The Fight for Voting Rights Across the Country

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

It's that time of year again.

The leaves are starting to turn in the north, and summer is refusing to leave the rest of us alone.

Awards season is revving up, and new television shows will soon arrive.

Oh, and there's an election right around the corner.

However, just as regular as the quadrennial vote for president is the resurgence of voter suppression.

That tendency by those in political power to quash the rights of others who want to get and stay on the voting rolls, cast a ballot, or have that ballot counted.

In fact, the lengths to which some will go to silence voters has reached a level of absurdity.

The jury has reached a verdict in the trial of the people of the state of Georgia versus Larry David.

It's not about what this man has done or the poor decisions he's made in the past.

It is about this heinous and needlessly tool.

That clip was from Curb Your Enthusiasm, which in its last season chose to highlight the ongoing battle over voting rights in my state of Georgia.

In the episode, Larry David gives water to Leon's aunt as she's in line, waiting to vote in Georgia, and he gets arrested for breaking Senate Bill 202.

Yes, that's a real law.

This is one that Republicans passed and the governor signed in 2021 that criminalizes anyone giving food and water to folks waiting in line to vote.

It also establishes new restrictive voter ID rules and slashes the time you have to request a mail ballot.

But Georgia wasn't done in 2021.

Just this year, the Republican governor and legislature expanded their efforts with SB 189, which made it harder for the homeless to vote, added complications for the disabled, and doubled down on the big lie of 2020.

Republicans of all stripes voted to expand the ability for one individual to challenge an unlimited number of voters, paving the way for easy mass challenges to legitimate voters.

But Georgia is not alone.

Across the country, it is getting harder and harder to vote.

During the 2024 legislative session, 291 restrictive bills were introduced in states across the country.

And when people go to vote this November, in 28 states, they will be facing voting laws that they did not face in the last presidential election, voting laws that restrict their right to vote.

While I have been raising the alarm about voter suppression for years, I don't think we can overstate the magnitude of these most recent developments.

As of May, voters in at least 21 states, that's nearly half of our United States, will face restrictions on their right to the ballot box, restrictions that they've never seen before in any presidential or midterm election.

This aggressive attack on voting rights is extreme, but it is not sudden.

In fact, since 2013, legislators have passed over 100 restrictive voting laws in at least 31 states.

The year 2013 is, of course, the year the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, v.

Holder.

The argument sharply divided the justices.

The court's conservative majority appeared poised to strike down at least part of the act and eliminate the current federal oversight of voting in the South.

In this decision, the Supreme Court made Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act inoperable.

Section 5 required specific jurisdictions, mainly in the South, to get permission to change voting procedures before the laws had a chance to harm minority voters who were usually the targets.

Vulnerable voters in the Sun Belt, like Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, and in specific counties in California, Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina, used to have this added layer of protection from discriminatory voting laws.

Now, that protection is gone.

And I'm sure you've noticed something about some of the states I mentioned.

Yeah, in the national polling, Kamala is in the lead, but it's not about national mood.

It's the polling in the six or seven swing states that really counts.

That is what will decide this.

And in those states, well, it's within the margin of error, no.

We have had some good news in voting rights.

Nevada and Michigan have actually expanded voter access since 2020, including universal mail voting in Nevada and extended early voting in Michigan.

In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, no significant changes in voting occurred between 2020 and 2024 that will affect voters, though not for lack of trying by GOP legislators.

In Wisconsin, the Democratic governor had to veto bill after bill to keep it from becoming harder to vote.

So voters there are facing about the same level of access that they had in the last presidential election, which had been previously weakened by nearly a decade of GOP voter suppression tactics.

Pennsylvania has made some progress, and its current trajectory make it a state to watch for voting rights expansion.

Now, in Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia, voter suppression isn't a MAGA issue.

It's a Republican mantra.

Each state has a GOP legislature that has been hard at work, and in Georgia, the Republican governor is in on the fix.

In North Carolina, the Democratic governor has had to contend with a legislature that can override his vetoes.

And in Arizona, the Democratic Secretary of State, turned governor, has been beating back attempts to weaken the very few protections voters there have been able to gain.

As a result, in North Carolina, two restrictive laws will be in place for voters in November, including a barrier to mail voting and a resurrected voter ID law.

In Arizona, there are four new restrictive laws, including an added difficulty in correcting absentee ballot signatures.

Now, I know this sounds like a litany of all bad, but that's not how we do things here at Assembly Required.

We start with where we are, no matter how terrible it might sound, and then we get into how we make it better.

Because we can, as we've proven in Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and across the country, where we've overcome their bad intentions with our righteous engagement.

The antidote to voter suppression begins with understanding voting rights.

And there are few people more capable of plotting with us than my next guest.

Ari Berman is the National Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jones.

He recently published a new book called Minority Rule, The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People and The Fight to Resist It.

He also wrote extensively about voting rights in his wonderful book, Give Us the Ballot.

Ari is on hand to help us untangle what's happening in voting rights and figure out what we do about it in this election and beyond.

So let's get into it.

Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining us on Assembly Required.

Stacey, it's always a highlight of my day when I get to talk to you or my week or my month or my year.

We've got to get you out more than very few people that I'd be more excited to see than you.

Maybe a few professional athletes, maybe if Caitlin Clark was here, but other than that, you're pretty high on my list.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Well, you have become a national leader on understanding the contours and the challenges to voting rights.

What brought you, particularly as a journalist, to this beat?

And why does this topic matter so much to you?

It was after the 2010 election when I believe you were still in the Georgia state legislature.

And I noticed that a lot of really pivotal swing states flipped from blue to red in that election.

Places like Wisconsin and Ohio and North Carolina and Michigan.

And they all in very short order started changing their election laws.

to make it harder to vote, doing things like requiring strict IDs that you never needed before, cutting early voting, closing polling places, purging the voting rolls, all the things that we're quite familiar with now, but we weren't as familiar with back then.

And this seemed to me to be a major national story that wasn't getting a lot of attention.

There was like a story here and a story there, but no one had kind of put it together that this was a national strategy by the Republican Party to try to really nullify the impact of the election of the first black president.

So I wrote a story about it for Rolling Stone in August of 2011.

It was called the GOP War on Voting.

You could pretty much reprint it word for word today, or they'd have to make some pretty disturbing updates.

And I thought I would just cover this because I was a general reporter.

I thought I would write one story about this and move on.

But then a lot of things just kept happening.

This became a major issue, as you know very well from your own campaigns.

And then the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

And I realized that this was not a fringe issue, but the fight over voting rights was really really at the core of what kind of democracy we would be.

I appreciate you framing it that way because I began this episode with a very

brief overview of some of the voter suppression tactics that are currently being promoted across the country, especially in battleground states, swing states.

You've been tracking this since 2010, and we know that we reached a bit of an inflection point in 2020.

So, can you talk about what's different about voting access in this upcoming election as compared to 2020?

What tactics to restrict voting are new?

And what do you recognize from years past?

So there's really been a continuum since 2010 of restrictions on access to the ballot.

But those got turbocharged by Donald Trump's effort to try to overturn the election.

So since 2020, 28 states have passed new laws making it harder to vote in some form or another.

And some of them, as you know very well, were direct response to the things Trump said in 2020.

He singled out mail voting, for example.

So they went after mail voting in states like Georgia.

He wanted partisan poll workers to be able to mess with the count.

So they changed what partisan poll workers could do.

And I think the really big difference, Stacey,

from my vantage point, and I think you would agree with this, is that the big thing since 2020 is that we have voter suppression on the front end, but now we also have voter suppression on the back end, meaning that they're not just trying to make it harder to register to vote or cast a ballot, they're making it harder for votes to be counted because that was Trump's ultimate goal in 2020.

So that to me is the most alarming tactic we're seeing in places like Georgia.

And I think it's the newest tool in their arsenal to try to undermine democracy.

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Well, one of the ways that I talk about voter suppression, it's can you register and stay on the rolls?

Can you cast a ballot?

And does that ballot get counted?

You just emphasize the focus in this current moment on does the ballot get counted?

But we're still facing challenges to the first two.

And one of the most important developments over the last decade has been voting by mail, which is can you cast a ballot?

So let's talk about the focus on vote by mail.

I mean, we know in Arizona, more than three quarters of the people vote by mail.

In North Carolina, voting by mail is also crucial.

And yet one of their new laws requires that mail ballots be received by 7.30 p.m.

on election day, even though no one controls the U.S.

Post Office.

Had this law been in place in 2020, more than 11,000 ballots would have been nullified.

Why are state laws targeting the ability to vote by mail?

Because that was the voting technique that Trump falsely blamed for his loss loss in 2020.

A lot of new people voted by mail because of the pandemic, and they were disproportionately Democrats and communities of color because they were the most concerned about the impact of the pandemic and because Trump told all his supporters, don't vote by mail.

Even though, as you know very well, Stacey, vote by mail was a Republican idea.

It was a Republican idea in Georgia.

They specifically exempted voter ID laws from mail ballots because they thought that they would be used by older, whiter, more rural constituencies.

In Florida, vote by mail was a big part of increasing Republican vote totals, first for George W.

Bush and then for subsequent candidates.

So

Republicans really had no problem with vote by mail.

In fact, it was one of their preferred methods of voting until Democrats and people of color and younger people started using it.

And then they've targeted it in so many different ways, as you know from Georgia.

It's harder to get a mail ballot.

First off, just there's more requirements to get your mail ballot.

It's harder to return your mail ballot.

There's fewer drop boxes.

There's more requirements about what you need to sign, what you need to date, all these small little bureaucratic things that can actually trip a lot of voters up.

There are new rules in terms of when you can return your mail ballot.

So in a lot of states in 2020, you could have your ballot arrive two, three, four days after the election, as long as it was postmarked by election day because of mail delays.

Laws have tightened, as you said, in places like North Carolina.

So a lot of times your ballot has to be received by election day.

Well, you don't know.

We're still dealing with mail delays.

Amazingly, we still have the same postmaster general, the Republican mega donor Louis de Joy that we had in 2020, which I still can't quite believe.

And so for that reason, what I'm telling people, and I'm curious what you think about this, voting by mail is still very convenient.

Voting by mail is still very safe.

But if you vote by mail, you have to understand what the laws are because it is more complicated in certain states.

I would say it's more complicated in Georgia to cast a mail ballot than to vote in person.

Now, you might have to wait in line in person, but there are more rules governing what you can and can't do when you vote by mail because of these Republican restrictions than what you can do if you show up at a polling place.

Exactly.

And one of the challenges, particularly in Georgia, but this is true in Arizona, where they've tried to make it harder as well because of the remoteness of so many of the voters.

I remember when I was working on Our Time Is Now, and I think you talked about this and give us the ballot, that if you live in Arizona, your mail goes to two different states before it gets to Phoenix.

And so in some parts of Arizona.

And so the rules that are being put in place not only disproportionately harm those who are rural or older, it also disproportionately harms those who are disabled.

And to your point, it is so critical that we understand the rules in our states.

We don't have a single democracy.

We've got 50 different systems that are operating at the same time, theoretically, towards the same end.

And so it's critical that we actually understand how vote by mail now works today where you live.

Exactly.

And I mean, that is one of my enduring frustrations covering voting rights is how much the law differs state by state, that it can be really easy to vote in certain states and really hard to vote in other states.

And even within states, it can change quite dramatically.

So it was very easy to vote by mail in Georgia until a few years ago.

Now there's a lot more rules governing it.

That said, there are still, no matter where you live, there are opportunities to vote.

I think that's the important thing.

So

take Texas, for example.

Texas is a state where it's hard to register to vote.

It's very, very difficult to vote by mail because you basically have to be over 65 or out of town during the election to be able to get a mail ballot or have some kind of physical illness or condition that prevents you from going to the polls, which COVID was not one of them, according to the Republicans in the state.

But they have three weeks of early voting in Texas.

So yes, it's hard to vote by mail, but you also have three weeks to vote early.

So I think that the key thing, no matter where people live, is try to figure out what is the easiest mode to vote in your state.

Now, theoretically, it would be easy to vote in all three phases, right, Stacey?

It would be easy to vote by mail.

It would be easy to vote early, and it would be easy to vote in person on election day.

That would be the kind of the gold standard.

But in some places, that's not the case, but there's always going to be at least one method that is available to you to be able to cast your ballot and hopefully more.

And for anyone listening to this, trying to figure out in this moment, vote.gov is a wonderful resource.

You can just plug that in and it can take you down the pathways you need to figure out how you vote where you live.

So part of the reason we are in this moment is that the ability to change the rules became easier, especially after the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act.

And as you pointed out, after 2010, when there was a very concerted Republican effort to change the rules of voting, and we've seen that just

snowball over the last 20 years.

And yet, one of the hallmarks of a democracy is the ability to challenge those rules in a court of law, which is how we've been able to protect the right to vote for millions.

And yet, since 2020, this long-standing practice of challenging the rules has been conflated with the more spurious behavior of Donald Trump and others, which was to manufacture evidence and manufacture behavior that they could not prove in order to deny the outcome of the election.

Can you describe the difference between challenging election laws and denying election results?

And why does this difference matter?

Yeah, I mean, and so what I think you're getting at is the courts have always been the proper recourse to challenge laws that make it it harder to vote.

But Trump kind of flipped that on its head and then started trying to use the courts and of course other

methods as well to try to overturn the results, right?

And so I think that's the distinction you're getting at, correct?

Correct.

Got it.

So I mean, the interesting thing here, though, is that I think that voting rights groups and voting rights activists got too reliant on the courts.

And I think that is probably a big reason why you decided to found Fairfight, which is that the courts, first off,

what if they get captured by people that are not sympathetic to voting rights, which is what we've seen not just with the Supreme Court, but with lower courts in general.

Donald Trump made 230 appointments to the federal courts.

Only three of them were to the Supreme Courts.

So what he did at the district court level, at the Court of Appeals level, that was just, if not more, problematic in terms of what is happening in those kind of places, particularly in states with the South, where you're consistently challenging voting laws before really reactionary judges.

But also, courts respond to boots on the ground.

If they think that there's going to be ramifications for what they're doing or accountability for what they're doing, they, I think, make political choices.

And I think you look at the fact that A day after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, they legalized gay marriage.

Now, I don't know why Anthony Kennedy, who was the swing vote in both of those cases, saw a difference there, but I think he felt like gay marriage was this evolving social right, whereas the Voting Rights Act was stuck in his belief in the 1960s and had not evolved in the same kind of way.

Now, I know you disagree with that, I disagree with that, but it was interesting to me that they happened on the same kind of day.

And so, what I think that voting rights groups did is they became too reliant on the courts and too reliant on the Congress to protect voting rights as both of those things shifted to the right.

And they didn't build enough boots on the ground, enough of a grassroots movement like we had during the civil rights movement to protect voting rights so that you could change laws politically as opposed to being so reliant on the courts to always do it.

I think that's perfectly said.

You and I first met during the voter suppression crisis of 2018.

I was standing for office, and there was an AP story that revealed

discrepancies is the nicest way to put it in how names were being added to the roles or taken off of the roles in Georgia.

And then there was sort of this unfolding and unwinding of reveals about what was happening in Georgia.

And so Georgia became part of the epicenter.

of the conversation about voter suppression.

And recently you wrote in Mother Jones about how the Georgia State Election Board has passed a rule that would allow counties not only to decertify elections if Democrats win, but to continue to make changes.

And in fact, as we record this episode, the State Elections Board has just met recently.

So.

Can you talk about today's election board meeting?

And can you start with summarizing what happened and what you think it means, not just for Georgia, but for the national election cycle?

So there's been a series of controversial rule changes on the Georgia Board of Election, which now has a majority of election deniers who Trump has praised publicly, which is very odd for a former president to be going around the country praising members of a state election board by name when no one even knows who these people are usually.

So as we're talking, they passed a rule that was opposed by pretty much all election officials and the Republican Secretary of State and the Republican Attorney General that required the hand counting of ballots on election night.

So the way it worked before is, you know, you put your ballot in the machine, it counts the votes, there's a record of it, and that's it.

Now the way it works is they have to manually count all of those votes one by one by one, which election officials fear is going to take a lot longer, be more costly, open it up to human error, and could ultimately be used as a pretext not to certify election results if a Democrat wins.

And as you know, Stacey, this is on top of other rules they've already passed.

This is not happening in a vacuum.

They already said that counties must undertake a reasonable inquiry into the results without specifying what that inquiry actually is.

They've said they have access to all election-related documentation, again, which is a very, very broad list.

And I think the concern here is that counties have to certify their results by the Monday after the election.

So they basically have six days to do it.

This is not a fishing expedition.

They have a mandatory duty to certify the election and to kick things up and up the chain to eventually be certified.

And I think the big fear here in Georgia, and it's also happening in other states, is they're putting in all these reasons why a county that doesn't want to certify the results to begin with could then point to and say,

like they have legitimate good reasons for not certifying, right?

So they could say, we haven't done our reasonable inquiry, or there's discrepancies in the hand count, or we haven't gotten access to all this documentation.

And that's the kind of chaos potentially that Donald Trump could be very effective at weaponizing.

And as we talked about in one of our conversations, there's deadlines that the counties and the state have to meet.

And if they don't meet

those deadlines, there's major ramifications in terms of what it could mean.

So let's prognosticate a little further because as we speak today, Nebraska is thinking about changing its laws.

Can you talk a little bit about what the Nebraska rule change means and why Georgia and Nebraska could be the pivotal conversations November 6th?

Yeah, it's an odd couple to imagine,

the Omaha-Atlanta contingent.

Different cultures, but similarly screwed up democracy situation.

So basically, Nebraska is one of two states, Maine is the other, that awards its electoral college votes separately.

It doesn't have all of the state's electoral college votes together.

There is one district that counts separately, which is the district that represents Omaha.

So it is the most liberal part of the state.

And that is a district that Democrats have won a lot.

And it matters.

It's only one vote.

But what Republicans want to do is they want to get rid of that at-large seat in Omaha because they're worried that Kamala Harris might take it.

So you're probably wondering, what does one electoral vote matter?

Well, here's why it matters.

If Kamala Harris wins the so-called blue wall of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, she has 269 Electoral College votes, meaning she needs that Nebraska district, which Biden carried and which there's all indications she would carry to get to 270, to win the Electoral College.

If she doesn't get it, and it's a tied scenario, then as you first told me about, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives.

That's the same thing that could occur if Georgia's Electoral College votes are not certified in time and there is no majority winner in the Electoral College.

The election could be thrown into the House.

The crazy thing about this scenario, Stacey, is not only does it get thrown into the House, which should not be picking the president, it's decided not by a majority of House members, but a majority of state House delegations.

And that's a thing that a lot of people don't understand.

They just say, let's flip the House in November and we can prevent Mike Johnson from installing the next speaker.

It doesn't work that way.

Republicans have a majority of state House delegations, both because they're overrepresented in rural states, but also because they've gerrymandered states like Georgia and Wisconsin and Arizona.

So Harris could win these states, but Republicans could have a majority of the House delegations.

So

this is really, you called it a nightmare scenario.

And I think when we spoke, and I think it really is that, because imagine you could have Kamala Harris wins the popular vote.

She would have a majority in the Electoral College if the rules were done fairly.

Democrats could win back the House and still Republicans could install Trump as president.

I mean, I don't think you could imagine anything that would be a bigger constitutional crisis than that.

Now, I want to say to everyone listening, this is all speculative.

It takes a series of dominoes.

But for those of you who have ever watched Community,

there's a darker timeline.

There's nothing to say this is what will happen.

But it is true that you're going to be hearing about Nebraska.

You're going to be hearing about Georgia.

And one of the goals of this show is to give people the context to understand what they're hearing.

not to freak us out, but to prepare us for what needs to happen next.

So I just want to insert that little caveat.

Exactly.

And to be prepared for it, because a lot of the worst case scenarios happened in 2020.

I mean, if you had said the Saturday after the election in 2020, hey, two months later, there's going to be an insurrection at the Capitol where Donald Trump's going to inspire a mob to try to kill his vice president and overturn the Electoral College votes.

That would have sounded pretty insane at the time.

So the worst case scenarios, I think, are meant not to scare people into not acting, but to be prepared for those eventual outcomes and what it might mean.

And honestly, it makes the race for the House even more important because there are delegations that you could potentially flip in Arizona, in some other pivotal swing states.

There's narrow Democratic majorities in places like Minnesota and Michigan.

And that is something that people are aware of, the importance of retaking the House, but I don't think they've thought about the importance of the state delegations as well.

And so this is one of those things where people have to be prepared for all eventualities because to me, the biggest change since 2020 is 2020 was really a seat of the pants effort to try to steal the election.

It was really the Rudy Giuliani hair dye dripping down his face, four seasons total landscaping form of stealing the election.

It was easy to dismiss in a lot of ways.

Now they're much more serious.

I mean, they have put people on the Georgia election board.

They have

tried to change the Electoral College votes in Nebraska ahead of time.

So they're trying to do this all ahead of time.

So they don't have to do as much to try to steal it after the fact.

And I think that's the really important thing that people need to focus on.

One of the targets of voting changes

have been the people who have to make it work are election workers.

They have been threatened in Georgia.

They have been criminalized for certain behaviors in Texas.

They have been challenged across the country.

In fact, as I said, in Texas, they have made it a crime for an election worker to encourage a voter to request a mail ballot, for example.

And we know that across the country, these are unsung heroes in our elections.

These elections officials, these poll workers, these volunteers who have to navigate these issues and to the litany that you've laid out, the changes that have happened.

Can you talk about why these often volunteers and sometimes these public servants, depending on which state you live in, this combination of volunteers and public servants, why they're so vital to the process and why it's so critical that we pay attention to what's happening to them.

We had the highest turnout in 120 years in 2020.

And I think one of the reasons we had the highest turnout was not just because of the unprecedented times we were living in and the interest in election, but there was more voter education than ever before in terms of how to cast a ballot.

And more people got involved in the election system than ever before.

And I think that was really, really critical because the election system is us, right, Stacey?

It's not anyone else it it's it's your neighbor right um those are the people that that run elections in in many cases and so i think a lot of those people were hit with a tremendous amount of disinformation misinformation death threats a lot of them got burnt out some have persevered some have left for good reason that has created a void that the maga people have been all too willing to fill.

People who don't know anything about elections, who have bad intentions, are now running things like the state election board in Georgia, which is very, very concerning.

So my whole thing is that

if you don't want this void to be filled by election deniers and people who believe the election was stolen, then you yourself have to get involved.

And you can't wait for someone else to do it.

You have to become a poll worker or a poll watcher or volunteer to register voters or volunteer to take people to the polls or whatever you can do.

This is really the machinery of democracy.

And that will lead to a smoother process for voters.

If they feel like they can be confident that they'll have a smooth experience and their votes will be counted, they're more likely to participate, right?

But I think you know from your own experience, if people feel like voting is going to be dangerous or scary or even potentially illegal, then a lot of people are just not going to want to put up with the risk of doing it.

So

we have to show them that it's the opposite.

Absolutely.

Okay, we've focused a lot on the bad actor states, but we have some states that have been showing us what a strong, resilient, democratic process should look like.

So, which states do you put in the Hall of Fame and why?

Well, there's a lot of states that could be in there.

My current Hall of Fame right now starts with Michigan because it was a very,

very narrowly decided swing state that is close to 50-50 in terms of its politics.

But what people did in Michigan was they put initiatives on the ballot to unrig the political process.

They put initiatives on the ballot to create a citizens redistricting commission instead of politicians drawing the maps.

They put in place things like automatic registration, no excuse absentee voting.

early voting that hadn't existed before.

They passed laws that combated election subversion.

And the fascinating thing here is all of these initiatives were overwhelmingly supported at the polls.

And so what that told me is that even in a close to 50-50 swing state, there's strong pro-democracy majorities, not just in the country writ large, but in these key states.

And when you ask people, do you want the maps to be drawn fairly or do you want them to be drawn by self-interested politicians?

Do you want a process that works better for more people and makes voting easier and more accessible?

The public overwhelmingly says yes.

And so that was a big reason why I decided to write my book, Minority Rule, was I wanted people to understand that it's not about there not being majority support for protecting democracy.

It's that too often there's these reactionary minority factions that block majority support.

from actually translating into policy.

And I think Michigan's a really good example of how majority support can be channeled into ways that change the actual laws in the state.

One of the ways we are seeing people try to change the laws is that there are those who want to limit voter participation who have trafficked in disinformation.

And usually that's around the

pseudo-myth of voter fraud, which for the record is less likely to occur than being struck by lightning.

And to be more precise, the Brendan Center reviews election reports and they had been meticulously studied for voter fraud.

And they found an incident rate between 0.0003%

and the high end of 0.0025%.

So

not quite myth, but really, really hard to find in reality.

And yet the current false narrative in vogue is to claim inaccurately that there's a problem with people who are not citizens voting in elections.

This lie has been aggressively spread by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations and spokespeople, and unfortunately through social media.

You have written extensively about how people understand

what is and what is not.

Why are these false tropes so effective and who does it impact beyond feeding the current anti-immigrant rhetoric that we know is behind some of this?

I think what we learned unfortunately, after 2020 was that if political leaders just say things over and over again, their followers start to believe them.

So Trump says the election was rigged.

Every credible person, every credible news outlet, every major politician of stature says it wasn't rigged.

But 70% of his followers believe it.

And a lot of the same thing is happening with non-citizen voting.

They say it over and over and over, and then people start to believe it.

And it's not just Donald Trump.

Trump, it's being pushed by Elon Musk and a lot of other people who have a huge reach.

And one of my big fears is that a lot of the things that Elon Musk is saying on Twitter would have been outright banned in 2020 as disinformation.

Now he's running the place.

Facebook, Instagram, all of these places have just eviscerated their networks that are meant to ensure the integrity of the election and fight false claims.

So there's a lot more opportunity to spread disinformation and misinformation now.

And a lot of bad actors are filling that void.

And I think that they're pushing the non-citizen voting, which just, first off, there's no evidence of it.

The Georgia Secretary of State, who you know well, did a 25-year audit and didn't find a single non-citizen who actually voted during that time.

So there's no evidence.

It's happening.

If they get on the registration rolls, it's often by mistake.

But it's not happening.

It makes no sense why it would happen.

It makes no sense why someone who's coming here, try to get a better life, to work, provide for their families, would risk deportation or worse for casting a ballot.

So

there's no logical sense for it, and there's no actual evidence of it.

But I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to build support both for a restrictive voting, a restrictive voter suppression campaign, and a restrictive immigration.

campaign as well, and trying to tie these two issues in a way that makes it seem like white America is under threat.

Because my argument has been for a long time, a lot of this is about the changing demographics of the country.

And a lot of this is about the fact that we are going to become a majority-minority nation at some point.

The Census Bureau predicts 2045, in which white people will no longer be the majority.

Now, those terms are static, people's identities change, but the fact is, white America as we know it is declining in terms of its numbers and in terms of its influence.

And that is really the backbone of what the Trump campaign is talking about.

So they want to believe that immigration is coming for your jobs and immigration is coming for your vote.

And they want to confuse and intertwine these issues.

And to me, that is their newest and loudest dog whistle in this election is to try to make it feel like we should be afraid of people that don't look like us and that they are somehow not just ruining our economy, but ruining our voting system as well.

And therefore, they can build support for protecting this reactionary white minority that they view as under siege.

You're just full of light and hope.

Well, and I want to stick with this for a second.

So, we know this is what's happening.

You've written two really incredible books.

Give Us the Ballot was,

for me, incredibly important in helping me understand beyond the contours of what I understood about voter suppression.

You were very thoughtful about what the world could look like if we did it right.

And in Minority Rule, you do a lot to unpack how much power

such a small group of people have accrued to themselves.

And in your last response, you talk about the changing demographics, and that often speaks to who are the targets of voter suppression.

And one thing I've always argued is that no matter who you aim at in a democracy, you're going to hit

unintended victims.

You're going to aim at a minority community of color and you're going to harm the disabled.

You're going to aim at young people and you are going to disproportionately affect seniors who who live in rural communities.

You were going to, it's hard to target beyond what they were able to do with Jim Crow or prior to the 19th and the 13th and 14th, 15th Amendments.

It's been difficult to be as precise with voter suppression.

Yes.

And so

when someone's listening to this podcast and thinking, well, why should we try anymore?

What are the things that you want folks to take away from where we are in this moment and to start saying out loud to their friends about what this means?

Well, that's a really good question.

And I want people to come away hopeful, right?

I mean, that's ultimately why we do what we do.

We tell people about what's wrong, not so that they feel depressed and crappy, but so they want to do something about it.

And what I always tell people in terms of what they can do is first, Vote for pro-democracy candidates and make sure that your candidates support democracy, because that is not a given, whether you're a Democrat or certainly not a Republican.

The second thing is make sure you work and organize at the local level.

This is a presidential election year.

But as you know, Stacey, you came up as a member of the state legislature.

These are the most important bodies that nobody ever thinks about until they do something crazy that manages to get national attention.

But things like state legislatures have so much power.

So, and one person can make such a big difference in those kind of races.

There was a coin flip to decide who would control the Virginia legislature not so long ago.

The Minnesota legislature had a Democratic trifecta, which ultimately led to Tim Waltz being put on the ticket because they won the key swing race by 300 votes.

So if you're talking about where do votes actually matter, it's in local races that often affects people's lives so much that votes really matter.

And then the third thing I think we need to do is build a longer-term movement for structural reform in our democracy.

Because we're talking about how are they trying to rig the vote in Georgia?

How are they trying to rig the vote in Nebraska?

If we had a direct election of the president by the people where every vote counted equally, they could not do these kind of things.

Messing with one congressional district or one state would be a lot less effective.

There would have been no insurrection at the Capitol.

if we did not have the electoral college, because Trump could have theoretically tried to overturn 45,000 votes in three states, but he was never going to be able to overturn 7 million votes nationally, which is what he lost by.

So we need to think about how do we change the Electoral College?

What can we do about a Supreme Court that has greenlit things

like

gutting the Voting Rights Act, upholding gerrymandering?

And I think too often these are the kind of things that get pushed to aside.

When people get in there, they're always thought of as the good government, the process issues, right?

But these are the issues that are at the core of what our democracy looks like.

And so I think we have to think about not just how do we elect people in terms of using democracy to mobilize people, but also to say, once they're there, what is the pro-democracy agenda that can be enacted?

And I think there's been a lot of movement on that front, but there's still a lot of work that can be done.

Ari, you have been such an eloquent explainer of voting rights and you

so effectively, we were together in Texas recently.

You talked about the reasons we need to stay engaged, and you've done it again here.

So, what's the question that I didn't ask you that you need to answer for our listeners?

Ooh, good question.

Well, there's one thing that I wanted to talk to you about that you said in Texas that really stuck with me.

We did an event together at the Texas Tribune Festival.

And one thing that was interesting, first off, there was a lot of young people there.

And these events tend to skew older.

So I thought that was really interesting.

And they all basically had the same question for you, which is, how do we convince people that voting matters?

Because Texas is a very low voting state.

I think you would get this question anywhere you went, but particularly in a place like Texas.

And you basically said

that you need to meet voters where they are, right?

And you need to connect voting to the things that matter in their lives.

And I thought that was really interesting because I I think often as people who write and think about these things, we take it as a given that people understand that voting matters and understand that voting has an impact.

But not everyone understands that.

So I'm just wondering, I'm going to ask you a question before you ask me your last question, but how effective have you found as you go around Georgia and the country in terms of being able to meet people where they are and being able to convince them that voting matters if they feel like it doesn't sometimes?

I will use the tragedy of Ahmaud Arbery here in Georgia, a young man who was murdered in the town of Brunswick in Glenn County, and the district attorney declined to prosecute the offenders.

That was one of those moments where people finally connected the dots between this travesty they saw happen in their community and a person with power who refused to use it.

And they voted her out.

The DA's race was never a big race in Glenn County, but

in that election cycle that followed, she lost her job.

And it was because people were able to connect the dots.

And it shouldn't take a tragedy like the murder of a young black man

in a very racist murder to then galvanize not only the removal of that DA, but also finally getting the state of Georgia to revisit some of its

failure to have hate crime laws and some of the permission structures that it created that manifested that situation.

But what I want people to understand is that so much of our daily lives, and you just said this, I think, very effectively, it's not what happens in Congress.

It's not what the president does.

Vote for the president, vote for Congress, but it's what happens at your city council level.

It's a school board member being able to remove books.

It is whether or not your state legislature believes that you should have not only the right to control your body, but whether the governor believes your children should have access to school lunches.

So these are very granular things that we experience in a moment.

And we have every two to four years to try to do something about it.

And by the time we get to the next election, you may have forgotten the pain.

You just remember the displeasure.

And so it's part of our responsibility to have a conversation.

You don't lecture people into voting.

You ask them what they need and what their pains are, and you connect them to how voting is the medicine they can take.

And that's the other part.

Voting is not magic.

It is not going to fix everything.

Voting is medicine.

If you take it, things can get better.

And if you don't take it, whatever ill you have is going to metastasize and probably get friends.

And so for me, the issue is if you meet people where they are and you ask them why they think they're there.

and you talk to them about where they want to be, you can move them.

And that gets us to voting rights because the way we move things in a democracy is through voting.

Yeah, that was so well said.

And I think everyone cares about something, right?

And the key is to try to connect that something to how it matters in the political process and how having a vote will change that.

And I've been thinking both in terms of the practicalities, but also a little bit in terms of the bigger picture, in terms of the historical sweep.

Because one of the things I went back and did for my research for the last book was I read the constitutional debates and I looked back at our constitutional structures and I realized there has been a 230-year struggle in this country over how democratic we should be and who should get to participate in American democracy.

And we've had these major historical hinch points and at various times a lot of people have been excluded.

When the Constitution was written, it excluded pretty much everyone but white men with property from participating.

There's been other movements when there's been other moments where we've included people, like during Reconstruction, when black men got the right to vote in the South, and then that right has been violently taken away.

There's been other moments in which we have tried to rectify those sins, like in the 1960s with the Voting Rights Act.

And so there have been these pivotal moments in our history, which basically boil down to how democratic are we going to be and are we going to truly embrace multiracial democracy?

And I think we're in this election at one of those historical hinge moments right now, where we can either commit to multiracial democracy and we can make it a reality and try to improve it so it works better, or we can turn it back, turn our backs on it in a way that unfortunately has a lot of echoes.

in the darker chapters of our history.

So I want people to understand the practicalities of voting, but I also want them to contextualize this moment in our history and understand that there's two different ways we can go.

And those two different paths are very, very dramatic in terms of our history.

And I think that's one reason why they're trying to ban so many books is so people don't learn from this history.

So we repeat these kind of mistakes instead of ultimately correcting them.

Author, historian, journalist Ari Berman, and author of Minority Rule, thank you so much for spending time with us today on Assembly Required.

It is always just an honor to be with you.

So great to talk to you.

Thanks so much for doing this, Stacey.

At Assembly Required, we encourage the audience to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

So each week we want to leave the audience with something to do to make a difference, however small.

Get involved in the fight for good at the local or national level, whatever works for you, or just get started on working out a solution in the segment we like to call our toolkit.

First, as Ari reminded us, we are in the middle of a hinge moment in history, and he invited everyone in to defend and fight for a multiracial democracy.

So, to start being curious and to stay current on the latest in voting rights, I encourage you to follow Mark Elias' Democracy Docket and its reports on the latest developments in voting rights and voter suppression.

Second, the best way to improve our democracy is to speak up and get involved.

When there is a voting rights bill being discussed in your state capitol or in the U.S.

Congress, call your representatives.

As a former legislator, I can promise you, we do listen to and we track what issues are getting your attention.

So yes, calling us or showing up to push for or against a bill does make an impact.

And no matter where you live, we need your help in this election.

To do something somewhere soon, visit fairfight.com slash LFGV, where you can sign up to volunteer from anywhere across the country.

We can do this if we show up.

Don't worry that you'll have to do something awkward.

There are many ways to participate in our elections beyond voting, of course, which I'm assuming you're going to do.

So from door knocking to managing voter hotlines to collecting voter stories, it all matters.

You can also do some good by sharing what you've learned with your friends and family.

Encourage them to support pro-democracy candidates.

Make sure they are registered to vote and that they check their registration status if they are already registered.

And lastly, make a plan to vote, like write it down.

And for the youngest people in your world, I'd recommend you pick up my new picture book, Stacey Speaks Up, which is about how to advocate for others at any age.

Now, if you want to tell us what you signed up for or who you see making a difference, send us an email at assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

Well, that wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Meet you here next week.

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Steven Roberts, and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kira Polaviev is our video producer.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Herringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

James Baldwin is one of those writers who commands respect as well as love and affection.

And he would have turned 100 this year.

Join host Razia Iqbal for Notes on a Native Sun, a special series from Notes from America with Tanahasi Coates, Brian Stevenson, Nikki Giovanni, and many others discussing their favorite works by Baldwin.

Notes on a Native Sun.

Listen to new episodes every Saturday on Notes from America from WNYC Studios, wherever you get your podcast.

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