VOTE!
A few days ago I was engaged in a conversation with a new friend. A bio-chemist, so he’s gotta be brilliant. He mentioned that although he votes, he knows that his vote doesn’t count because he lives in a state that always votes the same way and with or without his vote, his party wins.
Maybe the conversation caught my attention coming as it did on June 21st, the 60th anniversary of the murders of Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman - the three Civil Rights workers who had come to Philadelphia MS to register Black Americans to vote. They knew it was dangerous work. But they also knew the importance of the vote.
The 19 men who murdered them - one of whom was a deputy sheriff, another a minister - also knew the importance of voting. For many Americans it’s been worth dying or killing for.
The hundreds of people, mostly Black, who walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 towards the nightsticks, mounted Alabama State Police, and state-sanctioned brutality understood the value and power of the vote.
In the 2013 case Shelby County, Alabama vs Holder, the county asked the Supreme Court to strike provisions of the Voting Rights Act that had protected voters for over 50 years by, among other provisions, requiring that states and jurisdictions with a history of suppressing votes and making voting difficult - primarily for Black Americans - to get permission from the Department of Justice before making any changes to their voting laws and procedures. The court agreed. Within hours of the decision Texas enacted new voter restrictions.
In March, 2020, a Democratic led Coronavirus stimulus package meant to keep people out of the public, contained provisions to vastly increase funds for absentee and mail-in voting. Donald Trump spoke up: “The things they had in (the stimulus package) were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a (MAGA) Republican elected in this country again.” Earlier, Lindsay Graham had spoken up as well at the 2012 Republican National Convention: "We’re losing the demographics race badly...[Republicans are] not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
Trump and Graham clearly understood - and feared - the power of your vote.
In the aftermath of the murders of Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act. Johnson understood the value and importance of voting as did those who bitterly opposed the law.
In the 2016 election of Clinton vs Trump, Black voter turnout declined by 7%. The narrative was Black people just didn’t show up to vote. Lazy. Lethargic. Uninvolved. Don’t care. Overlooked and unacknowledged was the fact that 2016 what was the first election in 50 years without the protections of the voting rights act. Many voter suppression obstacles had been enacted across the entire country.
And then there are the elections that were close. In 2022 Ralph Warnock edged out Herschel Walker with only 2.8 precent of the vote in a runoff election - essentially a ‘do-over’. Maybe not all that close until you consider and wonder how the heck did Walker, who could barely put together a coherent sentence, end up as a serious contender against Warnock - a PhD from Morehouse College, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the former pulpit of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and who had honorably served one term in the U.S. Senate.
In the 2002 Bush vs Gore election that was decided in Florida after a lengthy court battle to prohibit a recount, a study found that Gore would have edged out Bush by somewhere between 42 and 171 votes.
In 2017 Doug Jones beat out Roy Moore in Alabama for a seat in the U.S. Senate by 20,117 votes out of 1,344,406 votes cast, a margin of 1.5%. That may not be all that close, but I bring it up because Jones appealed to and won the support of Black voters. Moore had multiple accusations of sexual assault on women, one only 14 years old. Black votes matter.
And then there’s my home state of Colorado where Congresswoman Lauren Boebert edged out challenger Adam Frisch in 2021 by 551 votes.
“For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today. We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it.
People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro, whose approval rating in late August (2021) was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.” ”[1]
You vote counts.
Your vote matters.
Use it wisely.
Reject the extremist.
Sources
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrat-doug-jones-defeats-roy-moore-in-alabama-senate-race
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/us/politics/voting-rights-act-history.html
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/shelby-county-v-holder
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/06/us/elections/results-georgia-us-senate-runoff.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida
https://coloradosun.com/2022/11/18/lauren-boebert-adam-frisch-final-results-colorado/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrat-doug-jones-defeats-roy-moore-in-alabama-senate-race
Imagine millions of lives saved without GW as president in Iraq, Afghanistan and American soldiers: In the 2002 Bush vs Gore election that was decided in Florida after a lengthy court battle to prohibit a recount, a study found that Gore would have edged out Bush by somewhere between 42 and 171 votes.