The Day After Tomorrow
The Day After Tomorrow
Why would I publish a blog the day before the election when it will be read mostly after the election? Why write something that is almost immediately out of date?
Because it’s important to make a point that will not be changed regardless of what happened in the election or who won which race:
Our country, which proudly trumpets itself as the most functional democracy on the planet, which proudly sends teams around the world to tell others how to run their elections, is in very serious need of democratic reform. The list of needed reforms is long: How we vote, who gets to vote, whose votes are disqualified, how we draw legislative and congressional districts, …The list goes on, but one point is abundantly clear:
Our democracy never was fair and equal, and it may actually be getting worse.
That last line was painful for me to write because I grew up with such a glorified view of American democracy. I am embarrassed to admit, because it was so long ago, that the first time I was in a polling place was in 1960 when my mother took my five-year-old self into the voting booth. She moved the giant lever that pulled the curtain shut and there we were in a space as seemingly sacred it felt like as church. I saw myself as part of a ritual passed on from the Founding Fathers who, in those times, we regarded as nearly infallible.
Others may have also grown up with this reverential view of American democracy but that doesn’t mean we should treat our election practices like they were the Ten Commandments, written on stone tablets, never to be messed with. We now know those “nearly infallible” Founders who dreamed up the Electoral College and other gems were an elite group of white men who allowed slavery and considered slaves 3/5 of a person, didn’t allow women the vote and lived in only 13 states on land they took from native peoples, who they were in the process of trying to drive from the earth. Are we really supposed to treat their ideas from more than two centuries ago as sacred text for a wholly different world?
We have known we need change for decades but after so much talk and so little action, if change really possible? I believe it is and in fact, in just the last few months we have seen one long-standing impediment to fair elections fall: Election Day may be over!
Strange for me to say that because as someone who has campaigned almost since I could walk, and been a candidate myself, my adrenaline is programmed to surge into overdrive the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Problem is: it is unfair, inequitable, and really nonsensical to give people one single day to cast the vote. Start with how much harder it is for people working two jobs and/or single parents managing kids and work. Now, after an extraordinary early turnout in this election, there seems no going back. The genie is out of the bottle: Early voting, by mail or in person, is now a way of life and Election Day is rapidly on the way to being a thing of the past. That’s a good thing.
See, that wasn’t so hard; In just a few months we have put a stake on one of the most inequitable parts of the election ecosystem. Now let’s keep going. Voter registration: Why? We have multiple interactions with the government that require us to prove who we are — so why can’t we automatically be registered when we file taxes, get a driver’s license, pay taxes, graduate from high school, and much more. Or at the very least, why can’t every state follow Minnesota and have same-day registration?
Speaking of state election laws: Why? Does it make sense to have every state, county, and city have their own crazy quilt of laws and practices? Well, we know what that’s all about. Many of these local laws were expressly created to prevent some people from voting — notably people of color and young voters. It is also deeply disturbing to see these localized laws are becoming more restrictive and more targeted. The villain here, or at least the enabler of discriminatory voting laws, is the Supreme Court of 2013: It struck down the key part of the 1964 Voting Rights Act that prohibited communities with discriminatory histories from changing their voting laws unless they could prove they were fair. Now a person has to be discriminated against and then prove the discrimination after the fact. (This is the ruling that moved the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg to write her famous line that taking away that protection was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you aren’t getting wet.”)
RBG was right and once the “umbrella” was thrown away there was a whole world of rain. Since that ill-advised Supreme Court ruling, more than 1,500 polling places have been closed, which is a major reason why we are seeing the unconscionable 10-hour voting lines that, no surprise, are overwhelmingly in communities with the highest percentage of people of color. It’s also no surprise that there was a systemic effort in multiple states to move polling places off college campuses.
One of the bright spots in this election cycle was unexpected players helping to expand access, notably the National Basketball Association. The NBA worked in a number of cities to have their arenas become mass polling places. Progress, but having spent time this year trying unsuccessfully to help the Timberwolves create a voting site in Target Center, there are still too many hoops with what should have been a slam dunk.
Now let’s talk about how votes are counted:
Here’s a novel notion — what if every person’s vote counted the same? One person, One Vote. Great idea, but if you believe that then you have to be for eliminating the Electoral College. The Founders, who, as mentioned, were a pretty elite group, seemed to believe people like them were smarter than the rest of us. The idea was — in case people got too out of hand with, say, expressing who they wanted to lead them, the majority of voters could be overruled by “men of virtue” acting as the Electoral College. Seriously? Why is the only legit democracy on the planet with this barrier to direct representation even debating it anymore?
If you believe in One Person, One Vote then you should believe that when the new census data comes out every Congressional district should be redrawn by a nonpartisan commission, not whatever political party happens to be in power. The extreme polarization of the current Congress can be traced directly back to the egregious partisan redistricting enacted by the Congress and state legislatures that lurched to the right in the Tea Party elections of 2010. Ten years later, if Democrats get control in D.C. and more states, they could lurch redistricting to the left, and the cycle will go on and on. Another partisan round of gerrymandering, no matter by either party, will protect incumbent seats so most of the races will be decided before people even vote. Let’s not let either party rig this again. All that does is let incumbents protect their own jobs and, in the process, build extremism and polarization into a system that has proven it can’t get much of anything done. Let’s join a growing movement of states that are putting the power of drawing districts into non-partisan hands.
If you believe in One Person, One Vote, then you should be asking: Why do we give every state two senators, regardless of their population? That means on an issue where the Senate has tremendous power — like picking Supreme Court justices — one of the 40 million people of California has dramatically less representation than the 580,000 people of Wyoming. And, it means the people of Washington D.C., which has more people than Wyoming or Vermont, have no say at all — so, it’s time for D.C. statehood.
If you believe in One Person, One Vote, you also have to overturn Citizen’s United and reform campaign finance laws that have led to grotesque empowerment of super-rich donors. This, itself, is worth another full blog but I want to stop before you start thinking this is just another in the mountain of opinion pieces talking about common sense democracy reforms that never seem to happen. Is any of this possible in this political climate, especially if we try to do so much at once?
I believe, again, the answer is yes, especially because the extreme and obvious disenfranchisement we have seen in recent years has brought so many more rightfully outraged people into this fight. In fact, we have already seen action: After the 2018 midterm elections — when campaign spending was so out of whack and when statewide races (especially in Florida and Georgia) exposed clear examples of race-based voter suppression — the new Congress made democratic reforms their very first order of business. H.R. 1 was a sweeping body of legislation that addressing voter access, election integrity, election security, political spending, and ethics for the three branches of government. It specifically expands voter registration and voting access while limiting removing voters from voter rolls. It was passed quickly by the new House, but for two years nothing happened in the current Senate.
It appears H.R.1 will again be a high priority of the next House — very likely the first act they take up after COVID relief — and it is very possible the new Senate after this election will be more open to reforms. If you want to take one action in the next month, read more about H.R.1 so you are prepared to help advocate for it if/when it comes into play in about early February.
Those of us in Minnesota should also be preparing for action in the legislature where democracy reform legislation is being discussed for automatic voter registration, joining the National Popular Vote Compact to eliminate the Electoral College, enabling more vote by mail and online registration, adopting a non-partisan redistricting commission, restoring voting rights for those who have served their time and more.
In these next few months, the battle to make our democracy more fair and just will be fought in the halls of government in detailed debates around legislation like HR1 and whatever is moving in legislatures in Minnesota and elsewhere. While we are having those policy debates it will be important to elevate the discussion to the values we need to restore and rebuild; around why it matters so much to value every vote the same.
I see those values my mom passed on to me in that voting booth years ago very differently today. True, there were almost no barriers that kept her from voting in our almost all-white neighborhood in south Minneapolis. But I know that — especially in those days before the Voting Rights Act — there was massive race-based voter suppression across the South and, yes, here in Minnesota. I know I was standing with a woman who could only vote today because of decades of battles by other women to simply be given the same democratic rights as men.
I have learned that the electoral values I inherited were a privilege not provided to so many people of color and, increasingly, young voters. I saw that so clearly firsthand in 2012 when I was sent around the country to encourage people to vote and saw one barrier after another being erected in North and South Carolina, Mississippi, and across the South. Sadly, the worst abuses of access were in neighboring Wisconsin where we had to spend hours with black voters in Milwaukee and young voters in Madison to help them get around the new restrictions enacted specifically to keep them from voting.
The one exchange that stuck with me the most came on the Sunday before the election in Cleveland:
Ohio’s Governor and Secretary of State tried to close the early voting polling sites three days before the election. That sounded logical enough until you know that Sunday before Election Day in Ohio has historically been “Souls to the Polls”, when waves of black churchgoers finish their services and then head, en masse, to cast their votes. They had learned the hard way that safety in numbers was the best way to prevent voter suppression. We sued the state to reopen Sunday voting and won, so now I was standing in a bone-chilling drizzle with blocks of African Americans straight from church, ready to vote.
Being a Minnesotan, I tried to start a conversation with a woman in line by talking about the weather but before I could finish saying, “It sure is cold out here” she shot back “I’m. Not. Moving!” The look in her eye and the determination in her voice was all I needed to know that the voting traditions she grew up with were very different than mine. Her eyes told me plenty about obstacles she — and almost certainly her parents and grandparents — had to endure to simply have the right my mother so seamlessly observed when she walked into that polling place years ago. I came home so glad I was from Minnesota where we didn’t erect those barriers but a couple of nights later on Election eve, I was sent to Brooklyn Park to try to keep lines of mostly immigrant voters from leaving even though they had to wait for more than an hour. Then I got a call to go to a polling place near the University of Minnesota to do the same thing for an overcrowded polling place full of students.
Traditions are a wonderful thing, but some are meant to be broken. There was a tradition in my neighborhood growing up to burn your leaves in the street; I loved that smell of burning leaves, and it still reminds me of Fall, but we were smart enough to stop doing this. I loved the tradition of Election Day, but we are seeing that early voting and vote by mail means millions more people will be able to have their say.
American democracy is at a tipping point. It can part of a glorified past that our inability to act allowed to slowly sink into irrelevance. Or, we can grab the reins now, make the sweeping changes that are long overdue and finally start a new tradition: One Person. One Vote.
I like the sound of that.
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