Everyone and their Will Ferrell encourages you to vote whenever an election comes up. But is voting really important? If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, you’ve never been targeted by someone in power who wants you to stop from voting. All In shows how for large chunks of the US population, The Fight for Democracy is real, and endless, and it is only when we use our power that we can overcome it.
The movie uses the concept of voter suppression, and builds it around the most recent Georgia governor’s race between Brian Kemp, a lifelong white politician, and Stacey Abrams, an African American female upstart. From there, Abrams takes us through her upbringing and the documentarians tie her story to the historical look at voter suppression in the United States, it’s causes, and how hard voting can still be today.
All In is a wonderful entry point into the concept of suppressing the vote for someone who knows nothing on the subject. The movie points out how the US started with all the right democratic ideas, it just rolled out those ideas to white men only for about 70 years. Amendments were then need to account for black men. Then another 50 years for women. Then, over the next 50 years, those rights were covertly stripped away through Jim Crow laws like poll taxes and the grandfather clauses most obviously but, like with Asian immigrants in California, laws tended to be put in place to restrict an ethnic minority ascending to power from reaching that power. And so began the back and forth fighting for the right to vote for those ethnic minorities. Sometimes justice prevails (the Civil Rights Act), and sometimes it doesn’t (a Conservative Supreme court striking down the Voting Rights Act, leading to new Jim Crow laws like Voter ID requirements, felony disenfranchisement, poll closures and voter roll purges). For someone like me, it’s a sobering reminder that what should be a right for everyone is a privilege in practice for many, and it’s up to me to use my voice to stop that from happening.
The secret weapon in The Fight For Democracy is the truly inspiring Stacey Abrams, whose stock has only risen since the 2020 election. Her detailing of her life story explains why she cares so much about the right to vote, and why people choose to follow and listen to her. Her presence also helps All In, because all of the new examples of voter suppression were on display in her Georgia gubernatorial race, a race so compromised the person who won (Brian Kemp) was in charge of overseeing his own election. Seems just a smidge biased right? Dude also closed 214 polling places and purged 1.4 million voters from the voter rolls, targeting generally the more African-American parts of Georgia, which in the past, vote primarily Democrat, which Abrams is. Where did poll closures and voter roll purges come up? Oh yeah, the paragraph above, as examples of the new Jim Crow. These suppressions are meant to stop voter fraud from happening as Kemp and other politicians in power say, but those claims are unfounded, because well, voter fraud rates are so infinitesimally small it doesn’t really exist on a mass scale. All these little things like requiring and ID to vote or consistently having to reregister to vote seem benign on the surface, but because the people affected tend to be urban, and more racially diverse in representation, the summation amounts to Conservative, mostly white ruling class keeping blacks, latinos, asians, and other ethnic minorities in a perpetual underrepresented class of people. That means no problems affecting those communities ever get heard, let alone solved.
The final message of All In is in Stacey Abrams’s truly spectacular speech after the Georgia election, where she admits she lost, but does not concede. Why? “Because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper” as she says. The Fight For Democracy is also something Abrams walks the walk for, talking about how she is going to mobilize a coalition of voters to stay engaged and fight for their democracy. If 2020 is any indication, I’d say suppressors have a major brawler on their hands in Abrams, a beacon for all those American ideals we want in our leaders.