"Stacey Abrams"

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Speaker 1 Hey gang, welcome to Smartless. We are a sweet new podcast starring myself, Sean Hayes, Jason Bateman, and Will Arnett.
And we are complete idiots.

Speaker 1 So what we do is we bring on a guest and we ask them stuff and they make us smarter. Hopefully, it's super cool.
So please come with us. Enjoy the show.
Smart.

Speaker 1 Smart.

Speaker 1 Smart.

Speaker 1 Okay, so welcome to SmartList. Now, Jason, today's guest is your guest, Stacey Abrams.
But we recorded this a while ago.

Speaker 1 So could you just give us a little bit of a timeline on Stacey's interview and why she's airing now?

Speaker 2 Yeah, we recorded this a few weeks ago and we wanted to hold it so that we could release it a little bit closer to Election Day because of the ground that we cover.

Speaker 2 You know, we talk about voter suppression and, you know, the election in general, et cetera, et cetera. So the stuff that we don't talk about has not happened or did not happen.

Speaker 1 Right, because a lot has happened, right, in that time.

Speaker 1 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 2 So apologies for stuff not mentioned, but the future had not happened yet. So enjoy the episode.
Here comes.

Speaker 2 guys we've got a respectable guest with us today and i'm not going to bore anybody with a bunch of intro nonsense because she need none ladies and gentlemen stacy abrams whoa

Speaker 1 yeah okay

Speaker 1 all right oh my gosh what an honor this is so

Speaker 1 tighten up man okay look at well let's have the good stacin what a guest i i'm such a huge fan of yours yours. This is so cool to meet you.
Oh, Stacey, this is great to meet you.

Speaker 3 Well, likewise, I'm fangirling internally. Jason can tell you I can do an IMDb on all of you.
So

Speaker 3 I watch a lot of television.

Speaker 2 I did have a brief conversation with her about a week ago, and

Speaker 2 she was very, very, very nice. I was surprised.
I'm always surprised that anybody knows who the heck I am.

Speaker 2 It is one of the few good things about being kind of pseudo-famous is that you can kind of cut through the first 12 questions and you get right into kind of a conversation with someone like at a peer level and you just get right into it.

Speaker 2 It's a nice.

Speaker 1 Right, because they're not going like, Jason, now what do you do?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Right, you haven't had that in a minute.

Speaker 1 All right. Well,

Speaker 2 Stacey, I'm really not sure where to begin.

Speaker 2 Obviously, you're doing the country an enormous service with the amount of work you're doing on

Speaker 2 giving people

Speaker 2 the sense or the reality, hopefully, that all their votes are going to count.

Speaker 2 And for our single listener out there who is not that bright,

Speaker 2 they're as smartless as we are. That's why they tune in.

Speaker 2 They want to get less dumb.

Speaker 2 Can you give them a brief explanation about

Speaker 2 what your primary focus is every morning now that you're getting up and trying to push the ball forward in this main area area of trying to eliminate voter suppression.

Speaker 2 How can they feel better about the possibilities of that today?

Speaker 3 How many hours do I have?

Speaker 2 You've got all the time you want on this.

Speaker 2 We have nothing left to do today.

Speaker 1 You're it.

Speaker 3 So first of all, thank you so much for having me. This is a delight.
Voter suppression is basically when you are prevented from or discouraged from voting.

Speaker 3 Typically, it is practiced by an instrument of the government, like, oh, let's say a secretary of State running for governor against you as an opponent.

Speaker 1 Or

Speaker 1 what do you mean?

Speaker 3 Off the top of my head, that's one example.

Speaker 3 Or it can be a U.S. Supreme Court telling you that you have to go and vote in the middle of a pandemic if you live in Wisconsin or Texas or Alabama.

Speaker 3 Anyway, so voter suppression is when there is an attempt made to throttle your ability to vote.

Speaker 3 The challenge is that in the 21st century, most voter suppression activities have been perpetrated by Republicans because they find themselves on the losing end of an expansion of who can participate in our democracy.

Speaker 3 And so typically the strongest predictor of political leanings is race, which means that whether they think they're racist or not, most of the voter suppression actions are targeted at people of color because we are the most likely to vote Democratic.

Speaker 3 Their second favorite target are students, and that's why you find voter suppression across the country, but why you find it in New Hampshire, where they passed a law to try to disenfranchise student voters.

Speaker 3 And then the last thing I'll say is this: the architecture of voter suppression is the same no matter where you live. It's, do they make it hard for you to register and stay on the rolls?

Speaker 3 Do they make it hard for you to cast a ballot? Meaning, do they make it hard for you to get an absentee ballot?

Speaker 3 Do they make it hard for you to get to a polling place because they shut it down, they moved it and didn't tell you? And then the third is, does your ballot count? What I like to refer to as Florida?

Speaker 3 So it is,

Speaker 3 it's basically, and it looks different from state to state because we do not have a single democracy in America.

Speaker 3 We've got 50 different iterations where each state gets to decide how to administer elections.

Speaker 3 The Constitution says you have the right to vote, but it delegated to each state the ability to administer the vote. And so we have voter suppression because bad actors get worse.

Speaker 3 Good actors sometimes stay okay.

Speaker 3 And folks who are in the middle look to see if they can win or lose depending on what they do. And they tend towards voter suppression.

Speaker 1 I'm a bad actor, I think. I feel like when you said bad actor, you looked at Sean too.
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 let's, you won't say this, so I'll say it. They were obviously successful in what they tried to do in the gubernatorial race.
In Georgia. In Georgia.

Speaker 2 In other words, they knocked a ton of people off that that would definitely have voted for you. You lost by 50,000.
They knocked, what, over a million, almost 2 million people off the rolls, right?

Speaker 3 1.4 million were purged over time. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 they were successful there, which is horrific.

Speaker 2 Can we feel confident that were that race to be run today, that wouldn't happen again? Have you been successful, at least locally there?

Speaker 2 And if the answer is yes, have you been able, do you get the sense that you've been successful in other states as well, such that we have less to worry about now than we did back then?

Speaker 3 I would say we have different things to worry about, but it's getting better. So, there are two ways to tackle voter suppression.

Speaker 3 One is by actually making the laws work for voters, which is my preference. And so, in Georgia, for example, we face this thing called exact match.

Speaker 3 In 2018, 53,000 people had their applications to register to vote held hostage by the Secretary of State. 80% of them were people of color, 70% were black people.

Speaker 3 We have have been able to make strides in reducing the effectiveness of exact match in purging and basically stopping voters. In 2019, the Secretary of State attempted to purge 309,000 people.

Speaker 3 We were able to save 22,000 by pointing out that he was doing it wrong. We got another few thousand to reassert their right to vote.

Speaker 3 And there was a law that was passed that did not apply for some godforsaken reason to this group. But going forward, you have more time before you get kicked off the rolls.

Speaker 3 So Georgia is getting slowly better, but they have new ways to do stupid and incompetent. So when you saw the June 9th election, that was sort of a replay of their greatest hits of voter suppression.

Speaker 3 And they added on top of it the purchase of $100 million worth of machines that didn't work in most counties. And thus you had elections that took a long time.

Speaker 3 And so my point is, part of the reason for the work we do is that we've got to figure out for each election what the suppression looks like but using the primaries helps us get prepared for the general it's like the dress rehearsal and so we know both in georgia and around the country what is going to happen what's going to go wrong we know that in nevada the republican secretary of state shut down every single precinct except for one per county except in the county where las vegas is located 80% of Nevadans live in that county.

Speaker 3 So it's kind of problematic,

Speaker 3 but we know that. So we can either file a lawsuit about it.
We can try to negotiate with the secretaries of state or local elections officials.

Speaker 3 There's a lot that can be done now that we know what's wrong.

Speaker 3 And the work that we do through Fair Fight has been getting in there to mitigate the harm during the primaries, but also use the primaries to gather stories and evidence so that we can be prepared for November.

Speaker 3 And I'm hopeful that November will be better.

Speaker 1 I mean, wow. First of all, that's so chilling, of course, right? And all of it, any kind of sort of voter suppression is

Speaker 1 chilling when we look at it now. Obviously, it's been going on for a long, long time, and it must be frustrating just making these small dents in it, but having, you know, continuing on.

Speaker 1 And my question is, is this something, what I wonder, what scares me is, is this something that has just gone on sort of unsaid amongst the people who are perpetrating this suppression?

Speaker 1 Or is there an actual, do you think that there's actual dialogue that happens where they coordinate? Because it's happening.

Speaker 1 Is there an actual coordination, do you think? Because that's what I think. I think they must be talking to each other

Speaker 1 and having discussions about how can we further disenfranchise these people.

Speaker 1 So whether it's knocking them off the rolls, not letting them off of work, making them vote during a pandemic, making it very difficult, not knowing where they go, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 This is a orchestrated attack on our system.

Speaker 2 And not illegal, right? Not illegal. they don't have to worry about an electronic trail on this, right? Like if you got their emails,

Speaker 2 they wouldn't be put in jail for doing this either, right?

Speaker 3 No, they had a meeting. They literally had a meeting.

Speaker 3 We got recordings of it where Justin Clark, who is their architect and is now the deputy campaign manager for the Trump campaign, said voter suppression is how we win.

Speaker 3 I'm paraphrasing him, but he used all of those words in the sentence.

Speaker 3 So yes, this has been an orchestrated attempt, but let's understand that pre-1965, pre-Voting Rights Act, you didn't have to do a lot of organizing because the law said black people can't vote, Latinos can't vote, Native Americans can't vote.

Speaker 3 So you had Jim Crow and its Western iterations. Post-65 to around 2008, you had this détente where Republicans understood that Democrats at the beginning, and then eventually they became Republicans.

Speaker 3 But over time, those who were angry about people of color participating in elections, they realized that they could only do so much because the Voting Rights Act had stopped.

Speaker 3 In 2008, Barack Obama kind of, you know, put them on alert that, oh my God, things are changing. And so you saw states like North Carolina start to limit early voting and Sunday voting.

Speaker 3 They literally reduced Sunday voting because black people used it. It was called souls to the polls.
They said, we're not going to let y'all do that anymore. So they limited it.

Speaker 3 Young people were voting too much. So they, in Florida, in Texas, you can't use your student ID to vote.
You can use your gun license, but not your student ID.

Speaker 3 So then you get to 2013, and that was their, like, that was the moment of greatness for them, because that's when they eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, when they removed Section 5's effectiveness.

Speaker 3 And what that basically means is that before 2013, you had to get permission to be racist in voting. You had to get permission to make it harder for people to vote.

Speaker 3 As of 2013, John Roberts said, well, we elected a black guy as president. Racism is done.
Let's all party. You guys, you're good.

Speaker 3 And so what has happened since that time is that you saw this dramatic acceleration of voter suppression activities. They have been meeting about it.

Speaker 3 So groups like Alec, folks like Chris Kobach, who's running for the U.S. Senate, ran for governor, who's the Secretary of State of Kansas.

Speaker 3 He believes that his mission in life is to push greater voter suppression. Brian Kemp, the Secretary of State of Georgia, architect of voter suppression in the South.

Speaker 3 You've seen it play out in almost every state, but they do. They share information.
They meet about it. And for this election, they have committed to raising $60 million,

Speaker 3 $20 million towards litigating,

Speaker 3 basically opposing any expansion of the right to vote. Meaning, if you don't already use it, we don't want you to have it.

Speaker 3 And if you already have it, we're going to limit how effectively you can use it. They also plan to stand up an army of 50,000 poll monitors.

Speaker 3 who are going to be people who basically challenge black and brown voters and question their right to vote because it worked in 1981 and they were told not to do it for 35 years. They,

Speaker 3 shockingly, under the Trump administration, that consent decree was lifted. So now it's legal.
So to Jason's point, they can legally stand in line and challenge people and try to scare them.

Speaker 3 And they might have a little band on their arm that says off-duty ICE officer. Things like that can happen.

Speaker 3 So all of these things are legal, which is why our work exists and the work of so many others.

Speaker 3 We are here to push back against what they intend, but we know what they intend because they had a meeting.

Speaker 1 Wow. So groups of citizens might be going going around intimidating people in voting lines who aren't necessarily law enforcement, but are going around intimidating and they have armbands on.

Speaker 1 And I'm trying to think

Speaker 1 of what that reminds me of. I'm trying to.

Speaker 2 Just give it some thought. We'll come back to you.
Yeah. Just close your eyes.

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Speaker 1 I wanted to know, like, is it a pipe dream to think that one day or maybe it's just, or is it impossible to think that we'll do what some other countries do and make it not only mandatory to vote, but it's a holiday?

Speaker 1 Like, why is that such a hard thing to pass?

Speaker 3 So I wrote this book called Our Time is Now. And part of what I wanted to do is let people understand just how complicated the United States has made its most basic right.

Speaker 3 And most nations, you don't have to register. You are automatically registered as a perk of citizenship.
They put you on the rolls. You have to fight to get off.

Speaker 3 To your point, if you live in Australia, it's the law. You have to vote.
In most nations, you vote either on a Saturday or on a holiday.

Speaker 3 The United States has you vote on a Tuesday in the winter after you've registered by, you know, in whatever state you happen to be in, and you have to make sure you get there in time because the registration laws differ from place to place.

Speaker 3 All of this is solvable. There is a bill that passed, and the very first bill passed under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, HR1.

Speaker 3 It would create all of the things we need to make democracy modern and useful in the United States when it comes to voting. And then you have H.R.

Speaker 3 4 introduced by Terry Sewell and in honor of John Lewis, it should be the only, it should be the next bill that passes, but Mitch McConnell will not do it.

Speaker 3 It will restore the Voting Rights Act that says not only are we going to create a national baseline for democracy, the right things to do, we're going to make certain that if somebody tries to do the wrong thing, we're going to stop them.

Speaker 3 But that means we have to win the White House and the Senate and hold the House.

Speaker 1 Right. Are you shocked that Mitch McConnell is standing in the way of people participating in a democracy?

Speaker 2 So is that basically the main and only thing that we need to do in order to get all these common sense things into law is to just get control over the Senate, correct?

Speaker 3 So that's one. That's a big piece.
We need to win the White House. We need to take the Senate.
Most of this is statutory and very little of it is contestable under the Constitution. So that's first.

Speaker 3 The second piece is that we have to flip state legislatures. We need people to vote down ballot because this is a census here.

Speaker 3 And I harp on the census all the time because it is the most important thing nobody cares about. The census is how we decide the next 10 years of leadership.

Speaker 3 People close their eyes and remember how great they felt in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama and the lovely two years that followed.

Speaker 3 And then in 2010, we were all sobbing, those of us who could pay attention, because in 2011, Republicans drew the lines that took out Nancy Pelosi's speaker and replaced her with John Boehner.

Speaker 3 We lost our rights because people did not understand that gerrymandering, this thing we talk about, this spooky thing, it happens because of the census and because of who gets elected to state legislatures.

Speaker 3 So if we want to not only do it, but hold it, you can't just win the race. You've got to win the race and then you've got to like burn down the field so they can't come back and undo it.

Speaker 3 That's a terrible analogy. Sorry.

Speaker 1 No, it's good.

Speaker 1 But the gerrymandering, I mean, this is the thing that Eric Holder is spending a lot of time working on, and Barack Obama is helping him with that as well. And it's incredibly important.

Speaker 2 I mean, also something legal that on its face should be completely illegal.

Speaker 3 Well, but you can't get there. So what I need people to understand is, yes, Eric Holder and the president have done extraordinary work to raise the specter of gerrymandering.

Speaker 3 And the thing is, what the Supreme Court has said is that gerrymandering that is political or partisan is permissible.

Speaker 3 In 2019, they said, as long as your constitution doesn't say you can't do it in a state, have at it. You can be as partisan as you want.

Speaker 3 But the only constitutional prohibition against gerrymandering is racial. Well, how do we know the races of the people in our states? The census.

Speaker 3 And so Donald Trump, in one of his sort of moments of pressed dedigitation, put out this memo saying he was going to make sure that undocumented immigrants immigrants were not going to be counted for reapportionment.

Speaker 3 And it's a terrible thing, but it's wholly and completely unconstitutional. What he's really trying to do is through Mitch McConnell, he's trying to accelerate the count through the census.

Speaker 3 Because of COVID, everything's been slowed down. Well, if you don't count everyone, if you speed through the process and people are left behind, then the

Speaker 3 Census Bureau has the authority to do something called imputation. Please stay awake.
Imputation means that they can look at the census tracts that are next door.

Speaker 3 So let's say you've got one census tract that's responsive. Everybody's telling who they are.
They're doing all their work.

Speaker 3 Another group has been scared out of doing it because they were told, if you fill out the census, you're going to be deported. If you fill out the census, you're going to be arrested.

Speaker 3 If you fill out the census, they're going to make you pay your child support. All of these specters that are out there trying to convince people of color not to fill out the census.

Speaker 3 If those two census tracts are near each other, they will impute that the race of the people who did not respond is the same as the race of the people who did respond, which means black and brown communities suddenly look white.

Speaker 3 Well, the way this ties back to Trump is that if you can make communities of color look white, and right now

Speaker 3 the response rate for people of color is down by almost 10%,

Speaker 3 then you can slash 10% of the people of color.

Speaker 3 Well, when it comes time to gerrymander, you're not violating the prohibition against racial gerrymandering because you don't have any people of color to count.

Speaker 1 Wow. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 My gosh.

Speaker 3 Everyone who is within the sound of my voice, please, God, fill out your census. Huh.

Speaker 1 Sean told me that his strongest census was census of smell, right? You were just sensibility.

Speaker 2 Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Census and sensibility. It's a play that we're doing about the census.

Speaker 2 Is it,

Speaker 2 God, I would love, I would love like you, or you probably can't, but somebody

Speaker 2 like you to send out kind of like a playlist for people around voting day of like, this is who you should vote for. When you look at your ballot, just check all these boxes and you're good.

Speaker 1 But this is something we've talked about before. It's so important to get involved locally and how important all these elections, not just up top, but all the way through, it's so important.

Speaker 1 And it's taken me to this, I mean, I'm 50. I look like I'm 30.
I'm taking words out of your mouth. But

Speaker 1 it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 It's not clear.

Speaker 1 It's taken me this long to realize how important these things are because, you you know, look, Alexander. Was that a skin toner?

Speaker 2 Are you talking about?

Speaker 1 I mean, well, I start with the toner and that's a moisturizer. But the point is, because I'm not a maniac, the point is

Speaker 1 I feel delinquent that it's taken me so long to start paying attention to what's happening.

Speaker 2 We just can't get complacent, right?

Speaker 2 Things look lined up pretty good, but we can't get lazy yet, right?

Speaker 3 So let me do three things first. So one on the list, the playlist, that's why we have political parties.

Speaker 3 The whole point of political parties is that the letter is supposed to give you the best sense of who you can vote for if you don't have time to check.

Speaker 3 And the reason you have primaries is to make sure that those who are paying attention give you the best person to vote for when you get to the general.

Speaker 3 And so while you won't get the exact list every time, depending on your political leanings, that's what the playlist is supposed to look like. Because we elect everything in America and it becomes

Speaker 3 I think it's both impertinent to try to tell people exactly who to vote for if you don't know enough about their community, But that's why the shorthand of political parties exist.

Speaker 3 But of course, it's completely fallible and terrible people make their way through.

Speaker 1 Will is kind of hoping that a flock of seagulls is on that playlist. Aren't you? Yeah.
There you go. Do you think?

Speaker 3 I believe they'd be in the green party, but you know, it depends on if they like them.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 for Will, your point is do not feel bad. I mean, I want people to

Speaker 3 understand why it matters, but most of us never were never taught this.

Speaker 3 Trillions of dollars have been spent making sure we know who the president is, not just the campaigns, but we have entire oeuvre of shows and movies about the presidency.

Speaker 3 Nobody cares about a state legislator, except that the state legislator is the reason you will lose your reproductive choice.

Speaker 3 It's the decision that is made about whether you go to jail for five years or 50 years for a crime.

Speaker 3 State legislators and local officials have a lot of power, but not a lot of money is spent trying to tell you about them. And we haven't had civic education in this country for about 40 years.

Speaker 3 So do not feel guilty just see this as a moment of expansion of your mind so the last thing i'm going to do is vote by mail vote by mail absolutely the thing to do because we need to make certain one that it is safe vote so if you have vote by mail and 34 states let you vote by mail with no excuses 16 states require an excuse of some kind but every state is capable of vote by mail.

Speaker 3 So if you live in a state where they're already good with it, use it, get it done, be happy. It's not just because it's the safest way to get votes in.
It's also a way that you can audit the ballots.

Speaker 3 So in a lot of states, if you want to make sure that there is no shenanigans, vote by mail gives you a chance to go back and check and make sure that what happened happened.

Speaker 3 But it's also critical for people who don't have the option to vote by mail. There are a lot of folks who are essential workers, shift workers.
They don't get a choice of when they get off work.

Speaker 3 And if they can't get to their polling place, if they don't get to vote by mail, that's the only way they're going to get to vote.

Speaker 3 And then the same thing is true if you're disabled, if you have a language barrier, or if you're homeless, if you've been displaced by COVID because Mitch McConnell in the Senate refuses to do anything about the evictions that are about to sweep this country.

Speaker 3 All of those people are going to need to vote in person. Everyone who votes by mail creates a safe space in line for the person who doesn't have a choice.

Speaker 3 And you got folks like me who would try to vote by mail, but my mail-in ballot, when it finally arrived, filled it out. It was really long.

Speaker 3 I went to put it in the return envelope and it was sealed shut. And under Georgia law, I could not open it.

Speaker 3 If I could steam it open, I could use it. But if I ripped it in any way, I could not use it.
I requested a replacement envelope. It never showed up.
And so I had to vote in person.

Speaker 1 That is unbelievable.

Speaker 2 So she had a drive down on that day. I mean, that's pretty crafty, right? I mean, yeah, yeah, we'll give you a mail-in ballot, not a problem.
But then they seal the envelope.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's, they just send them all, they send them all sealed. How, how

Speaker 1 cynical is it when you hear you hear Trump and you, you, or you see his tweets about rigged election because the mail-in vote and blah, blah, blah, knowing that that's how he votes?

Speaker 3 Well, not only is it how he votes, this is the same man who said in a tweet, absentee ballots are safe.

Speaker 3 They're not subject to fraud. They're fantastic, but mail-in voting is fraudulent and terrible.
It's the same thing.

Speaker 3 It's the exact same thing.

Speaker 3 And so I don't know how much of it is. And I mean, there's a bit of ignorance that pervades a lot of his whining.
And in this case,

Speaker 3 I know it's shocking. I don't mean to throw you guys off, but vote by mail is safe.
It is not subject to fraud. It does not happen with any degree of density or worry.

Speaker 3 And so voting by mail, if you can, do it and do it as fast as you can, because they are trying to take down the post office. He is doing his best to underfund and undermine the post office.

Speaker 3 So as soon as you can vote by mail, do so because that gets your ballot counted. But the thing is, no matter what he tries, everyone can still vote in person on election day.
Right. Right.

Speaker 3 Unless you live in one of the five states that do only vote by mail, but even they make provisions.

Speaker 2 But if people think that there are still

Speaker 2 existing problems, barriers, it's going to be a waste of my time to spend four hours in line or take the day off from work to vote, then they're just going to say, screw it.

Speaker 2 At the end of the day, I'm just one vote anyway, and I'm not going to vote. Like, that's the problem.
So when will they know? Actually, I don't need to worry about that.

Speaker 2 It is going to be worth my time and I am going to go vote.

Speaker 1 But also, right. But also to that point, like, sorry to go back to the national holiday and like making election day a national paid holiday.

Speaker 1 Why don't we start with like, I don't know, Jeff Bezos or some of these huge corporations, if it's not a law, I would be like, guys, go vote. I'll pay for the day.

Speaker 1 Like, why don't we start at a corporate level instead of a government level?

Speaker 3 Well, we have to do all the above. So Fair Fight is working with corporations.
Here in Georgia, we've gotten Arthur Blank to let those who work for him, they're giving them time off to vote.

Speaker 3 And we're working with a number of national corporations to get them to do just that. But here's the reason I don't want people to think that because it's not solved, that they shouldn't vote.

Speaker 3 That's the point. The point is to just make you believe your vote doesn't count.
73,000 people changed America in 2014.

Speaker 3 10,000 people in Wisconsin voted in a certain way and changed the future of America. 24,000 in Michigan, around 30, about 40,000 in Pennsylvania.
So let's be clear, every vote does count.

Speaker 3 54,723 people are the reason I'm not the governor. I know one of the reasons they didn't get to vote, but if you can make it through the gauntlet, do it.
And the last thing I'll say is this.

Speaker 3 Black people stand in line longer than anyone else in America when it comes to voting. If we can do it, so can you.
The reality is we only get the change we're willing to fight for.

Speaker 3 And the only way we can fight Republicans and win is if we win this election, because they're not going to give in.

Speaker 3 We can sue them and they will counter sue, but we can make it easier and we can make people more aware and we can provide the help you need.

Speaker 3 But the only solution to voter suppression is a new president and a new senate and new legislators.

Speaker 3 And so I created Fair Fight to work on the elections and Fair Count is the other organization to work on the census because I am crafty.

Speaker 3 I try to think about what the next thing that you're going to do to hurt me is. And so I try to figure that thing out too, because I'm from Mississippi and I've been black my whole life.

Speaker 3 So so i don't take anything for granted and i need us all to operate with that mindset that we can't just win this thing and we can't be defeated by this thing i i should still be curled in the fetal position from 2018 yeah right right it's astonishing that you aren't

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Speaker 1 Stacey, I just want to say thank you so much for educating me and Will and Jason and all our listeners about voter suppression and what that means and everything that goes with it.

Speaker 1 So for everybody listening, on a serious note, please get out and vote. Your voice matters now more than ever.
It's such an important election. Please use your voice.
It's the only thing we have.

Speaker 1 Vote, vote, vote. It's a very serious thing.
So now I'd like to take a hard left turn and ask you a question that I've always wanted to know. I heard you're a fan of Star Trek.
Is that true? Yes.

Speaker 1 I wanted to know what you think of the movies that J.J. Abrams directed.

Speaker 3 Are you a fan? I am, actually. I think he's done an amazing job of recasting the story.

Speaker 3 It's hard to come in this far into a franchise, but the way he reimagined it so that people could enter and enjoy is fantastic.

Speaker 3 And he and he and Katie have both been very supportive of the work we do too.

Speaker 1 Yes, I know. But I liked him before that.

Speaker 3 I loved him with Alias. So

Speaker 2 why would somebody be a Star Trek fan and not a Star Wars fan or a fan of both, but a more of a, you say you're more of a Star Trek than Star Wars. What's the difference?

Speaker 3 So Star Trek is science fiction. And Star Wars uses science, but it's more fantasy.

Speaker 3 So Star Wars doesn't, it happens in space, but it doesn't really think about what's about physics and astrophysics and astronomy. Star Trek is for nerds who love physics.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I mean, it just, it, you could take the narrative of Star Wars, which is fantastic, but you could put it in another place. Star Trek requires that you be in space.

Speaker 3 It requires that you have this frame of, you know, transportation, you know. and this way of thinking about the rest of the universe.

Speaker 1 I remember seeing the Wrath of Khan. Yes, The Wrath of Khan is amazing.
I remember seeing it in the theaters. The Wrath of Khan.
Yeah, that's a good story. And then,

Speaker 2 how does JJ do both?

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 He did both, right? I mean, JJ did Star Wars and Star Trek.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 How do you do that? I mean, that should be disallowed, right? By the future.

Speaker 1 No, no, no.

Speaker 3 We are a peaceful race. We will allow you to come from other spaces.

Speaker 3 I'm a Star Trek person who appreciates Star Wars. I am not a Star Wars fan.

Speaker 1 Are you a trekkie? Yes.

Speaker 1 You are. Wow.
Right off the bat. Oh, boy.

Speaker 2 Listener, she just put up the

Speaker 1 Vulcan. Vulcan.
Was Nichelle Nichols like when you were a girl? You're like, oh, my God. Wow.

Speaker 3 So I did because she was a long, terrible story, but we didn't have CBS when I was growing up. So I couldn't have watched Star Trek because it was on CBS.

Speaker 3 But I did see her in an airport when I was running for governor and lost all of my mind.

Speaker 1 I'm sure. I'm sure.

Speaker 2 Is there anybody in the Senate or the House of Representatives that you have not met,

Speaker 2 that you would love to meet and would dork out as much as if you were trapped in an elevator with William Shatner?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 There's nobody you'd fan out on in government?

Speaker 3 I've gotten to meet most of my governmental heroes. I appreciate meeting all of them.
But if you put William Shatner, Kate Mulgrew, Avery Brooks, Scott Bakula, and my God.

Speaker 2 Scott Bakula? Well,

Speaker 3 he was the captain of Enterprise.

Speaker 2 God, he's such a nice guy. You would love him.

Speaker 3 And Patrick Stewart, who, of course, is the quintessential captain of this era.

Speaker 3 I would probably pass out.

Speaker 3 Truly. Really? Yeah.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I love it. Not a lot of people know that.
Scott Bakula, right? So he was a captain of one of those ships and it crashed in New Orleans and then he became a policeman in New Orleans, right?

Speaker 1 Isn't that how NCIS New Orleans is? That's going to be the prequel, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 One interesting fact, everybody.

Speaker 2 Stacy is the,

Speaker 2 she is also Selena Montgomery,

Speaker 2 who writes romantic suspense novels.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And quite a few of them.
When is the last time you wrote one of those? Do we have one to look forward to? I want to hear about why you want to write these things.

Speaker 1 I could do a whole nother hour on this.

Speaker 3 So I wrote my first one during law school. It was actually going to be a spy novel, but I was told that publishers did not publish spy novels by or about women.

Speaker 3 And if you think about it, there have been no major women as espionage writers.

Speaker 3 But I also remembered General Hospital, Luke and Laura, Robert Nana, Scorpio, and I watched a lot of all of the James Bond movies.

Speaker 3 So I just made my spies fall in love, killed the same number of people. Someone bought the book, then they kept buying them.

Speaker 3 And then my last book was in 2010. I'd moved out of espionage into just action adventure, although I did do a serial killer romance novel.

Speaker 3 And then my last novel was written right before I became Democratic leader and I started a small business that was a finance company.

Speaker 3 And so that was the last time I wrote a book, but I owe one more book because it's the, I've forgotten to do the, I haven't forgotten, I've neglected to do the third book in the trilogy.

Speaker 3 And my sister, every so often, every major holiday asks me when I'm going to get it done. So I'm going to get it done.

Speaker 2 Well, now that the cat's out of the bag with the pseudonym, I mean, are you, are you going to use Selena Montgomery anymore? Or is it just Stacey Abrams writes this suspense novel?

Speaker 3 I was never ashamed of the, of writing romance. I was writing tax articles at the exact same time.
And this was at the advent of Google.

Speaker 3 So if you googled my name, you got the operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax exemption, an article I'd written in high school on Mesopotamian astronomy. Same.

Speaker 3 And my romance novel.

Speaker 1 Please make that a book. Please write that in a full book and a movie.

Speaker 3 No one was going to read a romance novel by Alan Greenspan. So I had to have a different name for my romance.
to separate it from my more pedestrian efforts in tax policy.

Speaker 2 But what about going forward?

Speaker 3 Are you going to write them under Stacey abrams no i mean she's a brand selena's a brand and people okay but i'm happy to my my picture was in all the books i love it that's awesome

Speaker 2 um you've been incredible to join us i can't thank you enough huge fan i wish you all the all the luck and support and love in the world going forward and um hope to see a whole lot more of you uh in the future this has been the most fun thank you all three of you for your art your activism and for letting me join you today thank you Stacey.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much. Thanks, Stacey.

Speaker 1 Have a great day.

Speaker 3 Take care, guys.

Speaker 1 Bye. Bye, bye-bye.

Speaker 2 She's just an angel, right?

Speaker 1 Her and her life are the perfect

Speaker 1 thing to do a movie for. That was fun.
Boy, she's great. That is so good to know.
I mean, there's so much stuff when it comes to voter suppression and all of that. Like, how enlightening was that?

Speaker 1 I learned so much.

Speaker 1 How do we not spend

Speaker 1 so much more money and resources and time? How do we not throw it at elections? They couldn't be more important.

Speaker 1 And we know why, because the answer is for certain people, they know that educated people or people who know what they're doing or people being allowed to vote is bad for them.

Speaker 1 And we know who that is.

Speaker 2 Well, also, there's no consequences. You would think that the consequences for trying to take somebody's right to vote would be a minimum 10 years in jail.

Speaker 1 When does that happen?

Speaker 2 There is zero con, in fact, it is legal.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, the thing is that the way that they broke it down by the rigging of the census and sort of making it, you know, that that has become the way that they can do it and they can get away with it in broad daylight.

Speaker 1 But that's why I'm really passionate about these corporations stepping in and, but all the corporations, like as many as possible, stepping in and making it a paid holiday for that.

Speaker 1 That's a great way to start, you know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. And right now, there's so much societal pressure to do the right thing at a corporate level.
You can see it with Black Lives Matter.

Speaker 2 Not to be a cynic about that at all, but it's so nice that it is forcing the hand of a lot of these

Speaker 2 corporations, even if they're doing it for hearts and minds and the optics of it, whatever it is, these great things are getting pushed through. And maybe this could piggyback on that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Exactly. If we can, if we can kind of, this sort of corporate guilt can be, can be

Speaker 1 taken from what's going on now and we can administer that onto voter suppression, then that would be amazing. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Very, very lucky to have her. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Good get, dude. Right.
Yeah, right. That was awesome.
Made us way smarter. I loved it.
Learned so much. I got something I really want to say to you guys, and it goes a little like this.
Bye.

Speaker 1 Costa.

Speaker 1 That's not your thing.

Speaker 1 Smart.

Speaker 1 Less.

Speaker 1 Smart.

Speaker 1 Less.

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