Last week’s midterm elections were groundbreaking in many ways. By voting to elect an unprecedented number of women and members of the LGBTQ community, flip the House of Representatives back to blue and re-enfranchise over 1 million ex-felons in Florida, Americans’ votes made history. While the biggest topic of conversation over the past week has been how President Donald Trump’s administration will fare in the face of the new “blue wave” and what the results mean for the future of our country, we should also reflect on the lessons of this election — and I don’t just mean the results. We need to take a critical look at our election process and how we exercise our rights and figure out if our system can really be called a democracy.
To start, 110 million people, more than 47 percent of the eligible voting population in the United States, voted in the election. The last time turnout was so high was in 1966, when 49 percent of Americans voted in the midterms. While this is indeed a high number compared to midterm turnout in recent years, it should be concerning that we consider our country a democracy when not even half the population votes on important, long-term issues that affect the entire population.
There are obvious ways to increase voter participation, like having early polls in every state and making Election Day a holiday. However, the larger problem at hand is that of voter apathy. Non-voters offer up many sorry excuses for not voting, like they didn’t feel educated enough on the candidates or the issues to cast their vote, or that the absentee ballot process was too tedious and they never found time to submit their request forms or that they’re simply uninterested in politics. None of these are valid excuses, but people will continue to make them unless we make serious changes to the way people think about politics.
This begins with thorough, mandatory education — beginning in high school and continuing through college — on the importance of voting, as well as information sessions on the issues so people can make informed decisions about who and what they’re voting for. It’s important to instill the motivation to participate in one’s democracy in people at a young age so that they continue to vote throughout their life. Young people also tend to have a greater stake in elections because the issues and candidates they vote on may affect them for the rest of their lives.
The issue of felon disenfranchisement has much to do with the issue of voter turnout and representation as well. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that, based on the variety of laws certain states have as to whether people can vote based on their criminal record, about 5.85 million ex-felons or incarcerated people are unable to vote. The enactment of Amendment 4 in Florida will be a huge step in the right direction, but over four million Americans will still be unable to vote, and in some states they may never be able to vote because of their criminal records.
This is a significant problem, particularly when it comes to prison reform, because the very people who are imprisoned have no chance of voting to improve their conditions. But more importantly, it is an issue of disenfranchisement and voter suppression. At the end of the day, a person’s mistakes or criminal actions do not deprive them of their American citizenship, which is the only requirement when it comes to voting. There should be no reason why they are not allowed to vote.
Ultimately, disenfranchising incarcerated people is just one of the myriad of ways voter suppression is enacted in America, and it is time we start addressing this fact. The events in Florida show that we are on our way toward remedying this problem, but we have a long way to go in restoring voting rights to all inmates and ex-felons. At the federal level, laws should be enacted ensuring the voting rights of all prisoners and ex-felons.
Problems with voting, which have become increasingly common in American elections, also plagued these midterms. Besides the typical issues of long lines and hours-long waits at polling places, there were reports that in Maryland, one county’s voting precincts didn’t print enough ballots. Infrastructure issues like these are foreseeable, and it is ridiculous that such problems should delay or prevent people from casting their ballots.
Other more serious issues of voter suppression arose, too. In Georgia, gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp’s administration prevented thousands of voters (most of whom were African Americans) from registering because the information on their applications did not exactly match the information in their files at the DMV or Social Security Administration. This is a clear conflict of interest and calls into question the validity and fairness of his race against Stacey Abrams, who, if elected, will be the country’s first African-American, female governor. Our government must be more diligent in ensuring that elections are indeed “free and fair” as is constitutionally promised to the American people. The voting process should be simple and straightforward, like it was intended to be. People shouldn’t have to spend hours at the polls or have to worry about a third party interfering with their constitutional rights. Additionally, ballot machines should be standardized and brought up to date — we shouldn’t have to worry about the effects of the elements, of all things, on our ability to vote.
Though the results of these midterms brought hope in the form of increased diversity and representation, we still have a long way to go before our system functions as a true democracy. At the most basic level, this begins with increasing voter turnout and restoring voting rights to all eligible voters. The difficult tasks come when we reflect on the problems with our system and attempt to fix them — but it is critical for our country to do so.
