There Is More Work to be Done

Good morning! First, allow me to thank you all for supporting my petition to make the Georgia mail-in ballot system more accessible. I appreciate all of your support to eliminate modern-day voter suppression. So far, we have over 8,000 supporters. I truly could not have done this without you.

The 2020 Presidential Election is over, but there is still more work to be done.

Last week was a very tense week for America’s political climate and I am sure that all of you felt the pressure. Regardless of which side of the aisle you most identify with, we witnessed something amazing during this election season: historic voter turnout. It is wonderful that more voters than ever took the initiative to ensure that their voices were heard.

Despite the historic turnout, Georgians still have some work to do, both on individual and systemic levels. While the 2020 Presidential Election might have passed, we still have state and local elections to contend with. We cannot afford to overlook state and local elections. Local and state governments might not receive the same media coverage that the federal government does; however, state and local governments affect us more immediately and directly. We cannot afford to ignore the influence of local elections on the daily lives of Georgia residents.

As many of you know, the mail-in ballot system is far from perfect and many of us will be relying on this imperfect system for the foreseeable future. A considerable number of Georgia voters need a reliable mail-in ballot system for a whole host of reasons, including but not limited to:

Low-income voters for whom conventional voting methods are either inconvenient or inaccessible
Disabled voters for whom in-person voting can be difficult or impossible
Voters who wish to protect themselves from contracting COVID-19.
Minority voters for whom, historically, voting has been designed to be inconvenient and inaccessible.

There is an infinite number of reasons that Georgia voters need an improved and streamlined mail-in system, and the current one needs a lot of improvement. Hopefully, some of those improvements will occur before the January elections.

Multiple honest representatives from the state of Georgia, Fulton County, and Dekalb County have told me that the complexity of the mail-in ballot system is made deliberately complicated. The rules that govern them are deliberately made unclear and difficult to follow completely, designed to suppress votes that do not meet very narrow criteria. This is modern day voter suppression. This should have ended long ago, but sadly it has not.

That is where you come in, friends.

I propose that we make mail-in voting accessible and easy. We need transparent, easy to locate rules that are widely available to the public. I cannot say that I know precisely how to do that, but we must make it clear to Georgia’s state government that the current system isn’t functional and fully representative of everyone’s interests. For example, my ballot for the 2020 presidential election was never accounted for.

If you have not yet done so, please sign this petition demanding transparent, easy to locate rules regarding the mail-in ballot system. It is currently stacked again a great deal of Georgia voters and everyone’s voice deserves to be heard.

Thank you.

-Katherine