Today, in the United States, the right to vote is more precarious and more contested than ever. “I have had front row seats to voter suppression,” writer, poll worker, activist and Georgia resident Anjali Enjeti tells me, referring to Shelby County v. Holder, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enjeti explains that things have been going downhill ever since, because “states can now enact voter-suppressing laws and policies that erect tremendous barriers,” especially for Black, brown or Indigenous Democrat voters.

Enjeti’s recent book, Ballot, is a history of voting in the US, and it certainly delivers. However, along the way, the book equally exposes a corrupt and manipulative system that destabilizes democracy by making it harder for people to physically go and vote.

Being a Democratic voter living in the state of Georgia offers a particularly important vantage point, in her case.

“I've been gerrymandered out of districts that I helped flip blue in 2018. I've seen it. I felt it. My dropbox for my absentee ballot was closed down. It used to be close to my house,” she says, “now it's 30 minutes away. I was directly impacted, as many voters have been, who live in these red, Republican-led states that have been enacting a cascade of laws.” With almost no oversight from the federal government, she adds, these laws “have a wide berth of destruction.”

Even as the Republican party has been shamelessly and strategically enacting such destruction for decades, she says, Enjeti is unsparing in her criticism of the Democratic party. She admits that while there were more checks and balances that affected both Republicans and Democrats at some point in time, the Democratic Party today is entirely overrun by corporate interests. Democrats are neither able to counter the vile and dehumanizing rhetoric deployed by the Republicans, nor effect a bulwark of opposition to their policies.

“There's something ingrained in Democrats about the fact that they want to be friends with extremists,” she says. “They want to erase themselves and their belief system because they feel that that will get them the ability to be elected again…They care more about donations from billionaires for their next election than they do about actually serving in office. They will watch Palestinian babies being blown up and vote for more weapons going to Israel because they care more about the belief that that will get them reelected than they do about the fact that we've had some of the largest protests in this country since the Vietnam War for a ceasefire, for stopping the armament of Israel.”

In her book, Enjeti wanted to give readers a sense of the magnitude of this moment and the role of elections, but she is aware that voting is only one element in a vast political ecosystem.

“I have been a progressive activist for many years, so I've actually never felt that elections paved the way to liberation,” she tells me. “We've got strikers. We've got protesters. We've got people boycotting corporations. We've got a big mix of tools in our toolbox, and voting is one of them. We need to not have the police, we need to not have ICE, but we can hold that and understand that we've got to have the abolitionists and then we've got to have the people doing something about elections. We have to hold these multiple roles at the same time, and elections are still very important.”

Further reading:

Ballot by Anjali Enjeti https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ballot-9798765126202/

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure.

Edited by Agatha Jamari. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes

Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat

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