Don't Take Voting for Granted!

 

This was another lecture I did to the UU. I had to cut this way down for the time limit. My husband did help me edit it. I believe even if we have nothing but the worse candidates, we must never refuse to vote, because once that right is gone, it is gone for good.  My voting is done, it was one of the most Democratic ballots I've ever voted. The Green party usually gets a lot of my votes, but we are in crisis mode, even locally the Republicans here have a death-grip on us, and are impacting our lives, refusing all Covid19 mandates.  We get to see who is going to be president next soon.

Don’t Take Voting for Granted

"Voting isn't the most we can do. But it is the least" [Gloria Steinem]

If the ballot doesn't work, we'll try something else, but let us try the ballot.” [Malcolm X]

So what does it mean to vote, exactly? It's something that many people can't access today, or have fought for centuries, to have a democratic process happen where they are truly represented. Few people in the history of this world have ever had the choice in electing their own government.

One snapshot of the problem comes from the Democracy Index, a project of the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranks how 167 countries are run.

Only 22, mostly in Western Europe, rate as full democracies, in which civil liberties are respected and protected by adequate checks and balances on government power.

The US is among 54 flawed democracies on the Index, or nations that provide free elections, and honor basic civil liberties, but suffer from major institutional problems, like governance problems. The last time I checked, we rank just ahead of Malta and Estonia in those areas.

Thirty-seven more nations on the Index are classified as hybrids, or flawed democracies hobbled by issues like rigged elections. The remaining 54 are authoritarian, mostly in Africa, or the Middle East, in which basic rights are severely oppressed, under threat, or essentially nonexistent.

Americans take the ability and right to vote for granted, when this has been chipped away. Even if you feel there is no one that's worth supporting, don't ever give up. Don't fall for the idea, “Oh, your vote doesn't matter,” or, “All those politicians are sold out, and rotten, anyway.”

Otherwise, you're just giving in to inertia. Voting is an important part of any activist's toolbox, even if it means sticking only with local races, or there's only candidate you're able to support. So you go and protest, but never show up to vote? Then you're missing an important part.

Poor people and people of color, and women all had to fight for the right to vote. People forget that our time in America of having an equal vote among all races, and sexes is a very recent development. Women didn’t gain the right to vote until 1920, Native Americans until 1924 – and some had to wait until 1948 – while 18- to 20-year-olds could not vote until 1971.

Before that date, most states set the bar for voting at 21, even though you were old enough to marry, get sent off to war, and pay taxes. Vietnam raised the issue with the saying, ''Old enough to fight, old enough to die – old enough to vote.”

By the 1980s and 1990s, however, getting young people to vote, or engaged politically, was nearly impossible – leading to campaigns like MTV's “Rock The Vote” effort, because so many people of our own generation checked out. I was politically active, however. I protested the Iraq War in the 2000s, and for much of that time, never missed a vote.

Too many of Generation X took the slacker media image to heart, though, and lost motivation for civil involvement. These days, from what I can tell, young people are getting more politically involved – and that’s good, because political vigilance is needed to keep our freedom and right now, we are in danger of it slipping away. Part of this vigilance requires exercising our voting rights as an informed citizen.

That brings me to our current problem of Voter Suppression, where a ruling political party or clique works to curtail the ability of certain groups or individuals from voting, or limit their representation in government.

For authoritarian or hybrid regimes, that often means sending police or paramilitary groups to polling places, either to scare off a particular candidate's supporters, or force them to vote for its preferred candidate. Sound familiar lately?

Claiming additional years in office is another common tactic. Examples include Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, who's just signed himself on as “president for life” through 2036, or the Ivory Coast, whose former president plans to seek a third term – defying his opponents, who argue its constitution forbids it. However, the government has already announced that national elections will go ahead, with or without its critics.

Other voter suppression tactics include changing how checks and balances work. In Poland, judges have been removed for not being loyal enough to the ironically-named Law & Justice Party, which then passed laws to give itself, the dominant political force, more power over the judiciary.

These things happen here, too. We all remember what happened in 2018, when Georgia's Secretary Of State Brian Kemp, whose office oversees elections, defeated Stacey Abrams – on paper, anyway – amid bitter accusations of voter suppression.

For those who keep score, Kemp's office canceled 1.4 million voter registrations between 2012 and 2018, including half a million in one night in 2017 – what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called “maybe the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history.”

Here's the rub, though. Unfair as they definitely are, such tactics are not illegal, in light of two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions – including Citizens United, which allowed corporations to count as “people” under the law. Many believe this 2010 ruling sold democracy to the highest bidder, and made Super-PACS a reality.

The other case is Shelby County v. Holder, a 5-4 ruling in 2013, where the justices threw out the idea of preclearance – or getting federal approval, in advance, for changes in voting laws and practices.

This is why we're seeing the last minute closing or shrinking of polling places in states like Ohio and Texas, for instance, or the tightening of voter ID laws – where someone without a driver's license ends up shut out of voting altogether, or unable to vote absentee, if they can't produce an excuse like a doctor's note. Or their name might end up getting struck off the list, as Kemp did in Georgia.

The Holder ruling prompted late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to fume, in one of her most blistering dissents: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked, and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes, is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Last but not least, let's not forget about gerrymandering, or redrawing district boundaries to lock down opposition-proof majorities for favored politicians – a tactic that often shuts minorities and other marginalized groups out of the equation.

Not surprisingly, the current Supreme Court has proven indifferent to addressing the problem, as it showed in a 5-4 ruling last summer that threw out challenges to redrawn districts in Maryland and North Carolina.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” Again, his reasoning prompted a scathing dissent from Ginsburg, and her more liberal colleagues: “If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.”

The Michigan Supreme Court apparently followed the same rulebook in October 2019, when it ruled, 5-4, that 34 districts didn't need to be redrawn until 2022, even though they purposely favored Republicans.

The decision also means that a 13-member independent commission can't do its job until 2022 – even though Michigan voters overwhelmingly created it four years earlier, in 2018, by a statewide referendum. The walls being thrown up against people of color, the poor, voters with disabilities, and young people are getting higher and wider all the time, it seems.

We get in our cars and go to a polling station, or fill out our ballots early now, not realizing how many people in America today are stopped from voting. Not everyone has a car to get to a polling place. People with disabilities may need help with reading a ballot, or even marking one. Accessible voting machines are available in our state, but are needed in lots of other places.

Whatever happened to government or civics classes? We need them more than ever nowadays, instead of teaching to standardized tests. Knowing how the system's supposed to work is the first step in trying to change it.

We also need to better educate young people on how marginalized groups like women and African-Americans, stood up against poll taxes, literacy tests and other tactics rolled out to prevent them from voting.

That kind of context is crucial, especially when you consider the approach of movies like Mississippi Burning, that present civil rights as a history lesson that wrapped up in the 1960s, or early 1970s, depending who's spinning the narrative. I doubt Stacey Abrams would see it that way, though.

Never take voting for granted. One important way to stand against Voter Suppression is exercise your right to vote, and agitate for everyone else's right to vote too. Don’t give in to apathy or thinking your vote won’t matter. This has chipped away at voting in America for too long, and we are seeing the results.

I think we need to bring back to the concept of civic duty, of being a good citizen, of being informed, and participating in your own government. After all, it’s supposed to be FOR THE PEOPLE. It's up to us to keep it that way.