Our textbooks, our media, and our political speeches take it for granted: we live in a representative democracy where the will of the people is paramount — our votes count.

But that isn’t actually true. America has never been a country of one person, one vote. For hundreds of years, activists have tried to get us closer. But even today, it’s not a direct democracy. And that’s by design. Our system was built by a select few, for a select few. We were never all supposed to get a say.

In this series, we’ll take a close look at voting in America, and how that’s shaped what American democracy is, what it was meant to be, where it’s failed, and what it might become.

All episodes of the (mis)Representative Democracy series are available now: