Ari Berman on Attacks on Voting

Welcome to CounterSpin, your weekly look behind the headlines. I'm Janine Jackson. This week on CounterSpin, Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing for changes to the electoral process that would make it harder for millions of people to vote. And some media are still presenting it as a matter of election integrity. Voter advocates described things like the Save America Act as aiming to make the U.S. into a show us your papers dystopia. That bill likely won't make it out of the Senate, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be sounding the alarm loudly about the various multi-level efforts this White House is pursuing to take control of elections away from the people. We'll hear that worrisome and enraging story from Ari Berman, National Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jay Jones, and author of Give Us the Ballot, the Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, among other titles. That's coming up, but first we'll take a quick look back at some recent press.

The United States has no right to wage war on Iran or to have a say who governs the country. You wouldn't get that baseline understanding, though, from this country's top opinion pages. As Gregory Shupak describes for fare.org, the Washington Post and New York Times are putting out arguments for the U.S. to escalate attacks on Iran out of, their telling readers, a sincere desire to improve Iranians' lives and brighten their futures. The Post offered two editorials addressing the possibility of the U.S. undertaking a bombing and shooting war on Iran with no opposition to that idea, as long as we throw in economic warfare as well. Crediting Trump with, quote, the wisdom of distinguishing between an authoritarian regime and the people who suffer under its rule. close quote. The Post's January 2nd editorial applauded Trump's promise to Iranian protesters that the U.S. will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go, he said. For the Post, the problem was not that Trump was threatening to bomb a sovereign state, but that, quote, air strikes are at best a temporary solution, close quote. The optimal strategy, the paper says, is, quote, to economically squeeze the regime as hard as possible at this moment of maximum vulnerability. More stringent enforcement of existing oil sanctions would go a long way, close quote. The odd pretense that you can economically squeeze a country's regime without hurting its people is a hardy perennial in corporate media. In this case, the sanctions that the posts like so much on Iran's primary source of revenue have curtailed the state's ability to provide for millions of impoverished Iranians through social safety nets. The U.S. nevertheless continues the sanctions, and the Post applauds them, but we're to hold on to the idea that the whole point is, as the Post puts it, to free Iranians from bondage. A second Washington Post editorial on January 23rd, citing a repressive crackdown in Iran, chided Trump for ratcheting back his earlier rhetoric, claiming Iran is now mocking Trump for backing down. No, this isn't pro wrestling. This is a leading daily offering counsel on engaging in war. Said the post, quote, air strikes alone won't bring down the regime or make it behave like a normal country. But Israel and the U.S. have shown in recent years that bombing can cause significant tactical setbacks. And there is always more room for sanctions pressure, close quote. To deter Iran's government from killing Iranians, you see, the U.S. needs to kill Iranians. The U.S. Israeli aggression against Iran last June killed more than a thousand Iranians, most of them civilians. But bombing other countries and depriving them of food, for the Washington Post, this is what it means to behave like a normal country.

At the New York Times, readers were told Iran's government is, quote, too depraved to be reformed, close quote. And all there is for it is more of the sanctions that are causing, for example, medical shortages that endanger the most vulnerable. But also, U.S. military violence is always an option. The Times suggests politely that there be, quote, adequate preparation and resources, close quote. Behind this military operation, which should be based on, quote, policies that have the best chance of creating the conditions for a democratic transition, close quote. As Shupak reminds us, U.S. wars don't bring about democracy and are not intended to do so. Instead, such wars bring about social collapse. Ask Libya or Syria. The Times is Brett Stevens came in with his own hot take. Invoking the DHS killing of Alex Preti in Minneapolis, Stevens urged thoughtful Americans to encourage the same administration that killed Predi to exercise the military option in Iran. Quote, if Preddy's death is a tragedy, what do we say or do in the face of the murder of thousands of Iranians? Are they, as Stalin might have said, just another statistic? Close quote. Did you follow that? Stevens is citing people's outrage against the U.S. government killing a protester as a reason they should support the U.S. government inflicting violence against Iran. The corollary to that would be that if you're opposed to Iran suppressing anti-government forces, you should therefore be in favor of Tehran launching armed attacks to defend protesters in the U.S. The Post and the Times insist that their call for the U.S. to assault Iran is a moral thing. It would mean the U.S. demonstrating loyalty to Iranian protesters. But to buy the premise that the U.S. is interested in enabling the Iranian population to flourish, you have to ignore more than 70 years of Washington's policy of inflicting pain on Iranians in an effort to dominate them. U.S. policy has included overthrowing Iran's democratically elected government in 1953, propping up the Shah's brutal dictatorship for the next 26 years, sponsoring Saddam Hussein's invasion of the country and use of chemical weapons against it,

partnering with Israel in a years-long campaign of murdering Iranian scientists and currently maintaining, along with its allies, a sanctions regime that is associated with a substantial drop in Iranian life expectancy. If these editorialists have knowledge that the U.S. under Donald Trump is so radically reorienting its conduct in the international arena that now carrying out a war on a country really is the best way to help its people, we imagine that they would want to share that proof with their readers. You're listening to Counterspin, brought to you each week by the Media Watch Group Fair. The L.A. Times recently reported on a California election administrator who explained that along with the things she's accustomed to do before a midterm, ordering supplies, confirming voting locations, she's also having to prepare staff to deal with federal agents showing up and demanding ballots, potentially, and masked ice agents marching around at the polls with guns. But that's just one piece of the Trump administration's multi-front assault on democracy. The most recent development, or maybe it's just Thursday, is the passage through the House of legislation that would make it harder to vote and harder for some than for others. Our guest tracks these dispiriting events along with the pushback. Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jay Jones and author of most recently Minority Rules. the right-wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to resist it. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to counterspin, Ari Berman. Hey, Janine. Good to talk to you again. Thanks. Well, I do want to ask you about the so-called Save America Act that passed the house yesterday, even though it... seems unlikely to get through the Senate. But I wonder if I could start asking you about a story that's supposedly about the past, but not really. And that's Fulton County, Georgia and the FBI raid. What the heck happened there? And what is the story behind it? Well, it's really crazy. I mean, the fact that the FBI just rolled in and took 656. boxes of ballots and election records from the 2020 election was a massive escalation in terms of President Trump's attempt to try to take over the election system. They had been talking about getting the ballots for years, but to actually just take them was really shocking. And then when the affidavit was unsealed and we saw the quote unquote evidence. they presented, it was even more shocking because they didn't have any evidence. It was a bunch of recycled claims from election deniers. It was even crazy that they got a judge to sign off on it because you need probable cause, meaning that you need evidence of a criminal offense to be able to get a warrant for this kind of raid. They seemed like they wanted to get the balance to try to find the evidence. So they were doing it backwards in the election that took place.

over five years ago. So it's just really, really crazy from the beginning to the end, the fact that they're still so obsessed to the 2020 election, the fact that President Trump is putting so many resources into trying to re-litigate the 2020 election, the fact that he is now involving the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice in this effort that he's bringing in debunked election deniers into the White House. We now know that this raid was based on an election liar, Kurt Olson, who was involved with January 6th, is now a temporary White House employee, and he was the basis for the FBI raid. And you're right, though. While it's been portrayed as about 2020, I think the bigger reason they want the ballots is about 2026 and 2028. They can say, okay, we now have definitive proof. The election was rigged, even though it wasn't. And therefore, we have to nationalize the voting as Trump has called for. We have to take over the voting process. And of course, Fulton County is one of those places where they're going to try to do that. And we're going to use every tool we can to try to interfere in the midterms. because we can't prevent, in the words of Steve Bannon, another election for being stolen again. Wow. Wow. Just points of information, the whole Georgia thing was investigated, right? We did this in the past in terms of looking at whether there was malfeasance in Georgia's voting in 2020. It's not like it wasn't looked at, right? It was looked at extensively. Right. I mean, more so than probably in any other place. And it was looked at by Republicans. I mean, it was the Republican governor, the Republican Secretary of State, the Republican Attorney General, the Republican legislature that signed off on all of this. There were three audits. There were multiple subsequent investigations. But, you know, this has gained momentum in election denier circles. And one of the things that's happened in... Georgia was their trio of election deniers took over the state election board. And they have really been beating the drum on Fulton County, Georgia, which is... Georgia's largest county home to Atlanta. And they've been trying to get more control over elections in Fulton County. And they have now been feeding information to the Justice Department, to the FBI. You'll see if you read that affidavit, two members, two Republican members of the state election board are named as witnesses in that affidavit. And so there is a feedback loop. between election deniers in Georgia and election deniers in Washington to try to not just relitigate the 2020 election, but to gain more control over how elections are run in 2026 and 2028. And Georgia is one of those places that's going to have a lot of important elections, not just for the U.S. House, but for the U.S. Senate.

your voter rolls. That was one of the number of conditions that she put out there. And this was shocking because, you know, ICE is supposed to be there ostensibly for immigration purposes. Now, we know that ICE has gone way beyond what their mandate was supposed to be in Minnesota, but the Department of Justice went even further to tie the voter rolls to immigration raids, which made it seem like the whole purpose of ICE being there was just as a... political front so that the administration could carry out its political priorities. And it's just really disturbing because I think if you look at the way it's gone down in Minnesota, the way it's gone down in Georgia, I mean, basically... blue states, blue cities, election boards controlled by Democrats. I mean, they are essentially occupied territory right now. And it's kind of like the Trump administration is the Kremlin and anyone who opposes the Kremlin. becomes the opposition, when we know what happens to the opposition in authoritarian countries. And I think that is the playbook that the Trump administration would like to follow. We'll see if they're successful in doing so. But I don't think we've ever seen an administration use the full weight of the federal government and the full weight of law enforcement, whether it's the FBI, ICE. DOJ in this kind of way before. And that's because legally, or at least, you know, last we checked, there are things that a president can't do at the state level, right? There's involvement that is meant to be prohibited, and that's why they are throwing everything at the wall and bending rules and making up new ones because there's meant to be a separation there, yeah. Yeah, and that's a really good point, Gene. I mean, the fact is the Trump administration hasn't been very successful. in its attempts to quote-unquote nationalize the voting. Trump passed an executive order early in his term to try to do a lot of things like, for example, require proof of citizenship to register to vote. It wasn't successful. It's been blocked in the courts because the president can't usurp the power of the states in Congress. Congress has also tried to pass due restrictions on voting, but they haven't been able to get it through the Senate because of the 60 vote requirement in the Senate and the lack of enthusiasm even for some Republicans. for trying to federalize voting. And then the U.S. election system at the state level is very decentralized. That is something that Republicans have often praised the fact that there is so much power for the states when it comes to running our election. So that has made it difficult for Trump to take over. And they've met resistance even from Republicans when it comes to some of this stuff. I mean, I just saw yesterday the Secretary of State of West Virginia.

said he wasn't going to turn over his voter rolls to the Department of Justice, basically saying the DOJ can't run state elections. You had a recent conference of secretaries of state, and there was a bipartisan outcry over the kind of things that Pam Bondi is trying to do to federalize elections. So I think that Trump administration is operating for a position of weakness rather than a position of strength, and that's why they're acting more and more extreme in terms of their tactics. Well, continuing that, because this so-called Save America Act, which has been tried and failed before, and folks say is very likely to fail again in the Senate, but Wednesday, February 11th, the House with the whole Republican caucus plus Henry Quayyar passed this so-called Save America Act. But... We still have to think about it because it's what they want to do, even if they are mainly not going to get there. But what would this, in fact, try to do? Well, it does three major things. The first thing is what's already been passed in an earlier bill called the Save Act, which is require proof of citizenship to register to vote. And that is much worse than just requiring a driver's license, for example, to cast a ballot because you would need a passport or a birth certificate. to be able to register. These are things that people don't carry around with them. Half of all Americans don't have a passport. A lot of people don't know where their birth certificate is or may have had issues obtaining one in the first place. These aren't things that you carry around with you. on a regular basis. It also requires you to show your documentation in person at an election office. That means people that live in rural areas can have to drive very long distances to show this kind of information. There's also the possibility that it could really burden married women who have changed their names and taken their partner's last name. Interestingly enough, both rural voters and married women are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, so it could hurt. conservative constituencies more than liberal ones. Then they'll add it on to it a strict photo ID requirement to vote. About 21 million Americans don't have a current driver's license. That's about the same numbers, the number of Americans that don't have access to their citizenship papers and other IDs would be excluded like student IDs, tribal IDs. And the third thing it does is... it forces states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, much like the Department of Justice is trying to get those voter rolls in states like Minnesota and other places. Wow. Wow. You know, when you hear just kind of talk radio arguments, you might hear someone say, oh, well, you know, I have ID. Why would you object to showing ID? And it's kind of framed that way. You less often hear... What is the problem this intervention is supposedly addressing? Because we've been around this story before, you know? Exactly. I mean, it's trying to address the problem in particular of non-citizen voting, which is basically a completely non-existent problem. There have been so many audits at the state level of this recently in Georgia.

in North Carolina in Utah, and they find an infatestable number of non-citizens who are even registered to vote, and a much smaller number cannot existent number of non-citizens who have actually voted. Utah just reviewed the 2.1 million people on its voter rolls that didn't find a single instance of a non-citizen voting because the cost-benefit analysis just doesn't make sense. Why would someone risk five years in jail, a felony, potential deportation for passing a ballot? I mean, it doesn't... actually make any rational sense. And of course, there's already safeguards against it. But yeah, they added voter ID to this bill for messaging purposes. So they could say, you need an ID to buy liquor, you need an ID to get on a plane, so you need ID to vote. We'll leave aside the fact that those other things are not constitutionally protected rights like voting are. They always understate the difficulties of it. But the real problem with the bill is not the voter ID part. It's the proof of citizenship part, right? And that is a lot more burdensome. And I think a lot of Americans... maybe intuitively support this, but would be surprised by the difficulties they would have under a kind of law like this. For example, Kansas put a proof of citizenship law in effect a few years ago, and it blocked one in seven people. from registering to vote. Because, again, people do not bring their birth certificates with them when they register. Like, for example, people carry around a driver's license. So it's much more draconian than what they normally pass. If you listen to Trump, he would like to go much further. He wants to get rid of mail voting altogether. That's not going to happen. That would hurt a lot of Republican constituencies. They just keep banging this drum, and they're putting out a tremendous amount of disinformation. A lot of it's fueled by Elon Musk on X. And they're convincing a lot of people of things that aren't true. And that can't be good for democracy in any kind of way. Well, finally, Donald Trump on Fox and Friends in 2020 said that if voting access were expanded, if we eased barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people, if voting were made more widely accessible, Trump said, quote, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again, close quote. So again, I come back to the idea that this could possibly be spun. These measures could be spun as protecting democracy or even respecting the democratic process is just bizarro world. But I don't see a lot of media on this bigger picture, the fact that this is a frank effort to avoid accountability and to have the capacity to push through policies that are simply not. popular, you know, to do things that people don't want, you know, through these power moves. And I am concerned that media seem to be more interested in whether he can pull it off than about the bigger enterprise at work. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true. I also think the risk is always just kind of reporting this like it's a normal political story. I go, it's the average Tuesday and the FBI just took self a hundred bucks.

It's not normal. And I think we risk becoming numb to the abnormality that we're seeing here because so many of this stuff is just truly unprecedented, even compared. to Trump's first term. The kind of things that Trump is doing in his second term are the kind of things he contemplated in his first term, but was talked off the edge of. And so we really are in, you know, the Mike Flynn declaring the Interaction Act, seizing ballots, that kind of thing. And I think we just can't. report it like it's a normal thing when it's deeply, deeply, deeply abnormal. All right then, absolutely. Thank you. We've been speaking with Ari Berman. He's national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jay Jones. They're online at motherjones.com. His latest book is Minority Rule, the right-wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to resist it. Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin. Thanks so much for having me, Janine.

And that's it for CounterSpin for this week. CounterSpin is produced by Fair, the National Media Watch Group, based in New York. If you missed part of today's show or you'd like to hear previous shows, you can find shows and transcripts on our website, Fair.org. And the website is also the place to show much needed support for the show if you are able and so inclined. The show is engineered by Michael Cherry. I'm Janine Jackson. Thanks for listening to CounterSpin.