Voter Suppression By Pandemic

Speaker 2 Hey, it's Hanna, host of Radio Atlantic, here to tell you about the 17th annual Atlantic Festival happening in New York City this September.

Speaker 5 We have an incredible roster of guests, including David Letterman, Scott Galloway, Dr.

Speaker 3 Becky Kennedy, H.R.

Speaker 7 McMaster, and many more.

Speaker 2 I'll be hosting a live recording of Radio Atlantic, and we'll also have book talks and screenings, including a first look at season three of The Diplomat and a conversation with stars Carrie Russell and Allison Janney and creator Deborah Kahn.

Speaker 8 Guys, you can ask them about that season two cliffhanger.

Speaker 1 Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.

Speaker 11 Lines here in Milwaukee have been going on for hours.

Speaker 10 Look at that line. Blocks and blocks and blocks long.

Speaker 11 This morning, people in Wisconsin have a tough choice to make. Protect their health by following the state's stay-at-home order or exercise their right to vote.

Speaker 12 Welcome to The Ticket. I'm Isaac Dover.

Speaker 12 This week, Wisconsin held an election.

Speaker 12 It's hard to believe people were asked to show up and went on lines in central locations amid the pandemic and all the measures were all taken to keep people healthy.

Speaker 12 It's so hard to believe, of course, that Wisconsin's governor issued a last-minute order to delay the election.

Speaker 12 But the Republican-controlled state legislature appealed to the courts where it won on the state level, and then on Monday night at the Supreme Court, the justices voted in a 5-4 party-line decision to not extend absentee voting.

Speaker 12 Fears of the coronavirus have fallen more heavily on cities, on minority populations, and that's why observers expect the pandemic to have an effect that will be clear in the turnout and the results.

Speaker 12 Here's how Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin's lieutenant governor, put it as voters waited in line on Tuesday.

Speaker 14 Unfortunately, they saw an opportunity. Our speaker, our majority leader, are our conservative, or you can just say Republican-controlled Supreme Court in the state of Wisconsin.

Speaker 14 And they saw an opportunity to suppress the vote here with coronavirus fears so that a low turnout would benefit the Donald Trump-endorsed Supreme Court candidate, Dan Kelly.

Speaker 12 So maybe the big question of the 2020 election is not anymore who will face Donald Trump, but now how will the coronavirus affect the vote?

Speaker 12 Turnout was expected to be the biggest in history, now could be severely depressed by the pandemic. And if Wisconsin is any guide, that may be exploited for political gain.

Speaker 12 So, on today's episode, I'm talking to Sherilyn Eiffel. Eiffel is the president of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund.

Speaker 12 She's one of the nation's foremost voices on voting rights, and she tells me that the recent years of voter suppression efforts leading into this crisis were already only comparable to the early 1900s.

Speaker 12 Take a listen.

Speaker 13 It seems like what we've seen over the last bunch of years is

Speaker 13 moves to change how voting is done,

Speaker 13 most of it to restrict voting, voter ID laws, cutting back in various ways to the voting rolls.

Speaker 13 There have been some moves to expand vote by mail or early voting, but generally it just seems like the direction of laws has been to make it trickier for people to vote rather than easier for people to vote.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I don't think we've seen a period like this.

Speaker 10 And in fact, I would only make it comparable to the early 1900s when southern states adopted new constitutions that restricted voting for African Americans.

Speaker 10 I don't think we've seen a period of sustained retrenchment as we have seen over the past seven or eight years. It's really quite astonishing.
And much of it is steeped in racial voter suppression.

Speaker 10 Some of it is steeped in partisan voter suppression. And there is an overlap between racial and partisan voter suppression, to be sure,

Speaker 10 and the willingness of the courts to allow it rather than to see it for what it is.

Speaker 13 And so it seems like what happened in Wisconsin with the state legislature not moving to change the primary date that it sort of fit into the overall movement that we've been seeing around the country cutting back on voting accessibility, but also in Wisconsin specifically, which has been home to a lot of moves, whether it's been cutting back the people who were registered to vote or gerrymandering that's been going on there.

Speaker 10 Well, it's interesting. Yes, Wisconsin really has been a very active player.

Speaker 10 You know, I think when people think about some of the voters' suppression that has been most dramatic over the last few years, they think about North Carolina, they think about Georgia.

Speaker 10 But if I had to pick a northern state, it would certainly be Wisconsin.

Speaker 10 Remember, Wisconsin also imposed a voter ID law that a federal court found was created for the purpose of discriminating against African-American voters.

Speaker 10 Wisconsin has a history of partisan gerrymandering that ended up in the United States Supreme Court. So it almost seemed

Speaker 10 somehow was not at all shocking that if there was going to be this pandemic voting showdown, that it would happen in Wisconsin. It was very dramatic, very stark.

Speaker 10 And in some ways, really, it's almost as though this country has been on a path of allowing schemes being being used by various state officials to keep people from voting almost ended up in that tableau, that scene that we saw people standing in line with masks on.

Speaker 10 It was Wisconsin, and I certainly indict the Wisconsin legislature. There is no reason that the Wisconsin primary could not have been postponed.

Speaker 10 The governor made an attempt to try to unilaterally move the primary, and the Wisconsin State Supreme Court, interpreting Wisconsin law, and they are the last word on Wisconsin law, said that the governor did not have that power.

Speaker 10 So the primary was going to go forward.

Speaker 10 The question before the Supreme Court was about absentee ballots, was about changing the date, moving the date as the district court had done for when absentee ballots could be received back by the Board of Elections, giving people more time.

Speaker 10 There was an absentee ballot backlog because of the pandemic.

Speaker 10 Ten times more voters sought absentee ballots in Wisconsin than had ever done so before.

Speaker 10 And so the Board of Elections was backlogged and had not had the chance to mail out a lot of absentee absentee ballots and in fact we've seen this week people have just been receiving their absentee ballots in the mail after the election so the idea the very modest adjustment that the district court uh made in the case was that absentee ballots could be received up until april 13th which is when the election has to be counted and certified right so it's not as though there was some you know date between now and the 13th that was particularly important so that's the only issue that was before the supreme court and the supreme court was not even willing to allow that very modest adjustment that he made to the process.

Speaker 10 And that meant that people who had sought an absentee ballot, but had not yet received it now felt if they wanted to vote, that they had to go out and cast their vote on election day.

Speaker 10 And people who had received the absentee ballot and were holding it could not put it in the mail because it now had to be received on election day. And so they now had to go out.

Speaker 10 and drop off their absentee ballot on election day. So it created a perfect perfect storm where it didn't have to exist.

Speaker 10 The election was gonna go forward, but the many people, the tens of thousands of people who had attempted to vote by absentee ballot now were forced out.

Speaker 10 If they wanted to exercise their right to vote, they had a choice between being disenfranchised, not voting, or risking their health and life in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

Speaker 10 I don't know that it gets more stark,

Speaker 10 really more humiliating for us as a democracy that that was the choice that we confronted voters with this week.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and it seems like when you think about the history of Wisconsin over the last 10 years, is that in 2010, Scott Walker, a Republican, was elected, and there began to be a move toward a larger and larger Republican majority in the state legislature.

Speaker 13 But also after that, they did redistricting and gerrymandering that essentially ensured the Republican majorities in the state legislature.

Speaker 13 And then there were these moves along the way to cut back on how voting was done.

Speaker 13 And the consequences of that were about what happened in Wisconsin and some of the laws that were passed in Wisconsin, what it had to do with union rights in Wisconsin, for example.

Speaker 10 Well, what you have described is all accurate, but what it masks is that our conversation about partisanship and

Speaker 10 winners and losers has overtaken any conception of democracy. And

Speaker 10 it troubles me tremendously because that's where these conversations end up. And we should remember that we've come here fairly recently.

Speaker 10 Of course, there's always been partisanship and naked partisanship, but it's also true that there used to be a space to talk about what were shared democratic ideals, right?

Speaker 10 The whole point of the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the movement to ensure that Southern jurisdictions were not able to prevent African Americans from voting was not only because it was nakedly racist, but it was also because of the recognition that we regard voting as a kind of sacred act of citizenship and that there was largely agreement on that, right?

Speaker 10 That that was not a matter that was controversial.

Speaker 13 Well, I guess that's my question, right? How does this become a partisan thing that people,

Speaker 13 the idea of people being able to vote? Because it does seem like at this point,

Speaker 13 somewhat reliably, if you look at people who want to expand access to voting it's Democrats and people who are looking to do things to restrict access to voting or what what is often talked about as protecting the vote but that ends up being lower voter turnout in practice are Republicans and that's that's just the fact of it and it's kind of stunning to see it fall down almost 100% reliably You know, it's really interesting you say that because it's so true.

Speaker 10 And I'll tell you how this plays out very problematically for the work that I do. So, you know, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund is a nonpartisan civil rights organization.

Speaker 10 We have been engaged in voting rights litigation for a very long time since the 1940s, you know, when Thurgood Marshall won Smith versus Allwright in 1944, which was a case in which the Supreme Court struck down the practice of the Democratic Party in Texas, who insisted on all white primary.

Speaker 10 So the all-white primary in the South was kind of the way that Democrats controlled the South for many decades.

Speaker 10 We all know that those were the old Democrats, and we know that beginning in the late 1940s and into the 1950s and certainly solidified by the early 1960s, those who were associated with racism and white supremacy flocked to the Republican Party, fleeing from the efforts to ensure that African Americans were true citizens in opposition to Brown versus Board of Education, in opposition to the Voting Rights Act, and so forth.

Speaker 10 So we cannot deny the racial dimensions of what you've described as a partisan reality.

Speaker 10 What becomes difficult is when we begin to talk about this as though it is purely partisan and as though the racial dynamic did not drive it first.

Speaker 10 And so I end up in conversations, even like the one I'm having now, even though I am nonpartisan, I don't work for the Democrats, nor do I try to advance any particular political party.

Speaker 10 And in fact, I'm old enough to actually have been a voting rights lawyer.

Speaker 10 And I won't say the age, but I've been a voting rights lawyer long enough that some of my first cases were suing Democrats, Southern Democratic governors.

Speaker 10 So this has never been a partisan issue for me.

Speaker 10 But what happens is that the conversation now rests within this framework of partisanship, in which I am compelled to say what I just said, off of the disclaimer, right?

Speaker 10 That I am nonpartisan and the organization I lead is nonpartisan because we have lost sight of the fact or because in conversation, because we're worried about whatever is the next election, we've forgotten that race was the engine that drove the whole thing and that race remains very central to this issue.

Speaker 10 Because when you ask the question why, it's about power. It's about white supremacy and power.

Speaker 10 You know, in 2013 and 14, when I would talk about white supremacy in the context of voter ID laws, people would roll their eyes. It sounded like I was being so dramatic, right?

Speaker 10 People understood white supremacy to be the march in Charlottesville, right? It's Nazi flags, it's people with Nazi salutes and using the N-word and saying racist things.

Speaker 10 But But white supremacy at its core is the effort by whites to hold on to power no matter what. That's what massive resistance was about.
That's what Southern segregation was about.

Speaker 10 That's what the denial of the right to vote throughout the South for Black people was about. It was about white supremacy, about the fear of sharing power.
with black and brown people.

Speaker 10 And I guess I want to be very clear that that remains at the heart of much of this.

Speaker 10 To the extent that that correlates with party, that is a complicating factor that I think makes it very difficult for people sometimes to see why this is so unconscionable, why voter suppression is so unconscionable.

Speaker 10 Because people say, well, it's partisan politics, and you know, we all always had partisan politics.

Speaker 10 But if people really wanted to understand why it's unconscionable, it's because it is animated by and emanates from the same motivation that kept the South from allowing black people to vote in the years before the civil rights movement.

Speaker 12 We'll be back with more with Sherilyn Eiffel in a moment.

Speaker 2 Hey, it's Hannah, host of Radio Atlantic, here to tell you about the 17th annual Atlantic Festival happening in New York City this September.

Speaker 2 We have an incredible roster of guests, including David Letterman, Scott Galloway, Dr.

Speaker 3 Becky Kennedy, H.R.

Speaker 7 McMaster, and many more.

Speaker 2 I'll be hosting a live recording of Radio Atlantic, and we'll also have book talks and screenings, including a first look at season three of The Diplomat and a conversation with stars Carrie Russell and Allison Janney and creator Deborah Kahn.

Speaker 8 Guys, you can ask them about that season two cliffhanger.

Speaker 1 Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.

Speaker 13 You look at, again, what happened in Wisconsin, and yes, it's the question of how it will affect the Democrats and the Republicans and all that. But

Speaker 13 one of the stats that came out of what happened in that election is that in Milwaukee, there are usually 180 polling places that are open.

Speaker 13 There were five that were open in the city of Milwaukee, which is a pretty big city. It is also a city that is a lot less white than the state of Wisconsin overall.

Speaker 13 And the black population is really powerful and important politically in Milwaukee. The margin that the Democratic governor won by was all

Speaker 13 there in Milwaukee.

Speaker 13 And one of the things that Republicans in the legislature were saying at the time was that they were saying there's Milwaukee and then there's the rest of the state and you know what all the people of Wisconsin want or which was a really strange thing to say because the people who live in Milwaukee are as much living in Wisconsin as people who live you know the northern border of Wisconsin

Speaker 13 and

Speaker 13 that mixes it all together I think in the way that you're talking about but it also seems like when we're talking about the

Speaker 13 the way this pandemic is coming through and we're seeing statistics that show that there is a much higher rate of infection and of death across the country in African-American communities and

Speaker 13 Latino communities than in white communities. And there seems to be some people who are talking about this as if there's like something genetic to it almost.

Speaker 13 But it's not, that's not what's going on. It's that disproportionately

Speaker 13 non-white Americans have

Speaker 13 jobs that have been deemed essential and so that they've been out working and have

Speaker 13 health care that is not as good. But just like overall, that's what we're looking at.
And that's why this is all then in a mix with that, right?

Speaker 10 There's no question about it. And, you know,

Speaker 10 what this has done, what you saw in those photographs and in those videos from Wisconsin this week were the wages of white supremacy across the board, not just in the context of elections and political power.

Speaker 10 It was about health care, it was about segregation, it was about all of the things that also contribute to the reality that although black people are 27% of the population in Milwaukee, they represent 70% of those who died from COVID.

Speaker 10 You can already feel the conversation shifting towards some kind of eugenicist explanation for why blacks are being stricken with COVID when it is all about structural racism.

Speaker 10 The disparities that we have seen in health outcomes for African Americans in terms of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, all of those things are connected to all of the other elements of disparities that are driven by racism, our access to health care, food deserts that provide opportunities for nutritional food, the jobs that we are compelled to take, the stress of racism.

Speaker 10 There are so many elements and factors that contribute to African Americans suffering disproportionately from these diseases that make you particularly vulnerable to COVID.

Speaker 10 So all of that was on display. And the part that is really important is that all of that was very much in play in terms of thinking about this election.

Speaker 10 If you read the district court's opinion, he talks about the ways in which the restrictions on voting fell most harshly in the African-American communities. And yet it was ignored.

Speaker 10 These are not things we don't know. And so when you watch what happened in Wisconsin, it wasn't just some accident.
It wasn't the confluence of factors that no one could have imagined.

Speaker 10 It was exactly what you would expect. So, I mean, we know what these things are.
We know how they're going to affect the African-American community, just like voter ID.

Speaker 10 We know how it's going to affect the African-American community, and yet we allow it to go forward in any case.

Speaker 10 So I think this is a really important watershed moment for us to start having the conversation about what voter suppression really is, about who really benefits when we make it harder to vote, when the president suddenly out of the blue disparages mail-in voting, which he has used consistently.

Speaker 10 What is it about? And if we start the conversation by talking about Republicans and Democrats, then we contribute to losing the very core racial dynamics that lie at the heart of all of this.

Speaker 13 So, when you think forward to the next few months and as what we saw happen over the last couple of weeks in Wisconsin be the question that voters and election administrators are facing all around the country where do you think that that points things

Speaker 10 well the the position we have taken is that we should be providing a range and as many means for all voters to access the system as possible I would never have thought that I would have to say this, but we start from the premise that voting should not require you taking your life into your hand so we think there has to be a menu sure there should be open polls to the extent possible many of the polls were closed for example in Milwaukee County because as we all know many of our poll workers are elderly and they began calling out in droves saying essentially that they weren't going to work and appropriately so on election day because they feared exposing themselves to the virus and I should say what that number of the 180 polling places down to five a lot of that was because people were saying the poll workers were saying, I'm not going to show up to vote.

Speaker 13 And so there's nobody to make a polling place. But I mean, does

Speaker 13 what happened here become a

Speaker 13 blueprint for, I guess, in the ways that you would fear for other states that want to restrict voting?

Speaker 10 Oh, it's absolutely for me a blueprint of what I cannot allow, right? What those of us who do this work cannot allow to happen in November.

Speaker 10 And that means we need more early voting so that you don't have lines because you have a longer period of early voting you do need to have drop-off absentee stations you do need to expand the time for absentee ballots to be returned to the board of elections we need all of this to deal with the challenges of this pandemic there are ways to manage this and i think that's the menu we're all sitting with right now and are prepared to lean into to ensure that in november we don't have an election that causes people to risk their lives but we also have an election that we don't have to be ashamed of that everyone who is a citizen who wants to participate can participate on November 3rd.

Speaker 13 A lot of your work is in filing paperwork and in the courtroom, but a lot of the overall work around voting rights is like much activism, rallies and demonstrations.

Speaker 13 That doesn't seem like it's going to be part of this year ahead in anything like the way it would have been otherwise without fears of the pandemic.

Speaker 13 How do you even go about doing this?

Speaker 10 Yeah, that's absolutely the new normal.

Speaker 10 What we do is we work to remove barriers and then we try to get the information out to voters about where they can vote, what their rights are, how they can register and so forth.

Speaker 10 And there's obviously no knocking on doors.

Speaker 10 We're not handing out palm cards in communities as we need to. We're not attending community meetings or church meetings to provide that information.

Speaker 10 And so I think all of us are working very hard to use online tools to reach our communities and to make sure that our communities have the information that they need and stepping that work up, stepping up that capability of reaching people online and by telephone and using whatever means we can to make sure that our communities have the information that they need.

Speaker 10 No question, it's a challenge.

Speaker 10 The activism, particularly that exists in the African-American community, has always been very strongly premised on our ability to come together and to march and to meet together.

Speaker 10 And we won't have that tool available to us. But we, like everyone else, will have to adjust.

Speaker 10 And we have every intention of ensuring that our communities are well informed, well informed, with the adequate tools they they need to be able to participate fully in the election and in the political process.

Speaker 13 When you think about November and where we're headed in this, it seems to me like no matter what happens, there are going to be people

Speaker 13 or lots of groups of people that suspect that the election is not fully reflective of the electorate.

Speaker 13 That either it's going to be because there is going to be a situation in Wisconsin where a lot of people feel intimidated as a public health matter from voting or long lines making it impossible or that there will be more moves to vote to mail and there are suspicions being ceded by the president and others about whether that's corrupt or whatever happens.

Speaker 13 This was going to be, in most people's expectations, the highest turnout election in a long time because of all the interest in the presidential election.

Speaker 13 It seems like That's certainly not going to be the case. It may actually be a low turnout election when it all comes down to it.

Speaker 13 And there are going to be questions of who got to vote and how the vote happened.

Speaker 13 How are we going to have faith, no matter who wins, that when we say this person won the election, that that person actually was the choice of the plurality, if not the majority of people?

Speaker 10 Well, I don't know that there's very much we can do except try to put in place processes that give those who are open to listening to facts a sense that there is integrity in the election system.

Speaker 10 And that means really, you know, look, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm also not for pretending that voter suppression doesn't exist.

Speaker 10 So I think it's very important that what we do is we work to make the election as legitimate as possible so that people can have confidence in it.

Speaker 10 And if it is not legitimate, people will not have confidence in it.

Speaker 10 So it is actually very important for whoever wins, in my view, to be invested in ensuring that the election is legitimate by ensuring that people have access to the ballot, by ensuring that every vote is counted, and so forth.

Speaker 10 That's how you get legitimacy. And to the extent that there are those who are working to undermine that, they are creating the context in which people cannot have confidence in the election.

Speaker 10 When I hear Attorney General Barr saying he has skepticism about mail-in voting, based on what? Where does that come from?

Speaker 10 These are the seeds that are being sown to try to create a sense of illegitimacy where one does not exist. And it is shameful.

Speaker 10 It is absolutely a disgrace for the Attorney General of the United States, a lawyer of longstanding practice and experience, to throw out those kinds of doubts.

Speaker 10 He's a person in a position of tremendous power and leadership.

Speaker 10 And when he says he's skeptical, he is making a suggestion to those who are listening to him, who are not, can't be expected to do their own research on it, but who are following his lead to suggest that there's something illegitimate about mail-in voting.

Speaker 10 It's appalling. It's appalling.

Speaker 10 So we also are facing just a crisis of leadership, but we are going to have to ask people to follow those voices that care about the future of this country, that care about citizenship and democracy and not just power.

Speaker 13 How worried are you about where we're headed and where our democracy is headed?

Speaker 10 Well, listen, this is what I've given my life to for 30 years. So I've been, you know, my dial is set for worry about our democracy because that's what civil rights work is.

Speaker 13 It is

Speaker 10 born of deep concern, right, about our democracy. But listen, you can look at that election and what we saw two ways.

Speaker 10 One, as I have already expressed, is that it was shameful and a disgrace that we consigned people to have to choose between their health and their right as citizens to participate and vote.

Speaker 10 No question.

Speaker 10 But I also am compelled to see the extraordinary, powerful nobility of those people standing, you know, some of them in wheelchairs, staggered and separated from each other as best they could by six feet for hours on end, determined, determined to participate in the political process.

Speaker 10 That has to be the power that really fuels us to do the work that we do and that gives us hope.

Speaker 10 Because no matter that they had been failed by the state legislature, no matter that they had been failed by a United States Supreme Court who would not even deign, in its opinion, discuss the truth of the factual context and the reality.

Speaker 10 of what voting would be like for people in Wisconsin, despite those failures, they marshaled their courage to gather themselves, to put on their masks, and to stand in those lines for two hours to have their voice be counted.

Speaker 10 And if you saw interviews with any of the people talking about the need to be heard, it was incredibly powerful.

Speaker 10 So if we want to feel hopeful, we should feel hopeful in the determination of ordinary people to be true citizens in this country.

Speaker 10 And we fight on their behalf, and we should never underestimate their power.

Speaker 13 Well, Charlene, I was going to end up thinking that we were going to be depressed at the end of it, but you're trying to make everybody feel more hopeful about where voting is headed.

Speaker 13 It does seem like this is going to be an ongoing theme of the next six, seven months. And

Speaker 13 I think that we'll probably look back on how we were all thinking about this in April, come November, and at least some of it will seem Prussian and some of it will seem naive.

Speaker 13 But I'm glad that we had you here. Thanks for joining us on the ticket.

Speaker 10 Thank you so much.

Speaker 12 That'll do it for this week of the ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Speaker 12 Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Silver.

Speaker 12 To support this podcast and all our work here at the Atlantic, go to theatlantic.com/slash support us.

Speaker 12 Thanks for listening. Catch you next week.

Speaker 2 Hey, it's Hannah, host of Radio Atlantic, here to tell you about the 17th annual Atlantic Festival happening in New York City this September.

Speaker 2 We have an incredible roster of guests, including David Letterman, Scott Galloway, Dr.

Speaker 3 Becky Kennedy, H.R.

Speaker 7 McMaster, and many more.

Speaker 2 I'll be hosting a live recording of Radio Atlantic, and we'll also have book talks and screenings, including a first look at season three of The Diplomat and a conversation with stars Carrie Russell and Allison Janney and creator Deborah Kahn.

Speaker 8 Guys, you can ask them about that season two cliffhanger.

Speaker 1 Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.