The assault on voting rights advances full bore. These people are fighting back.
Matt Ford/December 7, 2021
By one view, the 2020 election was an astounding success for American democracy. Despite a devastating global pandemic and spasms of civil unrest, almost 160 million Americans, or roughly 66 percent of the potential electorate, cast a ballot—the highest participation rate in an election cycle since 1900. For an optimist, the election was a stirring reaffirmation of the American ideal of self-government and its ability to overcome nearly any hurdle.
But a darker interpretation of these events is possible. Though the 2020 election saw record turnout levels, it also faced extraordinary challenges to its conduct and integrity. Every credible expert and agency concluded that there was no evidence of significant or serious fraud or misconduct, yet former President Donald Trump spent months impugning the legitimacy of the vote before Election Day and waged a cynical campaign of lies to overturn the results after he lost. On January 6, by inciting a riot to attack Congress during the Electoral College count, Trump broke America’s two-century streak of peaceful transfers of power.
Which vision of American democracy will prevail? Was the 2020 election the high-water mark for far-right groups and actors who wish to destabilize our republican systems of government for personal gain? Or was it the last, shining moment for a vision of liberal democracy that came into fruition with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s and has been steadily eroded ever since?
Kadida Kenner
WHO SHE IS
Executive director of the New Pennsylvania Project, an organization devoted to getting out the vote in Pennsylvania
HOW SHE’S HELPING
Kadida Kenner is working to expand the electorate in one of the most important battleground states in the country.
Perhaps the most well-known voting rights campaign of the past decade took place in Georgia, where, in 2013, then–state lawmaker Stacey Abrams and a host of other activists launched the New Georgia Project to turn out voters of color in that state’s elections. By 2019, according to the group, it had registered nearly a half-million voters across Georgia’s 159 counties. That long-term strategy changed the political complexion of a once reliably conservative electorate and helped propel Joe Biden and two Democratic senators to Washington.
Kadida Kenner, the executive director of the New Pennsylvania Project, told me that she hopes to replicate the Georgia group’s success in her own state. She said that she doesn’t expect to match its accomplishments right away. “But we do want to get to these numbers for 2022 and beyond.” As she pointed out, 1.1 million eligible yet unregistered voters remain in Pennsylvania—“there’s still so many more to engage.”
Every political campaign tries to register voters ahead of an election and increase turnout among its supporters in the weeks and months before Election Day. (Even Trump, who worked tirelessly to discredit the vote before his defeat in 2020, poured resources into making sure his supporters cast a ballot.) The New Pennsylvania Project, however, is consciously modeled on the New Georgia Project’s “secret sauce” for boosting voter engagement, as Kenner put it, which was predicated on involving voters more consistently, outside the rhythms of the election cycle. “We want to engage these folks year-round,” Kenner explained. “And we want to talk about the issues.” Just as in 2013 the New Georgia Project talked about the Affordable Care Act, the New Pennsylvania Project is talking about the American Rescue Plan, minimum wage, and the educational funding gap. “We’re talking about issues that matter to the communities that we’re in, and they all look different.”
Like many voting rights activists, Kenner hoped to engage people who were effectively disenfranchised from the process by gerrymandering or voter-suppression measures. But she said she also wanted to energize “functionally disenfranchised” voters. “They just don’t see themselves represented in government here in the commonwealth or federally,” she told me. “They don’t see someone who looks like them serving them, or they just don’t see their lives changing for the better after voting in several elections and have given up.”
The role Kenner is playing is not one she expected five years ago. Though she had worked for political campaigns early in her career, she began producing TV shows and sports broadcasts, and spent time in North Carolina at ESPNU, where she largely focused on producing football and basketball games for the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a Division II conference of historically Black universities. Then, in 2016, North Carolina Republicans passed House Bill 2, the controversial state law that preempted local anti-discrimination ordinances and barred transgender people from using bathrooms in public buildings that match their gender identity. H.B. 2 received nationwide backlash and boycotts, and the NCAA decided to pull its tournaments out of North Carolina, a move that left Kenner and many others in the state’s sports-broadcasting industry without work. So Kenner took a job with the Hillary Clinton campaign as an organizer in Charlotte. “I thought that after the 2016 election, I would go back to TV production,” she told me. But after the results, she found she couldn’t. “I couldn’t go back to having such a good time in production trucks and making sure commercials run. I wanted to come back home and defend democracy.”
Her move back to Pennsylvania came at an auspicious moment. The commonwealth narrowly went to Trump in 2016 but reelected Democratic Governor Tom Wolf in the 2018 midterm elections. Biden’s victory in 2020 came after an intense campaign by Trump and his allies to delegitimize the results, often by spreading false claims about voter fraud and making baseless accusations about the integrity of the vote-counting process. Even before the election itself, state Republican leaders told The Atlantic that they were considering whether the GOP-led state legislature could ignore the results and choose a slate of presidential electors itself, defying the voters’ will.
Biden’s narrow victory—and the role that voting rights protections likely played in it—have only heightened the stakes going forward. After the election, Republican state lawmakers tried to pass a series of restrictive voting measures but failed to overcome Wolf’s veto. Instead, they planned to enact the proposed law by way of a ballot initiative for the voters to decide in next year’s elections. Some state lawmakers are openly calling for an “audit” of the 2020 results, akin to the purported “audit” carried out in Arizona, in order to further delegitimize the results in the state. The point, Kenner told me, is to put “the thought in the electorate’s head here that we’re not having free and fair elections when we are.”
Though part of the New Pennsylvania Project’s engagement strategy involves discussing the issues with voters, its focus is still squarely on voting rights. To Kenner, the issues can’t be disentangled from one another. “We can care about environmental justice, we can care about economic justice, but if we can’t vote, then how do we even get to fight for these other issues that we’re hearing about? It all starts at the polls.”
Original article: https://newrepublic.com/article/164391/six-heroic-defenders-democracy