Thankfully, neither occurred, which is why I can write this column today as a free(ish) man. But those moments of having my name associated with the death penalty were surreal — like an out of body experience. My lawyer was speaking to me, but I couldn’t make sense of the fact that it was actually me that he was speaking to and about.

Even without the ultimate penalty, though, incarceration in America is still a civil death. It deprives individuals convicted of certain offenses of many of their legal rights. And one of its most pernicious effects is felony disenfranchisement.

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During my 10 years in the penitentiary and five years on post-release supervision (a.k.a. parole), I was disenfranchised by the state of New York. For 15 years, I was civically dead for a crime that I committed at 19 years old, as part of a penalty that dates back centuries.

Forty-eight of the 50 U.S. states prevent full voting rights to some segment of the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations. Overall, more than 6 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, with Florida alone counting for more than one quarter of that total. One in 13 black adults is disenfranchised due to a criminal conviction.

Recently, Florida voters approved an initiative that would have enfranchised that state’s voters with felonies, who were previously permanently barred from voting. The legislature then partially overturned the initiative, requiring that those who had regained the right to vote first pay all of their back court fees — a barrier that will continue to deny the ballot to many.

But that’s not the story everywhere. Maine, Vermont, and Puerto Rico are the only places in the U.S. where there are no restrictions on voting for people with felonies, inside or out of prison. Massachusetts was a part of this exclusive club until 2000, as was Utah until 1998.

But, why? Quite simply, those states never implemented laws that would deny incarcerated people that right. (Though in Vermont at least, there have been challenges to the state’s stance on suffrage for incarcerated persons, which has been in place since the 1790s.)  Leaders from both states, regardless of their political ideology, offer similar reasoning. Mike Donohue, a spokesman for the Vermont Republican Party said, “The last thing we want to do is start putting up insurmountable barriers to participation in civic life because someone may have been convicted of a crime.”  In Maine, meanwhile, former state prison warden Randall A. Liberty believes that, “it’s a basic American right to be able to vote for your elected officials … regardless of their offense.” Liberty’s beliefs, in particular, are supported by former Chief Justice Earl Warren, who wrote in a 1958 majority opinion that “Citizenship is not a right that expires upon misbehavior.”

But citizenship is also racialized in America, making this simple-sounding tale about civic responsibility and citizenship more complicated. Vermont is 96 percent white and Maine is 95 percent white, ranking them first and second as the whitest states in the country.

According to Ashley Messier of ALCU Vermont’s Smart Justice, who served time in a Vermont prison, “it’s easy for a 96 percent white state to allow its residents to vote.”  Civil death is less acceptable when the subject of the penalty is white.

That assertion should not surprise us, because since the incorporation of this country, the United States government had explicitly denied suffrage to anyone not white and male, whether through explicit law or reigns of terror. Only since the passing of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 and the civil rights movement that took place just 50 years ago has there been concerted action to reverse electoral oppression in America. That fight continues today, with the passing of Amendment 4 in Florida, and efforts such as the bill recently introduced in Washington, D.C., which would allow incarcerated people to vote.

In the case of Puerto Rico, the constitution there guarantees the right to vote for every person over 18 years of age (though, to be clear, they have no meaningful representation in the U.S. Congress). Interestingly, Puerto Rico is also significantly racially homogenous, with more than 80 percent of its population identifying as white, though mostly of Spanish origin.

Suffrage for incarcerated populations is a moral imperative. Many other countries allow for incarcerated people to vote, and the 48 states that currently deny that right should follow suit.

As a formerly incarcerated person, I can attest to caring deeply about education, safety, health care, and immigration while I was serving my time. A prison sentence does not disqualify you from caring about the community in which you once lived. Prison should not equate to a relinquishing of the civic right and duty to inform the policies that will impact your daughter, son, or elderly parents.

In an article I wrote for The Nation, I documented the concerns of incarcerated men during the 2008 presidential election. One of the men wanted then president-elect Barack Obama to pay attention to the “shrinking middle class and health care.” Another wanted him to pay attention to “the state of the economy and implement a sound economic plan that will take the country of its current recession.”

The inconvenient truth, though, is that it is easier for the American public to ignore policies that have disproportionately negative impacts on people of color.

The general public probably thinks it’s a no-brainer that people in prison cannot vote, if they’ve ever thought about the issue at all. In part, that’s due to the tough on crime rhetoric that has permeated American politics since the days of Richard Nixon. This conditioning is racist in conceptualization and practice.

But it is time to challenge that conditioning. Theoretically, people go to prison as punishment, not to be punished. Civil death is contrary to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.”

The 2.2 million people in America’s jails and prisons were not sentenced to civil death and should be allowed to inform the communities in which their loved ones still live. Neither race nor the narrative that people in prison do not deserve the right to exert their full humanity should be the factors that prevent their enfranchisement.

The undisputed good news is that Americans chipped away at the old guard last night. After two years of constant stress about losing our health care, massive tax handouts to the wealthy, and open animosity towards anyone perceived as different, we finally gained some ground.

To celebrate, we’re taking a break from our usual doom and gloom and rounding up the results that we were excited to wake up to this morning.

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We finally have some good news about health care.

Congressional Democrats are in a better position to defend the Affordable Care Act, and are likely to work on stabilizing the ACA and addressing high drug prices in the new congress.

On a state level, voters were clearly motivated by concerns about health care. They also approved Medicaid expansion in three states: Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah. This extends Medicaid coverage to 340,000 low-income people.

The victories for Medicaid don’t stop there. In Maine, where the governor and voters have been engaged in a protracted battle over Medicaid expansion, Governor-elect Janet Mills says she’ll implement Medicaid expansion “immediately” upon taking office. Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Laura Kelly in Kansas could also drive expansion in their states, where leadership has historically resisted it. Sadly, all isn’t rosy: Montana voters rejected a ballot measure that would have extended Medicaid funding via a tobacco tax, ending coverage for nearly 100,000 residents.

A number of pro-choice candidates performed well last night. But two states, West Virginia and Alabama, amended their constitutions to specifically rule out the right to abortion. It’s a symbolic amendment for as long as Roe v. Wade stands, but the new balance on the Supreme Court could place it in jeopardy.

Florida is giving the vote to 1.4 million residents.

Florida’s Amendment 4 restored voting rights to people with felony records. Until last night, it had been one of only three states (now two) that denied people convicted of felonies the right to vote after they served their sentences. That disenfranchised more than 9 percent of the state’s population overall, and 21 percent of African Americans.

It’s difficult to estimate how big of an impact this could have moving forward, but it’s certainly possible that this influx of new voters will sway future elections. And, most importantly, it will allow more than a million people to vote on the policies that affect their lives.

One other bright spot last night was in Colorado: The state passed an amendment barring the use of slavery as punishment for a crime. Other ballot measures were, to put it nicely, kind of a bummer. Six states passed a version of Marsy’s law, which establishes a victims’ bill of rights that has the potential to violate the rights of people accused of crimes and makes it harder for people who are incarcerated to access parole boards and early release. In addition, North Dakota and Ohio both rejected measures that would lessen sentences for drug crimes.

Conservative states are raising their minimum wage.

Voters in Missouri and Arkansas approved increases in the minimum wage, which will together provide a raise to nearly 1 million workers. Missouri’s ballot initiative, which won with more than 62 percent of the vote, will hike its wage to $12 per hour by 2023. Arkansas’, approved by nearly 70 percent of voters, will increase the minimum wage to $11 per hour by 2021. Missouri’s initiative also reverses a minimum wage decrease that the state legislature imposed on St. Louis, which had raised its own minimum wage to $10 in 2017.

This continues a trend of minimum wage action on the state and local level. Though the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not been increased since 2007, four states approved wage hikes in 2014, and four more did the same in 2016, while cities including Baltimore, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. have increased their own minimums.

Still, 21 states adhere to the federal minimum wage, the purchasing power of which peaked in the 1960s. We would certainly like to see more movement here, since wages have been stagnant across the country for the last several decades – particularly for low-income workers and black and Hispanic families.

Massachusetts will uphold rights for transgender Americans.

In 2016, Massachusetts passed a bill to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in public places, but the law’s opponents managed to get it placed on the ballot this year. Voters upheld the law, which provides protections that don’t exist on a national level, by nearly 70 percent. In most states, it is still legal to discriminate against someone in housing, business, employment, and public accommodations because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Because we’re celebrating, we’ll gloss over how irritated the entire TalkPoverty staff is that it’s possible to put these rights on the ballot. Instead, we’ll look at this as a blow to the specious arguments that opponents to trans rights have been making against trans Americans.

San Francisco is taxing corporations to help people experiencing homelessness.

It was generally a bad night for tax policy on the state and local level, due to several states, including North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, approving anti-tax ballot measures, and the defeat of an effort to raise corporate taxes and implement a progressive income tax in Colorado in order to spend more money on public schools.

However, San Francisco approved an increase in its corporate tax — which will be levied on about 300 of its biggest businesses — in order to raise money to combat the city’s homelessness epidemic. At least 50 percent of the funding will be dedicated to direct housing in a city where some 7,500 people are experiencing homelessness.

The successful campaign in San Francisco was mirrored in two other Bay Area cities and counters a similar effort in Seattle, where the city council passed and then repealed a “head tax” due to opposition from Amazon and other big corporations.

As a child, I couldn’t wait to turn 18 so I could register to vote and go inside the voting booth. And that’s just what I did. It made me feel like an adult, like an American citizen doing my civic duty. I voted in every election that I could.

But because I was convicted of a felony, I can no longer participate in our democracy. Florida is one of three states – along with Kentucky and Iowa – in which everyone convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting. Amendment 4, which is on the ballot this Election Day, would restore voting rights to some 1.5 million people just like me.

I grew up in a broken home filled with all types of abuse and despair. I had no mentors, only the golden rule to keep our family business inside the home. I went from a little girl filled with hope who got good grades to a young adult who no longer cared.

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I became a product of my environment, and ended up being the getaway driver in a robbery gone wrong.

Afterward, I could only think of the victim and his family and the pain they were going through. In those moments, I asked: If it was me and my family, what would I want? I would want the people involved to pay for what they did, I decided.

So I had my attorney take me to the Orange County jail and surrendered to the unknown. I did the right thing when it mattered the most, even when it was scary and the outcome uncertain.

The judge sentenced me to 15 years. I spent a third of my life paying my debt to society for my crime.

I fortunately survived. When I was given my end of sentence paperwork, I was presented with a form that I was told to sign. It advised me that I couldn’t vote anymore.

At first, I refused, because the judge had not sentenced me to the removal of my civil rights. But when I was told that I would be kept for the additional two years that were cut off my sentence due to good behavior if I didn’t sign the form, I quickly put my name on it. I wouldn’t understand the weight of that paper until after my release.

I came home with a plan to be the best person that I could. But I couldn’t get a job because of identifiers of my conviction on applications. I couldn’t go back to the college I attended pre-incarceration as an in-state student, because I didn’t have an I.D. that was a year old. My prison identification wasn’t acceptable, according to the board of governors.

When I finally thought I had broken through the invisible ceiling by obtaining my real estate license and selling a home to a cash buyer three months later, the significance of that the paper I signed in prison became clear. I took my commissioned earnings to get an apartment, but was refused; in many places, those with a felony conviction are not protected against this form of discrimination. As a professional in a business where it is our goal to make sales for profit, that was just mind-blowing.

I understood then that these things were allowed to happen to those of us with felony convictions because we could not vote. We had no ability to challenge policies designed to lock us out, and lock us back up again.

This is why the passage of Amendment 4 is so important, not just to those of us in Florida who would be affected, but to those in other states who have been denied their right to vote. It sends a message that we are American citizens, and that even though we made some mistakes along the way, we are forgiven and afforded a clean slate to become someone who contributes to society.

For my birthday this year, I am asking for the most important gift anyone can give me, and that’s to go out and vote yes on Amendment 4.

Last month, the administration began testing these policies at the state level. On January 11th, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) announced that states can now compel low-income people who rely on Medicaid to meet “work and community engagement requirements” in order to keep their health insurance. Within a day of making this announcement, CMS approved Kentucky’s plan to implement such requirements. The plan strips Medicaid coverage from most adults who fail to comply, including those who do not complete paperwork on time or report “changes in circumstances” quickly enough.

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All told, Gov. Matt Bevin’s office estimates that around 350,000 Kentucky residents will be subject to the new requirements and 95,000 will likely lose their Medicaid benefits. But once those people are booted from the program, Kentucky is giving them a chance to get it back: through “a financial or health literacy course.”

Of course, this is not the first time that Americans have been required to meet economic standards or pass a literacy test to exercise their rights. Discriminatorily applied literacy tests, known for their impossible difficulty, were administered by election officials who were given immense discretion over who to test, what to ask, and how to assess the answers when (mostly black) citizens attempted to vote. Similarly, extractive poll taxes disenfranchised poor black populations (and sometimes poor whites) from the end of the 19th century until the advent of the 24th Amendment (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

These methods were incredibly effective at preventing black people from voting. They led to dramatic drops in black voter registration in the South, and in the states that were the most egregious offenders—like Louisiana—black voter registration decreased by as much as 96 percent over an eight-year span.

Of course, the electoral arm of white supremacy in the postbellum era stretched well beyond such tools (and all the way to violent repression). Nevertheless, taxes and tests stand out as especially contemptible because they officially codified a logic of exclusion aimed at those presumed unworthy of American citizenship.

On the surface, Kentucky’s new Medicaid rules don’t look exactly like poll taxes or literacy tests. But there’s an equivalent logic of exclusion that holds across both domains: Those who are unworthy—either because of their race or due to their inability to access decent jobs—are ousted. Their political and social rights (like the right to vote and the right to be healthy) are sacrificed on an altar built by those with power.

Since social rights like health care are connected to political rights like voting, undermining one deteriorates the other. When Medicaid recipients are made to jump through hoops to prove that they are worthy of health care, they quickly figure out where they stand in the American social hierarchy. And once that’s clear, they have a diminished desire to participate in politics.

I know this because I spent years studying Medicaid and wrote a book about the politics surrounding it. I had in-depth conversations with people who use Medicaid; I observed  Facebook groups filled with Medicaid beneficiaries who readily recounted their experiences; I examined thousands of responses to large national surveys; and I scoured administrative records that detailed the actions that people with Medicaid took when they had scuffles with the government. I got to know some of the people who will find themselves at the losing end of the new Medicaid regulations, and I discovered how Medicaid shapes their political choices.

Take Angie, for example. Michigan’s Medicaid program stripped her coverage for not completing paperwork that she never even received. After battling for several months with local bureaucrats, she finally got her benefits restored. But by then she knew who she was in the eyes of the government:

“It’s like you are uneducated and you just want to get these free services and somehow you are inferior to other people if you receive those benefits … Once they hear Medicaid its ‘oh, one of those people.’”

Alienated from the government, Angie stopped voting and trying to advocate for herself. “I don’t do politics,” she said. When we talked about why she wouldn’t appeal devastating benefit cuts, she explained that she was a “nobody” and that the “powers that be” would not bend very far for her.

Angie was hardly alone. Ahmad fought back tears when he told me about the bureaucratic hurdles he faced after losing a limb in Iraq. Again and again he had to re-certify his enrollment, refile paperwork and find new medication when the old ones were no longer covered by Medicaid. He was clear on what this implied about his social status. “They treat us like we are stupid animals; like we don’t know anything,” he says. “I feel like I’m nothing, because when you are in Medicaid, they do whatever. You have to be on their rules.”

Just as literacy tests were applied unfairly by the election officials who administered them, adding stipulations to Medicaid will create opportunities for racial inequity. Blacks and Latinos face more labor market discrimination, have a harder time finding quality child care, and—because of biases in the justice system— are more likely to have a criminal record. In the face of such barriers, work and health literacy requirements pose burdens that will fall disproportionately on people of color.

That brings us back to where we started. Both types of literacy testing are predicated on assumptions about who deserves access to fundamental social and political rights, like health care and voting. Both also reinforce racial and economic inequality, whether purposely or inadvertently. Most crucially, both lead to the erosion of democratic citizenship among Americans whose political power has long been systematically suppressed.

The truth is, there is no shortage of excellent plans, great scholars, and people living in poverty who can tell you exactly what we need to do—we just elect too many political leaders who don’t give a damn.

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This Election Day, you have the power to move our nation towards doing right by people in poverty. Before you touch the screen, pull the lever, or fill out your ballot, here are some questions you might ask yourself to determine the hearts and minds of your candidates:

Does your candidate push stereotypes and myths about people living in poverty and anti-poverty policies, or does s/he stick to the facts?

Does s/he know that nearly 40% of us will spend at least one year in poverty during our working years?

Does your candidate conflate poverty and race, in a manner that stereotypes people of color as poor and urban?

Does s/he speak to the fact that the average food stamp benefit (SNAP) is just $1.41 per person, per meal; only 1 in 4 households that qualify for federal rental assistance actually receives it; and only 23 of every 100 families with children in poverty receives cash assistance (TANF)?

Does s/he fight to protect and strengthen the safety net, recognizing that poverty would be twice as high today—approaching 30%—without it?

Does your candidate accept a status quo that keeps people in poverty? Or do they embrace policies that work?

Does s/he want to raise the minimum wage so that it can lift a family of three out of poverty (just as it could in the late-1960s)?

Does your candidate take paid leave, but fail to fight for the 80% of low-wage workers who can’t take a single paid sick day to care for their families?

Does your candidate accept that most low-income parents can’t afford the child care they need to go to work? Or does s/he have a plan to make quality child care affordable for all families?

Does your candidate understand that people with low incomes often lack the transportation needed to get to good jobs? Does s/he have a plan to create affordable housing where jobs are located and reliable public transit so people can access opportunities?

Does your candidate understand that inequality is rooted in intentional policy choices throughout our nation’s history, and offer an agenda to correct that?

Does your candidate recognize that the average black family would now need 228 years to catch up with the wealth of today’s average white family? Does s/he consider this inequity when formulating key policies around the tax code, homeownership, college affordability, job creation, and more?

Does your candidate recognize the water crisis in Flint is not an isolated incident? And that across the country, the government is investing in and protecting affluent white communities, while exposing low-income communities of color to environmental and health hazards?

Does your candidate recognize mass incarceration as “the new Jim Crow,” which targets black men and communities of color? Does s/he have plans to end the school-to-prison pipeline, promote alternative sentencing and treatment, and ensure that people can successfully reenter society upon release?

Does your candidate speak to the fact that anti-LGBT laws drive economic insecurity for LGBT people, including higher rates of poverty?

Has your candidate ever said anything about addressing rural poverty across the country—from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta, the Alabama Black Belt to the colonias of south Texas, and on Indian reservations? What will s/he do to help reduce rural poverty?

Does your candidate recognize the connection between immigration reform and poverty, and that a path to citizenship would significantly decrease economic exploitation like wage theft, and increase payroll tax revenues by an estimated $33 billion over five years?

Does your candidate accept that women earn only 80 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, or does s/he make it a priority to close the gender pay gap?

Does your candidate have a real plan to help children in low-income families succeed?

Does your candidate accept that our public schools are separate and unequal, with many low-income students forced to share textbooks and work in decrepit classrooms while nearby affluent communities have state-of-the-art facilities? Does s/he have a vigorous plan to make sure our schools reflect that our nation values all children?

Does your candidate accept that many students are simply priced out of a college education, or does s/he have a plan to make college affordable for all?

Does your candidate talk about the fact that 1 in 6 children in America struggle with hunger, and have a detailed plan to address it?

There is nothing inevitable about poverty in America. This Election Day, send that message to all candidates with your vote.

Until recently, the history of political participation in America was one of forward progress, a timeline marked by an ever-increasing expansion of voting rights. The 15th Amendment in 1870. Women in 1920. And after decades of bloody struggle, the Civil Rights Movement—with the strong participation of Americans of faith—seemed to achieve true equality in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act is most celebrated for protecting the right to vote for African Americans, but it has also helped ensure that students, low-income Americans, and the elderly have been able to cast their ballots.

However, in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—one that required states with a record of racially-motivated voter disenfranchisement to get approval from the U.S. Department of Justice before making any changes to voter laws.

The result? A flood of new restrictive voting laws are now blocking low-income people, people of color, students, and others from the ballot box. According to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice, during the 2015 legislative session alone lawmakers from 33 states have introduced or carried over 113 bills that would restrict access to registration and voting.

What do these laws look like?

They impose barriers that keep low-income people, people of color, disabled people, and other historically disenfranchised communities away from polls. Among these barriers are strict photo identification requirements, cuts to same-day voter registration, and reductions in the number of early voting days. In a state like Alabama, which implemented a strict voter ID requirement last year and just last month closed 31 DMV offices, the result is that poor, rural voters—large numbers of them African-American—will not have easy access to the IDs they need to vote without traveling to a different county and likely missing shifts at work to do so. Faced with these kinds of barriers, and struggling to get by in our age of extreme income inequality, how many low-income Americans can actually afford to pay these 21^st century poll taxes to make it to the ballot box on Election Day?

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Before the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, laws like these would have likely never won approval from the Department of Justice. They would have been recognized and stopped for what they clearly are—attempts to disenfranchise certain classes of voters. Now, many are being challenged in the courts, but they’ll likely languish there for years in never-ending legal battles as election after election passes by.

Congress’ hyper-partisan “leadership” has refused to move forward with a badly needed reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act that would mend what the Supreme Court has broken.

What can people of faith—and all Americans—do about this moral crisis? Together, we need to convince Congress to act while also doing everything we can to protect voting rights in the states we call home. That means marching, protesting, petitioning and making our voices heard. We must expect no compromise, no consideration from those who seek to warp the electoral system in their favor.

To start, join the thousands of Americans who are calling on Congress to restore voting rights protections by signing the VRAforToday petition.

If you want to go a step further, look for opportunities to join protests and actions of civil disobedience. My organization, Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, for example, recently organized vigils across the country to draw attention to voting rights. You can expect more actions like this from us and many other groups if Congress continues to stall on the bill before next year’s crucial national election.

To take direct action that protects voters, volunteer as a poll monitor with organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. They need help assisting voters who are facing hardship or confusion from new voting or registration laws, or monitoring polling sites for discrimination on Election Day.

Other organizations doing great work on this front include the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the ACLU, the Brennan Center for Justice, and Rock the Vote. Sign up for emails from these groups and you will find many more opportunities to get involved.

This is a tough fight, but it’s a fight we can win if we all pitch in. Together, we have the power to force congressional action just as our parents and grandparents did fifty years ago when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.  Let’s make them proud.

My family is Assiniboine—from the Carry the Kettle First Nation in Saskatchewan. Though politics drew an artificial boundary a long time ago, our people—like so many of our neighboring tribes— straddle the US-Canada border. Our families, cultures, and histories are borderless. That is part of the reason I pay a lot of attention to Canadian politics—and to what our First Nations and family to the north have to teach us.

Here are three takeaways from Canada’s election that tribes and political leaders should consider as we organize for 2016.

Close the Worst Gaps 

The differences in health, education, and well-being between Native and non-Native people on both sides of the border are stark. Last month, the Assembly of First Nations—the largest national organization representing First Nation citizens in Canada—released their priorities for the federal election. National Chief Perry Bellegarde opens the new agenda with a call to action:

“Closing the gap in the quality of life between First Nations and Canada builds a stronger, healthier country for all of us. We need change now—we must close the gap.”

The gap is indeed wide—but not just in Canada. Half of First Nations children live in poverty, a figure that is triple the national average. Here in the US, 47 percent of children on reservations live in poverty, compared to the US rate of 21.1 percent. Secondary school graduation rates are 35 percent for First Nation students, compared to 85 percent for all Canadians.  Here, Native students have a graduation rate lower than any other racial and ethnic group at 68 percent. The graduation rate for students served by the Bureau of Indian Education is only 53 percent, compared to the national graduation rate of 80 percent. Perhaps most troubling is the crisis of youth suicide on both sides of the border. First Nations youth in Canada commit suicide at five to six times the rate of non-aboriginal youth, and the Native Youth suicide rate in the US is two-and-a-half times the national rate.

Not only should our candidates in the US have clear platforms for improving the education, welfare, and health of tribes, but they should focus on closing some of the widest and most extreme gaps in outcomes between Native people and the rest of the population.

Each of the leading progressive parties in Canada had clear platforms for First Nations and policy commitments that targeted these gaps. The new Liberal government has committed to increasing funding for K-12 First Nations education by $2.6 billion.

US political candidates should use the campaign trail to meet with—and listen to—tribal leaders and their communities in order to build meaningful policy platforms.

Rock the Native Vote and Fight Voter Disenfranchisement

Strong grassroots organizing contributed to a huge Native voter turnout in the Canadian election. Polling stations in six First Nation communities ran out of ballots. Many local observers believe the shortage was due in part to the Canada elections board underestimating the turnout. The Assembly of First Nations identified 51 “ridings”—the name for local elections in Canada—where First Nations voters in particular influenced the outcome.

Organizers in the US are also helping to get Native people to the polls through initiatives like the Native Vote campaign, but they face a formidable obstacle—efforts to disenfranchise Native voters.

The situation is so bad in Jackson County, South Dakota, that the US Department of Justice has now joined in a lawsuit accusing county officials of disenfranchising Native people from the Pine Ridge reservation. This disenfranchisement occurs through a highly restrictive early voting system and polling locations that require traveling long distances. And in Buffalo County, South Dakota, members of the Crow Creek reservation make up 85 percent of the population but have very few accessible options to cast a ballot.

Candidates in the US should speak out loud and clear during the campaign about the need for a fair and accessible election system for Native people.

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Listen to Young Native People 

When you look at the numbers, Native people in Canada and the US are a young and fast-growing population. This growth is clear in Canada when you consider that 54 Native people ran in this election.

Young Native people in the US were front and center in our politics this year too. Not only did President Obama meet with a group of Native youth during his trip to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, but he released a new Native youth agenda at the annual White House Tribal Nations conference, launched a new national leadership network called Generation Indigenous, and held the very first White House tribal youth conference this summer.

Candidates should pledge to keep this momentum going for our young people by building policy platforms that include Native children and youth. Take a cue from President Obama and his successful leadership in tribal policy.

There is no separation between the Native nations, peoples, and cultures that straddle the US-Canada border. It is colonial history and imposed political systems that necessitate advocacy for change on “both sides.”

North or South, elections still matter, and Native people deserve and need a strong voice to help determine our elected leaders and their policies.

Historically, the VRA derived much of its power from Section 5, which was often referred to as the heart of the bill. It recognized that racial discrimination interfered with voting rights and varied in severity by state. The section mandated that states with an established history of racial discrimination needed federal approval before they could overhaul their voter registration laws. This “preclearance” was determined by a formula established in Section 4 of the VRA, which Congress voted to renew in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006.

This bipartisan consensus changed quite suddenly in 2013. A conservative-led U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a controversial 5-4 decision that Section 4 was obsolete – that “our country has changed” – and repealed the preclearance formula. The ruling effectively dismantled one of the most important protections in the VRA because, without the preclearance formula, Section 5 applied to no states at all.  The New York Times Magazine eloquently summarized the result: “on June 26, 2013, we had less voting rights than we had on August 6, 1965.”

Within 24 hours of Section 4’s repeal, several states moved to enact voter identification laws that would intentionally and effectively limit the right to vote. For example, the state of Texas (a preclearance state) passed a law that required Texans to prove their citizen status with a passport or copy of a birth certificate, which can be costly and present increased barriers for lower-income or older Americans to access the ballot. And as predicted, the law did, in fact, lead to decreased voter registration and turnout. Across the board for all races in the state, voter registration dropped between 2010 and 2014, with communities of color seeing a larger decrease than whites. The law was struck down just yesterday by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals as racially discriminatory, a decision that will likely be appealed to the U.S Supreme Court.

As such, it should be no surprise that when the Center for American Progress Action Fund released its Health of State Democracies report earlier this summer, the state of Texas received an “F” grade for ballot accessibility (a metric used to identify potential barriers to the voting process for eligible voters). Other preclearance states that have recently passed changes to their voter registration laws include: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. And every single one of these states scored a D+ or worse when it came to ballot accessibility, underscoring the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s decision.

This right to vote is a cornerstone of our democracy. It is, in fact, the fundamental right that our forefathers considered as they fought a revolution to enshrine it in our Constitution. It is absolutely imperative, therefore, that we seek solutions to expand that right. House Democrats recently did just that. In order to bridge the preclearance gap created by the Supreme Court, they called on Speaker Boehner to advance legislation. Their plan, the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015, would only affect states that were found to have violated the VRA within the past 25 years – approximately 13 states. But Speaker Boehner and Republican House leaders have blocked the law from moving forward in the legislative process.

The reason to bolster voting rights here in America has never been clearer. If America is going to live up to its credo as the “leader of the free world,” we must ensure that all Americans are able to vote. We cannot continue to stifle the voices of people simply because we do not like the way they vote. The time to act is now, and we must ensure through legislation and action that all Americans are politically enfranchised.

Florida State Senator Dwight Bullard closed the summit with the following remarks.

I lead the Florida Democratic Party so on Wednesday I was pretty spent emotionally and physically.  But this anti-poverty summit we had just around the corner made me psyched.  It served as a reminder: “Time to get up off your butt.  We got work to do.”

We’ve got to organize, and we’ve got to change hearts and minds.

And we have a message that we can’t forget and have to keep pushing: People are suffering.  People are suffering.  People are suffering.  Not only in Miami, Florida, but nationwide—and we must serve as a catalyst for change.

There is a lot of money, and a lot of egos, trying to deafen this message.  And we need to stop waiting on ‘go betweens’ to deliver our message for us.

You all are the halls of power.  You don’t need people to be your voice—you are the voice.  You need to be active—at city hall, at the state capitol, and in Washington, DC.

People will see in you a chance to change the world we live in.  They will see the ability to be their own Gandhi, their own Dr. King, their own catalyst for change.

There’s only one way to change income inequality in this country: organize, mobilize, agitate and disrupt the current flow of B.S. from Tallahassee to D.C.

Your job is to hold the policymakers fully accountable.  And that doesn’t begin at the ballot box.  It needs to be a constant barrage that says, ‘If you are not the change agent I need, you are dismissed.’

And we need to believe in the power of the vote.  Scotland recently voted on whether to separate from Great Britain—89 percent of the voting population participated.

That’s called democracy.

Denmark—on a regular basis—has no less than 86 percent voter participation.  That’s why they have a $22 an hour minimum wage.  Unionized labor.  Universal healthcare.  Paid college tuition.  How?  It begins and ends with 86 percent participation every election.

When you average about 40 percent participation like we do in the United States—you get what you deserve.

So organize, mobilize, agitate—be the change agent you need to be.

Fast food and home care workers—the vast majority of them minority women who are living in poverty—have been striking for a living wage. Middle class and low-income families across the country are struggling to make ends meet. And while they are busy fighting to provide for their families and earn a living, their constitutional right to vote—to participate in democracy, to voice their opinions on the policies that shape this country—is under attack.

On a recent press call to discuss grassroots efforts to engage voters in Minnesota, Alice Flowers, a grandmother, spoke of her own experiences with economic insecurity.  But the point she made that really stuck with me was about the threat she feels to her voting rights.

“I can’t help but think we’re having to fight the same battles my parents fought in segregated Mississippi,” she said. “And that’s just not right.”

Under some states’ new restrictive voter ID laws, individuals must have a state-issued photo ID that matches the name on their voter registration cards. For women in the low-wage workforce—approximately two-thirds of whom are women of color—the time and cost of acquiring a photo ID are real barriers.

Imagine you live in Texas, several hours away from the nearest DMV. You’re a working mother with a chaotic shift schedule, trying to pay bills and care for your family. Maybe you were married and hyphenated your name, and now your photo ID and voter registration card don’t match. Maybe you never even had a state-issued photo ID to begin with. In these kinds of instances, the new laws will prevent you from voting, even if you were a registered voter in the past.  Under the guise of protecting our democratic process, these laws succeed only in disenfranchising low-income women of color and others, and threatening our democratic process.

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Women are consistently overrepresented in the number of people who are affected by these voter restrictions. In North Carolina, for example, women represent 54% of voters in the state, but they comprise 64% of the voters who are unable to vote under the new laws. That’s more than 200,000 disenfranchised women voters, and for women of color the data is even worse. While black women represented less than 24% of all women registered to vote in the state in 2012, they made up more than 34% of the registered women voters who didn’t have the necessary photo ID.

Texas has one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the nation.  In fact, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos blocked the state from enforcing it, concluding that Republican lawmakers had intentionally acted to decrease voter turnout of the growing minority population.  Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is allowing the law to be implemented in the upcoming election while it is appealed, and as a result more than 600,000 registered voters might be disenfranchised, including a disproportionate number of minority Texans.

These laws are being pushed at the state level by conservative lawmakers who claim that they are protecting elections from voter fraud, but the voter fraud doesn’t exist. A report by the US Government Accountability Office in September 2014 found that the Department of Justice reported “no apparent cases of in-person voter impersonation charged by DOJ’s Criminal Division or by U.S. Attorney’s offices anywhere in the United States, from 2004 through July 3, 2014.” But there is certainly evidence that voter ID laws keep many women from voting on the issues that matter to them—like increasing the minimum wage, requiring equal pay for equal work, creating paid family and sick leave, and providing affordable child and elder care—and from kicking out the politicians who support these discriminatory laws.

Ultimately, the new voting restrictions need to be struck down by the Supreme Court.  But until then, those of us who can vote, must vote—and must use our vote to ensure that the voices of women of color are heard at the polls.