Our Most Powerful Tool, But Not the Only One
Voting is the primary way we shape our democracy. But without a commitment to protecting democratic values and institutions, it won’t be enough.
In the opening paragraphs of the 1963 Supreme Court case that gave rise to American Atheists, Madalyn Murray O’Hair summarized her beliefs as an atheist to the Court. “An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death,” she wrote. “He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated.”
That “involvement in life” is a foundational value for all of us as atheists, regardless of our individual political views. The knowledge that this is the one life we have to live motivates us to build a better world for ourselves and for those who come after us. Whether it’s something as (seemingly) straightforward as making it easier to be an atheist in America or something as complex and world-defining as confronting climate change, our involvement in life takes different forms depending on the issues we’re trying to solve.
Generally, however, individual steps paired with collective action make the difference. Right at the intersection of those approaches is voting.
The power to vote, as civil rights icon John Lewis once said, is the “most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society.” Our ability to act collectively to solve society’s problems is predicated on our decision to vote, on our ability to exercise that right, and whether or not our vote makes a difference.
But two of those parts of the equation—the responsiveness of the system to our vote and our ability to cast that vote in the first place—face grave threats. To be sure, these threats are not new. But the intensity of the attacks and the speed at which they are accelerating certainly is.
With the completion of the most recent census, fights over congressional redistricting consumed many news cycles over the past year. But less well covered were fights over state legislative districts. In multiple perennial swing states, existing legislative majorities have used their power to lock in a decade of non-competitive elections, insulating their members from political accountability.
In Georgia, a state which elected two Democratic Senators in 2020 and where the 2018 gubernatorial race was won by Republican Brian Kemp by just 55,000 votes, the Republican-controlled legislature drew state Senate election maps which have the median Senate seat 15 points more Republican and the median House seat 10 points more Republican than the state as a whole. And in Wisconsin, the state’s highest court sided with the already gerrymandered state legislature in a fight with Democratic Governor Tony Evers and chose state House and Senate maps with even greater skew than Georgia’s, locking in Republican supermajorities in both chambers for another 10 years.
While these are two of the most egregious examples, they’re not the only ones. Texas, Florida, and Ohio all saw their state houses become less competitive, less reflective of their electorate, and less likely to respond to changing political preferences of their voters.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, ruled that partisan gerrymandering is not an issue federal courts can weigh in on. The solution, Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his 5–4 majority decision, is at the ballot box, not in the courtroom.
In states where voter-initiated ballot measures are available, people have done just that. Voters in California, Colorado, and Michigan enacted independent redistricting commissions through state ballot initiatives, taking control of their redistricting plans away from politicians. The results are crystal clear: the maps drawn by these independent commissions are more competitive, more reflective of the state’s overall partisan makeup, and more transparently drawn.
But only about half of states have this option in the first place. And it should come as no surprise that the states where partisan gerrymandering is the most extreme are far less likely to have this form of direct democracy available to voters.
Chief Justice Roberts’s decision in Rucho also ignores the fact that the simple act of voting is becoming harder in the first place. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, in 2021, at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting, including measures making it illegal to drop off a friend’s ballot, reducing the number of polling places or early vote days, adding additional barriers to registration, implementing stricter signature matching, and even prohibiting the distribution of water or snacks to voters waiting in line.
In Pennsylvania, state lawmakers have been litigating over whether or not a simple error—omitting a date on the outer envelope of a mail-in ballot—is enough to void an otherwise legal vote. In Texas, new requirements for absentee ballots seemed intentionally designed to make it harder to vote. State lawmakers can hardly claim ignorance about the effects of these laws. Remi Garza, an election official in Cameron County, told The New York Times, “We anticipated this, we expressed it to the Legislature, but it went unheeded.”
These major structural obstacles to voting—and to political responsiveness—are bad enough on their own. But then they combine to create a feeling of powerlessness, sow distrust in institutions, and lead to disengagement and cynicism. There is no easy answer here. Simply admonishing our fellow citizens to “vote harder” isn’t enough. Small changes and improvements can help, but once confidence in the system and trust in institutions disappears, they’re much harder to revive.
If conquering disease, vanquishing poverty, and eliminating war are still on our agenda after almost 60 years, it’s vital that we redouble our commitment to democracy and involvement in this life by fighting to expand voting access, end political gerrymandering, and create a more responsive political system.
The cliché that we have to “vote like our rights depend on it” is, in this case, true. But the act of voting isn’t enough. True believers—and rank opportunists—pushing election denialism will fan the flames of conspiracy theories and use the outcomes of races, win or lose, to justify further restrictions on the right to vote. Their actions will further undermine confidence in our systems, leading voters further down the path toward disengagement and nihilism.
There’s no magic antidote here. But our belief that this life isn’t a dress rehearsal for some mystic afterlife demands that we fight like hell for our values while we can. And voting is just the first part of that fight.
