Voting rights are at risk. Here's why.

This message comes from NPR sponsor, Raymond James, a firm where wealth management, banking, and capital markets solutions start with the connections between people. That's the power of personal. Disclosures at Raymond James.com. What's good? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. We've got elections coming up in a few weeks all around the country. And as those races get into the home stretch, we've been looking at the many things that President Trump and his administration have been doing to try to change how Americans vote. Like the president said, he wants to lead a movement, his words, to get rid of voting by mail before next year's big midterm elections. He's also been very skeptical of voting machines and ballots with barcodes. He's suggested at times he wants to get rid of voting machines completely. And his administration is now blocking NGOs like the League of Women Voters from registering new citizens to vote at their naturalization ceremonies. The president has said this is all necessary to protect elections and make sure only the right people are casting ballots. And you know, the president has been on this for a minute. Like, he's been falsely claiming four years that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Oh, and there's another thing. Another big thing. On October 15th, the Supreme Court is taking on a major voting rights case. It's called Louisiana v. Calais. In that case, has huge implications. It could effectively spell the end of the Voting Rights Act. One former U.S. attorney wrote that, depending on how that ruling goes, voting maps across the country could be changed to favor the Republican Party, quote, for a generation. Taken all together. These things are part of a larger trend that is making it harder and harder for many Americans to cast their ballots, particularly people of color. And for people who can still vote, especially in blue democratic enclaves, they are finding that their votes carry less and less weight. I mean, I didn't even mention gerrymandering yet. And so that's what we're getting into on this episode, because our guests today say that Americans access to the ballots being chipped away in big ways and small ways. And they say the clock is ticking because whether the U.S. continues as a functioning democracy depends on figuring out what to do about it. And soon. Be afraid. Be very afraid. This message comes from Vanta. Risk and regulations are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. That's not just faster compliance, it's more time for growth.

Get started at Vancea.com. This message comes from Granger. This is the story of the one. As a procurement manager for a hospital system, she keeps every facility in her network stocked and ready. That's why she counts on Granger to be her single source for thousands of products, from disinfectants to lighting, air filters, and more. And with fast, dependable delivery, Granger helps her keep every facility stocked, safe, and running smoothly. Call 1-800 Granger. Click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. This message comes from Instacart. Instacart makes grocery shopping easier, and just because you're not doing the shopping yourself doesn't mean you don't care how it's done. With Instacart Shopper notes, you can add details about what you want right in the app, like Extra Crispy Rotisserie Chicken or lettuce you'd pick yourself. Just leave a note so your shopper can get it right without having to ask. Download the Instacart app and shop today. Okay, y'all, let's start with the gerrymandering that I mentioned. So over the summer, there was this very big, very ugly fight that went down in Texas. And it might go down as one of those crossing the Rubicon moments for American democracy. I know it feels like we've been having a lot of those lately. Okay, so in the event that you missed it, this summer, Republicans in Texas decided to toss out their old voting maps, and they did so at President Trump's direction. They drove up a bunch of new maps with new districts, and the new maps were chopped and screwed in a way, those little Texas joke for you all, chopped and screwed in a way that broke up some long-standing districts held by Democrats in the U.S. Congress, and these moves would potentially... give Republicans five more congressional seats in Washington, five seats in a very tightly split House of Representatives. The districts in Texas that went away with these new maps, they were made up of mostly Latino and black voters. Voting rights groups like the NWCP and LULAC and the League of Women Voters argued that these new maps were drawn in such a way that favors white voters who lean Republican. Democratic lawmakers across the country watched what was going on and called foul. Some of the Democrats in the Texas legislature fled the state because the new maps could not be voted on if enough lawmakers were not in Texas. But that was all just delaying the inevitable. The governor is a Republican. He's a Trump loyalist. Republicans control the state legislature in Texas. And so the Democratic lawmakers eventually returned to the lone star state and the new maps passed. This is Vincent Perez, who's a lawmaker there. You cannot say you found a way for one racial group that is 40% of our state's population to have 70% political control in this state and say that the racial disparities are merely coincidental.

And then for other Republican states to follow California, whether it be Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, I mean, the number of states that are considering this is now on two hands. Already said that all the ways that voting rights are being watered down through things like redistricting are just adding to the outsized political power in Washington that is wielded by less populous parts of the country. I mean, it's an issue in the Senate, too. There's 15 states. that have a combined population of 41 million people. And they currently elect 30 Republican senators. And compare that to California, which has 39 people, so roughly the same population of those 15 states. California has almost that many people by itself, and only two Senate seats. And of the last four times a Republican has won the White House, only once has that candidate won the overall popular vote. Ari said that by the year 2040, control of 70 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate will be in the hands of parts of the country that represent only 30%. of the population. I mean, there's already this massive over-representation of small, wider, predominantly rural states. And that trend is going to get much worse as people increasingly move to larger and more diverse states, but those states won't gain any representation. in the Congress. And you could say, oh, well, that's just the Senate. What about the House? The problem is this whole conversation we've been having about redistricting is skewing the House right now. So if you have a Senate that is skewed by small states, you have a U.S. House that is skewed by... gerrymandering, you have a president that's not directly elected by the people, but by this anti-democratic vestige of an electoral college. And you have Supreme Court justices that are chosen by the undemocratic way that we elect senators and the undemocratic way we reelect presidents. You see why minority rule is such a problem in our political system. We're not fine. We have stuff going on that is going to systematically and systematically erode democracy, break citizens' rights to be able to vote because we've done it before. And now we've put it in a different kind of garb to make it sound legitimate, but it's actually really illegitimate, the attack on voting rights. I reached out to a historian of voting rights to help make sense of just how we got here. My name is Carol Anderson, and I'm a professor of African American Studies and History at Emory University. And you're also a bestselling author. I mean, big yourself up. Come on now. Yes, and I am a New York Times bestselling author. And I've written several books. One is one person, no vote, how voter suppression is destroying our democracy. I read Carol's book and told her that I had this rising sense of dread as I was making my way through it. And she was like, basically...

You should be scared. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Let's talk about why you should be afraid. We've got to do some history and go back 60 years to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was maybe the crowning legislative achievement of the civil rights movement. It made it illegal to throw up obstacles to voting. And part of that law said that for a bunch of the places that have been doing really shady stuff to keep certain people from voting, they now had to get the okay from the federal government if they wanted to change their voting rules that stopped places from giving people like impossible literacy tests or making them have to pay to vote or whatever. Well, in a 2013 case known as Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court basically tossed out that part. of the Voting Rights Act, which meant that states and counties suddenly had a lot more leeway to rewrite their voting laws however they saw fit. And this was a five-alarm fire for people who follow voting rights. So two hours after Shelby County v. Holder, Texas implemented its voter ID law. And again, one of the key things about these laws is that they look innocuous on the surface. They look really bureaucratic on the surface. And they look like they're supposed to be doing the work of democracy on the surface. So you keep hearing about voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud. And all we're doing is we're making sure that they are who they say they are when they vote. That's all voter ID does. That's what they say. That's what they say. No, no. I feel all Amy Winehouse right now. No, no, no. Because what they've done is they figured out the kinds of IDs that whites have and the kinds of IDs that black folks have. And they privileged the kinds of IDs have. And you say more about the kinds of ideas that black folk people have versus the kind of IDs that white folks have. Yes. So let's take Texas. So what they did in Texas is they said, your student ID doesn't count. as a government issued photo ID. Well, 50% of those in universities and colleges and universities in Texas are folks of color. But your gun registration card does. And 80% of those who have the gun registration card are white. That's how you get that imbalance. The other thing that they've done is access to being able to get an ID has been severely constricted. Are they making it harder to get an ID? Yes. Yes. So like in Alabama, they said you must have a government issued photo ID. And then shut down the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Black Belt counties. But gave the excuse that. We're trying to balance the state budget. And these facilities aren't getting a lot of traffic. So in order to be fiscally conservative, in order to be a really good steward of taxpayer dollars, we're shutting these units down. But what that meant was that folks now had to go 50 miles to go get a license, a driver's license. Yeah. So that's how you do it.

Shelby v. Holder was in 2013, as you said. By 2019, a civil rights group found that southern states had closed nearly 1,200 polling stations since that ruling. Doc, can we zoom out a little bit? Like, can you walk us through some of the most significant inflection points in the history of voting rights and voting suppression in American history? So one of the big moments was in the 1820s when New York changed this voting law. And what it said was that white men no longer had to pay basically a poll tax. But black men, they increased the amount that they had to pay. Right. And this is New York in the 1820. So the black population is pretty small. Pretty small. But it was just like, but there's still too many of them. So that was part of the constriction. One of the ways that you began to see the expansion was after the Civil War. And you got the 1867 Reconstruction Act. And then you've got the 15th Amendment. So the 1867 Reconstruction Act said that black men had the right to vote. And that was a major expansion. And the 15th Amendment said the right to vote shall not be abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. So you could no longer write a law saying we don't want black folk to vote. That would be unconstitutional. But Florida, in 1868, passed its permanent felony disfranchisement law and then crafted a series of criminal justice laws that disproportionately went after black folk in order to strip black men of the right to vote. And that was also when these places introduced things like, you know, vagrancy laws where you could be arrested and locked up for not being at work. Exactly, exactly. And so that was another major constriction. And that eddy threw to 2018 when Florida put on the ballot. an initiative to basically get rid of permanent felony disfranchisement. Because by 2018, 40% of black men in Florida could not vote because of a felony conviction. Wow. And about 25% of all African American adults could not vote in Florida because of a felony conviction. Yes. Then the legislature came back and said, whoo. oh, we don't want all those folks voting, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't say we don't want black folk to vote. So what they said was, you have to finish your sentence. So finishing your sentence means you have paid all of your fines, fees, and court cost as well. But then the fluid doesn't have to tell you how much you owe. And so to me, one of the big, big things was the 1890 Mississippi plan that pulled together all of the different disfranchisement mechanisms that had been there scattered around the South and put it into one big bill. And the reason they did that, as they were redrafting their Constitution, the reason they did that is because more black men were registered to vote in Mississippi than were white men.

And it is that power of the black political vote that frightens those folk. And so it combined the poll tax where you have to pay to be able to vote. And again, it sounds reasonable. Democracy is expensive. And so we've got to be able to pay for our election workers and the administration of elections. How do we pay for those things? How do we pay for those things? But the way that the poll tax worked was that it amounted to. somewhere like 6% of your annual income. Whoa. Yes. So imagine paying 6% of your annual income to be able to vote every year. Wow. And in Georgia, what happened was it was cumulative. So if you could vote it when you were 21, but you weren't able to pay your poll tax until you were 41, you owe 20 years of back poll taxes before you could vote. But they leaked the poll text with the literacy test. It was designed to basically block black folk from voting. And then you have these other components in there. Two years after the passage of the Mississippi plan, there were, let me see, originally in 1890,000 black men registered to vote. Two years later, there were only 8600. Whoa. Right. And the U.S. Supreme Court blessed that from on high in the Williams decision of 1898, where they said the literacy test and the poll tax do not violate the 15th Amendment because everybody has to pay the poll tax and everybody has to take the literacy test. Now, neither of those things are accurate. But the thing is that once it was blessed on high, you saw those kind of disfranchising mechanisms spread throughout the South. So by the time we get to 1940, when the world's in the riddle in the Second World War, only 3% of age-eligible African Americans were registered to vote in the South. And this is where most black folk in the United States lived in the South. That's the power of massive disfranchisement. But doing so in ways that cover it, saying, we just need to have. basically election integrity. We've got to stop all of this corruption at the ballot box. We've got to have a free and fair democracy. So they use the cover of cleaning up democracy, getting rid of corruption as a means to basically remove African Americans from the polling places, from being able to exercise their citizenship rights. Another place where the expansion happened was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And that came from years of struggle. Because remember, we're talking about the Mississippi plan of 1890. Then we get to 1940, and you're at 3%. By the time we get to 1965, we all know that image of the Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Fewer than 1% of African Americans were registered to vote in Dallas County where Selma was. fewer than 1%. In Lowndes County, it was 0% of African Americans and over 100% of whites were registered to vote. Over 100%. You're like, and how could that be? Yeah, right. Exactly. Two years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, fewer than 6% of African Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote.

Two years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, almost 60% of African Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote. Wow. Yeah. That thing was powerful. It was like the most powerful piece of legislation for citizenship rights. And this is what the U.S. Supreme Court gutted. And this is one of the major reasons why we're in the mess we're in now. Can you talk about some of the ways that people have been moving to disenfranchise or weaken the votes of Latino Americans? So part of what you see here, again, under the guise of being fiscally responsible, is the closing of polling places. So once you can increase the distance to the polling place from your neighborhood, your voter turnout will go down. Let's take Georgia, for instance. Georgia has closed over 200 polling places, the bulk of them in black and poor communities. that they have increased voter registration in these communities of Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinos, but the polling places in their neighborhoods have been shut down. So this is where on Election Day, when you see these long lines. Because you have more people being funneled into fewer and fewer spaces. And so that's part of how they do this. That's part of how disenfranchisement works. Because during the 2020 election, during the primaries, up in Cobb County here in Georgia, the wait time was something like 12 hours to vote. And I think there were some places where you were not allowed to hand out water bottles? Yeah. Yes. Yes. No. And so you're saying that one of the major ways that Latinos have been disenfranchises has been shutting down polling centers in Latino neighborhoods. Yeah. And one of the other ways is that the Voting Rights Act, the amended Voting Rights Act of 1975, I believe, said that if you have a certain percentage of non-English speakers in your district, then you have to have materials in that language. And we have had districts that have been really slow to put Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, the ballots in that language. And so imagine looking at a ballot and you can't read what language is in. How do you know what to vote for? And so that's another way of disfranchising folks. When we come back. We have to really turn out and vote. Really turn out and vote. We have to know that the people who are sitting in policymaking positions, greatly affect the quality of our lives so we can't be nonchalant about oh they're just the same they're all the same that's after the break stay with us y'all This message comes from Vanta. Risk and regulations are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. That's not just faster compliance, it's more time for growth.

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Gene, just Gene this week, Code Switch. And I'm talking to Carol Anderson, who is a professor at Emory University and the author of the book One Person, No Vote. And Carol argues that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has been one of the biggest factors in rolling back voting rights for Americans. So I asked her, what were the big ways that this rollback happened? You know, besides the Shelby v. Holder case. One of the things that I think is also really scary, what we should be looking at down the road, is that thing called the Save Act. The Save Act is designed to, as they said, strengthen election integrity, just making sure that American citizens can vote. So what they want, for instance, is that when you go to register to vote, you have to have something that proves you're a U.S. citizen. But I know my driver's license doesn't say U.S. citizen on it. Right. No one does, yeah. Right. A passport does. Passports are about $160. That's a poll tax. It's just, it's exorbitant. But it is a way to knock out entire groups of people that primarily vote Democratic. So it goes after young folk. It goes after black folk. It goes after Asian Americans. And it goes after Native Americans. And Latinos, just like with the voter ID laws. So when Alabama said, Your driver's license counts as a government-issued ID, but your public housing ID does not. I mean, does it get more government issued than public housing? 80% of those in public housing were African Americans in Alabama. And for many, it was the only government issued ID that they had. It was a way to eliminate that group from voting. And that's the same thing that you're seeing with requiring now something about citizenship. And also, like, more broadly to the point you made earlier about, like, disenfranchising the groups that you don't want to vote ends up disenfranchising everybody. maybe something close to half of Americans have passport. So it will also snag a whole lot of white folks, too. But, you know, one of the things, so part of what we're seeing is that a non-belief in democracy, so a sense that only those who are worthy should be voting. And we define who is worthy. And so that whole thing about a full-blown, multiracial, multicultural, multi-ethnic, vibrant democracy is not in their wheelhouse. Instead is this really exclusive thing. Only certain people should be able to vote. And how do we write the laws in such a way that doesn't say we don't want black folk to vote or we don't want Hispanics to vote or we don't want Asian Americans to vote?

How do we, instead of violating the 15th Amendment openly and brazenly, we put it in this kind of vague language of what I call bureaucratic violence. Are you worried at some time in the near future, like in 2020, that we just might not have elections? No. And I'm saying no so definitively because we need to not put that out in the universe. We need to be. expecting that we will have an election. So one of the things that we have found is that when democracy is under attack, basically the people rise up and the people demand democracy, they're willing to fight for that democracy. And that's where we are right now. What needs to happen is to reverse this trend line? We have to really turn out and vote, really turn out and vote. We have to know that the people who are sitting in policymaking positions, greatly affect the quality of our lives. And so we have to recognize that. We have to recognize how much power we do have and push back and insist on democracy. And so it is talking to your friends when they're saying, oh, they're all the same, explaining that, no, they are not, because all the same doesn't do A, B, C, D&E, you know, sending troops in to D.C. to D.C., ostensibly to control crime. When, yeah, right? When crime has actually gone down in D.C. And it's sending, talking about there's a war in Portland. Right. It is to try to get the American people used to having troops patrolling our cities and therefore having troops being near our polling places and having troops being able to seize ballot boxes from these democratic-led cities because they know that they're not popular. Because one of the things back in... The 60s, yes, it was the 60s and then the 1980s. And in the 2000 election, too. In Florida, they had police in the one entrance point to the voting precinct in the black community. So you had to basically go through a checkpoint Charlie if you wanted to go vote. And one of the things that they did in New Jersey. to basically rig the election was to put these billboards up and pass these flyers around and have armed men that looked official. They looked like police by the precincts. And it said, if you vote and if you have a warrant out for you or if you owe child support, you can be arrested if you vote. Yeah. And so it is that kind of intimidation, that kind of fear. that we have to say we're not afraid. And we have to push back. So it is organizing. It is really speaking truth to what is going on. So you see the troops. And why is that? You see the edicts coming down. So the edict about stopping mail-in balloting, mail-in voting. Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have.

a real democracy with mail-in ballots? There is no evidence of massive rampant voter fraud with mail-in ballots. And they were fine with mail-in ballots as long as it was generally elderly white folk, Republicans who were using mail-in ballots to vote. But in the 2020 and... particularly in the 2020 election, you had a massive increase in mail-in ballots from Democrats, from black folk, from brown folk because of the pandemic. And the power of those mail-in ballots, those absentee ballots, was essential in the wind of the Democrats in flipping Georgia blue. And again, they could not find any fraud. They did an audit of absentee ballots here in Georgia. They could not find any fraud. How do we separate the noise, right, that comes from people who are just disappointed that their candidate did not win and they said that something was afoot and something was amiss in the election from, you know, legitimate threats to voter? So this requires us to really read deeply, to think deeply, to talk, and not just jump at what we see on, on, on, on, on, on, on, in social media. It requires that we know a little something, something about something, that we do the heavy, what I call that heavy lifting of democracy. We do the work. We understand how voting works. How do audits work? It requires that we be really engaged citizens. Yeah, that's what it requires us to be really engaged citizens and not go down the rabbit hole of this is fraudulent, this is fraudulent, this is fraudulent, because that has been a trope that has been used. I mean, Mississippi used that trope. When they... In Camilla, Georgia, in 1868, when they kicked out the black representatives from the state house, from the legislature. Ostensibly, it was because of to stop all of the fraud. Yeah. So we hear fraud all the time. And I think about Justin Levitt, he did a study. And he found that from 2000 to 2014, out of one billion votes cast, that's with a B, there were 31 cases of documented voter fraud.

31. 31. Out of a billion. Out of a billion. You're right. Jesus. Yes. Yes. Call his name, right? Out of a billion. But that becomes foundational for this lie of massive rampant voter fraud. And so you have to ask yourself, self. Why is somebody trying to poison the water like this? Because part of saying it's all fraud, it is to try to get people to not engage in democracy. To say, my vote doesn't matter because they're not going to count it anyway. So I'm not even going to bother. And so when you have this way of trying to affect people's sense of urgency, the sense of participation, the sense of engagement, when you're trying to get them to be alienated. from democracy. That's what the lie of voter fraud is about, as well as providing a fig leaf to cover disfranchising laws.

Carl Anderson is a historian at Emory University and a New York Times bestselling author. Her book, One Person, No Vote, is about the rollback of voting rights across the country. Doc, thank you again for coming back on the show. Thank you so much for having me. All right, y'all, that's our show. But, but, but that is not all we have to say on this giant issue of voting rights. Because we wanted to talk to someone who's been out in the world sounding the alarm around these attacks on voting and the rise of authoritarianism. There are many ways we can get the government we deserve, but voting is the way we do it. In a democracy, you got to show up. And if you don't show up, the people who want you to be silent are going to use your silence as consent. And so what I tell folks is you may not be into politics, but politics is into you, and it is a stalker. And so you can either let your stalker win or you can get the restraining order, which is going to vote and getting them out of office. You can show up at their jobs and tell them you see them. And we can demand the democracy and the country we deserve. That voice belongs to Stacey Abrams. She's a lawyer. She's a voting rights activist. And she was very nearly the governor of Georgia. You can hear more from Stacey Abrams later this week in a special bonus episode of Code Switch. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR Code Switch. That's all one word. If emails, more how you get down, ours is CodeSwitch at NPR.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or, you know, wherever it is you get your podcast. You can also subscribe to the Code Switch newsletter by going to NPR.org slash code switch newsletter. Just a reminder that signing up for Code Switch Plus is a great way to support our show in public media. I don't know if you've been paying attention, but... We need your support right now. And, and you get to listen to every episode sponsor free, so please go find out more at plus.mpr.org slash code switch. This episode you're listening to was produced by Christina Kala. It was edited by Laudanella, and our engineer was Jimmy Keeley. And I'll be remiss if I did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch massive. Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Verlin Williams, Dalia Mortata, and B. A. Parker. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy. This message comes from Jerry. Noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims, you're not alone. That's why there's Jerry. Jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side by side from over 50 top insurers so you can confidently hit buy. No spam calls, no hidden fees. Jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best to shop. Drivers who say with Jerry could save over $1,300 a year. Don't overpay.

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