Voting Rights as a Reproductive Justice Issue

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Everybody who is of voting age has the right to register to vote, vote in an election, and have their votes accurately tallied. It might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about it, but voting rights are an important part of reproductive health, rights, and justice. Marcela Howell, President and CEO of In Our Own Voice, the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, sits down with us to discuss why exercising your right to vote is critical in achieving reproductive justice for all.

Due to caveats within voting laws during and after the suffrage movement, black women’s right to vote continued to be oppressed for years. While promised in both the 15th and 19th amendments, it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that black women and men gained the right to vote.

Currently, the Republican Party is working steadily to alienate voters. Some of the tactics include voter purging, voter ID laws, signature matching on absentee ballots, and moving or closing polling places. This voter fraud works to totally disenfranchise black people, immigrants who are eligible to vote, and young people. H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2019, would help secure and protect the right to vote.

Reproductive justice is a human rights frame that says there is intersectional ability to be in control of your body, your health, your sex life, and your family. To be in control of that, you have to be able to vote for candidates, vote to remove candidates from office, and vote for or against initiatives that may threaten or support reproductive freedom.

Voting isn’t just reserved for presidential elections or Congress. When you vote for initiatives, state legislatures, mayors, governors, city council members, or judges, it make a major difference.

Links from this episode

In Our Own Voice on Facebook
In Our Own Voice on Twitter
Blackwomen.vote
H.R. 1 Information

Transcript

Jennie Wetter: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back a podcast on all things repro. I'm your host Jenny Wetter. In each episode, I'll be taking you to the front lines of the escalating fight over our sexual and reproductive health and rights at home and abroad. Each episode, I will be speaking with leaders who are fighting to protect our reproductive health and rights to ensure that no one's reproductive health depends on where they live. It's time for repros to fight back.

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Jennie Wetter: welcome to rePROS Fight Back. I'm really looking forward to today's discussion because we're gonna talk about something that you might not normally think about when you think about reproductive health, rights and justice, but it's really important to ensuring we can achieve reproductive justice. So today we're going to dig into voting rights, um, helping me do that. I am really excited to have with me Marcella Howell who is the president and CEO of In Our Own Voice, the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda. Hi Marcella.

Marcella Howell: Hi. How are you?

Jennie Wetter: Good. How are you?

Marcella Howell: I'm fine.

Jennie Wetter: Thank you so much for being here.

Marcella Howell: You're welcome. I'm really excited too.

Jennie Wetter: I'm really excited. I think this is something that people don't necessarily think about when they think about reproductive justice, but it's so important.

Marcella Howell: Well, the thing is, is that reproductive justice is, um, sort of encapsulates a whole lot of different issues and voting rights is, is probably at its core. So most people, when they think of anything that says reproductive at the beginning, they think it's all about abortion rights, family planning, contraceptives. But reproductive justice is much more expansive than that. And it's around empowering women of color. So voting rights has always been a key component of that because if you don't understand that you have to vote in order to change policy, then you miss out on a lot of things. So voting rights, when we did our 116th congress policy priorities, voting rights for In Her Own Voice was, it's one of the top priorities.

Jennie Wetter: Yeah, I mean, and rightly so. Um, so let's roll back for a second and go, what do we mean when we say voting rights? What are we talking about?

Marcella Howell: Well, everybody who is of age voting age has the right to register to vote in elections and have their votes counted accurately. And what we have seen in the past, you know, everybody talks about how women got the right to vote through the 20th you know, and, and the reality is white women got the right to vote because there was a deal that basically allowed southern states to put all kinds of caveats on it so that black women could not vote. So there were a lot of different pieces that said that you had to have all this information that they didn't require white women voters to have when they came to register to vote. That prevented black women from voting for years and years and years. And it was not until the voting rights act that was introduced basically gave black women and black men, the right to vote, just as they had been promised, the right to vote in both the 15th amendment and the 19th amendment. And so what we're looking at now is there is a move within, well, I have to say it's within the Republican Party to disenfranchise voters. And they come up with a lot of different schemes to do it. One of the biggest ones is voter purges. They will, if you vote in one election, let's say you vote for a presidential election, but you don't vote in the midterms or you don't vote in the mayoral races or the state legislative races, a lot of states say that you can be purged from the voter rolls and you don't know that you've been purged until you go to vote. And they say, well, we don't have your name because they don't have to send you anything. They just take you off and list you as a non voter because, or they'll send you out these little postcards that most people get and they just look at it and go like, well, I'm already registered, I don't have to do anything like that. So they just throw it away. And what that card says is you have to return this to prove that you still live where you live. So voter purging is one of the big, big pushes. And then of course we had a whole group of states that were passing these voter ID laws that said you had to show ID to vote and that sounds logical until you really think about the impact and you had to show either some kind of official ID with your picture on it . And they, some states said the official ID had to be a driver's license or a state issued ID and if you didn't drive and you live very far away from a motor vehicle place where you could go and get your state ID essentially you were again disenfranchised. And many places they would only ask ID in black polling places, polling places that predominantly black or brown people came to vote and so they wouldn't ask for ID in white neighborhoods, they would only ask for an in black and again that was a way, a purging. Absentee ballots was another one. If you there the pass laws, it said your signature had to be an exact match for what they had on file at the state. Which means if you signed your marriage license and you put your middle initial in it because they asked for it, but you basically sign your name without the middle initial, and they would look at a voter of an absentee ballot and say, well, this isn't the right signature, so this person isn't the right person. This is a forge thing. And they would toss it out. And that's what happened in Georgia and Georgia, you know, Kemp did everything. He basically purged voters. He withheld registrations and wouldn't certify them. He threw out absentee ballots without notifying people so that they could come and, and verify that that really was their signatures. He cut down early voting places, um, did, uh, moved voting places around.

Jennie Wetter: Didn't he close some?

Marcella Howell: He closed some so that people who always went to vote one place got there and there were no, that wasn't a ballot. They couldn't vote. And they didn't know where else to go. In some places, like in Texas, they actually send out to a historically black college the wrong addresses to put on their registration forms.

Jennie Wetter: I think I missed that. Wow.

Marcella Howell: Yeah. At at Prairie View A&M. And essentially they said, well this is what you should put on there. And they gave two different addresses. So one of those addresses was wrong. And so a whole bunch of people that put that address were told they couldn't vote and you know, and there was push back from the school and from other people from, from other legal entities. And they finally said, whatever you have on there is fine. But that would have disenfranchised a lot of people. And it was targeted at black voters on that campus. So a lot of that kind of stuff happened. And, and they were able to do this because originally under the Voting Rights Act, any state that wanted to change something that was gonna make it harder for people to vote, had to get preclearance from the Justice Department. The supreme court in Shelby threw that out threw out that mechanism and it was specifically in there because so many southern states basically did things that prevented black people from voting. And so that was what they had to do and they threw it out. So because they said, well, we're in a different time period now and this doesn't happen. Well what it did is it gave a signal to all these conservative governors and conservative secretaries of state and state legislature, passed all of these that essentially made it harder to vote.

Marcella Howell: And that's the big problem right now. We have that as a problem and nobody's really addressing it. I mean, the, the problems we had in Georgia and Florida, in Texas, in North Dakota, you go to the courts and the courts will say, it's too close to the election for us to do anything. Come back to us later. And then you come back later after the election is over and people have lost because the elections were rigged. Um, and it's too late. So maybe you get some things passed to fix it, but it doesn't deter people because there's no longer that preclearance. And with this justice department, they're not going to investigate voting fraud. And it's fascinating because it'd be, think about it. Trump had this big, um, task force he set up to, to watch voting fraud, and they couldn't find any. So they had to disband the task force. And then the only parties that they found voter fraud in, um, in the 2018 election was in North Carolina, in a district that was predominantly Republican, where Republican won. And it turned out the voting fraud was they had people going around collecting people's absentee ballots and filling them out for them. The, you know, and they, the election board overturned that election and said, no, this was invalid and we're going to have to have a whole new election so they'll have a whole new election. The person who won decided not to run again. So if nothing else, there are examples of voter voter fraud and voter manipulation that disenfranchise black people, immigrants who are eligible to vote and young people. And we need to try and do things about that.

Jennie Wetter: You know, this is something that I really hear about. I'm originally from Wisconsin and that's somewhere where you've really seen a lot of these laws passed and you really saw it impacting the 2016 election. Um, and I remember when I was first able to vote with the very first time I voted in, um, college and I really, I just could show up at the voting place. There was same day registration. I didn't need an ID or anything and I just showed up in, um, voted and now it's so different.

Marcella Howell: And you would expect that in this country people would make it easier instead of harder to vote. And um, but it's all about politics. It's all about who has the power to disenfranchise somebody else who's not going to vote for them. And that's what we saw in Georgia. I mean, Kemp was the secretary of state, he had the power to basically manipulate voting in a race that he was running for. Right. And you kind of think, if nothing else, he should have recused himself from that. And absolutely the court should have said, no, you cannot be secretary of state, manipulate all this voting and run for governor in the same race. No, you've got to do one or the other. But he did. They, nobody said anything. He did it. And despite people, you know, challenging it, the challenge never really happened because the courts didn't do anything. The governor didn't do anything and he was able to manipulate himself into winning. And everybody still thinks, you know, Stacey Abrams won that. But for all of these different things, this man did, she won. And, um, so he is, as far as I'm concerned and a legitimate governor.

Jennie Wetter: And you know, it's not just the people who show up and aren't able to vote. It's the people who are then pushed to like, I'm just not even gonna bother to show up because I'm not going to be able to vote. I've been hearing all these things and so I clearly can't vote. And so they don't go when actually they may be able to, right.

Marcella Howell: Cause when you go, if they're, if you're challenged on it, you can always vote a provisional ballot. And the problem is provisional ballots get counted if the race is really close. Right. But you can do that. You can go ahead and do that. And then, um, have like the lawyers committees and others that monitor these election, the leadership conference, the ACLU, basically push to make sure your vote is counted. But you know, we recently did a poll of women of color and one of the things that was fascinating is um, almost 30% of women of color said they weren't sure their vote actually was counted. Now when you're in here, you are in America and people are voting and people are literally not too sure, like I voted, but I'm not sure if they really counted my vote because of all of these discrepancies and all of these illegal activity. I call it illegal. I don't care if the state legislature did pass these laws. It's illegal activity because it is stopping people from voting and voting is a right in this country. You Register, you're a citizen, you register, you should be able to vote and your vote should be counted. Doesn't make any difference about this. I think voter purging is illegal and should be illegal. It should not be allowed to happen. Doesn't matter how often you vote. If you register, you are registered for life and you should not have your, your, your, um, name taken off the voting rolls. Um, people who have been formerly incarcerated, once they have done their time and they have finished their parole, they should be able to vote again. And of course that's one of the other laws that disenfranchises mostly black and brown men and women because they are in this criminal justices system, they are the most highly incarcerated. And so they come out and they lose all of their rights as citizens. And the right to vote should not be something that you lose simply because you went to jail.

Jennie Wetter: Yeah. No. And you've seen some states I like say Oregon or Washington that has gone to automatic voter registration. So even just take that extra step out where you just are automatically registered and you don't have to worry about, oh no, I missed the deadline that was six months out or exactly whatever. And it really, we should be making it easier for people to vote.

Marcella Howell: We should have same day registration.

Jennie Wetter: Absolutely.

Marcella Howell: And Election Day should be a holiday. So that everybody can come and not have to worry about missing work or anything we should be doing. I mean, we look at other countries that we call third world countries, and their voting numbers are like high in the 90% and we barely, barely crack 40%. I mean, this is outrageous. We're supposed to be the country that that is for democracy. And one of the foundations of democracy is the right to vote to choose your own elected officials.

Jennie Wetter: Well, and that goes back to what you were saying with your polling where 30% of the people in the poll you had didn't believe that their vote was counted. Well, why would you keep voting if that's true? Right? So it's another form of disenfranchisement. If you don't believe your vote matters or it gets counted, you're not going to vote.

Marcella Howell: Right? And if you come and you have somebody you want to vote for, you vote, but you see all these other things happening in your state that disenfranchised other people, then you're going to say, it's rigged. Why should I even bother? It's rigged. And, um, so you decide not to vote. And one of the things that we've been trying to encourage people around is to encourage them to actually vote and then monitor what they're the people they voted for do in terms of their votes, whether they're in the state legislature, whether they're governors, whether they're in the congress to actually be a voter full time. And, um, as I was telling you, I, I, I really hate when you go to vote and they give you those little stickers that say I voted because it sounds like, okay, I did my service, I don't have to do anything else until, and cause I remember the last time, the second, the second term for President Obama, when he ran the second time, the lines were like forever. Yeah. At my polling place. And I'm in Silver Spring and, and I was standing in line and there were these four young men in line in front of me and they were new, this was going to be the first time they voted. And one of them had said, you know, I told my mom we were going to vote. And so they were all in line and the line was slow and it was getting. And so two of them kept saying, let's go, man, this is taking too long. And the guy would say, no, I promised my mother and we were going to vote. And they were in line. And then one of them will say, I'm hungry. And they were talking and talk. And then we've got, and I don't know who to vote for other than Obama and who else am I supposed to vote for? And they had little pieces of paper, what they were reading. And it was really quite fascinating. And I was listening to them talk. And then at one point they, we were getting closer and one of them turned to me and he had, and he said he wanted, he asked me if I had lotion and I said, yeah. And I gave him and I said, what do you mean with us? And he goes, I don't want my hands to be all ashy and dry when I go to vote. And I'm going like, oh, okay. And they went in there and they were first time voters. And of course that a polling place where if this is your first time to vote, they announce it to everybody. And people clap. And they were like, Hey, yeah, I'm coming here to vote and everything. So they go and they voted and then they get their little sticker and I was right behind them. And one of them goes, okay, well we voted, let's go have have lunch. I'm done. And I said, you do realize you're going to have to do this again. And again and again. And they all looked at me and go like, why? And I said, because now you're a voter, you have to vote in every election. They go, I just said I was coming to vote for Obama. They didn't tell me I had to vote some more. And I go, well the next time an election is comes up, you're going to have to vote again. And then you're going to have, and they kept looking at me and I go, you are now a voter. So that means you're supposed to vote, you're supposed to follow. And make sure you know what they're voting, what they're doing because they represent you. You just voted for people who are going to represent you. And they kept looking at me like, oh my God, you're kidding. And so that's what prompted us at, In Our Own Voice to launch this campaign called I am a voter. We want to make sure that people understand that once you register to vote, this is being a voter is a lifetime experience that you need to follow up. See how your elected officials are voting on issues that impact you when they come home, if they're at the federal level or at the state level when they come back to their district, you go visit them and talk about your issues.

Marcella Howell: And so this was a big campaign for us. It's targeted at black women precisely because black women are rapidly becoming the most progressive voting force in this country. And, um, and we want people as they, no matter what their age to understand that voting is a right. And as a voter, you have the authority to challenge your elected official to say, I voted for, for this. I don't understand why you voted wrong on this bill. I don't understand why you would vote for this to challenge them because they, they work for you. And that's the whole premise of our campaign. It's not I voted, it's, I am a voter and it's lifelong. And um, so that's also why we are supporting HR1, the bill that was introduced in, in, in um, Congress that is backed by the Democratic Party in Congress. Um, a few of the Republicans are backing it cause they know it's a good, it's good, a good bill, but it basically would reinstate some of those issues around voter purges and shutting down voting, you know, early voting, all the kind of things that have been done to stop people from voting. It also talks about automatic voting and, and how you can get act and incarcerated people, how they get to vote. Again, all of the kinds of things that say every citizen should have the right to cast their ballot for people who were supposed to represent them. And, um, so we're very supportive of this bill. We think it's just what we need, especially when we saw the courts throw out the very things that we're protecting people in a lot of these southern cities and southern states. So now we have a chance to do some things about it by passing this bill, whether or not the Senate, which is controlled by conservative Republicans will pass it is a question mark. So when we go into 2020, a lot of the senators are up as well. And so people should be asking them whether or not they support voting rights and they can't go, well, yes, but I don't support. I know, and we gotta be careful of voter fraud where they only voted fraud is, I said, was in our Republican district with Republicans winning. So maybe voter fraud is only somewhere else. It's not really what we have to worry about here. Voter fraud is not an issue. Um, even there, you know, taskforce couldn't find voter fraud. So, but we should be worried about the fraudulent actions of governors and secretaries of states and state legislature and trying to disenfranchise voters. That's where their fault fraud is a yeah.

Marcella Howell: And it's good to see HR1. I really am happy to see that there's a lot of um, candidates and the House that is really taking voting rights seriously. And I really hope that you see, um, presidential candidates really pushing it as well. You've seen some, um, really speaking out on it and I really hope to see more, you know, I think we need to, um, push anybody who's running for president. Anybody who's running for Congress, anybody who's running in state legislature has to come out and say they support HR1, they support voting rights for everyone. And if they can't do that, that tells us something about whether or not we want those people in office. Because it means if they get into office, they're going to try to disenfranchise voters again. And we take it very seriously. I mean there's, there's a reason why our organization took on this issue. There are people who died, black people who died in order to exercise their voting rights, black people who were beaten in order to exercise their voting rights. And we can't forget that history. It's not that long ago. And we have to make sure that we exercise that right to vote.

Marcella Howell: I worked in California for a long time and people used to send, folks who were in uniform looking like they were the police to polling places to intimidate immigrant voters, Hispanic voters who were legitimately voters who had gotten their citizenship papers and everything and could vote. But they were intimidated because they would see them and they would think that they were going to get picked up by ICE or something. And so they would not, they would get there and they would see these people dressed in these uniforms looking like police or something and they would turn around and leave. I mean those are the kind of other types of things I talked about. All the kinds of things going around and voter purges and stuff. But there's also that intimidation piece that happens where they basically tried to intimidate voters into not coming to vote. Um, or in North Dakota where they told people, Native Americans that they had to have street addresses in order to vote. Remember that? They passed a law specifically targeting Native Americans because they wore the deciding vote and getting a Democratic elected and she was up for, for reelection and they targeted Native Americans to say you have to have a street address knowing full well that most of them lived on reservations and they did not have street addresses. They had other kinds of things like root and stuff like that. But they did not have an actual name street address. And so they had to go around, you know, the people at on the reservation had to go around and put street addresses on and telling people that. But it was designed to disenfranchise them and because some of them didn't have them, they basically didn't bother to come and vote. And so it's, it's not just voter rolls and you know, early voting being shortened or people throwing out votes. Its things like that as well. It is designed toward non white voters because non white voter instead of the Republican party trying to attract non white voters, they are basically trying to suppress their vote instead so that they, so that they can continue to get elected and that's just obnoxious and unethical.

Jennie Wetter: And unAmerican.

Marcella Howell: And unAmerican unpatriotic and we need to be able to stop that.

Jennie Wetter: Wasn't it? Maybe in 2018 where you were hearing rumors or like getting news reports, a few with people trying to say that ICE was going to be at polling places? So the same thing, trying to get people who probably are going to vote Democrat to stay home.

Marcella Howell: To stay home because they were afraid that ICE would show up and you remember ICE started going through neighborhoods just a little bit before the Election Day and everything and picking people up randomly or going to people's kids' schools and waiting for the parents to drop them off and then going and picking them up and asking you if they were here legally and things. All of that intimidation going, moving up into the election day. Those are the kinds of things that were happening. And we need to be able to say to the court by gutting the Voting Rights Act in your decision, your Shelby decision, you have left people vulnerable to having these kind of things happening. And then we are, we'll have to, of course, if they rule to put that preclearance piece back in there, especially for states that are doing this, then we'd have to make sure that justice department was enforcing it because that's the other problem we have now is this is not a Justice Department that wants to enforce anything that has to do with, um, minority rights, human rights.

Jennie Wetter: Okay. So one thing we haven't talked about basically the whole episode and, but we have talked about it, but we just haven't used the word is reproductive justice. So why are voting rights or reproductive justice issue?

Marcella Howell: Well, reproductive justice, as I said, is, um, it's a human rights frame that says essentially that there are all these intersectional parts of what you do. Um, and it's the right to basically be in control of your body, your community, your workplaces, your production. All of these things. And in order to be in control of that, you have to be able to shift policies that negatively impact that, which means you have to be able to go out and organize. You have to be able to vote people out of office. You have to be able to vote against certain types of initiatives that come that will impact how you live your life. And so that's why voting, voting rights is reproductive justice issue. It really is about the empowerment of people who have been oppressed for so long in this country and being able to exercise their rights as citizens in this country, um, and their rights as potential citizens in this country. Because of course it also deals with immigrant rights. And what kind of rights do immigrants have in this country? This is a country that was built by immigrants. Um, it is also a country that was built by slaves. And so to exercise the right as an American in this country, you have to be able to vote. You have to be able to stand in those lines. Long lines sometimes because they've cut down polling places, long lines because they shorten early voting places. I always go and vote on the first day of early voting so that I can do other things and encourage people and then go around courage, people putting notes in their doors and say, early voting started, you got this time and this time go and vote. And so that's the other, I mean, that really is what this is about. And it's, it's incumbent on all of us to see ourselves as not just one voter, but as an ambassador to make sure other people know that voting is important and they need to turn out and they need to turn out every single time.

Marcella Howell: And then they need to monitor what their elected officials are doing. Because if you voted for somebody and all of a sudden they're voting wrong. I mean, look, look at what's happening in Maine. Yeah. I mean, Susan Collins said she would not vote for anybody to the court that would attempt to override Roe v Wade. Well, she voted for two of them, right? And we know that they're just chomping at the bit, waiting for a case to come up so they can gut Roe v Wade. And so her constituencies, her constituency now is going like, uh, no, you, you did this. How dare you. You told us something different and then you went out and did this. And so she is, she's going to have challenges because people remember what she did. She should have been a solid no vote on both Kavanaugh and Gorsich, but she wasn't. And so this is something that I think is addressed and we thought immediately with Maine basically starting to raise money to run anybody against her. Those are the kinds of things we need to start to do. We need to basically monitor what you said and when you were running, what you do once you're elected. And if you don't do what you said when you were running that made us vote for you, then we need to un-vote you out of office the next time. I guess that's not really a word, but yeah, we need to just take our vote back.

Jennie Wetter: Uh, that's why I really like your, I am a voter frame, right? It's not just you need to show up this day. It's you need to stay engaged. And that's so important because, and I think we're seeing a little bit if there's one tiny, not silver lining cause everything's terrible, but with the Trump administration is people are paying attention in a way. I don't feel like I've seen that. I can remember. So I mean that's a good thing in all the terrible this, but it's nice to see people being more consistently engaged in what their representatives are voting on.

Marcella Howell: Right. And what, what's fascinating to me is it wasn't just Trump gets elected, you get this Women's March, you get a group that basically is grassroots organizing called Indivisible. You get, um, the turnout rate for the 2018 midterm midterm elections where normally midterm election vote drops, especially among Black and Latina people. And you get them turning out in high numbers higher than they've ever turned out in a midterm election and casting their vote very decisively against the Trump administration. Now, what's interesting now I say against the Trump administration, but when we did our polling of women of color, we asked them about their vote and they overwhelmingly said they voted for a candidate, not against another one. That that candidate, they listen very careful to what that candidate was promising to do. And they voted for that candidate. And so they are paying attention. And one of the other questions we asked was about whether or not they were watching those candidates. And overwhelmingly they said yes, we're watching them, we're watching to see how they act when now that they're in office now that we voted them in, that's new as well. And so that whole idea of a voter being an engaged individual engaged in the policy work, the politics is um, what we advocate for. It's, you got to stay involved, you've got to stay involved and keep other people, your family, your friends, your neighbors involved as well.

Jennie Wetter: Great. So we talked a little bit about HR1. Is there anything else that we need to be thinking about to ensure everybody has equal voting rights?

Marcella Howell: Well, I think we just need to be vigilant and because so much of what we vote on impacts our daily lives. I think people think of Congress only and that that's what's going on. The president and the Congress. What they don't get is you vote on initiatives. You vote on state legislatures, you vote on mayors, you vote on city council people, you vote on judges. All of those things make a difference, especially if you believe in criminal justice reform. Judges levels are really, really important because it is judges that pass down more draconian sentences on black and brown people than they do on whites for the exact same crime and you have to pay attention to that. You have to make sure that you understand who these judges are. Boards of education, you have to know where people stand on, what kind of issues impact your, your kids in their school. You've got to know all those things. It means that you have to study up. You can't just walk into the polling place on that day and say, Oh, I'm supposed to vote for four people for this seat. Okay, I'll vote for this person because I like their name and I'll vote for this person because I heard a commercial or something bad. I'm not sure where they stand. You've got, you know, voting is work. Just like people say citizenship is work, you gotta work at it. You got to work at being a voter, you have to know what's going on in your community and there are a lot of organizations who can help you. Um, there are a lot of organizations who can tell you about the issues, can tell you about the ballot measures that are on and you can read up synopsis of them and figure out how you want to vote and you can ask a lot of questions. You can go on all kinds of websites and find this out. And that's one of the things that we're trying to do. We openned up a website called blackwomen.vote and we were shocked that nobody had taken that, but we got it. Blackwomen.Vote is a new website for our, I am a voter campaign and we are going to be updating it on different things. For the 2020 election, we're going to put in a whole bunch of different dates that people can do. We did these voter guides for people that had the dates of when you had to register, when you had to get your absentee ballots in, how you could find out where your polling place was. And we distributed them. We did a test case in, in like eight states and we had those distributed. And this time we'll do it in much bigger scale.

Jennie Wetter: Great. And actually I feel like you've already answered my question. I always close with, but we're still gonna ask it anyway, which is what can listeners do to make sure this happens? And I do feel like you really hit this, but..

Marcella Howell: Get engaged any way you can. Um, join a group, uh, go on the websites and put in voting rights. Find out who's doing what in your states around voting rights. Get involved. Uh, don't, just assume that you're voting rights are covered in your state. Go on there, find out what the laws are about you casting a ballot, find out what you have to do. And if you don't like all the pieces that they put in place, you know all the hoops that they want you to jump through? Find groups there and um, protest them. There are groups, there's ACLU all over the place. There is um, leadership conference on civil and human rights. There are lawyer committees in almost every state that you can, you can call up on and find out what you can do. You can join groups, you can join, you can come on our website either on www.blackrj.org, which is our in our home voice website. Or you can go on blackwomen.vote website on our, I'm a voter campaign, but there are a lot of places you can go to find out. And I would just say get engaged. Just do some homework. Find out where you can go and um, exercise your right as a voter.

Jennie Wetter: Marcella, thank you so much for being here. I think this is a great conversation about why we need to think about voting rights if we care about reproductive justice.

Marcella Howell: Thank you for it actually having me here.

Jennie Wetter: Of course, my door's always open to you, right. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at rePROs Fight Back. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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