Pamela Cruz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
After the election results last November, which gave Democrat Joe Biden the victory as U.S. president, were positive for most voters, they may relax and stop participating actively in the country's politics, so "it will take something catastrophic for people to feel that they need to participate at the levels that they did in 2020.
This was pointed out by Myrna Perez, director of the Elections and Electoral Rights Program at the Brennan Center, who noted that because this election turned out the way some people wanted it to, people will no longer feel the urgency to participate.
"It doesn't take a historic, outrageous or off-limits leader to inspire people to get involved, but we need to have a stake in our country every day all the time," he said during the virtual session "How safe is your right to vote?"by Ethnic Media Services.
The expert said an election was achieved despite incredibly powerful forces that wanted to prevent black and African-American voters from participating, and in the midst of a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
"We dealt with it, we dealt with a once-in-a-century global pandemic. We did it in spite of that crisis and we did it in spite of politicians, at all levels of government, who tried, intentionally, to confuse, mislead and lie to the voters," he said.
This was accomplished, he said, because 35 states changed some of their policies, which facilitated the vote after the pandemic was declared by COVID-19.
This, he said, "only happened because Americans from all walks of life got involved," which meant that it took the potentially widespread disenfranchisement of people who usually are not, to enable them to actively participate in change.
However, people from the African American, Latino and Asian American communities have long seen their voting rights violated, "having to deal all the time with barriers, inaccessibility and lack of response.
He stressed that during this last electoral process it was learned that disinformation can be used as a form of intimidation, since there are people who even though they know what they are saying is wrong, they spread it anyway. -At the Brennan Center- "we had more reports of intimidation than in any other election".
While there were no coordinated or organized assaults by the "proud boys" - a racist pro-Trump group - to disrupt the voting, "there were many what I call "rando jerks" - random jerks - with guns and trucks who blocked access to the ballot, scared the voters or threatened them.
"The most important thing that we learned - in the past elections - is that cracks in our system, that impact on communities of color in every election and some other things that go wrong, can affect the community at large and therefore we are all better off when our systems have the preparedness, resilience and planning to withstand the challenges our country faces," whether it's a pandemic or foreign attackers.
"We, as a country, depend on our choices as possible ways to resolve political differences and transfer power. Our democracy works best when it includes all of us.
Myrna Perez
The political scientist from Yale stressed that "we need to make sure that every day we are defending a solid, participative and inclusive democracy", a task in which journalists can also participate because of their high capacity to reach all citizens.
For her part, Gabriela D. Lemus, president of the Progressive Congress, said that in 2020, Latino political power increased through education, mobilization and community activation, mainly in California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Texas and Florida, as well as Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, places where the concentration of Latinos is strong but also emerging.
He recalled that the Latino community is the largest proportion of non-white voters in the country, with a record 32 million representing about 13 percent of all eligible voters.
He added that of the 8.6 million Latinos who had an early vote, 2.4 million registered for the first time, making it the second largest block of voters, so their participation was decisive in states like Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
He also said that part of the reason Latinos are not going to vote is because they don't see people like them trying to run for office or because their problems as voters are not being addressed.
"The assumption is that Latino voters are primarily concerned about immigration, which is not necessarily true... it could be number four or five on the list after education, health and the economy.
Gabiela Lemus
Judith A. Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, said this is a time when we must be reflective about race, not only because of the people who took over the U.S. capital or the Capitol, but because of all the racial baggage they carried with them.
"They came carrying Confederate flags with the idea that the Confederation would rise again, and what we saw on display in terms of the police response at that time underlines for us the unequal treatment of people," he said.
He said that the insurrection seen on January 6 at the Capitol "is about the rise of the Confederacy and the rise of white supremacy at a time when we have a rising majority, and therefore we should not view the riots as an isolated incident. They were part of a larger effort in the halls of state and federal government to undermine the will of the people.
Those actions, he explained, were motivated by the same anti-democratic sentiment that inspired lawmakers to challenge last November's election results, based on unfounded conspiracies, lies and misinformation about the election fraud perpetrated, specifically in communities of color.
Such attacks on the African-American community, he said, were made on cities where people of color came in record numbers, "from Milwaukee to Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta, which is where they wanted to focus their energies, because they wanted to continue the narrative of the criminality of people of color who were supposedly trying to steal an election.
"We know that the right to vote does not live explicitly in the Constitution, and what we hope is that we can get to a point where the Constitution recognizes it, so that when we file suit, the courts will treat it the same way they treat the First Amendment," he said.
Part of the equation, he said, is redistricting, "that's a concern that we'll see, I think definitely over time the growing majority will mean that state legislatures will look like us - a mixed bag of participants - will happen over time.
Currently, what worries Browne Dianis most is the continuous misinformation that exists on social networks, "they allow us to say what we want and act as if it were a fact. We already know what the truth is, what is false versus the truth. So how are we going to make sure that our people and my people of color in particular get to the truth?
