Don’t surrender right to vote
Recently, I was with some twentysomethings and they each said (about the presidential race of 2024) “if Biden and Trump are the only choices, we, as a country, can come up with, then I’m just not going to vote.” Politics aside, my knee-jerk reaction was, “oh well you have to vote!” at which point one of them got huffy and told me I can’t be telling them what to do.
The usual reasons to exercise the right to vote went through my mind, e.g. to vote is to exercise a fundamental right, to have a voice. It is not something to take lightly. Think of all the many years, not so long ago, when women did not have the right to vote, when Black men and women did not have the right to vote. So now, their rebellion to the complaint of slim pickins is to throw away that right, toss it in the wastebasket. To me, this is self-inflicted silencing, a relinquishing of the voice given to them.
For years, decades, people of many groups have been fighting for the right to vote. “The basic principle that governed voting in colonial America was that voters should have a ‘stake in society.’ … “But this right was not for everyone in colonial times. Each of the thirteen colonies required voters either to own a certain amount of land or personal property, or to pay a specified amount in taxes. Many colonies imposed other restrictions on voting, including religious tests. Catholics were barred from voting in five colonies and Jews in four.”
Women, Black people, Catholics, Jews, whatever group was denied the right to vote, the reason was because those in power, i.e., white men of certain religious persuasions, did not see the others as fully human, or as worthy, or as intelligent enough to vote. Voting was a privilege reserved for the few in power. This arrangement allowed those select privileged men to perpetuate their reign as they continued to elect their own kind to positions of power. Each time one of us relinquishes the right to vote, we give up the right so many fighters and activists risked their reputations and lives on so that we could exercise this right to vote and share in the expression of who we want to govern and lead us. If we do not vote, we cave into silence, we remain quiet, subdued, and disengaged from the issues that so deeply affect us such as what is happening to the Earth, climate change, abortion and reproductive rights, gun control, taxes, employment rights, health care and hate crimes. As Michelle Cottle states in her recent New York Times op-ed, “What are young voters looking for?” “(y)ounger voters need to be reminded of the concrete changes their votes can effect … The dark corollary to this is … the explicit damage that can be done if young people opt out.”
If a woman tosses away her right to vote, this is an unsettling affront to the women of the Women’s Suffrage Movement who toiled, marched, and faced ridicule as they protested for years to secure the right to vote for women. “In 1848, at the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., delegates adopted a resolution calling for women’s suffrage. But it would take 72 years before most American women could vote. Anti-suffragists truly believed women were not mentally capable of understanding and engaging in governing matters, and that women lacked the reasoning capacity to make decisions in civic matters.
Although the 15th Amendment gave Black people the right to vote in 1870, for almost 100 years, they were virtually unable to exercise that right. Onerous obstacles such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and civics exams blocked many Black people from registering to vote. Then, in 1965, Hosea Williams and John Lewis (Congressional representative from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District from 1987 until his death in 2020), led a nonviolent march for voting rights. The marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers. Lewis sustained a skull fracture and soon after, testified before Congress about the attack “remembered in history as ‘Bloody Sunday’… Six months after ‘Bloody Sunday,’ President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act.”
Fifth- and sixth-graders are taught that “Participating in elections is one of the key freedoms of American life. Many people in countries around the world do not have the same freedom, nor did many Americans in centuries past. No matter what you believe or whom you support, it is important to exercise your rights.”
“Supreme Court case law … has repeatedly characterized the fundamental right to vote in terms of ‘voice’ and expression. In Wesberry v. Sanders, the Court explained: “(N)o right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws.”
In the Yale Law and Policy Review, Derfer and Hebert wrote, “The expressive interests implicated by voting are strong. By voting, citizens declare their choice to participate, express this in front of their neighbors and poll officials, and allow a public record of their choice.” Therefore, a choice to not vote is to decline to participate. It is selfdenial of the right to have a voice, to engage in the process that bestows the freedom we so desire and cherish.
To vote is not only to exercise a right that was worth fighting for, but it is an act of taking responsibility for the freedom we enjoy. What is freedom? Freedom is “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.” To vote is to exercise freedom, i.e., to be “without constraint in choice or action.”
Right now, after all that has been said and done for so many years, for the purposes of civil rights and equality, the truth is that there are huge efforts by U.S. state governments to curtail the right to vote, to suppress the vote, to make it as hard as possible for people to exercise their right to vote. So, go ahead you twenty-somethings, play right into their hands.
Fairfield resident Victoria T. Ferrara is an attorney and author.