Abrams film tackles voter suppression
When Stacey Abrams conceded a close race for governor of Georgia in 2018, alleging systematic election mismanagement by her opponent, Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, she spoke out against “the weaponization of voter suppression tactics across America.”
Abrams knew those tactics all too well. She not only had been on the receiving end of a gutpunch loss under a national spotlight but also had spent her entire career as a political leader, activist and author committed to defending every citizen’s right to vote.
The urgent new documentary “All In: The Fight for Democracy,” produced by Abrams and directed by twotime Oscar nominee Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés, uses Abrams’ personal story to frame a much broader discussion of this country’s ugly history of voter suppression.
“All In” is an enraging but riveting dive into that tortured history, dating back to the country’s first election when only 6% of the population was eligible to cast a ballot, mostly white landowning men. The tactics used to exclude Black, Latino, Native American, young and poor voters have
evolved — from cops with billy clubs to voter ID laws, and now even a degraded Postal Service — yet they’ve persisted and even gathered strength since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
Abrams spoke with The Chronicle about the film, which will be available to stream on Amazon Prime starting Friday, Sept. 18, as well as her hopes that “All In” encourages people to see voting rights “as nonpartisan, as in fact a fundamental civil rights or human rights issue” — and that, most of all, it gets them to the polls in November.
Q: I imagine you’ve been approached before by filmmakers. Why did you agree this time?
A: Yes, I had been approached about doing a documentary even during the campaign, and some fantastic filmmakers asked about doing a story about me. That was not at all appealing, but when I knew that people saw what happened to me as a singularity, I realized they needed to understand that in fact what happened to me was just one egregious, public part of a much larger story. Voter suppression is as old as our nation, and it is something we can mitigate at worst and defeat at best.
Film is an extraordinary way in a very compact amount of time to communicate complex issues. It’s my job to talk about these issues not simply when I’m on the ballot, but when I have nothing to win or lose except my country, and that’s what I’m fighting for.
Q: You’ve been working on voter issues since you were in college. How did you become so focused on this at a young age?
A: My parents were civil rights activists as teenagers. They were born in ’49, so they were in their mid to late teens as the civil rights movement was coming to its apex. My dad was arrested at the age of 14 for registering people to vote.
They raised us with this very strong understanding that you were responsible for protesting the ills that you see, working to mitigate the harm and voting to build the world you wanted. In our universe, there was no difference between protesting apartheid and going to vote. They took us with them to do both.
Q: You tell a powerful story in the film of being invited as your high school valedictorian to visit the governor’s mansion in Georgia, and being told at the door that you didn’t belong there. How does the sting of that experience relate to your commitment to voting rights?
A: Because in retrospect, I was standing at the place of greatest power in the state, and yet my right to have access was being denied. The right to vote is supposed to be a leveler, so your wealth, education, privilege, assets are all irrelevant. Q: Another extraordinary scene in “All In” shows you going to the polls to vote when you were on the ballot in 2018 and being told you’d already voted absentee. You had a camera crew with you and were able to sort it out, but clearly there’s a message in there about the implied toll on people who aren’t famous and have no recourse, right? A: Yeah, that’s why I wanted to tell the story. I want people to understand that if we break the machinery of democracy, we break it for everyone.
I doubt Brian Kemp wanted me to have this as a flag to wave, but when you undermine the system, the outcome is you can’t predict who’s going to be harmed. Therefore, you cannot predict whether you’re going to hit your targets or your allies.
Q: Are you surprised by what’s going on now with threats to the Postal Service?
A: No, I’m not surprised. They’re doing the same thing by undercutting the census, and in both cases it’s about our democracy. If we cannot cast our votes, and if we are not counted, then we are not heard.
We like to say at both Fair Count and Fair Fight, the two organizations I started, that we knew there would be a catastrophe. I didn’t know it would be a pandemic, and I did not think that the president would try to break the Postal Service and break the census, but there you go.
Q: What’s your state of mind heading into November’s election? Are you hopeful?
A: I believe that if we can get people to do three things, we can win.
One, get people to make a plan to vote, and this film is designed to make certain they understand what that looks like. They can go to Vote. org and get all the information they need.
Two, we need people to sign up as poll workers.
Three, to keep fighting voter intimidation and voter suppression, we need people to sign up to be voter protectors.
We do those three things, and we can overwhelm the polls. I believe in Americans, and I believe that if we understand what we face, we will fight back and we will win.