Election Meltdown, Part 4

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Amicus with Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Episode: Election Meltdown, Part 4
Date: February 15, 2020
Host: Dahlia Lithwick
Guests: Rick Hasen (UC Irvine Law Professor), Carol Anderson (Professor of African American Studies, Emory University)

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Overview:

This episode, the fourth in Amicus's "Election Meltdown" series, explores the dangers and consequences of political rhetoric around "stolen elections," especially how it intersects with policies, historical context, and the undermining of voter confidence. Host Dahlia Lithwick, joined by election law expert Rick Hasen and historian Carol Anderson, focuses on whether it’s ever appropriate to describe elections as "stolen," how this rhetoric shapes public perception (and manipulates power), and the real-world consequences of voter suppression—with Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election serving as a case study.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. How Rhetoric Shapes American Elections

• Setting the Stage ([00:32–01:08]):
  • The episode is introduced as an inquiry into possible failure points in the 2020 U.S. election, considering scenarios ranging from vote purges to disinformation.
  • Hasen says, “Our system is only going to work if people have enough confidence in it that they can accept the results.” ([01:08])
• The panel agrees: The language leaders use when they claim elections are “stolen” can damage public trust, sometimes irreparably.

Notable Quote:

• Dahlia Lithwick: “What, I ask, could possibly go wrong with November’s election?” ([00:33])

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2. The History and Purpose of “Stolen Election” Claims

• Trump’s Rhetoric and Its Precedent ([03:30–06:21]):
  • Playbacks of Trump’s speeches repeatedly warning about “stolen elections”; compared (by Anderson) to segregationist rhetoric from the Jim Crow era.
  • Anderson draws a direct parallel between Trump’s calls to “watch at the polls” and historic efforts to intimidate Black voters.
• Contextualization:
  • Carol Anderson: “Yes, because he will steal it... this is about voter intimidation.” ([05:20])

Notable Quotes:

• Carol Anderson: “That watching is about intimidation of minority voters... putting communities back in their place as if their place is not as American citizens who have the right to vote.” ([06:31])

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3. From Rhetoric to Suppression: The Mechanics and Motives

• Voter Fraud Narratives ([08:47–11:39]):
  • Anderson details how claims of voter fraud provide pretext for restrictive laws—drawing a line from 1890s Mississippi’s poll taxes and literacy tests to today’s voter IDs and purges.
  • “Voter fraud to me is the false bottom, the false foundation for this enormous architecture... to block key segments of the American population from the ballot box.” ([08:47])
• Modern-Day Suppression:
  • The same rationales appear in today’s policies (e.g., Georgia’s “exact match” law, poll closures, gerrymandering).
  • Anderson: “What they are designed to do is to wipe millions off of the voter rolls... lethal to democracy.” ([12:22])

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4. Legal Landscape: The End of the Consent Decree

• Historical Guardrails Removed ([15:31–18:12]):
  • Discussion of the 1982–2018 Republican National Committee consent decree, which barred “ballot security” measures targeting minorities.
  • Now, with the decree expired, Hasen worries about renewed efforts at mass-scale intimidation and “poll watching.”
• Rhetoric Leads to Action:
  • “Words sometimes lead to actions... Words make people think the election is up for grabs and that there’s going to be some kind of struggle to try to control polling places.” — Rick Hasen ([18:33])

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5. The Georgia 2018 Gubernatorial Race: Democracy on Trial

• Case Study—Election Suppression in Action ([20:08–28:00]):
  • Carol Anderson outlines how Brian Kemp, both Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate, presided over widespread roll purges, polling place closures, missing ballots, and machine failures—largely in Black communities.
  • “It just, it reeked of all that is wrong in the system... the onus for protecting the right to vote on the individual and not on the state. And that is a massive game change.” ([20:08–28:00])
• Impact:
  • “In that withholding of the 53,000 voter registration cards in October of 2018, 70% of those withheld were African American.” — Carol Anderson ([28:00])

Notable Quotes:

• Sherrod Brown: “If Stacey Abrams doesn’t win in Georgia, they stole it. It’s clear.” ([28:15])
• Stacey Abrams: “This is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true, or proper.” ([28:27])

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6. Is the Language of ‘Stolen’ Elections Ever Justified?

• Hazards of Overheated Rhetoric ([29:01–38:26]):
  • Hasen expresses discomfort with Democrats describing the 2018 Georgia election as “stolen,” arguing:
    • (1) Social science cannot prove a different outcome would have prevailed.
    • (2) The focus should remain on voter dignity and individual rights.
    • (3) The term “stolen” could impair public trust in the entire electoral system.
  • “Let’s not call elections stolen. It’s going to undermine people’s confidence in the overall process if we start using this language when it can’t be proven.” ([31:01])
• Counterpoint—The Lived Reality:
  • Anderson responds by calling for rhetoric that matches the reality: “...a full blown assault on one of the key pillars of American democracy. And we have to be able to then say, and there will be consequences for this.” ([33:12])
  • She contends that requiring irrefutable, state-controlled evidence makes it impossible to fairly challenge bad acts: “When the ability to discern the evidence... is solely in the control of those who may have done it, then using irrefutable evidence as the benchmark becomes really fraught...” ([38:26])

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7. Moving Forward: Voting as Resistance and the Path to Reform

• Persisting and Resisting in the Face of Suppression ([41:24–47:10]):
  • Lithwick frames the dilemma: Voting requires acting with faith in a system that persistently targets and disenfranchises minorities and marginalized groups.
  • Anderson’s call: “To not vote is to allow those who really do treat you as if you aren’t a viable human being... The fight is there and the fight is in the vote.”
  • Resilience, not optimism: The episode closes with both guests agreeing that, despite a rigged system, organized, persistent voting is the most powerful answer available.
• Practical Preparation:
  • Anderson advises voters to protect themselves—check registration status, bring supplies to the polls, document everything.

Notable Quotes:

• “When you have different policymakers, then you have a very different reality about how they value the vote, how they value democracy, and how they value you.” — Carol Anderson ([42:42])
• “It’s not a message of optimism... it’s a message of resiliency.” — Rick Hasen ([47:27])

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Major Segments & Timestamps

• [00:32] Introduction of the slippery topic: election integrity rhetoric
• [03:30–06:21] Trump’s rhetoric and its historical parallels
• [08:47–12:22] Architecture of voter suppression: from Mississippi to modern times
• [15:31–18:12] The consent decree and its expiration
• [20:08–28:00] Georgia 2018: a ground-zero example of suppression
• [28:15–28:27] Reactions from Sherrod Brown and Stacey Abrams
• [29:01–38:26] Debating "stolen" election language—risks and moral imperatives
• [41:24–47:10] The moral and practical case for voting amid adversity
• [47:27–48:03] Closing reflections on resiliency and the struggle for fair elections

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

“When somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” — Dahlia Lithwick, quoting Maya Angelou ([03:30])

“What they are designed to do is to wipe millions off of the voter rolls... lethal to democracy.” — Carol Anderson ([12:22])

“Let’s not call elections stolen. It’s going to undermine people’s confidence in the overall process if we start using this language when it can’t be proven.” — Rick Hasen ([31:01])

“Where we are right now as a society is that we have one side that fights by the marquis, the Queensbury rules, and another side that is straight wwe, right, where anything goes.” — Carol Anderson ([33:12])

“…the fight is there, and the fight is in the vote. ... Because in one of the things that I’ve said here is ... even in the midst of all of this voter suppression, a candidate who was about how do I meet the needs of the people actually won.” — Carol Anderson ([42:42])

“It’s not a message of optimism... it’s a message of resiliency.” — Rick Hasen ([47:27])

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Conclusion

This episode confronts the crisis of faith in American democracy exacerbated by slippery, inflammatory election rhetoric and real-world policies that suppress minority votes. The panel debates the fine line between honest description and dangerous delegitimization when talking about “stolen” elections, with Carol Anderson providing searing historical context and Hasen warning about the effect on public trust. Ultimately, they agree: continual participation in the system, vigilance, and legal action are the best forms of resistance—at least for now.

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For listeners interested in the ongoing legal battles and reform strategies, and for a deeper dive into these issues, see Carol Anderson’s book “One Person, No Vote” and Rick Hasen’s “Election Meltdown.”

Transcript

[A]

Hi and welcome back to Amicus. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts and the law for Slate and I am also covering for this special series of Amicus voting. This is part four of our Election Meltdown series. It's produced with Rick Hassam, election law professor at UC Irvine and author of the new book Election Meltdown, upon which this series is based. Welcome back, Rick.

[B]

Be with you.

[A]

What, I ask, could possibly go wrong with November's election?

[C]

So I've got two scenarios that really worried me.

[B]

Imagine a Florida 2000 type situation with Trump in the White House. Then those precincts can't be counted.

[C]

Pretty wide scale voter purge.

[A]

We've been asking civil rights lawyers, public officials, local journalists and disinformation experts for their election doomsday scenarios. Imagine deepfake the night before an election, a scenario in which people did leave the Internet and take much more physical action.

[B]

Our system is only going to work if people have enough confidence in it that they can accept the results. We're not asking these questions, so we all spiral into despair, but instead to think about what we could do now before November to protect the most important thing we do as Americans voting.

[A]

Of course, if you want to spiral into despair, that's totally on you. But if you want to be part of this unbelievably important conversation, do join US in Washington, D.C. on February 19th for the Amicus Election Meltdown live show featuring former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, MacArthur genius fellow and vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, Danielle Citron, and the director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, Dale Ho. Go to slate.com live for tickets. So on this week's show we are tackling a kind of slippery issue that has already woven itself through the first three episodes. And that is how should we how do we what is the best way to talk about challenges to and problems with the integrity of US Elections?

[B]

You know Dalia, I think slippery is exactly the right word here because everything we've talked about before in the earlier three episodes was pretty tangible. We talked about voter suppression and claims of voter fraud and what that does. We talked about issues of election administrator incompetence, the non sexy topic that became sexy after Iowa. And we talked about dirty tricks, foreign and domestic, old fashioned and newfangled. What we're turning to now is the question of how do we talk about elections? What does it mean when people call elections stolen? Is it ever appropriate to do that? What does that look like?

[A]

We wanted to bring on board this week one of the very smartest writers and thinkers on this topic. Professor Carol Anderson. She is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on public policy with regard to race, justice, and equality. She's also the author of, I think, a simply extraordinary book, One Person no How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy. I blurbed that book at the time, and I still hand it out to people left and right. Like candy. Carol Anderson, welcome to the podcast.

[C]

Oh, thank you so much for having me, Dalia and Rick, thank you.

[A]

So I feel as though this Maya Angelou quote has been used every single day since then. Candidate Donald Trump came down the escalator and called Mexicans rapists. And the quote is this one. When somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time. And in the case of Donald Trump and how he may react if the election in 2020 is close, well, he's not just been showing us who he is. He's been telling us for a very long time.

[D]

So important that you get out and vote. So important that you watch other communities, because we don't want this election stolen from us. We don't want this election stolen from us. And when I say watch, you know what I'm talking about, right? You know what I'm talking about. I think you got to go out and you got to watch. You want to drive them crazy. Don't do four more years. Say eight more years. You'll drive him. We do not want this election stolen. I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election if I win. If you want to drive him crazy, just say eight more years. Or 12 more years. 16 would do it. Good. You'd really drive them into the loony bin.

[A]

So let's start with you, Carol. This episode is about rhetoric. What are your concerns about? We always say sticks and stones. Words will never hurt me. But this rhetoric is worrisome, right? Should we be taking Donald Trump seriously and literally when he talks this way about stolen elections?

[C]

Yes, because he will steal it. And I've got to say, when I. When I heard this language, it reminded me. It sent me right back to a period in 1946 where there was a US senator out of Mississippi named Theodore Bilbo, Ted Bilbo. And Bilbo was a vile man. And in 46 black veterans were coming back from fighting the Nazis, and. And they were demanding democracy. And Bilbo told his throng of white followers, you know, you gotta keep them from the ballot box. And so how do you keep the Negro from Voting, you get the tar and the feathers and you don't forget the matches. And there was a moment in there when he was laying out what to do and he said, oh, I don't think you understand what I'm talking about. Let me be more specific. And that's what Trump did right there. Oh, you know what I mean. You know what I mean. And so this is about voter intimidation.

[A]

And when you hear him say, you need to be watching, that chimes in a really different key when you look at through your historical lens.

[C]

Absolutely, absolutely. Because that watching is about intimidation of minority voters. That watching is really rolling up on them, making it really clear that the ballot box is not where they belong. It is about putting communities back in their place, as if their place is not as American citizens who have the right to vote.

[A]

And turning to you, Rick, Trump's rhetoric has shown zero sign of abating. I think it's probably ramped up in this area. But there has been a shift, right, since 2016 in the way other Republicans talk about voter fraud and stolen elections.

[B]

Yeah, I think Trump is no longer the aberration. It's become mainstream. There was a tweet from Marco Rubio back in the 2018 election where he basically said that this was back when it was the contest over whether Bill Nelson, the incumbent senator, was going to stay in office or whether it was going to be Rick Scott. And there were some problems in how the count was done down in Broward, as we've talked about. And Rubio tweeted, now Democrat lawyers are descending on Florida. They have been very clear that they aren't here to make sure every vote is counted. They are here to change the results of the election, and Broward is where they plan to do it. And you had Paul Ryan make similar kinds of statements, claiming that the late counted vote in California, which shifted some congressional seats from Republican to Democrat as more votes came in. He called that bizarre, insinuating, without actually saying that there was something nefarious going on.

[A]

So if now we're talking about Republican claims of vote fraud. We talked about this in part one of the series. Almost as night follows day, we're just gonna have to talk about voter suppression, which follows those claims. And, Carol, here's where I would love for you to sort of just walk us through your concerns about voter suppression, the sort of architecture of it and how it has come about and what it is that you think about when we talk about vote suppression.

[C]

And you're right, voter fraud to me is the false bottom, the false foundation for this enormous architecture that is designed to block key segments of the American population from the ballot box. Voter fraud was a Republican talking point because it reminds me again, as the historian, it reminds me of back in 1890 when Mississippi was trying to figure out, how do we stop all of these black people from voting? But they knew that they couldn't write a law saying we don't want black people to vote because the 15th amendment of the Constitution says that the state shall not abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. So you just can't write the law that blatantly. And they said, so what we're going to do is we're going to use the societally imposed conditions on black folk and make those conditions the access to the ballot box. And so you take endemic poverty born out of centuries of slavery, then the black codes, then sharecropping, and you say, well, you know, if you were real, really concerned about democracy and you were really invested in it, you would be willing to pay a small tax in order to be able to vote. Well, if you're impoverished, paying a small tax that is somewhere between 2 to 6% of your family annual family income is no small feat, but it will block you, sure as anything else from being able to vote. And the same with the literacy test, et cetera. And all of these measures they cast in terms of clearing out corruption from the democratic process, making sure that our elections were clean and that they were fair, making sure that they were protecting the sanctity of the ballot box with the Mississippi plan. So when we hear then this thing about voter fraud and it's about keeping those people from stealing elections, it's the same rhetoric emerging out of Mississippi in 1890 and in that language of voter fraud, because when you press them, as you know, they can't really point to this massive, rampant voter fraud that they claim is the reason for all of these voter suppression techniques, like voter IDs and like the kind of exact match program that they have here in Georgia, where your name has to be exactly that from your voter registration as to your as with your driver's license bureau, you know, or you get kicked into electoral limbo, all of those kinds of measures are around the lie of voter fraud, but they are lethal to democracy. Absolutely lethal.

[A]

And just to be super clear, Carol, because I think this is so important, a lot of people think these claims of, you know, busloads of Mexicans who are brought in to vote illegally or claims, how can it be Possible that there are more votes than there are registered voters. When we tally the counts. This is not new. I mean, the buses are new. But the arguments that the whole system is being gamed to make sure that non voters are screwing up free and fair elections, this goes way back to the time that you're talking about. It's just a different manifestation of the same claims.

[C]

Absolutely. A different manifestation. And what Mississippi did, and this is, you know, so what I look at right now is what I call Jim Crow 2.0. Because what Mississippi did in this rise of Jim Crow, which included the massive disfranchisement of black voters, was, yes, we think of disfranchisement in terms of the violence, the physical violence, the brutality, the terror, the killings and that happened. But it was the bureaucratic violence, the policies that seem really legitimate because they're cloaked in legalities. They're cloaked in these rationales about protecting democracy. But in fact, what they are designed to do is to wipe millions off of the voter rolls. Just the way this array of policies that emerged in this New Jim Crow 2.0 Post Shelby County v. Colder World that we live in, which was the Supreme Court decision that gutted the pre clearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act. And so we get voter ID laws that are racially discriminatory, we get poll closures. And having the majority of those poll closures being in the former pre clearance jurisdictions and creating these distances from voters to where they can actually vote, knowing that those distances in fact lead to a decline in voter turnout, we get extreme partisan gerrymandering. We get eliminating early voting days, we get massive voter roll purges. Even though the National Voter Registration act says you cannot kick somebody off of the rolls simply because they haven't voted regularly. You have these secretaries of State using the rationale of they haven't voted regularly, and we sent them a postcard as a means to wipe millions of people off of the voter rolls. So just like with the Mississippi Plan of 1890 that had like the poll tax, the literacy test, the grandfather clause, the good character clause, and it eventually would include something called the white primary. Knew that if one didn't get them, the other one would. If that one, that policy didn't get them, the next one would. If that policy didn't get them, the next one would. So by the time we got to 1940, only 3% of African American adults were registered to vote in the South. When you think about the policies that are coming right now with the voter ID gerrymandering, Poll closures, et cetera. They are designed to whittle away those key members of society that do not vote, basically for Republicans. Yes, you do get gerrymandering coming from the Democrats, but those other measures, those are Republican measures.

[A]

And, Rick, just on this question of constitutional history, I want you to fill in one other blank. There's going to be a big change in the landscape for the 2020 election. That's the expiration of the consent decree that was first worked almost 40 years ago. Can you tell us what that was about and why it's going away and why it matters?

[B]

Sure. So back in the early 1980s, the Republican National Committee was sued by the Democrats for engaging in what the Republicans euphemistically called ballot security measures, including things like sending off duty uniformed police officers to polling places to largely minority communities. And the Democrats said that they were violating the Voting Rights act and acting illegally and rather than contest the case, you know, try to prove that they were not engaged in illegal activity. The Republicans agreed to settle the case through what's called a consent decree. That's a kind of a court order that the parties agree to, and if you violate it, you're in contempt. So in 1982, the Republican National Committee was put under this rule that they couldn't engage in these measures to try to keep people from the polls or vote caging, trying to send mail out to people to try and find people who maybe have moved and try and kick people off the voting rolls. All of these things were done before this consent decree. And over the years, the consent decree was renewed, it was challenged, and it kept going. And then we got to the 2016 election, and here you had Donald Trump, and we heard that set of clips at the beginning saying, you know, go to those polling places and watch. And the Democrats went to court and said, look, they're doing it again. And this went through the courts for a couple of years. And eventually the Third Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, said, yeah, the consent decree can end now because it was supposed to expire after the 2016 elections. And even though Donald Trump has engaged in voter suppression, there was no evidence he was doing it in coordination with the Republican National Committee, and it was only the committee that was subject to this consent decree. Okay, so the consent decree's gone. In the meantime, Donald Trump has taken over control of the Republican National Committee, and he's taken over control of lots of state parties. And so we know in 2016 that Trump had a page on his website where you could sign up for so called poll watching activities. I'm expecting there's going to be a big ramp up of this activity with the RNC as a national effort to try to engage in the same kind of tactics that got the RNC in trouble back in the 1990s. So I think this is the first election we're having without these protections in about four decades. And I'm very worried.

[A]

Okay, we've now heard that Carol is very worried and you are very worried. And yet, Rick, you included the consent decree, the vote caging in your chapter on rhetoric. It's about the language of quote, unquote, stolen elections. Why did you put them in your chapter on rhetoric and not in your dirty tricks chapters?

[B]

Well, you know, words sometimes lead to actions. And so, you know, if all we heard was Donald Trump saying, oh, well, you know, the election's gonna be stolen and it doesn't mean anything, then, you know, who cares? You know, just. Just words. But I think words motivate people. Words make people think that the election is, you know, up for grabs and that there's gonna be some kind of struggle to try to control polling places. I gave a talk back in New York and someone came up to me after and said, what about all the people with guns? And it reminded me of a picture that a Trump supporter posted on social media around the time of the 2016 election where he said he was gonna go watch at the polling places. And it was basically a pickup truck with some guns mounted on it. You know, scary stuff.

[A]

So, Carol, this brings us to Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial election. It got so much attention in many ways. It became the focus point of so many of the issues that we're trying to bring together here. We have voter purges, we're talking about registration applications that were put on hold, all sorts of election day troubles, of course, at predominantly non white voting precincts, and problems with voters, absentee and provisional ballots. All of it is happening. Can you just give us a precis on what the issues were in Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial election and why it came to stand for something very consequential around the country?

[C]

And I think part of it is to understand that Brian Kemp, who was the Republican nominee for governor, was also the Secretary of state. So he was responsible for running the election and he didn't recuse himself. So he was in charge of running the election that he was running in to be governor. I liken it to the director of the lottery saying all of the equipment is fine and then pulling the Winning billion dollar lottery ticket going, look, I won. And nobody is supposed to look askance at that. And particularly when you've got a history, a history coming out of Georgia of massive voter suppression. And it crystallized, it really began to crystallize with Randolph County. I'm going to start there and then move us through. Kemp is running against Stacey Abrams, who would be the first black woman elected as governor in a state. And she's got an incredible organization behind her. Kemp is in charge of the state apparatus and his office approved a consultant who was going around to various counties recommending that they close polling places for fiscal reasons when it hit Randolph County. Randolph county is 61% black. This consultant recommended that seven of the nine polling places in Randolph county be closed. When you begin to realize that the counties where he was recommending this are counties that had sizable numbers of minorities and that Kemp had raised concerns about all of these minorities who are registered to vote and if they come out in November, that they're going to win this election, that you've got the template for voter suppression. So with the, the attempt at poll closures, the Randolph county one got, got beat back. But then you had issues with, wow, voter roll purges. You had issues with not enough machines in districts. So you had lines that were some, sometimes four and a half hours long before they even moved. You had issues with missing votes in the lieutenant governor's race. And as they track that down, and I mean missing votes, like 120 some thousand votes missing in the lieutenant governor's race. And those get tracked back to black precincts for people who voted on election day using the machines, but not. You don't see the decline for those in those precincts who did early voting or did absentee ballots. So it appears that something went haywire in those machines that you get the missing, missing votes. None of this gets investigated. None of this gets looked at. And you have voter intimidation also happening and you get him certifying his own election. It just, it reeked of all that is wrong in the system. But the narrative, when you talk about the rhetoric, the language that you get, is that it is easier to vote in Georgia than it is most places. We have automatic voter registration. We have early voting. We have, we have, we have. And that we had an enormous turnout. I believe it was over 60% in terms of voter turnout. So how could there be voter suppression when you have all of that? And so what we don't get is that that voter turnout happened in spite of, not because of the work of the state. What the gutting of the Voting Rights act did is that it put the onus for protecting the right to vote on the individual and not on the state. And that is a massive game change so that individuals have to stay in line for 4, 5, 6 hours in order to cast a ballot because there hasn't been enough. There weren't enough machines put in precincts for people to be able to vote in a reasonable amount of time, that it is up to people to be able to have the right kind of id. Although the kinds of documentation you need to get those IDs is racially skewed, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Phil so Yul Brenner right there, King and I, and that is what happened in Georgia. Georgia became ground zero for all that is wrong in the voting systems. That put the onus, and it is a major onus of responsibility on the people and not the state to provide the kind of election security and election protection and the adherence to the right to vote. And you got the rhetoric as well, the fearful rhetoric, that what Stacey Abrams was really trying to do was to get all of these non citizens to vote and to then justify the kind of crackdown in terms of the kind of scrutiny over people's names as they registered to vote. I mean, it's that kind of creating the boogeyman, creating the fear, creating the kind of sense that, you know, only I can save it. I'm here to protect democracy, when in fact the point was to figure out how to stop so many people from being able to vote. One of the, and I'll end with this one, one of the key moments was in October 2018, so a month before the election. And Georgia's Exact Match program, which a judge had previously ruled was racially discriminatory because it privileged Anglicized names. Brian Kemp withheld 53,000 voter registration cards applicants because their names on the voter registration card did not exactly match that in the state's driver's license database or in the Social Security Administration's database. Now, that could be something as simple as your name is Renee and you, you write it with an accent over the E, but the state's database doesn't have the accent. Or your last name is Garcia Marquez and you have a hyphen between Garcia and Marquez. The state does not. In that withholding of the 53,000 voter registration cards in October of 2018, 70% of those withheld were African American. I mean, this is, this is what was going on in Georgia.

[A]

So what CAROL Anderson is describing here is horrible. And the responses was horror. Let's listen to Sherrod Brown speaking at the National Action Network.

[B]

If Stacey Abrams doesn't win in Georgia, they stole it. It's clear.

[D]

It's clear. And I would say that publicly.

[B]

It's clear.

[A]

And here's Stacey Abrams describing the same election.

[C]

This is not a speech of concession because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that. But my assessment is the law currently allows no further viable remedy.

[A]

So, Rick Hassin, you describe being shocked at the response you got when you said that those kinds of things, speeches, that, that Democratic reaction, that that language was, quote, overheated.

[B]

Yeah. So, Dalia, this is a moment that makes me a little queasy. I've been worried about this discussion we're having, about to have now since we started recording the election meltdown podcast, because I'm trying to thread a very thin needle. On the one hand, what Carol's described as accurate in terms of what was going on in Georgia. It was disgusting what Kemp did. She didn't even mention what I consider to be the most banana republic moment in modern American election administration history, where Kemp had had for years problems with the security of his voter registration database. And a few days before the election, somebody called the Democratic Election Protection hotline and said, hey, I'm someone with a background in software development. I just went to check my voter registration information online, and I realized by changing a few keystrokes, I can see basically everybody's voter information and whatever files are on the system. The Democrats alerted computer scientists at Georgia Tech, who alert some national security officials. Next thing you know, Kemp posted on the official secretary of state website, the website you go to if you are trying to see where's my polling place, what am I voting on? He. He accused the Democrats of hacking into that database. So to cover up his misfeasance, he acted in a disgusting way. And yet I said that Democrats should not call the election stolen, that instead they need to watch their rhetoric. And for this, I was attacked relentlessly, including by Alec Baldwin with his million followers, and said, you know, don't listen to, to Rick Hassan, yes, call it stolen. And it seems to me there are three good reasons why we want to avoid the language of stolen elections. Number one, that gets us into a debate about social science evidence. And, you know, according to people who've looked at Georgia, despite the exact match, despite the voter purges, you can't say as a matter of social science, that the election was actually stolen, that the things, the disgusting things attempted actually swayed the outcome of the election. Number two, doing that puts the focus in the wrong place. It ignores the dignity of each voter. If you remember back to our first episode when we spoke to Nina Perales and she talked about the one voter who was being removed from the roles as a noncitizen when she was actually a citizen, that it was traumatizing. Even if it doesn't affect turnout, even if it doesn't affect election outcomes, it affects the dignity of each voter. That's where the focus should be. Yes, it's suppressive. Yes, it's an attempt to. To manipulate things. But once you move into talking about stolen elections, it raises my third concern, which is that it undermines confidence overall in the system. And so it's perfectly fine. The clip you played of Stacey Abrams saying that, I don't have a problem with it. It's Sherrod Brown saying it's stolen. And it's Stacey Abrams at other points saying, I won my election, which was a statement she made at one point. It's statements saying, I will not accept the governor as the legitimate governor of Georgia. She goes back and forth with Jake Tapper for about three minutes on this question. And it seems that we really need to draw the line and say, let's not call elections stolen. It's going to undermine people's confidence in the overall process if we start using this language when it can't be proven. And I think it actually could be counterproductive.

[A]

So, Carol, I think I want to ask you to just react because I think one of the problems we've seen throughout this series is a sort of asymmetry, right? Behave better. Behave better because one side needs to foment confidence in elections and the other side doesn't care. So I just want you to respond to what Rick is saying, because I think what he's saying all makes perfect sense. And yet behave better is a little bit bringing a shrimp fork to a knife fight. Right?

[C]

Where we are right now as a society is that we have one side that fights by the marquis, the Queensbury rules, and another side that is straight wwe, right, where anything goes. And so I hear Rick, in terms of we've got to make sure that we maintain confidence in the systems because one's confidence in the kind of institutional structures of democracy are. Are shaken, then everything goes off the rails. So I hear that being here in Georgia and watching this thing unfold, watching how demoralizing it was to voters who stood in line for hours only to be told that their names weren't on the rolls, but they could file a provisional ballot, but then not told that the provisional ballot requires them to come back within a certain number of days to prove that they were actually legitimately able to vote. And so you get a slew of provisional ballots not counted to watch those who had applied for absentee ballots because they knew that they weren't going to be here on election day only to not have their absentee ballots come to them. And so they were denied the right to vote. And then when you begin to, to hear that these are happening in these kind of key communities, it tells you that then what we need to have is a way to begin to talk about the perfidy, the vileness, the dastardly way that we have a full blown assault on one of the key pillars of American democracy. And we have to be able to then say, and there will be consequences for this. And so when we are afraid of questioning, of using the language that then leads to the questioning of the viability of the elections. There has to be a response to that, though that is of equal intensity, equal fervor, and an equal sense of integrity that the way that this election was run, it was unethical and it lacked integrity. And the results then rewarded someone who did something absolutely unethical and absolutely without integrity.

[A]

So, Rick, I want to give you a chance to respond, but I also want to flag here that Stacey Abrams said in response to your piece in Slate that, quote, this is not about rhetoric, it's about the reality of people being denied their basic right to vote in the United States, especially in the state of Georgia, end quote. I think Carol is saying the same thing. The rhetoric is the reality.

[B]

Well, you know, I'm 90% of the way there and you know, all of the criticisms that both Carol and Stacey Abrams have put out against how the election was run, I agree with. It's when you cross the line into calling an election stolen. I mean, what's going to happen the next time when the other side calls the election stolen? I would reserve that language for something we talked about in our last episode when you had actual proven ballot tampering. This was the North Carolina 9th congressional district race. There we can say that that election was literally one where we think there was so much fraud that we can't even say who the winner was. I think, you know, the week after I wrote this piece that was on Slate where I was attacked saying, don't call the Georgia election stolen, I wrote A piece called Stacey Abrams has a brilliant strategy to deal with voter suppression. And basically what she did was bring a series of lawsuits to try to, rather than attack the Georgia system piecemeal, attack one piece of it. She instead claimed that the whole system overall was a system that was unfair to voters and especially unfair to voters of color. And I thought that's the right strategy. That's the way to take this indignation, which is completely justified, and channel it in a productive way. If we get to a situation where Georgia can make it harder and harder for people to vote and the courts don't respond and there is no political response, that's the point where I think we've crossed the line, and I don't think we're quite there yet. But I understand the anger about what happened in Georgia and what could happen again. So I think the way to do this is to try to be productive but avoid crossing that line that says that this election was stolen, the loser was actually the winner, which is, I think, what Sherrod Brown said in that clip.

[A]

I think that there is merit to Rick saying unless there is proof that the thing was, quote, stolen, we dilute the value of the word stolen because we don't empirically know that's the case. Is that a fair marker for where we should really unloose the incendiary rhetoric?

[C]

You know, it's going to get tough because when you have a government that controls the system and can control your ability to determine what happens. So in previous elections here in Georgia, including a special election, there were some concerns, in fact, that there had been some hacking. As you know, at the time, Georgia's voting machines ran on Windows 2000, and Microsoft hadn't provided patches since, like, sometime in 2010. So, you know, this is four or five years after Microsoft is providing patches to the software. So these machines were easily hackable, and there was some concern about that and there were lawsuits. But when they went to go look at the machines, the servers had been wiped clean. So when the ability to discern the evidence about whether something had been done fraudulently or not is solely in the control of those who may have done it, then using irrefutable evidence as the benchmark becomes really fraught because it then leaves you in a space where they are continuing to be rewarded for perpetually bad democracy behavior.

[A]

And, Rick, you should probably update us. There are still lawsuits pending that came out of that election. Where do they stand right now? What does any of this implicate? What's going to happen in 2020 well.

[B]

So those lawsuits are ongoing and the lawsuits over voting machines, as Carol mentioned, those are among the most important cases in the nation right now. Right now, Georgia has been ordered to get rid of its old voting machines and they're bringing in new voting machines where it's a brand new kind of machine. It's called a ballot marking device. You're going to wrote on a touchscreen, it's going to pop out a paper ballot. But one of the big fights is it pops out a paper ballot with a little barcode on it. And the question is, what counts as the valid vote? Is it the barcode or is it the names that are also printed on the ballot? And like Carol, I'm very concerned because it looks like Georgia is going to say it's the non human readable barcode and there's going to be no way then to know if the election was fair. And then we're crossing into a question. If there's no way to be able to say who won the election through something we can verify with our own eyes, some kind of transparency, then we are moving into a situation where I think it is fair to call the election illegitimate. But you know, we're at that critical juncture now and so much is going to depend upon what happens in the courts over the next few months.

[A]

So, Carol, then this brings us, I think, to the guts of why we wanted to speak to you about this. There is this fundamental issue here, right? We're talking about the divide between aspiration and reality and the divide between the language we use to describe reality because we want to hang on to the aspiration. And yet there's this fundamental problem, right? Democracy asks all of us to suspend disbelief, vote as though every vote counts. And in so doing, Carol, they ask brown and black Americans, poor Americans, elderly Americans, new citizens, underrepresented Americans to do the heavy lifting, to both show up every damn time and vote as though it counts and also be treated constantly as though they are the enemy and their vote is in fact most susceptible to manipulation. So we're saying the remedy is show up, vote, vote like it matters and pretend away all the reality that you've just described. The remedy is more voting. And that's a kind of untenable argument to communities that work really hard, do show up and get blasted in the face with all of this.

[B]

Right?

[C]

I really, I mean, I saw it multiple times after the 2018 midterm here. The kind of can you believe that it's not quite despair because despair is just, you've Given up. It was an anger in that. But the, how do I put this? To not vote is to allow those who really do treat you as if you, you aren't a viable human being, as if you aren't a citizen, as if you don't have rights. It is to allow them to continue to shape the public policy sphere about how you live your life, how you work, how you don't work, how where you live, where you don't live. And it is, we have a tradition of refusing to cede that kind of authority. The fight is there and the fight is in the vote. Because when you have different policymakers, then you're having a very different reality about how they value the vote, how they value democracy, and how they value you. And all we have to do really is look at states that are figuring out, let's have same day registration, let's have automatic voter registration, let's have expanded early voting. Those kinds of states that are figuring out how do we have a greater, more vibrant, more inclusive democracy, how do we try to ensure as best we can that all eligible citizens will have access to the ballot box? So it's not like you even have to imagine what this can look like. Sometimes all you got to do is look at the state that's right next to you or the state that's right above you to see it happening. And that is why you mobilize, that is why you vote. So it's not like it's an act of futility. Because in one of the things that I've said here is that we had an election in, I think it was the 6th district that pitted Karen Handel, who had been a former Secretary of state and was currently a congresswoman, against Lucy McBath. And Lucy McBath won that election. So even in the midst of all of this voter suppression, a candidate who was about how do I meet the needs of the people actually won. And those are the things we have to look to. Those are the things that we know that that change can happen. And that requires us really showing up, showing up in such numbers that we cannot be denied, and showing up in such numbers. And again, when I talk about putting the responsibility of adhering to the 15th Amendment on the shoulders and on the backs of the individuals, that means checking your voter registration on a consistent basis to make sure you're still registered and to make sure your voting place is where you know it is, and then making a screenshot of it so you have evidence of means, knowing that the lines are probably going to be really long if you vote in a minority precinct. So you come prepared. You come with your cell phone, you come with a battery pack, you come with water, you come with snacks, you come with comfortable shoes. Because if we don't do that now, what comes afterwards is something that's going to be absolutely horrific to deal with.

[A]

So, Rick, at the risk of saying this much less gorgeously than Carol Anderson just did, I think the point of agreement between the two of you is because you vote and you believe in your vote because it's the best damn revenge, right?

[B]

Well, I'm just blown away by what Carol said. And I think it's not a message of optimism, because we've been looking throughout this series for optimism. It's a message of resiliency. And the organization that Stacey Abrams formed is called Fair Fight. And I think that's what we all have to struggle for. And really, let's put the focus on that and really make sure that every eligible voter is going to have a chance to cast a vote that's going to be fairly and accurately counted in 2020. That's really the bottom line of all of this.

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

Professor Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on public policy with regard to race, justice and equality. She's also the author of several great books. But for our purposes today, her book, One Person no How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, is a must read for anybody who is listening to this podcast. Carol, thank you for joining us.

[C]

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

[A]

And that is a wrap for this fourth part of our election Meltdown series on Amicus. Thank you so much for listening in. Slate plus members this week are going to have access to an interview that Rick Hassan did with Dale Ho. He's director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project. What did you talk about with him?

[B]

So we talked about Fish versus Kobek, which is a case we referred to back in an earlier episode about whether or not Kansas could require people to produce papers, their naturalization certificate or their birth certificate before they're allowed to register to vote. And Dale went head to head against Kris Kobach. And it was, at least from reading the transcript, an exciting and riveting evisceration of Kris Kobach by Dale Hope.

[A]

So that's going to be showing up in your Slate plus member feeds tomorrow. If you're not a Slate plus member, this is a good chance to check it [e-mail] amicusplus. Dale is also going to be one of our very special guests at the live show in D.C. this Wednesday, February 19th. The show is the fifth and concluding episode of Election Meltdown, and if you haven't got your ticket yet, grab one. It's going to be super interesting and you can go to slate.comlive for more information. If you want to get in touch, our email, as always, is amicuslate.com we love your letters. Or you can always find us on Facebook, facebook.com amicus Today's show was produced by Sarah Burningham, Gabriel Roth is Editorial Director of Slate Podcasts and June Thomas is Senior Managing Producer of Slate Podcasts. And we'll talk to you next week live on stage from Washington, D.