Voter Suppression

Voter suppression is basically a way of skewing the election by limiting people's right to vote. Voter suppression is usually done by the Republican party and is done very strategically. One of the main ways that voter suppression is done is by limiting the number of polling places. Usually BIPOC, poor or young people tend to vote democratically because their rights will be limited the most under a Republican government. Because of this, Republicans often don’t put polling places in poor, Black, or Latinex neighborhoods because the people in those neighborhoods tend to vote Deomocratic. There are often not many polling places on college campuses because young people also tend to vote Democratic. And now you might be thinking, ‘Well, they can just do mail-in voting, right?’ Wrong. Most states try to make it super complicated and hard to do mail-in voting by making so that you need another person to sign your ballot or by limiting the places from which you can send your ballot in. But the Trump administration is taking it one step further this year. Trump is shutting down post offices and made Louis DeJoy, a man with no experience with the U.S.P.S., the postmaster general. Trump is defunding the post office and laying off employees so that way less mail gets to its destination. Now you might be wondering what this has to do with voter suppression, but think about it. More people will be wanting to do mail in voting because of the pandemic, but because Trump has gone out of his way to say that the Coronavirus is not a big deal, his supporters will be more willing to go to a physical location to vote. This means that Democrats are more likely to use mail in voting, and now that the U.S.P.S. is less likely to be able to safely deliver ballots to the places where they are counted. Basically this means that Democratic votes are less likely to be counted. While this is very systematic, this is 100% illegal and unconstitutional. While we don’t technically have a constitutional right to vote, Our entire country is built on the system of a fair election, which we will not be having this year. However, here are some things you can do: If you are eligible to vote and feel comfortable doing so in person do that because that means that there's less mail and that your vote is more likely to be counted. If you are elegible to vote, please vote. If you are not eligible, talk to friends and family about their voting plan. Also if you can, you can volunteer at a polling place or phone/text bank. By Jane Shapiro