It’s one vote, so it’s natural to be deeply invested. At its core, that’s the dynamic that has been playing out during the exhausting, combative months leading up to the general election. Regardless of the method – and there have been dangerous, criminal, unacceptable ones – underneath it is a passion for that one vote to be a winner.
It’s not our place – nor your place, nor his place, nor her place – to choose for another. That’s why we have one vote. And when each and every vote has been properly tallied, there’s a winner, fair and square.
And that one vote? It’s precious.
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the U.S. Constitution’s 15th Amendment, ratified Feb. 3, 1870, promises.
But that promise didn’t include women. They had to fight a separate, decades-long battle, filing petitions in court and holding protests that sometimes turned violent, resulting in picketers becoming injured, jailed and beaten before the 19th Amendment was passed Aug. 18, 1920, paving the way for their right to cast a vote.
This movement had roots in the 1848 Seneca Falls convention – a full 72 years before they won their battle. On March 3, 1919, they descended on Washington for the Woman Suffrage Procession, the first of its kind and also the largest organized political march in Washington ever at the time.
These were just everyday women, like Ella Findeisen, a German immigrant who lived on Colby Street in Lawrence.
Findeisen was a 35-year-old bookkeeper working at the family dairy Nov. 9, 1917, when a friend who had just returned from Washington asked her to take her place on the picket line outside the White House, reporter Terry Date wrote in a story celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in 2020.
The friend and fellow suffragist, Methuen dressmaker Eleanor Calnan, had just served 60 days in jail for picketing, and was worried about returning too soon. Findeisen, a former mill worker and supporter of progressive causes, said yes. She traveled 450 miles to the nation’s capital and the next day, Nov. 10, she and 40 other picketers were arrested.
Given a choice between a fine or imprisonment, Findeisen chose prison and was sentenced to 30 days. During her stay at the Occoquan Workhouse she experienced the historic Night of Terror on Nov. 14, when the superintendent ordered guards to beat suffragists. She was among the last to be released from confinement — and she continued to fight for the cause.
Although Black men were expressly given the right to vote in the 15th Amendment, that didn’t mean they could. Racist government officials found creative ways to block them from doing so in many, many places.
Just 60 years ago, Albert Turner, a young college graduate with a bachelor’s degree from Alabama A&M, tried to register to vote upon returning home to Marion, Alabama. But at the Perry County Courthouse, he was presented with a challenge he could not meet.
“They had tests asking how many words in the Constitution, what side the moon was on, any kind of silliness,” Turner, who eventually became involved in voter registration efforts in Selma, Alabama, later told journalist Howell Raines for “My Soul is Rested,” an oral history about the civil rights movement.
“I’m serious, it was all kinds of jive,” Turner said. “They got so bad once after we started trying to learn how to pass the tests … they decided then they’d make up a book of tests with about 300 or 400 tests in it. You’d walk up to the desk, and they’d tell you to open the book, and whatever page you opened the book on, that would be your test. And this was fixed where you never would be able to pass the test. You couldn’t learn all the tests in the book.”
These tests were allowed to interfere with the rights of Black people until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act deemed them invalid in 26 states.
And so, all of this is to demonstrate what a serious matter our one vote is. Low voter turnout is a chronic problem in our country, so one very notable positive outcome of an impassioned voter base is that more people exercise their right.
Turnout in the 2020 U.S. general election soared to levels not seen in decades, according to the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. Propelled by the high emotions surrounding the Biden-Trump presidential race – and with the help of new mail-in and early voting rules put in place due to the pandemic – more than 158.4 million people mobilized, or 62.8% of people old enough to vote. That was up from 47.5% in the 2018 midterms, a turnout that was also unusually high.
Each and every one of us, regardless of political affiliation, has been bombarded with noise and spin from every angle for months. There’s anger, weariness, and sadly, fear. So for a moment, let’s take a pause to ask ourselves this: Come Tuesday, when I walk along a sidewalk crowded with fellow voters and candidates to cast my one vote, will I consider becoming part of the solution?
Will I stop to shake the hand of someone holding the wrong color sign?