Voting Is a Creative Act

Bear with me. This piece IS about Creativity. I promise.

Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Today is E-88 in California.

If you are not an elections nerd—and after 35 years as a professional elections official, I freely admit that I am—that probably means absolutely nothing to you.

But it means something to me.

E-88 is the 88th day before Election Day. For many California municipal elections, today is the deadline for candidates to return their nomination papers and officially put their names forward to serve their communities. It’s like the Super Bowl for Municipal Clerks.

All over California today, City Clerks and elections officials will be checking signatures, accepting candidate statements, administering oaths, stamping documents, and watching the clock. Because yes, sometimes a candidate comes in at 4:49 and wants to run for City Council.

And sometime around 5:00 p.m. in many city halls, another field of candidates will be largely set for November.

There is something particularly meaningful about that happening one day after the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, after generations of Black Americans had been systematically denied meaningful access to the ballot through literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, bureaucratic barriers and outright violence.

The Fifteenth Amendment had supposedly guaranteed the right to vote 95 years earlier.

A constitutional promise, it turned out, was not the same thing as practical access to the ballot.

The Voting Rights Act was intended to help close that gap.

And its impact wasn’t simply about who could vote.

Voting rights affect who can realistically run. Those are two very different things.

They affect whether communities can organize and build political power. They affect whether voters have a meaningful opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. They affect whether a person can look at a city council, school board, state legislature or congressional delegation and imagine that perhaps there is a place for someone like them there, too.

That is why yesterday’s anniversary isn’t simply history.

It is very much a conversation about today.

Earlier this year, the United States Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, another chapter in the long-running debate over race, representation, redistricting and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

The case involved Louisiana’s congressional map and the creation of a second majority-Black congressional district after litigation over whether the state’s previous map diluted Black voting strength.

The Court ultimately concluded that the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create that additional district under the circumstances before it, and that the new district constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

The Court did not erase Section 2. In fact, it recognized that compliance with Section 2, properly construed, can provide a compelling interest for race-conscious districting.

But the decision narrowed the circumstances in which Section 2 can require that remedy. And that matters because district lines aren’t just shapes on a map.

They determine which voters get grouped together.

And sometimes, they determine whether a community has a realistic opportunity to elect a candidate of its choice.

I spent 35 years working professionally in elections, and if there is one thing that experience taught me, it is this:

Democracy doesn’t happen automatically.

We like to talk about democracy as though it is something we have.

I think it is something we do.

Over and over again.

Election after election.

Ballot after ballot.

I write a lot these days about creativity.

At first glance, elections might seem pretty far removed from that conversation.

But maybe they aren’t.

Creativity is, at its heart, the act of imagining something that doesn’t exist yet—and then taking some action to bring it into being.

Isn’t that what voting is?

Every time we fill in a ballot, we are participating in the creation of a future that does not exist yet.

We are saying:

This is the community I want.

These are the people I trust to lead it.

These are the values I want reflected in its decisions.

This is what I want us to become.

A ballot is an extraordinarily small piece of paper carrying an extraordinarily large idea.

And nobody else should create that future for you.

Not a political party.

Not a cable news network.

Not an algorithm.

Not your Facebook feed.

Not your spouse.

Not your parents.

Not your friends.

And certainly not the loudest person in the room.

You.

Before you vote this November, research the people whose names appear on your ballot.

And please—especially in local elections—go beyond the mailers.

Read candidate statements. Visit websites. Look at voting records when they exist. Attend a forum. Watch a council meeting. Read local coverage from multiple sources.

If you have the opportunity, actually talk to the candidates.

Ask hard questions.

Ask what they believe.

Ask what they understand about the office they are seeking.

Ask them what they would do when the popular decision and the right decision aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Ask them how they handle disagreement.

Ask them who they listen to.

Then make up your own mind.

You may vote exactly the way your political party recommends.

You may reach the same conclusion as your favorite commentator.

You may agree completely with your spouse, your best friend or your mother.

That’s fine.

Just make sure the conclusion is yours.

Because people fought for that privilege.

People marched for it.

People were beaten for it.

People were jailed for it.

And people died believing that Americans they would never meet should someday have the ability to walk into a polling place—or sit at their kitchen table with a vote-by-mail ballot—and decide for themselves who should govern them.

Sixty-one years after the Voting Rights Act was signed, the laws are still being interpreted. The maps are still being drawn. Courts are still deciding what protections the Act requires and what the Constitution permits.

Those debates matter enormously.

But there is one piece of this system that still belongs to each of us.

Our vote.

So whatever your politics are, use it.

Research.

Question.

Think.

Choose.

Vote.

Because democracy isn’t something other people create for us.

We create it together.

And that may be one of the most consequential creative acts any of us will ever perform.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more creative inspiration. I promise. But just for today, can we think about our country’s future and what you’d like to create?

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