P.S. I'm so convinced that we need to talk more about voting that I want to hear about your work. What voting conversations are you having and what are you learning through them?

Reply to this email and tell me about it. Or drop a note in our Civic Learning Community and start a conversation there. 

A number of stories in the last couple of weeks require that we also talk honestly about the forces working against the democratic principles that we so often celebrate when encouraging others to vote.

Voter Suppression in the United States 

Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, is relentless on Twitter. At every mention of voter fraud, he is there to recast the content of the statement as an effort designed to suppress votes. Did you notice that the script above included planning on what ID to use?

From 107,000 Georgia voters purged from the rolls via "Use it or lose it" laws to misleading mailers, we have seen old tricks made new again. There's even a new concept up for discussion, "information terrorism." 

[Talk more about "information terrorism" in our Civic Learning Community here]

Stifling an Oppositional Press

Saudi Arabia murdered a Washington Post journalist, a Virginia resident and one of their most outspoken critics. While the terror of the Saudi regime is not new, it still seems important to take a moment to reflect on what we can learn from Jamal Kashoggi. 

In February of this year, 2017 was declared to be "one dangerous year" for journalists with 34 arrests in the United States and 262 journalists arrested around the world. 2017 was more dangerous than 2016 and it's easy to imagine that statistics for 2018 will continue the trend. 

The Washington Post published a blank page with Kashoggi's byline as they waited for news about his well-being. There was a column they expected but he never had the chance to send. So, they published his last column with the headline:
 

Kashoggi offers this insight into what we all lose when we lose a free press.

First he shares that there is only one country in the Arab world described as free according to the 2018 “Freedom in the World” report. Then he observes: 

"As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed. They are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives. A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative. Sadly, this situation is unlikely to change."
 

There's an art project in Texas that seeks to do the same work we have discussed here. The artist, John Fiege, has sought out young Texan voters to tell their stories through the I Will Vote Project. He explains his work as an effort to lift up the young Texans who see how their lives "intersect with politics" and make it possible for their less engaged peers can follow their lead. Portraits of these young voters are presented alongside videos and other artwork representing the issues that motivate them. 

Fiege's mission is one that Politicolor wants to lift up too. He explains: