Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
Stacey Abrams at the funeral service for the late Rep. John Lewis in Atlanta last month
During the first day of the Democratic National Convention, voting was top of mind. Voter turnout was a key point of emphasis in Michelle Obama’s primetime address, and a panel convened by Democrats prior to the convention on Monday addressed protecting the election’s integrity.
While issues around adapting to more people voting by mail and President Donald Trump’s attacks on the Postal Service were acknowledged in the conversation, the main message from the Democratic Party was that voters must educate themselves and are on their own in navigating the complexities of voting in 2020.
“We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received,” Michelle Obama said in the closing speech of night one. “We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.”
Speakers on a panel about protecting election integrity, moderated by Business Forward’s Ed Meier, also stressed the importance of individuals seeking out voter education and encouraging friends and family members to do the same.
“We as a campaign are doing the most we can do to educate voters about what their rights are and how they can exercise their right to vote,” said Joe Biden’s national director for voter protection, Rachana Desai Martin. “This will be so important because sitting here I don’t know the best way for anyone of you all to vote, you know your personal circumstances and what we need to do it get that information out to voters so they can exercise their right.”
Obstacles to voting this year don’t stem from a lack of understanding on how to vote in the United States.
The education strategy makes sense, especially as President Trump and his allies continue to spread misinformation about voting and voter fraud. However, obstacles to voting this year don’t stem from a lack of understanding on how to vote in the United States.
Problems voters face while trying to cast their ballots can come in many forms, from not having the right voter ID and having your polling place moved without warning on Election Day to dealing with an unprepared poll worker or having your absentee ballot rejected because of bureaucratic procedures.
When a Secretary of State uses aggressive name-matching or voter-activity monitoring to decide whether or not to purge thousands of people from the voter rolls, there’s no amount of individual voter education or phoning a friend that can combat these systematic efforts to stop people from voting.
In 2018, Stacey Abrams ran a grassroots campaign for governor that informed thousands of voters not just about her candidacy, but also how to turn out to vote in Georgia on Election Day. However effective her campaign was, it was no match for the efforts of her opponent, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. Abrams lost the governorship, but realizing the unfairness of the election’s playing field, she refused to concede.
It was a call to action that re-started the national conversation on voting rights and voter suppression, and led to Abrams’s latest venture, the voting rights advocacy group Fair Fight. With the recent death of Rep. John Lewis and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the nuances of voter-suppression laws and tactics were certain to be front in center at the convention, like they were in Abrams’s 2018 campaign. Abrams is a keynote speaker tonight, part of an unusual plenary that will feature 17 different local politicians.
But, the party’s rhetoric around voting fails to learn from recent history. After four years of Trump, Americans have shown they can adapt to fake news, misinformation, and disinformation around most topics—what former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon called “flood[ing] the zone with shit.”
Attention would be better focused on forcing the federal government to properly appropriate funds to election offices across the country, and holding local election officials on the state and county levels accountable to properly execute their duties. These responsibilities will start earlier than ever with more people opting to vote by mail weeks before November 3 and may continue later as ballots continue to arrive after polls close.
The responsibility to prepare for elections should be emphasized for elected officials as much—if not more so—as it is for the average voter. They will be the ones who control whether or not people have to bring “a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast” to the polls.
Hopefully on Election Day, people will not have to applaud voters waiting in long lines at the polls, usually in minority communities, and their patience to stay there for hours into early the next day. While the determination needed to cast a ballot reflects the virtue of American voters, it’s equally a sign of American systemic failures.
