Dear John,
As we look ahead to this fall and the 2024 election cycle, feminists are drawing attention to and working to counter the ways in which Republican-dominated state legislatures are working overtime to suppress voting, particularly by young people and communities of color. One of those feminists is Anderson Clayton—who at 25 is heading up North Carolina’s Democratic Party, making her the youngest party chair in the country, Republican or Democratic.
In our fall issue, Clayton tells Ms. that her strategy for expanding the party’s base is to focus on young voters and rural communities—groups she believes the party has neglected for too long. “We need to demonstrate that we care about people nobody else has cared about,” she says. (Read more about Clayton in the fall issue—get your copy here!) But in trying to capture more of those votes, she’s running up against a formidable foe: North Carolina's long history of partisan gerrymandering, which has made it one of the most gerrymandered states in the country.
Gerrymandering has been used with a vengeance by Republican legislatures to suppress votes. In Alabama—another severely gerrymandered state—a federal court once again struck down the state’s congressional map this week. The three-judge panel ruled that the map, which was supposed to be redrawn to create a second majority-Black district per a surprise Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, failed to do so, and called for it to be drawn yet again, this time by an independent party as opposed to the Republican-controlled state legislature.
“We have now said twice that this Voting Rights Act case is not close,” wrote the judges. “And we are deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”
In Ohio, a grassroots campaign spearheaded by Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights has successfully gathered the required number of signatures needed to place a measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution on the November 2023 ballot. But first, abortion rights supporters had to defeat a maneuver intended to block the constitutional amendment by increasing the threshold of votes required for passage from 50 percent plus 1 to 60 percent. The Republican-dominated legislature had placed a referendum before the voters in a special August election counting on low voter turnout to win. But instead, voter turnout broke records and the measure was defeated by a 14-point margin.
Proponents of the November abortion rights measure are confident. “Based on what I have seen in Ohio, and how I know that Ohioans are in support of not having the government making their medical decisions for them...and having the right to access abortion, and just the breadth of groups that are in support of this, I believe that we will be successful in November,” Dr. Lauren Beene, executive director of Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, tells Ms. in our fall issue. “We have to be successful here so we can carry the torch for the next group of states who are trying to do this in 2024.”
Measures protecting abortion have succeeded across the country in a number of states, including California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont. Abortion rights ballot measures are being teed up in a number of other states as we head into 2024. Ms. will be reporting on these efforts.
Now more than ever is the time for feminists to pay attention to voter suppression tactics, and for us to be working to ensure access to the ballot box—because our lives depend on it.
Onward,
