Oh, you beautiful souls in Battle Creek, Michigan: the teacher, the pipelayer, the barista, the big-hearted tech at the vet’s office checking in a scared family’s pug. How I wish you would stop being an infrequent participant in our democracy and take the time to vote in the upcoming election.

Scratch that. I’m off script.

I became a one-way pen pal for democracy in 2018, writing letters and postcards to strangers in the lead-up to that year’s midterm elections. 

I had spent the months before marching for women, science, immigrants, and Muslims. Then I decided marching wasn’t enough. I needed to engage individual Americans about electing politicians who shared my values. 

So that September, I attended a grassroots event to learn about volunteer voter outreach hosted by a Los Angeles group called Civic Sundays. We could choose to learn how to knock on doors, call and text prospective voters, or write postcards to engage people.

I’d never heard of writing postcards to strangers as a way to encourage them to vote. But I was charmed by the thought of an analog means of saving democracy. Civic Sundays and other organizations, many of which sprang to life following the 2016 presidential election, supply volunteers with lists of names and addresses of registered voters. The writers supply penmanship, stamps, and sometimes the postcards themselves.

I joined a large table of people with seemingly professional-level glitter and Magic Marker skills. While their postcards looked like illuminated manuscripts, I painstakingly struggled to make mine legible. A fourth-grade teacher once told me my writing resembled a hostage taker’s ransom note, but fortunately, I didn’t have to take a handwriting test to get a seat at the postcard table (some organizations do actually require one).

I found the work rather wholesome, but I wasn’t sold on the idea of trying to engage a population that couldn’t be bothered to vote.

The more postcards I wrote, the more I started to wonder: Who were these infrequent voters? Why weren’t they doing their civic duty? If I looked their address up on Google Maps, what would I see? Unmown lawns? Gated mansions?

I became racked by a desire to know who exactly were these shirkers of civic responsibility. But we’d been given clear instructions: Do not personally engage the recipients of your missives. Instead, we followed a clear and concise script of just a few sentences.

I participated in another postcard-writing campaign for the 2020 presidential election. This time, I specifically requested names from a swing state, Michigan. As I wrote to these strangers, I became increasingly frustrated, imagining them enjoying their weekends without a scintilla of voting guilt while I agonized over whether they might be offended by a postage stamp with a cat on it.

When I mentioned these frustrations to a cynical friend, he told me to read the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s famous 1966 “Letter to a Young Activist.” I should have been suspicious, seeing as my friend would be the last person to write a postcard to a stranger. Sure enough, Merton’s words did not reassure me about the fate of my postcards. “[D]o not depend on the hope of results,” he wrote. “When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.”

After reading Merton’s letter, I spent some months not writing the scofflaw voters of Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, or anywhere else.

But when the 2024 election campaign started up, with the future of the country once again on the ballot, I asked for another postcard list.

This time one of the choices was to write to people in my own state, California. This felt more like writing a neighbor than someone far away and utterly unknown. Once I had my list and started reading the names and addresses, I realized some of my postcards would be going to people who lived near the town where I work.

And then it happened. I recognized a name. The Gen Zer who needed a nudge to vote was one of my thoughtful, capable students.

I finally had an answer about the people I was writing to. They were just like the rest of us: unmarried singles and matriarchs of big families, people who drive electric cars and people who drive big trucks, charming people and irritating people and neighbors who played their music too loud but were sweet with their kids. People so busy leading their lives that they sometimes forgot or opted not to vote.

Recognizing just one name made me certain I had to keep penning these epistles of democracy, to keep reminding others, even if they didn’t listen or want to hear it, that their vote mattered. With new insight into Merton’s famous missive, I had to put my trust in, as he put it, “the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

The post How I Became a One-Way Pen Pal for Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In a small conference room nestled inside a secure red-brick building, I met with 11 fellow staff members of the Nash News, a prison newspaper in North Carolina. It was late March, and we were huddled over folding tables to discuss a novel idea: hosting a mock election for Nash Correctional’s 900 medium-custody prisoners.

Cris, the paper’s graphic designer, suggested it. “Maybe we can learn how our choices compare with society’s,” he said, smiling. “It’ll make a helluva story, too.”

A news story felt secondary, I thought, but a mock election would spark interest. It could also be transformative for men who will regain voting rights upon completing their sentences, modeling a democratic process they’ll eventually be able to participate in themselves.

We couldn’t do it just because we wanted to. First, we needed prison approval, which depended on logistical criteria: Is the gym available? Is there sufficient staff to supervise? But the larger question was a philosophical one: Would the prison see merit in our idea?

“To get approval,” I said, “we’ll have to explain why elections are important to a class of felons that can’t legally vote.”

Cris picked up his pen to jot down our ideas.

Incarcerated people care about elections because they can give us either hope or hopelessness. Criminal disenfranchisement, which traces its roots back to ancient Greece and Rome, is a sterile term for the irreconcilable truth that one of the groups most affected by elections cannot vote in them.

The decisions elected officials make shape nearly every aspect of our lives inside—from the quality of the food we eat to the length of the sentences we serve. The U.S. president and state governors can grant clemency; appoint prosecutors, law enforcement, and prison officials; and nominate judges who oversee criminal trials and appeals. Sometimes those judges, prosecutors, and sheriffs themselves show up on the ballot. Legislators, meanwhile, pass criminal codes and budgets governing prison conditions. I’ve witnessed enough elections from behind bars to understand their importance.

I was sentenced to life without parole for murder in 2002. A year earlier, while in jail awaiting trial, I awoke to images of airplanes smashing into the World Trade Center on 9/11. I was 23 and did not yet understand the politics of tragedy. Over the next few years, I watched that horrifying event propel George W. Bush to a second term in 2004. That’s when I started paying attention.

Shortly after the next election I folded t-shirts in a prison clothes warehouse during Barack Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009. A white female guard working beside me smiled up at the TV mounted in a steel cage on the wall. “I’m so proud of America,” she said, wiping tears, “and I’m not even Black.”

The same election installed Beverly Perdue as North Carolina’s governor. Shortly after, the legislature passed a budget, signed by Perdue, which slashed prison resources. We lost access to decent health care, quality hygiene products for indigent prisoners, and real chicken and beef in the chow hall (replaced by processed meat patties). Several smaller prisons closed, and thousands of state employees endured furloughs or pay cuts. Many correctional officers resigned or lost their jobs, leaving prisons dangerously understaffed. I got my first real lesson in how dramatically the decisions of politicians outside prison can reshape life inside.

In 2016, the Clinton-Trump election brought a new lesson, showing me how divided America had become. Acidic campaign ads were shoved between laundry detergent and nacho chip commercials during NFL games. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan resembled a Confederate war cry.

This division wasn’t just something we watched on TV. On the rec yard one day, I saw a white guard speed past the prison in his truck, honking to make sure we saw his huge Trump flag flapping. White prisoners pumped their fists and yelled in solidarity. A Black guard stood on the yard watching. “I gotta vote for Hillary,” he said, sighing.

When my mom, a Black woman from Chicago, came to visit, we agreed that Trump had emboldened white supremacists. But I also had monthly visits from my friend Bill, an elderly white Catholic and a Trump supporter. In his complaints about immigration and the economy, I recognized a feeling of vulnerability that Trumpian rhetoric exploited. People like Bill idolized Trump in the same way that I once idolized Obama, a Black man who experienced the same racial harms I had. I thought of Obama as someone fighting to make things right for me. I imagined Bill thought the same of Trump.

Bill was elated when Trump won. I was horrified.

Four years later, I followed the 2020 election with Bryce, a good friend who had majored in political science before landing in prison. “When politicians talk about money and prisons,” he said, “pay attention.”

Last year, the United States spent some $182 billion to imprison 1.9 million people. North Carolina spends about $133 per day—or $931 per week—to house each person incarcerated in the state, a figure that rose about 40% between 2021 and 2023. The most recent median weekly earnings for a full-time worker in the United States totaled $1,143. If the cost of incarceration continues to grow, North Carolina could eventually find itself paying more daily to house a prisoner than its free citizens earn for a hard day’s work.

In 2020, I remember watching a Biden-Trump debate with Bryce when Biden laid out a plan to end mandatory minimum sentencing by offering financial incentives to states—a stark contrast to the ’90s-era legislation he sponsored to enact harsher criminal sentences. I had never felt more hopeful. Maybe one day, I thought, I could walk out of prison.

Biden later abandoned his plan, making me wonder why I had been so hopeful in the first place. But hope is not a solid structure in prison. It gets torn down, and reconstructed. People on the inside continue trying to make a difference.

That same year, I coauthored a reform bill with Timothy Johnson, an incarcerated friend: the Prison Resources Repurposing Act, or PRRA, which aims to extend release to some serving life without parole if they can achieve educational, vocational, and behavioral goals. Democrats in the North Carolina House of Representatives sponsored the PRRA in 2021 and 2023, but it never came to a vote.

Until recently, I followed this year’s election with dejection. I found the most recent Trump-Biden debate pitiful, and I stopped watching halfway through, wishing both sides had better choices. But when Vice President Kamala Harris stepped in, she breathed new life into a dead contest. While I don’t affiliate with either party, if I could vote, I would vote Democrat, because we need to balance the Supreme Court, which is supposed to act as an impartial fulcrum. I worry about the partisanship that weighs down the current court, which governs criminal justice issues including fairness in criminal sentencing and prison conditions.

Inside, people boast about who they support. Many like Trump because he’s a so-called outlaw. Some don’t think Harris can win because she’s a Black woman. I’m doing time with a Black Republican who holds religious, conservative values and doesn’t seem to care that the party’s “tough-on-crime” stance offers no leniency for his life-without-parole sentence. Many others don’t pay much attention to the election at all, probably because it still feels disconnected from their realities.

Shortly after our Nash News meeting, Cris submitted our proposal, and the mock election was approved. We hope to hold it a week before election day and to pass out ballots featuring candidates for president, governor, and state attorney general. We plan to include a questionnaire on the back of the ballot inquiring about age, political affiliation, and other demographic traits. We’ll tally the results and share them on our prison-issued tablets.

Then, on Nov. 5, I’ll sit by the unit TV to watch the real-world returns with Bryce. We’ll talk politics over sodas and burritos, and compare how our prison’s results match up with voters in the free world. The whole time, I’ll watch with hope for democracy—inside and outside our prison. The results will offer hope or hopelessness for us all.

The post What It’s Like to Experience the U.S. Election From Prison appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s election season in Bangladesh—the roads are closed, vehicles are burning, and the threat of violence is close.

As I write these sentences, the country’s chief opposition party—the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)—is observing the 10th round of blockades protesting the ruling Awami League’s insistence on running the next election itself.

The idea of a continuous blockade may invoke images of a medieval warlord hoping to lay siege to an opponent’s fortress. Bangladesh’s modern blockades are often described in international media as shutdowns of passenger and freight transportation routes that bring inter-city movement to a crawl, especially in and out of Chattogram and Dhaka. In reality, rarely do you see large objects like poles or vehicles blocking roads and highways. Instead, the blockades more often take the form of assailants attacking, damaging, or setting fire to the vehicles that dare to traverse the routes whose closures have been announced.

When the Awami government announced a new election schedule, with balloting concluding on January 8, the BNP opposition declared that these blockades would be increased to four days a week, with only weekends and Tuesdays off. The blockades will continue, the opposition says, until the ruling party agrees to install a neutral “caretaker government” to administer the upcoming election.

I am a resident of Dhaka and worked in the media industry for half a decade. While handling news for some of the leading media outlets of the country, I saw the BNP and its allies enact its blockade strategy regularly. It does have an impact. Meetings and most outdoor activities have been shifted to only Tuesdays and weekends, adjusting to the blockade schedule.

Ordinary citizens of Bangladesh are rarely attacked, and don’t participate in the blockades. So the primary feeling about the blockades is not fear but annoyance, with the uncertainty and schedule juggling that blockades require. As a precaution, the public and private agencies often move activities to minimize the risk of violence or arson on the roads. People might suddenly find they have to work from home or rearrange their routine.

The blockades rarely penetrate the city in Dhaka. Long-distance travelers and merchants are much more affected by the threats. The blockades also produce a feeling that the opposition, by relying on these threats, are missing opportunities to build solidarity.

What’s perhaps most frustrating is the BNP’s choice of demands. The party has only been vocal about two: a neutral national election, and the release from prison of its chairperson, former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia. But there are many other issues that the BNP could capitalize on that feel more urgent to voters.

For example, the prices of basic commodities in Bangladesh have been skyrocketing for almost two years. The BNP and other opposition parties could have gone to the streets to gain larger public support or released detailed plans for stopping the price spikes. Instead, they offer more blockades and put out statements bashing the government.

As the election approaches, little has changed. The BNP is focused on security, so that no more of its officials or allies are “snatched away” for contesting elections. The party also wants to continue agitating and seeking international support for non-electoral challenges to the government, optimistic that international pressure will force the ruling party to give in on its demand for a caretaker government and a neutral election. So far, it’s not working.

Additionally, there is no indication that the BNP will even bother to compete in the election. They are vehement about not running any candidates and even expelling those party members who dared to stand as independent candidates in defiance of central orders.

This lack of competitive zeal is splitting the opposition. Some of those who were initially involved in the BNP’s anti-government opposition have withdrawn from the alliance and opted to participate in the election by running candidates. That could help the government claim its election is legitimate.

To be fair, the BNP has no reason to trust the current government to set up a fair election. Reports of mass arrests and police raids of opposition party members’ homes have raised serious concerns about violence and intimidation. The BNP claims that since October 2023, over 9,000 activists have been arrested countrywide in an effort to keep the BNP out of power. This is where their outcry for a caretaker government stems from.

But, at the same time, the BNP also faces criticism from the government and public for its blockades, which have also raised concerns about political violence. To enforce the blockade, assailants have set ablaze at least 20 buses in the past two months. Recently, even a train coach in the capital has been set on fire, killing four.

Political violence is deeply rooted in the election culture of Bangladesh as a means to seize power.

In 2006, when the BNP was in power—and was adamant about arranging the year’s national election—the Awami-led opposition started a nationwide protest called the Logi Boitha Movement (or Boat Hook and Oar Movement, because many rally participants waved boats hooks and oars). They alleged that pro-BNP advisors planned to rig the results in favor of the BNP. Clashes erupted across the country among the supporters of the two factions, killing 40 people in a single month.  The violence and political stalemate led to a military-backed “caretaker government” seizing power on January 11, 2007. They remained in power until the 2009 general elections.

Every election since has been violent. According to media reports, more than 500 people died in 2013 due to political violence. In 2018, at least 15 people died across the country on election day alone in clashes. According to estimations by human rights groups, at least 38 people died in political violence in the first six months of 2023.

When I look back to the elections of 2013 and 2018, the thing I vividly remember, more than any candidate or campaign, is the risk of attack on public transport. 2023’s campaign season has felt like a return to those days. At least two lives have already been lost to bus fires in the past two months and there are risks of further escalation.

The Awami League government and the BNP opposition are blaming each other for the fires, each claiming the other is using arson to destabilize the political situation. The Awami League government claims that the opposition wants to wage terror and thwart a free election; the BNP denies any affiliation with the attacks and claims the government has staged them in a bid to hurt the BNP’s image.

Irrespective of which party is responsible, I fear that the level of such violence will increase manifold in the upcoming elections. The government is not committed to holding fair elections. And the absence of the BNP will undermine the legitimacy of the vote.

The only way out of this stalemate, and the only way to temper the fear of violence, is a meaningful dialogue between the major political parties that will allow for the emergence of political common sense. The government must gain the trust of other political groups and hold a truly fair election. And the opposition—BNP and like-minded parties—should keep in mind that they cannot simply reject elections. They, too, need the support of the public, or their movement will fail.

One way to start would be to stop the blockades.

The post In Dhaka, the Roadblocks to Democracy Are Roadblocks appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

2024 will be the biggest election year in history. Some 4.2 billion people, or more than half of humanity, live in the 76 countries that are scheduled to hold national voting.

Can democracy survive it?

That question may sound cynical. Much of the world has been taught to equate elections with democracy, and to think of voting as a civic sacrament.

“The vote is a trust more delicate than any other,” wrote the 19th-century poet José Martí, a martyr of Cuban independence, “for it involves not just the interests of the voter, but his life, honor and future as well.”

In the 21st century, such romantic ideas of democracy are dying. The latest global reports show democracy contracting across every region of the world. For six straight years, more countries have experienced net declines in democratic processes than net improvements. Polling shows widespread disillusionment in democracy among the planet’s young people.

In this context, elections rarely serve to renew faith in democracy. They produce too little positive change, thus inspiring frustration. They can be used by authoritarian rulers to consolidate power. And they can be so bitterly contested that they divide societies or inspire violence.

Elections can also make democracies vulnerable to outside attack. That’s perhaps most apparent in Taiwan, site of the second of the national elections planned for 2024, on January 13.

When I visited Taiwan this past December, Vincent Chao, a top official of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), told me that the election itself was a form of national security against China, which has pledged to return the island nation to its control—by force if necessary. “Democracy is our best defense,” Chao said. In other words, Taiwan must be democratic enough to deserve to be protected from Chinese attack by the U.S. and its allies.

But democracy also makes Taiwan vulnerable. The Chinese government and its proxies exploit the island’s open politics to spread misinformation, funnel money to friendly politicians and institutions, and raise doubts about democracy itself. Chinese influence operations reach every neighborhood; many of Taiwan’s borough wardens—essentially, elected neighborhood presidents—have received Chinese financial support, mostly via free trips to the mainland.

Despite this, Taiwan’s election is freer and fairer than most. The first election of 2024, in Bangladesh on January 7, will merely cement existing rule; the main opposition party, citing threats to its members, is refusing to contest the election. Pakistan’s February 8 election is likely only to add to the conflict involving the country’s most popular politician, former premier Imran Khan, who has been in prison since last year, when he was removed from office by political opponents and the powerful military. And in Iran, the ruling mullahs are in the process of disqualifying thousands of candidates in March 1 elections for the 290-seat parliament.

On February 14, Indonesia will host the world’s largest single-day election, with more than 250,000 candidates competing for 20,000 offices across the national, provincial, and district parliaments. The country’s two-term president, Joko Widodo, is barred from running for re-election in 2024. But the increasingly autocratic leader, after weakening local democracy and a national anti-corruption commission, is using state power to back a successor, Prabowo Subianto, who has a record of human rights abuses and supports Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Indeed, it is in Russia where the vast chasm between elections and democracy may be most clearly demonstrated in 2024.

On March 17, both Russia and Ukraine are scheduled to hold elections. But it’s likely that only Russia’s unfree and unfair voting will go forward, with the dictator Putin seemingly guaranteed a fifth term as president. Ukraine’s democratic election, meanwhile, may be postponed to protect its voters from being killed by Russian missiles and bombs on their way to the polls.

In the spring, some crucial elections could reveal whether oppositions can reverse democratic decline—or whether they will deepen it. On April 10, South Korea holds legislative elections in which the political opposition seeks to check President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has reduced rights for women and freedoms of association and the press.

In May, South Africa’s opposition alliance can take power from the party that has ruled South Africa since apartheid’s end 30 years ago. But a change in power is full of risks. Would the opposition coalition improve democracy, end corruption, address some of the world’s worst inequality, and save faltering public services like electricity or water? Or would the opposition itself govern in a more authoritarian way?

Growing authoritarianism also provides the backdrop for the world’s largest election, India’s month-long voting in April and May. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, is a heavy favorite and is likely to be re-elected for a third five-year term. But he is also perhaps the biggest threat to democracy in India. His increasingly autocratic behavior includes limiting the power of regions, punishing critics and journalists, exploiting anti-Muslim bigotry, and a military and digital crackdown in Kashmir.

The world’s second biggest election will come in the European Union, where some 400 million voters across 27 countries will elect the European Parliament between June 6 and 9. There, fears are growing that far-right, anti-migrant parties that are hostile to democracy will make significant gains.

Across many countries holding elections this year, there are serious questions about the administration of polling. Nowhere are such questions bigger than in Mexico, where the outgoing president and his ruling party, Morena, stripped the independent national election institute, or INE, of much of the local staff and money necessary to organize balloting. Former INE officials tell me that the June 2 election, which includes votes on more than 20,000 public posts nationwide, is certain to see operational breakdowns that will raise questions about the vote’s legitimacy.

The electoral picture for the second half of the year is less certain, but no less full of danger. Venezuela’s presidential election is already violent and ugly, even though its date has not yet been set. It’s also unclear whether the United Kingdom, Canada, or Israel will end up calling elections in 2024; if they do, those contests promise to be divisive nationally and closely followed globally.

In the fall, two large countries where previous elections saw attacks on the seat of government will both head to the polls. Brazil holds two rounds of nationwide municipal elections in October, its first votes since President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters sought to overturn his 2022 defeat.

November will bring me home to the U.S. Ours may be the most perilous election of 2024. Former President Donald Trump continues to claim falsely to have won the 2020 election, and brags about his 2021 insurrection aiming to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Nevertheless, he is leading in the polls, using violent and bigoted rhetoric, and publicly pledging to arrest journalists, prosecute opponents, and bring “dictatorship” if he regains the world’s most powerful presidency.

The prospect of a dictator leading what used to be called the “free world” may test whether there is still a God who, as Otto von Bismarck is said to have remarked, “protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America.”

By year’s end, those earthlings who have paid attention to all this may feel as though they’ve lived through one long global election. After seeing all the ugliness of electoral democracy, they may start wondering if there is a better way.

If they do, they might take a look at the growing global movement to establish governing assemblies of everyday people, chosen by lottery, as an alternative to bodies of elected officials.

They might also start rethinking the nation-state itself. Most people on this planet disapprove of their politicians, institutions, and their national governments. In our times, nation-states simultaneously seem too small to address planetary challenges like climate change, pandemics, and war, and too big and distant to meet the needs of local communities.

If the point of democracy is to solve our problems, then national elections—of the various types filling the 2024 calendar—may come to seem beside the point. And 2024 might serve as the beginning of a global search for new tools of democratic decision-making that give us more power to govern our local communities and our world.

The post 2024 Will Be the Biggest Election Year in World History appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was in favor of keeping Donald Trump’s name on the presidential ballot in California.

Until I went to Berlin this fall.

At a Saturday conference on German election law—if you haven’t noticed, your columnist is a democracy nerd—I met an entrepreneur named Gregor Hackmack. He’s so committed to democracy and participation that he launched a non-partisan online platform last year to enable dialogue between everyday people and elected representatives.

But now he’s organizing a petition to ban Germany’s second most popular political party—the far-right AfD, or Alternative for Democracy—from participating in elections.

Hackmack is wrestling with one of the hardest questions in democracy: When, if ever, can a democracy exclude anti-democratic politicians and parties from democratic elections?

The question is urgent because around the world democracy is threatened by authoritarian leaders who won office through democratic elections. Some of the world’s most oppressive governments—including those in Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia—are led by men who came to power through voting.

It’s also a question now forced upon Americans by Trump’s return bid for the White House.

Blocking candidates or parties from elections doesn’t come naturally to democratically minded people. Nor should it—it’s a despot move. Autocracies and dictatorships routinely maintain and extend their power by blocking opposition figures from standing for office, such as when the Chinese government banned pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong’s 2020 vote.

So why and how could we justify blocking candidates? One answer to that question, now getting attention in declining democracies, might be called the Democratic Self-Defense Exception: You should bar parties and politicians only when they threaten democracy itself.

The self-defense exception is the logic behind current legal efforts by pro-democracy nonprofits and some to remove Trump from 2024 ballots in most states.

It is also why it makes sense for people around the world to examine how Germany, where the Nazi party took power through elections, reckons with those who threaten its democracy.

In Germany, AfD is the political party that poses a danger to democracy—and society. AfD partisans and officials make threats against democratically elected officials. One party leader has expressed pride in Germany’s “World War II accomplishments.” The party embraces racist policies towards migrants, and pledges mass deportation and cancelation of citizenship for minority groups.

Yet since its founding in 2013, AfD has secured support from one-third of voters in economically-marginalized eastern parts of the country, and from 21% of respondents in national polls, the second-highest of any party.

Germans like Hackmack are arguing for banning the party because such racism and anti-migrant policies violate the German Basic Law, the country’s governing document, which was developed after World War II with the assistance of American political scientists. Specifically, AfD’s critics say the party aims to undermine the democratic order as expressed in Article 1 of the Basic Law, which calls human rights and human dignity “inviolable.”

They also point to Article 21, which specifically provides for banning parties determined to be “unconstitutional” because they do not “conform to democratic principles,” “seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order” or “endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany.” Germany’s federal constitutional court gets the final say on banning a party.

To those who suggest that banning AfD would only make it more violent and dangerous to democracy, supporters of the ban respond emphatically. They state that Germans’ expectation of heightened violence is itself reason to keep the party off the ballot: “The democratic process is undermined if it takes place permanently under the sword of Damocles, that a group with real power options wants to torpedo precisely this process,” wrote the constitutional law expert Klaus Ferdinand Gärditz in support of the ban.

To those who suggest that banning the party is a political question best left to voters in future elections, German Institute of Human Rights director Beate Rudolf, a ban supporter, writes: “German history in particular has shown that the free democratic basic order of a state can be destroyed if positions of contempt for humanity do not meet with energetic opposition in good time and are thus able to spread and gain acceptance.”

Hackmack and other supporters—including members of the country’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union—have gathered more than 400,000 signatures on a petition demanding the parties and national parliament ask the constitutional court to ban the party. A TV comedy show has joined the drive. Still, it’s unclear whether the petition will succeed; it’s been decades since the court banned a party.

Here in the U.S., Trump represents one pressing threat to democracy. The former president led an insurrection after losing the 2020 election, and has announced plans for a second presidency that sounds like dictatorship, including mass firings of civil service workers and prosecutions and even executions of Trump’s political opponents (whom he calls “vermin”).

Seeing how Germans are re-examining the Basic Law because of AfD’s threat to their democracy, I understood better why Americans are rereading the U.S. Constitution because of Trump’s threat here. Various interest groups and voters have filed suits in 28 states seeking to bar the former president from primary ballots. Trump’s conservative critics, including law professors and judges, are pushing hardest to boot him from the ballot.

“A president who tried to use force and fraud to stay in power after losing an election should not be allowed to wield the power of office ever again,” writes George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. “And we need not and should not rely on the democratic process alone to combat such dangers.”

The legal grounds for the ban efforts come from Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which excludes from future office any person who has taken an oath to support the constitution and then rebelled against it, either through insurrection or by giving “aid and comfort” to the constitution’s enemies. Trump’s actions—his efforts to overturn the election, the January 6 insurrection, and his ongoing promises to violate the Constitution if he returns to office—all satisfy this criteria for ineligibility.

But these efforts have not been treated with the same seriousness that Germany gives its anti-democratic threats. The litigation hasn’t gotten much traction in the courts, or political support, even from Trump critics. As a practical matter, Trump’s eligibility will likely be decided by the courts; so far, no judge has been willing to bar him (with one jurist ducking the question with a dubious technical ruling).

In California, state officials—Secretary of State Shirley Weber, Attorney General Rob Bonta, and Gov. Gavin Newsom—have also taken no visible steps to block him from the March 2024 ballot before a December 28 deadline. That’s especially maddening because Trump has attacked California democracy, ever since his 2016 defeat in the state, with lies that our elections are “rigged.”

Trump has claimed that efforts to remove him are themselves an attack on democracy. In this gaslighting, he embodies the definition of “hypocrite” given by the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln: “The man who murdered his parents, and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.”

Trump also argues, falsely, that taking him off the ballot violates his rights of voting or free speech. But democracy grants no inherent right to be president. What citizens of democracies instead have—as I was reminded in Berlin—is a responsibility to protect democracy, even when it means excluding those who won’t abide by its rules.

The post The Case for Taking Trump Off the Ballot appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To knock on a door and talk politics with a neighbor. To crack open a book and hear a new voice. To canvass a side street, zig-zagging between houses. To turn from one line to the next until you reach the poem’s improbable end.

How are poetry and campaigning alike? It’s a question I’ve asked myself in the lulls that accompany both: while listening to the dial tone that defines a phone bank and while mulling an image or rhyme. Whatever answers I’ve imagined—about hope or the power of words—stem from November weekends I’ve spent splitting my time between the two.

Let’s begin then with the obvious: Both benefit from a clipboard. I’ve revised many a poem on a canvassing clipboard that I forgot to return. I pace around my office, repeating the same lines of verse. This, of course, is a lot like canvassing a precinct. A good campaigner sets out in search of conversation; they often find tedium in its place. But that tedium can give way to insights, which flare up like fireworks or startle like horns.

I once spoke about a possible Black president to a white guy on a sit mower; I watched his cigarette burn down to his knuckle. Years later, I met an immigrant family, all first-time voters. They wanted to talk and talk. Moments like these offer nourishment across any campaign’s march—a journey that includes resignation and a bit of revilement. If you’re lucky, it ends in reward. That too is like writing a poem.

Doesn’t this speak to a mutual vulnerability and courting of rejection? A willingness to expose some soft-bellied self to the world? The canvasser can expect a fair share of slurs and curses, slammed doors and snarling dogs. It can get personal. (One resident threatened to get his gun.) The contemporary poet often wears the first person like a thin mask. She submits her work; she waits for a “yes.” If or when it comes, its affirmation is limited—an editor here, a comment there. Most poets will encounter just a fraction of their readers. Campaigners shake hands and watch election night tallies—Walt Whitman called this “the final ballot-shower”—but can’t follow their voters into the booth.

The late New York politician Mario Cuomo once quipped, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” Poetry here is a metaphor. For the flourish and the promise. Prose is the achievable—it’s plain. But can’t poetry itself campaign? Every nature poem I write campaigns for climate justice. In doing so, I’m consciously working as a latter-day Romantic. To quote Percy Shelley: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

His legacy proved him right. The Romanticism of Shelley and his peers, who saw themselves as political actors, influenced Henry David Thoreau, who influenced John Muir, who influenced Teddy Roosevelt. And it was Roosevelt who, in 1906, established the first national monuments—like Devils Tower in Wyoming—that would form the core of the National Park System. So poets are campaigners, even legislators, just working at widely varying speeds. Poetry can take generations to sink in.

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” William Butler Yeats wrote, dividing wordsmithing into two insoluble halves: persuasion on one side, poetry the other. It’s a division that many activist-poets resist. Like Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg. Like June Jordan who, in the short poem, “Calling on All Silent Minorities,” reasserts her voice with the first word:

HEY

C’MON
COME OUT

WHEREVER YOU ARE

WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET

Jordan’s all-caps orthography sets an example: forget silence, go loud! Her colloquial diction invites everyone who can hear. It’s all a game, she implies early: the disenfranchised hide, the powerful pretend to seek. Better for this new majority to construct its own apparatus of resistance, an act that starts with imagination and work. There’s no tree here yet, but there will be. Let’s plant it.

I suppose it should shock no one that poets as different as Robert Lowell, a Boston Brahmin, and Eileen Myles, a puckish avant-gardist, made political endorsements. Lowell stumped for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary. Myles, who made her own bid for president in 1992, joined “Artists for Hillary,” a candidate-sponsored collective, in 2016. Other poets—from Robert Frost to Richard Blanco, Maya Angelou to Amanda Gorman—arrive when it all ends in balloons. Both the electioneering poet and the inaugural poet add prestige.

It is surprise, however—or, better yet, astonishment—that the campaigner and the poet truly share. At whom they’ll meet. At what they’ll learn. At the outcome born from long hours of work. I found just that last November when I volunteered for Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a first-time congressional candidate in southwestern Washington state. One pundit-pollster put her chances at 2%. Her noxious, anti-democratic opponent seemed poised to prevail.

So when the AP called the race in her favor, I felt as I do when I finish reading a remarkable poem: stunned at the sudden beauty of the world. And then I felt my body do what it reflexively does when poetry astounds: I sat down and wept.

The post How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We were then assigned to bipartisan pairs (Republican, Democrat, and Unaffiliated) to spend the next two-and-a-half hours elbow to elbow, reading aloud each of the 350 ballots cast in our town of 419 registered voters (out of a total of 500 or so residents). With our identical red pens and tallies, along with our highly stylized reading and movements, we became the littlest moving parts in a great procedural democracy that has been part of the stable transfer of power for more than 200 years.

Fewer than 0.6 percent of U.S. ballot votes are counted by hand and those are from the small towns in Maine, New England, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Alaska that manage their own elections and cannot afford to invest in optical scanners.

Today, for federal elections in most of the country, voters use paper ballots that are optically scanned or electronic voting machines. After the 2000 crisis, when hanging chads on punch cards became an issue in the presidential election, Congress passed the 2002 Help America Vote Act providing money to buy new voting equipment for towns all across the country. But by 2020, those machines will be nearing the end of their lives, which the Presidential Commission on Election Administration described as an “impending crisis.”

With so much up in the air in American voting, we hand counters offer continuity—and may play a surprising role in the future by ensuring impartiality, transparency, and trust in an increasingly sophisticated and opaque system for casting and counting votes.

Our town hall is straight out of Norman Rockwell: A spare, single story northern New England clapboard building with a floor made of worn unfinished boards. It was originally built around 1850 for the town band, relocated once in the 1880s by 42 teams of oxen, and then moved to its present position in 1949, with residents building the foundation themselves to save money. In the same spirit, we all pitch in to count votes.

There are three overseers of this voting process: the registrar of voters, the warden, who opens and closes the polls and oversees the tally, and the town clerk, who was once in the merchant marine. In my town, all three positions happen to be held by women, each of whom is attentive to the precise procedures and to their greater purpose—which is not only to count the votes but also to reinforce the integrity of a process much older and larger than ourselves.

At 8 p.m. on the recent election night, the warden declared the polls closed and the poll workers gathered up the remaining unused ballots and drew a red line across each one, rendering them useless. Then the old wooden ballot box was opened and the ballots were dumped on a large table in the center of the room. My fellow poll workers and I quickly unfolded the ballots, arranging them in piles of fifty.

I found my partner, a neighbor who I know slightly. I am registered “Unaffiliated.” I do not know his affiliation, and neither of us asked. Good fences, as they say, make good neighbors.

In Maine, the law requires that bipartisan pairs read the contents of every ballot in a way that is “verbal and concurrent.” In other words, we read in unison from the ballot: “For President: Donald Trump, for State Representative, Chellie Pingree,” and so on, through to the uncontested candidates for Registrar of Probate, Sheriff, and County Commissioner. On our tally sheets, there were spaces for 23 options, including official candidates, official right-ins, and blanks. As we read, we made marks in red pen on our tally sheets, which are divided into vertical cells that can each hold five marks. Every five ballots, we compared tally sheets to confirm that we had the same count for each candidate. Every ten ballots we did a verbal and concurrent report on our tally sheets. And so on until we completed all 50 ballots. Then we flipped the ballots over and did the same thing with the six ballot measures on the back of the sheets. By the end of the process, we were hoarse.

Tallying is a chore. It works best when both partners use stylized movements and a slightly singsong cadence. I first did it in the 2014 election, and I’ve ended up with an ungainly routine where I run my left index finger down the ballot to provide a visual anchor while carefully tracking the rows on my tally sheet with my right hand. Still, it’s easy to accidentally mark the wrong cell, to forget to mark it, or to get mesmerized in the chicken scratch of the hatch marks. The process is designed to prevent both accidental mistakes and collusion. And of course, everyone is in the open and easily observed.

Going through so many ballots, I get a chance to see—anonymously of course—how my townspeople have voted. I’m always surprised: Few vote a straight ticket. Many pick and chose between parties and initiatives. Some write in candidates. This time a few rejected all of the ballot measures, which included money for schools and bridges, marijuana legalization, background checks for private gun sales, and a move to ranked choice voting, which would allow voters to chose their first and second choice candidates for state offices. (Ranked choice voting passed, which may be a wonderful thing for democracy but it will add significantly to the work of us hand counters.)

I find that participating in the count is a good way to cope with the aggravating stress of election night. Instead of hitting refresh on CNN and Fivethirtyeight.com to see the latest totals, I am speaking every voter’s will and turning it into a tally. I may find out that my neighbors feel very differently than I, but in the end, we’ll still be neighbors. The town hall will still be standing.

And when I look at individual ballots with their quirky un-ideological votes I know that they are deliberate—I can’t pretend that voter didn’t know what he or she was doing—and I wonder about my own inconsistencies. Still, by revealing our differences, the elaborate ritual of the count reaffirms the deep ideals that hold us together. I’m not surprised that our town has voter turnout of 83.5 percent, compared to national rate of 57 percent. (Maine’s laws also encourage voting: Voters can register to vote at the polls. No ID is required to vote once you’re registered. And people who’ve committed crimes retain their right to vote.)

Part of the reason the tallying process is so arduous is that it makes it easier to recheck each batch of 50 ballots. Hand counts are frequently contested, and have to be rechecked often. Before we left the town hall we separately totaled our tally sheets, cross-checked that they accounted for all ballots in all cells, and completed a final verbal and concurrent check to see that they agreed. We presented one sheet to the warden and wrapped the other around our ballots, secured both with a rubber band and tucked them in a metal box that was then locked and ready for a recount.

Ever since the first mechanical voting machines were introduced in the 1880s, voters have feared that their votes were getting lost. More recently, voters have feared that electronic voting machines might get hacked, or crash without backup. In response, some people have suggested that all ballots in the country should be hand-counted, with thousands of new precincts containing 1000 voters each.

Are we due for a return to hand counts? I talked with David Kimball, professor of political science at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, who has studied how votes get lost, either on the ballot or in the counting process.

“If you want to know exactly how many more votes A got than B, then machines are more reliable,” he said. Hand counting national elections would be expensive and potentially inaccurate. But hand counting does offer something to the institution of elections—albeit in small doses. Both scanned paper ballots and electronic voting machines (which Kimball cautions should provide paper receipts) need to be audited regularly. How do we assure everyone that these audits are transparent and fair? Hand counts.

The long life of hand counting, even in the face of modern improvements, suggests the deeper truth of elections, which is that we’re not merely counting votes today, but building trust and continuity into a larger system that we hope to carry far into the future.

The post Why Hand Counting Votes Makes Every Vote Count appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Madison was talking about whether America should restrict voting rights to property owners—but he might as well have been debating ballot selfies.

Ever since Americans began carrying smartphones with cameras, we’ve been posting photos of our ballots on social media. The so-called ballot selfie—which is not an actual selfie but typically a photo of a completed ballot—is now nearly as ubiquitous on voting day as those omnipresent stickers. It is how a great many Americans, millennials especially, convey their choice for elected office, share their voting enthusiasm, and implore their friends to follow suit.

And, in at least 25 states, it is illegal.

This widespread criminalization of ballot selfies occurred in state legislatures over many years with relatively little debate; some states simply extended existing bans on voting booth photography to cover the new genre. But the issue shot to prominence in 2014 when New Hampshire began investigating three voters who posted ballot selfies in violation of a state law that bars voters from “taking a digital image or photograph of his or her marked ballot and distributing or sharing the image via social media or by any other means.” (One voter uploaded a picture of his Republican primary ballot to Facebook with the caption: “Because all of the candidates SUCK, I did a write-in of Akira,” his recently deceased dog.) Facing impending prosecution, the voters fought back in federal court, arguing that the New Hampshire statute violated their free speech rights under the First Amendment.

In August 2015, the voters won a total victory in a strongly worded opinion by U.S. District Judge Paul Barbadoro, a George H.W. Bush appointee. Barbadoro reasoned that the New Hampshire law was a “content-based restriction on speech because it requires regulators to examine the content of the speech to determine whether it includes impermissible subject matter.” And according to the Supreme Court, when a speech regulation “target[s] speech based on its communicative content,” courts must subject it to strict scrutiny—meaning it must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest.

Barbadoro found that the New Hampshire law satisfied neither prong. First, he challenged the state’s argument that the law furthered the “compelling government interest” of preventing vote-buying. New Hampshire hypothesized that vote-buyers might demand ballot selfies to ensure their money was well-spent but could not find an iota of evidence that this method of vote-purchasing actually occurred, making the threat too abstract to satisfy strict scrutiny: “For an interest to be sufficiently compelling,” the judge wrote, “the state must demonstrate that it addresses an actual problem.” Second, Barbadoro found that the law was far too broad to be narrowly tailored. “When content-based speech restrictions target vast amounts of protected political speech in an effort to address a tiny subset of speech that presents a problem,” he wrote, “the speech restriction simply cannot stand if other less restrictive alternatives exist.”

Just two months later, a federal judge in Indiana reached an identical conclusion in striking down that state’s ballot selfie ban. With some alarm, the judge noted that Indiana had criminalized political expression—thereby violating a bedrock principle of the First Amendment—in order to address an apparently nonexistent problem. Since then, New Hampshire has appealed Barbadaro’s decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. The judges’ palpable skepticism at oral arguments in September suggests the state is poised to lose unanimously.

Absent evidence of vote-buying, these ballot selfie bans do seem to be overreactions—possibly well-intentioned regulations that nevertheless foster perilous political censorship. Expressing joy or anger about an election is core political speech—where, the Supreme Court has noted, “the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith.” New Hampshire and 24 other states seek to suppress a mode of communication beloved by young voters with no justification other than abstract concerns over a phantom threat. The ballot selfie may be emphatically modern, but ballot selfie bans look a lot like old-fashioned censorship.

Not every election law expert agrees. Writing in Reuters, Richard Hasen insists that ballot selfies are a “threat to democracy.” Hasen asserts that vote-buying “is a real—not theoretical—problem,” and that banning ballot selfies is a narrowly tailored way to combat it. A ballot photo, he writes, “is unique in being able to prove how someone voted.” Hasen even speculates that the reason vote-buying is so rare is because of laws like New Hampshire’s. Quoting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a decidedly different context, Hasen proclaims that repealing ballot selfie bans because vote-buying doesn’t occur “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

There are three problems with Hasen’s analysis. First, ballot selfies don’t irrefutably “prove how someone voted”; as election law attorney Daniel Horwitz has explained, voters using both paper and electronic ballots could almost always change their votes after snapping a photo. Second, the (still relatively rare) instances of voter fraud to which Hasen alludes likely would not have been foiled by a ballot selfie ban. Vote-buying almost always occurs through mail-in absentee ballots, not at the polls. Yet some ballot selfie bans only proscribe photographs inside the voting booth. And even broadly written bans would surely fail to stop absentee ballot–buying. If you’re selling a ballot that you fill out in the privacy of your home, you could easily prove your vote by other means—like showing it to a vote-buyer in person. (Why would you want to tout your purchased ballot on social media, anyway? That’s the least private way to prove how you voted.)

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Hasen doesn’t seem to recognize the immense value that young voters today place on ballot selfies. Millennials use ballot selfies to convey information about their political views and engage with their friends about elections, to broadcast their personal ideologies, and share excitement about voting. (And they may foster more voting: One study suggests that Facebook users are more likely to vote when their friends reveal on social media that they have voted.) No matter how many states ban them, they will remain pervasive on Election Day, a key mode of political expression for the younger set. At this point, nothing short of a heavy-handed government crackdown can reverse that. The question, then, isn’t whether states should stop ballot selfies, because they can’t. The question is whether states should dangle the threat of prosecution over voters who dare to share a picture of their ballots, chilling speech and stifling political passions.

James Madison never wrote anything about smartphones. But it’s not hard to guess where he would’ve come down on ballot selfie bans. The founding father may have called election regulation “a task of peculiar delicacy,” but his view on free speech was simpler: It shall not be abridged. For better or worse, ballot selfies have become a fundamental mode of political speech in America. The First Amendment is clear here: Let the voters Snapchat.

The post I’ll Vote, But First, Let Me Take A Selfie appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Though seemingly innocuous, in many ways this suggestion is one of Trump’s most dangerous because its intent is not to preserve the sanctity of the voting process: it’s to guarantee a specific result. The miracle of our polling places—and the aspect which must be preserved—is that even though voting is the primary and most basic form of political action, voting precincts are neutral spaces, intended only to facilitate, not mandate, enforce, or guide, the choices voters make.

What’s more, polling places aren’t neutral because of law enforcement or government presence—though the Department of Elections does structure and oversee the process. Instead, voting spaces are kept neutral by other citizens, everyday people who agree to staff precincts. There is a small stipend involved, but given the long hours, money isn’t a huge motivator. Most poll clerks and inspectors are, essentially, volunteers. Other countries—Mexico, for example—compel citizens to staff the polls through a random lottery much like jury duty. The U.S. manages to find thousands of citizens freely willing to sit for hours and facilitate the process.

I signed up to staff my local precinct during the last primary after receiving an email from the San Francisco Department of Elections. I took a test to measure my English fluency and my ability to follow directions. I was interviewed by a woman who discussed my ability to work in teams (I can), my comfort handling disgruntled groups of people (high), and my ability to show up on time (unimpeachable).

Next I was required to attend a three-hour class. Though there was an instructor, training largely relied on a recitation of the Poll Worker Manual, your “ultimate resource,” and 11 videos displaying the same information again, all of which lulled one man in the back into a deep slumber, his head falling farther forward with every video. “The best way to complete your mission is to follow the manual,” our instructor assured us. As I stared at the flimsy, stapled booklet in my lap, my confidence in the voting process—and my ability to uphold it—started to wane.

That confidence all but disappeared when, on California’s primary election day, I found myself alone on the sidewalk at 5:50 am. Though I had only ever voted in large, solemn places—churches and school auditoriums—I was assigned to work in a garage. Recently remodeled, covered in drywall dust, and complete with a washer/dryer and a vintage Centipede arcade game, the space was hardly the bastion of democracy I had anticipated. I stood, baffled, as the garage owner, a man with hair to his waist and toe shoes, came out to open the door.

Soon the other poll workers arrived—two recently graduated high school sweethearts and Ashley, a 28-year-old health care worker who came attached to two emotional support dogs named Buddy and Honey. The sweethearts had prepared for the day by bringing a case of Gatorade and a backpack full of candy. I wanted to believe they were motivated by democratic ideals as romantic as my own, but when asked why they volunteered, the boy explained, “I didn’t want to sit at home all day.” The girl said, “I just wanted to be with him.”

Still, with Buddy and Honey kicking up dust and the four of us pitching in, we managed to assemble our polling place and proclaim the polls open at 7 a.m., just as people started to appear at the door. For the next 16 hours we muddled through. The sweethearts checked people off the roster and helped an elderly man to a chair so he could sit comfortably while marking his ballot. Ashley assisted people with Buddy perched happily on her shoulder. When we thought the Insight Machine had counted a ballot twice—it hadn’t—we reported it. When a voter from L.A. wanted to vote in San Francisco, we called the Voter Assistance Hotline to try and find a way for her to cast a ballot. When we discovered the Department of Elections had not included the requisite signage, we called and it was delivered.

Ashley, the sweethearts, and I were relieved to close the polls at 8 o’clock that night. We carefully counted the ballots we had received and the unmarked ballots that remained. We folded up the voting booths and printed the results from the Insight Machine, signing over the ballots to the Sheriff’s Department. Later, as accusations of irregularities began to swirl around the California Democratic primary, I started to worry. Had we unwittingly done something wrong?

As I reevaluated the experience, I realized it didn’t matter that we weren’t the dignified bearers of democracy I had envisioned: the system had worked. On the day I worked, some 9 million people voted. Many were given provisional ballots, either because they had lost or never received their mail-in ballot or because they didn’t appear on the voter rolls. While some claimed those votes were ignored, the reality is that they were assiduously counted in a thorough process that took weeks to complete. Although they called the primary before every vote was accounted for, officials continued to count the ballots, ensuring that every provisional and mail-in ballot was recognized and that no one voted twice.

Though the national conversation about voting nearly always focuses on the results, that process—that very deliberate act of collecting and counting every ballot long after the results are clear—matters equally. When Donald Trump and others insinuate the process is “rigged,” they aren’t really talking about the process; they’re talking about the outcome. Though it seems contradictory, running a polling place has nothing to do with the results, and everything to do with protecting a fair and open process. The “poll worker mission” is simple and very clear: to protect voter rights, serve voters with respect, and offer assistance. “On Election Day,” my manual instructed, “You will take an oath to perform your duties to the best of your ability.” In a time as politically polarized as this current election cycle, when everyone has an opinion to share, poll workers promise to put aside their political views for a single day and help people cast their ballots.

That willing silence is a radical act and one that continued to startle me long after my fellow poll workers and I had wiped the drywall dust off our backpacks and awkwardly waved goodbye, wandering home to see what the day’s results would be.

The post Take It From a Poll Worker, the System Isn’t Rigged appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Voting in my precinct took place in the fellowship hall of a rural Baptist church. Judging by the great piles of folding tables and chairs lining one long side of the pine-paneled space, some 200 souls could comfortably gather for a meal in the place where 486 people came the other week to participate in their representative democracy.

I had worked a primary and a runoff in the summer, but the general election on November 3 was the busiest day in my short tenure. I reported for work a bit before 6 and business was brisk from the stroke of 7 o’clock. There were occasional rushes, such as around the shift change at the chicken-processing plant down the road. It was satisfying to play a supporting role in keeping the process fair and as trouble-free as possible. No one had to wait more than about five minutes to vote while I was manning the machines.

I loved watching people take their kids around the machines with them, just as my folks did when I was little. We don’t use booths with curtains in my county, but the video screen adds to the allure for today’s youth.

“Mama, let me push the button!”
“Mama has to do it, but you can watch.”
Parents would whisper conspiratorially.
“See this one? We don’t like him. We like…”—beep—” … this one.”
Beep, beep, beep.

There are several jobs at a poll. In the primary, I had manned the check-in desk, comparing people’s IDs to their names in the registration book. Mississippi’s voter ID requirements are among the strictest in the nation, and a few would-be voters arrived unequipped. Their only choices were to go home and fetch their ID or complete a provisional paper ballot that would only be counted if the voter appeared at the courthouse with ID within five days. It hurt not to allow eager citizens to vote then and there, but the law is the law.

For the general election in November, my assignment was the Diebold machines, which had been delivered to the church and set up overnight. After voters showed their IDs and signed the register, I directed them to one of four machines. To activate a machine you must insert a plastic card, just as you would when paying at a grocery store checkout. The card must first have been encoded by me, using a little device that hung from a lanyard around my neck. Arrive, present ID, sign in, take a card, insert card, read the screen, vote.

We were glad to be busy; the veteran election workers described runoffs involving only a minor race or two in which the turnout was measured in dozens. The large kitchen at one end of the fellowship hall made it easy to imagine the countless squash casseroles and pots of chicken and dumplings that had been reheated in it over the years, but most of us subsisted on cold sandwiches and potato chips on Election Day. One kind woman brought blueberry muffins. The continuous flow of humanity left little time for conversation, but most people appreciated our help in making it easy to vote. Even the woman whom I asked to remove a campaign button took it in stride.

By mid-afternoon, we were downright gleeful. “We’re going to hit 60 percent!” And when the bailiff locked the doors at 7 p.m., 62 percent of the precinct’s registered voters had taken time from their day to express their opinions at the Diebold electronic voting machine. Our election, in a county whose entire population is smaller than many San Diego suburbs, demonstrated a remarkable level of interest and engagement. I wish elections had been so engaging back in Los Angeles.

As soon as voting ended, the six or seven of us commenced a long checklist of wrap-up tasks. From each of the machines, a report was printed showing vote tallies in every race. These reports, resembling fast food receipts and measuring 5 or 6 feet apiece, were then taped to the wall, where anyone who wanted to inspect them had the right. Indeed, several representatives of candidates or campaigns waited to look at numbers. Duplicate printouts were gathered, along with provisional ballots and curbside ballots—which came from voters with mobility challenges who voted from their cars, in the presence of two poll workers—then all the ballots were sealed in a canvas box. Just as every slip of paper was checked as it came out of the box in the morning, everything was accounted for when it went back. Finally, the ballot box was sealed with a numbered wire clasp, and the poll manager drove it to the county courthouse. My work was done by 8 p.m.

For all the delight in the poll over our impressive turnout, something gnawed at me: the fact that four out of 10 people in my precinct didn’t vote. And that’s just among the registered voters. When you consider the entire population that is eligible to vote, turnout numbers drop considerably. In America, voter participation ranks near the bottom among developed democracies.

For a period of about seven years, I worked in California state government, in a job that required me to travel from my home in Los Angeles to Sacramento for several days each week. I became acquainted with the speaker of the state assembly, in whose central-L.A. district I lived. He always treated me with courtesy, though I often wondered if that was just because I was the only person in the Capitol—400 miles from Los Angeles—who actually had the power to vote for him.

This man was arguably the most powerful Democrat in the nation’s most populous state, yet he had won his seat with fewer than 45,000 votes, in a district with a population of almost a half million. In fact, fewer people had voted in his district than in any of the state’s 80 assembly districts. I would ask if the situation didn’t seem strange to him. He could only shrug.

Why don’t more Americans vote? Some people don’t think their single vote matters, while others simply don’t know how the process works: where to register, where and when to go, primary vs. general elections, etc. People might read about electoral fraud and assume the entire process stinks.

And sometimes the ballot itself confuses. In Mississippi, we experienced that phenomenon this month, via a pair of ballot measures in the general election.

As in many states, measures can reach the ballot here in two ways: with signatures or by an act of the legislature. Some reform-minded folks gathered enough signatures to qualify Initiative 42 for the ballot. In effect, it would have taken control of school funding from the legislature and given it to judges. Some other folks—namely, the legislature and the state Republican Party—did not like this idea, and the legislature produced a competing measure, dubbed Alternative 42, which kept education funding decisions with the legislature.

When two measures are on the same topic, Mississippi requires two different votes—one in which you consider the two measures together, and another where you choose between the two of them. The thinking is that you get more choices; even voters who want neither initiative get to decide which measure is the lesser of two evils, in case they pass.

But this is confusing in practice. When voters looked at their ballots, what they saw, after a brief summary of the measures, was this:

VOTE FOR APPROVAL OF EITHER, OR AGAINST BOTH:
( ) FOR APPROVAL OF EITHER Initiative Measure No. 42 OR Alternative Measure No. 42 A
( ) AGAINST BOTH Initiative Measure No. 42 AND Alternative Measure No. 42 A

AND VOTE FOR ONE:
( ) FOR Initiative Measure No. 42
( ) FOR Alternative Measure No. 42 A

Dozens of people motioned me over to their machines and asked me to explain. I was limited in what I could say—certainly nothing that could be taken as advocacy of one side or another—but I tried to help them navigate the language. Voters of apparent higher-than-average intelligence scowled and remarked on the complication of the thing. “This is so confusing!” they’d complain.

Many said they would just skip the second question, rather than risk voting the wrong way. In the end, almost a quarter of the people statewide who registered a vote on the first question skipped the second question, despite the ballot’s use of the phrase “and vote for one” (of the initiatives). I see this as evidence of the widespread confusion.

By the way, both initiatives went down, the people having answered “no” to the first question. Was the issue purposely convoluted in order to achieve a specific outcome? One legislator acknowledged precisely as much, as reported by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger: “’Is 42A intended to make it more difficult to pass initiative 42? Of course it is,’ said [state representative Greg] Snowden, a Republican from Meridian.” And we wonder why people are sufficiently discouraged about voting to stay home on Election Day.

It would be a satisfying bonus to my part-time work if I were able to do more than just hand voters their little cards to slide into the voting machine, and help them, one at a time, navigate their ballot. But my reach is not very far. Ironically, while I am on the front lines of democracy with my work at the polls, I am prohibited from campaigning for any candidate or issue. I may not even put a yard sign in front of my house. Still, I will continue to work the polls and do my little part in helping people participate and stay engaged with their government. I’ll also cash the $115 checks and figure that the county got me at a bargain.

The post How I Help My Mississippi Neighbors Vote appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.