What Counts and Who Does

In 2008, I volunteered at Obama Headquarters in Phoenix, spending a lot of time with a button maker and a headset that made me feel official. I had a big box of magic markers and made signs about hope and change. I called strangers in the evening to ask if they were registered to vote, if they had a plan, if they needed a ride. If they didn’t, I drove them to the polling place like democracy was something you could deliver.

I became somebody with a clipboard and opinions about voter turnout.

I was also somebody who couldn’t vote.

Not yet an American citizen, I hovered at the edges of the democratic process, irrationally hopeful, behaving like someone who already belonged.

It’s a strange thing, wanting in on a country. Not for the passport – and not in the way some people are chasing an Irish one despite never having lived there or been part of its everyday life – but for the feeling of participation, for the privilege of checking a box and believing it counts. Believing I count. 

The heady days of Obama’s first presidential campaign didn’t just make me care about an election. It made me want a stake in the outcome.

Which is how I realized you can fall in love with a country before you’re allowed to belong to it.

Suddenly voting mattered.

Years later, watching the Supreme Court of the United States narrow the protections of the Voting Rights Act, I keep thinking about that version of myself – the one outside the system, believing in it anyway. A system that, as Barack Obama warned this week, is increasingly loosening the safeguards meant to guarantee equal participation, allowing the mechanics of representation to be reshaped in ways that can dilute voting power while still claiming procedural neutrality. The language of the Supreme Court’s decision remains technical, but the effect is not – who gets counted, and how, and whether their vote will carry the same weight once the maps are redrawn.

And it makes me think back to how invisible all of that once was, back to when the system didn’t feel so fragile, but simply there, waiting to be used.

Back then, I thought the hardest part was getting people to the polls.

I didn’t yet understand that the harder question is whether the system is still trying to meet them there.