Dear Fight to Vote readers,
This will be our last newsletter of 2020 and I’m feeling emotional. (By emotional, I mean completely exhausted by the wildest news cycle I’ve ever known.) So I thought the best way to cap 2020 was with a list of the most important voting rights stories we reported. These are stories about policies and politics that have stopped people from voting, and the efforts to overcome these threats to democracy. But most importantly, they are stories about the American people, and their right to the ballot box.
Without further ado:
1 How Republicans gutted the biggest voting rights victory in recent history
This definitive piece by Sam Levine digs into Amendment 4 – a ballot measure that was meant to give more than 1 million people with felony convictions the right to vote after leaving prison – and how it was in effect dismantled.
2 Bloody Sunday remembered: civil rights marchers tell story of their iconic photos
The Guardian traveled to Selma, Alabama – the birthplace of the voting rights movement – in February. In this piece, Lauren Aratani located activists from some of the most memorable photos of the 1960s marches to tell their stories.
3 How the US Postal Service became central to the election
The Guardian was one of the first publications to cover the tumult within the agency, and its impact on mail-in voting, which surged due to the coronavirus pandemic. This set of pieces by Jake Bittle, Sam Levine and Alvin Chang follows that story.
‘Disastrous at a time like this’: the US Postal Service is on the brink of crisis
USPS chief concedes changes causing delays but won’t restore sorting machines
Revealed: evidence shows huge mail slowdowns after Trump ally took over
4 Alabama blocked a man from voting because he owed $4
In a true example of how backwards voting rights laws can disenfranchise Americans, Sam Levine traveled to Tuscaloosa to tell the story of Alfonso Tucker, who lost his ability to cast a ballot over just a few dollars.
5 Mail-in ballot tracker: counting election votes in US swing states
We teamed up with ProPublica and the University of Florida researcher Michael McDonald to track mail-in ballot requests, returns and rejections in key states before and after the election. This is the first year the US has used vote by mail so extensively, and the varying rules and deadlines made this process a little bumpy. Our tracker revealed those inconsistencies, as well as how the preponderance of mail-in ballots influenced the results.
6 ‘Just like propaganda’: the three men enabling Trump’s voter fraud lies
In this prescient story, Sam Levine, Spenser Mestel and Anna Massoglia revealed how the conservative lawyers and politicians Hans von Spakovsky, J Christian Adams and Kris Kobach spent years sowing seeds of doubt in the voting system with their baseless claims. After the election, we saw that false narrative play out when Donald Trump undermined the election results.
7 Texas limits ballot drop boxes
Erum Salam and Sam Levine investigated one of the most egregious examples of the Republican crackdown on mail-in voting during the election. In the days before the vote, Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, limited the number of drop boxes for mail-in ballots to one per county, despite mail delays and the pandemic. It hit diverse cities the hardest.
8 Democrats lost the gerrymandering battle of 2021
These pieces by Sam Levine, Alvin Chang and David Daley underscored how Republicans will continue to dominate next year’s state legislatures, and the power to draw electoral districts – a procedure that only happens every 10 years.
‘Democracy is broken’: state races aim to undo decade of Republican map-rigging
As Biden won the presidency, Republicans cemented their grip on power for the next decade
9 ‘A perfect storm’: US census imperiled by Trump rhetoric and growing distrust
Reporting by Sam Levine and Madeleine Gregory on the decennial census count in January set the stage for a year of census battles, even before the coronavirus pandemic hit. In the months that followed, the attempt to count every living person in the US would become fraught as Trump attempted to exclude undocumented immigrants and curbed outreach amid the raging virus, We have yet to fully understand the impact of these moves.
10 Why this election calls into question whether America is a democracy
In this seminal piece, Sam Levine considered a year of tumultuous voting rights issues to ask a crucial question: is America a democracy?
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Thank you, as always, for reading our newsletter. We hope Fight to Vote has illuminated an aspect of US democracy that often goes unnoticed and amplified the voices of civil rights activists and those left out of the process. We look forward to taking on these stories again next year and hope you will join us. Our first stop next year will be the Senate runoffs in Georgia, and it certainly won’t be our last.
– Ankita
