The ballot is a piece of paper. It weighs almost nothing. It costs almost nothing. It is the most dangerous object in the history of power because every person who holds one holds the same amount of it. A billionaire's ballot weighs the same as a dishwasher's ballot and that fact has terrified the powerful since the invention of democracy.

John Lewis was twenty-five years old when he crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma Alabama on March seventh nineteen sixty-five. Six hundred people walked with him. The state troopers met them with tear gas and clubs and horses. They fractured John Lewis's skull. He could not vote. He was an American citizen who could not vote because he was Black and because the state of Alabama had decided that literacy tests and poll taxes and grandfather clauses were more important than the Constitution. Bloody Sunday was not about a bridge. Bloody Sunday was about a piece of paper.

Women in America could not vote until nineteen twenty. One hundred and forty-four years after the Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal. Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in eighteen seventy-two. She voted anyway. The judge fined her a hundred dollars and she never paid it. Alice Paul went to prison and they force-fed her when she went on hunger strike. A ballot is a piece of paper and women went to prison and were tortured for the right to hold one.

South Africa held its first free election on April twenty-seventh nineteen ninety-four. Nelson Mandela had been in prison for twenty-seven years. The lines stretched for miles. Some people waited three days. Some people died in line and the people behind them did not leave. They stood in the sun for three days to hold a piece of paper they had never been allowed to hold. Mandela voted in Natal and he said he was casting his vote with all of the people who had died for the right to cast theirs. That is what a ballot is. A ballot is every person who died so you could hold it.

They are making it harder again. They always make it harder again. They close polling places in Black neighborhoods. They purge voter rolls. They require IDs that cost money to get. They make you wait in line for eight hours and then they make it illegal to give you water while you wait. Every generation thinks the vote is settled and every generation learns that the vote is never settled. The vote is a door and the powerful keep trying to close it and the people keep pushing it open and the hinges never stop creaking.

I could not vote in prison. Ten years for two joints of marijuana and I could not vote. A man who cannot vote is a man the state does not have to listen to. That is the point. The poll tax. The literacy test. The felony disenfranchisement. The two-hundred-dollar passport they want you to carry now. Every barrier between a citizen and a ballot is the same barrier. It is the powerful saying your voice weighs too much. The ballot is a piece of paper. It weighs almost nothing. It weighs everything.