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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Voter Suppression and Other Threats to the 2020 Presidential Election
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Voter Suppression and Other Threats to the 2020 Presidential Election
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A
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This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, April 25th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. The Republican Party didn't exactly welcome the surge of new voters in last year's midterm elections. On the contrary, state legislatures where turnout increased dramatically, especially among black voters, are pursuing measures to reverse the trend. Texas, Arizona, North Carolina and Tennessee are all considering new rules that make voting more difficult. But their efforts aren't going unchallenged. Since losing the race for governor of Georgia last year, Stacey Abrams has brought increased attention to voter suppression efforts across the country. At the Brookings Institution in February, Abrams.
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C
Had this to Voter suppression acts as a means of denying those policies reality, and it is baked into the DNA of America. It has been perfected in recent years, in the last two decades, in a way that lets us forget that it's real because it has so many pieces. And that's the architecture. Voter suppression isn't simply saying you can't vote. Voter suppression is both a physical activity, but it's also a psychic effect. Telling people their votes won't count, telling people that the system is rigged has the act of actually stopping people from trying to use it.
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B
Jelani Cobb, a New Yorker staff writer, joins me to discuss the long history of voter suppression in the United States. We'll also talk about how Russian hackers used that history to target Black voters in 2016 and how it continues to be a problem as we approach the 2020 elections. Jelani, welcome back.
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D
Thank you.
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B
I thought we might start by asking you to give us a thumbnail history of voter suppression in this country and maybe take us all the way back, if you will, to start with the Democratic Party's disenfranchisement measures in the south after Reconstruction.
- [03:23]
D
Sure. I mean, so we could go further back. There have always been, you know, complications and complexities around access to the ballot and, you know, kind of landholder provisions and things that, you know, made sure that the electorate would look a particular way and, you know, going back to the origins of the country. But the real thrust and the kind of high water marker, I guess, that we can use that language for voter suppression came about, you know, after the end of the Civil War. And, you know, There are the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which are collectively known as the Reconstruction Amendments. And they created some assemblage of democracy in the South. And, you know, most crucially for our interest today, the 15th Amendment established the right to vote and expanded the franchise to African American men. And that was a real kind of strategic consideration for Republicans. They were worried that after the end of the Civil War that if Democrats gained a foothold in the south again, they would reinstitute the same set of affairs that had caused the war to break out in the first place. And so the African American electorate was thought of as a bulwark against the reassertion of plantation power. And then, of course, the solidly Democratic south was very much opposed to this and couldn't do much about it until the end of Reconstruction. Then we start seeing the emergence of the familiar landscape of voter suppression. Things like poll taxes and grandfather clauses saying that if your grandfather hadn't been able to vote that you wouldn't be able to vote in a particular county either. And that's really the state of affairs well into the 20th century until we see the rise of the civil rights movement. And with it, you know, one of the key points of legislation There is the 1965 Voting Rights act, which is intended to protect the right to vote for populations that had historically been disfranchised in states where this had been a problem, and these were specifically states of the former Confederacy. In the modern context of it, this has become a big area of contention in 2013 in the challenge to the Voting Rights act, the Shelby v. Holder case, One of the contentions that was made was that the Voting Rights act was implicitly discriminatory against Southern whites by presuming that these states of the former Confederacy were more racist than others. And, of course, social science would point us to affirmative conclusion on that question, that, yes, you do see a more, even to this day, a more prevalent array of racist attitudes in the states of the former Confederacy than you see them in many other places. But on the flip side of that question, it almost becomes too narrow in that it excludes the ways in which voter suppression has metastasized and become a real concern in states that were not part of the Confederacy and states that were not even part of the South. And so we have concerns about voter suppression among Native Americans in North Dakota and, you know, concerns about what happened to the missing African American votes in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And really, this is a national question at this point.
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B
People have a hard time sometimes getting their head around the fact that the Republican Party eradicated slavery, got the 15th amendment passed and the other amendments you referred to.
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D
And.
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B
And it was the Democratic Party in the south that championed segregation, opposed the Civil Rights act and the Voting Rights Act. How did the two parties almost, you know, become mirror images of one another?
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D
Sure. You know, it's kind of a cynical argument because it pretends it was never this realignment in the middle third of the 20th century. Of course, famously, African Americans began voting for Democrats in 1932. And then really, the nail in the coffin of this transition is the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And in the middle third of the 20th century, there's competition. Things that we would find to be unusual in that there are advertisements. If you go back to African American newspapers, you can see advertisements taken out by the Republican Party saying, you know, face it, the Democrats are taking you for granted. You know, or in the Democratic Party taking out ads saying that Republicans will never really support your rights to freedom. And there's an actual competition between the two parties for the African American vote after 1964 with the civil Rights act, we see that realignment really kind of take on a new dimension, and it speeds up dramatically. And, you know, Lyndon B. Johnson is aware of that when he signs the 64 Civil Rights act, that the south will align itself with Republicans for the foreseeable future. And prophetically, he was right on that.
- [08:32]
B
So now maybe sort of bring us up to the present. And we saw a number of extraordinarily successful efforts to register minority voters. And they went out to the polls in big numbers in some of the states we mentioned at the top. Could you tell us now what is happening in states like Texas, Arizona, Tennessee, North Carolina?
- [08:54]
D
There are a few things. If you go back a little bit in 2008, one of the notable things, obviously is the election of the first African American president. But one of the notable footnotes for that election was that black women had the highest voter turnout of any demographic in the United states. And in 2012, the same thing happened that black women voted at a higher rate than any other group in the US this was alarming for people who were concerned that, you know, very high African American turnout would be bad for them electorally. And so since then, we've seen a series of legislative challenges, things that involved purging people who are on voting roles, people who have, if you haven't voted in the last election, things like very stringent ID laws and so on. And these took on a different tenor after the 2013 Shelby v. Holder case, which struck down the real enforcement capacity of the Voting Rights Act. And in some instances, there were legislatures that literally drafted up laws around voting. The afternoon that the Shelby decision came down. In the lawsuit that Stacey Abrams has filed in the wake of last youth gubernatorial election in Georgia, it alleges that this has been a kind of concerted effort to ensure that people do not have the right to vote. It makes it much more difficult for people to have the right to vote. There are trends that are happening kind of simultaneously and kind of dueling approach to what voting will look like in the United States. On the one hand, you see something that is kind of tremendously progressive. In Florida last year, the ballot initiative that gave the right to vote back to more than a million people who had felony conviction records. Well, just recently, the Florida legislature voted to create a financial barrier in that people who have any kind of civil lien or there's any kind of monetary aspect of compensation that is associated with them having done a prison sentence. If you have an outstanding debt, you will not be allowed to vote. And it has been criticized by people on the left as a poll tax. And in effect, that's what it really does. It, you know, says if you don't have enough money to pay this back, you will not be allowed to vote. And that's effectively the way that poll taxes Worked.
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What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too, Katie. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview. Conversations are fun. I want a shark that. That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
I want to go back to Stacey Abrams for a minute because you've spent some time with her in recent months. You interviewed her at that Brookings event, and she came so close to winning the Georgia governorship in 2018. So maybe talk a little bit more about what happened there and why she characterizes voter suppression as the real national emergency.
- [13:01]
D
So to understand what happened just last year, you have to go back a little bit further in Georgia politics. If you live in Georgia for any period of time, especially if you live in one of the more liberal areas of the state, you will invariably hear about the 500,000 unregistered black voters in the state. And it was easy to be skeptical about whether or not these people actually existed, because there was never any significant upsurge in African American participation. So was this a kind of statistical anomaly? Where were these people? They did not come out in 2008 to vote for Barack Obama, which led people to say maybe this is just a non organizable group of nonvoters in the state. And Stacey Abrams took a different tack to that. She said that there had never really been a concerted and sincere effort to bring those people into the fold. And that was what her campaign was going to do. She really did just went all in on voter registration and turnout. And so something miraculous happened in that election, which is that in the previous election, Jason Carter, who was the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, got about 1.1 million votes total. Last year, Stacey Abrams got about 1.3 million African American votes. And so she tremendously expanded the field. At the same time, there's a kind of counter narrative that's happening that doesn't begin, by the way, with Brian Kemp. He notably is the Secretary of State. He is in a obvious conflict of interest position in that he oversees an election in which he is one of the candidates. And there are purges. There are people who, if you have one letter, if you have a dash on your name and there's no dash on your ID or the kind of, if there's any variance between that and your official registered name, they will not allow you to vote. So this wasn't new. This is something that's been happening in Georgia politics for some time, and it happens in direct correlation to the changing demographics of the state. And so in some ways, what happened with Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp in the election last year was a microcosm of what's happening nationally in American politics, the issues of demographic change. This has become given a motivation to kind of tinker with what the electorate actually looks like, or in some ways, some instances do much more than tinker and outright create or craft an electorate that would allow you to be.
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B
You know, there's so much willful blindness going on here. You know, just this effort to pretend that these demographic and political trends aren't happening. And the other thing that this all reminds me of is, so Republicans say that their efforts to tighten requirements for voting are a way to combat voter fraud. They've said that basically forever voter fraud really isn't a political problem. And yet there was that truly alarming electoral interference by Russian hackers in 2016, and very serious ongoing concerns about how the going to go about it again in 2020. And we learned yesterday that Trump Cabinet members don't dare to raise the issue in the presence of Trump, fearing his rage more than the threat that these actions pose to our democracy.
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D
Yeah, it's one of the stranger aspects of what we've been seeing for the last two years. I was telling someone, I think we've reached the event horizon for hypocrisy. You know, there's just. It's difficult to conceive of a situation that would be more at variance with what the Republican Party has said its main concerns are. And to make this even a bit more bizarre, you know, there's been the kind of dispute which has been a mainstay of Donald Trump's political rhetoric going all the way back to the debates. He's saying, we don't know. If Russia is involved with this, then, you know, he's elected. And famously in the presence of Vladimir Putin says last year, I don't see any reason why it would be Russia, which is vetoing the ideas of the American intelligence community about who was responsible for this. But the other point of it that is even kind of more sharply contradictory is that reality winner, who is the young woman who was arrested for the unauthorized release of documents that appeared in the Intercept. She's in prison for releasing documents that pointed internal documents that pointed to Russian hackers infiltrating voting software.
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B
We should touch on briefly the fact that the Supreme Court has begun hearing arguments on whether to allow a citizenship question in the 2020 census. If it does get added, which seems probable given the conservative makeup of the court. Millions of people, I think it's six and a half million people might not be counted by the census. Or what kind of impact do you see that having on voters in the decades to come?
- [18:13]
D
There are overlapping themes here. Like there are lots of different current events and questions that we have that seem to be discrete issues, but they all have the electorate and the makeup of what the voting blocs of the United States will look like as a common theme. And the census is almost the thing that ties these things together. By placing the citizenship question on the census, it will predictably and reasonably make people more reluctant to participate in the census. And these are people who are documented, people who are born in the United States. Multiply that by people who are fearful because we have a very aggressive deportation policy. What the impact of that will be is going to be an undercount, so that when people begin drawing new congressional districts, they will have fewer people in places where there are actually many more people. And they will likely not have as much of an effect in rural areas or in areas that don't have significant immigrant populations. This is also, I think, can be understood as part of the sectionalism. I don't think that's too strong a word in the Civil War era sense of it, but it's the kind of sectionalism that Trump has enhanced and initiated against sanctuary cities. And so in places where there are significant populations of people who are undocumented, this is going to have a very significant effect and will likely reduce their political power.
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B
I want to end on a slightly more hopeful note. It isn't all bad news. Many states are expanding voting rights by increasing access to early and absentee voting and by encouraging automatic voter registration. How significant are those undertakings?
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D
Well, I think that they're significant. And I also think that, you know, I wrote earlier this year about H R1 and how it is really a kind of omnibus bill about American democracy. You know, strengthening the Voting Rights act, making it impossible for someone who is a Secretary of State to oversee an election in which he or she is a candidate, creating a more rigorous system of protection for balloting machines. It was almost a kind of grad grab bag of things that you would want if you were concerned about the protection of American democracy. You know, the fact that there was so much support for this in the House is another hopeful sign. And I think that it's important to bear in mind that there are that this is a contested situation, that we see the worst effects of it happening with the census and with the voter purges and so on. But there are lots of people who are increasingly aware of just how important it is to maintain access to the franchise for the maximum number of people in the country.
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B
Thanks so much, Jelani.
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D
Thanks.
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B
Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at the New Yorker, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, and the author of the Substance of Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast and find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program is produced by Alex barron for new yorker.com with assistance from Kylie Warner. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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E
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Coloursy, Wired's director of consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [22:01]
B
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [22:02]
E
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is about.
- [22:07]
B
The people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [22:10]
E
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics. Right? So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Dogecoin, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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D
From prx.