10/20/25 (Special Episode)

Good morning! It’s Monday, October 20th.

A special episode! If you’re subscribed to the show, there should be another episode in the feed that’s all about the news. But over here in this episode, we’re covering my very favorite topic… voting.

And now, the special episode.

Voting in America

-via NPR, AP News, and Brennan Center

“Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won; you earn it and win it in every generation.”

That is a quote from Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luthor King Jr, yes, but also a leader in the civil rights movement herself.

History moves in cycles. We see the need for change and we fight for it and we take three steps forward and we get shoved four steps back but we organize and figure out how to take five steps before they even know we’ve taken one. Progress, then backlash, then resistance.

We learn. We get better. We get faster. We understand more each time we’re forced to do it because we are always forced to do it.

This moment we are in right now, as awful as it is, is not new. The tactics are new, the names are new – the games are not.

When we think about voting rights, we think about poll taxes and literacy tests. Susan B Anthony and Cady Stanton. John Lewis finally crossing that Edmund Pettus Bridge. Martin Luther King’s letters from that Birmingham jail.

But the fight takes place every day, in ways that sometimes make the news and sometimes… like a snake that you don’t see until it bites you… it lies in wait.

There are four ways you can gerrymander in a state. The main two are cracking and packing. Packing refers to packing, or concentrating, voters in one voting district, therefore reducing the party's congressional representation. Cracking, on the other hand, dilutes a voter’s power by spreading small amounts of opposition voters across multiple districts, and therefore lowering the chance of a district win by the opposition. There’s also hijacking or kidnapping which, just based on name alone, isn’t great. Those happen when an incumbent required to live in the district they represent is suddenly living in a different district because of new maps, placing them in more difficult districts to win in.

We’re talking about gerrymandering a lot right now because the President of the United States is literally calling states to say: do you mind do gerrymandering for me because I’m up to no good! And they are saying yes! Which is… also up to no good!

But it’s a tale as old as time. The name comes from the Governor of Massachusetts who did gerrymandering in 1812.

In Louisiana, Black residents make up nearly one-third of the state’s population. However, out of six districts in the state, there is only one majority-Black district.

Out of six. This is an example of packing gerrymandering.

To correct this, the Louisiana legislature established a 2nd Black-majority district, which was signed into law by the governor.

Following that move, a group of non-Black voters sued under the 14th Amendment saying, get this… that this was racial gerrymandering.

Part of the 14th says “No state shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” and that is called the Equal Protection Clause.

In this case, the Supreme Court interpreted it to prohibit states from doing racial gerrymandering unless the plan passes strict scrutiny which is a vibe and also the highest level of judicial review, which requires a two-part test, in which the government must prove a compelling government interest and that the law is narrowly tailored.

Strict scrutiny is very hard to pass.

Last year, this case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court but was punted, with the Justices requesting to rehear it this year. In the meantime, the two-district court remained in effect.

Cut to this year. Last week, Justices heard arguments in Louisiana v Callais and, based on their questions, we can expect that the Justices will gut Section 2.

Because they didn’t rule but instead they want to rehear the case on the more sweeping question on whether Section 2 in constitutional.

Now, the thing about a Section 2 violation is that you can’t just – say it. It has exacting requirements, knowing as the Three Gingles Preconditions. First, the minority group must be "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district".

Second, the group has to show that members tend to vote similiary, making it a voting bloc.

And third, that voting bloc has to show that the majority population votes "sufficiently as a bloc to enable it... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate". So in other words, the majority’s voting power consistently prevents the minority group’s preferred candidate from winning.

You have to hit all three, or no dice. Additionally, if preconditions cease to exist in the future, the Section 2 liability will sunset.

On top of that, you have to show that it’s possible to fix this with an ungerrymandered map. The map also has very strict requirements.

So it’s not like this is all just, you know, casual and vibes and wouldn’t it be cool if…

It’s law! It’s a strict, well-thought-out law.

Before I go on, let me first remind you that, somehow, I am the rational one. I stay fairly level-headed. Especially when it comes to this kind of stuff. We take things as they come. We don’t time-travel. We don’t do conspiracy theory. But we do live in the real world.

The thing about a snake lying in wait is that, while it does, it misses us… it misses that we were waiting for it. We were getting ready for it.

It misses that this is a fight as old as time.

It misses that we know that voting rights are never something we can take for granted.

We can’t pretend reality isn’t reality. Not if we’re going to fight back. And when it comes to voting rights – we are always going to fight back. Because without those, we have nothing

The right to vote didn’t magically happen.

Jimmie Lee Jackson, Viola Liuzzo, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Medgar Evers, Herbert Lee, Rev. George Lee, Lamar Smith, Inez Milholland – these people were murdered fighting for the right to vote.

Hundreds of people were arrested, thousands were beaten within an inch of their lives.

Black women joined white women in the fight for voting rights in the early 1900s, only to immediately be cast aside the instant white women thought their fate might be tied, and therefore slowed down, by Black women also getting the right to vote.

And even though those early Black suffragettes like, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and Anna Julia Cooper made great strides for the movement, and arguably the work could not have been done without them… all they were allowed to do was watch when white women got the right to vote and celebrated as if it were some great achievement for feminism. When what it is, is both a symbol of feminism and a reminder of what white women do best: take from women of color, and leave them behind the second we think that standing together might somehow make things even 3% more difficult without ever seeing the power we’d have if we could, just once, stick together.

Because even though they were there from the very beginning, and even thought the 19th Amendment did technically given women the right to vote, Jim Crow laws ensured that Black women would be the last in this country to be given the right to vote.

Anna Julia Cooper, was born enslaved, became one of the first Black women to earn a Ph.D., and wrote one of the first major texts advocating for Black women’s political and intellectual equality, which gave the universal suffrage movement one of its most important philosophical foundations, died one year before she got the right to vote.

The right to vote depends on individual voices.

Why do you think they are trying so hard to stop us from being able to use them?

And here’s what I want to tell you.

This isn’t the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This isn’t the Night of Terror.

But this is a serious time for voting rights.

We have to take back the House and Senate, because it is imperative that we start getting better judges in office. We have to win in 2028, obviously.

But there’s something else too – not everybody can do everything, but everybody needs to do something. Decide what you’re going to care about and really, really care. Fight for it. Learn everything you can about it. Become an expert in it.

I used to be a normal human being who could carry on normal human conversations (granted, they were all about Kelly Clarkson’s 2012 bangs and Mandy Moore’s body of work and why she can definitely EGOT in the next ten years and how I believe she can get there) but still – but then I watched a woman from Texas stand for 13 hours and suddenly I really cared about a gubernatorial race in Texas and lived there for a month doing a documentary about Wendy Davis. While I was in the hotel gym, on the treadmill, I watched Obama give a speech about voting rights. I didn’t even really understand why he was giving a speech about voting rights at that moment, but I heard him say, “The stark, simple truth is this: the right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago.”

Become an expert in something so that you can understand it well enough to teach others. Love something so fiercely that you are willing to fight for it at every single turn.

Because this administration is working very very hard to take those things away from us, and the only way that can happen is if we let them.

They are afraid of us. They are afraid of our numbers. They are afraid of our power. They are a group of small, feckless people led by a small, feckless man who loves nothing.

Of course he’s afraid of us – we’re going to win.

All we have to do is stay in it.

And that’s it. That’s the special episode.

I’m proud of every single person who is fighting for the right to vote. Who refuses to back down from the fascism and feckless regime.

And because you here, so obviously that includes you… I’m proud of you.