Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman about voter suppression for the March 12, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: Participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol were fueled by a mixture of things, but importantly by a big lie about the theft of the election, itself fueled by a multiyear GOP effort to propagate urgent concerns about voter fraud—that effort abetted by some media that now express dismay at the not-unpredictable effects.

But while the need to defend the integrity of US elections may be, for some, a sincere delusion, if you will, that’s not what’s at work when the Republican chair of a Georgia county board of elections demands that voter access be restricted, “so that we at least have a shot at winning.” Or when Donald Trump declared of a defeated franchise-expanding congressional proposal last year, “They had things, levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Voter suppression is a Republican strategy. And it’s not slowed or shamed in the wake of January 6, but moving full steam ahead. Media’s ability to confront assaults on democracy as precisely that will mean letting go of their go-to bipartisan balancing act, woefully inadequate to a crisis that will shape the political landscape for years to come.

Ari Berman covers voting rights as a senior reporter at Mother Jones. He’s the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.

Ari Berman: Hey, Janine, good to talk to you again. Thank you.

JJ: I guess tell us first about the what of what’s happening, because it’s a dizzying array of things. And maybe Georgia is deservedly in a spotlight, but that’s not the only place where we’re seeing overt and targeted GOP efforts to restrict access to the vote. What’s the landscape of this?

AB: That’s right. We are seeing the biggest assault against voting rights in decades. Historians believe it’s the biggest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction, depending on how many of these bills end up being signed into law. But 253 restrictions on voting have been introduced in 43 states in the first two months of this year alone; that is seven times higher than last year.

And, of course, we’ve talked about this a lot on the program. This is not the first time the Republican Party has tried to make it more difficult to vote. So for them to introduce seven times as many bills as they had already been introducing just gives you a sense of how much they’ve tried to intensify this effort.

JJ: And the nature of the bills should put paid to the pretense that they’re about election integrity, because they’re aimed at mail-in voting, and at in-person voting, and making them all harder. So what’s the range of of specific interventions that are looking to be made?

AB: I would say the general theme is they’re trying to target the voting methods they believe that Democrats in communities of color used most in 2020. But that paints a pretty broad brush, because mail voting was something that Republicans used in very large numbers until 2020. But a lot of the bills restrict mail voting in lots of different ways, from trying to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting in Georgia, so you could only vote in Georgia by mail for a very limited number of reasons; or preventing states from sending out absentee ballots to voters automatically, like in Florida; or getting rid of ballot drop boxes—another thing that’s been discussed in Florida, which 1.5 million people used in the last election.

Or changing the deadline for when you have to send your ballot back. There’s a really crazy bill in Arizona that says your ballot has to be postmarked by the Thursday before the election, which is something I’ve never seen before, that it could actually arrive on Election Day, but it wouldn’t be counted if it wasn’t postmarked by the Thursday beforehand.

So a lot of these bills are aimed at mail voting. But the real tell here is that they are going to push more people into in-person voting by cutting back on mail voting. But then they’re cutting in-person voting as well, namely early voting, which I guess they perceive as benefiting Democrats more than Republicans, even though a ton of Republicans use early voting as well.

In Iowa, the governor just signed a law cutting eight days of early voting. In Georgia, they’re trying to cut weekend voting, including Sunday voting, when Black churches do “Souls to the Polls” get-out-the-vote drives. There’s a bunch of other states that are considering similar things.

So that’s the general tenor of it, but it’s really coming from all angles. And every single day, it seems like we get a crazier bill. And people say, “Oh, this has no chance of passing.” And then it starts passing committees, then it starts passing different chambers of legislature, and before you know, it’s signed into law. So it is a very, very perilous time we’re in right now.

JJ: Yeah, there’s no skimping on the craven. One thing folks might have seen is Georgia trying to make it a crime to give water to people who are waiting in line to vote, which I saw covered as kind of like a wacky factcheck story, you know: “I saw this on Facebook, is it really true?” “Yeah, it actually is really true.” But that was just kind of a strange angle on what is really just an ominous, dark cloud phenomenon.

And I wanted to say, the fact that these Republicans’ goal is a country in which great numbers of people who don’t look like them have no electoral voice—I’m not saying that that’s not reported; media acknowledge that that is the goal. But I feel like that should be the template for this coverage; that fact should shape coverage. Politicians should be questioned based on this knowledge — that it’s not a misunderstanding, and it’s not confusion; it’s a strategy to suppress votes. And I feel like anytime you don’t name that, you advance it.

AB: Well, I think the media has done a much better job of covering this issue than they have in the past. I think they have still been slow to cover the severity of it, although it’s starting to get significantly more coverage. But, yeah, again, a lot of these things are being still covered as the usual kind of legislative debates—where there’s nothing normal about this process, this process shouldn’t even be happening, there should be no reason that we’re debating any of these bills.

There could have been a few tweaks made to the system. The No. 1 thing I would have liked to see, for example, is election officials allowed to process mail ballots quicker, so it doesn’t take seven days after the election to release the votes in Pennsylvania or Georgia or other places. But that would have been a small technocratic fix to the system.

The question is: Why are they even debating measures to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting? Why are they even debating bills to cut early voting? These are things that should have never even come up; if they were introduced at all, they should have never been passed out of committee, and they certainly should have never been passed both chambers of the legislature, and they certainly never should have been signed into law by governors.

And I still think a lot of people are covering this as a normal debate, and it’s not a normal debate; it’s an effort to try to overturn the election by other means. Donald Trump very publicly called on states to overturn the election results; he tried to get the courts to throw out the results. That failed. And now they’re moving on to the state legislative strategy, where they’re trying to get state legislatures to enact laws that are going to have the same kind of impact. And instead of trying to “find” 11,000 votes in Georgia, as Trump asked the secretary of state to do—I don’t know how he expected the secretary of state to do that, but he asked him to do that. And now, basically, the legislature is trying to just reduce 11,000 Democratic votes, and potentially a whole lot more than that, by changing the state’s voting laws.

And these are not small changes around the edges. These are major changes that are going to affect millions of voters. In Georgia, 1.3 million people voted by mail; many, many, many fewer people will be allowed to do so. Hundreds of thousands of people voted on days of early voting that could be eliminated. In Florida, 1.5 million people used mail ballot drop boxes; they just want to get rid of them entirely. So these are pretty major changes to the system that I think still need to be treated with more severity than they have been so far.

JJ: Yeah. And Carol Anderson talks about “bureaucratic violence,” and I think there can be a tendency to—you know, when you have that Raffensperger call from Trump, “Find those votes,” that’s a real smoking gun; that’s real obvious. But if there’s a legislative move to erase those 11,000, plus more, votes, it somehow isn’t presented as an act of violence; it’s presented as almost more lamentable than oppressive. And I think that’s kind of what you’re saying: It can kind of get lost because there’s a lot of going on, it’s at levels that we don’t often see, and it’s not so overt and aggressive, maybe, as when Donald Trump is saying it.

AB: Exactly. I mean, you have Republicans in some states saying some pretty crazy things. There was a Republican state rep in Arizona who just had a quote to CNN that said: “Everybody shouldn’t be voting. Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes as well.”

JJ: Oh my God.

AB: Which is straight-up Jim Crow language. I can imagine a segregationist Democrat saying that in 1890s Alabama or Mississippi, trying to defend literacy tests or poll taxes. But this is a hard story to dramatize, because you don’t have Trump at the center of it, and you don’t have people actually experiencing these restrictions on voting. So I am sure we will see long lines as a result of this. I am sure we will see people disenfranchised as a result of it.

But there’s no elections coming up, so it’s a little bit hard to dramatize. And I’m afraid that a lot of people aren’t going to see the impact of this until it’s too late, until there’s actually photos of long lines, and videos of long lines, and lots of complaints about people who didn’t get mailed ballots or aren’t eligible to vote by mail, or stories of people who are purged by the voter rolls.

I mean, those are more dramatic stories, and those haven’t happened yet, because this is still in the legislative debate phase. All we really can go on are the legislative debates and those kinds of things that are happening.

And I’ve actually been listening to a fair amount of the legislative debates in Georgia, and they’ve been pretty interesting and pretty dramatic. In Georgia, for example, we have a lot of Black legislators that grew up during Jim Crow, who have been speaking in the House and the Senate about these bills, and talking about how they grew up with this, and how they’re having to go through it again. I think that’s pretty dramatic.

And I think that’s one way the media can cover this better, is to actually show some of these debates. But of course, people don’t usually pay attention to the Georgia legislature, the Arizona legislature, or these other kinds of things.

JJ: Right.

AB: It’s not a sexy topic. There’s not as much local reporting as there used to be. And it requires some time and effort to navigate the landscape in these states, if you’re not familiar with it.

JJ: You said, in a recent interview, that part of what’s so interesting about the voter suppression virus throughout the Republican Party is how orchestrated it is. And so that’s where I think it kind of works against journalists’ tendency to tell a particular story about a particular person in a particular place, when the most important story might have to do with how all those local instances are actually being orchestrated from above, and that might be the thing that we need to talk about.

I did want to draw you out on one very particular thing that you wrote about that I didn’t see elsewhere. We really can’t underestimate the planning and the thought and the looking to cut off every possible avenue of escape. And you wrote about Pennsylvania Republicans trying to push through a constitutional amendment to gerrymander the state courts, which is another place—we keep thinking, “All right, well, if we don’t win in Congress, we don’t win at the Supreme Court, there might be state courts,” you know. I think people are thinking of all kinds of levels to fight minority rule. And this effort to gerrymander state courts, I think is very interesting, and I hadn’t heard about it elsewhere. I wonder if you could tell us just briefly about that.

AB: Yeah, it’s very disturbing, and I’m glad you brought it up. It’s been tabled for a little while, but I think it’s going to reappear later this year. State courts in Pennsylvania struck down Republican gerrymandering efforts. They struck down the congressional districts that Republicans gerrymandered, and that led to fairer districts in Pennsylvania, so they had a more even congressional delegation. They also, of course, refused to throw out the results of the 2020 election, and they made it easier to vote by mail in a number of instances.

And so now what Republicans are trying to do is, basically they lost in court, so now they’re trying to change the courts themselves. And in Pennsylvania judges are elected, and they run statewide. And they want to change it so that judges are elected by districts. And they want to actually draw the districts, which is something that I’ve rarely if ever seen.

No. 1, judges usually aren’t even elected. No. 2, if they are elected, it makes sense that they would run statewide, because they’re supposed to represent all citizens in the state. I mean, you pledge your loyalty to the Pennsylvania constitution, not to a particular district you represent.

And having the legislature essentially gerrymander the courts that struck down gerrymandering would be a real assault on democracy, particularly at a time when the Supreme Court has said, No. 1, we’re not even going to review partisan gerrymandering; that can only be reviewed in state courts, which makes state courts a lot more important. But No. 2, the Supreme Court just doesn’t take an expansive view of voting rights to begin with. And a lot of states have more expansive protections for voting rights in their constitution than the federal Constitution, which is something that I also think is really interesting.

So you’re right, state courts are a very underutilized part of protecting voting rights. And that’s exactly why they’re trying to change them in Pennsylvania.

 

JJ: And it’s exactly the kind of thing that you would just miss, particularly if it’s in one state. Although, we know that if it works in one place, it gets ALECed all over the place. Also, it wouldn’t necessarily lift up to your attention, and yet it can be so important.

In the few minutes we have left: At the end of your recent piece for Mother Jones, you point to the scale of response that is actually appropriate to the assault on democracy, no less, that’s going on now. And you say, “The only real way to reverse minority rule is through big structural reforms”: things like abolishing the Electoral College, eliminating the filibuster, ending gerrymandering, enshrining the right to vote in the Constitution, and statehood for Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico. I would encourage folks to read the piece in its entirety.

But if I could just ask you—I mean, I’m a media critic, and I can see what social change might be helpful, and I also know the way that media tend to scoff at big social change ideas—until they happen. So things need to happen that are big things, that are big, big changes, big visionary changes, but we shouldn’t necessarily expect media to have the wind at our backs as we’re pushing for these things. But if you could just talk about, maybe, what’s in Congress that we can push for now, or just a bigger vision of what’s appropriate to respond to this attack on voting rights?

AB: Yeah, I think you’re right that we are going to need really big structural change to fix what’s happening to our democracy. In the intermediate to abolishing the Electoral College or adopting the National Popular Vote Compact, I do think there’s two really important bills in Congress, HR 1, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that would be really transformative in adding federal protection for voting rights.

HR 1 would put in place all sorts of reforms to make it easier to vote nationwide for federal elections, like automatic registration, Election Day registration, expanded mail voting, early voting, all of those things across the board. And then the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would be a critical check in states like Georgia, to require them once again to have to approve their voting changes with the federal government, which would give the Biden Justice Department, for example, the ability to block a lot of the changes we’re talking about in places like Arizona and Georgia that are serial offenders. And so if those two pieces of legislation alone passed, I think it would be very, very important.

And then there’s other things I think that are really important: Obviously, statehood for DC is long overdue; it would go at least a little bit of a way to making the Senate more representative of the country as a whole. Same for Puerto Rico, if they wanted to go that direction.

But I think the Democratic Party has to realize, most importantly, this cannot be business as usual. They are facing an unprecedented assault on democracy from the Republican Party. If they don’t do anything about it, that assault on democracy is going to get much worse. And Democrats are also going to lose the ability to do anything about it, because they’re going to be out of power very, very soon, in 2022 or 2024. And so I think there needs to be urgency from Democrats in dealing with the structural threats to our democracy, because if they don’t deal with it now, you can make a very good argument they’re probably not going to get another chance to deal with it anytime soon.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ari Berman. The book is Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. It’s out from Picador. Find his work, including “The Insurrection Was Put Down. The GOP Plan for Minority Rule Marches On,” online at MotherJones.com. Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AB: Thanks so much, Janine. Good to talk to you again.

 

This post was originally published on FAIR.