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Voting is more than a right in the United States: it is a solemn duty and a proud honor. If voting is the country’s greatest tradition, voter suppression is its ugliest. Now, the majority needs saving from the opulent minority.

For as long as Americans have used our electoral process to make their voices heard, elected officials and our system of government has worked to silence and erase these voices. People of color, women and even white men who didn’t own land were barred from participating in the process at its conception, and the fight for suffrage has been a long, painful struggle.

Our nation’s founders designed the Electoral College to effectively reduce the significance of the popular vote in presidential elections and the U.S. Senate to protect the interests of the wealthy few. Little has changed since. Now, the Republican Party is returning to tactics of voter suppression to keep its chances of controlling the country afloat.

A representative democracy could effectively save the people from themselves, James Madison said in Federalist Papers No. 10, but he followed that suggestion with an admission that partisan and corrupt politicians could use the system to earn the votes of and subsequently betray the interests of the people.

In 2020, Madison’s hypothetical scenario has been actualized.

A Republican Senate majority — one which represents 15 million fewer Americans than their Democratic colleagues — shoved Amy Coney Barrett into the Supreme Court on Monday. The court’s newest associate justice is an ultra-conservative litigator whose controversial, overtly partisan opinions got her the nomination in the first place.

Barrett joins a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. She should be familiar with at least two of her colleagues — she worked for the Republicans alongside justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts in the infamous Bush v. Gore debacle, the most recent example of a faction stealing an election by suppressing and invalidating the votes of American residents.

Even as COVID-19 makes it more difficult to participate in the election, conservative officials are not to be outdone. Kavanaugh even cited Bush v. Gore in his defense of voter suppression in Wisconsin, rejecting a request to extend the deadline to vote mail-in ballots.

Washington, D.C.’s non-voting senator, Paul Strauss, said in an interview that the Supreme Court is willfully engaging and enabling voter suppression.

“Any time there are votes that were cast by voters, and they’re not counted, they are suppressed,” he said.

In a time of unprecedented calamity, the party that controls virtually every lever of the federal government is coordinating its powers to subvert the will of the people. When the GOP doesn’t have the votes, they get rid of the ones they don’t like.

The reduction of polling stations has resulted in voters waiting for hours to cast their votes, as well as voter registration purges. Polling stations are in the sharpest decline in states in the deep south, which have a large population of Black residents and tend to vote Republican.

Between 2012 and 2018, then-Georgia Secretary of the State Brian Kemp purged 1.4 million voters from the state’s registry and disenfranchised 560,000 voters in a single day. In 2018, he won the governorship of Georgia, beating Stacey Abrams by just 60,000 votes.

The GOP seems to have taken its cues in 2020 from Kemp’s corruption. A judge has ruled that the California GOP’s statewide distribution of fake ballot dropoff boxes is illegal. The GOP response was, “So what?” The Supreme Court ruled that curbside voting in Alabama was illegal as well.

In Texas, though, the GOP’s best efforts to suppress the vote are coming up short. Texas leads the nation in early voter turnout. Beyond that, it appears the GOP’s attack on mail-in balloting may have actually energized Democratic voters to participate like never before.

“We shouldn’t be making voting harder,” Strauss said. “American democracy works best when all Americans have a role to play.”

The only solution to this problem is to break down the barriers that keep Americans from the ballot box and to dismantle the systems that keep our voices out of decisions. That means the antiquated Electoral College should stay in the past, and the right to vote should really be a right.

Patrick McCarthy is a graduate student in the magazine, online and digital journalism program. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at pmcca100@syr.edu. He can be followed on Twitter at @pmcopinion.

Published on October 28, 2020 at 10:51 pm