Voting by mail is the safest way to cast a ballot for many voters, whether they are immunocompromised, have a disability, or simply want to protect the health of their community. Six voters from across the country shared with us why they want to vote by mail, and why it should be an option for all voters. No excuses. 

“I have voted in every general election since 1972. The right to vote is my tool to manage those conditions that I want for my country, my children and my old age. Failure to vote is simply to alienate myself from what I criticize of the current government and give it all my rights, without any consequence.

However, this year I am afraid of voting in person because I am high-risk to COVID-19 due to my age and asthma.”
 

—Belia Ocasio, 67
Puerto Rico

“As a Black man with a Black child who is immunocompromised, being able to vote by mail would make me feel so much better about our safety and our ability to have our voice heard. 

My daughter had open heart surgery six days after she was born. Since then, by a miraculous gift of God, she’s recovered to the point where she is able to function, but it still leaves her immunocompromised when it comes to her lungs and her heart.

I’m in a unique position to be able to advocate for my daughter, not just for absentee voting but for her wellbeing. The world is a dangerous place right now. Being able to vote by mail would give me a sense of protection while also ensuring I can exercise my right to vote and have a say in the direction this country’s going.”
 

—Cecil Wattree, 34
Kansas City, MO

“The first time I voted was for Eisenhower in 1952. I’ve voted in almost every election ever since. When I was diagnosed with legal blindness a few years ago, I wouldn’t let it stop me. Absentee voting has made voting accessible to me. It allows me to continue my lifelong tradition of voting while safeguarding my health.”
 

—Barbara Ebright, 90
Ohio

“I hate to say it, but if I’m not able to vote absentee, I just may have to regretfully sit this one out. It saddens me to even think about that because we’ve waited so long for the opportunity to vote again. The time is approaching us. And now a lot of us are stuck in a situation where voting is a matter of life or death. 

My doctor told me that if I am exposed to COVID-19, it could be fatal due to my asthma and hereditary angioedema. But whether or not someone has a health condition, we have a deadly virus on the loose. We should all have the right to not only vote, but to be safe in doing that. I urge everyone to find out what absentee voting is and speak out. Let your voice be heard.”
 

—Kamisha Webb, 42
Kansas City, MO

“As an essential worker, I come into contact with my community every day on my mail delivery route. I’ve talked to a good amount of people about [absentee voting]. I think that people will be more likely to vote if they can do it from home with an absentee ballot. 

I live right by my voting place, but lines are out the door before it even opens. I don’t think I should have to call into work to go vote.

Voting is a basic, fundamental part of a democracy and it needs to be viewed more as a celebration and an essential part of every American’s duty.”
 

—Javier Del Villar, 29
Lee’s Summit, MO

“Expanding access to vote by mail has been a major step toward accessibility because it allows people with disabilities to avoid the challenges of getting to the polls, waiting in line, and facing physical barriers at a polling place. 

A dozen states have expanded access to vote by mail for some elections this year. But there’s still more work to be done to make sure the right to vote applies to everyone, including people with disabilities.”
 

—Jim Dickson, 74
Washington, DC

Across the country, access to voting by mail has garnered bipartisan support as many states act to expand access. States should do more by expanding early vote periods, preparing for a surge in absentee ballots, and doing away with unnecessary requirements like getting a witness signature or having to pay for postage. At the same time, voting in person must remain an accessible option for all voters. 

Voting is a fundamental right, and nobody should have to risk their health to exercise it. 

Take action

• Learn how to vote by mail
• Send a message to Congress: Pass the HEROES Act
• Know Your Rights: Voting

I am tired of members of my profession dismissing my clients’ humanity. Sadly, it happens a lot:

“Your clients are probably lying to you, which is unsurprising,” reads an email from a representative of the Texas State government.

“People get better medical care in jail,” claim people who have never been incarcerated a day in their lives as reason to keep people locked up during this pandemic.

“We can’t trust inmates to follow the law, so how could we trust them to quarantine from others if they were released?” asks a judge who swore an oath to protect the fundamental rights of these “inmates.”

It should not be news to anyone that the scales of justice are tipped in favor of the powerful, but it’s never been starker to me than now. I’ve spent the last six months on the frontlines of the legal battle to protect incarcerated people from preventable illness and death as jails and prisons fumbled their response to the COVID-19 crisis. What I’ve seen is a chasm between the courage and humanity of my clients — people discarded in crowded facilities trying against all odds to follow public health guidelines — and the officials who incarcerate them: bureaucrats ever ready to point the finger elsewhere as they deny incarcerated people adequate food, water, PPE, cleaning supplies, testin, the ability to socially distance, and subject COVID-positive patients to pepper spray.

More than 1,000 incarcerated people have died from confirmed cases of COVID-19, and 88 of the top 100 largest outbreaks in the country are in jails and prisons. Even this paints an incomplete picture: Around the country, we’re seeing facilities refuse to provide COVID-19 testing to incarcerated people to keep reported numbers artificially low. In Arizona, officials reportedly went so far as to order incarcerated people to refuse COVID-19 tests or else face a “beat-down.” Other jurisdictions, including in Texas and California, simply ignore COVID-19 case counts in prisons in order to increase their chances of reopening.

And when we sue to hold these legal system actors accountable, it increasingly becomes obvious: They are lying to maintain the status quo, despite the risk it poses to our clients.

The philosophy behind our legal system is that adversaries — usually lawyers — present evidence to a judge or jury, engage in vigorous advocacy, and the truth should win out. Even in ordinary times, this is a myth for most people accused of crimes: Public defenders are given vastly fewer resources than law enforcement and prosecutors, and the overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved by plea bargaining instead of trial (often to avoid the additional prison time that comes with exercising trial rights). When people do demand their day in court, decades of “tough on crime” rhetoric have manifested in juries and judges who view arrested people — particularly Black and Brown people — as presumptively guilty instead of innocent.

Unfortunately, in the COVID-19 context, judges continue to favor the demonstrably untrue accounts of jail officials over those of incarcerated people who testify at great personal risk. For example, in Memphis, Tennessee, the chief jailer testified under oath that the jail was following a policy of not returning a COVID-positive person to the general population until they had twice tested negative for COVID-19. He even said that failure to do so would create a high risk of transmission. However, his staff and colleagues had never implemented this testing policy and routinely moved COVID patients back into the general population without testing. 

Government officials routinely employ this strategy of plausible deniability: Supervisors who brush aside evidence of daily practices testify that all is well, while the reality is bleak for incarcerated people, as well as prison and jail staff. The temerity knows virtually no bounds: As incarcerated people suffer severe illness and die, jurisdictions like Miami and Orange County filed legal appeals to save themselves from the grave injury of having to provide detainees with soap.

Yet, the officials who I feel the most betrayed by this year are our federal judges. Federal judges are uniquely entrusted to protect the constitutional rights of all. Their lifetime appointments are meant to ensure their total independence and ability to fairly protect the rights of even those without political or social influence. The federal judiciary — at least in principle — is our government’s best hope to protect the rights of the systemically oppressed.

Many recent legal rulings on important matters of public health have fallen short. Many trial courts have cherry-picked evidence or misapplied the law to rule against incarcerated people. And when trial courts find that our clients’ rights were violated, courts of appeals ignore the record and go out of their way to reverse course — most notably when the Supreme Court recently paused a court order requiring increased protections in the Orange County Jail without offering any explanation, and despite rising COVID infections and dishonesty by jail officials (called out as “bad behavior” by Justice Sotomayor in her dissent).

While profoundly disappointing, these pro-incarceration instincts track the composition of the federal bench. Seven times more federal judges are former governments lawyers (prosecutors and civil attorneys) than lawyers who brought challenges to government action; 80 percent of federal judges are white — despite the vast racial disparities the criminal legal system perpetuates — and 73 percent are men, despite the fact that women have been the fastest growing population in prisons and jails for decades. Judicial nominees from presidents of both parties have overwhelmingly been former prosecutors and corporate attorneys: 85 percent of President Obama’s nominees had one of those backgrounds.

Representation and fair adjudication of cases have always mattered. This year, a lack of judges who understand the true horrors of our incarceration machine meant that incarceration has been a death sentence for far too many people. The United States’ unique obsession with mass incarceration also means that the pandemic is harder to mitigate here than in other countries without these super-spreader sites.

The next President has a moral and institutional obligation to appoint judges who will counterbalance this bias against people who have been accused or convicted of crimes by appointing judges who are civil rights advocates and criminal defense attorneys, not just private corporate attorneys and prosecutors. Given how overwhelmingly lopsided our current judiciary is, the next President should aggressively appoint judges with underrepresented backgrounds to help restore our judiciary’s independence and our national trust in our courts.

I am tired of the disdain members of my own profession exhibit toward my clients. However, some of this comes with the territory of combatting our national obsession with incarceration. What should not be expected, or tolerated, is the absence of a fair and impartial judiciary who will tip the scales of justice back into balance.

Andrea Woods, Staff Attorney, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project

For years, the Smith County School System in Carthage, Tennessee, has violated the separation of church and state with impunity. But no more.
 
Yesterday evening, a federal district court issued a permanent injunction that requires the school district to stop an array of unconstitutional activities that have included, among other practices, imposing prayer on students, displaying religious symbols and messages throughout school facilities, and inviting the Gideons International, an evangelical Christian association, to distribute Bibles to fifth-graders during homeroom.
 
The court’s order comes in the form of a consent decree, meaning the school district — to its credit — recognized that these practices are legally indefensible and agreed to an injunction to resolve a lawsuit filed last year by the ACLU and ACLU of Tennessee on behalf of two families.
 
The families, including three high-school students and one middle-school student, were repeatedly subjected to official prayer at athletic events and practices, assemblies, graduation ceremonies, and other school activities. Teachers proselytized the students by reading biblical scripture in class and soliciting prayer requests. And school hallways and walls were adorned with religious posters and symbols, including a giant Latin cross painted next to the words “In God We Trust” in the school’s athletic center. These practices created a religiously hostile school environment, alienating minority-faith students and non-believers, including our clients.
 
As atheists bombarded with religious messages and forced prayer, our clients felt unwelcome and deeply uncomfortable at school. But school officials didn’t care in the slightest and rebuffed our clients when they tried to express their concerns. In one instance, a mandatory Veterans Day assembly included not one, but two prayers. Our client Kelly Butler, a U.S. Army veteran who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, attended the assembly with his children.  When he later approached the principal to tell her that he found the prayers disrespectful of his and other veterans’ service, she shouted at him and asked police officers who were present at the event to escort him off school property.
 
Unfortunately, our clients’ experience with Smith County Schools is not unusual for minority-faith and atheist families. One study published last month found that atheist and Muslim families faced significant discrimination in public schools across the country. In conjunction with the study, researchers emailed the principals of more than 45,000 public schools in 33 states, assuming the identity of parents considering enrollment of their children and asking for a meeting with the principal. The emails randomly indicated a particular religious affiliation or belief, such as Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, or atheist.
 
The results of the study were alarming but not surprising: Muslim and atheist parents were heavily discriminated against. When they revealed their beliefs in the signature part of their emails, school officials were much less likely to send a reply. Additionally, the study found discrimination against Muslim and atheist parents increased dramatically if they asked about the compatibility of the school with their beliefs and practices or requested accommodations. This is just one example of the type of discrimination students and families of non-majority faiths may face in public schools.
 
As the study concluded — and as our clients’ own experiences demonstrate — religious equality for all students in America’s public schools remains elusive. Victories like today’s mark an important milestone in this fight, but there is still much more work to be done. Every student, regardless of their faith, should be able to access public education without discrimination and religious influence by school officials. Now, in Smith County — thanks to our brave clients — they will.

Heather L. Weaver, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief