Suppressed: The Fight to Vote Parent Guide

In the words of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, “Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.” Suppressed: The Fight to Vote lays out, in unsparing detail, how that critical democratic right has been systematically undermined in the state of Georgia.

This short documentary focuses on the 2018 elections – a midterm year for Congress and a gubernatorial contest between sitting Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams, past minority leader in the state’s House of Representatives. As Secretary of State, Kemp was responsible for overseeing the election – and as history shows, he used that position to suppress the votes of Georgians who were likely to vote for his Democratic opponent.

Suppressed: The Fight to Vote documents the tools in Kemp’s voter suppression arsenal. It reviews Georgia’s closure of 200 polling places – 79% of which were in majority-African American counties. It documents how the Secretary of State’s office purged over 14% of the electorate – 890,000 in total. There’s no pretense of this being a non-partisan bureaucratic task: counties that lean Democrat were purged at four times the rate of Republican-leaning counties. The documentary also tracks the state’s failure to distribute absentee ballots and an election day fiasco that saw lines of three to five hours in some majority-minority districts. Damningly, the film documents Kemp’s decision to delay the processing of over 53,000 voter registrations – 80% of which were for African American, Latino and Asian voters. Since the election was decided in Kemp’s favor by a mere 54,723 votes, it’s clear that these voter suppression strategies could easily have delivered the governor’s office to him.

Watching this movie is an exercise in frustration. If you believe in democracy, in the right of every citizen to have an equal say in selecting their government, Suppressed: The Fight to Vote will either enrage or sadden you. This should be a bipartisan issue: if your neighbor’s right to vote isn’t safe, neither is yours.

Frustrating or not, this is a critically important documentary and should be watched in civics or social studies classes around the nation – and in homes as well. There are no content issues to deter viewers – aside from a single muffled swear word – and the warnings in the film are vital as is its call to action. The US Constitution’s declared goal “to form a more perfect union” cannot be achieved unless all citizens’ voices are heard and their votes are counted.