Pushkin. The first time I voted in the presidential election was November seventh, two. I can still remember that night, watching the results in my dorm room at Florida and M University. We rooted against George W. Bush, like we rooted against our football rivals, on the edge of our seats, shouting at the same TV. Like many black people in Florida, we were angry that Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jed Bush, had recently terminated the state's affirmative action programs, and like many Black Americans, we had heard about the disgraceful Willie Horton ad his father ran decades earlier on his way to the White House. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Newconka not only opposed to the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy and a robbery, stabbing him nineteen times. We viewed our ballots as lifeboats cast to save America from four more years of the Bushes. As the hours passed, we realized that Florida would determine the election's outcome and the nation's future. Shortly after our local polls closed, several news networks declared our gore the next president of the United States. When ours did, we turned off the TV, relieved and went back to our dorm rooms. The relief was welcome and short lived. I'm ibramex Kendy, and this is be anti racist. The next morning, I was shocked to learn that George W. Bush was narrowly winning the Florida race that had been called the night before. The election was now declared too close to call. As votes were recounted. In the weeks that followed, I heard story after story of voter suppression from classmates in their families back home. Stories of black citizens who registered but never received registration cards. Stories of polling locations being changed without warning. Stories of people who were unlawfully denied a ballot for showing up without a registration card they had never received in the first place. Stories of people waiting in line for hours and being ordered to leave the lines when the polls closed. Stories of hanging chads or uncounted votes and miscounted ballots. Gaston County, an hour down the road from FAMU, had both the highest percentage of black voters in the highest rate of rejected votes. Black voters were ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected. The New York Times would later conclude that this ballot disparity could not be explained by income, educational levels, or by hanging chads. There was only one explanation for the disparity, racism. On December twelfth, more than a month after election day, the US Supreme Court stopped Florida's recount. Almost two hundred thousand ballots were invalidated by Florida's election officials. With the help of his legal team, George Bush went on to win Florida and the White House by a mere five hundred and thirty seven votes. My first dance as an American voter was met with a stampede of racist voter suppression. Two decades later, that stampede has swept a nation. Republicans figure that suppressing the votes of their political opponents can counteract their failure to attract the majority of voters. Their cries of voter fraud echo the great lie many former slaveholders use to destroy the voting power of black and working class white people in the late nineteenth century and allow Republicans to claim that new restrictions are needed to protect the integrity of the democratic process. An election provided my anti racist wake up call, and now two decades later, a new generation is waking up to just how fraud and how corrupt and how racist these Republican elected officials pushing these new voter restrictions truly are welcome. To Be Anti Racist an action podcast where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, How to free humanity through the unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy. On Be Anti Racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible, and how to bring into being what modern humans have never known, a just and equitable world. You ready, let's roll. Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti lynching law. We will buy the power of our vote right the law on the statue of Books of the South, and bringing in to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of blood feesht de mobs and to the calculated good deeds of orderless citizens. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Gave that speech in nineteen fifty seven. It would be a long, hard journey for him, for so many anti racist activists to the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five, And as I witnessed in the election of two thousand and many are witnessing today that journey is ongoing. These battles over the vote are a side show. There are few, if any, storylines more central to American history. That's why I'm grateful for journalists like Ari Berman. He is, without question, one of the leading journalists documenting voter suppression in the United States today. He is the author Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, which chronicles the history of voter suppression after the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. He covers voting rights at Mother Jones and is the perfect person to anchor a conversation on voter suppression and the type of anti racist policies. We need to build a multiracial democracy. Ari. I'm so glad we're able to sit down and have this conversation. It feels like the nation is in a place that you have been pointing towards and speaking about, really certainly since your book Give Us the Ballot came out six years ago, but even before then, and it seems as if on some level, the American people are waking up to what you've been writing about for quite some time. I think you're right. One of the reasons they're waking up, though, is because of the sad fact that voter suppression is not a thing of the past, and it's in a lot of ways the same thing with your work. Right, people are waking up to the reality of racism and white supremacy because these things are all too evident these days, and in many ways, your writing was ahead of its time, and I think the same thing happened with a lot of the stuff I wrote about. When I started covering voter suppression a decade ago, people didn't even realize that voter suppression was still a thing. And when I wrote my book about the history of the Voting Rights Act in twenty fifteen, a lot of people weren't even aware that the Voting Rights Act had been weakened, or that there were new voter suppression efforts in the wake of the efforts to weaken the Voting Rights Act. So I think there's a lot more awareness in general about the fact that voting rights are under threat. But part of the reason there's more awareness is because voting rights are under threat, and that's the disturbing and less hopeful part of the story. Yeah, definitely, So certainly there's a growing number of people who are becoming aware. But I'm just curious, since your awareness came long before the awareness of so many people, what sparked your personal awareness. I became aware of the issue of voting rights in the attack on voting rights about a decade ago, And this was after the twenty ten election and a bunch of states flipped over from blue to red, places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and North Carolina. And the first thing all of these newly Republican controlled states did was passed new laws to make it harder to vote. This was back in twenty eleven, and it wasn't getting a lot of coverage. This is when we saw the first real voter id laws, efforts to cut back on early voting, efforts to close polling places, purge the voter rolls, things like that, and it clearly seemed to me to be an attempt to try to nullify the election of the first black president and to try to create an electorate that would be older, wider, more servative, as opposed to younger, more diverse, more progressive. And then when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, this was after the twenty twelve election, and they released the decision in June of twenty thirteen gutting the Voting Rights Act, I became a lot more interested in the history of the Voting Rights Act, what it had done, and also why it was being challenged. That really is what led me deeper into the research for my book, Give Us the Ballot. And then it just became a much bigger issue once the Supreme Court had weakened the law. Your book and others have since documented that almost as quickly as it was passed, that attack on the Voting Rights Act began, and it's been policies and practices and ways to undermine it and ways to make it harder for people to vote ever since. But why do you think so many people had not seen and even so many scholars had not documented the attacks Act. I think a lot of people for many years took the Voting Rights Act for granted. I know I took it for granted before I started reporting on it. I thought there was a general consensus in favor of protecting the right to vote. And it was only when I saw these new restrictions on voting rights, and when I saw the effort to challenge the Voting Rights Act, that I became a lot more aware of the history behind it and realized that basically, not only was there a titanic struggle to pass the Voting Rights Act, but there was a huge struggle just to maintain and expand it over the next fifty years after Selma, after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August six, nineteen sixty five, I think the general perception was, Okay, well, we solve that problem, let's move on to the next one. And so there were voting rights lawyers, there were voting rights historians, there were experts, but it wasn't really thought of as a central civil rights struggle. And I think It really took the Shelby County Versus Holder decision in twenty thirteen and then the aftermath of that decision to realize for many people that the fight for voting rights wasn't over, and then in many ways it remained a very big and titanic civil rights struggle. You know, in my work a document how political or economic or even cultural self interest leads to racist policies like voter suppression. But then typically a justification has to be born to rationalize and normalize and makes sense of those policies. And in your work you've documented how the principal justification has been this idea of voter fraud. Yeah, invoking voter fraud to justify voter suppression has been around for a very long time and has a really ugly history in this country. I mean, that's what in many ways was invoked at the end of Reconstruction by white segregationists to justify literacy tests and poll te and things like that. Yes, they were explicit about the fact that they wanted to uphold white supremacy, but one of the reasons why they said they wanted to uphold white supremacy is that they believed that Blacks and others had sullied the ballot box through fraud, and so they were restoring the integrity of the election. You heard that argument be made against the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five. If you go back and listen to what George Wallace and other governors were saying about the Voting Rights Act. They were saying that it was going to lead to widespread fraud, bringing in uneducated African Americans to the ballot box, illiterates who couldn't be trusted with the ballot. That was an ideological argument, but it was also one that really had no basis in fact. And so when they wanted to once again try to suppress the vote, they had to have a justification for doing so, and so voter fraud became their justification, and they tried really hard to find evidence for it. They've never been able to find any major evidence for it. But I think it's been one of those things where if you just say something enough times, people start to believe it. Yeah, And I think that's what happened with this. Approximately how many people overall voted last year and how many documented cases of voter fraud were there in the twenty twenty election. So about one hundred and sixty one million people voted in the twenty twenty election. It was the highest turnout in one hundred and twenty years. And as far as I know, I have only seen two documented cases of voter fraud in the entire election. It was two people say two million or two two cases? Did I say two million? No? I just want to make sure, because you know, we've been hearing about all this widespread voter fraud, and so one hundred and sixty million people voted and you're saying there was you've only heard of two documented cases. I've heard of two documented cases in Pennsylvania where people wrote in dead relatives voting for Donald Trump. Those are the only two documented cases I've seen. I'm sure there is more under investigation. But when it came time for the Trump campaign to file at sixty lawsuits trying to overturn the integrity of the election, which is when they would put all their evidence on the table, they presented zero cases over and over and over of actual frauds. So there was a tremendous amount of allegations of fraud, but just an infinitesimal number of actual documented instances and that's what I find so interesting. The rhetoric is so overblown when you compare it to the actual numbers in reality of how rare voter fraud is in this country, and that voter fraud is now justifying, from my understanding, hundreds of bills in what forty seven states? Yeah, three hundred and sixty one new restrictions on voting have been introduced in forty seven in states in the first three months of this year. I'm sure that number will be much higher by the time people are listening to this. But it's just incredible the extent to which the Republicans and Trump in particular, manufactured this crisis and then pointed to the crisis they manufactured as a reason to introduce these sweeping restrictions on the ballot. I mean, it was incredibly cynical from the very beginning. First, you try to undermine people's faith in the electoral process so they don't vote in the first place. Then when they vote, you try to throw out their votes. And then when you can't throw out their votes, you then make it so that they have a harder time voting in the next election. I mean, this is a strategy, or this is a plan here. This is a roadmap here. I think a lot of people are not connecting one to the other to the other, and so I see a clear narrative from efforts to make it harder to vote before the twenty twenty election. Efforts are trying to throw out votes, the violent insurrection at the capitol to nullify votes, and then the effort and all of these state legislatures around the country to try to make it harder to vote in future elections and basically to try to succeed legislatively where Trump failed through the courts and through just outright intimidation. And that's really what reminds me of the Jim Crow era, because in the Jim Crow era, first they relied on violence and fraud to keep Blacks away from the polls. But then they realized that was too difficult, so they actually had to enshrine all of these things into law. And it was only when the literacy tests and the poll taxes and the property requirements of the white primaries were enshrined into law through so called legal means, that then they really succeeded in disenfranchising black voters. And they succeeded in disenfranchising them, not through illegal means, although they obviously did through violence and fraud and intimidation, But it was really through the legal process, through state legislatures, through the courts that they succeeded in the ultimate disenfranchisement. And I think that's what makes the story so chilling, and I think that's what is so concerning about what's happening today. Are they going to succeed through legal means where they didn't succeed through illegal means. I'm Ari Berman, and you are listening to be anti racist with Abram X Kendy. Obviously there is a clear attack on the ability of the American people, not just people who vote Democrat, even people who vote Republican, people of all racial groups. It's harder for people to vote now. Of course, black and brown and Indigenous people due to these voter restrictions, it's even harder for them to vote. But I'm curious, how can we re establish and strengthen American democracy. Well, I think there's two really important pieces of legislation that are moving their way through Congress. The People Act, which would put in place sweeping protections for voting rights so that every state would have things like automatic registration, election day registration, two weeks of early voting. There would be lots of protections for voters no matter what state you live in. And then there's a companion piece of legislation, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to restore the part of the Voting Rights Act of the Supreme Court gut it in twenty thirteen. And I think that's critically important as well, because there are certain states like Georgia that just discriminate over and over again. So it's both a carrot and sticks approach that for the people. Act would put in place a lot of reforms, a lot of pro voter policies that would help people, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would block the worst policies from emerging from the states that are repeat offenders, definitely, and especially with the Lewis Act, some of the states or jurisdictions that would apply would be those who have discriminated over the course of time, and others would be new discriminators. I'm reminded of a piece that you wrote following the twenty sixteen election in which you specifically looked at Wisconsin and voter suppression policies there and the role they may have played in Trump's narrow victory. So I'm curious, what are some of those potential new places that you think will fall under that act. Well, what the law does is it says that if a state has a certain number of violations found by the courts over the last twenty years, it can be covered under the new Voting Rights Act. So if a state like Wisconsin which doesn't have the same history of discrimination in voting that a Georgia or Mississippi would, for example, but if it's found to have discriminated a lot in the more recent past, then they could once again be covered under the Voting Rights Act. And the other thing that the bill does is it says that certain changes have an impact in terms of discriminating against voters of color. So, for example, if you close a polling place in an area with lots of minority voters, that would have to be covered under the Voting Rights Act no matter what state it's in. They're basically saying some states will have to approve all of their voting changes because they are repeat offenders places like Georgia. But certain changes, no matter what state you're in, have the impact of discriminating against voters of color, and therefore you're going to need to get approval for that even if you're not one of those covered areas. So it looks more holistically at how voting discrimination works. The places that have always discriminated are doing discrimination still Texas, Georgia, Mississippi. They're always going to be covered. But also this has spread. This has spread to places like Wisconsin, or it's spread to places like Ohio that don't have the same history terms of Jim Crowe, things like that. But at the same time, they're doing a lot of similar voter suppression techniques in a lot of ways. Southern bread voter suppression has spread to the North under Republican control. What do you think is still needed to ensure that every single American, no matter their background, has the ability to easily vote in this country. Well, I think if those two pieces of legislation passed, I'd be a lot happier. But I still think that, you know, listen, they're still going to find ways to try to get around it, just like Southern states in the eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties found a way to get around the fifteenth Amendment. I mean the legislation was there, but it wasn't enforced, and it had some loopholes they were able to exploit. I think what we really need is a fundamental guarantee of voting rights in this country that says that you have the right to vote except for X, Y Z. Very good reason, because we have things that you can't do in this country. We supposedly can't disenfranchise people based on their race, or based on their age, or based on their gender. Now and practice, those things happen, but we don't have anything just broadly guarantees the right to vote. And I think that's one reason why voting rights remain such a contested issue in our country, because we've never really put it into our constitution to protect it. If you look at the debates over the fifteenth Amendment, there was a more expansive version that was written that would have banned voter suppression not just based on race, but based on class and education as well. But the point is that the fact that the fifteenth Amendment wasn't as broad as it could have been left loopholes for voter suppression. I think that's still the case today when these voting cases go before the Supreme Court, their challenge under the fourteenth amdent, their challenge over the fifteenth Amendment. But there's no amendment that just says, you, guys, shouldn't make it harder to vote unless you have a really good reason to do so. I mean, you would have to have a more eloquent drafting, ever, But that's basically what I'm saying. What we need. Voting rights are such a fundamental right that they really should not be abridge unless there's a really good reason to do so. We don't have that language in our constitution. I'm trying to think of an example. I was born in the United States. Should I date myself, I'll date myself in nineteen eighty two, That's what I was. So that means, oh my gosh, which what's your birthday? May first, nineteen eighty two. Oh man, you're an old man. I was born in August thirteenth. So you know, both of us we are guaranteed citizenship since we were born in the United States. In other words, that can't be taken away from us. To compare it to what you're saying, you're stating that a citizen, one of their guarantees of citizenship would be the right to vote and it couldnt be taken away like this whole idea of even registration you have to register to vote, that you could lose your vote when you go to prison. You're saying that that would not be possible. We would always have our right to vote. And then you're also saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that it would clearly state that any effort that precludes a person from voting makes it difficul quote for a person is unconstitutional. Yes, and I guess I would say I would like the right to vote to be looked at more like the First Amendment. We're born with freedom of speech. It's not conferred upon us. We don't get freedom of speech when we're eighteen. Right, we have it based on a guarantee in our constitution. But I have to affirmatively register to vote when I turn eighteen, I have to possibly show other forms of documentation depending on what state I live in. If I commit a crime, I could be stripped of the right to vote, potentially for life, depending on what state I live in. If I have to move, I have to reregister to vote. I have to affirmatively seek out what my polling place is. All of those kind of things. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have to do anything to be able to qualify for a voting, but I think it would be a big shift in terms of voter participation if we said that voting is a right that can't be taken away from you. In Australia, they have mandatory voting, and the reason they have mandatory voting is they don't view voting as a right or a privilege. They viewed voting as a responsibility, that it's just something that you do. I would like to think we don't need that, we don't need to force people to do it. But it's an interesting experiment in that if voting is compulsory, there's no such thing as voter suppression. Yeah, the state can't say you have to vote and then prevent you from doing so. I think in America we think, oh, we're doing everything better than everywhere else, but in fact, our political system, in our voting system, is probably more screwed up and backwards than virtually any other advanced industrial democracy. With this past election, many of the people who voted, of course, voted absentee, and so obviously there's been efforts to roll back in Republican led states, the ability to absentee vote ords it harder. Some people have proposed, well, we should be able to vote in every way we can bank, which then brings in the controversial. Should we be able to vote online and would that then make voting we're accessible for young people? What are the types of policies and practices we can put in place to ensure every single person is voting well. I would say that we should automatically register people to vote in the same way that when you or I turned eighteen, we are automatically enrolled on the Selective Service if there was ever another draft for war. I think the government knows enough about us to be able to do that. I think that people should have as many options to vote as possible, meaning that we should be able to vote by mail and have ballots automatically sent to us. I think we should have early voting so that we don't vote on a Tuesday in November because that's when farmers used to bring their crops to the market in the eighteen hundreds. I think it's a very integrated system, and also obviously some people are still going to want to vote the traditional way on election day. I think online voting is really tricky in an era of hacking and disinformation. Right now, it sounds good theoretically, but I think it would pose a lot of security problems, just given how insecure it seems like some of our systems are. But I think in general, there's this expectation that voting should be so much more inconvenient than other things we do. I mean, people rarely wait two, three, four eleven hours to get money out of a bank, but we're just told that you have to do that to be able to vote, or we can do all sorts of things on our phones. But in Texas, for example, you can't even register to vote online. And there's hundreds of thousands of kids that turn eighteen in Texas every single year and they can't even register to vote on their phones or even their computers. I mean, that's totally anachronistic in terms of talking about modern day technology. So I think the rules can go a long way. And then I think at the end of the day, people are going to have to have something to vote. Four people then have to be convinced that their vote matters, that their vote will be able to change things, and things like jerrymandering that reduces the choice that people have the fact that the political system is so unrepresentative that voters of color have much less representation all across the board than their percentages in society. A lot of people still look at the system and still see a bunch of old white guys running things. And to some extent that's still true if you look at the Supreme Court, or you look at even who the president is, or you look at who the leaders are in the Senator of the House. By and larger political system is still run by old white people, and I think that's something that turns a lot of people off as well. And so, in other words, it's not just about ensuring everyone has the right to vote, that it could never be taken away from them, and ensuring that it's easy for every single person to vote. But the other side of it is candidates. And indeed, last year I wrote a series of pieces in The Atlantic on what I called the other swing voter. Yeah, that was great. Of course, there's a traditional swing voter that political pundits talk about, who are people who swing from voting Republican to Democrat, And those people are disproportionately white and disproportionately older. So I wrote about the other swing voter, and these are people who typically swing from voting to not voting, many of them swinging from voting Democrat to not voting yea. And typically it's based on the candidate. These other swing voters are more likely to be younger and especially people of color. And so how do we thereby create through policies ways in which we can have more candidates who would be attracted and even seek to swing the other swing voter, especially in this political environment when the traditional swing voter that's white and older seems to be dominating our political discourse. Well, the fact is, if you vote your other radar of Candida, but if you haven't voted, it's almost like you don't exist to political campaigns. They don't try to spend any time trying to get your vote, and then it kind of becomes a self defeating cycle. And I think if you look at people that aren't voting, they are buy in large progressive in terms of what they care about, but they're disenchanted with the political system. I think a lot of them think that there's too much money in the political system, that they candidates don't reflect them, that the candidates are bought off. That doesn't really matter what party you are, because there's going to be the same outcomes at the end of the day. That's why things like in the For the People Act they have public financing of congressional campaigns because I think money is a huge barrier to new people getting involved. I think it's often the Aana Presses of the world, the Corey Bushes of the world. They don't have money to run for office. They don't sometimes come with communities that are well resourced. They are often taking on established candidates, they're insurgent candidates, or the party machines aren't funding them. And it's very hard if you're a young black man or a young Black woman, or a young Tino man or young Latino woman to be able to get those kind of resources and to be able to get known and work your way at the ranks to then become a city council member or a county commissioner, or a mayor or a congress person. I mean, we're seeing shifts in this, but the shifts are happening slowly, so I think that's one thing that needs to change. One of the things that was fascinating to me about the civil rights movement in the nineteen sixties was people decided to go from protesting to running for office. Right you had the John Lewis's, the Andrew Youngs, they got involved in politics, and of course that required compromise, right they weren't going to be the same politicians like they were when they were in SNICK or when they were in SELC or when they were in corps. But I think in a lot of ways, some of the ground was laid in terms of these protests, in these movements in the past few years to get the next generation of people to want to be in office. And some of them aren't going to want to be in office because they don't see the political system changing things. But I think you're going to have the Coreys, the AOC's, people like that who come out of an organizing background and say we're going to take what we learned in organizing and we're going to bring it to politics. And I think that's the kind of thing that can start to reach people that think about voting, that they are turned off by the political system and might care about things like a higher minimum wage or legalizing marijuana or reforming the criminal justice system that often really aren't on the table in the quote unquote mainstream conversations that we have about politics. And of course there's a certain segment of Americans who are like, you know, I just don't do politics right especially now. It's so messy, it's so divisive, people are so angry, and so that's just not me. And oftentimes it seems as if some of those people who are saying that would actually make great elected officials. I think that what people see as they see, if we don't get something instantly, then we can't get it at all. And sometimes things take a long time. I mean, just look at people's views of criminal justice now first twenty years ago, completely night and day in terms of how we talk about the issue, how Democrats talk about the issue. So you can change politics by being in the political process, but you can also change politics by changing the scope of what is possible. That's one thing that I think is really important. I think that's one thing that a lot of the young activists and organizers can do right now. Wow, and let's say you're not necessarily an organizer or an activist, but you also recognize that voter suppression policies are not just a racist attack on democracy, but preventing us as a nation from getting some of those policy proposals that are taken for granted in other nations. What can they do to be part of this struggle to really defend America democracy. I think that you have to get involved in your own communities. If you're in a place like Georgia or Texas and there's fights going on right now, you can obviously call your legislators. You can get involved in protests. You can get involved in terms of working with different groups, whether it's the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or the League of Women Voters. There are lots of different groups that are working on this issue. I also think that you can just get involved in your own backyard. I mean, the system is not perfect no matter where you live. There's always things that can be improved, and there's always new people that can get involved in the process. I think one of the really cool things that happened in twenty twenty was a lot of people volunteered to be poll workers. And once you get involved in the process, it's a lot easier to stay involved. Understanding that what happens to our democracy affects so many other things, and that it's very, very hard to make progress on any issue if so many people are frozen out of participating. And so that's why I think it's such an important issue, because I really view it as central to all other rights, and it's very hard to protect lots of different rights if the right to vote itself is not protected and expanded. Definitely, and Ari, I'm so glad we were able to have this conversation. You know, people when they ask me who should I be reading to understand voter suppression in this country, of course I always suggest you and your work. You know, I think you're the premier journalist in the country covering voter suppression. So I'm thankful for your work. I'm thankful for cal Anderson holding it down in academia, of course, Stacy Abrahams holding it down in the realm of activism. And I'm hopeful that people realize that path forward that we've never truly achieved as a nation, a multiracial, multi ethnic, multicultural democracy where we all feel free, where we all have one voice, where that single voice is acquired and we're all speaking to what's best for our communities. That's really what we're trying to achieve. Thank you. So much. I really appreciate the kind words, and I'm really thankful for your work, and I think you opened the eyes of a lot of people. You were talking about these uncomfortable issues way before it was cool, before people were posting black squares, before it was a trendy thing to do. You were deep in this work. So I really appreciate you having me on and hopefully we'll get to do it again soon. Definitely. All right, take care, Thanks Abram, great to talk to you. Shortly after I spoke with Ari, a video of a private meeting of Heritage Action for America's surfaced. After seeing the leak video, Ari and his colleague Nick Sergey released a story that exposed the conservative Heritage Foundation's rolled in shaping and even drafting voter suppression bills across the country. The Heritage Foundation has actively promoted voter suppression since its inception in nineteen seventy three. Co founder Paul Wyrick admitted way back in nineteen eighty that he didn't want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote as a matter of how fact on leverage and the elections, quite candidate goes as the voting populace goes down. Wyrick's founding dreams have come true. The Heritage Foundation authored several provisions of the recent voter suppression law in Georgia, including sections that inhibit mail in voting and election administration and oversight. Heritage also drafted provisions for similar bills in battleground states like Iowa. In Texas, Heritage is leading the fight against HR one, a bill that would protect voters by implementing nationwide anti racist measures like automatic election day registration, two weeks of early voting, in the expansion of mail in ballots. In the leak video, Heritage Action for America leaders bragged about their role in recent voter suppression laws. We did it quickly, and we did it quietly. Honestly, nobody noticed. The executive director even admitted Heritage uses misleading tactics to deliver their proposals to state lawmakers. Or we have a sentinel on our behalf. Give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots you know, from the bottom up type of vibe. Voter suppression isn't just a war on voters of color, It's a war on voters. Through their reporting, arian Nick showed that the movement to suppress votes reflect not the will of the people fearful of voter fraud, but the will of the wealthy and powerful, fearful of American voters. I want to be clear about what just happened on the Senate floor. Every single Senate Republican just voted against starting debate, starting debate on legislation to tech to Americans voting rights. Republican state legislatures across the country are engaged in the most sweeping voters suppression in eighty years. Capitalizing on and catalyzed by Donald Trump's big lie, these state governments are making it harder for younger, poorer, urban, and non white Americans to vote. The fight continues. If you're living in a state trying to pass stricter voting laws, call your legislators, demand their opposition. Volunteer and donate to organizations combating voter suppression, like the League of Women Voters in Fair Fight in Black Voters Matter. Now is the time to do more. Now is the time to fight for a multiracial democracy. Now is the time to be anti racist. Be Anti Racist is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It is written and hosted by doctor Ebram x Hindy and produced by Alexandra Garrattin with associate producer Brittany Brown. Our engineer has been Talliday. Our editor is Julia Barton and our show runners Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers Arelie tim Willad and Mio Lobell Manny. Thanks to Tammy Winn and doctor HEATHERN. Sandford at the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University for all of their help at Pushing, and thanks to Heathern Fame, Carlie Migliori, John Schnaris, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r Ebram and on Instagram at ebrahm x K. You can find Pushing on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods. You can sign up for our news that are at pushkin dot fm to find more Pushkin podcast listen on a heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'd like to listen.

Pushkin. The first time I voted in the presidential election was November seventh, two. I can still remember that night, watching the results in my dorm room at Florida and M University. We rooted against George W. Bush, like we rooted against our football rivals, on the edge of our seats, shouting at the same TV. Like many black people in Florida, we were angry that Bush's brother, Florida Governor Jed Bush, had recently terminated the state's affirmative action programs, and like many Black Americans, we had heard about the disgraceful Willie Horton ad his father ran decades earlier on his way to the White House. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Newconka not only opposed to the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy and a robbery, stabbing him nineteen times. We viewed our ballots as lifeboats cast to save America from four more years of the Bushes. As the hours passed, we realized that Florida would determine the election's outcome and the nation's future. Shortly after our local polls closed, several news networks declared our gore the next president of the United States. When ours did, we turned off the TV, relieved and went back to our dorm rooms. The relief was welcome and short lived. I'm ibramex Kendy, and this is be anti racist. The next morning, I was shocked to learn that George W. Bush was narrowly winning the Florida race that had been called the night before. The election was now declared too close to call. As votes were recounted. In the weeks that followed, I heard story after story of voter suppression from classmates in their families back home. Stories of black citizens who registered but never received registration cards. Stories of polling locations being changed without warning. Stories of people who were unlawfully denied a ballot for showing up without a registration card they had never received in the first place. Stories of people waiting in line for hours and being ordered to leave the lines when the polls closed. Stories of hanging chads or uncounted votes and miscounted ballots. Gaston County, an hour down the road from FAMU, had both the highest percentage of black voters in the highest rate of rejected votes. Black voters were ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected. The New York Times would later conclude that this ballot disparity could not be explained by income, educational levels, or by hanging chads. There was only one explanation for the disparity, racism. On December twelfth, more than a month after election day, the US Supreme Court stopped Florida's recount. Almost two hundred thousand ballots were invalidated by Florida's election officials. With the help of his legal team, George Bush went on to win Florida and the White House by a mere five hundred and thirty seven votes. My first dance as an American voter was met with a stampede of racist voter suppression. Two decades later, that stampede has swept a nation. Republicans figure that suppressing the votes of their political opponents can counteract their failure to attract the majority of voters. Their cries of voter fraud echo the great lie many former slaveholders use to destroy the voting power of black and working class white people in the late nineteenth century and allow Republicans to claim that new restrictions are needed to protect the integrity of the democratic process. An election provided my anti racist wake up call, and now two decades later, a new generation is waking up to just how fraud and how corrupt and how racist these Republican elected officials pushing these new voter restrictions truly are welcome. To Be Anti Racist an action podcast where we discuss how to diagnose, dismantle, and abolish racism, how to save humanity from the divisiveness of racist ideas and the destructiveness of racist power and policy, How to free humanity through the unity of anti racist ideas and the constructiveness of anti racist power and policy. On Be Anti Racist, we discuss how to make the impossible possible, and how to bring into being what modern humans have never known, a just and equitable world. You ready, let's roll. Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti lynching law. We will buy the power of our vote right the law on the statue of Books of the South, and bringing in to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of blood feesht de mobs and to the calculated good deeds of orderless citizens. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Gave that speech in nineteen fifty seven. It would be a long, hard journey for him, for so many anti racist activists to the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five, And as I witnessed in the election of two thousand and many are witnessing today that journey is ongoing. These battles over the vote are a side show. There are few, if any, storylines more central to American history. That's why I'm grateful for journalists like Ari Berman. He is, without question, one of the leading journalists documenting voter suppression in the United States today. He is the author Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, which chronicles the history of voter suppression after the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five. He covers voting rights at Mother Jones and is the perfect person to anchor a conversation on voter suppression and the type of anti racist policies. We need to build a multiracial democracy. Ari. I'm so glad we're able to sit down and have this conversation. It feels like the nation is in a place that you have been pointing towards and speaking about, really certainly since your book Give Us the Ballot came out six years ago, but even before then, and it seems as if on some level, the American people are waking up to what you've been writing about for quite some time. I think you're right. One of the reasons they're waking up, though, is because of the sad fact that voter suppression is not a thing of the past, and it's in a lot of ways the same thing with your work. Right, people are waking up to the reality of racism and white supremacy because these things are all too evident these days, and in many ways, your writing was ahead of its time, and I think the same thing happened with a lot of the stuff I wrote about. When I started covering voter suppression a decade ago, people didn't even realize that voter suppression was still a thing. And when I wrote my book about the history of the Voting Rights Act in twenty fifteen, a lot of people weren't even aware that the Voting Rights Act had been weakened, or that there were new voter suppression efforts in the wake of the efforts to weaken the Voting Rights Act. So I think there's a lot more awareness in general about the fact that voting rights are under threat. But part of the reason there's more awareness is because voting rights are under threat, and that's the disturbing and less hopeful part of the story. Yeah, definitely, So certainly there's a growing number of people who are becoming aware. But I'm just curious, since your awareness came long before the awareness of so many people, what sparked your personal awareness. I became aware of the issue of voting rights in the attack on voting rights about a decade ago, And this was after the twenty ten election and a bunch of states flipped over from blue to red, places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and North Carolina. And the first thing all of these newly Republican controlled states did was passed new laws to make it harder to vote. This was back in twenty eleven, and it wasn't getting a lot of coverage. This is when we saw the first real voter id laws, efforts to cut back on early voting, efforts to close polling places, purge the voter rolls, things like that, and it clearly seemed to me to be an attempt to try to nullify the election of the first black president and to try to create an electorate that would be older, wider, more servative, as opposed to younger, more diverse, more progressive. And then when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, this was after the twenty twelve election, and they released the decision in June of twenty thirteen gutting the Voting Rights Act, I became a lot more interested in the history of the Voting Rights Act, what it had done, and also why it was being challenged. That really is what led me deeper into the research for my book, Give Us the Ballot. And then it just became a much bigger issue once the Supreme Court had weakened the law. Your book and others have since documented that almost as quickly as it was passed, that attack on the Voting Rights Act began, and it's been policies and practices and ways to undermine it and ways to make it harder for people to vote ever since. But why do you think so many people had not seen and even so many scholars had not documented the attacks Act. I think a lot of people for many years took the Voting Rights Act for granted. I know I took it for granted before I started reporting on it. I thought there was a general consensus in favor of protecting the right to vote. And it was only when I saw these new restrictions on voting rights, and when I saw the effort to challenge the Voting Rights Act, that I became a lot more aware of the history behind it and realized that basically, not only was there a titanic struggle to pass the Voting Rights Act, but there was a huge struggle just to maintain and expand it over the next fifty years after Selma, after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August six, nineteen sixty five, I think the general perception was, Okay, well, we solve that problem, let's move on to the next one. And so there were voting rights lawyers, there were voting rights historians, there were experts, but it wasn't really thought of as a central civil rights struggle. And I think It really took the Shelby County Versus Holder decision in twenty thirteen and then the aftermath of that decision to realize for many people that the fight for voting rights wasn't over, and then in many ways it remained a very big and titanic civil rights struggle. You know, in my work a document how political or economic or even cultural self interest leads to racist policies like voter suppression. But then typically a justification has to be born to rationalize and normalize and makes sense of those policies. And in your work you've documented how the principal justification has been this idea of voter fraud. Yeah, invoking voter fraud to justify voter suppression has been around for a very long time and has a really ugly history in this country. I mean, that's what in many ways was invoked at the end of Reconstruction by white segregationists to justify literacy tests and poll te and things like that. Yes, they were explicit about the fact that they wanted to uphold white supremacy, but one of the reasons why they said they wanted to uphold white supremacy is that they believed that Blacks and others had sullied the ballot box through fraud, and so they were restoring the integrity of the election. You heard that argument be made against the Voting Rights Act in nineteen sixty five. If you go back and listen to what George Wallace and other governors were saying about the Voting Rights Act. They were saying that it was going to lead to widespread fraud, bringing in uneducated African Americans to the ballot box, illiterates who couldn't be trusted with the ballot. That was an ideological argument, but it was also one that really had no basis in fact. And so when they wanted to once again try to suppress the vote, they had to have a justification for doing so, and so voter fraud became their justification, and they tried really hard to find evidence for it. They've never been able to find any major evidence for it. But I think it's been one of those things where if you just say something enough times, people start to believe it. Yeah, And I think that's what happened with this. Approximately how many people overall voted last year and how many documented cases of voter fraud were there in the twenty twenty election. So about one hundred and sixty one million people voted in the twenty twenty election. It was the highest turnout in one hundred and twenty years. And as far as I know, I have only seen two documented cases of voter fraud in the entire election. It was two people say two million or two two cases? Did I say two million? No? I just want to make sure, because you know, we've been hearing about all this widespread voter fraud, and so one hundred and sixty million people voted and you're saying there was you've only heard of two documented cases. I've heard of two documented cases in Pennsylvania where people wrote in dead relatives voting for Donald Trump. Those are the only two documented cases I've seen. I'm sure there is more under investigation. But when it came time for the Trump campaign to file at sixty lawsuits trying to overturn the integrity of the election, which is when they would put all their evidence on the table, they presented zero cases over and over and over of actual frauds. So there was a tremendous amount of allegations of fraud, but just an infinitesimal number of actual documented instances and that's what I find so interesting. The rhetoric is so overblown when you compare it to the actual numbers in reality of how rare voter fraud is in this country, and that voter fraud is now justifying, from my understanding, hundreds of bills in what forty seven states? Yeah, three hundred and sixty one new restrictions on voting have been introduced in forty seven in states in the first three months of this year. I'm sure that number will be much higher by the time people are listening to this. But it's just incredible the extent to which the Republicans and Trump in particular, manufactured this crisis and then pointed to the crisis they manufactured as a reason to introduce these sweeping restrictions on the ballot. I mean, it was incredibly cynical from the very beginning. First, you try to undermine people's faith in the electoral process so they don't vote in the first place. Then when they vote, you try to throw out their votes. And then when you can't throw out their votes, you then make it so that they have a harder time voting in the next election. I mean, this is a strategy, or this is a plan here. This is a roadmap here. I think a lot of people are not connecting one to the other to the other, and so I see a clear narrative from efforts to make it harder to vote before the twenty twenty election. Efforts are trying to throw out votes, the violent insurrection at the capitol to nullify votes, and then the effort and all of these state legislatures around the country to try to make it harder to vote in future elections and basically to try to succeed legislatively where Trump failed through the courts and through just outright intimidation. And that's really what reminds me of the Jim Crow era, because in the Jim Crow era, first they relied on violence and fraud to keep Blacks away from the polls. But then they realized that was too difficult, so they actually had to enshrine all of these things into law. And it was only when the literacy tests and the poll taxes and the property requirements of the white primaries were enshrined into law through so called legal means, that then they really succeeded in disenfranchising black voters. And they succeeded in disenfranchising them, not through illegal means, although they obviously did through violence and fraud and intimidation, But it was really through the legal process, through state legislatures, through the courts that they succeeded in the ultimate disenfranchisement. And I think that's what makes the story so chilling, and I think that's what is so concerning about what's happening today. Are they going to succeed through legal means where they didn't succeed through illegal means. I'm Ari Berman, and you are listening to be anti racist with Abram X Kendy. Obviously there is a clear attack on the ability of the American people, not just people who vote Democrat, even people who vote Republican, people of all racial groups. It's harder for people to vote now. Of course, black and brown and Indigenous people due to these voter restrictions, it's even harder for them to vote. But I'm curious, how can we re establish and strengthen American democracy. Well, I think there's two really important pieces of legislation that are moving their way through Congress. The People Act, which would put in place sweeping protections for voting rights so that every state would have things like automatic registration, election day registration, two weeks of early voting. There would be lots of protections for voters no matter what state you live in. And then there's a companion piece of legislation, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, to restore the part of the Voting Rights Act of the Supreme Court gut it in twenty thirteen. And I think that's critically important as well, because there are certain states like Georgia that just discriminate over and over again. So it's both a carrot and sticks approach that for the people. Act would put in place a lot of reforms, a lot of pro voter policies that would help people, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would block the worst policies from emerging from the states that are repeat offenders, definitely, and especially with the Lewis Act, some of the states or jurisdictions that would apply would be those who have discriminated over the course of time, and others would be new discriminators. I'm reminded of a piece that you wrote following the twenty sixteen election in which you specifically looked at Wisconsin and voter suppression policies there and the role they may have played in Trump's narrow victory. So I'm curious, what are some of those potential new places that you think will fall under that act. Well, what the law does is it says that if a state has a certain number of violations found by the courts over the last twenty years, it can be covered under the new Voting Rights Act. So if a state like Wisconsin which doesn't have the same history of discrimination in voting that a Georgia or Mississippi would, for example, but if it's found to have discriminated a lot in the more recent past, then they could once again be covered under the Voting Rights Act. And the other thing that the bill does is it says that certain changes have an impact in terms of discriminating against voters of color. So, for example, if you close a polling place in an area with lots of minority voters, that would have to be covered under the Voting Rights Act no matter what state it's in. They're basically saying some states will have to approve all of their voting changes because they are repeat offenders places like Georgia. But certain changes, no matter what state you're in, have the impact of discriminating against voters of color, and therefore you're going to need to get approval for that even if you're not one of those covered areas. So it looks more holistically at how voting discrimination works. The places that have always discriminated are doing discrimination still Texas, Georgia, Mississippi. They're always going to be covered. But also this has spread. This has spread to places like Wisconsin, or it's spread to places like Ohio that don't have the same history terms of Jim Crowe, things like that. But at the same time, they're doing a lot of similar voter suppression techniques in a lot of ways. Southern bread voter suppression has spread to the North under Republican control. What do you think is still needed to ensure that every single American, no matter their background, has the ability to easily vote in this country. Well, I think if those two pieces of legislation passed, I'd be a lot happier. But I still think that, you know, listen, they're still going to find ways to try to get around it, just like Southern states in the eighteen eighties and the eighteen nineties found a way to get around the fifteenth Amendment. I mean the legislation was there, but it wasn't enforced, and it had some loopholes they were able to exploit. I think what we really need is a fundamental guarantee of voting rights in this country that says that you have the right to vote except for X, Y Z. Very good reason, because we have things that you can't do in this country. We supposedly can't disenfranchise people based on their race, or based on their age, or based on their gender. Now and practice, those things happen, but we don't have anything just broadly guarantees the right to vote. And I think that's one reason why voting rights remain such a contested issue in our country, because we've never really put it into our constitution to protect it. If you look at the debates over the fifteenth Amendment, there was a more expansive version that was written that would have banned voter suppression not just based on race, but based on class and education as well. But the point is that the fact that the fifteenth Amendment wasn't as broad as it could have been left loopholes for voter suppression. I think that's still the case today when these voting cases go before the Supreme Court, their challenge under the fourteenth amdent, their challenge over the fifteenth Amendment. But there's no amendment that just says, you, guys, shouldn't make it harder to vote unless you have a really good reason to do so. I mean, you would have to have a more eloquent drafting, ever, But that's basically what I'm saying. What we need. Voting rights are such a fundamental right that they really should not be abridge unless there's a really good reason to do so. We don't have that language in our constitution. I'm trying to think of an example. I was born in the United States. Should I date myself, I'll date myself in nineteen eighty two, That's what I was. So that means, oh my gosh, which what's your birthday? May first, nineteen eighty two. Oh man, you're an old man. I was born in August thirteenth. So you know, both of us we are guaranteed citizenship since we were born in the United States. In other words, that can't be taken away from us. To compare it to what you're saying, you're stating that a citizen, one of their guarantees of citizenship would be the right to vote and it couldnt be taken away like this whole idea of even registration you have to register to vote, that you could lose your vote when you go to prison. You're saying that that would not be possible. We would always have our right to vote. And then you're also saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that it would clearly state that any effort that precludes a person from voting makes it difficul quote for a person is unconstitutional. Yes, and I guess I would say I would like the right to vote to be looked at more like the First Amendment. We're born with freedom of speech. It's not conferred upon us. We don't get freedom of speech when we're eighteen. Right, we have it based on a guarantee in our constitution. But I have to affirmatively register to vote when I turn eighteen, I have to possibly show other forms of documentation depending on what state I live in. If I commit a crime, I could be stripped of the right to vote, potentially for life, depending on what state I live in. If I have to move, I have to reregister to vote. I have to affirmatively seek out what my polling place is. All of those kind of things. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have to do anything to be able to qualify for a voting, but I think it would be a big shift in terms of voter participation if we said that voting is a right that can't be taken away from you. In Australia, they have mandatory voting, and the reason they have mandatory voting is they don't view voting as a right or a privilege. They viewed voting as a responsibility, that it's just something that you do. I would like to think we don't need that, we don't need to force people to do it. But it's an interesting experiment in that if voting is compulsory, there's no such thing as voter suppression. Yeah, the state can't say you have to vote and then prevent you from doing so. I think in America we think, oh, we're doing everything better than everywhere else, but in fact, our political system, in our voting system, is probably more screwed up and backwards than virtually any other advanced industrial democracy. With this past election, many of the people who voted, of course, voted absentee, and so obviously there's been efforts to roll back in Republican led states, the ability to absentee vote ords it harder. Some people have proposed, well, we should be able to vote in every way we can bank, which then brings in the controversial. Should we be able to vote online and would that then make voting we're accessible for young people? What are the types of policies and practices we can put in place to ensure every single person is voting well. I would say that we should automatically register people to vote in the same way that when you or I turned eighteen, we are automatically enrolled on the Selective Service if there was ever another draft for war. I think the government knows enough about us to be able to do that. I think that people should have as many options to vote as possible, meaning that we should be able to vote by mail and have ballots automatically sent to us. I think we should have early voting so that we don't vote on a Tuesday in November because that's when farmers used to bring their crops to the market in the eighteen hundreds. I think it's a very integrated system, and also obviously some people are still going to want to vote the traditional way on election day. I think online voting is really tricky in an era of hacking and disinformation. Right now, it sounds good theoretically, but I think it would pose a lot of security problems, just given how insecure it seems like some of our systems are. But I think in general, there's this expectation that voting should be so much more inconvenient than other things we do. I mean, people rarely wait two, three, four eleven hours to get money out of a bank, but we're just told that you have to do that to be able to vote, or we can do all sorts of things on our phones. But in Texas, for example, you can't even register to vote online. And there's hundreds of thousands of kids that turn eighteen in Texas every single year and they can't even register to vote on their phones or even their computers. I mean, that's totally anachronistic in terms of talking about modern day technology. So I think the rules can go a long way. And then I think at the end of the day, people are going to have to have something to vote. Four people then have to be convinced that their vote matters, that their vote will be able to change things, and things like jerrymandering that reduces the choice that people have the fact that the political system is so unrepresentative that voters of color have much less representation all across the board than their percentages in society. A lot of people still look at the system and still see a bunch of old white guys running things. And to some extent that's still true if you look at the Supreme Court, or you look at even who the president is, or you look at who the leaders are in the Senator of the House. By and larger political system is still run by old white people, and I think that's something that turns a lot of people off as well. And so, in other words, it's not just about ensuring everyone has the right to vote, that it could never be taken away from them, and ensuring that it's easy for every single person to vote. But the other side of it is candidates. And indeed, last year I wrote a series of pieces in The Atlantic on what I called the other swing voter. Yeah, that was great. Of course, there's a traditional swing voter that political pundits talk about, who are people who swing from voting Republican to Democrat, And those people are disproportionately white and disproportionately older. So I wrote about the other swing voter, and these are people who typically swing from voting to not voting, many of them swinging from voting Democrat to not voting yea. And typically it's based on the candidate. These other swing voters are more likely to be younger and especially people of color. And so how do we thereby create through policies ways in which we can have more candidates who would be attracted and even seek to swing the other swing voter, especially in this political environment when the traditional swing voter that's white and older seems to be dominating our political discourse. Well, the fact is, if you vote your other radar of Candida, but if you haven't voted, it's almost like you don't exist to political campaigns. They don't try to spend any time trying to get your vote, and then it kind of becomes a self defeating cycle. And I think if you look at people that aren't voting, they are buy in large progressive in terms of what they care about, but they're disenchanted with the political system. I think a lot of them think that there's too much money in the political system, that they candidates don't reflect them, that the candidates are bought off. That doesn't really matter what party you are, because there's going to be the same outcomes at the end of the day. That's why things like in the For the People Act they have public financing of congressional campaigns because I think money is a huge barrier to new people getting involved. I think it's often the Aana Presses of the world, the Corey Bushes of the world. They don't have money to run for office. They don't sometimes come with communities that are well resourced. They are often taking on established candidates, they're insurgent candidates, or the party machines aren't funding them. And it's very hard if you're a young black man or a young Black woman, or a young Tino man or young Latino woman to be able to get those kind of resources and to be able to get known and work your way at the ranks to then become a city council member or a county commissioner, or a mayor or a congress person. I mean, we're seeing shifts in this, but the shifts are happening slowly, so I think that's one thing that needs to change. One of the things that was fascinating to me about the civil rights movement in the nineteen sixties was people decided to go from protesting to running for office. Right you had the John Lewis's, the Andrew Youngs, they got involved in politics, and of course that required compromise, right they weren't going to be the same politicians like they were when they were in SNICK or when they were in SELC or when they were in corps. But I think in a lot of ways, some of the ground was laid in terms of these protests, in these movements in the past few years to get the next generation of people to want to be in office. And some of them aren't going to want to be in office because they don't see the political system changing things. But I think you're going to have the Coreys, the AOC's, people like that who come out of an organizing background and say we're going to take what we learned in organizing and we're going to bring it to politics. And I think that's the kind of thing that can start to reach people that think about voting, that they are turned off by the political system and might care about things like a higher minimum wage or legalizing marijuana or reforming the criminal justice system that often really aren't on the table in the quote unquote mainstream conversations that we have about politics. And of course there's a certain segment of Americans who are like, you know, I just don't do politics right especially now. It's so messy, it's so divisive, people are so angry, and so that's just not me. And oftentimes it seems as if some of those people who are saying that would actually make great elected officials. I think that what people see as they see, if we don't get something instantly, then we can't get it at all. And sometimes things take a long time. I mean, just look at people's views of criminal justice now first twenty years ago, completely night and day in terms of how we talk about the issue, how Democrats talk about the issue. So you can change politics by being in the political process, but you can also change politics by changing the scope of what is possible. That's one thing that I think is really important. I think that's one thing that a lot of the young activists and organizers can do right now. Wow, and let's say you're not necessarily an organizer or an activist, but you also recognize that voter suppression policies are not just a racist attack on democracy, but preventing us as a nation from getting some of those policy proposals that are taken for granted in other nations. What can they do to be part of this struggle to really defend America democracy. I think that you have to get involved in your own communities. If you're in a place like Georgia or Texas and there's fights going on right now, you can obviously call your legislators. You can get involved in protests. You can get involved in terms of working with different groups, whether it's the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or the League of Women Voters. There are lots of different groups that are working on this issue. I also think that you can just get involved in your own backyard. I mean, the system is not perfect no matter where you live. There's always things that can be improved, and there's always new people that can get involved in the process. I think one of the really cool things that happened in twenty twenty was a lot of people volunteered to be poll workers. And once you get involved in the process, it's a lot easier to stay involved. Understanding that what happens to our democracy affects so many other things, and that it's very, very hard to make progress on any issue if so many people are frozen out of participating. And so that's why I think it's such an important issue, because I really view it as central to all other rights, and it's very hard to protect lots of different rights if the right to vote itself is not protected and expanded. Definitely, and Ari, I'm so glad we were able to have this conversation. You know, people when they ask me who should I be reading to understand voter suppression in this country, of course I always suggest you and your work. You know, I think you're the premier journalist in the country covering voter suppression. So I'm thankful for your work. I'm thankful for cal Anderson holding it down in academia, of course, Stacy Abrahams holding it down in the realm of activism. And I'm hopeful that people realize that path forward that we've never truly achieved as a nation, a multiracial, multi ethnic, multicultural democracy where we all feel free, where we all have one voice, where that single voice is acquired and we're all speaking to what's best for our communities. That's really what we're trying to achieve. Thank you. So much. I really appreciate the kind words, and I'm really thankful for your work, and I think you opened the eyes of a lot of people. You were talking about these uncomfortable issues way before it was cool, before people were posting black squares, before it was a trendy thing to do. You were deep in this work. So I really appreciate you having me on and hopefully we'll get to do it again soon. Definitely. All right, take care, Thanks Abram, great to talk to you. Shortly after I spoke with Ari, a video of a private meeting of Heritage Action for America's surfaced. After seeing the leak video, Ari and his colleague Nick Sergey released a story that exposed the conservative Heritage Foundation's rolled in shaping and even drafting voter suppression bills across the country. The Heritage Foundation has actively promoted voter suppression since its inception in nineteen seventy three. Co founder Paul Wyrick admitted way back in nineteen eighty that he didn't want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote as a matter of how fact on leverage and the elections, quite candidate goes as the voting populace goes down. Wyrick's founding dreams have come true. The Heritage Foundation authored several provisions of the recent voter suppression law in Georgia, including sections that inhibit mail in voting and election administration and oversight. Heritage also drafted provisions for similar bills in battleground states like Iowa. In Texas, Heritage is leading the fight against HR one, a bill that would protect voters by implementing nationwide anti racist measures like automatic election day registration, two weeks of early voting, in the expansion of mail in ballots. In the leak video, Heritage Action for America leaders bragged about their role in recent voter suppression laws. We did it quickly, and we did it quietly. Honestly, nobody noticed. The executive director even admitted Heritage uses misleading tactics to deliver their proposals to state lawmakers. Or we have a sentinel on our behalf. Give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots you know, from the bottom up type of vibe. Voter suppression isn't just a war on voters of color, It's a war on voters. Through their reporting, arian Nick showed that the movement to suppress votes reflect not the will of the people fearful of voter fraud, but the will of the wealthy and powerful, fearful of American voters. I want to be clear about what just happened on the Senate floor. Every single Senate Republican just voted against starting debate, starting debate on legislation to tech to Americans voting rights. Republican state legislatures across the country are engaged in the most sweeping voters suppression in eighty years. Capitalizing on and catalyzed by Donald Trump's big lie, these state governments are making it harder for younger, poorer, urban, and non white Americans to vote. The fight continues. If you're living in a state trying to pass stricter voting laws, call your legislators, demand their opposition. Volunteer and donate to organizations combating voter suppression, like the League of Women Voters in Fair Fight in Black Voters Matter. Now is the time to do more. Now is the time to fight for a multiracial democracy. Now is the time to be anti racist. Be Anti Racist is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. It is written and hosted by doctor Ebram x Hindy and produced by Alexandra Garrattin with associate producer Brittany Brown. Our engineer has been Talliday. Our editor is Julia Barton and our show runners Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers Arelie tim Willad and Mio Lobell Manny. Thanks to Tammy Winn and doctor HEATHERN. Sandford at the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University for all of their help at Pushing, and thanks to Heathern Fame, Carlie Migliori, John Schnaris, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find doctor Kendy on Twitter at d r Ebram and on Instagram at ebrahm x K. You can find Pushing on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods. You can sign up for our news that are at pushkin dot fm to find more Pushkin podcast listen on a heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'd like to listen.