Time March 2–9, 2020INEQUALITY| VOTING
ELIUD BONILLA, 57
Eliud Bonilla, an engineer working on NASA’s mission
to reach the sun, was falsely accused of voter fraud
in 2017 in an online report titled “Alien Invasion II,”
published by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. It
labeled Bonilla, a U.S. citizen who had been voting since
age 18, and thousands of other Virginia residents as
noncitizens who had either illegally registered to vote or
cast ineligible ballots. A 2019 settlement required the
conservative group to apologize and scrub the voters’
names from its website.
“I went through a whole variety of feelings. The first
one was shock. Then I became indignant. I am a U.S.
citizen by birth. I was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. So were
my parents. I worried for my safety and my family’s,
because in the world that we live in today, especially the
country we live in today, there are a lot of angry people
trying to right any perceived wrong on their own.
“This is an emotional topic. Most people do not like
to think that there’s cheating in the electoral system.
Where I live, there’s a very large Hispanic, Latino
population. In Northern Virginia, for years there’s been
tension from certain groups that are anti-immigrant.
“It just comes to prove that no one is safe. You’re not
shielded from anything—the good or the ugly—in this
country. But for better or worse, we’re in a democracy,
and if you don’t vote, you don’t count. There’s a reason
why there are efforts to try to get you not to vote. If it
were not important, no one would care. But this is an
indication that it is important. It is sobering that after all
these years we find ourselves in the same issues, that in
the U.S. we haven’t progressed as much as we should.”
STACEY HOPKINS, 56
In 2017, Stacey Hopkins of Atlanta received a notice in
the mail telling her to confirm her residential address
within 30 days or be dropped from voter rolls. State
officials call this “routine and legally required” as people
leave Georgia, move counties or die. Hopkins had done
none of those things, so the American Civil Liberties
Union of Georgia sued the county election board and
Brian Kemp, then Georgia’s secretary of state, on her
behalf. A settlement allowed Hopkins to vote in the
2018 gubernatorial race pitting Republican Kemp
against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who hoped to become
America’s first black female governor. Kemp won by
1.4 percentage points; Abrams in 2019 founded Fair Fight
2020, an organization to combat voter suppression.“Particularly for the black community, voting is sacred. To
receive that notice is like an affront. It takes you through
a lot of emotions. It’s like going through the stages of
grief. It minimizes your existence. It reminds me that in
1776, I would not have been a voter then either. You feel
helpless. You feel deceived. If you fight, you fight to keep
yourself from being purged. You fight to get your voter
registration recognized by the state. You manage to get
to the polls, and then they turn around and electronically
lynch you. It wasn’t a mistake. It was intentional. It’s about
keeping power. This is state- sponsored violence. There
are insidious anomalies that exist particularly when it
comes to black voters. This is Jim Crow on steroids. They
just evolved and changed in a way so that they’re more
subtle with it. But this is no different. They’ve just adapted
to a digital age.”