After class, I viewed the New York Times video of how drastically different the voting process is for BIPOC. The lines to vote in a 2% white area were drastically larger compared to the 80% white area which had no lines you could walk up and vote in minutes. I used a mail-in ballot for this election and I could never imagine waiting for 7+ hours just to vote. There are 5 common ways that can be used to suppress voters:
- Voter ID laws
- Polling place closures
- Proof of citizenship requirements
- Voter roll purges
- Cuts in early voting
These methods of suppression are passed off, by mainly the Republican party (cough cough Trump), as methods to avoid voter fraud because they care about the sanctity of the elections. One of the scariest things I learned in this video was about the case Shelby County v. Holder, which allowed states to pass individual laws about voting requirements without the federal government oversight. States with a history of enforcing racially discriminatory voting laws could put any barriers they wanted in order to make it harder for anyone, more specifically BIPOC to vote. After the Shelby decision, some states like Georgia immediately passed laws that required more from the voter and made an exact match policy which is seemingly inconspicuous but targets minorities and pages them from voter rolls if their information does not match what is on a government database. This caused approximately 55,000 ballots to not be counted and 70% of those ballots were black Georgians.
A sense of nationalism is instilled within Americans beginning with the youth in school, which tells us stating how great America is and how many rights we have compared to other nations essentially having children think from a young age that we’re the best. We were the first to put a man on the moon that’s great, but we make it basically impossible for our own people to vote without having to wait in lines for hours, during a pandemic where those in power didn’t do the basic minimum to keep their citizens safe.
It is wonderful how they are giving out more information on the different ways you could vote for this election such as early voting, voting by mail, and absentee ballots to name a few, but why did they wait until this election to inform us, why now? They could have given these resources during the 2016 election, we could have avoided some of the deaths caused by the pandemic. If we made voting easy and accessible to all citizens Republicans feel like they would never win another presidency, and I agree with them if we solely went by the majority of votes the current president would be Hillary.