Meeting the Moment for Democracy

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• Meeting the Moment for Democracy
• Errin Haines (bio)

three days after i turned eighteen, my mom, who was born in Jim Crow Florida, took me to register to vote at the same precinct where I grew up watching her vote. The experience taught me at an early age that voting was my birthright, something adults—and Black women in particular—did as good citizens. I loved the idea that on Election Day everyone is equal. It is our unofficial national holiday, our common language, regardless of race, age, gender, political party, ability, or state.

Like my mom, I have rarely missed an election. And like many Black Americans, I have had the experience of waiting hours to cast my ballot—an experience that is at once a privilege other people who look like me don't always have and an indignity no American should have to endure. As a Black woman, a southerner, and an American, I have never been conflicted about my participation in our democracy and my role as a journalist; indeed, I have long believed that a healthy press and a healthy democracy are mutually dependent.

Four years ago, I helped to start a newsroom named for the amendment to the Constitution that enshrined the right to vote for some—but not all—women. The Nineteenth Amendment, passed in 1920, largely benefited the white women who sacrificed their Black sisters to [End Page 2]

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Love Rollercoaster (2016 Butler County Line) (1965 John Lewis Accepts Voting Rights Act Signing Pen from LBJ), 2020, by Tomashi Jackson. Acrylic, Pentelic marble, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric. 88⅛ × 81 × 8 in. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York. Commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.

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Time and Space (1948 End of Voter Registration Line) (1965 LBJ Signs the Voting Rights Act), 2020. Acrylic, Pentelic marble, Ohio Underground Railroad site soil, American electoral ephemera, and paper bags on canvas and fabric. 89⅜ × 83¾ × 8 in. Courtesy the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York. Commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.

[End Page 4] gain access to the ballot. Women and many people of color would have to work twice as hard for their full access to the franchise, which came with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. More than a half a century later, the Vote stands as both the strongest and the most fragile symbol of our democracy.

This year, our democracy will be tested anew in our first election since former president Donald Trump falsely claimed both victory and widespread voter fraud. Much of Trump's strategy relied on his attempt to cast many Black Americans as unqualified to participate in the electoral process. In addition to the Black voters Trump and his supporters tried to delegitimize, two Black women were singled out: Ruby Moss and her daughter, Shay Freeman, both poll workers in Georgia whose efforts were falsely cast as part of a sinister plot to rig the 2020 election. In the waning days of 2023, a federal jury held Trump acolyte Rudy Giuliani liable for his role in removing Moss and Freeman, ordering him to pay $148 million in damages, a decision he has appealed.

The Big Lie, which led to a violent insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, is a fiction Trump continues to peddle as he campaigns for reelection. He does this while also facing criminal charges for his role in attempting to help overturn the results of the 2020 contest, and he will spend the 2024 election moving between the campaign trail and the courtroom.

Despite the events of the last four years, Trump entered the 2024 race as the Republican frontrunner and his party's likely nominee. President Joe Biden is expected to again be the Democrats' choice. But it is democracy that is on the ballot in November. The stakes of this election could not be higher—and I say that not as the...