Thumbs Up
- Voting
- We cannot stress this enough: Please vote! Your voice matters, and this may be one of the most important elections in our lifetime. If you can vote, then it is your civic responsibility to do so. If you’re voting in-person on election day in Massachusetts, polls open anywhere from 5:45 am to 7 am and close at 8 pm.
- Stickers!
- The coolest accessory for fall 2020 is an ‘I Voted’ sticker. Critics rave that the sticker was all anyone could talk about during (virtual) New York fashion week. CNN put together a cool collection of photos of the stickers from all 50 states. Best sticker award probably goes to North Dakota. The state’s sticker was designed by a fourth-grader who won a state-wide contest.
Thumbs Down
- Voter suppression
- Voter suppression has unfortunately always been a part of American elections. Voters of color, particularly Black and Hispanic voters, have long been locked out of voting at a substantially higher rate than their white, non-Hispanic neighbors. This isn’t just a past phenomenon—it happens now. Voter ID laws and automatic voter purges disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic voters. The hardship doesn’t stop there: According to The Atlantic, these voters have harder times finding a polling location and getting time off of work to vote. Voters of color also report alarmingly high occurrences of being harassed at the polls.
- Sitting this one out (or voting third party) because of a ‘moral high ground’
- Please vote. The moral high ground is null if the real-life consequences of not voting could have profoundly devastating effects on minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ people.
