Post by Tanya Wilkinson
America is in the middle of a rolling election crisis. On June 10th, the state of Georgia became the latest exemplar of voter suppression. The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea filed a report from the ground, which includes accounts like this from people who tried to vote:
“Kate Whitney, a thirty-one-year-old design researcher, also arrived early at her polling location, the West Oakland Missionary Baptist Church, in a poor part of Fulton County. She’d requested an absentee ballot—because her father is ill and she worried about exposure to the coronavirus—but never received one. At her polling location, there were three poll workers also dealing with problems, which delayed voting until around nine o’clock. ‘When you put the new cards in the machine,’ Whitney said, ‘It would say that the data was invalid on the card.’ In the first two hours, Whitney told me, eight people, at most, were successfully able to vote. Volunteers brought chairs outside to encourage people to stay, but, Whitney said, ‘We’d already lost a significant number as the day got hotter and people had to get to work.’”
The visceral impact of police violence against people of color, coupled with the immediacy of the coronavirus threat, overshadow our ongoing voting rights problems. However, these issues are overlapping and must be addressed as interrelated aspects of a national crisis.
There is a wide ranging campaign by the Republican party and its cohorts to suppress voting. Republicans are devoting 20 million dollars and 50,000 people to efforts to restrict voting. As the New York Times reported in May, the GOP and its soft money groups are mounting “a vast and expensive campaign of voter suppression, deploying lawsuits, ‘voter fraud’ misinformation, voter registration purges, direct intimidation of voters at the polls.”
The GOP and its allies equate more voters with failure at the polls. This assumption is probably correct in many swing states. As a consequence, the Republicans have fought changes to voting in court, and opposed funding to expand mail-in voting in Congress.
Conservative special interest groups are a powerful part of the push to suppress voting. According to the Guardian, a powerful new conservative organization is fighting to restrict voting in the 2020 presidential election: “The organization, which calls itself the Honest Elections Project, seemed to emerge out of nowhere a few months ago and started stoking fears about voter fraud.” It is “backed by a dark money group funded by rightwing stalwarts like the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos’ family.”
According to New York Magazine, the primary in Wisconsin this May was a prime example of Republican legislators and conservative judges, on both the State and Federal levels, attempting to curtail voting by mail, aided by soft money ad campaigns from conservative groups like the Honest Elections Project. These tactics forced citizens to vote in person, putting themselves at risk during a pandemic. And it backfired spectacularly as Democrats made voter suppression a campaign issue and and a progressive judicial candidate “romped to victory.”
Grassroots organizers were a vital force in the successful effort to counter voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin. Leaders Igniting Transformation, an Airlift supported, youth of color led independent nonprofit based in Milwaukee, was part of that fight. LIT engages in “values-based issue and electoral organizing, direct action, advocacy for public policy, and leadership development. On campuses and communities in Milwaukee’s key geographies, we organize young people to build independent political power for social, racial and economic justice.”
In an April 23rd Facebook post, LIT noted that: “The Wisconsin Pandemic Primary was not easy to work through, the fact Republicans forced voters to go to the polls to be heard during a global pandemic in which thousands of people lost their lives is shameful and unconscionable.” Nonetheless, they will persist in their efforts to ensure that every young voter in Wisconsin is able to vote in a safe way.
Leaders Igniting Transformation is currently raising funds to insure voter safety in the Fall. Their goal is to “raise $100,000 by August 1, 2020 to ensure that we have the resources necessary to conduct massive digital voter registration, education, and mobilization efforts to defeat President Trump and his allies, who forced our communities to the polls during a global pandemic, endangering thousands of lives.” Donate to their effort here.
The fight for true universal suffrage is crucial to the preservation of Democracy. As Ed Kilgore wrote in New York Magazine:
“Supporting or opposing voting rights is not just some backstage duel between lawyers or campaign consultants, part of the inevitable if sometimes sleazy game of business-as-usual politics. It’s the moral and constitutional foundation that makes political competition legitimate. And it has to be treated that way every single day.”