At the 1995 Source Awards, André 3000 from the hip-hop duo OutKast famously responded, “The South got something to say,” when the New York audience jeered their win for Best New Artist. That defiant line has been echoed throughout the South in recent months as southern content creators and activists work to fire up voters. The focus is generally on federal elections, policies, and sound bites, but Y’all Vote is working to shift the focus.

Y’all Vote is the brainchild of Amanda Nelson, Anna Ruderman, and Kate Barr. It was created less than two hours after the U.S. Supreme Court made Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act nearly impossible to enforce in April 2026. The case is now simply known as “The Callais Decision,” and it kicked off a firestorm across the South. Y’all Vote is helping to lead the charge by organizing southern content creators.

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Regular voters doing more

What sets them apart from others is their organizing efforts around state and local elections. Their bottom-up approach comes from their own personal experiences.

Barr tells Upworthy via email, “I ran for NC State Senate in 2024 in a heavily gerrymandered district with the explicit campaign goal of making as much noise about our unfair maps as I could (the campaign was called Kate Barr Can’t Win). I was one of those people who didn’t know a thing about my state reps, couldn’t even name one, for most of my life. And I was politically engaged! Running for state leg gave me a crash course on how little we understand about state legislatures and what they do…and how important they are.”

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Ruderman explains, “In 2020, my mom worked hard to........

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