🇺🇸 America's Protests: We Must Now Focus on Voter Suppression
Hello! Welcome to another edition of Inside The Newsroom where today we’ll continue from last week’s newsletter on America’s protests against police brutality that have been felt around the world, and how it’s time to think differently in a world that only sees black and white. Protesting is the ultimate way to stand up for what you believe in, and is the most immediate form of action to raise awareness. But my bottom line last week was that all the anguish and heartbreak will be for nothing unless people take that energy and anger to the polls on November 3 and vote for state and locally elected officials. It’s the police chiefs who can install fresh ideas about police tactics, and the district and state attorneys who decide whether or not to charge those involved in police misconduct. But in typical fashion of nothing being that simple, just turning up to the polls on election day isn’t enough for some folks. For a plethora of reasons, which we’ll get into, a significant portion of Americans have been stripped of their right to vote. So buckle up and let’s dig into the current state of voter suppression in America. But first…
The most loyal of Inside The Newsroom loyalists will remember my very first podcast episode of the then shamefully named Daniel Levitt Podcast. God I’m a vain dick. Anyway, the very first person I spoke to on the air was my cousin Ali Rendely, who is a fine physiatrist up in Toronto and now she needs our help. Ali’s a finalist for an international research competition focused on improving quality in hospitals, and now needs us to vote for her so she can have her tireless research implemented into the healthcare system for real. I just voted and it took less than 30 seconds, and I hear there are a few dozen votes in it. Please and thank you 🙏
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Racism Kills, Literally
Before we get to the history of voter suppression and which states are most restrictive, it’s important to truly understand what black people in America are dealing with. We’ve all seen the sickening video of George Floyd crying for help in Minnesota as a white police officer used his knee to pin Floyd down to the ground by his neck. And new footage has surfaced showing an additional two officers simultaneously pin Floyd by his back and lower body while another officer stood by and watched. We’ve also seen the video of Ahmaud Arbery being shot and killed by two white men in Georgia while he was out jogging in the neighbourhood. And that’s just in the past month. What most folks don’t know is that when black Americans aren’t literally being gunned down, they’re being silently killed from the health effects suffered from racism.
According to a recent study by scientists at USC and UCLA, racism promotes genes that trigger inflammation, one of the biggest causes of various diseases. “If those genes remain active for an extended period of time, that can promote heart attacks, neurodegenerative diseases, and metastatic cancer,” said co-author Steve Cole of UCLA. Racism is just one of the myriad of reasons why if you’re black in America, your life expectancy at birth is 75.6 years, but if you’re white you can expect to live to 79.
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The Purge: Election Year
Perhaps the highest-profile case of voter suppression in recent years was during the 2018 midterms. In Georgia’s race for governor, Democrat Stacey Abrams, a black woman, lost by just 1.4 percent or less than 55,000 votes to Republican Brian Kemp, a white man who just so happened to be the Secretary of State since 2010. In that time, Kemp oversaw the removal of more than 1.4 million voter registrations for reasons that included not voting in consecutive elections and missing hyphens. It’s thought to be the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history, of which a U.S. House Oversight Committee investigation is still ongoing. In the very state where the civil rights movement rose to prominence 60 years ago, Kemp arguably purged his way to the Governor’s mansion.
Abrams has since launched a national voting rights campaign, Fair Fight 2020, which aims to educate and protect voters of their rights. In some ways, Republicans understand black voters better than Democrats. While voter suppression laws aren’t as overt as they once were (more on that next), some Republican-controlled states now use more insidious methods carefully planned to make it harder to register and to cast a vote. In Georgia, some counties were left with just a single polling station, and it’s thought that nationally almost 16 million Americans were removed from electoral register between 2014 and 2016.
Which States Are Most Restrictive To Vote?
Like with everything in this world, we must turn to the past in order to make an impact in the future, and understand how the U.S. became so damn hard to vote in. In 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a landmark 5-4 decision to strip away key protections of the Voting Rights Act, a staple in the country’s democracy since 1965. In the judgement, the SCOTUS ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act — the section that determines which states can change their voting laws without approval — was unconstitutional. Chief Justice John G. Roberts delivered the court’s opinion stating that “the Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem.” Seven years after the decision and we need extraordinary measures to protect voting rights more than ever.
The evisceration of parts of the Voting Rights Act has paved the way for more than half of the nation’s states to tighten their voter-ID laws, including most recently Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Tennessee and Texas. The fine folks at the Guardian US put together this awesome guide to find out how restrictive each state is.
That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll continue the conversation about what we can all do to put an end to the atrocious injustices taking place around us. You can find me on Twitter at @DanielLevitt32 and email me corrections/feedback or even a guest you’d like me to get on the podcast at daniellevitt32@gmail.com.