A look at new barriers at the ballot box

Summary

Fresh Air — “A Look at New Barriers at the Ballot Box”
Host: Tanya Mosley | Guest: Ari Berman (Mother Jones)
Date: July 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Fresh Air, hosted by Tanya Mosley, features journalist Ari Berman—a longtime voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. Berman dives into recent Supreme Court decisions and legislative moves that are fundamentally reshaping America’s elections, focusing on new hurdles to voting and the reach of money and gerrymandering in the modern electoral system. The episode examines both the legal landscape and the real-world consequences for marginalized communities, probing the fragility of voting rights in the U.S. today.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Recent Supreme Court Decisions on Voting and Campaign Finance

• Contradictory Rulings:

  • Mail-in Voting Preserved: Supreme Court (5-4) allowed Mississippi to count ballots postmarked by Election Day ([01:32]).
  • Campaign Spending Limits Struck Down: The court struck down decades-old limits on coordinated party spending, likely increasing wealthy influence in elections ([01:32], [04:38]).
  • Comment:
    • Ari Berman: “The mail voting ruling was really an aberration because the Roberts Court has issued so many decisions weakening the right to vote and essentially destroying the Voting Rights Act.” ([01:52])

• Long-Term Court Trends:

  • The Roberts Court has consistently favored deregulating campaign finance and diminishing protections for minority voters, part of a decades-long project ([02:59], [04:38]).
  • Ari Berman: “There were far more defeats for democracy than there were victories in this last term.” ([01:52])

2. Impact and Mechanics of the New Campaign Finance Landscape

• New Route for Dark Money:

  • Unlimited coordinated party spending now enables wealthy donors (e.g., Elon Musk’s $288M to Trump and GOP in 2024) to influence politics even more ([08:14]).
  • Ari Berman: “Since that Citizens United decision, the amount of spending by billionaires has increased 160 fold.” ([08:14])

• Partisan Benefits:

  • The changes are likely to aid Republicans more, as party committees have a significant financial advantage compared to Democrats ([07:01]).
  • Ari Berman: “The RNC has 100 million or more of a financial advantage over the DNC right now.” ([07:01])

3. Erosion of the Voting Rights Act and Minority Representation

• Supreme Court’s Ongoing Rollbacks:

  • Landmark decisions have dismantled key protections—Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Brnovich v. DNC (2021), and the recent case concerning majority-minority districts ([13:53]).
  • Ari Berman: "The Louisiana vs Calais decision in late April was a death blow to the Voting Rights act..." ([13:53])

• Real-World Effects:

  • Southern states are aggressively redrawing maps, reducing Black representation, and leaving minority voters with little real choice ([15:06]).
  • Berman likens the situation to a “politics of Jim Crow… a politics of white supremacy” ([15:06]).
  • Quote: “We are going back to a day in which white voters have more power than black voters in the South... That’s the very kind of situation the Voting Rights Act was meant to rectify.” ([16:59])

• Loopholes for Partisanship:

  • Modern courts now accept "partisan" intent as sufficient defense, effectively insulating racist outcomes ([18:01]).
  • Ari Berman: “They've really turned the 14th and 15th amendment on their heads...” ([18:01])

4. Roots and Reversal of Bi-Partisan Consensus

• Historical Bipartisanship:

  • The Voting Rights Act was reauthorized four times, each by bipartisan majorities and Republican presidents ([23:03]).
  • Ari Berman: “What changed was the Supreme Court... made it their mission to overturn the Voting Rights Act and...roll back the most important accomplishments of the civil rights movement.” ([23:03])

• Personal Impact on Advocates:

  • Berman relayed emotional reactions from civil rights veterans and their families, underscoring the pain felt as decades of progress are rolled back ([25:16]).
  • Quote: “All of those struggles, all of the blood, all of the horrors... it ultimately meant nothing.” ([25:16])

5. The “Arms Race” of Gerrymandering

• Escalating Redistricting Battles:

  • Both parties are now maximizing their advantages, with Republicans currently enjoying a redistricting edge worth about 10 seats ([28:06]).
  • State and federal courts are green-lighting even extreme map redraws, making a federal fix appear necessary ([28:06]).

• National Solution Stymied:

  • Court composition virtually guarantees that even if Congress passed meaningful reforms, current SCOTUS would likely strike them down ([30:17]).
  • Poll Note: Black voters now cite the Supreme Court as “the number one threat to democracy right now, ahead of even Donald Trump.” ([30:17])

6. The Save America Act (SAVE Act) and New Voting Barriers

• Draconian Proof-of-Citizenship Requirements:

  • The proposed bill would require a passport or birth certificate to register, a burden that would likely disenfranchise millions ([33:53]).
  • Berman calls it a “show your papers” bill ([33:53]), noting that half of Americans lack a passport and documentation mismatches (e.g., married women’s names) could create major obstacles ([34:53]).
  • Stat: “9% of Americans, 21 million people, don’t have ready access to their citizenship documents.” ([33:53])

• No Evidence for the Underlying Rationale:

  • Noncitizen voting is “extremely rare” ([36:17]); the law’s premise is unsupported by actual voting data ([36:17]).

• Presidential Advocacy and Political Motive:

  • President Trump is heavily pushing the law, in part to lay the groundwork for contesting future election results ([38:29]).
  • Trump, quoted: “If we terminate the filibuster... and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.” ([38:01])
  • Ari Berman: “Trump… is creating the predicate for some kind of dramatic intervention to challenge how people vote, how their votes are counted, or how elections are ultimately certified.” ([39:53])

7. Threats and Pressures on Election Officials

• Climate of Fear:
  • Clerks and poll workers are facing threats of prosecution, intimidation, and fear for simply doing their jobs; this is amplified by government intimidation (e.g. DOJ, FBI interventions) ([44:33]).
  • Ari Berman: “They worry that they could be prosecuted… just for doing their jobs if Trump doesn't like it.” ([44:33])

8. Post-Election Scenarios and Risks

• Fear of 2026 Electoral Crisis:
  • Berman describes a likely scenario: slow vote counts in key states, conspiracy claims, and efforts to block seating of delegations (“a January 6th in miniature”) ([45:42]).
  • Ari Berman: “The closer the election is and where those close votes are being counted is what makes me really nervous.” ([47:12])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Court's Direction:

  • “There were far more defeats for democracy than there were victories in this last term.” — Ari Berman ([01:52])

• On Campaign Finance Deregulation:

  • “This is now a decades long project by the Roberts court to give wealthy individuals more power in the political process.” — Ari Berman ([04:38])

• On the Voting Rights Act:

  • “We are returning to a politics of Jim Crow in the South...a politics of white supremacy in the South.” — Ari Berman ([15:06])

• On Disenfranchisement:

  • “Half of all Americans don't have passports...people tend not to carry a passport or their birth certificate with them.” — Ari Berman ([34:53])

• On Republican Motives:

  • “Republicans have won plenty of elections without the SAVE Act. I don't believe that most Republican strategists think that it would make much of a difference…” — Ari Berman ([38:38])

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:32] — Start of the discussion on recent Supreme Court rulings (mail ballots, campaign finance)
• [04:38] — Detailed breakdown of campaign finance deregulation and effects
• [07:01] — Republican vs. Democratic fundraising advantages
• [13:53] — Supreme Court decision on voting rights and minority representation
• [15:06] — Real-world effects on Black representation and Jim Crow analogies
• [23:03] — The historical bipartisanship of the Voting Rights Act
• [25:16] — Firsthand impact on civil rights leaders and families
• [28:06] — The gerrymandering arms race and growing polarization
• [30:17] — Challenges to Congressional solutions, and increased suspicion of the Supreme Court
• [33:53] — Introduction of the SAVE Act and its implications
• [34:53] — Practical barriers posed by documentation requirements
• [36:17] — Hard evidence on voter fraud and noncitizen voting
• [38:01] — President Trump's “100 years” quote (SAVE Act); use as a predicate for post-election challenges
• [44:33] — Election officials’ fears of interference and intimidation
• [45:42] — Post-election “January 6th in miniature” scenario
• [47:12] — Closing discussion: fragility of the system and heightened risks for the 2026 midterms

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Conclusion

Ari Berman, in a sobering and fact-packed discussion with Tanya Mosley, details how America is entering an era of intensifying barriers to the ballot box, growing power of money in politics, and threats to multiracial democracy. From the Supreme Court’s decades-long agenda to the practical threats facing local election officials and voters, the episode unpacks how current legal and political trends are converging to create new challenges for American democracy, especially for communities of color and ordinary citizens. The warning is clear: without structural reform, democracy’s most basic guarantees remain vulnerable.

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For those who haven’t listened, this episode is a crucial update on how the future of the American vote is being fought—both in the courtroom and on the ground.

Transcript

[Tanya Mosley]

This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's flexpath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.

[Ari Berman]

Edu.

[Tanya Mosley]

This is FRESH air. I'm Tanya Moseley. My guest today, journalist Ari Berman has spent the last decade covering the battle over who gets to vote in America and who gets to write the rules that govern our elections. With just over four months until the midterm elections, he's tracking the latest wave of court rulings, lawsuits and new laws that are reshaping how elections are run. In just the last week, the Supreme Court preserved mail in voting in a 5 to 4 ruling allowing Mississippi to count ballots postmarked by Election Day. Days later, the court struck down decades old limits on campaign spending, a rule expected to reshape how our elections are financed. That's only part of the story. In April, the court weakened what remained of the Voting Rights act, after which states across the south quickly moved to redraw congressional maps. And the president wants Congress to revive a law that would require a passport or a birth certificate just to register to vote. Ari Berman is a national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and the author of several books, including Minority Rule and Give Us the Ballot the Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Ari Berman, welcome back to FRESH air.

[Ari Berman]

Hey, Tanya, thank you so much for having me back.

[Tanya Mosley]

Okay, so last week the court preserved Mellon voting by a single vote. Then two days later, they removed this decades old limit on party spending. So essentially it's a win for voters on one hand and a win for money on the other. What do these two rulings tell you together about where the court is taking our elections?

[Ari Berman]

Well, the mail voting ruling was really an aberration because the Roberts Court has issued so many decisions weakening the right to vote and essentially destroying the Voting Rights Act. So it's almost like an asterisk. They were asked to do something with mail voting that was just a bridge too far. Remember, this was a law that was passed out of Mississippi that said that if your ballot was postmarked by Election Day, it could be received up to five days later. So it wasn't like it was a law that came out of California or some other liberal state. This was a very conservative state in Mississippi that was asking essentially the Supreme Court to maintain the status quo. And so while that is a victory for voters, it's not like it was a term on the whole by the Supreme Court that gave a lot of victories to democracy. There were far more defeats for democracy than there were victories in this last term.

[Tanya Mosley]

Okay, that's why you call it an aberration, because your reporting suggested that this court had been moving steadily in one direction on this issue.

[Ari Berman]

They have been. I mean, you look at, for example, the decision that essentially killed the Voting Rights Act. They weakened the last remaining provision of the Voting Rights act in such a way that it has no power. And by extension, the Voting Rights act of 1965, the most important civil rights law of the 1960s, has no teeth left. And that's just the beginning of what they've done in terms of weakening democracy. You mentioned the campaign finance decision that struck down limits on how much parties can spend in coordination with candidates. So before there were limits on these type of expenditures. Now there isn't. Meaning that an individual can give a lot more money to a party than they can give to a candidate. Now the party can spend an unlimited amount on behalf of those candidates. And it's just another way in which wealthy individuals will have more influence in the political process. And the campaign finance decisions by the court are very similar to decisions on the Voting Rights act by the court. And that this wasn't the first decision by the Supreme Court, by the Roberts Court, that deregulated the campaign finance system in such a way that gives wealthy individuals far more power. And it wasn't the first decision by the Roberts Court weakening the Voting Rights Act. This is now a decades long project by the Roberts Court to give wealthy individuals more power in the political process. At the same time, they're giving voters less power in terms of their ability to elect their representatives and to be protected from racial discrimination in voting.

[Tanya Mosley]

Let's break down for a moment more about the campaign finance ruling, because I was just thinking about the gubernatorial race in California, for instance. Tom Steyer, very wealthy individual, spent more than 200 million of his own money running for governor. He didn't make it out of the primary. We're not necessarily saying the more money you have, the more sway you will have in being able to determine the outcome of an election, but it does play a big role in campaigns itself. I'm guessing the lawyers, the organizers, the voter databases, turnout operations, all that kind of stuff. Can you just kind of break it down like what the potential ramifications of this could be?

[Ari Berman]

Well, it's another victory for the Republican Party because the Republican Party as a party has more money than the Democratic Party. The RNC has more money than the DNC and the Republican committees for the House and the Senate have more money than their Democratic counterparts. What that means is they can now, for example, run TV ads on behalf of their candidates without being constrained by campaign finance limits anymore. Whereas if a Democratic candidate previously had more money than their Republican counterpart, now the party committees are going to be able to swoop in and help those Republican candidates who might not have raised enough money for one reason or another. And if you're a wealthy individual, you can give up to half a million dollars to a political party. You can only give $7,000 to a candidate. So now what wealthy individuals are going to do is they're gonna route that money to political parties, kind of like they're doing with super PACs, and then it's gonna be routed back in support of the candidate. That kind of thing was made illegal after Watergate because the Congress was concerned that if a wealthy individual or some kind of group wanted to influence a candidate, they would just go through the party. So they eliminated that as an option. Now, the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, and has basically rolled back those post Watergate rules that were meant to stop political corruption.

[Tanya Mosley]

Can you give us a scale of difference between Republicans and Democrats on the money scale? I think I was reading in some of your reporting that Republicans are entering the midterms with something like 125 million in the RNC. And how does that compare to the Democrats?

[Ari Berman]

The RNC has 100 million or more of a financial advantage over the DNC right now. I mean, the DNC has really been struggling, and the RNC has been raising a lot of money. That tends to happen when you have the presidency. Trump has obviously raised an extraordinary amount of money from all sorts of people, a lot of whom we may never even know of. In terms of the ballroom and all the other different things that he's done, it was just an article saying he's made $2 billion off the presidency in the last year alone. So a ton of money is flow through the Trump White House, and some of that money is flowing through the RNC and the party committees as well. And so you would say if you looked at polling right now, Democrats have the advantage when it comes to the 2026 elections. But if you look at the structural factors, things like who has the most money, who has the advantage in redistricting, those kind of things, that's where Republicans have the advantage. Despite Trump being so unpopular during election

[Tanya Mosley]

cycles, dark money comes up all the time. You've written pretty extensively about it. How, if at all, does this latest ruling perhaps intersect with this practice, well,

[Ari Berman]

it just means that it's another way for wealthy individuals to donate more money and to have more influence over the political system. Political parties are still capped at the amount of money they can raise, unlike super PACs. But I think we saw in the 2024 election perhaps the best case study in modern times of the influence of money in politics, which is that Elon Musk gives $288 million to Trump and Republican candidates. That is an astonishing amount of money. And then Trump basically puts Musk in charge of dismantling the federal government. We'd never seen something like that take place before, and it was a clear example of, okay, you helped get me elected. Now I'm gonna let you do whatever you want to the federal government. And that was an extraordinary arrangement that was only possible because of how the Supreme Court had deregulated the political system when it comes to money and politics, particularly the Citizens United decision. And that decision basically allowed corporations and individuals to give unlimited sums in secret to super PACs and, to, quote, unquote, nonprofit organizations. And since that Citizens United decision, the amount of spending by billionaires has increased 160 fold.

[Tanya Mosley]

What fascinates me is the timing of this case. So it was filed back in 2022, so long before this election, with the understanding that it might take years to reshape the rules. And so really, I mean, has the fight over elections become less about winning campaigns and more about winning the system that governs campaigns?

[Ari Berman]

There's been so many fights about the rules of the political system, and that's because the rules shape the political system to a great degree. How much money you have, who draws your district, what the voting laws look like in your state, how the votes are counted, how elections are certified. These kind of debates have really been magnified in recent years, and particularly they've been magnified by Donald Trump, because Trump is obsessed with the mechanics of voting, and every time he feels like his party is losing, he tries to mess with the mechanics of voting in one way or another, either trying to overturn the election or getting his party to gerrymander ahead of time to protect their vulnerable majority, or whatever it might be. And by and large, he has found a receptive audience in the Supreme Court.

[Tanya Mosley]

In the case of mail in voting, four of the justices, including Alito, signed a dissent claiming that mail in ballots increase the potential for fraud. What does the evidence actually show?

[Ari Berman]

The evidence shows that mail voting is safe and secure, and lots of states use it. There are states that have all mail elections for a Long time places like Oregon and Washington and even Republican controlled states like Utah, Alaska is another one that votes largely by mail. And there's no evidence that those states have higher rates of fraud than states that vote a different kind of way. And so the disturbing part of the dissent in the mail ballot case was that this was about a very narrow issue, whether ballots that are postmarked by Election Day can be counted if they're received in some period after the conservative justices who dissented made a much bigger argument against mail voting, basically calling into question mail voting writ large. And that's going to embolden Trump, and it's going to embolden Republican states to try to take more drastic action to end mail voting, even as lots of Republicans continue to vote by mail. President Trump himself has voted by mail on numerous occasions, most recently in a special election for the Florida legislature. And so often what we see is that even when the GOP appointed justices lose, their dissent often becomes the basis to be in the majority the next time this kind of case comes around.

[Tanya Mosley]

And you feel like that is the potential for mail in voting, the future is the fight against it?

[Ari Berman]

Absolutely, because I don't think anyone believes that Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts are strong proponents of mail voting to such an extent that they'll save mail voting no matter what happens. I mean, you look at the cases on the Voting Rights act, you look at other disputes over voting, it's almost always six to three. It's almost always the six Republican appointed justices in favor of whatever law is being backed by the Republican Party, and it's almost always the three liberals dissenting. And that's generally how these cases go. Now, on the mail ballot dispute, it was 5, 4, with Barrett and Roberts breaking with their conservative counterparts. But generally speaking, that is the aberration, not the norm.

[Tanya Mosley]

Ari, let's talk a little bit about the Voting Rights act, and I want to spend time talking about congressional maps. So this past spring, the Supreme Court made it much harder for voters to challenge maps they believe dilute the voting power, specifically of black communities and other minority groups. And in your reporting, you called that decision basically the final blow of the Voting Rights Act. Can you say more?

[Ari Berman]

The Louisiana vs Calais decision in late April was a death blow to the Voting Rights act because the Roberts court has already weakened the Voting Rights act on numerous occasions. It said that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to approve their voting changes with the federal government. In the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, it then made it much harder to strike down laws that discriminate against minority voters when it comes to casting a ballot in a 2021 decision. And now they've basically struck down the creation of majority minority districts in which black voters or other voters of color can elect their candidates of choice. And we've already seen, in the wake of that decision, a mad scramble by Southern states, places like Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, to redraw their maps to reduce black representation before the midterms.

[Tanya Mosley]

So if you're a black voter in a place like Louisiana, where congressional district disappears, kind of give us a visual of what changes, what has actually been lost. What will the next few months look like in November?

[Ari Berman]

Well, I'll just give you an example of what happened in that Supreme Court decision. They struck down the creation of a second majority black district in Louisiana that went from Shreveport to Baton Rouge, the state capital. And what will happen now is voters in those districts, instead of being able to elect a black member of Congress that will advocate for their interests, it will almost certainly elect a white Republican who is not likely to advocate for their interests because it has gone from a majority black district to one that is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly pro Trump, much like the rest of Louisiana. And the same thing is going to happen throughout the South. There are states that have multiple majority black districts in which maybe the state only eliminated one of them. But there are states that have only one majority black district, for example, Mississippi. And Republicans have already vowed to eliminate those districts as well. And that's why I say you could have states where the Black population is 30 or 40%, but Black voters will have no ability to elect their candidates of choice. And that really undermines the entire spirit of the Voting Rights act, because the Voting Rights act of 1965 wasn't just about giving African Americans or other racial minority groups the right to vote. It was about making their right to vote effective, giving them real political power. And the way that you gain real political power is not just being able to cast a ballot, but ultimately being able to vote for politicians that are gonna advocate for your interests. And my fear is that we are returning to a politics of Jim Crow in the South. We are returning to a politics of white supremacy in the South. And the decision destroying the Voting Rights act doesn't just weaken the country's most important civil rights law. It really weakens the entire project of multiracial democracy. We've just celebrated the 250th anniversary of America, and we're talking about, where are we as a country? And we're talking about ideas, founding ideas like all men are created equal. And if you look at politics in the south right now, in the wake of the destruction of the Voting Rights act, all people do not have equal rights. We are going back to a day in which white voters have more power than black voters in the South. And that's the very kind of situation the Voting Rights act was meant to rectify.

[Tanya Mosley]

Remind us of the argument of this because of course, like, it's pretty obvious what it shows going back to white supremacy, but. But, you know, in the case of Alabama, for instance, a federal court had previously found redrawing those congressional maps discriminatory. It was pretty obvious that that was the case. So what is the argument for doing this, aside from what it appears?

[Ari Berman]

Well, what the Supreme Court argued was that you had to show intentional discrimination, which is very difficult in this day and age to be able to show that the votes of black voters, for example, had been diluted. Now, as you mentioned, Tanya, in Alabama, in the wake of the Klay decision, a federal court found that Alabama Republicans had intentionally discriminated against black voters by refusing to draw a second majority black district, even when the federal courts ordered Alabama Republicans to do so. This came back to the Supreme Court in the wake of the Clay decision. And the Supreme Court said the that's not enough. So that they already, in the weeks after the Clay decision, went beyond what they said in Clay, and they basically said that legislatures are entitled to what they called a presumption of good faith. And that if you can say you're doing this for partisan reasons, that's basically a get out of jail free card. So all Republicans in Alabama or Louisiana or Mississippi or wherever it might be, have to say is, yes, we diluted black voters power. Yes, we got rid of a majority black district, but we just did it for partisan reasons. We believe that Alabama's better served if we have an all Republican delegation. It just so happens that that all Republican delegation, because of how racially polarized voting is in the south, is going to be all white. The problem with that is that's the very thing that the Voting Rights act of 1965 was meant to stop. It didn't matter what the reason was, that you tried to eliminate a black member of Congress or tried to make it impossible for black people to be elected. If that's what was happening, that was a violation of the Voting Rights Act. And the Roberts Court has turned the Voting Rights act on its head, and they've really turned the 14th and 15th amendment on their heads because they have said that these amendments, these Reconstruction era amendments, have to be read in a race blind way. But there was nothing race blind about the 14th and 15th amendment. They were passed to give equality to formerly enslaved people. The 15th amendment says very clearly the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude. So you can't interpret the 15th Amendment in a race blind way or you're gonna strip all meaning from the 15th amendment or from the 14th amendment. And right now what they're doing is they're using the 14th and 15th amendment as a weapon to help aggrieved white voters as opposed to a tool that was meant to rectify historical injustices in America, including the injustice of slavery.

[Tanya Mosley]

Our guest today is journalist Ari Berman. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH air.

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[Tanya Mosley]

250 years ago, the nation's founders considered a free press a critical protection for we the people. Today, the NPR network proudly upholds your First Amendment rights with reporting accountable only to you. It's something we protect together. Join the people who power the NPR network by showing your [e-mail] this is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is journalist Ari Berman. For more than a decade, he's covered voting rights and election law in America. We're talking about a series of recent changes to how elections are run. A Supreme Court decision upholding states power to count mail in ballots that arrive after Election Day. Another striking down limits on coordinated party spending, a ruling that narrowed the Voting Rights act and redrawn congressional maps in several Southern states. Berman is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and the author of three books, including Give Us the Ballot and Minority Rule. You know, one of the things that I think is Easy to forget, especially now in this current day, is that the Voting Rights act was once. Is it right to say it was once one of the most bipartisan laws in America? I mean, reauthorized four times, often by overwhelming margins, and signed by Republican presidents. I mean, this is the case, right?

[Ari Berman]

It is the case. The Voting Rights act was passed by overwhelming support by the Congress in 1965. It was a white Southerner, LBJ, who made the case for the Voting Rights act, said in very powerful terms that we could not have an America in which people were disenfranchised based on the color of their skin. The Voting Rights act was reauthorized four times by the Congress, each time with overwhelming bipartisan support. Each reauthorization of the law was signed by a Republican president. And what changed was the Supreme Court. You had a Supreme Court first with the appointments of Justices Roberts and Alito, and then with the three judges appointed by Trump, that turned its back on that bipartisan consensus and made it their mission to overturn the Voting Rights act and to really overturn the second reconstruction of the 1960s and to roll back the most important accomplishments of the civil rights movement. And the Voting Rights act is only 60 years old. It's not hard to find people whose relatives were murdered in the fight for voting rights. It's not hard to find people in the south who had to face literacy tests and poll taxes. It's not hard to find people who didn't have anyone to vote for even when they registered because their entire states were gerrymandered in favor of white candidates who supported white supremacy. This is a relatively recent history in America. And the fact that in the weeks after this decision, you already saw states scramble to eliminate black representation just shows you how our country is now moving backwards when it comes to race and voting in really alarming ways.

[Tanya Mosley]

You've lived inside of this for quite some time. I mean, you basically wrote the history of this law in a book of yours, in that you interviewed people who marched and organized and bled to make this possible. Have you checked back in with many of those people to see how they are processing this moment in particular?

[Ari Berman]

It's devastating for them. I mean, I think about the times that I spent with Congressman John Lewis in Alabama, where we went back and we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he was brutally beaten in the infamous Bloody Sunday march. And to think about someone like Congressman John Lewis, who devoted their entire life to fighting for the right to vote, and to see that rolled back, it makes it Feel like all of those struggles, all of the blood, all of the horrors, that it ultimately meant nothing. I mean, that is really extraordinary. I was at a function not too long after the decision, and I was with David Goodman and his brother Andrew Goodman went down to Mississippi in 1964 and was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. He is part of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner, the three young civil rights workers who were murdered by the Klan simply for trying to help black people register to vote. That's why I said you can find people who lived through this period, you can find their relatives, and they feel like 60 years of progress has been reversed by the Supreme Court's elimination of the Voting Rights Act. And I believe that the justices that signed onto this decision, in particular Justice Alito, who wrote the majority of the decision, they had one view of the South, a South that is governed by racial progress, but they ignored the entire other part of the south, the south of poll taxes and literacy tests and grandfather clauses and violence and lynchings and all of that history, which is not so long ago and which is coming back in a different kind of form today. Yes, we no longer have literacy tests, we no longer have poll taxes, we no longer have all white primaries. But we do have a situation in which there is a new version of Jim Crow in which we have these states that are going to have all white delegations to Congress in which black voters, unlike the first Jim Crow, will have the ability to vote, but they won't have anyone to vote for. And so their right to vote will be effectively nullified.

[Tanya Mosley]

How are you thinking about the way Democrats are, the tactics that they're taking specifically as it relates to these congressional maps? Because they haven't been on the defense. We know in California, for instance, you know, listeners might remember the state pursued these new maps that would strengthen their position in Congress, basically arguing that they're responding to these Republican led redistricting efforts elsewhere. Are we in the same way that you talk about mail in voting being a fight? Are we entering an arms race over congressional maps?

[Ari Berman]

We're in an arms race, yes, for congressional maps. I mean, we're right in the middle of this. It's been going on. This mid decade redistricting fight has been happening since last summer when Donald Trump pressured Texas to pass a new redistricting map to give Republicans five new seats. That was basically unprecedented for the President of the United States to lean on a state to redraw their map simply for the purpose of giving their party more seats and protecting a Fragile House majority. And then of course, that led to more Republican controlled states redrawing their maps. It led to Democrats fighting back. But Democrats have been hamstrung. They've been hamstrung by the Supreme Court, they've been hamstrung by state courts. For example, the Virginia Supreme Court throwing out a voter approved referendum where state courts in other places like Florida or Missouri have given a green light to Republican gerrymandered efforts. Which means that if you look at the totality heading into the midterms, Republicans have a 10 seat advantage because of redistricting alone. Had it not been for this kind of gerrymandering, there would be no question that Democrats would retake the House. And the question wouldn't be, are they going to retake the House? The question would be, how many seats are they going to win? 10, 20, 30, 40? Now the question is, can they overcome that 10 seat advantage that Republicans have from redistricting alone? And this is just the first phase of this fight, because once we get out of the midterms, a lot of state legislatures are going to come back and they're going to redraw new maps in 27, in 28, both red and blue states. And my fear is that this is going to be a race to the bottom, that Republican controlled states are going to try to maximize their representation. Democratic controlled states are going to try to maximize their representation. What it's going to lead to is more polarization, less competition, more partisanship. All the things that voters say they hate about the political system the most is going to become magnified. And that's ultimately why I think we need a solution on a national level here to get rid of this kind of partisan gerrymandering once and for all.

[Tanya Mosley]

Is that even possible? As we look at the stack of the Supreme Court Congress right now, it's

[Ari Berman]

certainly not possible now. And I believe an increasing number of Democrats are saying it's not even possible if they retake power without somehow changing the structure of the Supreme Court. Because I've been talking to a lot of voting rights experts in the past months and asking them, could Congress pass a new Voting Rights Act? Could Congress pass a ban on partisan gerrymandering? Could they make racial gerrymandering illegal, for example? And basically everyone tells me they could do it, but the Supreme Court's just going to strike it down. Which is why the issue of Supreme Court reform is gaining momentum in Democratic circles. Whether it's term limits, whether it's expanding the Court, whether it's doing something to reign in a court that feels unchecked by democracy, by the democratic norms. And I believe this issue is now resonating with voters. There was a poll recently of black voters that said that they saw the Supreme Court as the number one threat to democracy right now, ahead of even Donald Trump. And that was extraordinary to me. I've never seen a poll say something like that before. And, of course, these issues are intertwined because Trump appointed the supermajority that has effectively killed the Voting Rights Act. But the issue of the Supreme Court and the radicalism of its decision is really resonating. It began to resonate earlier. The Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade was a wake up call for a lot of people. But for black voters in particular, I think the fact that the Supreme Court has essentially nullified the country's most important civil rights law has really become a rallying cry to make sure that their voting rights are protected in the future.

[Tanya Mosley]

Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with journalist Ari Berman from Mother Jones. We'll be right back. This is FRESH air.

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[Tanya Mosley]

This is FRESH air. And today my guest is Ari Berman, who covers voting rights for Mother Jones. We're talking about how this year's midterm elections are being shaped at this moment. Okay, Ari. We have spent years debating voter ID laws. Most recently, however, the president has been pushing what he's calling the SAVE act, which it sounds Similar to those debates on the surface. But the SAVE act is much more comprehensive. It has yet to pass. But how would it work if it did?

[Ari Berman]

It would change voting in a lot of fundamental ways and it would make it much harder to register to vote and much harder to cast a ballot. And it's much more than a voter ID bill. It is really a show your papers bill, because at its heart, the bill requires a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote. So before you even are able to vote, you have to register. And this would make it a lot harder to register. We know that 9% of Americans, 21 million people, don't have ready access to their citizenship documents. But I believe that understates the number of people that could be affected. Because people carry around a driver's license with them on a regular basis. People tend not to carry a passport or their birth certificate with them.

[Tanya Mosley]

And slow down here for a minute, Ari, because I mean, those who are on the side or just might be tangentially looking at this, they might say, well, what's the problem with that? Then just access your birth certificate, get a passport. Why is that such a bigger hurdle?

[Ari Berman]

Well, half of all Americans don't have passports. So already there you're talking about half the country can't comply. Ask the average person, do you know where your birth certificate is? And a lot of people are going to struggle to find it. There are people that, for example, were born at home in the Jim Crow south that never got a birth certificate in the first place. And the burdens of the law go beyond that because, for example, there are 69 million married women that have changed their name, that now have a legal name that doesn't match the name on their birth certificate, who could find it harder to register to vote under this bill. The bill requires you to present your documentation in person at an elections office, meaning that you can no longer register to vote online or at DMVs. You would have to physically go to an election office. If you live in a rural state, you could have to drive up to five hours just to be able to register to vote. So there are burdens that are associated with proof of citizenship that aren't necessarily obvious. And of course, this whole idea is predicated on the idea that non citizens are systematically voting in US elections, which is just demonstrably untrue.

[Tanya Mosley]

Yeah. What do the numbers show? Like, what does the data show about that? The number of people who are not citizens actually voting in American elections.

[Ari Berman]

The numbers show that that kind of fraud is extremely rare. I would say that the numbers show that all types of voter fraud are extremely rare. But noncitizens voting is particularly rare because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why someone's going, whether they're documenting or undocumented, is going to risk deportation simply to be able to cast a ballot. And there's lots of data on this because states audit their voting rolls all the time. Utah just did an audit, for example, of its voter rolls, and they looked at 2 million people on their voter rolls, and they found only 27 cases of noncitizens who were registered to vote and only 13 cases of a noncitizen voting since 2018, which is something like 0.0025% of people who have voted illegally. And most of the time, these are people that are documented that don't understand that they're not able to vote. So the idea that there's 3 million people voting illegally, for example, in California, which is what Donald Trump claimed in 2016 when he lost the popular vote, or the idea that there's millions of people who are illegally registered or illegally casting ballots, I mean, we're talking about at most, you know, a few handfuls of cases here. And so the problem has been dramatically, dramatically overstated.

[Tanya Mosley]

As I mentioned, the SAVE act has not passed, but that has not stopped the president from pushing it. I mean, he is pushing it really hard. And I want to play a clip of him talking about it on July 3rd in South Dakota. He was giving a speech on the eve of Independence Day and celebration of the 250th. And the backdrop was Mount Rushmore. And let's take a listen to what he has to say.

[Ari Berman]

We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should do, and immediately vote for the Save America act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years. We do that, we're not going to lose an election for 100 years.

[Tanya Mosley]

That was the president on July 3rd. And, Ari, what is he saying here about not losing elections for 100 years?

[Ari Berman]

Well, there was another great quote by Thomas Massie, the Republican from Kentucky, who Trump effectively ousted in his House primary. And Massie basically said, we won everything in 2024. We won the presidency, we won the House, we won the Senate. Where was all the election fraud then? Why didn't that stop us from winning if it was so rampant and widespread? And so I think the fact is, Republicans have won plenty of elections without the SAVE Act. I don't believe that most Republican strategists think that it would make much of a difference if they ended up passing it, which is not likely to happen. If you look at the details of the bill, it could actually hurt Republican constituencies more than Democrats. Republican constituencies are less likely to have a passport. They're more likely to have an issue with their birth certificate because married women who change their names are more likely to be Republican than Democrat. Republican women are twice as likely as Democratic women to take their partner's last name when they get married. So they could have more of these bureaucratic issues with their citizenship documents. Rural voters are more Republican. They could have a much harder time registering to vote under the bill. So Republicans haven't really thought this through. I think we're basically seeing a redux of 2020 when Trump fears that he or his party is going to lose and is looking for something to blame. In 2020, he blamed mail voting. He's still, of course, blaming mail voting. They have added a ban on mail voting to the Save America act, which is quite unpopular with many Republicans. But now he's expanded his list of grievances. He's not just blaming mail voting, he's blaming non citizen voting and all these other things that don't really happen. And I believe he's laying the groundwork to try to challenge the results of the midterm elections. If Republicans lose, he's going to say, well, we didn't have the SAVE act, therefore the election was rigged, therefore we have to challenge the count in some kind of way, like we challenged it in 2020. And I believe he keeps talking about the SAVE act for that reason, because he is creating the predicate for some kind of dramatic intervention to either challenge how people vote, how their votes are counted, or how the elections are ultimately certified.

[Tanya Mosley]

Okay, so less this idea of him trying to, like, push the SAVE act to turn around and to, for those Republicans that are against it, turn their votes around, but more so to say, like, yeah, set up that fraud had happened during the midterms.

[Ari Berman]

That seems certainly plausible to me. Trump clearly wants this bill to pass, but I think he's been told many times, including repeatedly by the leader of the Senate, John Thune, that it's not going to happen. And so he keeps talking about it because he wants Republicans to distrust the voting system. And if they distrust the voting system, that will then build support for more dramatic interventions into the electoral system. For example, the raid in Fulton County, Georgia, where they took 700 boxes of ballots. More of those kind of things are probably coming. And we are likely to see the full force of the federal government weaponized to try to interfere in the midterms in some way or another, and possibly to interfere in the midterms at multiple levels, whether it's interfering in the casting of ballots or whether it's interfering, interfering in how votes are counted or interfering in how elections are certified. Trump tried to do this in 2020. He was ultimately unsuccessful, but it wasn't for a lack of trying. And a lot of the Republicans who argued against it inside the administration have been pushed out, and they've been replaced by people that led the effort to try to overturn the 2020 election. And those are the people that are in positions of power in his administration. Those are the people who have Trump's ear outside the administration. And that's why these more dramatic interventions are on the table right now. And if you're asking me what am I worried about in the next phase of the election, that's probably the thing that's keeping me and other experts on voting up at night is what steps could this administration take to try to interfere in the voting process that we've never seen another administration in our history take before?

[Tanya Mosley]

Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking with journalist Ari Berman from Mother Jones. We'll be right back. This is FRESH air.

[Ari Berman]

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[Tanya Mosley]

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[Ari Berman]

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[Tanya Mosley]

You know that moment in an interview when someone says something that just blows you away? On NPR's Wildcard podcast, we've got a deck of questions that offers a shortcut to those moments. What do you admire about your teenage self? What's a lesson you keep learning again and again? When has selfishness served you well? I'm Rachel Martin. Listen to the Wildcard podcast only from npr. This is FRESH air. And today my guest is Ari Berman, who covers voting rights for Mother Jones. We're talking about how this year's midterm elections are being shaped at this moment. Let's talk a little bit about the people who run our elections, the clerks and the poll workers and the county officials. You have talked in a lot of your reporting with Some of these people, and you've suggested that many of them are heading into November, kind of afraid of interference and threats. What are you hearing from them?

[Ari Berman]

Well, they see things like the raid in Fulton County, Georgia, where they took 700 boxes of ballots as a preview of the kind of things that could happen in 2026. They hear the president attack election officials. They see how the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, have tried to, for example, seize state voter records, things like that. And they worry about what's coming. They worry that they could be prosecuted, for example, just for doing their jobs if Trump doesn't like it. I mean, there's lots of things you could try to do to try to cower people into submission. And right now, election officials are standing up to that, but they're under a tremendous amount of pressure.

[Tanya Mosley]

Okay, so let's imagine it's a week after Election Day. The votes are still being counted in some places. Some races are really close. Based on everything you reported this year, what are you watching for in that week, and what's the scenario that maybe concerns you the most?

[Ari Berman]

Well, it's really much like the scenario that unfolded in California recently, but on a national scale. Let's say, for example, control of the House comes down to California. Rich redrew its maps to give Democrats five more seats. And those five more seats are pivotal in terms of the margins. And it's taking a while to count votes because California takes a while to count votes. And you suddenly have Trump come out and say the election is rigged. I don't want Mike Johnson, while he has power, to do anything to seat any kind of Democrat. And you have kind of a January 6th in miniature unfold in the House, where somehow Republicans try to hold onto power. They deny the members of the California delegation the right to be seated based on unfounded claims of fraud. And therefore, the results of the midterms are thrown into doubt in the House of Representatives. Now, again, this would be challenged in court, and the courts would ultimately decide. And I think if they found that there was nothing untoward about the election, they would ultimately say that these Democrats have to be seated. But you could obviously imagine how this would take place. Right. And the level of instability it would cause in the political process. And so the closer the election is and where those close votes are being counted is what makes me really nervous. And I believe the administration is spending so much effort trying to relitigate the 2020 election, not just to soothe Trump's ego, but to build a predicate to in some way challenge the 2026 results. It doesn't make sense why the FBI was sending 260 agents to Georgia to examine the 2020 election unless they had some kind of thing they were trying to do, looking forward, that would try to protect Trump or his party. So there's a lot of things we still don't know behind the scenes in terms of what the administration is doing. But Trump has given no indication, based on what he's said so far that he's going to honor the results. If a Democrat wins, if it's a large majority, if we're talking about Democrats winning 20 or 30 seats, then it's probably going to be very hard to contest the election. But if it's a handful of seats in a place like California where they've already spread these conspiracies about voting, things could become unstable very quickly.

[Tanya Mosley]

Ari Berman, thank you for your journalism and thank you for this conversation.

[Ari Berman]

Thank you so much, Tanya. I really appreciate it.

[Tanya Mosley]

Ari Berman is a national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. Tomorrow on FRESH air, Lenny K. Patti Smith's longtime guitarist. He's made his first solo album, finally at 79. We'll talk about his contributions to punk rock through his collaboration with Smith and his anthology Nuggets, the more vulnerable direction of his new album and the song he recorded under a pseudonym in his teens. I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram @NPRFreshAir. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanischewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Annmarie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show with Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley.

[Ari Berman]

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[Ari Berman]

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