Georgia on my mind - What if we treated votes as speech?

 

The remarkably gigantic leap backward recently taken by the State of Georgia on voting rights has reawakened a line of thinking about voting that my mom kindled in me with her words back in 1964 when I was five. Now, you might ask yourself, what on earth could a mother have said to her five-year-old daughter related to voting rights back in 1964? And that would be the point, she didn’t talk about voting rights she talked about her how her vote was the way she made herself heard. It was her speech.

On election day in 1964, my mom took me with her to go vote. We walked into the polling place, and after a brief discussion with the polling ladies, I stood with her and watched her vote. As she was filing in her ballot, she looked down with her most serious mom face, and said the following, “Rachael, voting is one of the most important things you can do. It is how I tell the government what I want and make myself heard.” Now, she also taught me to write letters, make signs and all other manners of “speech” to let the government know what I’m thinking. But that idea that my vote is speech has stuck with me my whole life.

And it seems to me that it’s an idea whose time may have come. What would happen if we shifted the argument around voting rights to include suppression of political speech? Make a First Amendment argument against voter suppression by making the voting, and the vote, itself a form of speech. In the simplest of terms, a vote is the official form of speech in an election. Whether it’s by raising your hand, saying “yea” or “nay”, or a paper ballot for confidentiality. The act of voting, the vote, is the speech. If the ballot is the only method for that speech to be heard, and government infringes on it by making it unduly difficult for me, it would follow they have suppressed my First Amendment right to free speech guaranteed under the Constitution. Now, I realize that this is a very simplified argument, and there are lawyerly nuances to be made. But for those who think that the legal argument seems far-fetched; I would simply say this: If a corporation’s money is speech, then a vote sure as hell is.

 

Rachael A. Heade
March 30, 2021