Letters from a Fragmented Democracy

American democracy is under profound stress. This stress was caused by the legal erosion of hard-won voting rights protections. Supreme Court decisions have slowly chipped away at the Voting Rights Act’s safeguards, emboldening a wave of restrictive voting policies under the guise of promoting election integrity. These measures—voter ID laws, purges of voter rolls, closure of polling places—are often defended as neutral bureaucratic management or lawful audits of the voter rolls to eliminate non-citizen registration. But in practice, they fall hardest on marginalized communities. The political playing field has been becoming increasingly skewed, and public faith in the democratic process has corroded with time. The Constitution’s broad promise of equal voting access and fair political representation has thinned, and now reveals an unsettling paradox: At the very moment when electoral participation should be most protected amid democratic backsliding, it is increasingly precarious.