Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of the Left

podcast where we remember the past and choose to repeat it. Today's episode

was originally published in December 2021 and we're replaying it today as a major election

nears once again to refresh ourselves on the structural obstacles to real democracy we face in this country, as many of the elements of our system were designed to favor the minority over the majority.

Sources today include network for Responsible Public Policy, AJ Plus, Battleground, The Humanist Report,

CounterSpin, Amicus, and the M Mutbreak political podcast.

Now the idea behind a representative democracy is that the system is representative.

It's kind of built into the word, right?

Representative democracy means we are represented equally.

Our system is unrepresentative because of the many ways in which it renders us unequal as citizens.

So think about a couple dimensions of that. Do we as citizens have an equal freedom to vote?

The answer is we have no equal freedom to vote.

Because states administer voting systems. freedom to make it make it harder for the party that just doesn't happen to be in power.

That typically is African Americans in states that have Republican administrations because

African Americans vote primarily Democratic, but you don't have to see it as racism.

It's just politics.

But what that means is that those who are in the party out of

power find it harder because of rules designed to make it harder for them to vote or inequalities in access to

voting machines or the capacity to vote. That inequality, that inequality

suppresses the vote of many Charles Stewart and MIT

estimates in the last election 16 million Americans found their vote

suppressed because of this inequality Or do we have an equal freedom to vote for president? We do not.

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