“VOTE!!!”
This Tuesday, November 3 brings the voting cycle to a close – if you haven’t voted by now, please do so, and get all your friends and neighbors to do so also! It is a precious and hard-won right, so please don’t take it for granted. It is such a powerful tool for democracy, so powerful that the Trumpster and many of his cronies are scared to death of it.
There has been a long and continuing fight to expand the right to vote from white men with property to anyone who is an adult citizen of the United States. Women tried early on (from the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848) and finally achieved the right to vote in 1920 with passing of the 19th Amendment. Still, this was interpreted to mean white women only, and it would take the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 before all women citizens in the USA could have the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony voted in 1872 in New York, which was illegal at the time, and she was arrested, tried and convicted. Fourteen other women had voted in New York in the same election, but they were never arrested or brought to trial.
Those of us in the South know what a long and hard struggle it was to win the vote for Black people. Black men were given the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, but with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, that right was stripped away in the South when white, male supremacy rose again. The struggle to gain the vote was long and violent, with many people beaten and some killed to establish the Voting Rights Act. But, with President Lyndon Johnson wielding his considerable power, the Voting Rights Act came out the Senate and then was passed by the House, becoming law in 1965.
White resistance to the VRA has been long and deep and fierce. The VRA has been considerably weakened by two SCOTUS decisions - in Shelby v. Holder in 2013 and in Louisiana v. Callias earlier this year. With that weakening, the door was opened to the crazy gerrymandering that we experienced in this election cycle. Under the original Voting Rights Act, that would not have been possible. The white supremacy that is rooted in American history continues to battle to keep white supremacy at the center of our lives. Part of this current anti-voting move is the fear that those of us classified as “white” have about becoming a plurality in the USA. Sometime in the next 10-15 years, white people will no longer be the majority racial classification in the USA. Indeed, there will be no majority racial category in the USA in those days, and those of us classified as “white” are scrambling as hard as we can to strip voting rights from people of color before we cross the border into plurality.
So, please go out to vote by Tuesday, if you have not already done so. I would like for us to switch from the idea of Election Day being primary, and instead emphasize that day as when voting ends, with the elections being held during the time of the beginning of early voting until the first Tuesday in November, when it ends. All elections are important, but this one is especially important to enable us to have some sort of check on the Trumpster. I believe that the Democrats will take the House, but I’m anxious about the Senate. I’d like to believe that the Democrats will take the Senate 52-48, but I’m afraid that it will be 50-50, meaning that the Republicans will still have control, with JD Vance holding tie-breaking vote. Please prove me wrong by getting as many people as possible to get out to vote.
What will Trump do when he loses? I can’t say accurately, but he is a scary figure who wants to be dictator or at least President for life. So far, the courts have not given him any victories on voting issues – as it should be, since the Constitution clearly indicates that voting is a state issue, not a federal one. We’ll all be anxiously awaiting the outcomes of the 2026 midterm elections. But, as we say in Georgia, vote your Bottoms and Ossoff!
