Nevada Voices

By Tran Zen Belila Torres
Photos and videos of burning skies, burning forests, burning flags, and burning cities consistently flooded my social media feeds this year. Scrolling through these felt so surreal at times—as if this year was nothing but a dumpster fire.

By Eric Duran-Valle
I was making a U-turn on Sahara Avenue when I got a frantic phone call from my mom about the election. Calmly, I explained there was no way that Donald Trump would even come close to winning. By precedent alone, it was impossible.

By William Huggins
What am I doing here? The night before the Presidential election of 1988 between Democrat Michael Dukakis and Republican George H. W. Bush I sat in front of what would now be considered an ancient rotary telephone dialing prospective Democratic voters in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, urging them to the polls the following day.

By Prism Zephyr
I was very conflicted over voting in the year leading up to my first time. As a person with multiple intersections, Black, queer, nonbinary, fat, neurodivergent, assigned female at birth, and as an orphan living with a retired grandparent with a limited income (pardon the length), I felt that I was going to be harmed on the account of one identity or another.

By Don Hall
I was 18-years-old in 1984, and while I was bright enough to have read and understood Orwell’s prophecy, Melville’s opus to obsession, and given up on Hawthorne’s seven gables (I still don’t really know what a ‘gable’ is), I was not as up to speed on political nuance.

By Joan Dalusung
It is October 2020, and I’ve been a librarian for 23 years now. Libraries nationwide frequently host early voting or are sites for primary and general Elections. I've had the pleasure of working with election workers many times, including meeting them at 5:30 am on Election Day for voting machine setup and staying until the last votes are cast and the machines are picked up that same day.

By Eunkang Koh
In one of the classes I teach, we recently discussed the feminist movement and various other social movements in American history. The subject matter was not new to any of us, but it acted as a sobering reminder that not everyone enjoyed the right to vote throughout America’s past. Some of us, including myself, were overcome with emotion as we discussed how women and people of color had to fight for rights many of us take for granted today.