department at the local housing authority. For more than a decade, they lived in their house on the reservation, a family home surrounded by gravel roads and no street signs. The absence never struck them as unusual. Native American reservations rarely have residential addresses, as the state or local governments often fail to assign them. So life on reservations has adapted to use a combination of P.O. boxes, cluster boxes, and approximated street addresses to direct emergency vehicles. In 2012, when the Peltiers went to vote, the registrar notified them of the updated residential address that would now be used for 911 calls. The Peltiers dutifully recorded the address and updated their drivers’ licenses to reflect the new information. However, when they went to vote in 2013, the poll worker told them that the new residential address meant they had to vote in a different city, off the reservation. They hadn’t moved their home or changed...

Following the tumult of the Bush v. Gore election of 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002. Federal lawmakers wanted to limit the ways voting processes differed from state to state, and they picked high-profile problems to address, like replacing the infamous punch-card and lever-based voting systems, establishing the Election Assistance Commission, and setting minimum standards for voting across the country. One of those standards was mandating the provisional ballot, which required states to allow eligible voters who might be rejected to cast ballots anyway, especially in light of administrative errors. Prior to HAVA, a voter might be turned away from a precinct if his name didn’t appear on the rolls or if her address had changed but not been updated in the state’s records. Intended as a fail-safe for voters, like most other election laws, the process for handling and counting provisional ballots differs by state. In the hands of vote suppression masters, the provisional ballot provides not safety but a guarantee against full democratic rights. 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 pe...

In a democracy, where the state refuses to fix either the problem or the solution, voters are well and truly suppressed.

At the core of our American democracy is the theory of representation. We believe the people should elect the leaders who give voice to their values and ambitions. The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democratic republic, yet we have seen partisanship overtake patriotism in our process—where one party maintaining power is used to justify stripping voters of constitutional rights. Across the country, Republicans have passed laws designed to block, deflect, and deny access to the ballot. Since 2010, according to the Brennan Center, twenty-five states have heightened voting restrictions—almost entirely authored by Republican officials. Voter suppression typically targets the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the inconvenient—those whose decisions challenge the established order of things, like college students or ex-offenders. But the effect is broader and exponentially more pronounced. These communities tend to share a common belief that political leaders should pass laws to guarantee equity and justice, and they vote that way. However, the disenfranchisement of individuals and entire populations from democracy through the booby traps of registration, access to the ballot, and ballot counting works to divide groups, often leaving the privileged unscathed by the process but hurt by the outcomes. 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. Consider...

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. The changing demography of America speaks to more than whether Democrats or Republicans control political decisions. Young people will be financially responsible for the largest population of elderly Americans in our history, but without the resources necessary to provide for them. The increased frequency of extreme climate events costs billions of dollars that will not be spent on education or infrastructure. The past fifty years of public policy toward communities of color have consequences. For decades, Black and brown children have had higher dropout rates, higher incarceration rates, and lower earning power. This very same population continues to grow in size and political might, but America has largely abandoned our tradition of civic educati...

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 pract...

Before I lay out the path to ending voter suppression, I must dispel one persistent myth. When perpetrators are caught in the act with the intent and effect of restricting voting, calling out their undemocratic behavior has led to cries of innocence from Republicans and feigned outrage in conservative media. When absurdly long lines kept Black voters away from jobs for hours, President Obama convened a commission to study the problem. In response, GOP secretaries of state and other Republican politicians and pundits argued that the lines were simply a result of excitement rather than suppression. Because the Democratic candidate won, most Americans of both political stripes quickly moved on to other concerns. However, when a number of us raised the issue in 2018, the concerns resonated and ricocheted around the country. In response, Republicans have tried to argue that because high numbers of voters of color participated in the 2018 election, this is proof that no voter suppression occurred. Employing this level of purposeful intellectual laziness and gaslighting voters of color who were deprived of their constitutional rights is shocking but not surprising, given that it comes from a crop of politicos whose primary strategy for victory is to make voting more difficult. Their spurious logic is belied by a simple thought experiment: on an obstacle course, more people can sign up and decide to compete, but an increase in participation does not negate the fact that the coach ...

The Black response to suffrage granted by Reconstruction elected Black men at every level of government. Women gained the right to vote in 1920, reversing years of suppression, and their participation rates have continued to rise. The fact that Black, Latino, and AAPI voters showed up in droves in 2018 is proof that voter turnout and voter suppression can operate in tandem, but in relation to each other. Research shows that when voters become aware of suppression activities, if they become angry rather than disheartened, they will take extra steps to defeat it, including by getting out to vote. I liken it to a toy or possession that a bully threatens to take. Human nature says we may not use it very often, but when the wrong person tries to steal it, we’ll fight hard to keep it for ourselves.

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. Still, too many Republicans accept voter suppression as th...

The 2020 presidential election will be the first national test since the end of the decree, and voting activists and election experts worry that the GOP has not learned its lessons.4 From once again hiring off-duty law enforcement, including off-duty Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, to posting false information threatening returning citizens with criminal violations, the potential for harm is grave. 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.

Our nation has struggled with real, universal suffrage from its earliest days; yet across this nation, dogged citizens have found ways to make democracy real for as many as possible. Whether through the action of state legislators and thoughtful governors or through citizen-led ballot initiatives that take the politics from politicians, we have a range of examples about what should be done to make our democracy work. In Oregon and Washington, voters and leaders aligned on a range of best practices, including automatic registration, same-day registration, no restrictive voter identification, and ballots mailed directly to voters (Washington State even sends voters a handy guide to the election). There, the ease of voting has not been marred by rampant fraud or corruption. Instead, both states have seen high levels of voter participation and turnout in recent elections. 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. Being an eligible citizen should be sufficient for full participation, and we have multiple examples of what and how this can be accomplished. 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. Political scientists and voting rights advocates know what works; and in the first act of the 116th Congress led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the signature legislation ...

The place where most of our problems begin is voter registration. 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. In fact, in North Dakota, voter registration isn’t a thing. Already, seventeen states plus D.C. offer some form of automatic registration and twenty-one states plus D.C. give voters same-day registration, including on Election Day. Federal law must go beyond the limited success of motor voter and require automatic registration, same-day registration, and preregistration for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. For automatic registration, the process should be designed for interaction with federal and state agencies with the broadest contact, such as expanding beyond DMVs to include courthouses, human services offices, state tax offices, and public housing locations. If states wish to follow the models in Oregon, Washington, and California, the jurisdiction can aggregate data from all sources to register eligible voters, and then citizens who get added must be able to opt out with ease. Like automatic registration, same-day registration would eliminate the patchwork of state rules for when a voter signs up, particularly given the fluidity of twenty-first-century lives. Already, states with early voting allow voters to go to a central location to vote on issues for their neighborhood or district. This capacity should be available for all eligible voters, ...

Once a voter gets on the rolls, deciding not to vote cannot be a pretext for taking a voter’s rights away in what is known as a voter purge. No state should be permitted to remove voters simply for choosing not to vote. States should absolutely continue to conduct list maintenance—that is, removing the dead, those who have moved out of state, or those who are otherwise ineligible. However, the issue of database inaccuracies and faulty determinations means that stripping someone of their rights shou...

The second prong of voter suppression is limiting access to the ballot. 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. Instead, states must be barred from requiring voter IDs that go beyond proof of identity to screening out likely voters: that means prohibiting impossible address requirements, demanding expensive or inaccessible records, or disallowing customary identification like college IDs or federally issued badges. Federal standards must be set for what states can require of voter identification, prohibiting suppressive requirements that exceed the most basic standards. In addition to undoing the harm of strict voter ID, Congress should adopt restoration of the Voting Rights Act, as proffered in H.R. 4. This bill limits the closure of polling locations without preclearance by the Department of Justice, resto...

The third issue is how we reform the act of ballot counting and ballot rejection. Our lives have become increasingly complex, and our options for how we vote need to keep up with the times. Making every vote count will necessitate changing how ballots are cast and who gets to do so. Dozens of states have adopted versions of early voting, voting by mail, and improvements to Election Day voting. But rather than leaving it to states to decide to support voter access, federal law should mandate minimum standards for early voting, absentee ballots, and equipment for polling locations. States can do better, have more days, have longer hours, and have more locations, but we need to have a foundational set of rules that don’t change simply because voters change their state of residence. Similarly, we need a set of standards for how polling locations are staffed with both equipment and people. Debate rages about the best equipment for voting, in part because of issues related to hacking by either hostile foreign governments or domestic attackers who want to game the system. Equipment for voting can run the gamut from the purely analog approach of hand-marked paper ballots to an array of ...

For absentee ballots, all states should be required to offer them without excuse to anyone who seeks to vote from home. The process for receiving the ballot should have federal guidelines to ensure that voters actually get what they ask for, and reasons for rejection, such as signature matches, should be federally prohibited. Moreover, returning the completed ballot should have uniform deadlines, as with filing taxes with the IRS: postmark deadlines that voters can control versus delivery deadlines they cannot. Waiting for absentee ballots may delay the call of a contest on election night, but that’s not a good enough reason to restrict access to the vote. 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. Though well-intentioned, provisional ballots have become a hindrance for certain communities, but again, standards for how provisional ballots are allocated and how they apply can mitigate many of the rejections. More important, by s...

It also matters if a voter can actually have time to participate. One option is to make Election Day a national holiday, which benefits most but not all voters. Of the thirty-six nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a consortium of democratic countries from around the globe, the United States is one of only seven nations that hold national elections on a day when most of the country is at work; twenty-seven of those countries hold national elections on a weekend, and both Israel and South Korea designate Election Day as a national holiday. Only twenty-two American states offer paid leave for voting. Low-income voters could lose pay on that day if they are not otherwise compensated for holidays. Likewise, disabled voters may have difficulty securing support to get them to the polls. Another option is guaranteed paid time off on Election Day, with employees hav...

While we are tackling the infrastructure of democracy, we also have to return to who is considered an eligible citizen with the right to meaningful political representation at the federal level. Taxation without representation led to the Revolutionary War, yet it has become acceptable to treat the citizens of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico as less than citizens. Both areas enjoy qualified citizenship rights, despite having populations that meet or exceed ten states with full citizenship. At a little over 700,000 residents, D.C. is more densely populated than Wyoming and Vermont. Puerto Rico has more than three million residents, placing its population above twenty other states. However, no resident in either of those areas has a voting member of the House of Representatives or a U.S. senator, and only D.C. has a vote in the Electoral College. As two areas with high concentrations of Black and Latino citizens, the granting of statehood to both would recognize the historic injustices and offer a pathway for full inclusion. The key to creating permanent voting rights lies in major federal change. When the right to vote is left to the states, implementation is fragmented, racist, and plain suppressive. Still, short of major federal action, I firmly adhere to a code of citizen action. In 2017, the New Georgia Project spun off into a stand-alone organization still committed to voter registration and education, adding tens of thousands of people of color to Georgia’s rolls eac...

If you or someone you know has been a victim of voter suppression, do not keep it to yourself or assume that it’s a one-off problem. Or worse, do not blame yourself. Know that voter suppression is designed to look like user error. Despite the complicated rules and the arcane provisions, voters who are denied their rights often believe they did something wrong. As the mantra goes, if you see something, say something. Contact organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Voto Latino, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO), Fair Fight—and do so while it is happening. Not every problem can be solved by lawsuits, but laws rarely improve if they are never challenged. By collecting stories, demanding access, and pushing for more, we not only can help you or your friends, we can build a legal record to potentially force change at the local, state, or federal level.

believe the most important job of a citizen advocate is to first educate leaders about what you want and why you want it. So often, we assume that the issue that is top of mind to us is known to our leaders. It’s not. Therefore, you can be the one to introduce the problem, tell them why it’s a problem, and then share your ideas about how to solve it. Understand, however, that once they know the problem, the solution may differ from yours—and that is not always a bad thing. The second job is to activate others to help you press leaders to adopt rules to make it happen. While it can sound daunting, all this really means is finding friends and allies who share your concerns and are willing to help to gather even more allies. One note of caution is the tendency to want people on your side to share both your passion and your solution. Sometimes, you get one or the other, but do not push away potential support. Figure out how to work together toward the common goal and go as far as you can together. And, when education and activation have taken your issue as far as it can, the final step is to agitate the powers that be. Bring pressure to bear until doing what you want is easier than resisting or opposing you. Use social media, traditional outreach, and good old-fashioned protests to raise awareness and push for action. Groups like Indivisible will provide training, resources, and support for electoral advocacy, and organizations like Planned Parenthood Action Fund, National Abo...

Federal laws only change when the leaders do, and state and local laws have similar if smaller playing fields. But one of the barriers to change has long been that people didn’t have the language to describe what is wrong, or have the information to prove that it happens. I know voting rights are complicated and messy, and voter suppression is infuriating and patently wrong. But we can only win our fights if we understand how they steal our power and when we resolve, each of us, to take it back.

Broadly speaking, identity politics describes when people, rather than using traditional categories like political parties, give priority to their racial, gender, sexual orientation, social, cultural, economic, or other identity affiliation when approaching political decision making.

In the Deep South, as in much of America, race is the strongest predictor of political leanings, and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to share her values. Women are more likely to champion legislation surrounding issues that primarily affect women and children. Thus, if Kimya hedges her bets, the most likely politician to support her needs would be a Black woman Democrat. Her politics—her voting decisions—are governed by who she is, what she has experienced, and how she needs government and society to function. In most ways, for her, identity politics just means common sense.

Electoral politics is often the final barrier to social change, especially in America. Social movements rise, force change, and achieve gains; however, until the movement’s leaders can embed those wins into law and lawmakers, the successes are temporary. Therefore, when a marginalized group can get one or more of their own inside the corridors of power, it is more likely that they will see permanent change. The reality, though, is that electing someone to office cannot guarantee that they will stay loyal to the cause that got them there. More than one politician has become seduced by the power of the office and in turn refuses to jeopardize their position by taking action on the issues they once championed. When these leaders demonstrate that they have feet of clay, social movements quickly learn that quantity and quality are of equal importance. That is to say, politics can distract the most well-intentioned leaders from their purpose or, worse, weaken their commitment to the ultimate goal of social change. For a movement to use electoral power from inside the system, one person is not enough. So, to guarantee expanded access, social groups like women, people of color, the LGBTQ+, and poor communities quickly learn that they need a team of supporters—both agitating for action outside and pushing for legislation and policies inside the political process. One law, one representative, one strategy rarely succeeds in its quest for fundamental change.

Dozens of Black men elected at every level of government during Reconstruction terrified the Southern white congressmen who knew expansions of Black power would shake the cultural and economic foundations of the former Confederacy. Instead, the Southern white congressmen used the 1876 presidential election to end the transformation of the South and restore the discrimination that had served them so well. Those who rage against and work against expanding the electorate know what’s at stake. The goal is to block access to the ballot and to policy making because letting the agitators inside might yield new laws to remedy inequality or injustice. The fear of these elected officials is a loss of power, grounded in an assortment of causes like racism, sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, or an inchoate desire to keep the world as it was when they...