Using Your Voice

With election season well underway, Smith has launched a campus-wide nonpartisan effort to get out the vote. Called Smith Votes, the initiative aims to educate students about the value of voting and boost civic engagement among members of the campus community by providing easy-to-access information about voter registration deadlines, polling locations, and opportunities to volunteer. Across campus, faculty are also incorporating lessons about the electoral process, the history of the vote, and policy issues in classes including Elections in the Political Order with Professor Howard Gold; Gender, Law, and Policy with Professor Carrie Baker; and The American Presidency with Professor Claire Leavitt, among others.

Here President Sarah Willie-LeBreton discusses how preparing to vote provides an opportunity to engage with different perspectives, how voting is one way to honor her own voice and experience, and what she hopes the entire community learns from the electoral process.

The United States has a checkered history in terms of ensuring that its citizens have a right to vote. Within that context, why is the Smith Votes initiative so important?
Smith Votes is important because it reminds us that voting is not automatic worldwide, even in this country. Many countries allow only a handful of people to make decisions for everyone else. And in our country, a backlash against the pluralism that has made the country strong and kind and interesting is being waged in disenfranchising folks. Voter suppression movements are active across the country, often by people who are sure they know what’s best for other people. When it comes to voting, the United States doesn’t just have a checkered history, it has an ignominious one. Extending the franchise beyond arbitrary physical and financial characteristics of the founders has been a struggle throughout the country’s history. I’m thrilled that Smith Votes is encouraging everyone who can vote to exercise their right and their responsibility at the ballot box.

Do you remember the first time you voted?
Yes, I voted in a Massachusetts primary the spring of my senior year of high school.

What would you say to someone who’s on the fence about voting?
For those who have the right to vote but are not sure they will, the last thing I’d want is for them to be afraid of doing so, afraid of not knowing enough, or afraid of doing the wrong thing. Before an election is a great time to speak with people you know are supporting different candidates to get their take on things (but you really do have to speak to folks supporting candidates from different parties!). It’s also an opportunity to go online and read about the candidates, understand their platforms, or hear them speak.

There are international students here at Smith who can’t vote in the presidential election—and there are others who aren’t permitted to vote in their home countries. What do you hope these students learn from watching the election season unfold and their peers prepare to vote?
There are students, faculty, and staff on campus from countries where they can vote at home and others from countries where they cannot. There are also students from democracies that may run much more effectively and inclusively than ours. So what I would say to all students, not just international students, is, take this opportunity to observe what’s happening in the U.S.—from how we vote, to when, to how our votes do and do not count, to whether there are different ways to vote and participate. In many ways, the United States isn’t only young as a nation, it’s young in terms of its participatory maturity as a democracy. There are many ways to ensure more participation, more inclusion, and more fairness. One of our greatest shortcomings as a nation is the belief that ultimately we’ll all just be fine, whether or not we vote, whether we nurture our democracy or not. But it has become very clear that we’re not “all fine” depending on our leaders and the power and influence they wield. In such a large nation with so many complex needs, increasing the times and places where we can all participate and weigh in on issues that directly impact our lives is central to the idea of freedom we hold dear, central to the quality of our lives, and central to our sense that we feel good about ourselves and our country.

Some people believe not voting is in itself a vote. What are your thoughts on the idea of not voting to send a message?
In deeply repressive societies, citizens usually have fewer means of making their voices heard. Not voting can be one of those ways. Certainly, in the U.S., those of us who are eager to encourage our fellow citizens to participate must also be part of the apparatus of encouragement. Many of us are doing a lot of other things: in school, working two jobs, raising families, exhausted, and maybe even depressed. But to encourage others to vote and to vote oneself is a kind of secular prayer: it’s putting into the universe (or the ballot box) one’s hope for a better future.

What inspires you to vote?
I think I can better express why I vote. First, voting honors the people before me who thought enough of themselves and their families and communities that they were willing to work hard, often putting their lives on the line, to participate in the governance of their communities and their country. Second, I see voting as taking responsibility for our neighbors and the kind of community and nation in which we want to live. And, third, I see voting as another way of honoring my own voice and experience, knowing that I am not all-knowing, but like each of us I contribute to the whole.

What role, if any, did your parents play in making you understand the importance of voting?
They helped us to understand that women, people of color, and people who didn’t own property were all denied the right to vote when this country was founded, and that voting was a way to honor our forebears who were denied the right to vote. They also helped me and my siblings to appreciate that we could affect change in our schools, our neighborhood, our community, any organization in which we participated. They appreciated that voting was not the only way to do so, but they encouraged us to be participants in our various communities.

At a time when tensions are high and political divisiveness is rampant, what message do you want to convey to the Smith community this election season?
It’s important to remind ourselves that people vote in ways that they believe will be good for them, their families, and the country. That means that if you have fundamental disagreements with others, the aim in a democracy is to persuade them of your position. That’s really hard to do when there are so many social magnets pulling us with a kind of justifiable righteousness toward calling each other names, canceling each other, and calling each other out as if we expect never to be called out. For those of us who are facile with language, know we have subdominant positions in the society and assume we are in the majority within our own more local communities, those magnets are, I think, particularly challenging to resist. There is never a time when we should stop being self-reflective, stop appreciating that regardless of the unfair systems of which we are apart, others were also not asked to whom to be born, and we only deepen our humanity when we treat others as we would like to be treated.