Election 2024: ‘We get the government we deserve if we’re not engaged,’ say voting and civil rights experts say
Election 2024: ‘We get the government we deserve if we’re not engaged,’ say voting and civil rights experts say
The calendar is inching toward Nov. 5. #electionday
The pressure to vote is growing. Will Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Gov. Tim Walz win the White House, or will former president Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance prevail in the close and heated race? And what about the other important races down the ballot?
Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, news stories and conversations have centered around voting. But what if you don’t support any of the candidates? What if you’re tired of the lies and petty bickering that have overshadowed presidential debates and the 24/7 news cycle? What if you’ve never voted and don’t really know how? What if you have a felony in your background and are unsure about the process? What if you don’t believe your vote matters?
What then?
“When you don’t feel or act like voting matters, then those who are elected treat you like you don’t matter,” said Bernice King, CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center For Nonviolent Social Change Inc. and daughter of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. during the center’s recent voting podcast series.
The center live-streamed its two-part Voter Education & Responsibility podcast, which is part of the center’s Beloved Community Talks series. The video featured King and several national voter education and civic engagement experts.
King said people take advantage of “uninformed people.” The more educated the citizenry is, the less politicians can use “divide and attack” tactics, she said.
“Politics is a game that involves winners and losers, and in its worst sense, politics taps into the most angerous form of human thinking, which is binary thought,” said Rohit Malhotra, a guest and the founder and executive director of the Center for Civic Innovation, which operates voter education efforts in Atlanta, Georgia.
Politics pits people against each other and can create a world of “winners and losers,” where people are “either completely for or against something,” he said.
Political action, however, is about the “moral position” people want to see in public policy, he said. Legislation and budgets are not just pieces of paper but are “truly moral documents,” he said.
“Every step of this country’s history has required us to have to modify those documents in order to make sure that people were included in the law of the land,” he said. ‘And, so to me, politics is a moment, but political action is truly the movement.”
Moderator Vonnetta West, who is a senior nonviolence trainer and instructor at the center, said some people don’t believe their individual vote matters because of the Electoral College, a process used to determine the winner of the presidential election. If it’s the presidential race and you don’t think you have a role to play because of the way the Electoral College works, you have a role to play in electing other people in different levels of government,” said Robert Brandon, president and CEO of the Fair Elections Center, which operates the Campus Vote Project.
Malhotra said trust is broken and is at “historic lows” between people and institutions. He said accountability is lacking from candidates who show up at cookouts, kiss babies and cut ribbons during election season, but “ghost us” when election season is over.
“I think it’s very difficult to start the conversation on like: ‘Hey, it’s so important you vote. It’s so urgent.’ People are like, ‘All right, well sure, it might be urgent for you, but my neighborhood has looked the exact same under the last four presidents,” he said.
There’s a dishonest discourse happening around voting, he said.
“I think we have to stop leading with purely this imaginary tale that government has been good to people,” he said. “Government can do a lot — in the hands of the wrong people – can accelerate harm much faster than it can accelerate progress.”
Malhotra said fear is not a policy position.
“When you tell people, ‘Well, you’ve got to do this because otherwise this bad thing is going to happen to you,’ is not a way to get people engaged and involved in the process,” he said.
People are “inspired by being for something” and by the possibilities of what could happen, he said.
Voters matter and ultimately decide elections. Malhotra said the last two mayoral races in Atlanta, Georgia, were close races.
“Your voice actually really does matter,” Malhotra said.
In part two of the series, West said some people don’t feel they have anyone to vote for. She said political leaders need to be cultivated.
Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, which was created after Hurricane Katrina, said the system is working as designed.
‘Sometimes people don’t have folks to vote for because we have a system that is designed in that way — where people are drawn into districts where they don’t have really a chance to elect someone that represents them, or that there are rules around the voting in their area that makes it kind of really hard to vote,” he said. “And, this is all the more reason why we need to encourage the largest number of people to engage.”
He said telling people to vote for civic engagement purposes doesn’t work. The discussion has to include “people at the table who are accountable and voting for the Black fighters” who have been in the courthouses and legislatures “fighting and winning” on student debt reform, relief for Black businesses, making sure the justice system is more equitable and holding corporations accountable, he said.
“Those Black fighters who are standing up every day need you to vote because they need a person on the other side of that table that doesn’t take them away from that table,” he said.
“We also need to show the people in office that we put them in, and we can take them out,” he said.
Camille Rivera, senior partnerships advisor, of Vote Latino, said a colleague told her that voting for someone isn’t a love letter to a specific person, but: “It’s that what is important to me right now has to be important to you.”
“The people that want to narrowly control the system benefit from people — voters — deciding it’s not worth their vote, and I just think we have to not accept that,” Brandon said.
He said it’s important for voters to learn where and how decisions are made, including state legislatures, governors, county prosecutors and other offices.
The experts pushed for year-round organizing and increased civics education at the high school and college levels to educate people about the government and their role in it.
“Trying to get people to jump in right now and just be like: ‘Ok, now go educate yourself. Get ready, let’s go,” won’t work, Malhotra said, of voting.
Building greater civic engagement begins with trusted messengers already working on the ground “to make sure that we’re actually hearing people, and not just talking at people for the purposes of politically advantageous action,” he said.
King said conversations often center around “debating an issue rather than talking about what matters.”
“We don’t have to call it politics,” King said. “Let’s just talk about things that matter to us in this world . . . that impact the people we love in this world.”
The experts said increasing public trust and engagement begin well before elections — at local gatherings.
The election is looming, and the stakes are high. There’s still time to learn about the candidates and issues, register and make a plan to vote on Nov. 5.
“Our Project 2024 needs to be voting because their Project 2025 is to make sure that we can’t vote in the future,” Robinson said.
This story first appeared in the Black Iowa Voter Guide.
The Electoral College
There are 538 total electoral votes possible, and 270 are needed to win the presidential election. A president can win the popular vote but still not become president because of failing to receive a majority of electoral votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral majority to Donald Trump. Source: Ballotpedia.org.
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