Even as Republican efforts around the country to roll back and suppress voting rights have justly received a great deal of mainstream media attention, this coverage, as well as the rhetoric of Democrats working to halt these attacks, has tended to emphasize how this voter suppression aims to keep members of certain groups from being able to vote. While completely true, and illustrative of the racist animus of the Republican initiatives, they seldom delve into the specific effects of disenfranchisement on those voters themselves, beyond the general sense that it’s bad for them. The idea that they are denied a political voice is clearly the crux of the matter — yet the consequences of that denial are seldom elaborated or explored. The result is to keep voter suppression too often at an unhelpful-level of abstraction, solely a matter of principle (“their voting rights are being denied”) rather than also a matter of power and who has it (“their power is being denied via a denial of their voting rights”).
This frequent omission sidelines two crucial aspects of voter suppression that would heighten everyone’s sense of the stakes, and a sense of outrage among all democracy-supporting American, Democrats and non-Democrats alike. First, just as some define the most basic duty of a government as defending the physical safety of its subjects, the ability to vote, and have your vote count, is essential to protecting oneself against physical violence. Lest this argument for concreteness itself sound abstract, we need look no further than the surge of violence directed at Asian-American communities around the country after our former president repeatedly used racist, scapegoating language to describe covid and its Chinese origins. And as the New York Times reports, a sense of fear, not just of harassment but of physical threat, continues to haunt many Asian-Americans even five months into the Biden administration. From this perspective, the right to vote and help decide whether a white supremacist, violence-propagating president remains in office isn’t just an assertion of an abstract human right; it’s the ability to help determine whether one lives in a country where one is likely to be attacked or killed by bigots. And indeed, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein reports, those who have closely tracked Asian-American voters point to Donald Trump’s cultivation of an atmosphere of menace towards this diverse group as having played a strong role in a surge in Asian-American votes in 2020 — votes which broke in favor of Democrats.
The case of Asian-American voters helps highlight the second enormously important aspect of voting suppression that is currently given short shrift by both the media and Democrats. Despite the rapid growth of this voting population (Asian-Americans went from casting 2.5% of all votes in 2000 to 5% of all votes in 2020), a group that constitutes a mere 1/20th of the overall voting population can hardly put preferred candidates into office on its own. But this perhaps obvious fact helps us highlight a basic truth about voting that can get obscured with too much emphasis on voter suppression as a violation of individual rights (which it of course also is): in the United States, as in any democracy, one exerts one’s power not simply by casting a single vote, but by doing so in concert with hundreds, thousands, millions of fellow Americans who support the same candidates and the same party. The right to vote means nothing if we are not able to form majority coalitions with like-minded voters.
Our ability to form majority coalitions by voting is as important as the ability to defend one’s physical well-being by voting; indeed, it’s the precondition for any ability to have one’s vote count in any meaningful way. And as outrageous as it is to deny the individual right to have one’s vote counted, it’s just as outrageous to prevent majorities of voters from coming together and attaining power by targeting subsets of those voters — which is exactly what the Republican Party is determined to do to the majority Democratic coalition, by suppressing the vote of individual African-American, lower-income, and other voters who tend to vote Democratic (not to mention by gerrymandering measures that dilute the votes of these and other Democratic voting blocs).
From this perspective, you can see that the idea that only particular individuals directly affected by Republican anti-voting measures are the victims is deeply misleading. I don’t think it’s too much to say that voting suppression targeted at one’s political allies actually also constitutes voting suppression of those allies. After all, take the case of two Democratic-leaning groups from the last election, African-Americans and Asian-Americans. The votes of both groups were crucial not only in securing Joe Biden’s victory, but the Democrats’ control of the Senate via two hard-won victories in Georgia. If Republican efforts to suppress the votes of African-Americans had been more successful, their allies in the Asian-American community would have been denied the senators of their choice and their ability to benefit from Democratic control of the Senate. But the same principle applies to Democratic white voters in Georgia, and indeed, in every state in the union: if the crucial votes of Asian-Americans and African-Americans had been suppressed in Georgia, Democratic white voters everywhere would have been denied their preference as to which party should control the Senate.
And so describing voter suppression primarily as a violation of individual rights, or even the rights of particular groups, fails to do justice to the monstrosity of such actions, and how they strips millions more voters of their political power. Talking about voter suppression as something that is being done to particular groups who must have their rights restored is not sufficient, as it misleadingly suggests that the rights of other groups not targeted so directly are somehow safe. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is truly a situation where an attack on one is an attack on all, and Democrats and other defenders of democracy should employ rhetoric, and political remedies, that are equal to the affront. Likewise, the basic role of voting in keeping oneself safe from physical harm needs to be placed closer to the center of voting rights discussions. We need to energize and even radicalize our fellow Americans to a defense of democracy — and key to this is making the case that none of us can consider our right to vote as safe or meaningful if the right of any of us is under threat.