It’s election season! If you social media pages look like mine, it seems that every other post is encouraging people to check their registration, to apply for a mail in ballot, to make a voting plan now so their vote will be counted. Your vote matters!
I am not going to say voting isn’t important. I checked my registration multiple times. I applied for my absentee ballot in August, and, when I finally got the correct one, I mailed it back the same day. I have badgered many people in my life to make sure they do the same.
But also…it’s not actually true that my vote matters, and pretending that it isn’t a lie is pissing me off.
I live in New York, which will vote blue and give all its electoral votes to Biden. My district is blue, and my congresswoman will be re-elected. My state assemblywoman has had that job for a long time, and there’s no real challenger. My state senator is somehow the candidate for both the Democrat and Republican parties. The ballot also let us vote to fill eight judge vacancies; there were eight candidates. There is no senate election this year, and my state is already represented by Dems.
[ID: an Instagram-style graphic that says “Vote” five times.]
My vote doesn’t matter. It doesn’t! After the 2016 election, so many people were mad at the millions of people who could have voted and didn’t. But in that election, 12 states actually decided the result. Millions of people live in the 38 other states! I remember being mad at one of my coworkers who didn’t vote, but he lived in New Jersey. Him not voting didn’t actually have anything to do with Trump winning!
The even more sinister side of “your vote matters” internet activism is that it acts as if the system isn’t literally designed to keep you from voting. Most states keep anyone with a felony conviction from voting. Many states have cut down on the number of polling locations, have instituted voter ID laws, or found other ways to make voting as difficult as possible. On Monday, people in Georgia waited in line for over ten hours to vote. These things keep people from voting, and that’s by design. Republicans are systematically using voter suppression to keep black people from voting, and writing “please check your voter registration” on Instagram doesn’t actually do anything to combat that.
Those state that do allow mail-in votes often have complicated laws, some requiring multiple signatures on a ballot. These limits do not just exist in Republican states! In New York usually you can only get an absentee ballot in certain circumstances; they had to make an exception for the pandemic. The state finally instituted early voting in 2019, but while some states’ early voting period started in September, New York’s is for just the one week before the election. Many people have advocated for election day becoming a national holiday to make it easier to vote, but on national holidays, most working class people don’t get time off!
There are no good reasons to not have automatic voter registration and universal vote by mail in every state in the union. Nineteen states and D.C. already have the former and five states have the latter (we won’t even get into how little your vote matters if you live in D.C.). It works.
So much organizing around making sure people vote right now makes it a personal issue. Request your ballot. Look up your polling location. Plan a time to drop off your ballot. If you fuck this up, the blame is on you. If Trump wins again, the blame is on voters who didn’t follow the rules. In actuality, lawmakers have made voting a Herculean task for some people. To make a country where every vote would actually matter equally, we need to get rid of the electoral college and the Senate, pass a new Voting Rights Act, get rid of ID laws and signature matches, and reinstate every single American’s voting rights. That would just be a start, and it’s a lot harder than buying tee shirts or necklaces or socks that say “VOTE.”
And yeah, obviously I know that any of those reforms only possible if the Democrats win, and that can only happen if people vote for those Democrats now (though not every Democrat even supports those things, but we shall pretend for a minute). But this feels like the enormous lie we’re all telling ourselves, acting as if this election — or any American election — is actually free and fair. I can’t handle the dishonesty, the doublespeak, the lie; we need to name it. Yeah, I’m voting, and I’m encouraging people to vote, but voting itself isn’t noble and brave. Posting “I voted” stickers on Instagram is easy. Learning about how the Republican legislators in your state have cut the number of polling sites and organizing to stop it is hard. If your involvement in politics ends with voting, you have to reflect on if you’re doing anything that matters.