This week, Winona Her Campus was offered the opportunity to partner with Amazon Prime Video! The new documentary All In: Fight for Democracy officially comes out September 18, but with the link below, the first 20 people to R.S.V.P. will be given the link to screen it FREE by September 8.
Click on this link to be one of the first 20 people to screen the documentary for free before the Amazon Prime release on September 18: http://amazonscreenings.com/ALLINhcwinona
This documentary is about an hour and a half long and talks about voter suppression in America. While America is supposed to be a Democracy, and one of the best, thanks to multiple barriers and powerful individuals, it’s not.
Viewers will follow the story of Stacey Abrams who ran for governor of Georgia against Brian Kemp in 2018. In this election, not all votes were counted and some were even eliminated. Despite protests that were held, Kemp still won. He removed 107,000 people for voting too infrequently, eliminating people’s right to vote.
There were many things I liked about this documentary, and I think it’s an important film for everyone to see. I don’t think people realize how important voting is. Every voice matters; staying silent is not voting. I have personal peers who aren’t planning to vote because they think their votes don’t matter and that the choices aren’t “great,” but every vote does matter!
The documentary goes all the way back to the Constitution and explains how people fought in the past just to have the right to vote. The fight to establish the 15th Amendment (the right to vote in any color) and the 19th Amendment (women’s right to vote) are mentioned along the way. The screening also touches on gerrymandering, the drawing of districts depending on class and party, which still exists today. This affects poor neighborhoods and restricts how they vote. Other things that add on to voting restrictions are poll taxes, literacy tests, and voter I.D. laws. What strikes me the most about this is how these restrictions make it impossible for some people to vote. Law students were given literacy tests to show how hard the process was for voting, and many didn’t even pass. And they were law students in college. The United States is the only Democracy that rids citizens’ voting rights if they are convicted of a felony.
Viewers that watch this documentary will receive so many facts about voting from not that long ago. In Obama’s presidency election, there were 15 million new voters at the poll. There is no evidence that mail-in ballots result in rampant voter fraud. In Trump’s election, 23,000 registered voters in Wisconsin were affected. Machines broke, and some people waited for hours just to be turned away because their name “wasn’t in the system.” In Ohio, with a population less than 12 million, there were two million voters purged. Finally, in July 2020 the Supreme Court blocked nearly 800,000 of Florida’s returning citizens from accessing the polls.
So, what can we do?
Vote. Every vote matters. Once that is done, volunteering to help others vote can be done. Voting is worth the wait.
Abrams told her own personal story of when her family was turned away from a powerful place because of the color of their skin. “You don’t belong here,” they said to her. She told the story of the first time her grandma could vote, and said that she was scared because she didn’t believe it would be true. Her grandma never missed a chance to vote after.
I would also like to add, just for fun, that some celebrities even gave their inputs in this documentary. And the Jonas Brothers were some of the ones featured.
Voting is important. There are many restrictions that some people who want to vote so badly face. If you have the chance to vote, don’t waste it. Please watch this documentary. It is so important to understand what is happening in our world today.
I personally learned a lot. By clicking the link at the top, you can save your spot to watch this documentary, too. Educate yourself because every vote matters.