The most important job of a citizen is under threat

How does democracy and civic life play out, and what is it like to be a citizen?

This question was posed to former mayoral and gubernatorial candidate Sam Katz by Andrew Ferrett, the director of In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America. The three of us had been collaborating for years on documentary history films produced by Katz’s company, History Making Productions. But despite his experience as a newsmaker, Katz had categorically refused to be interviewed himself.

In September 2024, when we finally convinced Katz to move to the other side of the camera, we were in the final editorial phases of In Pursuit. This was going to be a legacy project, we argued, your voice is needed (he had enjoyed a front-row view of Philadelphia civic life since the 1960s).

“I would say that the most important job of a citizen, it’s to vote,” he began. We’d brought our crew up to a Fitzwater Street roof. The wind was blowing Katz’s peach tie; the skyline glinted behind him. “And in the sense of the use of the word democracy, even in its Greek origins, the only place where people could practice democracy was through voting.”

I recalled Katz’s remarks on democracy when I heard that President Donald Trump, taking another step to try to control November’s midterm elections (as The Inquirer argued recently), had fired the two remaining Democratic members of the federal Election Assistance Commission, and that the last remaining Republican member, Christy McCormick, had resigned.

The EAC was created in 2002 as a pro-democracy measure after the contested 2000 presidential election. As a bipartisan commission, it has set standards for voting machines, mail-in ballots, and cybersecurity. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling on June 29 overturned over a century of precedent, giving the president power to fire members of federal commissions like the EAC for political reasons and appoint loyalists.

Vacating the EAC won’t keep the midterms from happening in November, but it’s one more act in what former U.S. Reps. Richard Gephardt and Timothy Wirth call a “rolling coup.”

The firing of the commissioners was “deeply concerning in light of President Trump’s relentless efforts to try to interfere in elections,” said Michael Waldman, the president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, the New York Times reported.

The dangers are real, as much to American democracy as to the spirit and meaning of citizenship, as Katz defines it. In Pursuit, a 10-part series being released throughout 2026, makes the consequences clear.

And yet, voting as a practice of democracy has almost always been threatened. In 1838, as Episode 4 of the series brings into dramatic focus, a new Pennsylvania Constitution determined that Black men, free men and landowners otherwise, no longer had the right to vote. Were no longer citizens.

In 1871, a year and a half after the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave all Black men the franchise, a revanchist movement led by Philadelphia congressman and Speaker of the House Samuel Randall and his disciple, 4th Ward boss William McMullen, resulted in the murder of Black men trying to vote in the mayoral election, including civil rights leader Octavius V. Catto.

Episode 6 opens with Susan B. Anthony and a group of organized suffragists seizing the podium during the 100th anniversary reading of the Declaration of Independence, demanding what the 15th Amendment never delivered: women’s right to full citizenship (it would take another 44 years).

“I believe that I understood what citizenship meant from a very early age,” Katz continued. “My grandmother was legally blind. And so from the time I’m a young person, I took her to the polling place to vote.”

This familial joy, this right and responsibility, this tiny and also enormous act: it’s what defines our ability to be American. Lily Yeh, the founder of North Philadelphia’s Village of Arts and Humanities and an immigrant from Taiwan, says in Episode 10 of In Pursuit: “It reflects democracy and the essence I feel of America, which is most dear. One person, one vote.”

This is what’s fundamentally under threat. It’s a strange thing, as a filmmaker, to watch reality imitating all this history.

Nathaniel Popkin is the writer and producer of “In Pursuit: Philadelphia and the Making of America.” Episode 5, “America (1838 to 1876),” premiered at the Philadelphia Film Society’s Film Center on Thursday. The series streams on YouTube.