US elections 2020

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      in US Politics

      Why this election calls into question whether America is a democracy

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      America has long held itself up as the world’s leading democracy, but it has an equally long history of denying people the right to vote.
      To understand how voter suppression is shaping the 2020 election, just look at Texas. While many states do not require voters to have a reason to vote by mail, Texas only allows voters to do so if they are 65 or older or meet other conditions. The state does not allow people to register to vote online.
      Even with a flood of Covid cases, Texas has successfully fought tooth and nail in federal and state courts to uphold those restrictions. Last month, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, a Republican, abruptly issued an order that limited each county in the state to offer one ballot drop box. The move meant that Democratic-friendly Harris county, which covers more than 1,700 square miles and is home to 2.4 million registered voters, could only offer one place for voters to return their ballots. The state of Rhode Island, which is smaller than Harris county, will have more drop-off locations this year.
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      The battle playing across America is in some ways a continuation of a centuries-long fight over access to the franchise. African Americans were formally denied the right to vote at the nation’s founding, and even when granted access in the 19th century, states responded by implementing devices such as poll taxes, literacy tests and felon disenfranchisement laws designed to keep African Americans from the polls.
      The 1965 Voting Rights Act, a crown jewel of the civil rights movement, blunted many of these racist tools, in part by requiring places with a history of voting discrimination, like Texas, to get voting changes pre-cleared before they went into effect. But in 2013, the US supreme court gutted that provision, saying it was no longer necessary. States, freed from federal oversight, unleashed a wave of new voting restrictions, including new voter ID laws and efforts to close polling places.
      “The forces that were fine with poll taxes and literacy tests are the same kinds of forces that are equally comfortable in the 21st century with ‘targeting African Americans with almost surgical precision’ in voter IDs and requiring extra hurdles to cast an absentee ballot in the midst of a global pandemic,” said Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta who has written extensively about voter suppression, in an email.
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      Underneath it all, many see a cynical attempt by the Republican party to try to preserve power while making it deliberately harder for people less likely to support them – groups like minorities, young people and the poor – to vote. In many places, Republicans have been able to get away with this because of an unprecedented effort in 2010 and 2011 to draw electoral districts that cemented their control of state legislatures, which shape election laws in the US. This effort succeeded across the country, including in key states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
      The pandemic has exposed how deeply entrenched this strategy is in the Republican party. Even as Americans face an unprecedented health risk, people have waited in hours-long lines across the country to cast their ballots in person. Republicans in several states have fought efforts to make it easier to vote by mail, like eliminating requirements that voters have to have an excuse to vote by mail or that they get a witness for their ballot. They have also fought efforts to automatically mail absentee ballot applications to voters.
      Many states require voters to return their ballots to election officials by election day to have them counted. After widespread mail delays earlier this summer, many local election officials encouraged voters to return their absentee ballots in person to physically secure drop boxes. But Republicans in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Texas have all moved to try to limit their use, making it unnecessarily harder for voters to return their ballots.
      “What has been troubling to me this year, as it relates to election administration, is that commonsense, practical services for voters have been politicized and weaponized as possible partisan activities,” Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund who works closely with election administrators across the US, said in an email. “Election officials at the state and local level, in red/blue/purple states, have advocated offering services like this to all voters in a pandemic. Some were able to do so, others were prevented from serving their voters well.”

      Concerned about mail delays, Democrats and voting rights groups sued in courts across the country, asking election officials to count ballots as long as they are postmarked by election day and arrive in the days after. While the Pennsylvania supreme court, over the loud objection of Republicans, ordered a three-day extension, courts have upheld the election day deadline in Michigan and Wisconsin, two key states that will probably shape the outcome of the 2020 race. Those decisions mean that thousands of ballots will probably be rejected simply because they arrive late, regardless of when the voter puts them in the mail (Trump carried Michigan in 2016 by about 10,000 votes and Wisconsin by just under 23,000).
      For all of the Republican attacks on the right to vote, their most powerful ally has been the United States supreme court as well as the lower federal appeals courts to which Trump has appointed an unprecedented number of judges. The supreme court has taken a brazenly anti-voter stance, refusing to ease the ballot receipt deadline in Wisconsin, witness requirements in South Carolina or even permit counties in Alabama to offer curbside voting. The supreme court’s conservative majority has simply said that federal courts shouldn’t interfere with voting rules on the eve of an election and shouldn’t second-guess state lawmakers, who have the constitutional authority to set election rules.
      The supreme court also refused to block a Republican-written Florida law that required people with felony convictions to pay financial debts before they can vote again. Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the move would block people from voting “simply because they are poor”. An estimated 774,000 people in Florida, one of the closest swing states in the country, can’t vote because they owe money.
      The supreme court’s actions are all the more alarming because Donald Trump is unlikely to concede the election (he has falsely said the election is “rigged” and will be stolen from him). With the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump now has a firm 6-3 majority on the court and there’s little question he will try to use the federal courts to try to overcome a close margin in the race if Trump is behind. There are expected to be legal fights to try to get ballots disqualified on technicalities. While experts caution there is a long road before the supreme court would be asked to decide an election, the court’s swath of anti-voter rulings do not bode well.
      “The supreme court has an outsized role because it has become politicized. I do think the president is looking to the court to expect a certain outcome, but I don’t think that outcome is guaranteed,” said Franita Tolson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Southern California.
      Despite all of this, there’s some evidence Americans are fighting back. There’s been a tidal wave of turnout in the weeks leading up to the election. A staggering 73 million people have already voted early, far more than cast early ballots in 2016, according to data collected by Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida. In Texas, a state with a history of abysmal voter turnout, the youth vote is surging and the state is fast approaching the 2016 total turnout. Experts expect the highest overall turnout in a presidential race since 1908.
      After the election, Republicans are likely to point to these numbers as evidence that claims of voter suppression are exaggerated. But that’s not true – even if we have record turnout this year, we will never know the number of people who were deterred from voting because they didn’t want to risk their health or get a witness or have proper ID.
      Instead, America is seeing a flood of Americans continuing to chip away at the infrastructure of voter suppression that is supporting Republican power. The structure is creaking under new weight – America is getting closer to its democratic promise. More

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      in US Politics

      Behold Trump's pre-election secret weapon: Nigel Farage, 'king of Europe' | Marina Hyde

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      How poignant to see KentgaragisteNigel Farage interfering in the US election, much in the way a drop interferes in the ocean. Farage is appearing at the odd rally for his emotional support president, Donald Trump, which tells its own story about where the US leader is at, psychologically speaking, for the final days of his campaign. On Wednesday, Trump gibbered to a crowd: “I’m glad I called him up.” So is Nigel’s agent.
      Nigel was brought on stage in Arizona by Donald, where the latter introduced him as “the king of Europe”. In fairness, he could just as easily have got away with passing Farage off as the duke of Ruritania or the sultan of Jupiter. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, and Trump went on to hazard that Farage was “one of the most powerful men in Europe”, even though Nigel’s an unemployed radio DJ and has spent a good part of the past four years hanging round the old US-of-A hoping to get a 40-minute 6pm “dinner” invitation to eat a well-done steak with a self-confessed sex offender.
      By way of recompense, Farage rubed his way on to the rally platform and took the microphone to declare Trump was “the single most resilient and bravest person I have ever met in my life”. That is probably the only truthful thing to have been said on stage that night. Yes, Trump received five draft deferments – first for college, then for something called “heel spurs” – and once described the business of avoiding STDs in Manhattan during the 1980s as “my personal Vietnam”. But you have to remember that Nigel is himself a wildly overemotional nervous Nellie who would have been interned for spreading panic during the second world war he self-owningly fetishises. There is no one more histrionic, more whiny, and – let’s face it – more willing to make alliances with far-right German politicians. We simply couldn’t have risked him failing to keep calm or carry on among the general populace.
      Anyway, this week, he was giving it his best Lord Haw-Haw, informing Trump’s crowd: “You’ll be voting for the only leader in the western world with the real courage to stand up to the Chinese Communist party.” Stand up to them? He pays more tax to them than he does to the US. Later, Nigel justified his media credentials by explaining to Daily Telegraph readers that Trump had “what Americans call ‘the big M’ – momentum”. Is that what Americans call momentum? We’ll have to take this latterday Alistair Cooke’s word for it, I suppose.
      Then again, engaging with Farage on his own terms is like trying to debate a fart or conduct a symposium with cystitis. Though operationally pointless and redundant now, he somewhat horrifyingly endures – a vestigial tail on our body politic. It is increasingly accepted that Nigel will always be with us, like far-left antisemitism or a mutating respiratory virus.
      It is probably more helpful to step back and see him for what he represents in this case, which in some ways is nothing particularly new. British politicians have always nursed a certain desperation to be noticed by Washington power.
      The trouble for Boris Johnson’s government of superforecasters is that they seem not to have forecast in time that it was at least a remote possibility this Joe Biden guy could win the presidency instead of Trump. Thus, with no meaningful bonds forged at all with the current favourite, the omens for the UK should Biden prove victorious are not what you’d file under encouraging. Any appearance of Farage within a restraining order’s distance of Trump simply serves as a reminder to Biden’s Democrats of their long-held conviction that Brexit and Trump are of a piece.
      Furthermore, Johnson’s government still fails to understand that there IS a special relationship, it’s just that it’s between the US and Ireland. So when Biden last month warned that the Good Friday agreement must not become “a casualty of Brexit”, there was a very urgent need for the Conservative administration to do and say precisely nothing. As so often, alas, Iain Duncan Smith failed to get the memo, or certainly to understand the words crayoned on it, and consequently could be found across the airwaves honking that Biden shouldn’t be lecturing the UK, but should be trying for “a peace deal in the US” to stop “the killing and rioting” in cities following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. Quite what power Duncan Smith thought Biden would have at that point to strike a “peace deal” is unclear, but details aren’t exactly Iain’s strong point.
      Nor are they Farage’s. It was during the EU referendum campaign, you’ll recall, that Nigel lost his rag about Barack Obama “interfering”, after the US president announced that Britain would be “at the back of the queue” for a trade deal. This didn’t go down enormously well at the time, it must be said, but has regrettably increased in accuracy as we near the conclusion of the Brexit process, a full four-and-a-half years after the event and without a trade deal lined up. Unless any agreement with the US is signed by April, the legislation allowing it to speed it through Congress will have expired, meaning we will be at the back of a queue of queues. Already, our ability to strike a deal has by all accounts been hampered by the failure to put the NHS on the table, while the need to have anything at all on the table means the table is now heaving with heavily chlorinated chicken shit. Ah well. Perhaps Britain has had enough of exports.
      Speaking of chickenshits, you can be sure Nigel Farage will be a million miles away from that queue and all the other queues when they come to pass. What does he care? He’s a wrecker, not a builder. Perhaps the UK will live up to a vision “the king of Europe” couldn’t even be bothered to sketch on the back of one of his fag packets – or perhaps it won’t. Perhaps our chlorinated chickens will come home to roost.
      • Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump Jr and father play down Covid deaths as daily toll nears 1,000

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      As coronavirus deaths in the US approach 1,000 a day in the current record surge of infections, Donald Trump and his son, Don Jr, appear intent on publicly disputing the lethality of the outbreak at repeated opportunities.
      Don Jr sat for an interview with Fox News on Thursday night during which he called critics of the Trump administration’s approach to the pandemic “truly morons” and said that deaths from Covid-19 in America right now are “almost nothing”.

      Bill Maxwell 😷 #NeverTrump
      (@Bill_Maxwell_)
      Don Jr. falsely claimed on Thursday that the number of Americans dying from the coronavirus amounts to “almost nothing.”An average of 1,000 Americans a day are dying from Covid-19 right now.pic.twitter.com/oHNzQtfDOS

      October 30, 2020

      Meanwhile, having said at a rally last weekend that “you don’t see death” at this stage of the pandemic in the US, Donald Trump reiterated in a tweet on Friday morning that deaths are “WAY DOWN” in the US, mass testing is exaggerating the numbers of infections and hospitals are coping.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      More Testing equals more Cases. We have best testing. Deaths WAY DOWN. Hospitals have great additional capacity! Doing much better than Europe. Therapeutics working!

      October 30, 2020

      In fact, many hospitals across the US, especially the midwest and upper midwest heartland and Texas are on the brink of being overwhelmed and are setting up field hospitals and calling in the military and assistance from state governors.
      On Fox News, Don Jr said: “If you look at, I put it on my Instagram, I went through the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] data because I kept hearing about the new infections, [but] why aren’t they talking about deaths? Oh, oh, because the number is almost nothing, because we have gotten control of this thing.”
      Public health experts, such as the top public health official on the White House’s own coronavirus taskforce, Anthony Fauci, just this week warned that the US was in for “a whole lot of pain” this winter because it is not controlling the pandemic, and that life probably will not return return to normal until late 2021 or 2022, even with a successful vaccine likely to emerge in the coming months.
      Nearly 90,000 new coronavirus infections were reported in the US on Thursday, the highest single-day total in the country since the pandemic began, or about one new case every second.
      In the recent surge deaths can lag cases by several weeks. But already deaths are increasing in about half of states, the New York Times reported.
      And in the past month, about a third of US counties hit a daily record of deaths in the pandemic. More

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      Facebook leak reveals policies on restricting New York Post's Biden story

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      Facebook moderators had to manually intervene to suppress a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, according to leaked moderation guidelines seen by the Guardian.The document, which lays out in detail Facebook’s policies for dealing with misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, sheds new light on the process that led to the company’s decision to reduce the distribution of the story.“This story is eligible to be factchecked by Facebook’s third-party factchecking partners,” Facebook’s policy communications director, Andy Stone, said at the time. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending factchecker review.”In fact, the documents show, the New York Post – like most major websites – was given special treatment as part of Facebook’s standard process. Stories can be “enqueued” for Facebook’s third-party factcheckers in one of two ways: either by being flagged by an AI, or by being manually added by one of the factcheckers themselves.Facebook’s AI looks for signals “including feedback from the community and disbelief comments” to automatically predict which posts might contain misinformation. “Predicted content is temporarily (for seven days) soft demoted in feed (at 50% strength) and enqueued to fact check product for review by [third-party factcheckers],” the document says.But some posts are not automatically demoted. Sites in the “Alexa 5K” list, “which includes content in the top 5,000 most popular internet sites”, are supposed to keep their distribution high, “under the assumption these are unlikely to be spreading misinformation”.Those guidelines can be manually overridden, however. “In some cases, we manually enqueue content … either with or without temporary demotion. We can do this on escalation and based on whether the content is eligible for fact-checking, related to an issue of importance, and has an external signal of falsity.” The US election is such an “issue of importance”.In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress earlier this week, we have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation. Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our factcheckers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”The guidelines also reveal Facebook had prepared a “break-glass measure” for the US election, allowing its moderators to apply a set of policies for “repeatedly factchecked hoaxes” (RFH) to political content. “For a claim to be included as RFH, it must meet eligibility criteria (including falsity, virality and severity) and have content policy leadership approval.”The policy, which to the Guardian’s knowledge has not yet been applied, would lead to Facebook blocking viral falsehoods about the election without waiting for them to be debunked each time a new version appeared. A similar policy about Covid-19 hoaxes is enforced by “hard demoting the content, applying a custom inform treatment, and rejecting ads”.Facebook acts only on a few types of misinformation without involving third-party factcheckers, the documents reveal. Misinformation aimed at voter or census interference is removed outright “because of the severity of the harm to democratic systems”. Manipulated media, or “deepfakes”, are removed “because of the difficulty of ‘unseeing’ content so sophisticatedly edited”. And misinformation that “contributes to imminent violence or physical harm” is removed because of the security of imminent physical harm.The latter policy is not normally applied by ground-level moderation staff, but a special exception has been made for misinformation about Covid-19, the document says. Similar exceptions have been made to misinformation about polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to misinformation about Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Facebook also has a unique policy around vaccine hoaxes. “Where groups and pages spread these widely debunked hoaxes about vaccinations two or more times within 90 days, those groups and pages will be demoted in search results, all of their content will be demoted in news feed, they will be pulled from recommendation systems and type-ahead in search, and pages may have their access to fundraising tools revoked,” the document reads.“This policy is enforced by Facebook and not third-party factcheckers. Thus, our policy of not subjecting politician speech to factchecking does NOT apply here. If a politician shares hoaxes about vaccines we will enforce on that content.” More

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      in Elections

      Why the US military would welcome a decisive 2020 election win

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      Federal laws and longstanding custom generally leave the US military out of the election process.
      But Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated warnings about widespread voting irregularities and exhortations to his supporters to become an “army for Trump” as uncertified poll watchers have raised questions about a possible military role next week.
      If any element of the military were to get involved, it would probably be the national guard under state control.
      These citizen soldiers could help state or local law enforcement with any major election-related violence, especially in the event of a contested result.
      But the guard’s more likely roles will be less visible – filling in as poll workers, out of uniform, and providing cybersecurity expertise in monitoring potential intrusions into election systems.
      Unlike regular active-duty military, the national guard answers to its state’s governor, not the president.
      Under limited circumstances, Trump could federalize them, but in that case, they would generally be barred from doing law enforcement.
      A contested vote could stir the kind of wild speculation that forced America’s top general to assure lawmakers the military would have no role in settling any election dispute between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
      A decisive result could allay such concerns by lowering the risk of a prolonged political crisis and the protests it could generate, say current and former officials as well as experts.
      “The best thing for us [the military] would be a landslide one way or another,” a US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters, voicing a sentiment shared by multiple officials.
      A week before the election, a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll showed Biden leading Trump nationally by 10 percentage points, but the numbers are tighter in battleground states that will decide the election and gave Trump his surprise 2016 win.
      The coronavirus pandemic has added an element of uncertainty this year, changing how and when Americans vote.
      The president, who boasts about his broad support within military ranks, has declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he believes that results coming in on election day next Tuesday or, more likely with postal ballots still being counted, a day or days thereafter, are fraudulent.
      He has even proposed mobilizing federal troops under the 200-year-old Insurrection Act to put down unrest, and his tendency to be provocative on Twitter adds an extra element of tension, which caused discomfort among some military top brass.
      “Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in and we do it very easy,” Trump told Fox News in September.
      For his part, Biden has suggested the military would ensure a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses and refuses to leave office after the election.
      US army general Mark Milley, selected last year by Trump as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has been adamant about the military staying out of the way if there is a contested ballot.
      “If there is, it’ll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the US Congress,” he told National Public Radio this month.
      “There’s no role for the US military in determining the outcome of a US election. Zero. There is no role there,” he added.
      Peter Fever, a national security expert at Duke University, cautioned that America’s willingness to look to the military when there is a crisis could create a public expectation, however misguided, that it could also help resolve an electoral crisis.
      “If things go poorly and it’s November 30 and we still have no idea who the president is … that’s when the pressure on the military will grow,” Fever said, imagining a scenario where street protests escalate as faith in the democratic process erodes.
      Steve Abbot, a retired navy admiral who has endorsed Biden, said the danger that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act “undoubtedly concerns those who are in uniform and in the Pentagon”. More

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      in Elections

      'You're a crook': barbs-strewn Georgia election debate goes viral – video

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      Republican senator David Perdue has pulled out of the final debate with his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, after the pair exchanged personal attacks during a televised debate on Wednesday.
      In the debate moderated by WTOC-TV, Ossoff called the incumbent ‘a crook’, while Perdue accused his rival of profiting off ‘communist China’. The exchange later went viral after Ossoff shared the clip on social media
      ‘It’s voter suppression’: the Republican fight to limit ballot boxes
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      in Elections

      We who can vote have a powerful responsibility to those who can't | Laila Lalami

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      “Terrible voting weather,” a character remarks at the beginning of José Saramago’s Seeing. In this powerful novel, torrential rains blanket the streets of an unnamed capital and no one turns up to vote until late in the afternoon. When the ballots are counted, however, poll workers discover that more than 70% are blank. The few valid ballots aren’t enough to give complete legitimacy to the winning party, which is the party on the right. (The other parties – the party on the left and the party in the middle – earn humiliatingly small percentages of the vote.) After a period of confusion, the government organizes a new plebiscite, in the hope that citizens will exercise their civic duty and cast proper ballots. But the number of blank ballots this time is 83%, thrusting the capital into bureaucratic disarray, media excitement and government conspiracy.
      I read Seeing years ago, during a time in which I devoured Saramago’s books one after the next, barely pausing to catch my breath. I was reminded of it recently because of the current moment. The novel renders an extreme version of the situation we have in the United States, where turnout in the last presidential election was little more than half of all eligible voters. In effect, more Americans sat out the election than voted for the current president. “I don’t feel bad,” one non-voter from Wisconsin told the New York Times in November 2016. “They never do anything for us anyway.”
      I recognize this feeling, because I grew up hearing it. Perhaps you heard it, too, from people in your life who speak of elections with indifference or even distrust. After all, elected leaders change, but images of police brutality, border violence and drone bombing continue to flicker on our screens, year in and year out. It’s hard for conditional citizens – people whose rights are often curtailed because of accidents of birth, like race, gender or class – to trust in a system that historically has not served our interests. To add insult to injury, conditional citizens may be courted during electoral campaigns, then ignored the rest of the time.
      But the disproportionate focus on presidential politics in our media obscures the fact that elections are about local choices as well. We choose sheriffs, district attorneys, state and local judges, and school board members, which is to say the people who will make decisions that directly affect how criminal justice is handled in our communities, how schools are run in our districts, or what textbooks are chosen for our children. Not voting means forfeiting the right to have a voice in policy decisions that affect us every day. The government isn’t just in the White House; it’s here in our streets, and the ballot is the only means we have to evaluate the public servants whose salaries we all pay, whether we choose to vote or not.
      Then there are state propositions on the ballot. In California, where I live, voters can decide by simple referendum whether people who have served their felony convictions should regain voting rights, whether rent control should be expanded by local governments, and whether cash bail should be replaced by risk assessment for suspects in pre-trial detention. In other words, we have in our hands the power to expand the franchise, protect people from eviction at a time of enormous financial strain, or reduce the number of people in pretrial detention. In each case, the lives of tens of thousands of people – our families, our friends, our neighbors – will be affected by the outcome, whatever it may be.
      Of course, non-voters aren’t the only reason why turnout in US elections remains relatively low compared to other democracies. There are millions of would-be voters who face obstacles of all kinds, resulting in disenfranchisement. In some states, particularly in the south, many polling stations have been closed, which means lines of as long as 12 hours to cast a ballot. Hourly-wage and other non-exempt workers must forfeit a day’s pay in order to take part in the electoral process, at a time when the pandemic has already caused financial stress for so many people.
      There are also rules that complicate the voting process unnecessarily. Some states have plenty of collection boxes for mail-in ballots, for example, while others limit them to one a county. Then there are logistical hurdles. Once I was text-banking with voters in Georgia to remind them to vote when I heard from an elderly lady who said she lived in a rural area and didn’t have a ride to the polls. Each year, voters like her are prevented from participating in the democratic process because voting is more onerous and more convoluted than it needs to be.
      To me, the most important reason for voting has to do with our past and our future. In the earliest days of the republic, the franchise was a privilege accorded only to propertied white men. They could be governed by consent, but everyone else was to be governed by force. It took decades of struggle, some of it violent and bloody, for voting rights to be extended to people of other races and genders. Until the Civil Rights Act, the right to vote could not be taken for granted: Black people were enfranchised, disenfranchised and re-enfranchised depending on the state and the political moment. Given this history, voting is a moral obligation, a way to honor the sacrifices of the people who came before us.
      It is also a way to honor those who will come after us. In the last few weeks, California has been consumed by the largest wildfires in the state’s history, which have severely damaged our air quality and threatened the health of our most vulnerable residents. Elsewhere in the US, there have been massive tornadoes in Iowa, record-shattering heatwaves in Florida and hurricanes in Texas. Casting a vote with the future in mind is a way to take responsibility for the kind of natural environment we will leave for our children.
      [embedded content]
      Earlier this month, I spent time researching the candidates and initiatives on the ballot, then filled it out and mailed it. Afterward, I took a walk through our neighborhood, where signs advocated for different candidates for school board, city council or president. One of my neighbors, fed up with the abundant advertising all along our tree-lined street, recently put up a sign that read “Giant Meteor 2020”. I let out a dry laugh. Our state is struggling with wildfires, a housing crisis, food insecurity and the effects of the coronavirus pandemic – a meteor can’t be much worse.
      Yet the sign also signaled despair, which is a gift to apathy. Apathy isn’t going to resolve the crisis we face. Since March, the United States has endured a public health emergency and an economic downturn that have been called “unprecedented”. No one can say with certainty how much time it will take to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, how long schools and businesses will remain closed, and whether workers will recover from the loss of jobs and wages. Despair won’t fix this mess; only action will. What is certain is that the struggle is collective and our success will depend on solidarity.
      Active solidarity takes many forms. We can join local mutual-aid organizations, make monthly contributions to food banks, volunteer in schools, or donate time, money or effort to various grassroots organizations. We can strike, protest or engage in acts of civil disobedience. Voting is another expression of solidarity, especially when our electoral choices are based not just on self-interest, but on collective wellbeing.
      Those of us who have the right to vote have a huge responsibility toward those who don’t, including children and young adults, documented or undocumented immigrants, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people, and citizens who can’t access the ballot for various reasons. Voting is our duty in the social contract, a way to steer the republic in a direction that accurately reflects the will of all its citizens.
      In Seeing, the blank ballots create a dilemma for the government and the media because they deprive the former of legitimacy and the latter of a conventional story. But the fallout is swift. The minister of defense imposes a state of emergency, which is breathlessly but unquestioningly covered by journalists. The people seem unmoved, however. They go on about their daily business. “Since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution,” Saramago writes, “it was only logical, even natural, that they failed even to notice that those rights had been suspended.” These words serve as a warning, which we should heed, now more than ever.
      Laila Lalami is the author of The Other Americans and, most recently, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America
      This essay is part of Pen America’s We Will Emerge project, a collection of essays speaking directly to voters around the country in advance of the US election. This project is made possible with the support of Pop Culture Collaborative’s Becoming America. You can read the full version of this essay here More