Narrator: In 1946, a sharecropper named Otis Moss Sr. put on his best suit and walked six miles to the polling place in LaGrange, Georgia. He was determined to vote against an avowed segregationist. When he arrived, officials told him he was at the wrong location. So he walked another six miles to a second precinct. There, they sent him to a third. After walking from dawn to dusk, he finally reached the correct school, only to be told the polls had just closed. He never got the chance to vote. He died before the next election. This gut-wrenching journey, a deliberate and exhausting maze designed to disenfranchise a single citizen, is not just a relic of a bygone era. It is the root of a struggle that continues today, albeit in more subtle and bureaucratic forms. In her book, Our Time Is Now, author and political leader Stacey Abrams argues that the fight for the soul of American democracy is being waged on this very battleground: the right to vote. She provides a powerful analysis of how voter suppression works, who it targets, and what it will take to reclaim power for all citizens.

Narrator: The book dismantles the comforting notion that voter suppression ended with the Civil Rights Act. Abrams argues it has simply evolved from overt violence to a sophisticated system of bureaucratic disenfranchisement. This modern suppression works by creating so much friction and fear that citizens give up.

This is powerfully illustrated by the story of Abrams’s own grandmother, Wilter. In 1968 Mississippi, even with the Voting Rights Act newly passed, she was paralyzed by fear. "I’m afraid of the dogs and the police," she told her husband, refusing to leave her room to vote. She had seen the violence and doubted real change was possible. It was only when her husband reminded her of the sacrifices their own children had made in the civil rights movement that she felt ashamed of her fear and found the courage to cast her first ballot.

Decades later, in her 2018 gubernatorial race, Abrams saw this same fear manifest as disillusionment. A friend of her sister’s, a young woman who had previously voted for Abrams, declared she would never vote again. She had heard too many stories of registrations vanishing and voters being sent to the wrong polling places. She felt the system was rigged, and her vote didn't matter. Abrams shows that these two stories, separated by fifty years, are two sides of the same coin. Whether through overt intimidation or a death by a thousand bureaucratic cuts, the goal of voter suppression is the same: to convince citizens that their power is an illusion and that participation is futile.

Narrator: Abrams presents voter suppression not as a single act, but as a three-stage gauntlet designed to filter out unwanted voters. The first stage is registration. The book details the story of Diamond, a young Black college student who tried to register to vote in 2014. She registered at a high school drive and later updated her address with the New Georgia Project. Yet, her name never appeared on the voter rolls. On Election Day, she was told she didn't exist as a valid voter. Only after persistent calls from lawyers was she found on a supplemental paper list and, even then, was initially told she could only cast a provisional ballot, which is often discarded. It took direct intervention from a team of attorneys to secure her right to a regular ballot. Her story highlights how tactics like "exact match" laws—which reject applications for minor typos—and the demonization of third-party registration groups create immense hurdles, disproportionately for young people and communities of color.

The second stage is accessing the ballot. Even if a voter is registered, they must overcome physical barriers. Abrams points to the story of the "Quitman 10+2," a group of Black political organizers in Brooks County, Georgia. After they successfully used absentee ballots to elect a Black-majority school board in 2010, they were targeted by the Secretary of State. They were arrested, charged with voter fraud, and removed from office. Years later, every single one of them was exonerated. No fraud had occurred; they had simply used the existing laws effectively. The message was clear: for some communities, full participation will be punished.

The final stage is getting the vote counted. Here, Abrams tells the story of Marcus Soori-Arachi, who faced an absentee ballot nightmare. After moving, he updated his registration, but his ballot never arrived. When he finally got one through a third-party site, he was warned his signature didn't match the one on file. He mailed it in with extra postage, hand-delivering it to the post office, only to find out after the election that it was never received or counted. His experience shows how signature mismatch laws, broken voting machines, and under-resourced precincts can cause legally cast ballots to simply disappear.

Narrator: The book directly confronts the criticism of "identity politics," reframing it not as a divisive tactic but as a necessary tool for marginalized communities to gain a voice. Abrams argues that for groups who have been systematically excluded, identity is the lens through which they experience the world and its injustices. To ignore identity is to ignore the specific barriers they face.

She shares the harrowing story of Kimya, a survivor of domestic violence. In 2011, her estranged husband shot her four times and their young daughter once in the head at a daycare center. Miraculously, they both survived. In the aftermath, Kimya became a fierce advocate for gun safety laws and better support for domestic abuse survivors. Her political decisions are now inseparable from her identity as a survivor. She supports candidates who understand the systemic failures that allowed her abuser, who had a known history of violence, to possess a gun. For Kimya, and millions like her, politics is not an abstract debate; it is about survival. Abrams argues that this is the essence of identity politics: leveraging one's lived experience to demand policies that protect one's community.

Narrator: Beyond the ballot box, Abrams reveals how the decennial U.S. Census and the subsequent process of redistricting, or gerrymandering, are used to predetermine political outcomes. The census is not just a headcount; it determines the allocation of over a trillion dollars in federal funding and the distribution of political power. An undercount of a community, particularly "hard-to-count" populations like people of color, renters, and rural residents, means fewer resources for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure, and less representation in Congress and state legislatures.

The book details how this data is then weaponized through gerrymandering. Abrams tells the story of James Williams, a retired Black deputy sheriff who ran for a Georgia State House seat in 2016. After he qualified for the ballot, he was suddenly disqualified, with officials claiming he no longer lived in the district. His team discovered that the district lines had been surgically redrawn to move his house just outside the boundary, ensuring the incumbent ran unopposed. This, Abrams argues, is how politicians pick their voters, rather than voters picking their leaders. It’s a silent, structural form of suppression that rigs the game before it even begins.

Narrator: Abrams offers a clear playbook for winning elections in our current political landscape. It begins with rejecting the myth of the "magical swing voter"—the often white, moderate voter whom campaigns spend millions to persuade. She argues that a far larger and more reliable path to victory lies in mobilizing unlikely voters: the vast coalition of people of color, young people, and unmarried women who are often ignored.

She points to the story of an unpaved Latino neighborhood in the West. Residents paid taxes but had no paved streets or regular trash pickup. When they confronted their county commissioner, he bluntly told them he didn't have to respond because they didn't vote. Angered, the community organized, went door-to-door, and mobilized their neighbors to vote for the first time. They ousted the incumbent, and the next year, their streets were paved. This story demonstrates that low-propensity voters are not unreliable; they are uninspired and unengaged. Abrams’s own 2018 campaign followed this model, nearly doubling Democratic turnout in some conservative counties not by changing her message, but by showing up, listening, and asking for their vote. The formula is simple: expand the vision of who belongs in the electorate, invest in their inclusion, and talk to them about what’s at stake.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Our Time Is Now is that democracy is not a spectator sport, and its survival is not guaranteed. Stacey Abrams makes a compelling case that the right to vote is the central pillar of a fair society, and the systematic efforts to weaken it are the gravest threat we face. The fight is not just about winning a single election; it is about ensuring that every citizen believes their voice matters and has the power to be heard.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. It asks us to look past the partisan noise and see the structural decay in our democratic process. Are we willing to accept a system where a person’s zip code, race, or income determines their ability to participate? Or will we, like the communities Abrams highlights, organize and demand more? The future of American democracy may depend on our answer.