Voter suppression is a strategy that, via tactics legal or illegal, attempts to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing specific groups of people from voting. Intentionally or indirectly preventing an individual or group of individuals from voting is a political concept that has a lot of history in American politics; from grand-father clauses, poll taxes, and literacy taxes, to stricter voter ID laws, and the newly established Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, the suppression of these rights is prevalent and recurrent but a subject not commonly looked into.

This is a racial issue. Attempts to write it off as government interference in voter-fraud crimes or further, as is the case with the president’s Voter Fraud Commission, some sort of regulation to uphold the fabric of democracy are unfortunately mistaken.

Many of the maneuvers, specifically the ones adopted post-Civil War that prevented African Americans from voting, were made illegal by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Georgia Secretary of State and Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp is in the hot seat after it was  reported by the AP that his office “has canceled over 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012” and “nearly 670,000 registrations were canceled in 2017 alone.” The Associated Press’s analysis revealed that a great majority of these registrations, whether they have been placed on hold or completely voided, are predominantly black.

This is, to Kemp, as can be assumed with many parties responsible for these acts, the standard shot against the looming threat of voter fraud. By nullifying the votes of civically active minority individuals, his office believes to be contributing to election integrity when they are quite literally dishonoring a pillar of the democratic republic.

Why vote? As Stacey Adams, the Democratic candidate in Georgia’s gubernatorial race who vies to be the first black female governor in this nation stated, “we have got to vote like our lives depend on it because they do.” Vote because the very nature of democracy and our system for deciding representatives depend on it.

If you are able, please visit https://www.vote.org/ because only you can be in charge of the future of your democracy.