Every Vote Is a Prayer

INTRODUCTION

How You Can Help Fix the United States

I think a vote is a kind of prayer about the world we desire for ourselves and our children. And our prayers are stronger when we pray together.

—Rev. Raphael Warnock, U.S. senator from Georgia

If I choose not to speak out of fear, then there’s no one that my silence is standing for. And so I came to realize that I cannot stand standing to the side, standing silent. I must find the strength to speak up.… Poetry is always at the pulse of the most dangerous and most daring questions that a nation or a world might face. What path do we stand on as a people, and what future as a people do we stand for?

—Amanda Gorman, poet

Politics. Many Americans these days associate the word with divisiveness, anger, polarization, and chaos. A 2023 survey found that nearly two-thirds of adults say they always or often feel exhausted when they think about politics; only 10 percent reported often feeling hopeful.

But the intense political polarization that is getting on Americans’ collective last nerve does have a silver lining: after decades of stagnant participation, more of us are showing up to vote in elections lately. Two-thirds of the eligible voters turned out to vote in the hotly contested 2020 presidential election, the highest rate for a national election in 120 years. The 2018 and 2022 midterms also saw historically high rates of participation.

Nevertheless, certain groups vote much more often than others. Notably, younger people tend to make up much more of the nonvoter population: 64 percent of the nonvoters in the 2022 election were under the age of 50.

There are lots of reasons people don’t vote. They may not follow the news or even know how to vote; they may be cynical about government and politicians; they may feel that their vote doesn’t count. It may be inconvenient and even difficult to vote. If options such as early voting and absentee voting aren’t available, it may be impossible for some to get off work, arrange for transportation, or juggle childcare, especially if lines are long at the voting location.

This book is a declaration that you should try your hardest to vote anyway. It’s a compendium of voices reflecting the hurdles that Black people, women, Native Americans, and young people of previous generations overcame so that we would have access to the expression of our right to self-government. It’s a plea for us all to become involved so that our government can reflect the voices of us all. It’s an acknowledgment that elections are messy, complicated, frustrating, and divisive and yet represent the most powerful way that ordinary citizens can have an effect on our country’s future.

Participating in elections is a way of being part of the community. It’s a way of holding politicians accountable, not just passively disapproving of them. Voting is a way to honor those who came before us, whose dreams and hopes we embody. And it’s a way to reaffirm that your voice matters—and that the future we decide on together matters, too.

The only way we can begin to make things better is to choose leaders who are willing to face these issues and find ways to work through them.

—Taylor Swift, singer, songwriter

You have to turn people on before you can turn them out.

—Al Sharpton, minister and civil rights activist

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., minister and civil rights leader

I vote for all the people who made a way-out of no way-so that I might live in a world of choices. I vote for those who marched and prayed and sacrificed and withstood humiliations and disrespect and devastation just trying to cast a ballot. I vote for those who died carrying the dream that one day their vote would be counted and could matter. I vote for the shoulders I stand on.

—Oprah Winfrey, television host, producer, actor, author

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers—Emily Dickinson

Dickinson’s poem was published in 1891.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

A Brief History of U.S. Voting

Voting in the Early Years

In the 1780s, when the United States was new, voting varied widely from locality to locality. The requirement that voters be white male property owners, a carryover from the days of British governance, was largely but not consistently followed; for example, from 1776 to 1807, women who owned property and free Black men could vote in New Jersey.

The U.S. Constitution, ratified with the Bill of Rights by 1791, reflected the competing interests of states with very different economies and cultures. The Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise allowed southern states, with more than half a million enslaved inhabitants, to count each one of them as three-fifths of a person for purposes of deciding how many representatives each state would have in Congress, as well as how many electors would represent the state in the Electoral College, the body that selects the U.S. president. The Constitution largely leaves the states in charge of deciding on the time, place, and manner of electing representatives to Congress and to the Electoral College.

The codification of racism and disenfranchisement is a feature of our lawmaking-not an oversight. And the original sin of the U.S. Constitution began by identifying Blacks in America as three-fifths human: counting black bodies as property and their souls as nonexistent.

—Stacey Abrams, lawyer and former Georgia state representative

The Electoral College

The states historically selected electors for the Electoral College in various ways; they were appointed by state legislatures in some states and chosen by voters in others, by district or statewide elections. Today, the political parties in each state select a slate of electors; once the votes are cast in the presidential election, the electors for the winning candidate in the state are appointed to the Electoral College. The candidate for president who receives the majority of electors’ votes (270 out of 538) then wins the election, regardless of who wins the popular vote, or the most overall votes nationally.

Currently, most states follow a winner-takes-all-electors rule; only two states, Nebraska and Maine, provide for proportional representation in the Electoral College based on the percentage of the vote received by each candidate for president. The winner-takes-all rule followed by all the other states means that in the presidential election, some voters have more say in the outcome: namely, those who live in more rural states and in swing states that have fairly equal numbers of voters supporting each of the two major political parties.

The National Popular Vote agreement, with sixteen states and the District of Columbia signing on to date, would change the way electors are appointed so that the result in the Electoral College would mirror the outcome of the popular vote. About 65 percent of Americans reportedly favor having the popular vote rather than the Electoral College determine who will be president.

The only way to make progress is if every single American is empowered to vote-and those who have historically been drawn out of our democracy are able to make their voices heard so that this country can live up to its full promise and potential.

—Beto O’Rourke, former U.S. representative from Texas

Everyone needs to have their voices heard and we can do that by VOTING. We will not let voter suppression stop us!

—Selena Gomez, actor, singer

The Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act

In the years leading up to the Civil War, the states largely expanded voting rights for white men, dropping the requirement of owning property. At the same time, most of the states that had allowed voting by free Black men changed their laws to restrict voting to white men only. For example, in 1838, delegates at Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention added a clause to the state constitution limiting voting to whites, over the protests of free Black voters in the state (see Robert Purvis speech in chapter 3).

After slavery was abolished in the United States with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and with the end of the Civil War in 1865, the issue of whether formerly enslaved people would be permitted to vote became a pressing one. The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, proposed in 1869 and ratified in 1870, guaranteed the right to vote to the formerly enslaved—but crucially, federal enforcement of that right ceased entirely with the end of postwar Reconstruction in 1877. Decisions of the Supreme Court in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) curtailed the power of the federal government to protect Black people’s constitutional rights and enshrined as constitutional the comprehensive system of racial segregation known as Jim Crow. Black Americans, particularly in the South, were prevented from voting by a wide variety of means—from violence and intimidation to poll taxes and literacy tests—or were simply refused a ballot by officials who knew there would be no consequences for the refusal.

It wasn’t until nearly one hundred years after the Civil War that Black Americans’ constitutional rights began to be respected, as a result of lawsuits, marches, sit-ins, and other forms of pressure from participants in the civil rights movement—many of whom were beaten, jailed, and even killed for their efforts. The Supreme Court overturned Plessy v.