Pamela Cruz. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P].
After last November's election results, which saw Democrat Joe Biden win as U.S. president, went positively for most voters, they may relax and stop actively participating in U.S. politics, so "it will take something catastrophic for people to feel they need to participate at the levels they did in 2020."
So said Myrna Perez, director of the Brennan Center's Elections and Voting Rights Program, who noted that because this election turned out the way some people wanted it to, people will no longer feel the urgency to participate.
"You don't need a historic, outrageous or out-of-bounds leader to inspire people to get involved, but we need to have involvement in our country every day all the time," he said during the virtual session. "How secure is your right to vote?"by Ethnic Media Services.
The expert said an election was achieved despite incredibly powerful forces that wanted to prevent voters of color and African Americans from participating, and in the midst of a pandemic due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
"We dealt with it, we did it in the face of 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 intentionally tried to confuse, mislead and lie to voters," he said.
This was achieved, he said, because 35 states changed some of their policies, which facilitated the vote after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared.
This, he said, "only happened because Americans from all walks of life got involved," which meant that it took the possible widespread disenfranchisement of people who are generally disenfranchised to enable them to actively participate in change.
However, people in the African American, Latino and Asian American communities have long had their voting rights violated, "dealing with barriers, inaccessibility and unresponsiveness all the time.
He pointed out that during this last electoral process they learned that disinformation can be used as a form of intimidation, because there are people who even though they know that 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.
And while there were no coordinated or organized assaults by the ?proud boys? ?a racist pro-Trump group? to disrupt the voting, "there were a lot of what I call 'rando jerks? with guns and trucks blocking access to the ballot, scaring voters or threatening voters.
"The most important thing we learned - in past elections - is that the 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 so we're all better off when our systems have the preparedness, resilience and planning to withstand the challenges that face our country," whether it's a pandemic or foreign cyber attackers.
"We, as a country, depend on our elections as possible ways to resolve political differences and transfer power. Our democracy works best when it includes all of us."
Myrna Perez
The expert in political science from Yale stressed that "we need to make sure that every day we are defending a solid, participatory and inclusive democracy," a task in which journalists can also participate because of their high capacity to reach all citizens.
Gabriela D. Lemus, president of Congreso Progresista, said that in 2020 Latino political power was increased through educating, mobilizing and activating the community, mainly in California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Texas and Florida, in addition to 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 voted early, 2.4 million registered for the first time, making it the second largest voting bloc, so their participation was decisive in states like Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
He said part of the reason Latinos don't vote is because they don't see people like them trying to run for office or because their issues as voters are not being addressed.
"The assumption is that Latino voters care primarily about immigration, which is not necessarily true ... it could be number four or five on the list after education, health care and the economy."
Gabiela Lemus
In her remarks, the executive director of the Advancement Project, Judith A. Browne Dianis, noted that this is a time when we should be reflective about race, not just because of the people who took over the U.S. capital or the U.S. Capitol, but because of all the racial baggage they carried with them.
"They came carrying Confederate flags with the idea that the Confederacy would rise again, and what we saw on display in terms of the police response to that moment underscores for us the unequal treatment of people," he noted.
And that is because, he said, the Insurrection seen on Jan. 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 being made in the halls of state and federal government to undermine the will of the people."
These actions, he explained, were motivated by the same anti-democratic sentiment that inspired legislators to challenge last November's election results based on unfounded conspiracies, lies and misinformation about voter fraud perpetrated specifically in communities of color.
Such attacks on the African-American community, he said, were made on cities where people of color turned out in record numbers, "from Milwaukee to Philadelphia to Detroit to Atlanta, which is where they wanted to focus their energies, because they wanted to continue the narrative of the criminality of people of color supposedly trying to steal an election."
"We know that the right to vote doesn't 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 bring lawsuits, the courts will treat it the same way they treat the First Amendment," he said.
Part of the equation, he noted, is redistricting, "that's a concern we'll see, I think definitely over time the growing majority will mean that state legislatures will look like us - mixed panel of participants - it will happen over time."
Currently, what concerns Browne Dianis the most is the continuous misinformation that exists on social networks, "they allow us to say whatever we want and act as if it were a fact. We already know what the truth is, the 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?"
