Why keep counting votes?

I’ve limited my exposure to the minute-by-minute developments in the agonizing vote count in the wake of the election. But I do know that people all over the country are trying to stop the vote count, and that this effort originates with the president and his family mainly, and includes a few other characters such as the inscrutable Rudy Giuliani and ignominious former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Why do they want to stop counting votes? Even typing this question, I feel like I’m writing unspeakably un-American words. To me—a white person in a society geared toward us and our voices, who’s never been disenfranchised in my life—it’s all a little bit of a distant drama that offends my sensibilities but doesn’t actually encroach on my rights. It’s shocking, but I know my vote was counted. As a dear friend of mine said to me recently, summing things up for the average white lady in the United States, I don’t have to care about politics, so I don’t.

But you know, and I know, the United States is not made up exclusively of white middle aged ladies. And millions of voters aren’t white middle aged ladies. And millions of voters who aren’t white middle aged ladies voted in this election with a simple expectation that parallels my own: my vote counts.

Doesn’t every voter’s vote count? Hasn’t it always? This is the United States, after all. That’s what white middle aged ladies think.

But of course we’re incorrect in that assumption. I’m here today to share the words of a friend who isn’t a white middle aged lady. She wrote these words after voting in this election. Why does she vote, in full expectation that her vote counts? I think her words are illuminating.

Here’s Nellie Cotton.

I vote. 

For my ancestors, to stand in defiance and hold their space. I vote because although we are the original people of this continent, after the United States was created we were not even considered as citizens upon our own land. It was not until 1924 that Native Americans born in the U.S. were given citizenship. Even after the Snyder Act of 1924, Native Americans were still prevented from participating in elections because the Constitution left it up to the states to decide who has the right to vote. It took forty more years for all fifty states to allow Native Americans to vote. 

I vote because before 1920, it was illegal for women to vote in many places across the country. I vote for the 33 women of the National Woman’s Party who were clubbed, beaten and tortured by the guards at the Occoquan Workhouse. The 33 suffragists were arrested Nov. 10, 1917, while picketing outside the White House for the right to vote.

I vote because although Congress passed the 15th Amendment in 1870, which stated that voting rights could not be “denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, it took the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's to ensure the right of all Black and Native American citizens to vote.

I vote because society continues to try to directly or indirectly disenfranchise us. I vote as an act of revolution and resistance. 

Revolution and resistance? These words are harsh and strange to white middle aged ladies in most of the United States. But what could be more American than resisting efforts to disenfranchise citizens? What could be more American than revolting against systemic efforts to silence of millions of Americans?

You think systemic efforts to silence voters aren’t happening? Just check out the vote counts in Michigan, Philadelphia, and Georgia, and any other place people are barging into the process in order to stop it. Check out the gerrymandering that’s been happening for decades, the fees felons must pay in order to access voting despite having been granted the right to vote, the removal of tens of thousands of polling places, the placement of phony vote collection boxes, robocall campaigns that lied about the dangers of mail-in voting. All of this is from the hands of the GOP. All of it.

I realize I’m probably preaching to the choir here. But we white middle aged ladies—whatever our political affiliation—need to seriously rethink our understanding of voting rights in this country, and we need to speak up when we see voting rights of anyone anywhere being abrogated. We need to stand against illegal stoppage of vote counts, speak out against illegal fees, and raise holy hell when we see polling places eliminated by the hundreds and thousands. White ladies, we have a very loud voice should we choose to use it. Let’s stand in revolution and resistance with all voters in the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, in every election, every year, every day.

Follow CPF Insider on twitter @JulieVassilatos.