(Un)vanquished Dragon
By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young
In so many ways, voting is both the most basic of rights a citizen can claim, but it is also the most contested. Throughout our country’s history, the ability of non-white, non-male, and non-landholding people to leverage their political voices in shaping the conditions of their daily lives has been an issue of debate, protest, scrutiny, and revolt. While much of white America takes for granted a life of uninterrupted and undisputed voting, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, rural, and poor communities remain in a state of heightened vigilance as they seek not only to defend but also to preserve the promise of one person, one vote.
Since January 6th, 2021, we’ve heard calls for unity echoing from almost every podium and influential room in our country. The rhetoric of unity at any cost is a thrilling one — a call that asks us to remember our best selves, to choose togetherness, and to eschew all that divides us. But that same call for unity also asks us to misremember — to downplay the intent of the insurrectionists, who sought to push aside the lawful votes of millions of Americans and violently disregard the constitutional rights of those same citizens.
To embrace this false unity — the kind that is predicated on disenfranchisement — is to leave unvanquished the kind of monstrous, white supremacist, raging monster that would be democracy’s undoing. To not address directly the reality that voting rights remain under constant siege — one so poignantly demonstrated by an angry mob literally laying siege to the U.S. Capitol — is to dishonor the legacies of millions of people who continue to bleed and die for their lawful right to representation.
We have not turned a corner. We are not better than this. Voter suppression is exactly who our nation has been and will continue to be if we do not work fervently to defeat this lumbering, violent beast. As a nation, we are so accustomed to voter disenfranchisement that its violence has come to seem completely normal. Minoritized people in America suffer the indignities of every day violence so regularly that the lack of access to free and fair voting can seem like just another.
In fact, it is voting equity that is a real challenge to the American status quo. When a biased judicial system arrests, tries, and convicts exponentially more Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people, the voiding of voting rights for felony convictions is violent. When economic mobility and housing are irrevocably contoured by racism and systemic bias, gerrymandering is inherently violent. When a pandemic is draining life expectancy for Black and Latinx people, state governments’ refusals to expand early voting or provide more polling locations is undeniably violent. Being asked to forget these transgressions and unify with white supremacists who believe your vote matters less because you are Black, Indigenous, or Latinx is stunningly violent. When such violence becomes routine, it further entrenches inequities in every layer of society — causing damage that can reverberate for generations.
January’s insurrection came on the heels of a momentous electoral victory in Georgia; the state elected its first ever Black senator to the U.S. Senate, wrested two U.S. Senate seats from presumed Republican control, and marked a huge Democratic shift in the state's voting outcomes. Such a feat, one led by Black women organizers across the state, was ground-shifting not because Georgia was a “red state” but because a century of active and pernicious voter disenfranchisement had made it almost impossible for Georgia’s Black and brown voters to have their voices heard above the gerrymandered fray.
Under the last two gubernatorial administrations alone, Georgia’s Black voters saw their names unceremoniously and illegally purged from voting rolls, their ballots thrown out for errors they were never allowed to correct, and their polling places eliminated even as a pandemic raged. Such tactics were used as tools to disrupt faith in the electoral process, further suppress votes, and discourage citizens from believing that voting is a viable avenue for building political power.
But voting is powerful. In fact, the people most focused on holding and hoarding power know that to be true — and they know it is in their best interest to keep tampering with this most fundamental American right in order to achieve their own ends.
What would it look like to truly vanquish the dragons of white supremacy and disenfranchisement in our country? Where would we even begin in our quest to end these beasts? What could a truly unified country — one in which whiteness was decentered and Blackness, queerness, Indigenousness, and otherness were elevated — truly look like?
An equitable vision for voter access includes an easy, automated voter registration process, one that does not place undue burden on people with limited access to transportation or identification. A fully realized electoral vision means that Black, Indigenous, and poor people are assured that their vote will count — and, as such, are able to elect representation that is responsive to their community needs. As the Supreme Court is set to weigh two additional cases on voting rights and as state houses weigh erasing voter protections, our national and state legislators must work to reaffirm and strengthen this vision.
This is an issue we cannot look away from. It is imperative that we pay close attention to this fight — not only to secure our own inalienable right to vote, but to ensure that right for every person. We’ve been living in an incomplete democracy for longer than we can remember. Now is the time to stand together to demand full-bodied democracy in every election.
Elections are happening across the country over the next few months. While presidential elections receive all the fanfare, local and state elections are just as important — and in some cases, more — to our everyday lives. If this dragon remains unvanquished, the gains made in places like Georgia, Arizona, and others stand to be erased today, tomorrow, or next week. And the violence that started with our country’s founding, when only white, land-owning men were allowed to vote, will continue to enact its fury on communities that are Black, Indigenous, Latinx, rural, and poor. Securing the right to vote for every person is perhaps the greatest unfinished work of the American project.