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    Fight to vote: the woman who was key in 'getting us the Voting Rights Act'

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    Happy Thursday,
    During the final week of Black History Month, I wanted to continue to look at the people who helped shape the Voting Rights Act, the powerful 1965 law that offered unprecedented protection for voting rights in America. As the country faces another surge of efforts to make it harder to vote, it’s a reminder of how hard Black Americans had to fight to gain and protect the rights to vote that are in place now.
    Last week, I wrote about Bloody Sunday, the March 1965 protest that led directly to the Voting Rights Act. The heroes of that march – people like John Lewis, Hosea Williams and Martin Luther King Jr – have become lions of American history. But until recently, one of the most overlooked people in the march was Amelia Boynton (later Amelia Boynton Robinson), who had been organizing in Selma for years before Bloody Sunday and was the one who called in King to bring national attention to the voter suppression in the now historic city.
    “She got us the Voting Rights Act,” said Carol Anderson, a historian at Emory University.
    “It’s one of the ‘failings’, and I’ll put that in quotes, of the writings of the civil rights movement, is that women who are key in organizing are written out,” she added. “The grassroots work of Mrs Boynton just didn’t get the kind of respect and honor that it deserved.”
    By the time Lewis, King and others arrived in Selma, Boynton was already one of the most well-known and respected people in its Black community. She came to the city in 1929 when she got a job with the US Department of Agriculture, traveling around the state to show African Americans how to improve their farming, but also talking to them about voting. She and her then husband, Samuel Boynton, held meetings in homes and churches, showing people how to register to vote as they faced literacy tests and poll taxes, Jim Crow era obstacles that prevented Black people from registering to vote. More

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    Fight to vote: activism works – just look at the 1965 Voting Rights Act

    Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,This week, midway through Black History Month, I wanted to open up the archives and look at some of the history that helped shape the Voting Rights Act, the powerful 1965 law that offered some of the most significant protections for voting rights in US history. As I’ve covered the struggle over voting rights over the last several years, and amid a push for sweeping new federal voting protections, I’ve often found myself turning back to the fight over the act to understand how efforts to restrict the vote today mirror what has occurred before.I was struck recently by these two telegrams, exchanged days apart in March 1965, between Martin Luther King Jr and Lyndon B Johnson. King sent the telegram the morning after Johnson gave a speech to Congress introducing the law – a speech that has since been described as one of the greatest speeches by a sitting US president.The horrific images of Bloody Sunday – the 7 March 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, where law enforcement brutally beat protesters as they demonstrated for voting rights – had galvanized the country, and Johnson, to move quickly to embrace the legislation.In his speech, Johnson linked what had happened in Selma to some of the most well-known battles in US history, tying the struggle for voting rights to the historical battle for American freedom.“At times history and fate meet at a single time, in a single place, to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama,” Johnson opened his speech.King praised Johnson’s speech.“Your speech to the joint session of Congress last night was the most moving eloquent unequivocal and passionate plea for human rights ever made by any president of this nation,” King wrote from Selma. “You evidenced amazing understanding of the depth and dimensions of the problems that we face in our struggle, your tone was sincere throughout and your persuasive power never more forceful.”Days later, Johnson wrote back, saying he appreciated the comments from the civil rights leader.“I sincerely believe the that the mood of the country and the Congress offers us an opportunity to secure legislation which will provide a direct, quick, effective and constitutional means of ensuring all citizens will be able to register and vote,” he wrote. “I fully appreciate the pressures and tensions under which you are laboring and I am confident you will continue to offer a course of leadership that will permit us to move towards our goal of universal suffrage.”The telegrams underscore just how significantly Selma had changed the calculus on pushing voting rights legislation. In a 2015 essay, Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, wrote that Johnson was hesitant about moving the bill so early in the year, as King and other civil rights leaders pressured him to move quickly. In choosing to give the speech after Selma, Johnson signaled he was embracing the activists. It was an example of how activism can work.“Delivering that speech was a courageous decision,” he wrote. “Despite strong opposition in Washington to the federal government committing itself to the protection of African American voters, Johnson delivered a powerful speech that left no doubt of where he stood in this debate,” he wrote.Less than five months after the telegram, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.Also worth watching …Georgia advanced two measures in the state legislature that would make it harder to vote by mail. One measure would eliminate a provision in state law that allows anyone to vote by mail without an excuse, while another would require each voter to provide a copy of their voter ID during the vote by mail process.
    A Republican in the Arizona legislature broke with his party to vote down a measure that would allow the state to remove people from a list of people who automatically receive a mail-in ballot each election.
    The US supreme court is set to hear a case from Arizona that could have major implications for the Voting Rights Act. The court, if it wants to, could choose to narrow a section of the Voting Rights Act and make it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws in the future. More

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    Fight to vote: civil rights are making a comeback at the DoJ – here’s why

    Happy Thursday,For the four years that Donald Trump was president, the Department of Justice (DoJ) did little to enforce America’s federal voting rights laws – though it’s the federal agency with the most power to do so. The department’s voting section, which is well-staffed with some of the best voting rights attorneys in the country, got involved in almost no cases. And when they did get involved in major cases in Texas and Ohio, the department chose to defend voting restrictions.“It just seems like there’s nobody home, which is tragic,” William Yeomans, a former DoJ official, told me back in June.That’s set to change in a big way.Last month, Joe Biden nominated Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, two longtime civil rights lawyers, to top positions at the justice department.Gupta, who previously led the civil rights division, is Biden’s pick to be the associate attorney general, the number three official at the department.Clarke is Biden’s pick to lead the civil rights division, and would be the first Black woman to hold that role if she is confirmed. Over the last four years, she has been one of the people most raising alarm that DoJ wasn’t doing enough to enforce voting rights.Reminder– > This Justice Dept. hasn’t brought a SINGLE case under the Voting Rights Act despite the era of widespread voter suppression that we face across the country.— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) August 19, 2019
    I am not aware of a single Voting Rights Act case brought by this administration under AG Jeff Sessions.Secy Wilbur Ross’ claim that a citizenship question on the #2020Census is needed to help with VRA enforcement is as false as it is laughable.https://t.co/jcp5gGjFh7— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) March 29, 2018
    New prioritiesCivil rights activists and former department officials this week said they expected more aggressive enforcement on policing and voting rights, among other issues (in a sign of how quickly priorities are changing, DoJ withdrew a case challenging affirmative action policies at Yale on Wednesday). There are probably a stack of cases that have been pending in the pipeline that could be near ready to file, Bryan Sells, a former justice department attorney, told me last week.“You’re going to have someone in that office that really wants to make sure that the division to use the powers it has to enforce the voting rights laws,” said Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee.Cautious optimismBut don’t expect a quick change and a new flurry of cases. The justice department picks its cases carefully, and unlike outside civil rights groups that often file groundbreaking cases, the department is much more conservative. The lawyers at the justice department are also facing a federal judiciary that is much more conservative than it was four years ago after Donald Trump appointed an unprecedented number of judges. That could also affect the calculus in choosing what cases to bring. Much of the voting section’s work has traditionally been reviewing cases submitted under section five of the Voting Rights Act – a provision that was gutted by the US supreme court in 2013.Still, advocates say it will be refreshing to once again have an ally in the justice department.“It’s going to be really important and energizing and exciting to be able to be in conversation and discussion with people who understand the department’s role in civil rights enforcement,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “But it’s also going to be exciting, and as a matter of resources, to have the department actually do civil rights enforcement.”Also worth watching …I was struck by a story in the Advocate that highlighted a library board in Lafayette, Louisiana, that rejected a $2,700 grant for voting rights programming over concerns some of the speakers were too “far left”. The board apparently wanted the library to find someone to present the other side of the issue.
    Thirty-one counties in Florida agreed to provide Spanish-language election materials, including ballots and lawsuits as part of a settlement in a federal lawsuit. In 2018, civil rights groups sued 32 counties in the state, arguing they were failing to comply with a provision of the Voting Rights Act that guarantees access to the ballot for non-English speakers. The groups filed the lawsuit after a surge in Puerto Rican immigrants to Florida following Hurricane Maria. The one county that didn’t settle was Charlotte county in south-west Florida.
    Arkansas Republicans are advancing a measure that would eliminate a part of the state’s voter ID law that allows people to vote without ID if they sign an affidavit. These affidavit provisions are often included in voter ID laws as a safeguard to prevent people from being disenfranchised.
    Missouri Republicans are also advancing a new voter ID measure, citing “questions”about the 2020 election.
    Wisconsin election officials are seeing the sky high turnout from last year’s election carry over to 2021 contests that are typically lower profile. On election official in Madison said they’ve already sent out 20,000 absentee ballots so far. More

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    Republicans are going all-out to limit voting rights. We know why | Jill Filipovic

    It’s been less than a month since rightwing insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building in a deadly riot incited by the former president and his false claims of mass voter fraud. In the riot’s wake, many prominent Republicans have tried to distance themselves from the attackers and those who spurred them on. “The mob was fed lies,” said the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”Those “other powerful people” were powerful members of the Republican party and leading voices in conservative media, who are now either claiming we simply need to move on for the sake of healing, or saying that actually, the riot was the left’s fault. But while some Republicans are positioning themselves as honest and reasonable by condemning the riot and recognizing that it was sparked by lies about voter fraud, their party’s actions and policy priorities tell a very different story. Because as our nation remains rocked by an attack on the heart of our democracy, Republicans are using the same baseless lies that fueled it to push a staggering number of laws to scale back voting rights.A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice shows just how effectively Republicans have been talking out of both sides of their mouths, at once decrying the violence over false allegations of election rigging, and at the same time using false allegations of voter fraud to make it harder for people to vote. In 2021 legislative sessions (which six states haven’t even yet begun), lawmakers in 28 states have pushed a whopping 106 bills that would restrict voting access – and we’re not even a month into the year. According to the Brennan Center, that’s three times the number of restrictive voting laws that were introduced by 3 February last year. These laws are clearly responsive to widespread conspiracy theories on the right – conspiracy theories started by the Republican party and the former president.Each one of these 106 bills aims to make voting harder, either by scaling back vote-by-mail, imposing stricter voter identification laws, limiting policies that successfully registered large numbers of voters, or allowing states to more easily and aggressively purge their voter rolls.None of these laws actually correct an existing problem – because, as we learned through a great many court cases brought by the Trump administration, there simply was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. And there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in elections before that one, either.So why, then, would Republicans waste their time and taxpayer dollars so aggressively battling a problem that doesn’t exist? It’s because Republicans do have a voting problem – or rather, a voter problem. Many of their policies aren’t actually that popular, and the more eligible voters turn out for elections, the less Republicans win. Their clearest path to staying in power is limiting the number of people who are able to cast a ballot – and particularly limiting the number of Democrats: people of color (and Black people in particular), people in cities and college students. The sharper members of the Republican party rely on claims of “election security” and voter fraud to justify limiting what is perhaps the most sacred duty of any individual living in a democracy. The duller just flat-out admit that making it easier for people to vote would hurt the Republicans. Former president Donald Trump, for example, told Fox & Friends that Democratic appeals for wider use of absentee ballots and vote-by-mail would cause “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”.Republicans trying to restrict voting rights is not new – the conservative justices of the US supreme court even sided with them in overturning key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which is why so many new anti-voting laws have flooded the nation in recent years.But the context after the Capitol riot is different: Republicans now cannot deny the serious, deadly and democracy-threatening costs of exploiting lies about voting fraud to the advantage of Republican politicians. And yet, across the nation, they’re choosing to do it anyway. Until they drop this dangerous farce and quit using the big election fraud lie to strip Americans of our right to vote, no one should believe a word they say about defending democracy, admonishing those who physically attacked it, or aspiring to national healing.It’s not all bad news on the voting front, though. Appalled by conservative malfeasance, newly emboldened by the success of mail-in voting during Covid, and heartened by hard-won wins in Georgia, more Democrats are latching on to what leaders and organizers like Stacey Abrams have been doing for years: fighting for expanded voting rights. Legislators in 35 states have introduced a total of 406 bills that would make voting easier for more people. The most common new laws seek to expand mail-in and early voting, methods of casting a ballot that enable far more people to participate in the democratic process – people who are ill, elderly or disabled and find it challenging to vote in person; people who work demanding jobs, or several jobs, or jobs without predictable schedules, and don’t get the first Tuesday in November off of work; people who are caring for small children or the elderly or the infirm and can’t easily sneak away to stand in line for what can turn into hours. Other proposed laws would make it easier for citizens to register to vote, allowing same-day, online, or automatic registration so no one shows up on election day only to learn that, despite being a US citizen, they can’t cast a ballot. And still other laws would allow people who have served time and paid their debt to society to regain their right to vote.It’s easy for anyone to say all the right things about valuing democracy, especially in the aftermath of a stunning attack on it. But words are free. The real question is what both parties are actually doing to strengthen American democracy and ensure that all American citizens have a say in our governance. And while Democrats are pushing for expansion, Republicans are using the same dangerous lies that caused an anti-democratic insurrection on 6 January in the service of their own anti-democratic policies. The visuals aren’t as shocking. But the damage to the nation is just as severe. More

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    How the much-litigated ballot deadlines affected the US election

    This article is made possible through Votebeat, a non-partisan reporting project covering local election integrity and voting access.
    Americans shattered records for voting by mail in many states in the 2020 presidential election, a phenomenon that tested existing election laws, new pandemic-related regulations, postal service capacity, voter education efforts and voters’ own resolve.
    Some states had more wiggle room in accepting the mail-in votes than others, allowing ballots that were postmarked by election day to come in later, anywhere from the following day to nearly three weeks after. These grace periods became a highly contentious and politicized aspect of the election. The Trump campaign and its allies challenged them all the way up to the US supreme court as part of an overall campaign questioning the legitimacy of mail-in voting.
    Grace periods for mail-in ballots also became more significant as it became clear that the vote’s results would not be even close to final on election day and that the country would indeed experience the “big blue shift” that experts predicted.
    But what are the implications of letting ballots arrive late? A state-by-state look at the turnout data shows that the numbers weren’t large but were substantial enough to potentially sway a local race or a tighter election. It also shows a messy national picture, with chaotic regulations and poor record-keeping.
    Late-arriving ballots, by the numbers
    Twenty-two states had grace periods for late-arriving ballots this election – some already had the provision written into their laws, some implemented special extensions just for the pandemic. Five states allowed ballots to arrive three days after election day (until 6 November) and five others allowed a full week (until 10 November). There is no uniform system in the United States for tracking data on ballots, and some of the data Votebeat collected are merely estimates.
    Bar chart showing the number of days in states’ grace period.
    In Pennsylvania, after a partisan legal battle, the US supreme court (Scotus) allowed election officials to keep accepting absentee ballots over a three-day extension. About 10,000 votes arrived in that period, according to the secretary of state’s office. Those ballots are still subject to a lawsuit pending at Scotus and are sequestered from official results. They made up about 0.4% of the total mail-in vote. In Massachusetts, which also had a three-day rule, 3,403 votes came in, or 0.2% of the mail-in vote, the secretary of state’s office told Votebeat. More

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    Why this election calls into question whether America is a democracy

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

    “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.
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    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

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    Wisconsin sees record number of early voters as Covid cases climb in state

    After pressing forward with in-person voting back in April despite the pandemic, election officials expect a smoother process nowWisconsin, a state notoriously divided by politics, bucked national trends in April when it pressed forward with in-person midterm elections during the pandemic, despite objections of the Democratic governor, Tony Evers. Faced with a sudden exodus of volunteer poll workers, Milwaukee consolidated 180 polling locations in five, resulting in hours-long wait times.Having had six months to prepare for fall elections – stocking up on PPE, creating plans for cleaning, and finding enough volunteers to work the polls – experts and election officials expect a smoother process on 3 November. But the wave of coronavirus outbreaks that first walloped the nation’s coastal areas has now crashed on the midwest. Wisconsin cities made up seven out of 10 areas with the highest share of Covid cases relative to their populations, according to a New York Times analysis. Continue reading… More