The “I voted” stickers, much like the fall leaves, were plentiful during the last election season. It looks as though recent policy agendas have not lost their steam. President Biden won on a platform charged by younger voters who were looking for an end to the Trump era. However, as rhetoric following the end of the campaign trail showed, partisan politics embroiled itself in an information war over election security and the existential trust in public institutions. The For the People Act, commonly referred to as H.R.1, was received by the Senate on Thursday, March 11. The bill is touted as the biggest expansion of voting rights since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which banned the disenfranchisement of people of color. The argument lies in how people vote – notably, mail-in voting.
There’s a lot to like about H.R1. Notably, it overturns the devastating effects of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court case, which allowed super PACs and corporations to pour nearly unlimited amounts of capital into political campaigns, oftentimes directly coordinating with candidates. And people should have access to voting – the bill ubiquitously expands access to the polls across the country, including indigenous reservations out West.
The broader implication here is trust in our voting system. Since the Russiagate conspiracy and Trump’s claims of widespread fraud in the most recent presidential election, the narrative has not been left alone. What Democrats don’t want to say is that voting propaganda is implicitly “vote for Democrats.” While voting is absolutely a powerful tool, the left has to stop retreating into the arms of mainstream politics that don’t care about everyday Americans. Expanding and leveraging our own political power is necessary, and we aren’t going to find that in the Democratic Party.
If we’re insisting on having this mudslinging contest, I suggest we make the election a national holiday (like HR1 proposes for federal workers) and incentivize voters to vote in-person post-pandemic. However, it’d be silly to think the Democrats and Republicans want to give people a day off, regardless of mail-in voting spurring the discussion.
