Use the Vote, Choose the Vote

“The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”

Our late civil rights leader and Congressman, John Lewis, wrote these stirring words on his deathbed, and I consider it our responsibility to live by them. This was especially important during the presidential election on November third, which many would argue was the most important election ever. One woman has done more than her part to assist with this poll - my mother, Dr. Marjorie Pak, Ph.D., who teaches at Emory University.

I interviewed my mother to get details about the work she’s done to help and encourage people to vote and to get her opinion on our voting system as a whole. The first thing I asked was for her to describe - in detail - the work that she’s been doing.

“The first thing I did was to email the Human Resources at Emory to try to get more time off for voters on election day,” she told me. “And it worked! Before I talked to them, people got just two hours off to vote, and only if they worked a twelve-hour shift that day. Now they get four hours off, regardless of how much they work. Then, I started trying to educate my students - I sent them lots of materials about voting, and I made flyers and slideshows and pamphlets for my students, and then I circulated them to other people on Next Door (a social app) and to the faculty at Emory so that they could then pass them on. I talked to some student groups, and I gave presentations to them, and then one of the members asked me to give a presentation to his mosque, so I did that too. I found information on the Secretary of State’s website on who had already voted, and who had asked for a ballot and had not returned it yet - that’s a sign that they may not have gotten it in the mail. So I got that information and I found out who on that list - it’s a list of thousands, tens of thousands of people - and then I filtered it down and found all of the people who had Emory addresses, and then I emailed directly to them and told them what to do if they hadn’t gotten their ballot. I also did some volunteering through groups. I did phone banking - telling people where to go to vote, and how to vote, giving them information about voting . . .”

“That’s an interesting question,” said my mother thoughtfully. “Until very recently, I thought it was very bad that voting was managed locally - you know, each state - each county - has its own election laws. And that’s true. But also, in some ways, it’s a good thing because it would be very difficult for any one person to mess with all of our elections - they’d have to mess with so many different counties and states, all over the place. But I also think there are more problems with the voting system. You know, in Georgia, you have to be registered to vote a month before the election. It’s kind of silly - there’s no reason for that. There are places where you can register the same day you vote - there’s no reason for Georgia to have that special rule. There are also some places where there’s no early voting at all, actually. And there are some states that automatically mail every registered voter a ballot. That makes it really easy to vote - you just fill out the ballot and mail it back, so you don’t have to worry about where to go. There are lots of different things we could do to make voting easier.”