Our Time is Now by Stacey Abrams.
4/5 rating. 268 pages.
Book #42 of 2022. Read November 22, 2022.
This book deals with issues of voter suppression, voter engagement, government, and much more.
If you want a wake-up call to the horrors of voter suppression and shady measures by some government officials, look no further than this book. I had to keep taking breaks to digest the unreal ways that US citizens are stopped from this fundamental right.
Some examples:
- “Worse, state law in Georgia does not require timely processing of applications before an election. In fact, it set no deadline at all. Potential voters had to register twenty-nine days before an election, but the state had no legal obligation to get the name on the rolls in time for an election.”
- “When the ACLU warned the Ford County [Kansas] clerk, Deborah Cox, about the potential harms and asked her to publicize a local hotline to aid stranded voters, she forwarded the email to Secretary of State Kris Kobach with the message, ‘LOL.’”
Stacey does a great job of laying out why voting matters so much. Only when we hold the people in charge accountable, is anything going to change. It is so easy for citizens to moan about how things are unfair and their government doesn’t care about them, but if officials aren’t held to account for their transgressions and lack of caring for their constituents, they are going to continue doing what they always have done. This is a hard reality; it does not mean that voting-in one person is going to change anything. It requires voting in each race you can, and then holding those people to account.
This book inspired me this winter to start getting involved in some civic engagement groups. Simpler than that, everyone should take Stacey’s advice:
“This month, we should identify and contact our city councilmember, our county commissioner, and our state representative. Yes, all three, because each manages a distinct set of laws that govern our lives. If all you do is send a quick note to introduce yourself, or leave a voicemail about an issue you care about, then that’s good enough. Elected officials work for us, and they do their best when they know we are paying attention.”
Quotes:
“In political circles, what we accomplished would be dismissed as a moral victory. To that, I say, absolutely. Because I learned long ago that winning doesn’t always mean you get the prize. Sometimes you get progress, and that counts.”
“Though the Voting Rights Act would come the next year, like Brown v. Board of Education, the act of Congress would be slow to penetrate and create real change. We often see these historical moments as flash points with instant gratification; however, with most movements, the new laws, the new rules, only herald possibility. More must be done to make it so.”
“In telling their stories, they wanted us to understand the complexity of progress, how what is written on paper has to be made real by engagement and attention.”
“In other nations, voter registration is automatic and the responsibility of the government, a system followed by most European democracies as well as countries like Peru and Indonesia. The United States is one of the few democratized, industrialized nations that uses the piecemeal, inconsistent, state-by-state method of registration – and that puts the onus on the citizen to get on the rolls. With the management of elections left to individual states, the fractured, disjointed process is key to voter suppression. Where registration is easier, voters are more likely to participate.”
“The New Georgia Project collected more than 86,000 registration forms during our first foray in 2014. For each applicant, we went a step further and secured their permission to retain a copy of their form. In the end, 40,000 of our applications – including Diamond’s – disappeared from the process of registration in 2014.”
“Only two states – Maine and Vermont – do not restrict the right of citizens to vote, even during incarceration.”
“Felon disenfranchisement denies a fundamental right, but it also harms their reintegration into society. Research shows that when people released from correctional control are able to vote, they are more invested in community and are less likely to commit new crimes and return to prison.”
“Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp strongly favored the ‘use it or lose it’ power in Georgia, where he removed over 1.4 million voters in a state with 6 million registered users. In July 2017, he removed more than half a million voters in a single day, reducing the number of registered voters in Georgia by 8 percent. An estimated 107,000 of these voters were removed through ‘use it or lose it.’”
“[I]n fact, an American is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate a voter. To be more specific, according to analysis, out of 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014, only 31 instances of voter impersonation occurred.”
“Restrictive voter identification is the main weapon to fight the nonexistent wave of voter fraud, but this is not the same as basic voter ID. Basic voter ID has been a part of voting since the beginning, and both Democrats and Republicans agree that people should provide proof of who they are before casting ballots.”
“For those who seek to comply, gaining access can prove prohibitively difficult. In the town of Sauk City, Wisconsin, those in need of free voter ID cards could secure them at the local DMV; however, the nearest office was open only four times in 2016 – on the fifth Wednesday of every month.”
“After Wisconsin adopted its restrictive voter ID laws, Mrs. Smith attempted to get the required photo identification. To do so, she had to produce a birth certificate that would prove her date and place of birth. But Mrs. Smith, an African American woman born during segregation in 1916, does not have a birth certificate because, like many Blacks of her era, she was born at home due to lack of access to a hospital.”
“How big an issue are signature mismatches? Of the top ten reasons for rejecting absentee ballots – from otherwise eligible voters – the nonmatching signature is number one. According to the Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS), in 2018 signature mismatches accounted for 27.5 percent of rejections. In states with these laws, the problem starts with requiring untrained workers to assess the veracity of a signature. Forensic scientists have found that laypersons, like these poll workers, have a 26 percent error rate for judging the authenticity of a signature, even when they have access to six authentic reference signatures for comparison.”
“In 2005, Arizona had four hundred polling locations; as of 2019, the number had dropped to sixty.”
“The disproportionate effect on communities of color in Arizona means that in rural counties, Hispanic and Latino voters are five to six times as likely to be disenfranchised as white voters. Even in urban counties, they have double the likelihood of not having their votes count.”
“Relative to entirely-white neighborhoods, residents of entirely-black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place.”
“In defiance of desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education, Georgia leaders had added the Confederate battle emblem to the state seal on the flag of Georgia in 1956.”
“There are no ob/gyns in 79 of Georgia’s 159 counties,”
“Those of us who believe in the promise of democracy must become outraged about even a single act of suppression. In an honorable system, the loss of a single voter’s right to participate is a wrong that cannot be tolerated – and as Americans, we should know that a failure in the system weakens us all.”
“Not every problem can be solved by lawsuits, but laws rarely improve if they are never challenged.”
“Statistically, the possession of a gun raises the risk of homicide in domestic violence cases by 500 percent.”
“Nationwide, from 2012 through 2016, the Republican Party won an average of nineteen additional seats in the House of Representatives because of gerrymandered districts.”
“Americans like to think that we’re invulnerable, but we are not. Our systems are not. Our democracy may be resilient, but it is also fragile.”
IG Link.
Leave a Reply