Voter Suppression is Solvable

what about people who want to vote and can't. Homeless people, people who are transient and move around a great deal, people who may have been furloughed and lost their jobs and have been displaced. All of these people are American citizens who deserve the right to vote. There was a Supreme Court case the cut back on the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Are we feeling the effects of that now? Every single day? Voter suppression is an urgent problem.

Between twenty fourteen and twenty sixteen, over sixteen million citizens were removed from state voter registration roles, and in twenty sixteen alone, nearly one million ballots cast were rejected. I don't understand why people aren't angrier. There's nothing more fundamental in a democracy than the right to vote. Marching for the streets is absolutely one powerful vehicle for a reform. The other way that you can achieve meaningful reform is

that the ballot box. Voter suppression is solvable. Kristen Clark is the president and executive director of the National Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights under Law. The committee was established in nineteen sixty three at the request of President John F. Kennedy to target, in particular, the inequities confronting African Americans and other minorities. Clark sees the disenfranchisement of millions of American voters as central to her work. Here's our conversation.

Voter suppression is solvable, and we can do it by restoring the Voting Rights Act and resisting efforts made to deny people access to vote by mail in the midst of the pandemic. You know, I think our listeners have at least some familiarity with the old voter suppression, the Jim Crow era poll taxes, literacy requirements, all those things that were supposed to be ended by the Voting Rights Act. But there's a new voter suppression that we're dealing with.

How is it different from the old voter suppression. They're like cousins of the old tactics from the Jim Crow era. Long gone are the days of literacy tests and understanding clauses, and instead what we see today are equally nefarious efforts

to make it harder for vulnerable communities to vote. Polling places consolidations, literally efforts to shut down the vast majority of polling sites in a community under the guise of wanting to save money or save expense, but in ways that we'll make it literally harder for people to vote. On election day, we see purging of the voter registration roles, and it'll be packaged as we're just cleaning up the roles.

But often when you dig deep, what you find our efforts to remove African American and Latinos from the registration roles. People who are legitimately registered, who exercise that right and have every right to be there. So why do these kinds of procedural changes and rule change disproportionately affect Black,

Latino and other minority voters. You know, our country has a long and sordid history of efforts to deny African Americans access to the franchise In nineteen sixty five on Bloody Sunday, when peaceful demonstrators, including John Lewis, were brutally assaulted while crossing the Edmund Pettit's Bridge in search of in the quest for the right to vote. Those horrible

events gave rise to passage of the Voting Rights Act. Today, that racial history still looms heavy, and we continue to see states that have built into their DNA this desire, this unfortunate need to oppress people of color. African Americans and Latinos are growing in number in many parts of

the country, and there is a correlation. We often find that it is in those very communities where white people seek to maintain and preserve the status quote seek to resist the change in demographic shifts that may be happening

in their communities. So this ugly racial history is something that we have to confront, that we have to air out when we talk about voter suppression and when we talk about exactly why we need to restore the Voting Rights Act and have in place once again it's full protections. So the Voting Rights Act, past in nineteen sixty five, was supposed to prevent using those kinds of pretexts that

have the effect of suppressing voting. There was a Supreme Court case, if I remember, maybe ten years ago, that cut back on the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Are we feeling the effects of that now every single day. That Supreme Court ruling Shelby County, Alabama versus Holder was issued in twenty thirteen and has literally opened up the

floodgates to voter suppression efforts all across the country. Part of the Act required that certain states with very long and egregious histories of voting discrimination get federal review of any new voting change before it could be put into effect. And that federal review process was about looking to see if it's a voting change that would make it harder for African Americans, Latinos, or other protected communities of color

to vote. And that Section five federal review process throughout the decades had done remarkable work in blocking literally hundreds of discriminatory voting changes from taking root, and it also had a powerful deterrent effect as well. The Supreme Courts its decision basically brought that federal review process to a grinding halt. I'll give you an example. On the day that the Supreme Court issued its Shelby County decision, the state of Texas moved forward with a discriminatory photoid law

that had been blocked previously by this review process. It's a law that literally disenfranchised thousands of people who voted a year after year but simply didn't have one of the strict, narrow categories of photoid required by this law if you have a passport or a driver's license fine, a concealing carry permit fine. But under the initial iteration

of the law, student ID didn't qualify. And the law also didn't think about the poorest of the poor in our country, people who don't fly, people who don't have driver's life since it is because they rely on public transportation and so forth. And so it's been a very messy picture since that Supreme Court ruling. That ruling one is one that absolutely has made it harder for people

to have voice in our democracy. And because when you haven't been mentioned COVID nineteen yet, I mean, if in normal times you would be dealing with all these reverses to voting rights, and now we have voting is dangerous, potentially physically dangerous in a way no one would have expected. What's the Lawyer's Committee's approach to having a successful vote in November. Here's what we know, and here's what we're fighting for. States have to provide as many avenues as

possible for people to have voice. They have to have a robust absence voting system that is streamlined and easy for people to participate in, one in which we're providing postage paid envelopes and easing the deadlines for people to

request the ballot and return the ballot. That's key. We also need to provide expanded early voting opportunities, give people a period of two weeks to come out prior to election day to vote, and make that period one that is open and accessible so that people can comply with

social distancing guidelines and so forth. But we have to also prepare for in person voting on election day, and what we've seen is that in some states where they reduced ninety five percent or more of polling sites, there have been really long lines because there are some people for whom the experience of turning out and voting in person is incredibly important to them. Wisconsin and Georgia have

been two states where we've seen really significant problems this season. Wisconsin, particularly Milwaukee reduced upwards of about one hundred and eighty pulling sites to five, resulting in miserably long lines that stretched for hours on election day, and we saw a similar picture in Georgia. We're running out of time to get this right. But that three part strategy we deem really critical to a successful election season in the midst of this pandemic. So Kristen, let's break this solvable down

a little bit. You mentioned these three aspects to it. First of all, you know, I think some people see mail in voting if you did it the right way as a kind of panaceist, send everyone who's registered a ballot within a prepaid envelope. You know. Absentee voting just has been a part of voting in our country for decades. It extends back to the eighteen hundreds, and it has been and done in ways where we've not seen fraud.

So these baseless sham claims that we have seen put forth by the President are frankly very hard to understand given that he himself, his voted apps and Tee, his wife and daughter and many family members have voted apps and Tee, and you know, have made our work a little bit harder because there's some officials who are kind of heating his call and are throwing up unnecessary obstacles

for voters. All the while, as we continue to wrestle with this pandemic that is continuing to have such a devastating impact on the public, why can't we just have mail voting for everybody? So in our experience, mail voting will not work for everybody. I'll give you an example. Utah when to one hundred percent vote by mail system a few years ago and didn't think about the unique needs of Navajo speaking voters in San Juan County, many of whom need oral language assistance in order to cast

an effective ballot. San Juan County, we sued them and now they do provide in person voting opportunities for Navajo speaking voters and understand and appreciate that the law requires that they provide oral language assistance. We've also seen discrimination and voter suppression in some vote by mail systems, and this is an issue we're really paying close attention to. Now. I'll give you an example, an example from the twenty

eighteen midterm election cycle in Georgia. We were monitoring what was happening across the state very carefully and found that Gwinette County was an outlier. They were rejecting absent see ballots that extraordin narrowly high rates. We went in and looked at the data and found that African American and Asian Americans were having their absence HEE ballots rejected at

far greater rates than white voters. And we sued the county and found out that they were using things like this voter provided two digits of their birth year and not four digits. They were looking at minutia right. Really, and for all of those reasons, vote by mail may

not work for everybody. There are some communities that just may not have faith and vote by mail and faith that their ballot will be counted, and so no matter what, they intend to go and vote in person on election day and feel more confident about showing up in person and voting. And then you also have homeless people and people who are transient and move around a great deal, particularly low income people, people who may have been furloughed and lost their jobs and have had to move around

a lot and have been displaced. All of these people are American citizens who deserve the right to vote. But I point out those examples just to make clear that vote by mail may not work for everyone, which is why providing these three avenues is really critical to getting it right in twenty twenty. So tell me about early voting in person. That's the thing I know the least about. I've never done early in person voting. I'm not even sure if we have that in New York, where I live.

How does it work? Yeah, Early voting opportunities sadly are not in place in every single state, but they are in many. It's another chance to go and vote, often at your local elections office or some designated site at periods of time before election day. It's helpful to people who may work on election day and may not have confidence that they can actually get off in time to vote.

It's helpful for parents who may have childcare responsibilities that they can't maneuver around on election day, or people who just know that they may not be home or in their jurisdiction on election day. So it's just yet another avenue that gives people a chance to turn out and vote.

I'll tell you that in places like North Carolina, early voting has become incredibly popular and heavily promoted by churches for example, that encourage sold to the polls, encouraging people to leave church on Sunday and go and early vote. So it is another way for people to have voice, and during the pandemic especially important because it's helping to ease that strain and burden that officials will otherwise experience

on that one election day. How will we judge Kristin if we've had a successful election, or how will we judge how successful it's banned on November third? You know, sadly we saw voter turnout level drop in two sixteen, and in my view, we want a democracy in which we have high turnout, high participation rates, high numbers of

eligible people who are registered to vote. To me, the measure of success is getting those numbers up and doing all that we can to help people overcome the unnecessary barriers that we often throw up that make it harder for people to vote. When you look at modern democracies across the globe, we rank always at the bottom. Currently we're about twenty six out of thirty two in terms of turnout levels, and that's because we don't have things

like same day registration across the Board. We don't make election Day a holiday. We do things like purging the voter rolls, polling place consolidations of failing to account for the very real impact that the pandemic is having on people's lives. So if we can take steps now then get our numbers up across the board, that to be will be one measure of success. We run a program

at the Lawyer's Committee called Election Protection. Election Protection is the nation's largest and longest running nonpartisan voter protection program. It came about in the wake of Bush fee Gore when the American public just started to pay a lot more attention to the way in which our elections are run, and we thought it was really critical that we provided a nonpartisan place where people can report issues, bring forth complaints.

We hear from people and the hundreds of thousands who are reporting complaints happening all across the country by way of our eight sixty six our Vote Hotline, and we've got a network of thousands of trained legal volunteers who help resolve those issues one by one. But sometimes we learn about issues that are truly breaks in the systems that require litigation, and so it's been a busy season for us in twenty twenty, and we anticipate that it will remain busy until the bitter end. What can you

do about that? At the Lawyer's committee. If someone says my polling place opened an hour late, it's an hour later. They can't go back in time. Do you is there some remedy for that? It's one of the most heartbreaking problems. Frankly. Sometimes we will go to court and we will sue to get an extension of the polling hours, as we

did recently in Georgia. We saw an extension of the poll hours proved critical for voters in the Louisville area during their recent primary, where they had one polling site for an entire county and voters were driving up to that location trying desperately to get into the parking lot before six pm and ended up finding a door shut in their face. But a thirty minute extension was granted,

allowing those people the opportunity to vote. So we will fight tooth and nail for voters and do all that we can to make sure that if and when states get it wrong on the front end, that they're giving people that extra opportunity on the back end to come back out. The frustrating part is knowing that there's some people who only have one shot on election day. That person who may have paid bus fare to get to a polling site and won't have bus fare to come

back again later in the day. That parent who may have arranged childcare to go vote and just won't be able to do it again later in the day. That person who talked to their boss think got time away from work to go vote, who won't be able to get that time off again. That part kills me. But we still do everything in our power to make sure that we let officials know we're watching and we expect them to get it right, and that we're prepared to go to court to get people that extra time, to

see what we can do to level the playing field. Kaysen, you're a lawyer. You keep a pretty cool head about this, But I don't understand why people aren't angrier. There's nothing more fundamental in a democracy than the right to vote. There are people actively and openly trying to take that

vote away from people. I'm worried we're going to have a tremendous wave of anger on November third and after as a result of people being disenfranchised in all the ways we've talked about, but we need the anger now. We need the anger now for sure. One place where we are seeing anger is in the streets. I am heartened by the ways in which we're seeing people embrace the Black Lives Matter movement and really taking to the streets to channel anger about police injustice and racial injustice

in our country. My hope is that in twenty twenty we will see people channel that anger as well to the ballot box, and that this will result in the higher turnout levels that we deserve. My hope is that for the people who are very incensed and enraged about police violence perpetrated against unarmed African Americans in our country will realize that marching for the streets is absolutely one powerful vehicle for reform. But the other way that you

can achieve meaningful reform is at the ballot box. Your mayor is often the one who has the prerogative in the right to put in place a police chief. Your elected district attorney is the one who makes decisions about whether or not to prosecute an officer who used violence, so use force without basis your sheriff, a position that very few people pay attention to is often an elected person who makes decisions about how the jails are run,

how they're responding to the pandemic. So with some aggressive voter education work, I am hoping that a lot of the angst that we are seeing in response to the deaths of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and Rachiard Brooks and so many others will be energy that we see propel people to the ballot box this fall. Chris, and I wanted to ask you what brought you personally to

the issue of voting rights and voter suppression. I know you've had a long career in civil rights law, and you worked in the New York State Attorney General's Office as head of the Civil Rights Division, But why is this your issue personally? So I started off my career at the Justice Department. It was my first job out of law school, working in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, doing voting rights cases in the Deep South.

And I can remember being in Louisiana, just outside Baton Rouge, and I was monitoring a school board election. Black voters had called the Justice Department to express concern about potential voter suppression and I remember stepping out side the polling site at this local school and seeing all of these cars doing a U turn and not coming to the polling place. And it was because a cop had set

up a speed trap feet from the school. And this speed trap was absolutely having its intended effect of discouraging black voters from going and voting. And you know, I was able to use my power and position as a Justice Department attorney to call the local law enforcement office and they got that copper move. But remember thinking, my goodness, if voters didn't call us, if we didn't respond, if we weren't there, how many people would have been blocked

from voting that day. So, you know, doing this work throughout the years and just seeing the Shenanigans, seeing the nefarious attempts, seeing these Jim Crow type tactics constantly rearing their head, just makes clear the work is important. And indeed, elections in our country come down to razor thin margins. You know, our elections are often hotly contested and every

vote matters. And I'm a civil rights lawyer through and through, but I'm a voting rights lawyer at my heart, and there's sadly has never been a dull moment in the two decades during which I've been doing this work. What are a few things that listeners can do if they're concerned about having a fair and successful election in their local communities, and if they're concerned, as we all should be, about having a fair and successful election throughout the country.

So a few things. One, Now is the time to get registered if you're not already, or to just confirm your voter registration status. Sadly, you know there are states that will move people on to the inactive list and you may not find out. So regardless of whether or not you think you're registered, now it's the time to just get registered or to check on your voter registration status. The second thing is we need more conversation to promote

voter education in our communities and across the country. So open up conversations with folks. You may go to school with folks, you may go to church with folks, at home with family members about voting and why it's important. And it's about far more than just what's at the top of the ballot. It's about far more than just

the presidential seat. It's about connecting the right to vote up to the issues that you care about that animate your life, whether again it's criminal justice, fairhousing, abortion, understanding and appiating how the right to vote links up with issues that impact your day to day life. Are the kinds of conversations that we need more of. The third thing is make a plan, Make a plan now to vote.

There's still primaries happening, there's still special elections that will happen between now and November, and then there's big general election on November third. But now's the time to figure out, Okay, what are the rules for voting absentee in my state? If that's the way I want to vote? What's the deadline for requesting an absen see ballot? If that's what I got to do, what's the deadline for returning it? When can I early vote? What are the hours for

voting on election day itself? Where's my polling place going to be? What's going to be on the ballot? Are there a bunch of local races, state races along with the congressional seats? Are there ballot initiatives that I should read up on now so that I can understand them and be ready on election day? What about my grandmother who needs a ride to the polls. Now, it's the time to really think through all of those questions and just make a plan so that you are ready on

November third. And our election protection hotline our eight six six our vote Hotline is one place that people can turn to if they need help with those kinds of questions. We need to get this right in twenty twenty. This is an election season like none other, and it's one in which we have to provide maximum opportunities and ways for people to have voice in our election. Kristin Clark, thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much

for having me. That was Kristin Clark, President and Executive Director of the National Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights under Law. Remember to check out our show notes for links to the suggestions our guests make for ways that you can get involved. Solvable is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our show is produced by Camille Baptista, Senior producer Jocelyn Frank. Catherine Girardou is our managing and producer, and our executive

producer is Mia Lobell. Special thanks to Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliori and Kedija Holland. I'm Jacob Weisberg,