You're listening to Comedy Central. My guest to right is the chair of African American Studies at Emory University and a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is called One Person, No Vote, How vote suppression is destroying Our democracy. Please welcome Carol Anderson. Welcome to the show.
Thanks doll Marts. Thank you. It's so wonderful having you here. Um. You wrote a book called White Rage, which was a New York Times bestseller, where you spoke in depth about how America is dealing with an issue that it really hasn't dealgued completely, which is the rage that many white people feel that what appears to be America changing. This book is is, I guess, based in some way off of that, and yet it's a completely different topic. One
per some no votes, voter suppression destroying our democracy? How bad and how big do you believe voter suppression actually is? I think it is massive. Um. We have had millions of people blocked from voting. We have had millions purge from the roles who had been on the voter rolls. The purging and the voter suppression has been so intense that we have Donald Trump in the White House right now,
that's the power of voter suppression. The the numbers in in the election, especially in and around the black vote, were really interesting. You saw in key states and swing states where voter turnout dropped from may have been like seventy eight thousand people turning out and dropped to below fifty thou or you know, you saw, you saw drastic drops. Now, some people have argued that that was because Hillary Clinton
didn't motivate black voters to come out. But you've looked at the data, You've analyzed a lot of the information, and it's seems like there's been a systematic effort to
remove people of color from the voting world. But why why people of color though, and I believe why people of color Besides being just snide and saying it's been that way for a long time, it's because that after the two thousand and eight election with Barack Obama, Barack Obama brought fifteen million new voters to the polls with
that incredible ground game. They were overwhelmingly black, Latino, young, poor, and and with that then the Republican Party that has moved further and further to the right and has become more and more White Um and and their policies have become more right wing. They don't have policies that resonate
with the growing diversity of America. And so instead of thinking about how do we reform this party so that it resonates with America, that our policies are really strong and talk about benefiting more Americans, instead, what they decided to do was to suppress the vote. There was there's some really scary parts of the book where I read
about things I never knew before. I knew about the larger picture of voter suppressions in certain states, in certain places, but you read about how so many people have been stripped of their rights. Now, the argument the other way from people like Chris Koback, you know, from Donald Trump and his team has been we're protecting democracy. That's why we scrub people of votes roles. If they've died, if they no longer respond to mail, then why are we
keeping on keeping them on the votes roles? How do you respond to that? And I respond to that because one of the ways that this works and the guy is so effective, is that they're able to use that cover of being reasonable. You know, we're just keeping the voter rolls up. But when you really look at what they're doing is that those the people that they're scrubbing.
They're not scrubbing people who have moved or who have died. Overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly who they're scrubbing are people who are African Americans, people who are young, people who are poor. And they're doing it by the character uristics. Um. So they can't say, oh, we don't want black people to vote, because there's still this thing called the fifteenth Amendment. Although the Voting Rights Act got gutted by the Supreme Court, there's still this
thing called the fifteenth Amendment. So what they do is they go after the characteristics of a people, societally imposed characteristics. They go after those things like, um, if you move a lot, and we know that people move a lot, particularly if you're poor, you don't stay in the same house, right, that moving then becomes a reason to to knock people off the rolls, they say. And one of the things that we also know characteristics is that, um, young people, minorities,
they don't and students, they don't vote regularly. So they start knocking people off the rolls for not voting regularly. And so they use those characteristics, and those are the characteristics of people who don't overwhelmingly vote for Republicans. Yeah, when you when you look at the numbers and you look at how impactful this could actually be, the argument is always met with, yes, but look at how much
votes of fraud there is. Now. We talked briefly about this, but overwhelmingly most Americans believe that voter fraud is a very definite threat. Absolutely, and that has been a well cultivated myth. Um it has born. It was borne up out of the two thousand election, that horrible election with hanging chads, and that myth of massive rampant voter fraud coming out of the city's uh stealing our elections. Except when they really went hunting for it, they couldn't find it.
Um Justin Levitt, a law professor out of California, he looked and he went from two thousand and two thousand and fourteen out of one billion votes, he was able to identify thirty one cases, thirty one out of one
billion votes of voter impersonation fraud. When Chris Kolbach, the Secretary of State that you mentioned who helped um head up Trump's election and integrity Commission um in their report, which was all about when Trump said five million voters have come in and I would have won the popular vote. By the way, thank you, thank you. It's not as good as yours, you know, when he said, you know, he's got five million. Then they went hunting and they couldn't find it. I mean, the pages are blank when
it says voter fraud. His commission is looking blank pages, it's not there. When Greg Abbott out of Texas is arguing for voter I D and Judge Ramos is saying, okay, you've got rampant voter fraud. Where where? And he's like, it's rampant. She's like, where how many? Is a lot rampant? How many too? And I like, is that rampant? The The argument I've seen a lot of people parrots with with a lot of confidence is it's not suppression. What we're doing is making sure that the integral t of
our election is maintained. And so they say, we're not purging people or we're not restricting them from voting. We're just saying that everyone needs a vote to I D. Now,
I understand it. But if you were explaining to someone who is genuinely well intentioned, someone says, I don't understand why is it so so hard or why is it so difficult for for the government to say, Well, why is it so bad for the government to say everyone should have a vote to I D that is issued by the government or at the d m V. Why why is that so much to ask? Okay, and so let me just give you a couple of examples about
how that really works. Because part of again the way that it sounds so reasonable because you need an I D. You know what Trump said, you need an ID to go buy groceries. But as we all know, it doesn't quite work that way. So, for instance, in Alabama, Alabama said you've got to have a government issued photo I D and then said, but your public housing I D does not count. Now, Alabama's a poor state, They've got lots of public housing. Of those on public housing in
public housing in Alabama are African American. For many, that's the only idea they have. So you automatically wiped away that type of government issued photo I D because public housing is government issued. Then Alabama shut down the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Black Belt counties, and so now people are going to have to go fifty miles to get a driver's license. But if you don't drive, how are you going to go fifty miles and you
don't have public transportation. So what you do is you create an obstacle, and then you create an obstacle to the obstacle, and you make it so difficult for people who are already working their hardest to make it to now be able to just access their basic right to vote. We see this in state after state, North Carolina, the fourth circuits that you have targeted Frican Americans with nearly
surgical precision. So these states, they make it sound innocuous, Oh, you need an I D. But it's not in the I D. In Indiana, you need to have a driver's license to get a birth certificate, but to get a birth certificate you need a driver's license. That's brilliant, it's genuinely really Let's look to the future. Yes, we have elections coming up. You have midterms happening in America. You also have the presidential election which will be on its
way shortly after that. Is there anything people on the ground can do, what can people do to protect their votes? Yes? Absolutely, so there are several things. UM. One is you have to register to vote, and there are organizations that are on the ground helping people like get the identification, get the documents they need in order to get the identification.
Organizations like vote writers that are that are doing that work. UM. Also, when you're registered, check your UM the Secretaries of States voter registration page to make sure you're registered to vote, because they are notorious for purging people off the list even well closely close to an election. So you think that you're registered to vote, you go in to vote and boom, your name is nowhere there, and then you're
getting the run around. So that checking regularly. I check every week and then I print off a copy so that I've got documentation that I am actually registered to vote and that this is my polling place. I say, I think the other thing is really important is to help others so that you're volunteering, you're you know, you've got election poll workers, and you're you're paying attention to what's happening at the polls when somebody is getting the
run around. I think that that is really important as well. In their organizations like the Lawyer's Committee that's that's doing that incredible work. So that's what we can do and register. The deadline is coming up in early October. Register to vote because we cannot be part of the solution if we're just sitting there on and not participating. With Doctor v Show, One Question, No Vote is available now. Scary and fascinating Carolinas and everybody The Daily Show with Governora
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