June 23, 2021 • 42 mins
Ari Berman is, without question, one of the leading journalists documenting voter suppression in the United States today. He covers voting rights at Mothers Jones and is the author of Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, which chronicles the history of voter suppression after the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. Dr. Kendi and Berman discuss the history of voting rights in the United States, the Republican-led attacks they face, and the type of antiracist policies necessary for a multiracial democracy. For further reading, resources, and a transcript of this episode visit https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/be-antiracist-with-ibram-x-kendi.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The first time I voted in the presidential election
was November seventh, two. I can still remember that night,
watching the results in my dorm room at Florida and
M University. We rooted against George W. Bush, like we
(00:38):
rooted against our football rivals, on the edge of our seats,
shouting at the same TV. Like many black people in Florida,
we were angry that Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jed Bush,
had recently terminated the state's affirmative action programs, and like
many Black Americans, we had heard about the disgraceful Willie
(00:59):
Horton ad his father ran decades earlier on his way
to the White House. Bush supports the death penalty for
first degree murderers. Newconka not only opposed to the death penalty,
he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.
One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy and a robbery,
stabbing him nineteen times. We viewed our ballots as lifeboats
(01:22):
cast to save America from four more years of the Bushes.
As the hours passed, we realized that Florida would determine
the election's outcome and the nation's future. Shortly after our
local polls closed, several news networks declared our gore the
(01:42):
next president of the United States. When ours did, we
turned off the TV, relieved and went back to our
dorm rooms. The relief was welcome and short lived. I'm
ibramex Kendy, and this is be anti racist. The next morning,
(02:07):
I was shocked to learn that George W. Bush was
narrowly winning the Florida race that had been called the
night before. The election was now declared too close to call.
As votes were recounted. In the weeks that followed, I
heard story after story of voter suppression from classmates in
their families back home. Stories of black citizens who registered
(02:30):
but never received registration cards. Stories of polling locations being
changed without warning. Stories of people who were unlawfully denied
a ballot for showing up without a registration card they
had never received in the first place. Stories of people
waiting in line for hours and being ordered to leave
the lines when the polls closed. Stories of hanging chads
(02:54):
or uncounted votes and miscounted ballots. Gaston County, an hour
down the road from FAMU, had both the highest percentage
of black voters in the highest rate of rejected votes.
Black voters were ten times more likely than white voters
to have their ballots rejected. The New York Times would
(03:14):
later conclude that this ballot disparity could not be explained
by income, educational levels, or by hanging chads. There was
only one explanation for the disparity, racism. On December twelfth,
more than a month after election day, the US Supreme
Court stopped Florida's recount. Almost two hundred thousand ballots were
(03:39):
invalidated by Florida's election officials. With the help of his
legal team, George Bush went on to win Florida and
the White House by a mere five hundred and thirty
seven votes. My first dance as an American voter was
met with a stampede of racist voter suppression. Two decades later,
that stampede has swept a nation. Republicans figure that suppressing
(04:03):
the votes of their political opponents can counteract their failure
to attract the majority of voters. Their cries of voter
fraud echo the great lie many former slaveholders use to
destroy the voting power of black and working class white
people in the late nineteenth century and allow Republicans to
claim that new restrictions are needed to protect the integrity
(04:26):
of the democratic process. An election provided my anti racist
wake up call, and now two decades later, a new
generation is waking up to just how fraud and how
corrupt and how racist these Republican elected officials pushing these
new voter restrictions truly are welcome. To Be Anti Racist
(04:52):
an action podcast where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle,
and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness
of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy,
How to free humanity through the unity of anti racist
ideas and the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy.
(05:15):
On Be Anti Racist, we discuss how to make the
impossible possible, and how to bring into being what modern
humans have never known, a just and equitable world. You ready,
let's roll. Give us the ballot and we will no
(05:48):
longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead
to the federal government for passage of an anti lynching law.
We will buy the power of our vote right the
law on the statue of Books of the South, and
(06:09):
bringing in to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators
of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform
the salient misdeeds of blood feesht de mobs and to
the calculated good deeds of orderless citizens. Doctor Martin Luther
King Jr. Gave that speech in nineteen fifty seven. It
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would be a long, hard journey for him, for so
many anti racist activists to the Voting Rights Act of
nineteen sixty five, And as I witnessed in the election
of two thousand and many are witnessing today that journey
is ongoing. These battles over the vote are a side show.
There are few, if any, storylines more central to American history.
(06:58):
That's why I'm grateful for journalists like Ari Berman. He is,
without question, one of the leading journalists documenting voter suppression
in the United States today. He is the author Give
Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,
which chronicles the history of voter suppression after the Voting
Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. He covers voting rights
(07:20):
at Mother Jones and is the perfect person to anchor
a conversation on voter suppression and the type of anti
racist policies. We need to build a multiracial democracy. Ari.
I'm so glad we're able to sit down and have
this conversation. It feels like the nation is in a
(07:41):
place that you have been pointing towards and speaking about,
really certainly since your book Give Us the Ballot came
out six years ago, but even before then, and it
seems as if on some level, the American people are
waking up to what you've been writing about for quite
(08:03):
some time. I think you're right. One of the reasons
they're waking up, though, is because of the sad fact
that voter suppression is not a thing of the past,
and it's in a lot of ways the same thing
with your work. Right, people are waking up to the
reality of racism and white supremacy because these things are
all too evident these days, and in many ways, your
(08:24):
writing was ahead of its time, and I think the
same thing happened with a lot of the stuff I
wrote about. When I started covering voter suppression a decade ago,
people didn't even realize that voter suppression was still a thing.
And when I wrote my book about the history of
the Voting Rights Act in twenty fifteen, a lot of
people weren't even aware that the Voting Rights Act had
(08:44):
been weakened, or that there were new voter suppression efforts
in the wake of the efforts to weaken the Voting
Rights Act. So I think there's a lot more awareness
in general about the fact that voting rights are under threat.
But part of the reason there's more awareness is because
voting rights are under threat, and that's the disturbing and
less hopeful part of the story. Yeah, definitely, So certainly
(09:08):
there's a growing number of people who are becoming aware.
But I'm just curious, since your awareness came long before
the awareness of so many people, what sparked your personal awareness.
I became aware of the issue of voting rights in
the attack on voting rights about a decade ago, And
this was after the twenty ten election and a bunch
(09:28):
of states flipped over from blue to red, places like
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and North Carolina. And the first thing
all of these newly Republican controlled states did was passed
new laws to make it harder to vote. This was
back in twenty eleven, and it wasn't getting a lot
(09:49):
of coverage. This is when we saw the first real
voter id laws, efforts to cut back on early voting,
efforts to close polling places, purge the voter rolls, things
like that, and it clearly seemed to me to be
an attempt to try to nullify the election of the
first black president and to try to create an electorate
that would be older, wider, more servative, as opposed to younger,
(10:11):
more diverse, more progressive. And then when the Supreme Court
heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, this was
after the twenty twelve election, and they released the decision
in June of twenty thirteen gutting the Voting Rights Act,
I became a lot more interested in the history of
the Voting Rights Act, what it had done, and also
why it was being challenged. That really is what led
(10:32):
me deeper into the research for my book, Give Us
the Ballot. And then it just became a much bigger
issue once the Supreme Court had weakened the law. Your
book and others have since documented that almost as quickly
as it was passed, that attack on the Voting Rights
Act began, and it's been policies and practices and ways
(10:55):
to undermine it and ways to make it harder for
people to vote ever since. But why do you think
so many people had not seen and even so many
scholars had not documented the attacks Act. I think a
lot of people for many years took the Voting Rights
Act for granted. I know I took it for granted
(11:16):
before I started reporting on it. I thought there was
a general consensus in favor of protecting the right to vote.
And it was only when I saw these new restrictions
on voting rights, and when I saw the effort to
challenge the Voting Rights Act, that I became a lot
more aware of the history behind it and realized that basically,
not only was there a titanic struggle to pass the
(11:37):
Voting Rights Act, but there was a huge struggle just
to maintain and expand it over the next fifty years
after Selma, after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act
on August six, nineteen sixty five, I think the general
perception was, Okay, well, we solve that problem, let's move
on to the next one. And so there were voting
rights lawyers, there were voting rights historians, there were experts,
(12:01):
but it wasn't really thought of as a central civil
rights struggle. And I think It really took the Shelby
County Versus Holder decision in twenty thirteen and then the
aftermath of that decision to realize for many people that
the fight for voting rights wasn't over, and then in
many ways it remained a very big and titanic civil
(12:22):
rights struggle. You know, in my work a document how
political or economic or even cultural self interest leads to
racist policies like voter suppression. But then typically a justification
has to be born to rationalize and normalize and makes
(12:43):
sense of those policies. And in your work you've documented
how the principal justification has been this idea of voter fraud. Yeah,
invoking voter fraud to justify voter suppression has been around
for a very long time and has a really ugly
history in this country. I mean, that's what in many
ways was invoked at the end of Reconstruction by white
(13:06):
segregationists to justify literacy tests and poll te and things
like that. Yes, they were explicit about the fact that
they wanted to uphold white supremacy, but one of the
reasons why they said they wanted to uphold white supremacy
is that they believed that Blacks and others had sullied
the ballot box through fraud, and so they were restoring
the integrity of the election. You heard that argument be
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made against the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five.
If you go back and listen to what George Wallace
and other governors were saying about the Voting Rights Act.
They were saying that it was going to lead to
widespread fraud, bringing in uneducated African Americans to the ballot box,
illiterates who couldn't be trusted with the ballot. That was
an ideological argument, but it was also one that really
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had no basis in fact. And so when they wanted
to once again try to suppress the vote, they had
to have a justification for doing so, and so voter
fraud became their justification, and they tried really hard to
find evidence for it. They've never been able to find
any major evidence for it. But I think it's been
one of those things where if you just say something
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enough times, people start to believe it. Yeah, And I
think that's what happened with this. Approximately how many people
overall voted last year and how many documented cases of
voter fraud were there in the twenty twenty election. So
about one hundred and sixty one million people voted in
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the twenty twenty election. It was the highest turnout in
one hundred and twenty years. And as far as I know,
I have only seen two documented cases of voter fraud
in the entire election. It was two people say two
million or two two cases? Did I say two million? No?
I just want to make sure, because you know, we've
(14:52):
been hearing about all this widespread voter fraud, and so
one hundred and sixty million people voted and you're saying
there was you've only heard of two documented cases. I've
heard of two documented cases in Pennsylvania where people wrote
in dead relatives voting for Donald Trump. Those are the
only two documented cases I've seen. I'm sure there is
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more under investigation. But when it came time for the
Trump campaign to file at sixty lawsuits trying to overturn
the integrity of the election, which is when they would
put all their evidence on the table, they presented zero
cases over and over and over of actual frauds. So
there was a tremendous amount of allegations of fraud, but
(15:36):
just an infinitesimal number of actual documented instances and that's
what I find so interesting. The rhetoric is so overblown
when you compare it to the actual numbers in reality
of how rare voter fraud is in this country, and
that voter fraud is now justifying, from my understanding, hundreds
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of bills in what forty seven states? Yeah, three hundred
and sixty one new restrictions on voting have been introduced
in forty seven in states in the first three months
of this year. I'm sure that number will be much
higher by the time people are listening to this. But
it's just incredible the extent to which the Republicans and
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Trump in particular, manufactured this crisis and then pointed to
the crisis they manufactured as a reason to introduce these
sweeping restrictions on the ballot. I mean, it was incredibly
cynical from the very beginning. First, you try to undermine
people's faith in the electoral process so they don't vote
in the first place. Then when they vote, you try
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to throw out their votes. And then when you can't
throw out their votes, you then make it so that
they have a harder time voting in the next election.
I mean, this is a strategy, or this is a
plan here. This is a roadmap here. I think a
lot of people are not connecting one to the other
to the other, and so I see a clear narrative
from efforts to make it harder to vote before the
twenty twenty election. Efforts are trying to throw out votes,
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the violent insurrection at the capitol to nullify votes, and
then the effort and all of these state legislatures around
the country to try to make it harder to vote
in future elections and basically to try to succeed legislatively
where Trump failed through the courts and through just outright intimidation.
And that's really what reminds me of the Jim Crow era,
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because in the Jim Crow era, first they relied on
violence and fraud to keep Blacks away from the polls.
But then they realized that was too difficult, so they
actually had to enshrine all of these things into law.
And it was only when the literacy tests and the
poll taxes and the property requirements of the white primaries
were enshrined into law through so called legal means, that
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then they really succeeded in disenfranchising black voters. And they
succeeded in disenfranchising them, not through illegal means, although they
obviously did through violence and fraud and intimidation, But it
was really through the legal process, through state legislatures, through
the courts that they succeeded in the ultimate disenfranchisement. And
I think that's what makes the story so chilling, and
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I think that's what is so concerning about what's happening today.
Are they going to succeed through legal means where they
didn't succeed through illegal means. I'm Ari Berman, and you
are listening to be anti racist with Abram X Kendy.
(18:34):
Obviously there is a clear attack on the ability of
the American people, not just people who vote Democrat, even
people who vote Republican, people of all racial groups. It's
harder for people to vote now. Of course, black and
brown and Indigenous people due to these voter restrictions, it's
even harder for them to vote. But I'm curious, how
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can we re establish and strengthen American democracy. Well, I
think there's two really important pieces of legislation that are
moving their way through Congress. The People Act, which would
put in place sweeping protections for voting rights so that
every state would have things like automatic registration, election day registration,
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two weeks of early voting. There would be lots of
protections for voters no matter what state you live in.
And then there's a companion piece of legislation, the John
Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to restore the part of
the Voting Rights Act of the Supreme Court gut it
in twenty thirteen. And I think that's critically important as well,
because there are certain states like Georgia that just discriminate
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over and over again. So it's both a carrot and
sticks approach that for the people. Act would put in
place a lot of reforms, a lot of pro voter
policies that would help people, and the John Lewis Voting
Rights Act would block the worst policies from emerging from
the states that are repeat offenders, definitely, and especially with
the Lewis Act, some of the states or jurisdictions that
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would apply would be those who have discriminated over the
course of time, and others would be new discriminators. I'm
reminded of a piece that you wrote following the twenty
sixteen election in which you specifically looked at Wisconsin and
voter suppression policies there and the role they may have
played in Trump's narrow victory. So I'm curious, what are
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some of those potential new places that you think will
fall under that act. Well, what the law does is
it says that if a state has a certain number
of violations found by the courts over the last twenty years,
it can be covered under the new Voting Rights Act.
So if a state like Wisconsin which doesn't have the
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same history of discrimination in voting that a Georgia or
Mississippi would, for example, but if it's found to have
discriminated a lot in the more recent past, then they
could once again be covered under the Voting Rights Act.
And the other thing that the bill does is it
says that certain changes have an impact in terms of
discriminating against voters of color. So, for example, if you
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close a polling place in an area with lots of
minority voters, that would have to be covered under the
Voting Rights Act no matter what state it's in. They're
basically saying some states will have to approve all of
their voting changes because they are repeat offenders places like Georgia.
But certain changes, no matter what state you're in, have
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the impact of discriminating against voters of color, and therefore
you're going to need to get approval for that even
if you're not one of those covered areas. So it
looks more holistically at how voting discrimination works. The places
that have always discriminated are doing discrimination still Texas, Georgia, Mississippi.
They're always going to be covered. But also this has spread.
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This has spread to places like Wisconsin, or it's spread
to places like Ohio that don't have the same history
terms of Jim Crowe, things like that. But at the
same time, they're doing a lot of similar voter suppression
techniques in a lot of ways. Southern bread voter suppression
has spread to the North under Republican control. What do
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you think is still needed to ensure that every single American,
no matter their background, has the ability to easily vote
in this country. Well, I think if those two pieces
of legislation passed, I'd be a lot happier. But I
still think that, you know, listen, they're still going to
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find ways to try to get around it, just like
Southern states in the eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties
found a way to get around the fifteenth Amendment. I
mean the legislation was there, but it wasn't enforced, and
it had some loopholes they were able to exploit. I
think what we really need is a fundamental guarantee of
voting rights in this country that says that you have
(22:52):
the right to vote except for X, Y Z. Very
good reason, because we have things that you can't do
in this country. We supposedly can't disenfranchise people based on
their race, or based on their age, or based on
their gender. Now and practice, those things happen, but we
don't have anything just broadly guarantees the right to vote.
And I think that's one reason why voting rights remain
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such a contested issue in our country, because we've never
really put it into our constitution to protect it. If
you look at the debates over the fifteenth Amendment, there
was a more expansive version that was written that would
have banned voter suppression not just based on race, but
based on class and education as well. But the point
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is that the fact that the fifteenth Amendment wasn't as
broad as it could have been left loopholes for voter suppression.
I think that's still the case today when these voting
cases go before the Supreme Court, their challenge under the
fourteenth amdent, their challenge over the fifteenth Amendment. But there's
no amendment that just says, you, guys, shouldn't make it
harder to vote unless you have a really good reason
to do so. I mean, you would have to have
a more eloquent drafting, ever, But that's basically what I'm saying.
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What we need. Voting rights are such a fundamental right
that they really should not be abridge unless there's a
really good reason to do so. We don't have that
language in our constitution. I'm trying to think of an example.
I was born in the United States. Should I date myself,
I'll date myself in nineteen eighty two, That's what I was.
So that means, oh my gosh, which what's your birthday?
(24:18):
May first, nineteen eighty two. Oh man, you're an old man.
I was born in August thirteenth. So you know, both
of us we are guaranteed citizenship since we were born
in the United States. In other words, that can't be
taken away from us. To compare it to what you're saying,
you're stating that a citizen, one of their guarantees of
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citizenship would be the right to vote and it couldnt
be taken away like this whole idea of even registration
you have to register to vote, that you could lose
your vote when you go to prison. You're saying that
that would not be possible. We would always have our
right to vote. And then you're also saying, correct me
if I'm wrong, that it would clearly state that any
(25:03):
effort that precludes a person from voting makes it difficul
quote for a person is unconstitutional. Yes, and I guess
I would say I would like the right to vote
to be looked at more like the First Amendment. We're
born with freedom of speech. It's not conferred upon us.
We don't get freedom of speech when we're eighteen. Right,
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we have it based on a guarantee in our constitution.
But I have to affirmatively register to vote when I
turn eighteen, I have to possibly show other forms of
documentation depending on what state I live in. If I
commit a crime, I could be stripped of the right
to vote, potentially for life, depending on what state I
live in. If I have to move, I have to
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reregister to vote. I have to affirmatively seek out what
my polling place is. All of those kind of things.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't have to do anything
to be able to qualify for a voting, but I
think it would be a big shift in terms of
voter participation if we said that voting is a right
that can't be taken away from you. In Australia, they
have mandatory voting, and the reason they have mandatory voting
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is they don't view voting as a right or a privilege.
They viewed voting as a responsibility, that it's just something
that you do. I would like to think we don't
need that, we don't need to force people to do it.
But it's an interesting experiment in that if voting is compulsory,
there's no such thing as voter suppression. Yeah, the state
can't say you have to vote and then prevent you
from doing so. I think in America we think, oh,
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we're doing everything better than everywhere else, but in fact,
our political system, in our voting system, is probably more
screwed up and backwards than virtually any other advanced industrial democracy.
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With this past election, many of the people who voted,
of course, voted absentee, and so obviously there's been efforts
to roll back in Republican led states, the ability to
absentee vote ords it harder. Some people have proposed, well,
we should be able to vote in every way we
can bank, which then brings in the controversial. Should we
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be able to vote online and would that then make
voting we're accessible for young people? What are the types
of policies and practices we can put in place to
ensure every single person is voting well. I would say
that we should automatically register people to vote in the
same way that when you or I turned eighteen, we
are automatically enrolled on the Selective Service if there was
(27:40):
ever another draft for war. I think the government knows
enough about us to be able to do that. I
think that people should have as many options to vote
as possible, meaning that we should be able to vote
by mail and have ballots automatically sent to us. I
think we should have early voting so that we don't
vote on a Tuesday in November because that's when farmers
used to bring their crops to the market in the
(28:01):
eighteen hundreds. I think it's a very integrated system, and
also obviously some people are still going to want to
vote the traditional way on election day. I think online
voting is really tricky in an era of hacking and disinformation.
Right now, it sounds good theoretically, but I think it
would pose a lot of security problems, just given how
insecure it seems like some of our systems are. But
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I think in general, there's this expectation that voting should
be so much more inconvenient than other things we do.
I mean, people rarely wait two, three, four eleven hours
to get money out of a bank, but we're just
told that you have to do that to be able
to vote, or we can do all sorts of things
on our phones. But in Texas, for example, you can't
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even register to vote online. And there's hundreds of thousands
of kids that turn eighteen in Texas every single year
and they can't even register to vote on their phones
or even their computers. I mean, that's totally anachronistic in
terms of talking about modern day technology. So I think
the rules can go a long way. And then I
think at the end of the day, people are going
to have to have something to vote. Four people then
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have to be convinced that their vote matters, that their
vote will be able to change things, and things like
jerrymandering that reduces the choice that people have the fact
that the political system is so unrepresentative that voters of
color have much less representation all across the board than
their percentages in society. A lot of people still look
at the system and still see a bunch of old
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white guys running things. And to some extent that's still
true if you look at the Supreme Court, or you
look at even who the president is, or you look
at who the leaders are in the Senator of the House.
By and larger political system is still run by old
white people, and I think that's something that turns a
lot of people off as well. And so, in other words,
it's not just about ensuring everyone has the right to vote,
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that it could never be taken away from them, and
ensuring that it's easy for every single person to vote.
But the other side of it is candidates. And indeed,
last year I wrote a series of pieces in The
Atlantic on what I called the other swing voter. Yeah,
that was great. Of course, there's a traditional swing voter
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that political pundits talk about, who are people who swing
from voting Republican to Democrat, And those people are disproportionately
white and disproportionately older. So I wrote about the other
swing voter, and these are people who typically swing from
voting to not voting, many of them swinging from voting
(30:31):
Democrat to not voting yea. And typically it's based on
the candidate. These other swing voters are more likely to
be younger and especially people of color. And so how
do we thereby create through policies ways in which we
can have more candidates who would be attracted and even
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seek to swing the other swing voter, especially in this
political environment when the traditional swing voter that's white and
older seems to be dominating our political discourse. Well, the
fact is, if you vote your other radar of Candida,
but if you haven't voted, it's almost like you don't
exist to political campaigns. They don't try to spend any
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time trying to get your vote, and then it kind
of becomes a self defeating cycle. And I think if
you look at people that aren't voting, they are buy
in large progressive in terms of what they care about,
but they're disenchanted with the political system. I think a
lot of them think that there's too much money in
the political system, that they candidates don't reflect them, that
the candidates are bought off. That doesn't really matter what
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party you are, because there's going to be the same
outcomes at the end of the day. That's why things
like in the For the People Act they have public
financing of congressional campaigns because I think money is a
huge barrier to new people getting involved. I think it's
often the Aana Presses of the world, the Corey Bushes
of the world. They don't have money to run for office.
They don't sometimes come with communities that are well resourced.
(31:58):
They are often taking on established candidates, they're insurgent candidates,
or the party machines aren't funding them. And it's very
hard if you're a young black man or a young
Black woman, or a young Tino man or young Latino
woman to be able to get those kind of resources
and to be able to get known and work your
way at the ranks to then become a city council
member or a county commissioner, or a mayor or a
(32:21):
congress person. I mean, we're seeing shifts in this, but
the shifts are happening slowly, so I think that's one
thing that needs to change. One of the things that
was fascinating to me about the civil rights movement in
the nineteen sixties was people decided to go from protesting
to running for office. Right you had the John Lewis's,
the Andrew Youngs, they got involved in politics, and of
(32:43):
course that required compromise, right they weren't going to be
the same politicians like they were when they were in
SNICK or when they were in SELC or when they
were in corps. But I think in a lot of ways,
some of the ground was laid in terms of these protests,
in these movements in the past few years to get
the next generation of people to want to be in office.
And some of them aren't going to want to be
(33:04):
in office because they don't see the political system changing things.
But I think you're going to have the Coreys, the AOC's,
people like that who come out of an organizing background
and say we're going to take what we learned in
organizing and we're going to bring it to politics. And
I think that's the kind of thing that can start
to reach people that think about voting, that they are
turned off by the political system and might care about
(33:26):
things like a higher minimum wage or legalizing marijuana or
reforming the criminal justice system that often really aren't on
the table in the quote unquote mainstream conversations that we
have about politics. And of course there's a certain segment
of Americans who are like, you know, I just don't
do politics right especially now. It's so messy, it's so divisive,
(33:50):
people are so angry, and so that's just not me.
And oftentimes it seems as if some of those people
who are saying that would actually make great elected officials.
I think that what people see as they see, if
we don't get something instantly, then we can't get it
(34:10):
at all. And sometimes things take a long time. I mean,
just look at people's views of criminal justice now first
twenty years ago, completely night and day in terms of
how we talk about the issue, how Democrats talk about
the issue. So you can change politics by being in
the political process, but you can also change politics by
(34:33):
changing the scope of what is possible. That's one thing
that I think is really important. I think that's one
thing that a lot of the young activists and organizers
can do right now. Wow, and let's say you're not
necessarily an organizer or an activist, but you also recognize
that voter suppression policies are not just a racist attack
(34:54):
on democracy, but preventing us as a nation from getting
some of those policy proposals that are taken for granted
in other nations. What can they do to be part
of this struggle to really defend America democracy. I think
that you have to get involved in your own communities.
If you're in a place like Georgia or Texas and
(35:16):
there's fights going on right now, you can obviously call
your legislators. You can get involved in protests. You can
get involved in terms of working with different groups, whether
it's the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or the League of
Women Voters. There are lots of different groups that are
working on this issue. I also think that you can
just get involved in your own backyard. I mean, the
(35:37):
system is not perfect no matter where you live. There's
always things that can be improved, and there's always new
people that can get involved in the process. I think
one of the really cool things that happened in twenty
twenty was a lot of people volunteered to be poll workers.
And once you get involved in the process, it's a
lot easier to stay involved. Understanding that what happens to
our democracy affects so many other things, and that it's very,
(36:00):
very hard to make progress on any issue if so
many people are frozen out of participating. And so that's
why I think it's such an important issue, because I
really view it as central to all other rights, and
it's very hard to protect lots of different rights if
the right to vote itself is not protected and expanded. Definitely,
(36:20):
and Ari, I'm so glad we were able to have
this conversation. You know, people when they ask me who
should I be reading to understand voter suppression in this country,
of course I always suggest you and your work. You know,
I think you're the premier journalist in the country covering
voter suppression. So I'm thankful for your work. I'm thankful
(36:42):
for cal Anderson holding it down in academia, of course,
Stacy Abrahams holding it down in the realm of activism.
And I'm hopeful that people realize that path forward that
we've never truly achieved as a nation, a multiracial, multi ethnic,
multicultural democracy where we all feel free, where we all
have one voice, where that single voice is acquired and
(37:05):
we're all speaking to what's best for our communities. That's
really what we're trying to achieve. Thank you. So much.
I really appreciate the kind words, and I'm really thankful
for your work, and I think you opened the eyes
of a lot of people. You were talking about these
uncomfortable issues way before it was cool, before people were
posting black squares, before it was a trendy thing to do.
(37:27):
You were deep in this work. So I really appreciate
you having me on and hopefully we'll get to do
it again soon. Definitely. All right, take care, Thanks Abram,
great to talk to you. Shortly after I spoke with Ari,
a video of a private meeting of Heritage Action for
(37:48):
America's surfaced. After seeing the leak video, Ari and his
colleague Nick Sergey released a story that exposed the conservative
Heritage Foundation's rolled in shaping and even drafting voter suppression
bills across the country. The Heritage Foundation has actively promoted
voter suppression since its inception in nineteen seventy three. Co
(38:13):
founder Paul Wyrick admitted way back in nineteen eighty that
he didn't want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody
to vote as a matter of how fact on leverage
and the elections, quite candidate goes as the voting populace
goes down. Wyrick's founding dreams have come true. The Heritage
Foundation authored several provisions of the recent voter suppression law
(38:35):
in Georgia, including sections that inhibit mail in voting and
election administration and oversight. Heritage also drafted provisions for similar
bills in battleground states like Iowa. In Texas, Heritage is
leading the fight against HR one, a bill that would
protect voters by implementing nationwide anti racist measures like automatic
(38:59):
election day registration, two weeks of early voting, in the
expansion of mail in ballots. In the leak video, Heritage
Action for America leaders bragged about their role in recent
voter suppression laws. We did it quickly, and we did
it quietly. Honestly, nobody noticed. The executive director even admitted
(39:20):
Heritage uses misleading tactics to deliver their proposals to state lawmakers.
Or we have a sentinel on our behalf. Give them
the model legislation so it has that grassroots you know,
from the bottom up type of vibe. Voter suppression isn't
just a war on voters of color, It's a war
on voters. Through their reporting, arian Nick showed that the
(39:44):
movement to suppress votes reflect not the will of the
people fearful of voter fraud, but the will of the
wealthy and powerful, fearful of American voters. I want to
be clear about what just happened on the Senate floor.
Every single Senate Republican just voted against starting debate, starting
(40:06):
debate on legislation to tech to Americans voting rights. Republican
state legislatures across the country are engaged in the most
sweeping voters suppression in eighty years. Capitalizing on and catalyzed
by Donald Trump's big lie, these state governments are making
it harder for younger, poorer, urban, and non white Americans
(40:31):
to vote. The fight continues. If you're living in a
state trying to pass stricter voting laws, call your legislators,
demand their opposition. Volunteer and donate to organizations combating voter suppression,
like the League of Women Voters in Fair Fight in
Black Voters Matter. Now is the time to do more.
(40:56):
Now is the time to fight for a multiracial democracy.
Now is the time to be anti racist. Be Anti
Racist is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It
(41:16):
is written and hosted by doctor Ebram x Hindy and
produced by Alexandra Garrattin with associate producer Brittany Brown. Our
engineer has been Talliday. Our editor is Julia Barton and
our show runners Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers Arelie tim
Willad and Mio Lobell Manny. Thanks to Tammy Winn and
doctor HEATHERN. Sandford at the Center for Anti Racist Research
at Boston University for all of their help at Pushing,
(41:37):
and thanks to Heathern Fame, Carlie Migliori, John Schnaris, and
Jacob Weisberg. You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at
d r Ebram and on Instagram at ebrahm x K.
You can find Pushing on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods.
You can sign up for our news that are at
pushkin dot fm to find more Pushkin podcast listen on
a heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'd like
(41:59):
to listen.
Pushkin. The first time I voted in the presidential election
was November seventh, two. I can still remember that night,
watching the results in my dorm room at Florida and
M University. We rooted against George W. Bush, like we
(00:38):
rooted against our football rivals, on the edge of our seats,
shouting at the same TV. Like many black people in Florida,
we were angry that Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jed Bush,
had recently terminated the state's affirmative action programs, and like
many Black Americans, we had heard about the disgraceful Willie
(00:59):
Horton ad his father ran decades earlier on his way
to the White House. Bush supports the death penalty for
first degree murderers. Newconka not only opposed to the death penalty,
he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.
One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy and a robbery,
stabbing him nineteen times. We viewed our ballots as lifeboats
(01:22):
cast to save America from four more years of the Bushes.
As the hours passed, we realized that Florida would determine
the election's outcome and the nation's future. Shortly after our
local polls closed, several news networks declared our gore the
(01:42):
next president of the United States. When ours did, we
turned off the TV, relieved and went back to our
dorm rooms. The relief was welcome and short lived. I'm
ibramex Kendy, and this is be anti racist. The next morning,
(02:07):
I was shocked to learn that George W. Bush was
narrowly winning the Florida race that had been called the
night before. The election was now declared too close to call.
As votes were recounted. In the weeks that followed, I
heard story after story of voter suppression from classmates in
their families back home. Stories of black citizens who registered
(02:30):
but never received registration cards. Stories of polling locations being
changed without warning. Stories of people who were unlawfully denied
a ballot for showing up without a registration card they
had never received in the first place. Stories of people
waiting in line for hours and being ordered to leave
the lines when the polls closed. Stories of hanging chads
(02:54):
or uncounted votes and miscounted ballots. Gaston County, an hour
down the road from FAMU, had both the highest percentage
of black voters in the highest rate of rejected votes.
Black voters were ten times more likely than white voters
to have their ballots rejected. The New York Times would
(03:14):
later conclude that this ballot disparity could not be explained
by income, educational levels, or by hanging chads. There was
only one explanation for the disparity, racism. On December twelfth,
more than a month after election day, the US Supreme
Court stopped Florida's recount. Almost two hundred thousand ballots were
(03:39):
invalidated by Florida's election officials. With the help of his
legal team, George Bush went on to win Florida and
the White House by a mere five hundred and thirty
seven votes. My first dance as an American voter was
met with a stampede of racist voter suppression. Two decades later,
that stampede has swept a nation. Republicans figure that suppressing
(04:03):
the votes of their political opponents can counteract their failure
to attract the majority of voters. Their cries of voter
fraud echo the great lie many former slaveholders use to
destroy the voting power of black and working class white
people in the late nineteenth century and allow Republicans to
claim that new restrictions are needed to protect the integrity
(04:26):
of the democratic process. An election provided my anti racist
wake up call, and now two decades later, a new
generation is waking up to just how fraud and how
corrupt and how racist these Republican elected officials pushing these
new voter restrictions truly are welcome. To Be Anti Racist
(04:52):
an action podcast where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle,
and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness
of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy,
How to free humanity through the unity of anti racist
ideas and the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy.
(05:15):
On Be Anti Racist, we discuss how to make the
impossible possible, and how to bring into being what modern
humans have never known, a just and equitable world. You ready,
let's roll. Give us the ballot and we will no
(05:48):
longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead
to the federal government for passage of an anti lynching law.
We will buy the power of our vote right the
law on the statue of Books of the South, and
(06:09):
bringing in to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators
of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform
the salient misdeeds of blood feesht de mobs and to
the calculated good deeds of orderless citizens. Doctor Martin Luther
King Jr. Gave that speech in nineteen fifty seven. It
(06:33):
would be a long, hard journey for him, for so
many anti racist activists to the Voting Rights Act of
nineteen sixty five, And as I witnessed in the election
of two thousand and many are witnessing today that journey
is ongoing. These battles over the vote are a side show.
There are few, if any, storylines more central to American history.
(06:58):
That's why I'm grateful for journalists like Ari Berman. He is,
without question, one of the leading journalists documenting voter suppression
in the United States today. He is the author Give
Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,
which chronicles the history of voter suppression after the Voting
Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. He covers voting rights
(07:20):
at Mother Jones and is the perfect person to anchor
a conversation on voter suppression and the type of anti
racist policies. We need to build a multiracial democracy. Ari.
I'm so glad we're able to sit down and have
this conversation. It feels like the nation is in a
(07:41):
place that you have been pointing towards and speaking about,
really certainly since your book Give Us the Ballot came
out six years ago, but even before then, and it
seems as if on some level, the American people are
waking up to what you've been writing about for quite
(08:03):
some time. I think you're right. One of the reasons
they're waking up, though, is because of the sad fact
that voter suppression is not a thing of the past,
and it's in a lot of ways the same thing
with your work. Right, people are waking up to the
reality of racism and white supremacy because these things are
all too evident these days, and in many ways, your
(08:24):
writing was ahead of its time, and I think the
same thing happened with a lot of the stuff I
wrote about. When I started covering voter suppression a decade ago,
people didn't even realize that voter suppression was still a thing.
And when I wrote my book about the history of
the Voting Rights Act in twenty fifteen, a lot of
people weren't even aware that the Voting Rights Act had
(08:44):
been weakened, or that there were new voter suppression efforts
in the wake of the efforts to weaken the Voting
Rights Act. So I think there's a lot more awareness
in general about the fact that voting rights are under threat.
But part of the reason there's more awareness is because
voting rights are under threat, and that's the disturbing and
less hopeful part of the story. Yeah, definitely, So certainly
(09:08):
there's a growing number of people who are becoming aware.
But I'm just curious, since your awareness came long before
the awareness of so many people, what sparked your personal awareness.
I became aware of the issue of voting rights in
the attack on voting rights about a decade ago, And
this was after the twenty ten election and a bunch
(09:28):
of states flipped over from blue to red, places like
Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and North Carolina. And the first thing
all of these newly Republican controlled states did was passed
new laws to make it harder to vote. This was
back in twenty eleven, and it wasn't getting a lot
(09:49):
of coverage. This is when we saw the first real
voter id laws, efforts to cut back on early voting,
efforts to close polling places, purge the voter rolls, things
like that, and it clearly seemed to me to be
an attempt to try to nullify the election of the
first black president and to try to create an electorate
that would be older, wider, more servative, as opposed to younger,
(10:11):
more diverse, more progressive. And then when the Supreme Court
heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, this was
after the twenty twelve election, and they released the decision
in June of twenty thirteen gutting the Voting Rights Act,
I became a lot more interested in the history of
the Voting Rights Act, what it had done, and also
why it was being challenged. That really is what led
(10:32):
me deeper into the research for my book, Give Us
the Ballot. And then it just became a much bigger
issue once the Supreme Court had weakened the law. Your
book and others have since documented that almost as quickly
as it was passed, that attack on the Voting Rights
Act began, and it's been policies and practices and ways
(10:55):
to undermine it and ways to make it harder for
people to vote ever since. But why do you think
so many people had not seen and even so many
scholars had not documented the attacks Act. I think a
lot of people for many years took the Voting Rights
Act for granted. I know I took it for granted
(11:16):
before I started reporting on it. I thought there was
a general consensus in favor of protecting the right to vote.
And it was only when I saw these new restrictions
on voting rights, and when I saw the effort to
challenge the Voting Rights Act, that I became a lot
more aware of the history behind it and realized that basically,
not only was there a titanic struggle to pass the
(11:37):
Voting Rights Act, but there was a huge struggle just
to maintain and expand it over the next fifty years
after Selma, after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act
on August six, nineteen sixty five, I think the general
perception was, Okay, well, we solve that problem, let's move
on to the next one. And so there were voting
rights lawyers, there were voting rights historians, there were experts,
(12:01):
but it wasn't really thought of as a central civil
rights struggle. And I think It really took the Shelby
County Versus Holder decision in twenty thirteen and then the
aftermath of that decision to realize for many people that
the fight for voting rights wasn't over, and then in
many ways it remained a very big and titanic civil
(12:22):
rights struggle. You know, in my work a document how
political or economic or even cultural self interest leads to
racist policies like voter suppression. But then typically a justification
has to be born to rationalize and normalize and makes
(12:43):
sense of those policies. And in your work you've documented
how the principal justification has been this idea of voter fraud. Yeah,
invoking voter fraud to justify voter suppression has been around
for a very long time and has a really ugly
history in this country. I mean, that's what in many
ways was invoked at the end of Reconstruction by white
(13:06):
segregationists to justify literacy tests and poll te and things
like that. Yes, they were explicit about the fact that
they wanted to uphold white supremacy, but one of the
reasons why they said they wanted to uphold white supremacy
is that they believed that Blacks and others had sullied
the ballot box through fraud, and so they were restoring
the integrity of the election. You heard that argument be
(13:28):
made against the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five.
If you go back and listen to what George Wallace
and other governors were saying about the Voting Rights Act.
They were saying that it was going to lead to
widespread fraud, bringing in uneducated African Americans to the ballot box,
illiterates who couldn't be trusted with the ballot. That was
an ideological argument, but it was also one that really
(13:49):
had no basis in fact. And so when they wanted
to once again try to suppress the vote, they had
to have a justification for doing so, and so voter
fraud became their justification, and they tried really hard to
find evidence for it. They've never been able to find
any major evidence for it. But I think it's been
one of those things where if you just say something
(14:10):
enough times, people start to believe it. Yeah, And I
think that's what happened with this. Approximately how many people
overall voted last year and how many documented cases of
voter fraud were there in the twenty twenty election. So
about one hundred and sixty one million people voted in
(14:31):
the twenty twenty election. It was the highest turnout in
one hundred and twenty years. And as far as I know,
I have only seen two documented cases of voter fraud
in the entire election. It was two people say two
million or two two cases? Did I say two million? No?
I just want to make sure, because you know, we've
(14:52):
been hearing about all this widespread voter fraud, and so
one hundred and sixty million people voted and you're saying
there was you've only heard of two documented cases. I've
heard of two documented cases in Pennsylvania where people wrote
in dead relatives voting for Donald Trump. Those are the
only two documented cases I've seen. I'm sure there is
(15:14):
more under investigation. But when it came time for the
Trump campaign to file at sixty lawsuits trying to overturn
the integrity of the election, which is when they would
put all their evidence on the table, they presented zero
cases over and over and over of actual frauds. So
there was a tremendous amount of allegations of fraud, but
(15:36):
just an infinitesimal number of actual documented instances and that's
what I find so interesting. The rhetoric is so overblown
when you compare it to the actual numbers in reality
of how rare voter fraud is in this country, and
that voter fraud is now justifying, from my understanding, hundreds
(15:59):
of bills in what forty seven states? Yeah, three hundred
and sixty one new restrictions on voting have been introduced
in forty seven in states in the first three months
of this year. I'm sure that number will be much
higher by the time people are listening to this. But
it's just incredible the extent to which the Republicans and
(16:21):
Trump in particular, manufactured this crisis and then pointed to
the crisis they manufactured as a reason to introduce these
sweeping restrictions on the ballot. I mean, it was incredibly
cynical from the very beginning. First, you try to undermine
people's faith in the electoral process so they don't vote
in the first place. Then when they vote, you try
(16:43):
to throw out their votes. And then when you can't
throw out their votes, you then make it so that
they have a harder time voting in the next election.
I mean, this is a strategy, or this is a
plan here. This is a roadmap here. I think a
lot of people are not connecting one to the other
to the other, and so I see a clear narrative
from efforts to make it harder to vote before the
twenty twenty election. Efforts are trying to throw out votes,
(17:05):
the violent insurrection at the capitol to nullify votes, and
then the effort and all of these state legislatures around
the country to try to make it harder to vote
in future elections and basically to try to succeed legislatively
where Trump failed through the courts and through just outright intimidation.
And that's really what reminds me of the Jim Crow era,
(17:26):
because in the Jim Crow era, first they relied on
violence and fraud to keep Blacks away from the polls.
But then they realized that was too difficult, so they
actually had to enshrine all of these things into law.
And it was only when the literacy tests and the
poll taxes and the property requirements of the white primaries
were enshrined into law through so called legal means, that
(17:47):
then they really succeeded in disenfranchising black voters. And they
succeeded in disenfranchising them, not through illegal means, although they
obviously did through violence and fraud and intimidation, But it
was really through the legal process, through state legislatures, through
the courts that they succeeded in the ultimate disenfranchisement. And
I think that's what makes the story so chilling, and
(18:10):
I think that's what is so concerning about what's happening today.
Are they going to succeed through legal means where they
didn't succeed through illegal means. I'm Ari Berman, and you
are listening to be anti racist with Abram X Kendy.
(18:34):
Obviously there is a clear attack on the ability of
the American people, not just people who vote Democrat, even
people who vote Republican, people of all racial groups. It's
harder for people to vote now. Of course, black and
brown and Indigenous people due to these voter restrictions, it's
even harder for them to vote. But I'm curious, how
(18:58):
can we re establish and strengthen American democracy. Well, I
think there's two really important pieces of legislation that are
moving their way through Congress. The People Act, which would
put in place sweeping protections for voting rights so that
every state would have things like automatic registration, election day registration,
(19:18):
two weeks of early voting. There would be lots of
protections for voters no matter what state you live in.
And then there's a companion piece of legislation, the John
Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to restore the part of
the Voting Rights Act of the Supreme Court gut it
in twenty thirteen. And I think that's critically important as well,
because there are certain states like Georgia that just discriminate
(19:39):
over and over again. So it's both a carrot and
sticks approach that for the people. Act would put in
place a lot of reforms, a lot of pro voter
policies that would help people, and the John Lewis Voting
Rights Act would block the worst policies from emerging from
the states that are repeat offenders, definitely, and especially with
the Lewis Act, some of the states or jurisdictions that
(20:02):
would apply would be those who have discriminated over the
course of time, and others would be new discriminators. I'm
reminded of a piece that you wrote following the twenty
sixteen election in which you specifically looked at Wisconsin and
voter suppression policies there and the role they may have
played in Trump's narrow victory. So I'm curious, what are
(20:24):
some of those potential new places that you think will
fall under that act. Well, what the law does is
it says that if a state has a certain number
of violations found by the courts over the last twenty years,
it can be covered under the new Voting Rights Act.
So if a state like Wisconsin which doesn't have the
(20:45):
same history of discrimination in voting that a Georgia or
Mississippi would, for example, but if it's found to have
discriminated a lot in the more recent past, then they
could once again be covered under the Voting Rights Act.
And the other thing that the bill does is it
says that certain changes have an impact in terms of
discriminating against voters of color. So, for example, if you
(21:07):
close a polling place in an area with lots of
minority voters, that would have to be covered under the
Voting Rights Act no matter what state it's in. They're
basically saying some states will have to approve all of
their voting changes because they are repeat offenders places like Georgia.
But certain changes, no matter what state you're in, have
(21:29):
the impact of discriminating against voters of color, and therefore
you're going to need to get approval for that even
if you're not one of those covered areas. So it
looks more holistically at how voting discrimination works. The places
that have always discriminated are doing discrimination still Texas, Georgia, Mississippi.
They're always going to be covered. But also this has spread.
(21:51):
This has spread to places like Wisconsin, or it's spread
to places like Ohio that don't have the same history
terms of Jim Crowe, things like that. But at the
same time, they're doing a lot of similar voter suppression
techniques in a lot of ways. Southern bread voter suppression
has spread to the North under Republican control. What do
(22:12):
you think is still needed to ensure that every single American,
no matter their background, has the ability to easily vote
in this country. Well, I think if those two pieces
of legislation passed, I'd be a lot happier. But I
still think that, you know, listen, they're still going to
(22:32):
find ways to try to get around it, just like
Southern states in the eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties
found a way to get around the fifteenth Amendment. I
mean the legislation was there, but it wasn't enforced, and
it had some loopholes they were able to exploit. I
think what we really need is a fundamental guarantee of
voting rights in this country that says that you have
(22:52):
the right to vote except for X, Y Z. Very
good reason, because we have things that you can't do
in this country. We supposedly can't disenfranchise people based on
their race, or based on their age, or based on
their gender. Now and practice, those things happen, but we
don't have anything just broadly guarantees the right to vote.
And I think that's one reason why voting rights remain
(23:15):
such a contested issue in our country, because we've never
really put it into our constitution to protect it. If
you look at the debates over the fifteenth Amendment, there
was a more expansive version that was written that would
have banned voter suppression not just based on race, but
based on class and education as well. But the point
(23:35):
is that the fact that the fifteenth Amendment wasn't as
broad as it could have been left loopholes for voter suppression.
I think that's still the case today when these voting
cases go before the Supreme Court, their challenge under the
fourteenth amdent, their challenge over the fifteenth Amendment. But there's
no amendment that just says, you, guys, shouldn't make it
harder to vote unless you have a really good reason
to do so. I mean, you would have to have
a more eloquent drafting, ever, But that's basically what I'm saying.
(23:57):
What we need. Voting rights are such a fundamental right
that they really should not be abridge unless there's a
really good reason to do so. We don't have that
language in our constitution. I'm trying to think of an example.
I was born in the United States. Should I date myself,
I'll date myself in nineteen eighty two, That's what I was.
So that means, oh my gosh, which what's your birthday?
(24:18):
May first, nineteen eighty two. Oh man, you're an old man.
I was born in August thirteenth. So you know, both
of us we are guaranteed citizenship since we were born
in the United States. In other words, that can't be
taken away from us. To compare it to what you're saying,
you're stating that a citizen, one of their guarantees of
(24:40):
citizenship would be the right to vote and it couldnt
be taken away like this whole idea of even registration
you have to register to vote, that you could lose
your vote when you go to prison. You're saying that
that would not be possible. We would always have our
right to vote. And then you're also saying, correct me
if I'm wrong, that it would clearly state that any
(25:03):
effort that precludes a person from voting makes it difficul
quote for a person is unconstitutional. Yes, and I guess
I would say I would like the right to vote
to be looked at more like the First Amendment. We're
born with freedom of speech. It's not conferred upon us.
We don't get freedom of speech when we're eighteen. Right,
(25:24):
we have it based on a guarantee in our constitution.
But I have to affirmatively register to vote when I
turn eighteen, I have to possibly show other forms of
documentation depending on what state I live in. If I
commit a crime, I could be stripped of the right
to vote, potentially for life, depending on what state I
live in. If I have to move, I have to
(25:44):
reregister to vote. I have to affirmatively seek out what
my polling place is. All of those kind of things.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't have to do anything
to be able to qualify for a voting, but I
think it would be a big shift in terms of
voter participation if we said that voting is a right
that can't be taken away from you. In Australia, they
have mandatory voting, and the reason they have mandatory voting
(26:08):
is they don't view voting as a right or a privilege.
They viewed voting as a responsibility, that it's just something
that you do. I would like to think we don't
need that, we don't need to force people to do it.
But it's an interesting experiment in that if voting is compulsory,
there's no such thing as voter suppression. Yeah, the state
can't say you have to vote and then prevent you
from doing so. I think in America we think, oh,
(26:31):
we're doing everything better than everywhere else, but in fact,
our political system, in our voting system, is probably more
screwed up and backwards than virtually any other advanced industrial democracy.
(26:55):
With this past election, many of the people who voted,
of course, voted absentee, and so obviously there's been efforts
to roll back in Republican led states, the ability to
absentee vote ords it harder. Some people have proposed, well,
we should be able to vote in every way we
can bank, which then brings in the controversial. Should we
(27:19):
be able to vote online and would that then make
voting we're accessible for young people? What are the types
of policies and practices we can put in place to
ensure every single person is voting well. I would say
that we should automatically register people to vote in the
same way that when you or I turned eighteen, we
are automatically enrolled on the Selective Service if there was
(27:40):
ever another draft for war. I think the government knows
enough about us to be able to do that. I
think that people should have as many options to vote
as possible, meaning that we should be able to vote
by mail and have ballots automatically sent to us. I
think we should have early voting so that we don't
vote on a Tuesday in November because that's when farmers
used to bring their crops to the market in the
(28:01):
eighteen hundreds. I think it's a very integrated system, and
also obviously some people are still going to want to
vote the traditional way on election day. I think online
voting is really tricky in an era of hacking and disinformation.
Right now, it sounds good theoretically, but I think it
would pose a lot of security problems, just given how
insecure it seems like some of our systems are. But
(28:21):
I think in general, there's this expectation that voting should
be so much more inconvenient than other things we do.
I mean, people rarely wait two, three, four eleven hours
to get money out of a bank, but we're just
told that you have to do that to be able
to vote, or we can do all sorts of things
on our phones. But in Texas, for example, you can't
(28:44):
even register to vote online. And there's hundreds of thousands
of kids that turn eighteen in Texas every single year
and they can't even register to vote on their phones
or even their computers. I mean, that's totally anachronistic in
terms of talking about modern day technology. So I think
the rules can go a long way. And then I
think at the end of the day, people are going
to have to have something to vote. Four people then
(29:05):
have to be convinced that their vote matters, that their
vote will be able to change things, and things like
jerrymandering that reduces the choice that people have the fact
that the political system is so unrepresentative that voters of
color have much less representation all across the board than
their percentages in society. A lot of people still look
at the system and still see a bunch of old
(29:27):
white guys running things. And to some extent that's still
true if you look at the Supreme Court, or you
look at even who the president is, or you look
at who the leaders are in the Senator of the House.
By and larger political system is still run by old
white people, and I think that's something that turns a
lot of people off as well. And so, in other words,
it's not just about ensuring everyone has the right to vote,
(29:50):
that it could never be taken away from them, and
ensuring that it's easy for every single person to vote.
But the other side of it is candidates. And indeed,
last year I wrote a series of pieces in The
Atlantic on what I called the other swing voter. Yeah,
that was great. Of course, there's a traditional swing voter
(30:11):
that political pundits talk about, who are people who swing
from voting Republican to Democrat, And those people are disproportionately
white and disproportionately older. So I wrote about the other
swing voter, and these are people who typically swing from
voting to not voting, many of them swinging from voting
(30:31):
Democrat to not voting yea. And typically it's based on
the candidate. These other swing voters are more likely to
be younger and especially people of color. And so how
do we thereby create through policies ways in which we
can have more candidates who would be attracted and even
(30:54):
seek to swing the other swing voter, especially in this
political environment when the traditional swing voter that's white and
older seems to be dominating our political discourse. Well, the
fact is, if you vote your other radar of Candida,
but if you haven't voted, it's almost like you don't
exist to political campaigns. They don't try to spend any
(31:14):
time trying to get your vote, and then it kind
of becomes a self defeating cycle. And I think if
you look at people that aren't voting, they are buy
in large progressive in terms of what they care about,
but they're disenchanted with the political system. I think a
lot of them think that there's too much money in
the political system, that they candidates don't reflect them, that
the candidates are bought off. That doesn't really matter what
(31:36):
party you are, because there's going to be the same
outcomes at the end of the day. That's why things
like in the For the People Act they have public
financing of congressional campaigns because I think money is a
huge barrier to new people getting involved. I think it's
often the Aana Presses of the world, the Corey Bushes
of the world. They don't have money to run for office.
They don't sometimes come with communities that are well resourced.
(31:58):
They are often taking on established candidates, they're insurgent candidates,
or the party machines aren't funding them. And it's very
hard if you're a young black man or a young
Black woman, or a young Tino man or young Latino
woman to be able to get those kind of resources
and to be able to get known and work your
way at the ranks to then become a city council
member or a county commissioner, or a mayor or a
(32:21):
congress person. I mean, we're seeing shifts in this, but
the shifts are happening slowly, so I think that's one
thing that needs to change. One of the things that
was fascinating to me about the civil rights movement in
the nineteen sixties was people decided to go from protesting
to running for office. Right you had the John Lewis's,
the Andrew Youngs, they got involved in politics, and of
(32:43):
course that required compromise, right they weren't going to be
the same politicians like they were when they were in
SNICK or when they were in SELC or when they
were in corps. But I think in a lot of ways,
some of the ground was laid in terms of these protests,
in these movements in the past few years to get
the next generation of people to want to be in office.
And some of them aren't going to want to be
(33:04):
in office because they don't see the political system changing things.
But I think you're going to have the Coreys, the AOC's,
people like that who come out of an organizing background
and say we're going to take what we learned in
organizing and we're going to bring it to politics. And
I think that's the kind of thing that can start
to reach people that think about voting, that they are
turned off by the political system and might care about
(33:26):
things like a higher minimum wage or legalizing marijuana or
reforming the criminal justice system that often really aren't on
the table in the quote unquote mainstream conversations that we
have about politics. And of course there's a certain segment
of Americans who are like, you know, I just don't
do politics right especially now. It's so messy, it's so divisive,
(33:50):
people are so angry, and so that's just not me.
And oftentimes it seems as if some of those people
who are saying that would actually make great elected officials.
I think that what people see as they see, if
we don't get something instantly, then we can't get it
(34:10):
at all. And sometimes things take a long time. I mean,
just look at people's views of criminal justice now first
twenty years ago, completely night and day in terms of
how we talk about the issue, how Democrats talk about
the issue. So you can change politics by being in
the political process, but you can also change politics by
(34:33):
changing the scope of what is possible. That's one thing
that I think is really important. I think that's one
thing that a lot of the young activists and organizers
can do right now. Wow, and let's say you're not
necessarily an organizer or an activist, but you also recognize
that voter suppression policies are not just a racist attack
(34:54):
on democracy, but preventing us as a nation from getting
some of those policy proposals that are taken for granted
in other nations. What can they do to be part
of this struggle to really defend America democracy. I think
that you have to get involved in your own communities.
If you're in a place like Georgia or Texas and
(35:16):
there's fights going on right now, you can obviously call
your legislators. You can get involved in protests. You can
get involved in terms of working with different groups, whether
it's the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or the League of
Women Voters. There are lots of different groups that are
working on this issue. I also think that you can
just get involved in your own backyard. I mean, the
(35:37):
system is not perfect no matter where you live. There's
always things that can be improved, and there's always new
people that can get involved in the process. I think
one of the really cool things that happened in twenty
twenty was a lot of people volunteered to be poll workers.
And once you get involved in the process, it's a
lot easier to stay involved. Understanding that what happens to
our democracy affects so many other things, and that it's very,
(36:00):
very hard to make progress on any issue if so
many people are frozen out of participating. And so that's
why I think it's such an important issue, because I
really view it as central to all other rights, and
it's very hard to protect lots of different rights if
the right to vote itself is not protected and expanded. Definitely,
(36:20):
and Ari, I'm so glad we were able to have
this conversation. You know, people when they ask me who
should I be reading to understand voter suppression in this country,
of course I always suggest you and your work. You know,
I think you're the premier journalist in the country covering
voter suppression. So I'm thankful for your work. I'm thankful
(36:42):
for cal Anderson holding it down in academia, of course,
Stacy Abrahams holding it down in the realm of activism.
And I'm hopeful that people realize that path forward that
we've never truly achieved as a nation, a multiracial, multi ethnic,
multicultural democracy where we all feel free, where we all
have one voice, where that single voice is acquired and
(37:05):
we're all speaking to what's best for our communities. That's
really what we're trying to achieve. Thank you. So much.
I really appreciate the kind words, and I'm really thankful
for your work, and I think you opened the eyes
of a lot of people. You were talking about these
uncomfortable issues way before it was cool, before people were
posting black squares, before it was a trendy thing to do.
(37:27):
You were deep in this work. So I really appreciate
you having me on and hopefully we'll get to do
it again soon. Definitely. All right, take care, Thanks Abram,
great to talk to you. Shortly after I spoke with Ari,
a video of a private meeting of Heritage Action for
(37:48):
America's surfaced. After seeing the leak video, Ari and his
colleague Nick Sergey released a story that exposed the conservative
Heritage Foundation's rolled in shaping and even drafting voter suppression
bills across the country. The Heritage Foundation has actively promoted
voter suppression since its inception in nineteen seventy three. Co
(38:13):
founder Paul Wyrick admitted way back in nineteen eighty that
he didn't want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody
to vote as a matter of how fact on leverage
and the elections, quite candidate goes as the voting populace
goes down. Wyrick's founding dreams have come true. The Heritage
Foundation authored several provisions of the recent voter suppression law
(38:35):
in Georgia, including sections that inhibit mail in voting and
election administration and oversight. Heritage also drafted provisions for similar
bills in battleground states like Iowa. In Texas, Heritage is
leading the fight against HR one, a bill that would
protect voters by implementing nationwide anti racist measures like automatic
(38:59):
election day registration, two weeks of early voting, in the
expansion of mail in ballots. In the leak video, Heritage
Action for America leaders bragged about their role in recent
voter suppression laws. We did it quickly, and we did
it quietly. Honestly, nobody noticed. The executive director even admitted
(39:20):
Heritage uses misleading tactics to deliver their proposals to state lawmakers.
Or we have a sentinel on our behalf. Give them
the model legislation so it has that grassroots you know,
from the bottom up type of vibe. Voter suppression isn't
just a war on voters of color, It's a war
on voters. Through their reporting, arian Nick showed that the
(39:44):
movement to suppress votes reflect not the will of the
people fearful of voter fraud, but the will of the
wealthy and powerful, fearful of American voters. I want to
be clear about what just happened on the Senate floor.
Every single Senate Republican just voted against starting debate, starting
(40:06):
debate on legislation to tech to Americans voting rights. Republican
state legislatures across the country are engaged in the most
sweeping voters suppression in eighty years. Capitalizing on and catalyzed
by Donald Trump's big lie, these state governments are making
it harder for younger, poorer, urban, and non white Americans
(40:31):
to vote. The fight continues. If you're living in a
state trying to pass stricter voting laws, call your legislators,
demand their opposition. Volunteer and donate to organizations combating voter suppression,
like the League of Women Voters in Fair Fight in
Black Voters Matter. Now is the time to do more.
(40:56):
Now is the time to fight for a multiracial democracy.
Now is the time to be anti racist. Be Anti
Racist is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It
(41:16):
is written and hosted by doctor Ebram x Hindy and
produced by Alexandra Garrattin with associate producer Brittany Brown. Our
engineer has been Talliday. Our editor is Julia Barton and
our show runners Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers Arelie tim
Willad and Mio Lobell Manny. Thanks to Tammy Winn and
doctor HEATHERN. Sandford at the Center for Anti Racist Research
at Boston University for all of their help at Pushing,
(41:37):
and thanks to Heathern Fame, Carlie Migliori, John Schnaris, and
Jacob Weisberg. You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at
d r Ebram and on Instagram at ebrahm x K.
You can find Pushing on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods.
You can sign up for our news that are at
pushkin dot fm to find more Pushkin podcast listen on
a heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'd like
(41:59):
to listen.
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