10 Voter Suppression Methods

Voter suppression in the USA is as old as voting itself. Listen in to hear about 10 ways we stifle the vote.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
Jerry's out there somewhere wandering around. So if you see her,
bring her back. And this is Stuff you should know.

(00:23):
A rare top ten. Yeah, where we do all ten,
although I'm sure we'll end up combining something and it'll
be like eight or something weird like that. But we
just don't even really do these anymore. Oh, I see
what you mean. No, No, it's been a while. This
one's an important top ten too. This isn't like, you know,
ten biggest things ever moved or anything like that. Did

(00:45):
we do that? No, I don't think we ever did.
It's on How Stuff Works. Yeah, it is right, it's
a real thing. Yeah, or maybe like ten heaviest objects
ever moved or something. Maybe we'll do it someday. Uh.
This is from our old website that we used to
work for or though How Stuff Works, and uh this
is and we've done stuff on different ways to suppress

(01:06):
the vote and to rig the vote through jerrymandering and
such efforts like that. We well, we did one specifically
called our election laws designed to suppress voting, and that's
a good one to go listen to as well. It
is because it's very sad. But in the United States, UM,
suppressing the vote and keep trying to keep people and

(01:26):
certain people and certain demographics from voting is as old
as voting itself. Yeah, which is sad because everybody has
this impression that you know, and it's pure state in America.
If you want to vote, if you say this is
my my right and obligation and duty as a citizen, Um,
you can go vote and it shouldn't be all that

(01:46):
hard and you just go and you vote, and your
vote is counted and maybe your person wins, maybe they don't,
but you voted, and there shouldn't be any barriers to that.
Voting is the way that a democracy functions. So the
most democratic way for the democracy to function is to
remove as many barriers as possible. Unfortunately, there are a

(02:07):
lot of barriers that are put up that do make
things harder for people to vote, which is what we're
talking about here. That's right, and they're not old barriers.
The Brennan Center for Justice, it's just a think tank
in New York and advocates for civil rights, especially around voting.
They said, since two thousand ten, states have passed new

(02:27):
laws making it more difficult for people to vote in
the United States of America. Yeah so, and we should
probably just come out and say, Unfortunately to our Republican listeners,
this is not one of those both sides do what
kind of things. Um. This is largely Republican. The Republican
controlled UM states and municipalities that create laws and regulations

(02:50):
that do make it harder to vote. And the reason
why on paper is because it's it's to combat UM
voter fraud. The problem is this voter fraud has been
shown many, many, many times over by many different studies
by by groups from both sides of the political spectrum

(03:11):
that it doesn't I mean, it doesn't really exist. It
exists in such minuscule amounts that it might as well
not exist. That same Brennan Center, Chuck, that you mentioned
a second ago, they're big time into into voting. They
they did a study and they saw that between nine
ten thousands of a percent to four one hundred thousands

(03:32):
of a percent, that's how the rate of overall voting
fraud in the United States and if you're like Brendan Center, all,
but that's liberal. Um. There was actually an exhaustive inquiry
investigation launched in two thousand two by John Ashcroft, who
is Bush Junior's Attorney General. If you'll remember heck of
a heck of a singer. Remember when he sang about

(03:53):
the eagle flying high. Yeah, man, I remember that he
was annointing feet with oils. Yeah. So Sacroft his Justice
Department launched a really thorough investigation into voter fraud in
the United States, and out of examining hundreds of millions
of ballots between I think, um, oh, I don't remember

(04:14):
what years they looked at it over, they managed to
bring charges on only one people and only eight six
of those were convicted. Um. So there's there's really no
evidence that voter fraud exists. And yet these solutions to
voting fraud voter fraud, which are obstacles and barriers to voting,
are still established. They're still supported. Even though people are

(04:37):
like voting fraud doesn't exist, they say, well, we still
have to protect against it anyway, so we're gonna make
voting harder. Um. And that's kind of the big problem
that we're dealing with right now, with with this thing.
And this is why a lot of people point to
this and say this is voter suppression. That's right. And
in fact, even in our most recent election, if I
remember correctly, uh, Donald Trump launched an investigative body to

(05:01):
look into the because he lost a popular vote by
roughly three million votes and he said that there were
at least three million illegal votes cast That's why I
lost that vote? Didn't he form a body to investigate that?
That just sort of quietly went away without any findings.
It did. There were like there were some findings, but
they were you know, and there was a report and

(05:23):
it was actually kind of a scandalous report that said
there's voter fraud everywhere. And then people said, well, can
you show us your your work and they said no,
and that's when it kind of faded off into nothing. Um.
So yeah, so there's like we're showing, like it's been shown,
voter fraud like basically doesn't exist. And yes, any instance
of voter fraud, especially purposeful voter fraud meant to to

(05:44):
affect the outcome of an election. Throw that person in jail,
like take away they're right to vote. Forever. And um,
maybe speke m on the bottom too, like this is
not it's not a good thing. No one's saying like
who cares about voter fraud? What people are saying is
that voter fraud virtually doesn't exist. So to institute all
these draconian measures that make it harder for people to

(06:04):
vote and seemingly weirdly make it harder for certain groups
of people like minorities and poor people to vote, Um,
that's that's a problem because number one, it's a solution
to a problem that doesn't exist. The number two, again,
it seems to be voter suppression. And all other people
would say, well, why why would why would the GOP
care if if if um, like, why would they do

(06:27):
this then? And apparently if you look at elections in general, Um,
the Republican Party tends to be favored when fewer people
turn out, when a lot of when there's a large electorate,
that usually tends to favor the Democrats. When not that
many people turn out to vote, the people who turn
out to vote usually tend to be Republicans. So a
lot of people point to the Republican controlled cities and

(06:48):
states around the country and say, um, I think you're
doing this to win, and which makes it cheating. And
you're cheating by taking away people's ability to vote or
making it hard enough that they just give up and
don't vote. That's right. So, uh, a lot of this
is gonna be historical as well. And I guess we
should start with number ten, which is poll taxes. And

(07:10):
early on, when voting kind of was in its uh
early stages, they thought, you know, I'm a really easy
way to keep people from voting is to have them
pay a tax to have to vote. And it doesn't
have to be exorbitant, but maybe just high enough to
where most of the people that we don't want to
vote can't afford it. Most of the Confederate former Confederacy

(07:32):
UM had these poll taxes. A lot of this stuff
was in the South historically. Unfortunately, Virginia charged about a
buck fifty a year, which was about eleven bucks in
today's dollars, so that's not a lot of money, but
it had to be paid in cash. And back then,
if you were a sharecropper or if you were a
small uh farmer with a small farm, you bought most

(07:55):
of your stuff on credit and you didn't have a
lot of cash line around. You might have had two
or three dollars at any given point, right, and you
hit it on the head when you said. A lot
of this happened or started out. A lot of voter
suppression tactics started out in the South, um during reconstruction,
because all of a sudden there were a lot of
black people who suddenly had the right to vote in

(08:15):
the white dominated South, and so the the white establishment
was at threat of being undermined or replaced by black people,
where people who were friendly to black interests, and they
didn't want that, so um, they started instituting things like
poll tax, but they had to do it in ways
where it appeared, um, like it applied to everybody. So

(08:36):
a poll tax applied to everybody. But then they would
institute things like grandfather clauses, which literally said, with poll taxes, um,
if your grandfather was able to vote before the Civil War,
your exempt. Well, black people didn't really have the right
to vote, especially in the South before the Civil War,
so it's impossible that their grandfather would have had that right.

(08:56):
With white people who might have been poor but could
and afford to pay the poll tax, but we're probably
going to vote in favor with wide interests in the
South during that election, they would be exempted because their
grandfather could vote before the Civil War, and that's how
that was done. Yeah. And in other Southern states, Um,
they had cumulative taxes on top of just being taxed.

(09:18):
You had to do this several years in a row
in order to earn that right to vote. So all
of these things, um. You know. Of course, this was
eventually rendered illegal in nineteen sixty four with the ratification
of the twenty fourth Amendment. They said, you can't do
poll taxes anymore. After a hundred years, we've determined it's
not fair. Yeah, And it took a couple of years too,

(09:40):
So all the way up until nineteen sixty six, dude,
there were four states that still had laws on the
books that had to be struck down in federal court
that poll taxes were okay. Yeah, which is crazy. Another
one that they did was literacy tests, um, which kind
of went hand in hand. Again, a lot of this
stuff started out in the the Reek Instruction and then

(10:00):
Jim Crow South. Um. And if you were black right
after the Civil War, there was a really good chance
that you couldn't read way more of a chance um
when compared to a white person. I'm not sure what
the percentages is, but there were laws on the books
that said it's illegal for you, as a white person
to teach your your the people that you have enslaved,

(10:24):
UM to read or write. It's illegal, like literacy among
slaves is not is not legal and so UM. One
way to prevent those people who were now franchised after
the Civil War UM from voting would be to say, well,
you have to be literate to vote because and this
is sneaky, because if you're not literate, how can you

(10:45):
possibly be an informed voter. You can't just come in
and say I want to vote for this person because
I like their name. You have to be informed, and
to be informed, you have to be literate. So we're
going to test your literacy before we let you vote. Right.
One good example is in South Carolina and the two
where you couldn't even if you could manage to learn,

(11:05):
if you really wanted to vote, and you managed to
learn to write down your name and and your your ballot,
they said, no, you got to write down a ballot
for each office. If you want to vote for governor
and senator and anything else, then you have to to
to be able to write down all of those and
put it in the correct box. This labeled that you
probably can't read. And we're going to shuffle these boxes

(11:27):
around too. So even if you have someone that wants
to help you cast that vote, that's not going to
be allowed to happen either. Um. And you know, forget
the fact that people are have learning disabilities and sometimes
have legitimate problems learning how to read, even if they
want to learn how to read. It's like saying that

(11:47):
you can't vote if you if you don't have arms
to cast to cast a ballot. It's just it's outrageous.
And uh, it gets even more outrageous if you go
to Louisiana, where they had literal brain teasers that you
had to be able to figure out in order to vote.
And this one, I I I'm sure if I sat
down long enough, I could figure it out. But not

(12:09):
when I'm probably nervous about casting my first vote as
a former enslaved person. Right. So, so this one in particular,
and this one was instituted as more and more black
people learned to read. Um. Which, so just buckle up
for this one, right, every other word in this first
line and print every third word in the same line,

(12:30):
but capitalized the fifth word. That you right, So you
could conceivably, especially as a literate person, figure this out.
It would take you a little while, but say that
you went and you so you wrote all this stuff,
and then you got to the last part where it
said capitalized the fifth word. Then you went back and
scratched out the small case whatever that fifth word was

(12:52):
and capitalize that one, or maybe you capitalize all the
words and you had to go back and put them
in lower case. The Act that these tests were administered
by white poll workers and that they were typically subjective,
meaning that if that poll worker decided you failed, you failed.
When you went back and scratched that out and made,

(13:14):
you know, capitalize that fifth word, there was probably a
hundred percent chance that that white poll worker, who didn't
want you voting in the first place, was going to
just say, sorry, you failed, you can't vote. Yeah, and
you think, well, sure, but this was the eighteen hundreds. No, No,
Some southern states had these brain teaser tests all the
way up until the mid nineteen sixties, when the Voting

(13:36):
Rights Act finally said you don't need to do a
brain teaser to vote. That's um illegal and it's kind
of dumb. Yeah. So you know, there was a lot
of UM, a lot of chicanery, effery I think, as
John Oliver would put it, UM that was going on
in the South. Uh. But I mean the one of

(13:56):
the mechanisms that I think that that really got you
u UM that were that really just kind of probably
the most effective one was just straight up violence, like
the the Ku Klux Klan, UM, the Knights of the
White Camelea UM, A bunch of different groups, terrorists, organizations
grew up two terrorized black people and people who supported

(14:22):
the rights of black people, UM to send a message
it saying like no, we're we're the white power structure
is going to be staying in power around here, and
we will go so far as to murder you and
your family and make examples out of you to like
leaving you in a tree as a signal to everybody else.
This is what happens when you try to vote. This

(14:44):
is what happens when you you try to register other
people to vote. UM. And it was a very long
lasting legacy that went on from the end of the
Civil War up until I believe Congress finally, UH passed
a law saying that no, this is this is illegal.
You can't do this kind of thing. But it went
on for decades like this. Yeah, they finally made it

(15:07):
a federal crime and more than three thousand clan members
were indicted. Only about six hundred of those were actually
convicted because again we're talking about juries in the South
for the most part. Uh, this seems like a good
time to take a break, Okay, and we'll pick back
up with number seven right after this number seven. Right, So,

(15:50):
there's some just to give you a little historical background
real quick. There's some um, there's reconstruction where black Americans
become in franchise they have the right to vote. In
response to that, there's terror, there's Jim Crow laws. And
then in response to the Jim Crow laws that that
just overtly suppressed the Black vote, there was the Voting

(16:11):
Rights Act. And for a long time, the Voting Rights
Act was really effective. And the reason why it was
effective was because there was a section to it, section five,
that said, hey, if you've ever ever engaged in voter discrimination,
you're on a statewide basis, on a systemic basis, you

(16:31):
have to have us. The federal government review any changes
to the voting procedure in your state before you can
implement them. And so any state that wanted to try
to come up with some voter suppression tactic, it might
be brilliant, but if the federal government said no, they
couldn't do it, and so the vote would be saved
in that respect. Well, in two thousand thirteen, the Robert's

(16:53):
leg Court um struck down Section five of the Voting
Rights Act. So now we're seeing the results of that
where voter suppression tactics are starting to come back, and
they're starting to come back in like this avalanche of
tactics where across the country. If you put them all together,
it's a real problem. But the Voting Rights Act figured
in dramatically to save the vote of people. UM, and

(17:16):
the gutting of that section five and two thousand thirteen
by the Supreme Court did the exact opposite to it.
That's right. One tactic that they could use and use
for many years was just making it and still used
to some degree, making it difficult to register or to vote. UM.
Here are some of the things that used to do.
Is you have to keep reregistering many many times you

(17:38):
have to have a street address with an actual name
and number. And if you were an African American living
in the rural South, you may not have an actual
street address. UM on the dirt road next to the
field that you farm. Um. You know, little things like this,
these technicalities to meet these requirements to vote that they

(17:58):
knew that African Americans didn't have. And you know, there
are were and are still literal conversations, some of them
these days are even on tape where you hear of
public officials talk about making it hard for black people
to vote. And if we do this, this is how
many people we think we can keep off the voter

(18:19):
registration logs. Uh. It's just it's shameful. And UM, I'm
surprised we're not screaming at this point. We're trying to
keep it together. It wasn't just in the South, oh,
in the North and in the West in the early
nineteen hundreds, Um, there were immigrants, and they didn't want
immigrants voting. A lot of times, UM, ethnic and religious
minorities they didn't want voting. So in places in the

(18:42):
North and the West, like New Jersey and California, they
made it tough for immigrants to vote by saying you
have to have your uh, your original naturalization papers at
the polling place. Or maybe we don't want maybe the
interests of people who work in factories don't align with
our So here's what we'll do. Those people work long
ten to twelve hour shifts, can't make it to the polls.

(19:05):
So we're going to close the registration offices before those
factories shut down every day to keep them from voting. Yeah,
and there were there were other ways, like you know
that that they went back to close these loopholes too,
Like it was a real public private partnership between the
government and other groups. There were there were groups that

(19:26):
were dedicated to kind of preserving white supremacy in the South.
Say that would um, that would boycott businesses that where
they found out that those those employers gave their black
employees time off during the day to go registered to
vote or to vote, Like, you could lose your customer
base because if they found out that you were doing

(19:46):
that with with black people, um or with your black employees.
So there were like even if you say, well, so
what it was hard to get registered to vote? Figure
it out, Um, it was disproportionately leveled at black vote ers,
and even if you did figure it out, there were
repercussions for figuring it out too. Yeah, or in New York,

(20:08):
if you know that UM a lot of Jewish people
might vote in a more liberal way, Hey, let's have
registration times on Saturdays and yam kapoor. When we know
that Jewish people won't be able to get out and
registered to vote, it's high time that we make UH
voting days national holidays. I agree, Chuck. I agree it

(20:30):
should be a paid holiday, UM, a national paid holiday,
or have it on Saturdays. Do something but make it
less hard for sure. Yeah, Like people need to be
allowed to vote. And we're not talking about UM voter fraud.
We're talking about legal Americans having the right in the

(20:50):
ability to vote in as easy away as possible. Yes.
And if you also say, well, if they really wanted
to vote, they would, they would find a way to
do it. When's it lie time you didn't log into
a website because it required two factor authentication from your
break And we're talking about having to take a bus
across the county to registered to vote when you have
to be working and your employer won't give you time off,

(21:14):
so you have to take sick time to just go
register to vote, and then you have to do it
all again to go vote. It's it's more problematic than
it appears. Just when you're saying it out loud. That
was a good burn. Sick burn, thanks man. UH Number six,
Straight up, voter intimidation still happens to a large degree. Uh.
In two thousand four, it was reported that in Florida,

(21:35):
in the state election there, they sent plain closed state
troopers to the homes of fifty elderly black voters to
question them for supposed election fraud um. And then when
they asked the state officials why they sent these state troopers,
they said, well, we saw we thought it might be

(21:55):
a more relaxed atmosphere to to come to their home
and ask these elder really black voters about whether or
not they participated in voter fraud, which, by the way,
this investigation turned up absolutely no fraud whatsoever, so it
didn't happen, um, which is like basically all investigations of
voter fraud turn up no fraud whatsoever, And a lot

(22:18):
of people say, well, these investigations are really just um
intimidation tactics, and this one, to me is one of
the more despicable ones because it directly traces right back,
uninterrupted to the reconstruction era and the fact that it's
still going on today is just despicable to me. But
they it is. And it's not just um, you know,

(22:41):
state troopers showing up at your house to ask you personally.
There was a really famous case that our dear governor
in Georgia, Brian kemp um when he was Secretary of State,
because we need to remember he was Secretary of State
running an election that he was the one of the
two candidates for governor in UM and a lot of
people say, well, he did some shady stuff, which we'll

(23:02):
talk about later, but when he was just straight up
secretary of State, he oversaw the arrest of the equipment
ten plus two where to African American school Board school
board officials UM who were elected a couple of times
in this one election in a runoff, fair and square,

(23:23):
they were arrested and their supporters and campaign advisors were
arrested and taken to jail and had mug shots of
them put on the news. UM because they were accused
of voter fraud and after years, the charges were finally dropped.
Not a single person went to jail, no one was convicted. Um,
but a lot of people point to that and say,
if you don't understand that as a clear message to

(23:45):
African American not just voters but also office holders, um,
that they shouldn't bother running or else their lives are
going to be ruined, then you're you're really missing the
point here. Yeah, in two thousand fourteen, that is another
intimidation tactic. Uh. And this is just you know, these
things that aren't technically illegal, but where candidates is trying

(24:07):
to be very sneaky and if they can, you know,
if they can trick a hundred voters into doing the
wrong thing, then it's their their time has been well
spent in their minds. But Mitch McConnell's campaign sent out
these mailers that were marked election violation notice, and it
had the warning you are at risk of acting on
fraudulent information. And you start to read it and what

(24:30):
it is is just, um, basically, here's my opposition candidate,
and UM, we don't like what they say, so this
is fraudulent information. But they dress it up in a
way sort of like the publisher's clearing house. That makes,
you know, our our elderly citizens drive across the country
thinking they have actually won real money. Right, this is

(24:52):
the making it. Yeah, this is the opposite of that,
but using the same tricks. Basically, it's like you get
a notice in the mail, um, and these you know,
it's usually preying on people that are that are older
in our country, which is sad and awful. Uh. And
they get a notice in their mail that says, oh
my gosh, I'm at risk of acting on fraudulent information. Yeah,
and you know they took this. Uh, they were sued,

(25:15):
but a federal judge said, no, I'm sorry, uh rejected basically, Yeah,
and I mean and also intimidation to um can be official,
like in part of official policies, like some of those
poll taxes in the South. Um, they added the extra
layer of keeping you from even trying by saying the

(25:37):
only place you can go pay for the poll taxes
that your sheriff's office. Right, you might say, especially if
you're white, Uh, well, big deal, I have to go
to the sheriff's office. Well imagine if you went to
the sheriff's office and there was a really good chance
that while you were there paying your poll tax so
that you could go vote. And for that reason only,

(25:58):
they said, hey, by the way, while you're here, you know,
we've got this case open. Where were you on Tuesday night?
And you would tell them and they would say, well
can you prove it? Um, just knowing that that was
a possibility, and if you don't realize that was a possibility,
I would urge you to brush up on your Jim
Crow South history. Um would would dissuade a lot of people,
I would guess from going to pay that poll tax

(26:20):
and then going to vote. Remember when Helmer Simpson, I
thought you want to vote and I had to go
to the police station to claim his prize. Yeah that
was a good one though, Yeah, that was a good one.
Another one, number five is something that is still You
mentioned Brian Kemp in Georgia, UM, pruning names from the
voter rolls. I thought that that was I thought that

(26:43):
that was a generous word that they used, pruning, pruning,
because it makes it seem like methodical and um, you know,
well informed. Yeah. Well this has happened time and time again.
Before the two thousand election for president in Florida, once again,
state officials Republican controlled Florida. They hired a private firm

(27:03):
to go through the registration rolls delete names who are
people who had died, who were registered multiple times in
multiple places, or convicted felons or declared mentally incompetent in
court proceedings. And you might think, well, that's great, because
you know you don't want uh, deceased people on voter rolls,
which is true. But what about when you make mistakes

(27:25):
and you delete a lot of voters who are fully
eligible to vote. Then what happens? And the answer is nothing, No,
there's not. And by the time that it does turn
out like, oh, we made a mistake, the elections long over.
These these inquiries and their reports that they produce are
usually a couple of years after the fact um. But

(27:47):
the in Georgia in particular, they found out that again,
the guy who oversaw the purging of the voter rolls
was one of the two candidates in the election. Just
basic ethics says, you recuse yourself, you have nothing to
do with us, or you say no, no, no, let's
not do this, or let's do it the right way,
not let's purge this many people that we actually mistakenly

(28:12):
removed two hundred thousand people removed their right to vote
in this in this election, two hundred thousand. And then,
just to add horrible irony to the whole thing, it
was only by fifty five thousand votes that that Brian
Kemp beat Stacy Abrams in that gubernatorial election. Yeah, that
was a bitter pill here in Georgia because remember it

(28:33):
was like I think it was the week or it
may even be the eve of the election when they
lobbied the charge that the Republican UH system had been
hacked and that they were launching a case against Abrams
to look into it. And then you know, after the election,
of course they're like, oh, we were wrong. They didn't
hack us after all, right, Which again, who who said

(28:56):
that they that they were hacked? Was that the Secretary
of State Brian Kemp, who was so running for governor
against Stacy Abrahams. Yeah, yeah, what about voter I D.
Voters should take a break. Oh yeah, let's take a break.
I'm pretty charged up here, all right, We'll take a
break and we'll talk about voter I D and some
in a few more things right after this. So we

(29:37):
talked a lot about voter I D chuck in, um,
the voter suppression episode, which again go go listen to that, guys.
It's a it's a good one as well. Um. But
the upshot of it, there's that word again. The upshot
of it is that, um, if you require someone to
show there that they are who they say they are

(30:00):
when when they go vote, you can make a good
case that at the very at least, you're adding an
obstacle or a barrier to voting. But you could also say, well,
if you have to pay for that, that technically constitutes
a poll tax. And people say, oh, yeah, well Section
five of the Voting Rights Act doesn't exist anymore, so
go sit on it. Ralph mouth. Yeah, I mean in

(30:26):
some states it costs up to sixty bucks. That's that's unconscionable, man,
that I D. And you know, sixty dollars for some
people is their grocery money for the week when you
lift paycheck to paycheck. And again, you know, it's really
easy to say, well, you know, just pay the money
and go out and get your I D. So you
can vote if you really want to vote. That's a

(30:47):
choice between that and putting food on the table for
your kids. It's a barrier to voting, plain and simple. Yeah.
And also, I mean there are plenty of states who
that rightly who require a voter I d um rightly
off or free ideas that you can use to vote.
Um Like, that's definitely the way that it should be.
But that's still again, any time you require somebody to

(31:09):
potentially take time off of work, that puts an enormous
burden on like working like the working poort, like people
who just can't afford to take time off of work.
They might be in a job where there's enough people,
um who would love to have that job that if
they take a sick day, their boss can be like,
you know what, I know, you weren't sick, and you're fired.

(31:30):
This is the last straw. So your job could actually
be on the line. Could be more than just a
loss of hours, It could equal the loss of a job.
And again, we live in a democratic country where the barriers,
the barriers to democracy should be lowered, not raised lowered.
And yes, we should vigorously prosecute any instance of fraud,

(31:51):
but because that hasn't been shown to exist, lowering the
barriers so people can legally vote is not problematic. And
it's andy democratic to do that to raise them. It is.
And when you when you hear these uh these taped conversations,
they're not talking about voter fraud. They're saying, hey, we

(32:13):
can get probably a two point five percent reduction of
African American voter turn out in this county if we
do X. And I again, like we keep saying African
American voter turn out. Like when when there was when
I think Miami UM purged their voter roles in I
don't remember exactly when it was, but there was a
commission that did a report on it, and their purge

(32:36):
affected sixty like six of the people who are deleted
were black voters, even though those voters represented just twenty
point four percent of the population, whereas only sixteen point
six percent of the people who are purged were white,
even though those people represented seventy seven percent of the public.
So yeah, like if you if you look at studies

(32:58):
of this stuff, it disprop portunately impacts black voters, typically
minority vote voters as a whole, but definitely black voters
for sure. And that's not to say like the Republican
Party just hates black people. The Republican Party knows that
African Americans typically tend to vote Democrat and they're a
large group of people, so if you can make it

(33:19):
harder for them to vote, UM, you're probably going to
affect the Democrats vote, not your vote. Yeah. Another thing
that you can do is close UH polling stations and
limit polling hours in counties where you think it might
help your vote. UM. There are a bunch of swing
states North Carolina, Ohio and some other states that have

(33:41):
cut early voting days or hours. UM. There was a
report in two thousand fourteen that said they're more likely
to inconvenience black voters who liked to vote early and
in person historically. UM. In Maricopa County in Arizona, there
were four voting voting locations in two thousand eight. In
two thousand sixteen there were sixty. This is a huge,

(34:06):
huge problem, a huge problem. This is one one way
that this is going on, making it harder to vote
by making voting less available to people when it can
totally be afforded. UM. It's being pruned. UM. And it's
not just Texas, although Texas has some agregious stuff going
on since two thousand UM. Oh I don't remember. Two

(34:29):
thou fourteen, maybe Texas has shut down seven hundred and
sixty polling locations places to vote, seven hundred and sixty
and there they they currently have on the UM on
the agenda. I don't know if it's been pasted or
if it's just been proposed or what. But UM, if
you want to vote by UM mail in ballot, the

(34:52):
drop off locations in Texas has been reduced to one
per county. They said, that's it. One place in two
hundred and fifty four counties. There there's one place in
each of those counties where you can take your ballot
to drop it off. The problem with this is that
some of Texas counties are enormous. Texas has a number

(35:14):
of counties that are larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island
put together. They have something like a hundred and twenty
counties that are larger than Rhode Island. Granted, Rhode Island
is small, but Rhode Island is a small state. These
are counties in Texas we're talking about, and in one
place in each of those counties, there's a place where
you can drop off your your mail in ballot. UM.

(35:36):
That's that's that's a problem and a lot of people
are just going bonkers over that one. Yeah. And beyond
closing polling places, like having to maybe take two or
three city buses to get to your place to vote.
When you finally get there, if you managed to go
through all that trouble, which is again they're trying to

(35:58):
to make you say, you know what, it's not worth
the trouble. H, then you're met with you know, five six,
seven hour lines all day long, right, and this is
what you get for your for your troubles to try
and participate an American democracy. Yeah, so going on you
on your lunch break doesn't end up working out very well.
What about trickery number two? This is pretty awful. Um,

(36:20):
you talked about that one by um the people. I
don't know if it was Mitch McConnell's campaign or just
a group supporting him, or if it was one and
the same. Who knows, um tricking people by saying you're
about to act on fraudulent information or something that's I mean,
that's long standing. There is one. I'm guarantee we talked
about this before. I'm almost positive. But in two thousand

(36:42):
and eight, Um, someone in Virginia sent a flyer out
that looked like it was from the state Board of
Elections that said, Um, if you're a Republican, you should
vote on November four. If you're a Democrat, you vote
on November five, which is the day after the election,
which is in one way hilarious. I mean, it's just
hysterical that that somebody did that in another way, and

(37:05):
the fact that it could have even if it didn't,
but it could have impacted somebody's vote by purposefully confusing them.
That's despicable. Again, that's a word I keep going to
because I genuinely feel that way about going to any
length to to deprive or fool someone out of voting. Right.
But if you get caught doing that, truly, there is

(37:26):
a massive debt to pay via jail time. Like in
Maryland in two thousand ten, a robocall campaign during the
gubernatorial election told thousands of voters in African American neighborhoods
that they could quote relax and stay at home that
evening because Democratic incumbent Governor Martin O'Malley had already won

(37:48):
the election. Uh, not true. The polls were closed, and
this wasn't just tricksters. This was Paul Shurick, who was
the campaign manager for the Republican opponent UM who went
ended up winning, and they caught him and he was
charged and found guilty of four counts of election fraud.
And you think, all right, throw the book at the guy.

(38:09):
What did he get? What did he get? He got
thirty days home detention, probation and community service, right, which
is really disappointing, not because that guy deserved worse, but
because our federal um, the penalties for federal election laws
are breaking them, UM, that are meant to protect people's
right to vote and punish people who try to deprive

(38:30):
people at the right to vote. Those are federal laws
and the penalties are supposed to be pretty stiff. So
thirty days of house arrest at his house, um, when
he when really he made a name for himself, is like, hey,
I'll make sure that you're going to get elected as
a campaign manager. That's very disappointing for sure. Well, because
the message it sends is it's totally worth it to

(38:52):
do this swinging, swinging election, little community service. Who cares?
And there's two guys, um, who are I don't know
what's going to happen to them, but they are. They
have a lot of charges against them right now. But
for this, I believe the election UM they had they
sponsored a bunch of robo calls, tens of thousands of
robo calls in places like Michigan, Chicago, UM, and I

(39:15):
believe they were targeting African American UH voters where it
said if you vote by mail, your information is subject
to be handed over to the police and run for
UM any potential outstanding warrants, or it may be added
to the mandatory vaccine list, as if that exists. But

(39:38):
just playing on people's deepest fears to to to prevent
them for voting, to dissuade them from voting. You'd have
to be a genuine scumbag of the highest order to
do something like that. And they caught these two guys,
Jacob Wall and Jack Berkman doing just that UM. And
as a matter of fact, there they I guess when
they registered these robot calls UM, they registered it to

(40:00):
one of their phone numbers and then came out and
blamed it on Democratic Operatives UM, because they wouldn't have
possibly used their own phone number for this kind of thing.
Just to add a little cherry on top. I just say,
all this is alleged because they're they're charged with this
right now, but they haven't been convicted, right Well, I'm
sure they have some community service to look forward to,
ye in some house arrest. So um. The final one

(40:22):
on the list here is is a controversial one to
be sure, but whether or not you should be allowed
to vote as a felon or as someone who has
ever convicted been convicted of a crime. Uh and many
and this is one that's kind of going the other
way now, but for many, many years in many states,
if you have ever been convicted of any crime, even

(40:46):
if you went to prison, served your time, got out,
and we're leading a great beneficial life towards society, you
are not allowed to vote anymore, right, which has started
to become overturned I think in two thousand eight teen. Yeah,
in Florida. Florida's had this long standing um disenfranchisement policy

(41:07):
which most people have accepted for for years. But then
finally some people came along and said, hey, this is
really affecting a lot of people who want to vote,
who've who you know, serve their time, who have become reformed,
they want to be full citizens again, can we give
them the right back to vote? And in two thousand
and eighteen, that was on the on the ballot and

(41:27):
Florida voters overwhelmingly said, yes, totally, let's do that. They
have to have served their time and repaid all of
their restitutions, but we're we're going to um give them
the right to vote back. And it was a huge victory.
And then there was a Republican lawmaker who said, well,
wait a minute, this is kind of vague. UM. It
says that they have to have um, have have fulfilled

(41:48):
all of their sentencing obligations. There's a lot of these
people who are about to get their their right to
vote back who haven't paid all their fines and fees, which,
as it's been understood traditionally, you have basically lifetime to
pay off the the actual financial fees and restitution that
come along with UM being convicted of a crime. Uh.

(42:09):
That that that you have to pay that off first.
That's that's in the law and actually got passed in
the Florida legislature, Republican controlled legislature that UM, you have
to pay all of your fines and fees first before
you can get enfranchised again, and that's proving to be
an enormous problem for a lot of the UH former convicts. Yeah,

(42:31):
so it you know it continues to this day. I
know we got on our soapbox and pretty passionate about
this one. But we're both believers in the right to
vote and to make it as easy as possible for
UH eligible voters to vote. I don't see any argument
counter to that. That's that's valid. Why why wouldn't you

(42:52):
and a great democracy want as many people to vote
as possible. Again, the only argument you will see again
and again is voter fraud. And if you can show
that voter fraud doesn't exist, then you just knock the
legs out from under it and all it's just exposes
voter suppression then, so hopefully the more people who know
about it chuck, the harder it is to do stuff

(43:12):
like this. And I hope that that's the case, because
that's why we shared this, Because I don't care what
political persuasion you are, it's wrong to suppress the vote.
It's just wrong. I'm sorry. If you want to know
more about voter suppression, UM, you can go try to
vote and see what happens and since I said that,
it's time for and by the way, go vote, go vote.

(43:36):
And you know, I think by the time this comes out,
most of the state's registration will be um shut down.
But for the future, even if you voted in the
last election, like I check mine two or three times
before every election because I don't want to show up
on election day at my polling place and be surprised
to learn that I'm not on the roll or the register,

(43:57):
or that my polling place has moved. Just check it,
check it, and check it and recheck it. Yeah, and
there's tons of websites out there that um legit websites
that aren't affiliated with any party that can help you
check that um. And if you are registered to vote,
please vote whoever you vote for. Just vote like it's
important that you vote, so go be a good American vote.

(44:20):
And since I said that, finally, I think Chuck, it's
time for listener mail. Uh. This is from Ellie. She says, Hey, guys,
live in Kansas working Topeka, and I just listened to
the episode on Fallout Shelters. I cannot begin to explain
to you the nerdy level of excitement I felt while
driving to a client meeting when I spotted a yellow
sign with the three triangles, just as you said there

(44:42):
would be in the episode. I wanted so badly to
stop and steal the sign off of the old brick,
nondescript building, but I didn't think that would bode well
since I worked for the state and I was in
a state licensed vehicle at the time. I think people
would have just guessed that you were requisitioning and kicking
it down. Yeah, would have been state. You would have
had to keep the nerdy giddiness in check. Not surprisingly,

(45:05):
the shelter is just two blocks from the Capitol Building
downtown because we all know in a crisis situation, politicians
like to make sure they're taking care of first love
random history tidbits, so you best believe I'm mentally cataloging
keep an eye out for more shelters in this area
to randomly point out to my husband who have no
idea what I'm talking about any who. Thank you for

(45:27):
your podcast and for keeping me company on my our commute.
Stay healthy and wear a mask because the coronavirus is
in fact real, and that is from Ellie t or L.
Actually I think so e l L E yep L
t I'm going to try to suss out what kind
of person l is um did L spell any who

(45:48):
with a w h o or an h o o h?
What what's your guess? Shoes nerdy, giddy over fallout shelters.
So I'm gonna get who you are? Correct? Yes, yes,
all is one word and y w h yeah, because
I think that that um that suggests a certain amount

(46:11):
of attention to rules and details. Note that she didn't
take the fallout shelter sign even though she could have,
and any who h o oh, it's much more like
whimsic goal and like I'll take my shoes off and
roll down the hill even though I'm in my fifties.
Kind of right. But she also believes that masks save lives,

(46:31):
so you know, attention to rule in details. Uh, well,
thanks a lot, L. That's fantastic and we appreciate hearing
from you. Kudos to to resisting temptation and yes, wear
a mask and go vote boy oh boy. We have
ticked a lot of people off with this episode, Chuck.
If we've ticked you off, we want to hear from you.

(46:52):
Be nice, but sure, of course we want to hear
from you. You can email us, and if you are
happy with it, you can email us to either way
send it off to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
How Stuff Works for more podcasts for my heart Radio
because at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

(47:13):
you listen to your favorite shows. H