It doesn’t matter how many of us vote or how much we talk about the power of a single ballot until we make sure that every single person has the ability to freely access and cast their ballot for a government that represents them.
Voter suppression (and the ugly, racist, and classist motivations at its core) is a conversation we have to have before we change anything in America. You can’t have equality without equal access. And my state is currently so gerrymandered that I have a hard time believing that it can be fixed. It’s easy to see why voters get disenfranchised.
But it must be fixed. It must.
We simply cannot sit back and let our elected officials pretend that they are not pursuing racist policy, espousing racist ideas, and pantomime that they’ve been wronged.
Listen: Voting should be easy, convenient, and secure.
In the computing world, we’ve solved this problem. America’s economy is little more than a series of electronic bits and bytes that are (occasionally) secured by math and distributed by electrons. America’s voting system is a physical piece of cardstock that, when scribbled on by the right kind of pencil, is converted into bits and bytes and secured by an octogenarian volunteer at a folding card table in the basement of the police station. Secure voting from a computer or phone or through the mail is a solved problem -- it’s the governance of the voting that is the issue. It doesn’t matter how the votes are cast when the governance of the voting is insecure and done in secret. And we can’t fix that until we fix the racist policies that drive that governance.
We must fix this problem. But we can’t fix it by refusing to play. We must be involved.
Stand tall against racist policies and ideas. Play the game. Vote against racist policies and the politicians who support them -- take small steps and vote against the incumbency and for change. It is the only way.
I used to think that it would take the end of the world to fix our broken republic. But that happened in March and April of this year; and, look at us, we’re still stuck. We’re stuck until voting is no longer a game and Scott Fitzgerald falls in a hole.