On Our Voting Rights

As we await the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais—a ruling that, if the Roberts Court acts as expected, may strip away one of the last remaining voter protections by effectively ending the unconstitutionality of racial gerrymandering—I can’t help but notice the broader context in which this moment is unfolding. We are living through a period in which the federal government is, quite literally, extorting state governments by threatening terror and violence against their residents unless they surrender voter files. This is a hair‑on‑fire moment. What is happening to our right to vote—and to what a vote is worth—is among the most important issues demanding our attention.

We are being attacked from all sides. The goal of the broligarchic kakistocracy that currently runs this country is to dismantle democratic processes altogether, including elections, in order to hold onto power indefinitely.

In this context, we are well beyond clinging to hope that we can slowly claw back the voting protections we have gotten group by group, painfully, over centuries. Many of those protections have already been lost through decisions like Shelby County v. Holder and Citizens United. So the question becomes: what do we build next? What do we learn from the 250 years of this experiment so that we can build something new? 

Our founders were not concerned with creating a pluralistic, representative democracy. What they wanted was freedom from a tyrannical king. Two hundred and fifty years ago, after a long period of simmer and a brief period of boil, they cried out: Hell no to tyranny. God help us. We will fight and see what we can do. They enshrined this impulse in the Constitution’s preamble—We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…—except that by “We the People,” they meant themselves: the broligarchs of their era.

The Constitution contains remarkably little about voting or elections, much of it shaped by efforts to placate the racism of Southern delegates. Nearly half of the Constitution’s signers owned enslaved people. To secure ratification, the founders struck an unforgivable bargain: each state would decide who could vote and how elections would be run. Federally, they created a president not elected by the people but by the Electoral College; a legislative branch with a Senate—two senators per state regardless of population, originally not elected by the people—and a House of Representatives, the only body elected proportionally by the people, but with districts and voter eligibility left to the states. Black people, meanwhile, were counted as three‑fifths of a person. Our entire constitutional order was designed to preserve the nation’s original sins—what bell hooks aptly named the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

As a result, white, land‑owning men have always been understood to explicitly possess the right to vote, while everyone else has been given access to the ballot only gradually over decades and centuries. Eighty years after the Constitution was signed, the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of race—but allowed denial on virtually any other basis: gender, literacy, property, or class. Fifty years later, the Nineteenth Amendment prohibited denial based on gender, but again allowing any other kind of discrimination not previously named as protected. It was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965—passed just a few years before my birth—that Americans were broadly guaranteed the right to vote. As brilliant civil rights attorney and scholar Sherrilyn Ifill has said, the United States was not a true democracy until the passage of the Voting Rights Act. She is right. And just sixty years later, we find ourselves once again not living in a true democracy.

But we are being forced to reconsider. Given what is happening on the streets of Minneapolis and in cities across the country, we are clearly in another moment of rapid boil following a long simmer. Sound familiar? Once again, We the People are being called to scream at the top of our lungs: Hell no to tyranny. God help us. We are going to fight and see what we can do.

This is our moment. 250 years of waves of racism, voter suppression, and state condoned violence have brought us here, and are intolerable. They present an opportunity—indeed, a necessity—to begin a new democratic experiment. I propose that we build it around three core commitments: birthright citizenship, the universal right to vote for all adult citizens, and elections that get us to proportional representation. We could and should establish a whole new constitutional order built around these.