Whose Vote Counts, Explained

In 1776, 56 men signed a document

claiming something radical:

All men are created equal.

A couple lines down, they went further.

It says quite clearly in the Declaration of Independence

that all governments derive "their just powers

-from the consent of the governed." -And then we got the Constitution.

The Constitution basically said,

"Yeah, we think that those things are true,

but we didn't mean it for everyone."

They want some level of democracy,

but they own human beings.

Voting was a privilege almost exclusively for white men with property.

In the founding Constitution, you will not find the right to vote.

When George Washington was elected America's first president,

at most, 20% of the governed were eligible to vote.

But that number grew.

One of the great engines of American history

is the struggle to decide and declare

that voting was a right,

not a privilege.

First, Black men won the vote, then white women in 1920,

then Native Americans.

And in 1971, the voting age dropped from 21 to 18.

By 2016, around 90% of everyone over 18 in America had the right to vote.

But only 56% actually used it.

The United States lags behind most other developed countries

in voter participation.

Our democracy is broken.

It's a rigged system, and people are angry.

People are upset.

And the coronavirus pandemic

has made the debate around voting inescapable.

The mail ballots are corrupt.

Some are concerned that, well, if we allow this,

there'll be, quote, "too many people who can vote."

Well, that's kind of a pathetic excuse.

You do have to ask yourself,

if someone doesn't really care enough

to go down to the school gymnasium and cast a ballot,

how eager should we be to get that person's vote?

It's an age-old battle in America,

whether the vote should be for everybody, or just some people,

whether it should be easy or hard.

It's the world's oldest democracy,

so why is the right to vote still a fight?

The great right of all.

Our most important right, the right to vote.

I'm so grateful to exercise my right as a voter again.

We're willing to be beaten for democracy!

You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote!

Some people gave more than a little blood.

-Some gave their very lives. - I don't want everybody to vote.

Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up

as the voting populace goes down.

Don't boo. Vote.

This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless.

America's never held an election quite like this one.

Given the deadly pandemic,

states all over the country have extended the option to vote by mail.

So there's a small number of states that have universal vote-by-mail.

States like Colorado, Washington, Oregon.

Ballots are mailed to every registered voter,

but in most states, you have to apply, like in Kansas.

The ballot won't be sent to you until

the signature on your request form is verified

and matched with a signature that the state has on file with you.

In some states, you need an excuse to vote by mail,

and the pandemic doesn't count.

The rules that govern American elections are largely made by state politicians.

That's how it's always been.

Voting was always left to the states.

Different states can try different systems,

and if they work, other states will copy them.

And these partisan politicians can also set the rules

for who has the right to vote at all.

You know, I remember in 2016, when my wife ran for office,

and I couldn't even vote for her.

Because I lived in Florida, I couldn't vote for my own wife.

Florida had stripped the right to vote

from all convicted felons for life.

But from 2007 to 2011 , 155,000 of them got it back

from then-Republican Governor Charlie Crist

through a nearly automatic process.

Then Rick Scott became governor.

I'll never forget when the governor at the time, Rick Scott,

he rolled back the clemency policies from the previous administration.

Ex-felons now had to make their appeal in an in-person hearing.

People would basically go in front of the governor and his cabinet

and beg the governor to restore their rights.

I'm here to get my rights back so I can have a voice.

And the governor would just deny so many people for no rhyme or reason.

I deny a full pardon.

I deny a full pardon.

I deny restoration of civil rights and deny the full pardon.

That whole process was an arbitrary process.

Scott restored the right to vote

to less than 4,000 ex-felons over eight years.

And I remember thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of power

to be able to decide which American citizen gets to vote

and which American citizen don't get to vote."

And I thought that was too much power for any politician to have.

Rick Scott then won a seat in the Senate by a very thin margin.

If he'd restored voting rights like his predecessor, he might have lost.

That's why expansions of the vote have faced resistance from the beginning.

When America declared independence,

New Jersey decided to let anyone with enough wealth vote.

There were women who were widows.

There were free African Americans in New Jersey who said, "I own property.

I'm going to vote." And they did.

But then came concerns about voter fraud.

Men cross-dressing to vote.

Ineligible women voting by the carriageful.

After 30 years, New Jersey politicians

stripped women and Black men of the right to vote,

groups that also happened to be voting against them.

Non-citizens could vote almost everywhere in early America,

but over the decades, states took that right away, too.

And when the federal government began to extend the right to vote

to Black men in 1867…

The very next year, Florida passed a law

that said those with a felony conviction could not vote.

The 15th Amendment banned states

from restricting the right to vote on account of race.

It doesn't say anything about getting arrested.

What's also happening at this time, a rise of laws coming out of these states

that criminalize Blackness,

laws that only Black people are subjected to.

The main reason was to prevent newly-freed slaves from being able to

actively participate in our democracy.

And it wasn't just Florida.

Felony disenfranchisement laws had spread all around the country.

White Democrats throughout the South enacted a patchwork of other laws

designed to restrict the vote, so they could hold on to power.

They did it by using the legacies of slavery,

the legacies of the lack of wealth.

Like taxes, you had to pay to vote,

with exemptions if your grandfather voted.

Well, if you were a slave, this is the first generation after slavery,

no one's grandfather, if you were Black, would have been permitted to vote.

The legacies of the lack of access to education.

Like understanding clauses and literacy tests.

The man who helped raise me talked about taking the literacy test.

And his question was, "How high is up?"

Yeah.

Those actually originated in the Northeast,

and they targeted European immigrants who came from non-English-speaking countries.

And so over and over again, we've seen voter suppression

target communities.

Sometimes it's racially-based,

but always it's because those in power do not want to share that power.

The list went on.

And whatever those policies didn't cover,

we'd experience state-sanctioned violence.

Voter suppression has existed in almost every state in our nation.

But the South was the most effective purveyor of voter suppression.

The right to vote there was essentially destroyed.

By 1940,

only three percent of African-American adults in the South

were registered to vote.

Three percent.

In 1964, a Constitutional amendment banned poll taxes,

but it took until the next year for the tide to break.

Hundreds marched for the right to vote in Selma, Alabama,

and the images of police

brutally attacking protesters, including future Congressman John Lewis,

finally shocked the nation

and President Lyndon Johnson into action.

The right is one which no American

true to our principles can deny.

With the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965,

the United States finally became,

in the full sense of the word, a democracy.

All these racist tactics became illegal, and crucially,

states that had disenfranchised the most citizens

now had to get pre-clearance from the federal government

if they wanted to make voting harder.

The system worked, and it changed American politics forever.

Starting in 1965, after the Voting Rights Act,

we saw the emergence of basically a bipartisan consensus

to make voting easier.

Every time the Voting Rights Act was set to expire,

the government reauthorized it.

As long as I'm in a position to uphold the Constitution,

no barrier will come between our citizens and the voting booth.

By reauthorizing this Act, Congress has reaffirmed its belief

that all men are created equal.

And there were new ideas to make voting easier,

like making registration simpler.

In this country, we don't have a person to waste.

Letting people vote before Election Day.

They're voting for president today, under the state's new early voting program.

And expanding voting by mail.

Everyone eligible to vote in this election, 1.4 million people,

received mail-in ballots.

Georgia actually has one of the most expansive standards for vote-by-mail,

and it was passed by Republicans when they took control in 2005.

And in 2008…

If there is anyone out there

who still questions the power of our democracy,