Love this, Danielle! But I think you left DC out entirely. We're doubly disenfranchised ... frankly, triply or quadruply-- since we have no Senators and our one elected Delegate can't vote on the House Floor. (DC voters actually passed a referendum approving semi-open primaries, but our DC Council -- including one of my opponents for the Delegate seat -- voted not to fund it. So much hypocrisy.) In any case, add us to your bottom right quadrant -- or make a special, lower layer of the chart just for us ...
Excellent analysis. We should keep in mind that middle and high school students will all qualify by age to be voters very soon. For the most "disenfranchised " among them (by which I mean economically most vulnerable), participating in this new voting rights movement will make or break the new movement, just as participation of young people in Mississippi made the last voting rights movement possible. For those students to take an interest in the technical questions you so rightly raise, their material conditions must be understood and respected. The way to their political involvement is through attending to their current, year-round need for additional income that supports, rather than distracts from, their education. The political question can be separated from neither the educational questions nor from the economic desperation of young people in the 21st century.
This analysis resonates deeply with something I’ve been observing — that our democratic institutions have lost the structural integrity needed to support meaningful enfranchisement. I wrote about this recently in an essay called Democracy Without a Backbone, in case it’s helpful context for others thinking about the systemic side of this issue. https://sbixby.substack.com/p/democracy-without-a-backbone
Cryptographic voter ID and constitutionally mandated ranked choice voting for all!
Love this, Danielle! But I think you left DC out entirely. We're doubly disenfranchised ... frankly, triply or quadruply-- since we have no Senators and our one elected Delegate can't vote on the House Floor. (DC voters actually passed a referendum approving semi-open primaries, but our DC Council -- including one of my opponents for the Delegate seat -- voted not to fund it. So much hypocrisy.) In any case, add us to your bottom right quadrant -- or make a special, lower layer of the chart just for us ...
Fair point, Kinney! I'll have to make an extra level of the chart, I think.
Excellent analysis. We should keep in mind that middle and high school students will all qualify by age to be voters very soon. For the most "disenfranchised " among them (by which I mean economically most vulnerable), participating in this new voting rights movement will make or break the new movement, just as participation of young people in Mississippi made the last voting rights movement possible. For those students to take an interest in the technical questions you so rightly raise, their material conditions must be understood and respected. The way to their political involvement is through attending to their current, year-round need for additional income that supports, rather than distracts from, their education. The political question can be separated from neither the educational questions nor from the economic desperation of young people in the 21st century.
This analysis resonates deeply with something I’ve been observing — that our democratic institutions have lost the structural integrity needed to support meaningful enfranchisement. I wrote about this recently in an essay called Democracy Without a Backbone, in case it’s helpful context for others thinking about the systemic side of this issue. https://sbixby.substack.com/p/democracy-without-a-backbone