I remember back in 1980, when I turned 18, my grandmother Ethel told me in her characteristic, “there’s-no-arguing-with-me” manner that I should vote. She stood in our kitchen in St. Paul, my mom putting a fresh pot of coffee on, and my grandma looked me in the eyes, pointed her finger at me and said, “We women fought hard for the vote, so you make sure you register and vote.” My grandmother Ethel was a self-made woman, a career nurse, and didn’t suffer fools well. But what stuck in my mind was the serious tone in her voice. I’d never seen my grandmother express such a firm opinion about politics before. Being the casual teenager, I said “OK grandma, OK, I’ll vote, don’t worry.”
In November of 1980, I was 18, and I voted for the first time. It was a national election, and after carefully reviewing the candidates, I cast my vote for the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Well, Carter lost by a wide margin to Ronald Reagan. 1980 was only 60 years after women fought and finally won the right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. My grandmother told me that it took decades of suffrage, struggle, marching, and protest for women to finally have a voice in government, and that I should never take for granted what those women sacrificed and accomplished prior to 1920. And it wasn’t just women, but minorities as well who have fought long and hard for the vote.
The 15th amendment, for example, finally awarded African Americans the right to vote in 1870. The amendment states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Of course this only applied to men at the time. Sadly, this amendment was essentially dodged and ignored for nearly a century. After passage of this amendment, African American men voted in droves, and almost 2,000 African American men were elected to public office during this time. But in 1890, several Southern states passed laws that made it almost impossible for American Americans to vote, and this ushered in the period known as the “era of disenfranchisement,” which lasted up until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Some of these disenfranchisement laws required potential voters to take literacy tests, pay poll taxes, demonstrate good moral character, or meet other bureaucratic hurdles before being able to vote. Some communities even resorted to intimidation and violence to restrict voter registration. Those laws, clearly targeting minorities, were successful in suppressing the votes of African Americans and other minority groups from 1890 to 1965 (1).
Despite the history of voter struggle, why doesn’t everybody vote in the US? According to the US Census Bureau, in 2016 only 56% of registered voters voted in the presidential election, and of that 56%, 39.4% of voters were between the ages of 18-24, 58.5% were women, 53.8% were men, 54.9% were African American, and 32.5% were Hispanic (2). In the 2018 general election, only 49.4% of registered voters voted (3), and in the recent 2020 primaries, Colorado had the highest turnout at 42.6%, Ohio at 28.8%, and my home state of New Mexico at 27.8% (4). So looking back at 2016, 138 million people voted in the US (5), but 200 million people were registered just a month before the 2016 November election (6). That means that around 62 million people didn’t vote, that’s 62 million registered voters! Just think about that for a moment, we could have a totally different make-up of representation in Washington right now. And looking at the 2020 primary numbers so far, what does that say about what will happen in November?
Going back to the low voter turnout in 2016, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017 showed that the main reason for voters not casting their ballots was “dislike of the candidates or campaign issues.” Other reasons were being too busy to vote (14%), feelings that that their vote wouldn’t make a difference (15%), having an illness or a disability (12%) or being absent or out of town (8%), or for other reasons (11%) (7). So if I do the math right, 40% of those surveyed didn’t vote in 2016 because they disliked the candidates or issues. That’s a big percentage, and a bit disturbing. I can empathize with being disabled or ill, with being too busy because of work or other obligations, being out of town or deployed overseas, and I can relate to the dislike of the candidates. I voted for Hillary, but reluctantly. I campaigned for Bernie in 2016, and I really hoped that his progressive agenda would take hold and lead him to the White House, but that didn’t happen. I campaigned again for Bernie for his 2020 run, and again, just like Jimmy Carter in 1980, my first choice didn’t pan out.
If we could transport a suffragette from 1920, and an African American man from 1870 to the present day, what would they have to say about these statistics? What would an Asian American from 1900 have to say? After all they went through to fight for the right to vote, I feel that as Americans we’ve let them down somehow. Think of all the marches, the arrests, the meetings, and the beatings that our fore bearers suffered for the simple right to vote. Sure, we’re seeing blatant voter suppression during the 2020 primaries in a number of states right now, from Georgia to Indiana. Reports of voters standing in line for hours, voting machines hidden in back rooms, the failure to count mail-in ballots, shutting down polling locations, the list goes on and on. It’s clear to me that we’re experiencing a resurrection of the era of disenfranchisement, but we can overcome this, we can, but as citizens we need to make our voices heard, and we need to vote.
I admit that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to make voting more accessible for all Americans, and our system is far from perfect. But we can fix that, we can fix that by raising our voices and voting for representatives that represent us, the people, period.
So going back to what my grandma Ethel said to me all those years ago, and it doesn’t just apply to women, it applies to each and every American. Those that came before us fought hard and long for the right to vote, we shouldn’t take that for granted.
Sources
1. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/fifteenth-amendment
2. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/p20-580.html.
3. http://www.electproject.org/2018g
4. http://www.electproject.org/2020p
5. https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/post-election-2016/voter-turnout
6. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/how-many-registered-voters-are-in-america-2016-229993