Our team chose to do our text-encoding project on "The Ballot and Me" by Langston Hughes due to the resounding relevance of its message, especially in this year's 2020 elections. As we coded this play, we began to make connections in our markup and use our code to highlight important aspects of each character's part in the play, and how they correspond to the importance of each historical characters' roles in real life. As we coded Hughes' work, and in doing so became more intimately familiar with this script, it became unquestionably clear how important the Hughes's message remains - especially to minority groups in society today. People of color (POC) had to fight for their rights back in the 1800's because the southern slave-holding states sensed danger in letting POC vote. As of today (2020), Voter ID laws have underlying racial biases which prevent minorities from enganing in active participation. With the 2020 election, active participation was encouraged to lift the restrictions against minority populations. Organizations and indivduals are bringing cases of voter descrimination to court in an attempt to resolve these wrongdoings. In this project, we aimed to highlight the prominent voices in African American history and politics, and show that there remains a lot of work to be done to combat racial discrimination - and, using our code, underline the emphasis in Hughes's cries to the audience to exercise and defend their rights to vote.