One man, one vote...or something
The United States has had a troubled history with voting.
At the founding of our Republic, enfranchisement was only offered to property owning males of European descent. It took 132 years for women to gain this right in 1920. Native Americans were denied voting rights until 1948, Asian Americans until 1952, and African Americans until 1965. This timeline shows that the road to universal suffrage has been a battle fought in court rooms and Statehouses for 228 years. The 2016 election should be a stark reminder that we are far from finished.
Most Americans would be surprised to know that there is still no explicit guarantee of universal voting rights in our Constitution. Our most sweeping protections exist in a handful of key laws and Supreme Court decisions, any of which can be overturned by aggressive legislators in Congress and strict constructionists on the bench. We are already seeing this play out with the striking of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that had offered protections to minority voters in southern states. This has been followed by voter suppression laws in several states that have reduced polling places, cut early voting options, and specifically targeted minorities.
Consider also the case of gerrymandering, perhaps the most insidious form of legal vote rigging in our electoral process. By giving the right to draw electoral districts to the party in power, our system creates a powerful incentive for legislators to protect themselves from opposition, effectively giving a fox the keys to the henhouse. As a result, the U.S. Congress does not look like the nation that it portends to represent, both in terms of politics and demographics.
For those of you who are confused by our electoral process, and simply can't understand why Hillary Clinton can earn 2 million more votes than Donald Trump and still lose, the answer is simple: our system is broken. The Electoral College was designed to balance power between slave-holding and free states, but it has not adapted to a rapidly urbanizing nation. This gives vastly more voting power to rural states than to their more populous counterparts.
As long as there is no explicit right to vote and universal registration, guaranteed by our Constitution, the party in power can use gerrymandering, Electoral College trickery, and voter suppression to stay in power. That's why we have formed the Voting Rights Brigade as an army of voters and volunteers who will continue the long march towards universal suffrage. We intend to capture the national frustration of the 2016 election and channel that energy towards greater advocacy for the most basic, yet troubled, of American values: one man, one vote.