Americans have been implored for the past month on every platform imaginable to go to the polls and vote, and that rhetoric came to a pitch Tuesday. “thank u, vote” Twitter tweeted, riffing on Ariana Grande’s new song. Even Tinder told users that “Every. Single. Vote. Counts. #everysinglevote.”
But a good number of people actually can’t walk into a polling station, cast an absentee ballot or contribute at all to the outcome of this midterm election. These people have been disenfranchised by efforts across the nation to limit and suppress minority votes.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed a lawsuit last month alleging that Texas’ Waller County, home to Prairie View A&M University, has been purposefully disenfranchising students for decades. Recently, they’ve been limiting early voting on campus — restricting polling stations to three days, compared to stations that are open for two weeks at a largely white university nearby.
This is intentional. At a primarily black university, students are more likely to vote Democratic, and they’re more likely to pose a threat to the status quo in a predominantly white area.
This isn’t happening because the county doesn’t have the resources to provide longer periods of early voting — it’s happening because county officials are afraid that if they give these students a full chance to exercise their civic duty, students will take it and run with it. They’re afraid that the midterm might not result how they want it to.
What should be a fundamental constitutional right is instead being used as a political tool.
Voter disenfranchisement runs in the veins of American history, beginning with the very way the Constitution was written, only allowing white, male property-owners to participate in elections. Our country is based off of certain people having more political power than others.
It might as well still be written in the Constitution that certain demographics are not entitled to political participation. There’s hardly a difference between putting those words into legislation outright and enacting under-the-radar policies designed to indirectly silence people.
College students are also generally unfamiliar with the logistically confusing process of voting. Students can have a particularly difficult time figuring out how to navigate roadblocks that arise when their county or state makes voting unusually difficult.
Students have busy lives. They need to fit voting around their schedules, rather than fitting their schedules around voting — and if they aren’t given this option, they may not vote. This may explain why college students are less likely to vote than older demographics. Only 17 percent of 18–24 year olds voted in the 2014 elections.
Georgia’s policies have come under fire this election. Georgia has enacted “use it or lose it” laws, which would prevent people from voting in the midterm if they didn’t vote in previous elections and didn’t respond to notices from the state. It’s hard to be limited to a slim window for early voting, but it’s worse to show up to a polling location expecting to be able to vote and be turned away at the last minute.
It’s nonsensical to remove a person’s voter registration for no reason other than the fact that they didn’t show up the year before. But furthermore, Georgia’s policies of flagging voter registration applications that don’t exactly mirror government databases disproportionately impacts people of color.
More than not, these efforts to suppress the Democratic vote come back to race. Kentucky has America’s highest rate of disenfranchisement of black people — one in three black men cannot vote due to a felony record that prevents them from voting for life. These felonies are usually imposed for low-level drug crimes.
Convicted felons often return to prison for the same types of crime they committed in the past. The same people who don’t want felons to vote are the people who don’t do anything in terms of trying to address this cycle. They’ll still be in power, and they are enabled to continue ignoring the problem — to continue enacting voter suppression.
It’s not political to state the obvious: one party has systematically, through various tactics over the years, tried to oppress the vote of another. These policies are almost always imposed in places with minorities, who overwhelmingly vote blue. We don’t see this kind of suppression in white or affluent areas.
Elections will always be fights over who can garner the most votes, but they shouldn’t be fights over which party allows the most people to vote. A win that comes from suppressing opposition isn’t a democratic win, and while it may be in line with the Constitution America was founded upon, it certainly shouldn’t still be that way.
People who are investing their effort in rallying others — posting on social media reminding friends to vote, campaigning for measures — are doing important work. Fighting for people to utilize their ability to vote is one thing, but if we’re not fighting for everyone to have that ability, that work is futile. We need to recognize that low voter turnout is not entirely due to laziness or a lack of motivation. To say that it is is to ignore the ways that minority voices are suppressed.
