CLC and many, many others spent months preparing for Election Day. Now, Election Day is behind us, and the nation is moving forward.
I’ve had a chance to breathe and write to you, and while much attention is focused on Washington right now, I want to take some time to recognize American voters.
Voters from all walks of life — young and old, rural and urban, from all parts of the country — turned out to vote in record numbers during a global pandemic.
The voter turnout in 2020 was historic:
It’s the highest number of voters in American history, and it’s projected to have the highest rate of turnout since 1900, when William McKinley won re-election with a much smaller portion of the U.S. population even eligible to vote — women could not exercise the right to vote then, for a start.
Expanding and defending access to safe and secure voting helped make this record turnout possible. As CLC’s Paul Smith said in a new video, a lot of public officials and advocacy organizations, including CLC, put in a tremendous amount of work to defend democracy.
For CLC’s part, we fought for democracy, and voters won. We fought for better access to voting in states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Tennessee. We achieved victories that mattered beyond the states where our litigation was directly focused.
In Pennsylvania, CLC advocated for better signature match policies. In response to a CLC lawsuit, the Pennsylvania Secretary of State issued guidance, in accordance with state law, that gave the more than 2.6 million Pennsylvania voters who voted absentee this fall more confidence that their ballots wouldn’t be rejected due to perceived discrepancies in handwriting, all while maintaining measures to ensure the security of ballots.
In Rhode Island, CLC also won an important case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, allowing voters to cast an absentee ballot without a witness present—an important change during a pandemic. CLC’s victory helped affirm good precedent that has been helpful in other legal battles this year, and absentee voting and overall turnout in Rhode Island increased dramatically.
These are just two examples, but every legal victory mattered, and the record turnout shows us that expanding access to voting works. These policies should be used in every election—so voters have the ability to participate in our democracy. We need to continue to fight for them.
The historic turnout is a victory, but what happened this year shows that the fight for democracy is as important as ever. Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, reminds us that this really wasn’t a smooth election, especially for voters of color. This election saw long lines, voter intimidation and deliberate attempts to make voting difficult during a pandemic, and voters of color were disproportionately impacted. For one example, just two weeks before Election Day, CLC attorneys were in Arizona working with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe to try to restore an early voting site so voters wouldn’t have to make a two-hour round trip to vote early during the pandemic. Situations like this happened across the country, and it’s important that they are addressed and prevented from happening again.
Voters decided this election. They’re ready to move forward, and most of us believe that if democracy is to work for all of us, it must include all of us. We have work to do. Free and fair elections that include every voter are a fundamental cornerstone of a free, prosperous and just society. Democracy — and voters — are worth fighting for.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center advances democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
