With a defined role on the campaign, the depth of my duties increased. One of the people I reported to was Obama’s Iowa youth vote director, Andrea C. Stevens, and among some of my new tasks was working with a group of lawyers on issues related to voting rights. While we were spending considerable time and resources educating young people on their right to vote and caucus, other campaigns were trying to persuade them to stay home during the primary.
My first experience with this was at Grinnell College, a beautiful campus about an hour east of Des Moines. I was clad in my Obama T-shirt, canvassing with a group of students, when a young woman jogging by yelled, “I love Obama! I hope he wins! Wish I was allowed to vote!”
Her parents don’t let her vote?
Being the athletic specimen that I am, I jogged after her to find out what was up. “I’m not allowed to vote in Iowa because I grew up in Colorado,” she explained.
“Wait a second.” I shot back. “The law says that if you’re a student in Iowa, you can caucus and vote in Iowa.” She slowed her pace and came to a stop as I doubled down. “Who told you that you can’t vote here?”
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A short break to introduce voter suppression. Have you ever wondered why Election Day is on a Tuesday? （If yes, keep reading. If no, also keep reading.） Election Day is on a Tuesday because in 1845, Congress decided we needed to come up with a standard day that met the needs of the voting populace—aka rich white dudes, as they didn’t allow anyone else to vote back then. You’d think that a weekend day like Sunday would make the most sense for the rich white dudes because it was a day off, right?
Ultimately, Congress decided people couldn’t vote on Sundays, since it was the Sabbath. （My bad, God decided that we couldn’t vote on a Sunday.） Monday couldn’t be Election Day either, because in 1845 the polls were located in the county seat; in order to get there by Monday, you’d have to start riding your horse and buggy the day before—but the day before Monday is what? Sunday! And we already know God decided we can’t do anything on Sunday. So, this ruled out Saturday （since you might have to ride the horse and buggy home on Sunday）， Sunday, and Monday.
How about Tuesday? Tuesday seemed to work well so they said, Let’s put a pin in that. Would Wednesday work too? Nah, Wednesday was a no-go because it was market day for farmers.
Sooooo, Tuesday it was! You could ride your horse and buggy to the polls in the county seat on Monday, vote on Tuesday, and make it back home for market day on Wednesday. This, in a nutshell, is how Tuesday became Election Day. In 1845.
Also in 1845? There was no electricity. No antibiotics. Slavery existed. Life expectancy was thirty-seven. Did I mention only rich white dudes were legally allowed to vote? It wasn’t until 1870—twenty-five years later—that the Fifteenth Amendment technically prevented states from denying the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Women couldn’t vote until 1920, though. And as you surely know because you remember your history, most Black folks couldn’t really vote until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. That’s one hundred and twenty years after Tuesday was declared Election Day because of God and horses and buggies and farmers. During those one hundred and twenty years, a whole lot of nefarious stuff went on. （As a brief refresher, google Jim Crow, the poll tax, and voting literacy tests.） In 2013 there was a whole bunch of extra bullshit with regard to a section of the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court, which is a separate story that you should also look up.
You might be wondering, Okay, Kal, but why is Election Day still on a Tuesday? I’ll tell you. People in positions of power don’t want to lose their power. If Election Day were, say, on a weekend （or maybe even lasted for weeks as it does in states with accessible early voting）， it would be a lot easier for single parents, students, and people working multiple jobs to get to the polls. That would mean candidates would have to appeal to the needs of this wider group of people. And if that happened, many of the people currently in power would lose because they don’t represent this wider group’s needs.
The thing is, the people in power don’t want to lose. So, some of them suppress the vote by—among other things—keeping Election Day on a Tuesday. As it’s always been. Since 1845. And that’s part of the reason America ranks 135 out of 178 nations in voter turnout.1
* * *
Back at the campaign office, I told Andrea about the strange interaction with the jogger at Grinnell who thought she was ineligible to vote because she heard it on her campus. “I guess some well-meaning political volunteer out there mistakenly told her that college students can’t caucus in Iowa?” I asked. It fell to Andrea to pull back the curtain and tell me about the frustrating range of things being done to confuse and discourage young people from participating in the political process.
First, there were robocalls. Some people reported getting official-sounding phone calls telling them, “If you’re caucusing for Barack Obama, remember the date of that caucus has changed to January fourth.” （It hadn’t. There was only one caucus date: January 3.） Another batch featured a caller underscoring Obama’s middle name, Hussein, in an attempt to make the senator seem foreign.
Second, there was in-person disinformation. When the Obama campaign embarked on a strategy of encouraging college students to return to campus early from winter break at their parents’ homes in order to caucus, it was accused of “systematically trying to manipulate the Iowa caucuses with out-of-state people.” From this allegation brewed the idea that you should only caucus in Iowa if you “consider yourself Iowan” as a matter of conscience. What a totally ridiculous thing to hear. If I got pulled over after doing four shots of J?ger, my conscience might not consider me drunk, but the cops would definitely arrest me for a DUI because that’s what the law says. Considering yourself Iowan was not a real prerequisite for voting—you’re Iowan if you live there most of the year, which college students do. No matter how much J?ger they’ve had on campus.
One of Obama’s spokespeople at the time was future White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who said, “Barack Obama doesn’t believe that we should disenfranchise Iowans who meet all the requirements for caucus participation simply because they’re in college. We should be encouraging young people to participate in the political process—not looking for ways to shut them out.”
In the early primary states, witnessing this sort of loose-rumored, anonymous voter suppression felt extra shady because I was meeting increasing numbers of young people who were opening up with inspiring and heartbreaking stories of what an Obama victory would mean to them and their loved ones. A young volunteer named Stephen told me that his mom had cancer and no health insurance. He’d had to leave college to help with the bills at home and volunteered after work every day because of Obama’s health care plan. A young woman named Sonal had a brother whose student loans were so large that he was unable to make the monthly payments. She wanted to make sure Obama’s pledge to double the Pell Grant came to fruition—it would be too late to help her brother, but it would help others like him who were thinking about higher education. And at a campaign stop on a snowy college campus, I was approached by a smiling, heavyset, wheelchair-bound young man named Miguel. After making small talk, Miguel reached into his wallet and pulled out a photo of a fit, handsome marine. “That’s me,” he said. “When my convoy in Iraq was hit by an IED, I was paralyzed from the waist down. I volunteer for the Obama campaign because both parties voted to authorize that war, and Barack was against it. I never want anyone to go through what I did.”