On March five, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a ninety eight page elections bill that, among many other measures, dramatically restricts absentee voting limits, the number and location of ballot drop boxes, gives the legislature the power to replace local election boards, and makes it a crime to provide water or food to those waiting and long lines to vote.
Passed on a party line vote by both Republican control chambers of the state legislature and signed by a Republican governor, the bill's provisions will have a disproportionate impact on the state's most heavily democratic urban counties, already notorious for their long lines on election day, and the law that was signed in Georgia is just one of more than two hundred fifty bills in forty five states that have been introduced to restrict voting access since last November's election. So
why am I telling you this? Because the right to vote is both fundamental to individual liberty and to the opper functioning of representative democracy. When voting rights are denied, deluded, or restricted, the ability of our government to solve problems, seize opportunities, and serve everyone is impaired and its legitimacy is weakened. And right now all across America, after a historic ellection with a record turnout, the foundation of our
democracy is at risk. That's why on today's episode, I'm grateful to be joined by one of our nation's most effective advocates for free and fair elections. After the Supreme Court got to the Voting Rights Act in opening the door to a wide range of discriminatory voting changes that disproportionately affect communities of color, like precinct closures and elimination of early voting, Stacy Abrams launched the New Georgia Project
to register voters and protect voting rights. She methodically got to work registering the very people who are being targeted by voters of Russian efforts, and advocating for laws that make it easier, not harder, to participate in our democracy. In she became the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, but lost the election by fifty five thousand votes, largely because of voter suppression and the removal of hundreds of
thousands of voters from the rolls. But she channeled her setbacks and a positive change for the state of Georgia and for our entire country, doubling down on her efforts and starting her organization Fair Fight to protect voting rights in Georgia and across America. Her work resulted in a national voter protection network amid the pandemic, along with record turnout in Georgia in the election and the critical Senate runoffs.
My conversation with Stacy was recorded shortly before the signing of Georgia's new law as part of the annual Clinton Global Initiative Meeting for University Students c g i U. Every year, CEU brings together hundreds of young change makers from around the world who are working to address urgent challenges on campus, in their communities, and across the lobe.
This year, our virtual host campus was Howard University. I wanted our c g i USED students to hear from Stacy because she's provided an incredible blueprint for achieving real, meaningful change. No matter what you're setting out to do, you need a clear vision, a realistic plan to get there, the fortitude to stick with it, and the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. Stacy Abrams has done that as well as anybody I have ever seen. I hope you
enjoy our conversation. Stacy, thank you for joining us today, and I think you should take it just a couple of moments and tell the people who are with us today how you got interested in this work and what you would say to young people about what are it's worth the time and effort and blood, sway tears put into it. Well, Mr President, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this conversation. Like you, I am a child of the South.
I was technically born in Wisconsin, but I grew up in Mississippi, and my parents were both civil rights activists when they were teenagers. So by the time I came along, I was part of the whole history of people who had been fighting for the right to vote, the right to have access to democracy. And as you know, Jim Crow, the system in the South that denied access to the right to vote to black Americans existed from the end of slavery basically through nineteen sixty five, and so my
parents were teenagers in sixty five. My dad was actually arrested helping register black people to vote. We tease him that my mom was doing the same work. She was just smart enough not to get caught. But I came of age knowing that the right to vote wasn't just about casting a ballot. It was the only way to tackle the poverty we lived in. And my parents both worked full time, and still we barely made ends meet.
We were what they called working poor. And so my parents took us with them to volunteer because they wanted us to work our hands to make people's lives better. But they also took us with them to vote because they said, individually, we can make a little bit of change, but when we vote, we make collective change. Society changes when you vote. So when I was seventeen, I was a student at Spellman College. I set up my first
table to register my fellow students to vote. And in nineteen ninety two, I got to work on my first major campaign, and that was for then Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. And so the very first campaign I was old enough to vote in, I voted in a primary. And I've worked to get people to vote in the nine two presidential election. And I used that one not only is an example of how long I've been at this, because that was thirty years ago. I also lifted up because it is a part of who I am. I've
never stopped working on the right to vote. When I was seventeen and eighteen, I was trying to expand access, trying to make sure more people could vote. By the time I was in my forties, I was fighting to protect the right to vote because of the harm that had been done by the Supreme Court to the Voting Rights Act, the law that basically said states couldn't hurt
the right to vote in the United States. And so I say all of this to say that, to answer your second question, it's worth doing this work because I've seen what happens when the right to vote is made real. When I was working on that campaign in ninety two, I got to see Bill Clinton become the President of the United States and start to address some of the terrible challenges, especially that we're facing poor people in the South.
And in two thousand and twenty and twenty one, I helped elect Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock and John ass Off, and now we have a plan, the American Rescue Plan, that will lift half of the children in poverty out of poverty. And that's because of voting. It's because when we fight for our democracy, when we do the work not only to protect democracy but to encourage people to participate in it. We've got to do both. You can't do one and not the other. But when we do
both together, real progress does happen. It's slow, it's sometimes plotting, it sometimes feels ineffective. But I know where I could be but for the times I voted, at the times my parents voted, and I know where we are, and I am very grateful that democracy can work. When you are the leader of the Democrats in the Georgia House, you ran for governor and you lost by volts, even though you got more votes than a Democrat ever had.
And most of us who looked at the race or convinced that you would have won if several hundred thousand voters hadn't been purged, I think you believe that too. And UH. Since the election, well over two hundred bills have been introduced in more than forty states to restrict the franchise again to make it harder for people to vote, Some of them overtly targeted at African Americans, others more broadly targeted at UH, younger voters, disabled voters, lower income voters,
people of color, immigrants. This used to be a by part of an issue. George W. Bush signed the extension of the voting rightside. Most Republicans voted for it, and then they said, we're digging our own graves. We gotta restrict the franchise again, and all of a sudden it
became party orthodoxy. So what do we do now? And tell us a little about the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act and why you think it's so report to the president as you you very clearly laid out the the onslaught isn't new, and and I want to give just a little bit of background. The United States does not have an affirmative right to vote in the Constitution. What the Constitution lays out is
how voting happens. It says that the Congress gets to determine the time, place in manner, and it delegates to each of the individual states and territories that get to participate in elections that they can administer the election. So there isn't a unlike in a lot of nations, especially most democratized nations, where there's a central universe of how
democracy works. And then it plays out locally. Everything for most American elections happens at the state level, and so the federal government, like the work that was done under your administration. We have some laws that say here are things you can't do. And we have the constitutional amendments, the fifteenth Amendment that gave black men the right to vote, the nineteenth Amendment that gave white women the right to vote, the Amendment that gave young people the right to vote.
And then we have the Voting Rights Act of nineteen five, which said, no matter where you live, they can't create laws that block you from voting. And we're going to make sure that states that have the right to administer these elections don't try to game the system. Because under Jim Crow, that was the most recent example, you had what we're called racially neutral and facially neutral rules. So Jim Crow didn't say in law for voting that black
people couldn't vote. It just created restrictions that only applied to black people. So it should have applied to everyone, but they created exceptions so it only applied to black voters. The reason this is important is that when you look at what's happening today, they're using the same system you hear these very they sound logical, these logical rules like photo I D or you know, we're gonna limit the
number of days of early voting. We're gonna end voting on Saturdays and Sundays, or make it uniform across the states. We're going to cut off the number of voters who can vote by mail. It applies to everyone in theory, but they've targeted these laws so that the people who are hurt by it are people of color, namely black people in the South, Latino and Native Americans in the West,
young people across the country. And the intention is to target these communities because they are the ones who are the most likely to vote in a way that is opposite of what Republicans currently want. And let's be clear, Democrats did it first, and before Democrats, the federalists did it.
So voter suppression isn't the proxy of the Republican Party alone, but they are the leaders now, and so any rules that will mitigate that harm, that will make it better or that can make it worse, Act Lee tend to start at the state level. And so, as you said, in response to more black people, more Latino, more Asian American, more Native American and more young people voting in one than in any election. The response has been two hundred and fifty three bills in forty three different states to
restrict access to the right to vote. And they use this term of art election integrity, but it is absolutely this code word for racial and age based discrimination. The only way to solve the problem is either to convince Republicans and the state legislatures that they control to not be bad people, to not do bad things. But they believe it's the only way they can win elections. They don't think they can compete with their ideas, so they're just going to stop voters they don't want to see
show up at the polls. And that leads to congressional action that leads to the four The People Act HR one slash S one and the John Lewisvoting Rights Advancement Act h R four. What these bills do for the People Act for the first time in American history, it sets a standard for how people register to vote, for the fact that everyone gets automatically registered if you're a citizen, and that if you move from place to place, you
can fix it the same day. The day you go to vote, you can vote, you can register to vote. It says that everyone gets to have at least two weeks of early voting because our economy is not the same economy we had in people who have different kinds of jobs, they can't all vote on a Tuesday. Number three, it says that everyone can vote by mail, which in
a pandemic became a really important issue. And then those laws, those rules become the rules no matter where you live, So for the first time in American history, there will be a standardization of who gets access to the right to vote. The second part, though, is how do you stop the states that have a history of seeing good laws and trying to make them worse from doing so.
And that's what the Voting Rights Advancement Act does. It restores Section five of the Voting Rights Act, which said that before you could do bad things to election laws,
you have to get permission from the Justice Department. And it's going to hopefully fix what we know the Supreme Court is about to break, which is Section two of the Voting Rights Act, which says you can't do anything that is going to have an effect of diminishing voters of color, and what they're arguing with the Republicans are arguing, and they set it in their presentation that if we don't stop these communities from being able to vote, Republicans
can't win elections. And so we need both HR one S one, the four the People Act, and we need the Voting Rights Advancement Act. We need both pieces because we have to make sure everyone has the same rights. And then we have to have a law that gives people a remedy to go to court to fix what they break. And what we have to remember is it's happening from Republicans right now. But any time a party gets into power, they are loath to give that power up.
And often the only way to hold onto power when demographics shift, when ideology shift, you can either change the way you run your campaigns and the policies you promote, or you can block people from voting. And in every authoritarian or autocratic government we see today that used to be a democracy, you will find that they started their dissent by limiting the voices of the minority because the
minority was getting too loud. You know, a couple of years ago, representative of Attorney General's Office in Texas actually said in an appeal and his defense of Texas voter restrictions. He said, absolutely, we're trying to make it harder for black and brown people to vote, but it's not race based. We wren make and harder because they don't vote for us. If they voted for us, we'd make it easy for them to vote. So that's an ultimant anti democratic statement,
small D and I actually appreciated it. I wish I could meet the guy and thank you for being honest. I'm sick of all this, you know, sort of smarmy talk about voter integrity, which doesn't have a look of merit, and which many of them have already acknowledged about the election, that it was the election was honestly held and and the votes were honestly counted. I remember after the election, I talked to an African American woman who lives in not very far from me, and she and her husband.
You know, they're wildly successful, they're well educated. And I said, I bet the place you live as a lot of people voted for Trump. She said, yeah, they do. And I said, did you ever ask him why they voted for him? And she said that they were really honest. They said, you had it for eight years we want it back, and he said they weren't talking about party. And so I think this is a sort of thing. You see this in the ethnic and religious and cultural tensions.
We see it in Europe, we see it in Asia, we even see it in Africa. Sadly, you know, when people don't want to ever give up their power, they make up for reasons to hold onto it, and then they have to have an information system that puts the poison into the minds and hearts of the people they're talking to so they can have a base big enough
to hold on. And this last election was really reassuring, and partly because the people who weren't with us showed up in big number two I think the highest percentage of registered voters where I saw a study that's at other registered uh, conservative evangelical Christians and ultra white nationalists voted. And you know, they didn't win. And I figured, we can't get higher, man, so we better change the rules.
And the sad thing is that it looks like spring Court is going to back them and changing the rules or as they certainly have to this point, and therefore Congress is our only hope. Now let me ask you this, since the Constitution gives the states a lot of leeway and running these elections. How far can the Congress go and telling them how to run the elections. There's a false dispute that's out there. Article one, Section four of the Constitution says Congress has essentially the ability to set
the time, place, and manner of elections. It delegates that to the states to actually administer it. But by and large, for federal elections, it is the responsibility of Congress to do what they think is necessary to set the time, the place, in the manor. Now they can't do that for a local election, for a mayor, or for a state legislative election. But the reality is there's not a single state that runs two parallel systems, one that's just
federal and one that's just state. There there's some tweaks, like, for example, Louisiana. The state of Louisiana holds most of their elections on Saturdays, except for the presidential election because it has to be held officially on that Tuesday. But on the rest of their elections they hold it on
Saturday because the federal government lets them do it. What would happen with HR one with the For the People Act is that there would be a baseline set where the federal government, much like the Motor Voter Act, and like the Act that created Provisional Ballots to Help America Vote Act, it would say that as a federal matter, we are saying that the time will be that you
will have at least two weeks of early voting. The place will be that you allow multiple people to vote on different days, and the manner will be that they can vote in person early, in person on the day of or they can vote by mail. It is absolutely constitutional for the federal government, through Congress to set that up.
And that's all the Four the People Act does. Now, the people pushing back against it don't like it because they like the fact that in the state of Oregon you can vote by mail exclusively, and they do an amazing job, have the single highest voter turnout, I think in the country. But you get to Mississippi, you can't vote by mail unless you are disabled, elderly, or you
can prove that you're gonna be out of town. You don't get to vote early, and you can only vote on election day otherwise, And so the that we have such a disparate methods of voting means that the quality of your democracy differs depending on the state you live in. And here in Georgia, until we sued them and forced changes, you could vote by mail in one county and they would let you know if they saw a mistake on your envelope, but if you voted by mail in another county,
they threw your vote out. So we sued them so that everyone got to be treated the same way. And that's why the federal action is so important. When the federal government says you have to vote this way, almost every state is going to vote using those rules for federal elections, but they're not going to change it for local and state elections because they don't they can't afford to.
Running two separate systems is incredibly expensive, and so not only as a matter of law, but as a matter of practicality, Congress taking action will create a safe baseline for elections for everyone in the United States who is eligible to vote. Stay tuned for more of the conversation
after this short break. Now we know the Congress is pretty closely divided in the House and the Senate, and the two of the Democratic senators have said they won't vote to abolish the fellow bus are altogether, which requires sixty votes to cut off debate on everything except the fundamental budget. Do you believe that we should say right now that when it comes two holding elections and who can vote, and how that's just as fundamental as the budget to our democracy and that there should also be
a carve out for that. Do you believe that that we can can we justify if it comes to that, Let's say we got to senators that won't repeal the filipbuster are altogether, or can't we justify saying we got to protect our democracy here? Do you favor uh a specific exemption for election related voting on the grounds that it's the building blocks of democracy and you shouldn't use a procedural vote UH to destroy it. Absolutely, So let's start with this number one. The filibuster is not in
the constitution. It is a rule that has been exacerbated over time. But it was a rule that was designed to encourage debate. It was designed encourage the minority to have a voice and not be overshadowed by the majority. But over time it became a procedural tool used to stop any bills that people didn't like, and the problem there is that when you do so, you not only shut down debate, you often shut down action against perfecty and bad behavior. There are three exemptions exist right now
to the filibuster. The budget reconciliation one, so essentially, if it's needed to fund the government and make the government work, you can get around the filibuster. The second is for judicial appointments. If you look at Articles three of the Constitution, we have to have judges. Congress has the responsibility to confirm the judicial appointments of the president. So they said, okay, we're gonna carve that one out that won't be subject
of filibuster. The third is cabinet appointments. They were blocking cabinet appointments, and it's the application of the president, which is Article two of the Constitution, to have a cabinet to help him do or her eventually do their work. And they carved out an exception for that. So I'm saying, if you've got a carve up for Article three, you've
got to carve out for Article two. Article one. Section four also is an example of a carve out because it is exclusively the responsibility of Congress to decide if the time, place, and manner of elections is meeting our obligations, and right now it's not. Therefore we should absolutely carve it out. I don't want to have the debate about the larger issue of the filibuster, because if we don't get this part done, if we don't solve the democracy crisis,
the rest of it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter what else they block, because most of the Americans who are trying to be heard won't have a voice in the process at all. And so it is not only I think, an existential crisis that we face. It is a moral imperative that we not allow a procedural rule to destroy the most durable democracy the world has known. First of all, thank you. That's as fine as accinct statement as I've
heard on the subject. There is no example in the world of a truly successful society where there is real upward mobility and shared prosperity without shared responsibilities of citizenship and a shared sense of community. And all is started basically when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, and then the reaction set in and by President Reagan was elected saying government is the problem.
Announcing in Philadelphia, Mississippi, I liked Reagan personally, it broke my heart when he did that, and it was a terrible thing to do, and uh, but it made the point. And ever since then, I spent eight long years trying to restore the legitimacy of the federal government in the minds of a majority of American people. And when I left, it was the highest that had been in thirty years, but it was it's not sustainable under these relentless attacks. So my question to you is, what do we do
to win the information war? What's your strategy for making people continuously believe this matters, Because let's be honest, one of the reasons where the fix we're in is that we passed off on too many mid term elections over the last twenty years when only the Republicans were voting practically, and they like that just fine. And so now you've got state government and many states way to the right
of where people are. I would say three very quick things. One, we have to be very clear with people that voting is not magic. It is medicine. Magic makes things happen, makes things disappear. Medicine helps make things better. And when you don't take your medicine things get worse in a democratic society. When you are silent, then you are refusing to take your medicine, and the disease that you're fighting, whether it's a disease of racism, poverty, and justice, whatever
the disease is that you think matters. If you are silent, the disease gets worse. So that's first. Second, we have to connect the dots. We unfortunately have seen not only forty years of denigration of government, we've also seen forty years of disinformation. People don't know who does what, and we've got so many layers of government and so many jobs. One of the most important responsibilities is getting back to the basics, explaining that if you care about criminal justice reform,
you need to watch what the mayor is doing. If you care about housing, look at your county zoning laws. If you care about abortion, about reproductive choice, if you care about the environment, make certain you know who your state legislators are. Not everything happens at the federal government. In fact, most things happen at the state and local level. So that's number two, And then number three is stop
trying to proselytize and convert someone's ideology. I start with the people that's who have never had anyone speak to them. And I would say this is true about your campaign for president, the work that President Obama did, what we are seeing happen now when we go to people who have been left out of the narrative and we actually talked to them by saying not just that we understand, but we listen. When you go to the people who are left out of the conversation, you expand the pool
of opportunity for change. And the work we do here in Georgia, the work we've tried to do around the country through fair Fight and fair count is by talking to people who are so often ignored or silenced, because when someone finds their voice, it is a rare occasion that they shut up ever again. And so if we do that work, voting is medicine, not magic. That we have to connect the dots to who does what, and that we talk to the people who should be heard.
I think that's how we overcome disinformation social media that is never going to tell us the whole truth. But it's also how we build the next generation of engagement and the next generation of democracy. I agree with you with one little caveat I think we talk about elections, who wins, who lost, loses as if they got eight percent of the vote, and very often it's a near
run thing either way. And I believe that for particularly for the party of government, if you will, though we're not a party of government only, but a party that believes you have to have a good government and a good private sector to make a good society. What we have to do is to realize that a lot of these people out in the middle will respond to performance. We don't have to get them allog, just a few. It's like a bunch of metal on the floor, and
to competing magnets, performance is the only thing. Once we get in, it makes our magnet stronger. And I think that's our aunts to get through this incredibly perilous time. We can do something about the increasing inequality of incomes. We can do something about every single one of these problems, but we have to have people committed to do it and to believe it. It's easy to sell the truth,
I think if it's evident to people. But if you're just going on a digging expedition and and they're digging in your hate and we're digging in your hope, we don't always have a bigger magnet. If we had more people like you, we'd have the most powerful magnet on Earth. We'll be right back. What makes you hopeful about the future in the United States and beyond? In I made my first trip of broad I went to Salzburg and I was there as a fellow on youth civic engagement.
This was, you know, twenty years ago. I was there to talk about why young people had to be engaged, had to be candidates, had to be operatives running campaigns, had to be activists encouraging people, and had to be social workers in the sense of connecting people to their power. I did it because I believe then as I believe now, that we can win. My great great great grandparents were
slaves in the United States. My great great grandparents were sharecroppers working on other people's land, making little money, barely able to make ends meet. My great grandparents were domestic workers. My grandparents were cooks who worked at a college. Their children were legally not allowed to attend because of their race. My parents, as I said, we're working poor despite having
college degrees. But I became the first black woman in American history to be a nominee for governor, and as President Clinton knows, governors are powerful people who can help change the future society. I do this work because I have seen change happen. I am not where my grandparents were, I am not where they imagine me to be yet,
but I am closer than we have ever been. And my responsibility is not to bemoan what has been passed, but to understand it and to do the work to make the next generation stronger and make the next story an even better story than my own. No one says it better than to you as well. Thank you so much, sir, Hi, I'm myshe Alexander. I'm senior Impact and Design Manager and a proud alumni of the Clinton Global Initiative University c g I U. President Clinton and Chelsea often say that
you're never too young to make a difference. Not c g I. You are working to engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses across the country and around the world to turn their big ideas for social change
into meaningful action. Through our year round program of mentorship, skills training, and partnership building, we're cultivating a community of more than ten thousand students in alumni who are committed to taking real, concrete steps towards working together and solving the pressing global challenges that affect us all, from responding to COVID nineteen to expanding access to clean water, to supporting refugees and so much more. The students of c
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