Ballot: Object Lessons

by Anjali Enjeti

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

Enjeti lays out the growing challenges for voters in battleground states, where rightwing legislatures have introduced staggering numbers of voter suppression bills and redrawn district lines, all to disenfranchise as many Black and other marginalized voters as possible. As her account of the history and stakes of election integrity shows, the aftershocks of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021 have manifested most egregiously on the four corners of the ballot.

Audible Audio

Expected publication April 16, 2026

About the author

Anjali Enjeti is a former attorney, organizer, and award-winning journalist based near Atlanta. Her collection of essays, Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change, and her debut novel The Parted Earth will be published in the spring of 2021.

Her writing about politics, social justice, and books has appeared in Harper’s BAZAAR, ZORA, Courier Newsroom, Mic, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her work has received awards from the South Asian Journalists Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. A graduate of Duke University, Washington University School of Law, and the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, she teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Reinhardt University.

Since 2017, Anjali has been working to get out the vote in Georgia’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community. In 2019, she co-founded the Georgia chapter of They See Blue, an organization for South Asian Democrats. In the fall of 2020, she served on the Georgia Asian American and Pacific Islander Leadership Council for the Biden Harris campaign. A poll worker for Fulton County, she lives with her family outside of Atlanta.