Voter Suppression By Pandemic

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Lines here in Milwaukee have been going on for hours.

Look at that line.

Blocks and blocks and blocks long.

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.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

This week, Wisconsin held an election.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

So, on today's episode, I'm talking to Sherilyn Eiffel.

Eiffel is the president of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund.

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.

Take a listen.

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

moves to change how voting is done,

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Some of it is steeped in partisan voter suppression.

And there is an overlap between racial and partisan voter suppression, to be sure,

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

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.

Well, it's interesting.

Yes, Wisconsin really has been a very active player.

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.

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

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

Wisconsin has a history of partisan gerrymandering that ended up in the United States Supreme Court.

So it almost seemed

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.

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.

It was Wisconsin, and I certainly indict the Wisconsin legislature.

There is no reason that the Wisconsin primary could not have been postponed.

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.

So the primary was going to go forward.

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.

There was an absentee ballot backlog because of the pandemic.

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

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.

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.

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.

and drop off their absentee ballot on election day.

So it created a perfect perfect storm where it didn't have to exist.

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.

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.

I don't know that it gets more stark,

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

winners and losers has overtaken any conception of democracy.

And

it troubles me tremendously because that's where these conversations end up.

And we should remember that we've come here fairly recently.

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?

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?

That that was not a matter that was controversial.

Well, I guess that's my question, right?

How does this become a partisan thing that people,

the idea of people being able to vote?

Because it does seem like at this point,

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

So this has never been a partisan issue for me.

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?

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.

Because when you ask the question why, it's about power.

It's about white supremacy and power.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Becky Kennedy, H.R.

McMaster, and many more.

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.

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

Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.

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

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.

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.

And the black population is really powerful and important politically in Milwaukee.

The margin that the Democratic governor won by was all

there in Milwaukee.

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

and

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

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

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.

But it's not, that's not what's going on.

It's that disproportionately

non-white Americans have

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

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?

There's no question about it.

And, you know,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

And so there's nobody to make a polling place.

But I mean, does

what happened here become a

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

How do you even go about doing this?

Yeah, that's absolutely the new normal.

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.

And there's obviously no knocking on doors.

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.

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.

No question, it's a challenge.

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.

And we won't have that tool available to us.

But we, like everyone else, will have to adjust.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When I hear Attorney General Barr saying he has skepticism about mail-in voting, based on what?

Where does that come from?

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.

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.

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

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.

It's appalling.

It's appalling.

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.

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

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.

It is

born of deep concern, right, about our democracy.

But listen, you can look at that election and what we saw two ways.

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.

No question.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

And

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.

But I'm glad that we had you here.

Thanks for joining us on the ticket.

Thank you so much.

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

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.

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

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next week.

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.

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

Becky Kennedy, H.R.

McMaster, and many more.

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.

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

Learn more at theatlanticfestival.com.