Only the Right Americans Have Rights
They rest of us just think we do
In America, we just love to tell folks about our rights; the ones we have, the ones we don’t, and the especially the ones we expect for ourselves but deny to others. Whether we admit it or not, a great many of our public arguments are about rights that belong to some but not to all.
Voting is certainly one of these limited rights, even though we pretend the right is universal. And let me be clear – it should be universal to all American citizens, even though it isn’t, and it never has been.
This might be a good time to pause for an example:
Ratified in 1870, the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteed the right to vote for men (but not yet women) of all races. This immediately resulted in huge voter turnout among African American men in the South. In the 1880 presidential election, for example, the African American vote was so huge it equaled or surpassed the white vote in eight Southern states. A majority of black voters were registered in all but two Southern states. Then came the predictable suppression efforts, which look pretty much like what we’re facing today – poll taxes, citizenship tests, fraud accusations, etc.
And it worked. After 1890, just ten years after the massive turnout in the 1880 election, less than 9,000 of Mississippi’s 147,000 eligible African American voters were registered to vote. That’s roughly 6%. In Louisiana, a population of 130,000 registered African American voters in 1896 was reduced to just 1,342 in 1904. And most of these voters were disenfranchised legally. The law, which exists to ensure our freedoms, was used to remove them instead. And none of this information is a secret. It is so commonly understood that to find it, I needed nothing more than a simple Wikipedia search.
And while the populations who have historically been affected by these vote-stealing efforts have typically been targeted by race, the current voter suppression tactics have moved beyond race to target any and everyone who might vote against the organized crime syndicate commonly known as the American Right.
And make no mistake – they’re going to succeed again. We don’t know how just yet, and we’re fighting several voter suppression efforts right now, but in the end, those in power are simply going to do what they’re going to do, and our votes will be suppressed, one way or another. Your right to vote is under assault, and the people responsible for this are not going to stop, because they never have before.
You may vote in November, but unless that vote benefits Trump, it’s not likely to be counted, and less likely to matter if it is indeed counted at all. And while that might sound like I’m telling folks not to vote because that vote is meaningless, let me assure my readers that I am saying exactly the opposite. Your vote has never been more important, and this is why efforts to steal it from you are going to be more aggressive than they have ever been before. I’m not telling folks not to vote. I’m telling folks that this time around, you’re going to have to fight for it.
Too many pundits and legislators are arguing about what we should do to prevent voter suppression instead of arguing about what we do when it happens, because it is a certainty and we need to be prepared for that. We need to be prepared for goon squads at the polls. We need to be prepared for the goons to have guns, and we need to know what to do when those guns are pointed at us. We need to know what to do when Trump seizes voting machines, arrests election officials, and when he declares Martial Law and tries to cancel the election altogether. All of these things are possible and given the state of the country and Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, each of these unprecedented acts becomes more and more certain to occur.
Trump can’t lose. Also, Trump will lose. And as long as these two sentences are true at the same time, we can expect something horrible to happen. The size and shape of it are unknown, but the fact it will happen is a certainty, and we need to start talking about it that way.
What is our plan for the day after the election, when Trump decides not to accept the results? When he breaks the law to steal our votes, what laws are we prepared to break to get those votes back?
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.