Ari Berman on The Contentious Right To Vote [07-18-19]

This is Larry Lessig, and this is the third season of the podcast. Another way you'd think in a democracy that some things would be easy, some points obvious, some practices so entrenched that nobody would have to argue about them. And among those, you'd think the right to vote would be right at the very top, that everyone would have a right to vote and that we all would have an equal right to vote. But of course, the reality is radically different. And the history of American democracy has been a long struggle to extend the right to vote broadly and now equally. And in this episode, we'll be talking to one of the journalists and writers who's done the most to carry this story to the public, Ari Berman, who has written a book that will be the foundation of this episode of the podcast, give Us the Ballot. The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Ari Berman is a senior contributor for the Nation magazine and a fellow at the Nation Institute, and he will join us by phone in the podcast to follow. But before we do the podcast, as we do each week, we we describe a sponsorship, which of course is not technically a sponsorship, but it's a sponsorship in spirit, a sponsorship by those who are doing similar work in other areas. This week, it's the great End Citizens United. End Citizens United is a grassroots funded organization dedicated to ending the influence of big money in American politics in the idea that the size of your bank account should not determine the amount of influence you have over your government. N Citizens United believes that Democrats need to campaign and govern in a way that restores the public's trust. We won't be able to make progress on health care, climate change, gun violence and other progressive priorities until we address the corrupting influence of money, big money, in our politics. Their website is N Citizens United States and they have a Twitter feed @stopbigmoney. Now n citizens United is focused to the left, to the Democrats. Next week we'll have a sponsorship for a similar organization that aims to the right, Take back our republic. So with that, we will turn to the episode with Ari. Ari, welcome. Okay, so, Ari Berman, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us. I've just explained that this podcast, this episode of this podcast is going to focus on the question of the right to vote. And most people come to this question a little puzzled because most people, I think, presume that something like a democracy would embed a right to vote for all citizens. Is that the way our democracy works?

That's not the way our democracy works, Larry. And that's a very good Point. I think a lot of people don't realize that we really don't have a fundamental guarantee of voting rights in our Constitution. We have things over time that have evolved that you can't do, at least theoretically. Right. You can't discriminate against people on the basis of race or on sex or based on age, as long as they're qualified. So there are things you can't do that are embedded in different amendments, whether it's the 15th amendment or the 19th amendment. But we don't have anything that says something along the lines of, and you would probably know this language better than me, but something along the lines that says everyone shall have a right to vote except for X, Y and Z. And I think that was by design. You know, the founders wanted to leave voting qualifications to the states, and they knew that most states at the time restricted voting rights to white male property owners, and they were okay with that right.

So before we get into the fight about the discrimination on the basis of race, there is embedded in the system all sorts of discriminations on the basis of sex, obviously, property. In many states, you had to be a property owner. And those discriminations were part of what we thought of the right of the state to include the right to define who their political, the political class of the state would be.

That's right. I mean, I think that there was a belief that voting should be restricted to people who owned property because that gave you some sort of skin in the game in society, that voting should be restricted to men because men were thought of as the rightful actors in a democracy or in a society that that voting should be restricted to white men because whites were superior to other races. So these kind of biases, economic biases, racial biases, gender biases, were really built into the foundation of voting in this country. And it took a long time to get rid of those kind of things, to get rid of property requirements and to get rid of gender requirements and to get rid of racial requirements for voting, that at the beginning, white male property owners were basically the only people voting in most states.

So this is the part of the history I don't quite understand. So let's imagine we're talking about again before the Civil War amendments and we're talking about a state that's restricting voting to white male property owners. Was there ever a practice of discriminating, for example, against Republican white male property owners or federalist white male property owners? Was there ever a kind of partisan discrimination or restriction that would make it so that even within the class of entitled Voters, there was not an equal freedom to vote.

That's a good question, as far as I'm aware. No, I mean, I think there were efforts to disenfranchise people for different reasons. And there were things that were done, for example, to try to limit the influence of one political party or another. But I don't think anything was done quite as explicitly as it was done along race, class or gender lines. That is my understanding. There are people, I will freely admit, Larry, there are people that know a lot more about the founding period than I do. So I could very well be wrong about this. But when I think about these kind of things, I think about it more along the lines of trying to create classes of people who could and couldn't vote as opposed to classes of people that belong to one party or another.

Yeah, that's my sense as well. And we'll get back to why that's, I think, significant at the end. But I just wanted to start to make sure that I didn't know there wasn't something there that I was missing. So the first fundamental point to recognize is that we don't have a right to vote. Instead, we've sort of built in reasons why you can't be restricted from the right to vote. The second important thing to keep in mind before we think about this is there's no real interest, is there, in a political system designed the way ours is to make sure that everybody is voting. The interest is in making sure that more of your side votes than the other side.

Certainly that was the way it was at the beginning. If you look at, I mean, just the fact that voting was restricted to white male property owners. I read one statistic that MEANT that only 6% of of Americans were able to vote in the first presidential election. So obviously you had a lot of white men who weren't property owners, they couldn't vote. You had a lot of women, they couldn't vote. You had different racial minority groups, enslaved people, free black people, they couldn't vote. And so I mean on down the line of people who weren't, obviously 18 year olds couldn't vote then either. So I mean, on the line you just kept restricting more and more people to a very small percentage of society was able to participate. And I think it was more important that they created this class of who they viewed as kind of wise men as opposed to which party they might be for. So I mean, they were okay with debates between Democrats or Republicans or whatever it was back then, but they wanted to restrict from the very outset who could participate in that kind of political process.

Okay, so I get that part. But what I'm trying to focus on is a different part of the dynamic here. For whatever class of people is allowed to vote, there's no real need for the political system. If you're the Republican Party leader in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, in 1995, and you're looking forward to the 1996 election, your objective isn't so much that everybody votes as much as it is that just more Republicans vote than Democrats. Right. It's not because we're a plurality system. We're a plurality democracy. You just have to get more than the other side and you win everything.

Exactly. And I mean, obviously, if you're a party that is trying to bring new people into the process. Right. If you're a party that believes that if there is broader participation you'll benefit, then you might support those efforts. But broadly speaking, if we have a political system that's defined by parties, and the parties want to win and they just have to get more votes in the next guy, they're just going to be chiefly concerned with getting more of their people out to vote. And I think that has been a historic dynamic, and that certainly remains a dynamic today.

Yeah. So this dynamic, I think, is important to keep in mind. You would think if you were running a democracy, you would try to build systems to make sure that everybody within the proper class of voters, like everybody over the age of 18 who isn't a felon or in prison or something like that, would be out there voting. But because we hand the political process over essentially to these politically interested people, the kind of partisans who run the Secretary of State's office or whatever it is, their interest is not really to make sure everybody's participating as much as it is to make sure that enough for participating for one side to win over the other. So that the interest of our system of democracy is not really universal participation in the suffrage as much as it is just to make sure we can pick one winner over somebody else.

Yeah. And particularly when you have winner take all systems. Right. So, I mean, there's no real benefit in most places to being in second either. So it's win at all costs. And parties have different constituencies, and they tend to focus on those constituencies, and if you're not part of that constituency, then you're not going to be considered at all. And sometimes this has just taken the form of, okay, you're not encouraging other people to vote. Far more often it's actually taken the form of discouraging your political opposition to voting. So not just trying to get your people out, but then also trying to make sure your opponents people don't get out. And that's the forms that voter suppression has taken in a lot of different ways.

Right, okay. So we're going to get to that technique, But I want to now shift to the other part of the history that it's shocking to acknowledge, but so few of us really recognize, and that is the extraordinary efforts at suppression of constitutional we would think of as entitlements to vote over the history since the Civil War. So, you know, the Civil War happens. 1865, it ends. The 13th Amendment, ending slavery is ratified. Three years later, the 14th Amendment, which has come to be the most important of the Civil rights amendments, is ratified. And then to everybody's astonishment, President Grant succeeds in rallying the nation to enact the 15th Amendment in 1870. And the 15th Amendment, again, doesn't affirmatively create a right to vote, but it does affirmatively say that you can't discriminate on the basis of race in extending the right to vote. Now, of course, only men are voting at the time. So this is basically saying you can't discriminate against a black man in extending the right to vote. But the reality is that between 1870 or there's a couple years after, where there's this kind of happy honeymoon after this is enacted, where there's incredible participation across the south of African Americans in this right to vote. But after the end of Reconstruction, which is 1877, at least until the Civil Rights act, there is an open effort by political actors and political parties to suppress the participation of African Americans in the process of voting. And this is the prehistory to the history that your fantastic book is describing.

Yeah, and I think it's a really important history that often isn't taught. I mean, we have the Henry Louis Gates new documentary on Reconstruction, but generally we don't really know about Reconstruction. We know that there was a Civil War then. We know that somehow Jim Crow happened after the Civil War. But we don't understand that there was this intervening period where we had really multiracial, integrated democracy in this country for the first time. And I think that people don't realize that we passed the 15th amendment that said that the right to vote shall not be abridged or denied on the basis of race or previous condition of servitude, race, color, or previous condition of servitude. And that that really only meant something for about a decade. And then shortly thereafter, you Get a disputed presidential election in 1876. You, you have Rutherford B. Hayes basically saying he's going to withdraw federal troops from the south to be able to get the votes of a few different Southern states, the electoral votes of a few different Southern states. And so then federal troops leave the south. And then the Congress basically stops deciding to enforce the civil rights laws that were passed during Reconstruction. The Supreme Court basically rewrites them to say that the federal government really should have no say in, in enforcing voting rights and enforcing civil rights laws. And so you get this situation where we have these amendments on the books, but they don't really mean anything because the federal government's not enforcing them. The presidents either don't care or are in fact hostile to them. The Supreme Court is hostile to them. The Congress is hostile to them. The Southern states never liked them to begin with. And the Northern states are basically indifferent. And that's how Reconstruction leads to, to this incredibly long, decades long period of Jim Crow.

Yeah, it's an incredible story. And the Gates documentary and the Gates book is really incredibly powerful in telling the story. There's this moment, I think, of the period of 1870 until the end of reconstruction, of 1870, 1876, 1877, where there's real ambiguity about what the future will look like. Again in 1870, Grant succeeds in getting the 15th amendment ratified. He's then quite aggressive in 1872 in that election. And it's basically a peaceful election throughout most of the nation. And one of the first African American members of Congress, John lynch from Mississippi, writes a book that describes how the culture had fundamentally changed after the election of 1872. Whites in the south began to accept the idea that there was going to be a mixed race America. And they accepted the idea the Republican Party was going to be a powerful party. And many whites and you know, the kind of elite whites especially, joined the Republican Party. And there was this moment of great hopefulness, as he describes in this book. And then in 1873, there's a depression. And the depression, of course, as is always the case, leads the public to throw out the party in power during the Depression. So in the 1874 election, the Democrats win because the Republicans have been, were in power during that Depression. And of course the Democrats say that they've won because the nation has rejected the idea of equality. But of course, what the nation had done is just get angry because they were thrown into depression under the reign of Republicans. And there's this incredibly tragic change in the south that lynch describes of Americans of White Americans recognizing that they needed to align exclusively with the Democratic Party. And there was traitors. Whites who remained Republican were traitors. And that begins the degeneration that leads to the really dramatic end of Reconstruction and then the incredible terrorism that defines the period of Jim Crow all the way up until the period that ends in the mid-1950s. And that story, you're right, is a story none of us understand well enough and really would help understand where we are today if it were more broadly understood. But your book, which has really inspired me in a book that I've just completed as well, but your book, give us the Ballot, describing this modern struggle for Voting Rights Act. If we think about a couple periods here, the first that we just talked about the period of the Civil war amendments, the 13th to the 15th amendment, then we take a second period, let's say the 15th amendment, to Selma. You pick up in the book with Selma, and I love the point you make in the book about what America is looking at on the day that Selma happens, March 7, 1865. So that's a Sunday. We refer to it as Bloody Sunday. But America that evening is watching a film about the Second World War, about racism in the Second World War. So why don't you pick up the story there, because I think you tell it in a really powerful and jarring way.

Thank you. So, yeah, if I can just go back a few weeks earlier. A young man by the name of Jimmie Lee Jackson is murdered in a neighboring county next to Selma in Perry County, Alabama. Basically, Martin Luther King goes to Alabama In January of 1965, after the Civil Rights act was passed, to go try and pass a Voting Rights Act. And he goes to Alabama because Alabama, along with Mississippi, is really the worst Southern state for disenfranchisement. And he goes to Selma in particular because it's one of the worst places for disenfranchisement of African Americans. Out of 15,000 eligible African Americans, only about 300 are registered to vote in Selma, Alabama. And there's this tyrannical sheriff, Sheriff Jim Clark, that is really the embodiment of Southern racism, kind of a small town version of Bull Connor. And so King goes to Selma knowing that he probably will provoke the white segregationists into doing something crazy which will then animate the conscience of the nation and put pressure on Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress to actually do something about the Voting Rights act, because Democrats are wary of doing too much on voting rights because they had just passed the Civil Rights act and Johnson wants to do all this other stuff. He doesn't really want to do a voting Rights act right away. And so they go down and they begin these demonstrations in January of 1965. And then in February of 1965, this 25 year old man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, is murdered by Alabama state troopers in Marion, Alabama. And the idea is that there's going to be a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery holding Jimmie Lee Jackson's casket. Now that is too improbable of an idea. It's too far. But John Lewis and other young civil rights activists decide instead they are going to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and they're going to try to march to Montgomery, but they have no idea what's going to happen. In fact, King basically tells them to cancel the march because it's so dangerous. And so what happens is John Lewis and about 800 marchers, they cross the Edmund Predus Bridge on a Sunday morning and they are met by Alabama state troopers wearing gas masks, holding bullwhips on horses. And essentially the Alabama state troopers tell John Lewis and the other marchers, who are all unarmed, they're just basically walking, carrying backpacks. If they're carrying anything, they tell them, you know, don't come any further. You have two minutes to disperse. And even before two minutes happens, the Alabama state troopers rush into the crowd, they start beating people with bully clubs, they start trampling people on horses, they're whipping people. It's this incredibly violent scene. There's tear gas everywhere. And what happens is that ABC cuts into its primetime premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, a film, as you say, about Nazi Germany, to show this footage from Selma, Alabama. And people are so confused by the footage, they think they're actually watching footage of Nazi Germany because there's tear gas everywhere, there's smoke everywhere, there's the police beating people. It's such a crazy scene. And of course, we had seen this footage already in the civil rights movement. We had seen footage, footage of buses being bombed during the Freedom Rides and of dogs attacking children in Birmingham and of four little girls being murdered in church. We had seen lots of footage like this, but nothing quite had the impact that it did of Selma, Alabama. And that night, really the situation became untenable. And by the next morning, I think Lyndon Johnson was aware that he had to push for a voting rights act very, very quickly or things were really going to get out of hand. That the kind of situation in Selma was going to quickly multiply.

Yeah. And it's striking that, you know, of course, these state troopers engage in this act of violence in full, well aware of the fact that there are television cameras right there filming them so entitled. Do they feel in the performance of their violence that. That the idea that the nation would watch didn't even trouble them. And the second part of that, that's really important, I think, is we forget just how dominant a few networks were in 1965. You know, the estimates are of something like 25% of America was watching that show and feeling good about America because we saw America holding these principles of equality and holding Germany to account for the injustice that they had performed. You know, violence and murder against Jews, and then to be hit kind of whipsawed with the same charge against our own made it as exactly as you said, completely untenable anymore. And the intensity of that reaction, I think, was really unprecedented. And it's the sort of thing that you. It's hard to imagine recreating today, because when are we all watching the same thing at the same time anymore? But it creates the predicate for the most important Civil Rights Act, I think, the political rights that are protected under the Voting Rights act, which defined the opportunity to vote for everything from 1965 until this modern Supreme Court. Now, that's the transition I'd love you to talk about a little bit, because I think that many people don't quite have a clear sense of what the Voting Rights act was trying to do. I think people have a vague sense, of course, that in the south, we had significant discrimination on the basis of race. Selma, maybe one of the most extreme. But all across the south, it was difficult to participate on the basis of race. And so the Voting Rights act is targeted to that racial discrimination. And so what is the mechanism? How has it achieved its objective of making sure that districts aren't discriminating on the basis of race?

So there's this broad problem that people, that African Americans are disenfranchised in the south, and everyone knows it's a problem. And it's been going on for decades. And the federal government has tried to attack it in a variety of ways, but nothing has been effective so far. And so the question is, how do you create an effective act? And so there are a few different things the Voting Rights act did to ensure that it actually met the goal of making sure that African Americans were going to first be able to register to vote and then actually be able to vote in free and fair elections. So the. The first thing it did is it struck down the literacy tests and related devices that prevented people from being able to Register to vote. So one of the most famous examples is that if you wanted to register to vote in Selma, Alabama, you had to name all 67 county judges to get on the voting rolls. Now, that was, of course, a question that was never asked of most white people, but it was asked of African Americans. And so the. The Voting Rights act created a mechanism to get rid of those things overnight through legislation, so that if a state like Alabama had a literacy test, the Voting Rights act, by virtue of the legislation itself, was able to get rid of it. Then it also authorized the attorney general to file lawsuits against the poll tax, because the poll tax was a little bit different than literacy tests. And so that had to be combated in a different kind of way. And then once you got rid of the mechanisms, the question was, okay, would people actually be able to register? And so in the worst parts of the south and places like Selma, they actually sent federal government officials down to the south to register black voters. And this was really revolutionary at the time, because registration had been conducted by racist Southern whites that weren't allowing nearly any, if any, African Americans to register to vote. And suddenly the federal government shows up and. And essentially hangs an open for business sign. And African Americans who can never even get through the door of the registrar's office are registering. Hundreds of people are registering in days, thousands in weeks. And they only did this in a few counties because I think they wanted. They knew, first off, they didn't have the manpower to take over the South. Secondly, they wanted to avoid another reconstruction situation where the federal government was viewed as a conquering authority, rightly or wrongly, where it seemed like the federal government was coming in and taking over the electoral processes in the South. So I think the hope was that they would be able to register people in certain places, and then that the rest of the counties would just voluntarily comply, which actually happened to a surprising amount that people realized if you were in an adjoining county that didn't have federal registrars, if you didn't register people, then the registrars were gonna come to your county, too. And so that opened up the registration process. And then they sent federal officials to monitor elections to make sure that elections weren't stolen. Because obviously, if you were able to register but you weren't able to vote, then the act wouldn't really mean a whole lot. So that's kind of how they did it. And then over time, the act broadened. For example, and I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but like in 1975, the Voting Rights Act Was expanded to encompass ethnic minority groups, language minority groups groups. So it didn't just apply to African Americans in the south, but it applied to Latinos and Asian Americans and native Alaskans and all of these other people that were being disenfranchised through things like English only ballots or other techniques that were aimed at disenfranchising language minority voters. And so it was really a remarkably effective piece of legislation. Often you hear about how people are disappointed by what's passed that it feels falls short of the goals. But the voting rights act really did what it set out to do, which was end the mass disenfranchisement of African Americans in the south.

One thing about the technique which is striking is that the statute, in its most important parts, is targeting particular jurisdictions or particular areas, not the nation as a whole. What was that choice about? Why would that be the strategy?

Well, in certain places were worse than others. I mean, the disenfranchisement in Selma, Alabama, was worse than in Boise, Idaho. There were just different conditions. And so in addition to targeting certain places in terms of getting rid of literacy tests, then what happened over a longer period of time is the federal government said that those places with the worst histories of discrimination that had the literacy tests and the poll taxes, et cetera, had very low rates of political registration and participation. They had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. This was known as Section 5 of the Voting rights Act. And this part was so important because I think the congress realized once you struck down a literacy test or a poll tax in Alabama, they were just gonna try to pass another one. And if you tried to challenge it through the legal mechanisms, it was gonna take years to challenge it, and people were gonna be disenfranchised in the meantime. And so what they did was they shifted the burden from those facing discrimination to those doing the discriminating to show why their election changes weren't discriminatory. So the fact that places like Alabama actually had to get federal approval for their voting changes was an incredibly powerful mechanism that didn't really exist in any other civil rights law. And that's what made the voting rights act so effective over time.

Yeah. So it moves it out of the courts, out of the litigation process, because that takes such a long time and flips the burden so that the business model of discrimination changes dramatically. It just doesn't make sense anymore for these jurisdictions to engage in these techniques in the way that they had before. And that, of course, results in incredible change in the opportunity of people to participate in the Voting process.

It does. I mean, the flaw in it is that it had to be enforced by the federal government. And so, depending on who you had in the federal government, enforcement would ebb and flow. There might be really great enforcement of the Voting Rights act in the Carter administration, but then you get the Reagan administration, and it goes in a different direction. But broadly speaking, the fact that these jurisdictions with a history of discrimination knew that, at the very least, the federal government was going to review what they were doing and that they could actually block it before it even went into effect, that was an incredibly powerful mechanism and allowed the federal government to stop crimes before they had even occurred. And in most of the law, and in most of civil rights law, the crime occurs, and then you try to get justice for it. But here it was the opposite. And so that's really what made the Voting Rights act so powerful.

So the Voting Rights act, one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation that we've had, then gets tested in a famous case the Supreme Court decides called Shelby County. And in the view of many, and you described this quite effectively, the Supreme Court in that case, really radically changes the reach or the effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act. So what was motivating Chief Justice Roberts in striking the Voting Rights act the way he did?

Well, it's important to note that Chief Justice Roberts had a long history of opposition to the Voting Rights act and two related civil rights laws. John Roberts came of age as a young foot soldier in the Reagan administration, and they were trying to change how civil rights laws were enforced. And their view was that the remedies for racial discrimination were as bad as the original sin of discrimination itself. So they were very hostile to things, for example, like busing and affirmative action. And they viewed the Voting Rights act as a form of affirmative action in the electoral sphere, that it was benefiting minority candidates and minority voters at the expense of whites, that it was leading to a quota system and proportional representation, all of these things that they viewed as fundamentally undemocratic and un American. And so Roberts, in the early 80s, leads this battle with the Congress over what to do about the Voting Rights Act. And he's a young attorney, he's an assistant to the Attorney General of the United States, and he's writing memo after memo after memo, basically arguing that the Voting Rights act should be as weak and as ineffective as possible. And so I think, first off, that's really important to know, because a lot of people don't know that. They think that John Roberts just woke up one day in 2013 and decided he didn't like the Voting Rights act, when in fact this had been among his chief goals in life was to roll back the Voting Rights act and to roll back related pieces of civil rights legislation. So in the Shelby County v. Holder decision, Roberts is basically saying the country has changed dramatically. And he points to all of these different data points. The election of the first black president, the increased registration of black voters in states like Mississippi, for example. And he says things have changed dramatically in the country and changed dramatically in the south, but the Voting Rights act continues to treat the country as if it were 1965.

And.

And the idea that some places should have to approve their voting changes with the federal government, but not others is fundamentally unconstitutional. And so he basically says that in his view, the Voting Rights act is antiquated, it's outdated, and that the formula under which these states have to approve their voting changes with the federal government is unconstitutional. What that means is that those states with the longest histories of discrimination, places like Alabama and Texas and Georgia, they no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. After the Shelby County v. Holder decision, it essentially guts the most important provision of the country's most important civil rights law.

And then did we see a bunch of changes after that?

Immediately, I mean, literally within hours, you had the Attorney General of Texas, for example, Greg Abbott, who's now the governor, saying that Texas voter ID law, under which you could vote with a gun permit but not a student id, would be allowed to immediately go into effect, even though it had been blocked by the courts under the Voting Rights Act. That happened within hours. A month later, North Carolina, which had the most progressive voting laws in the south, they decide to enact a strict voter id. They cut back on early voting. They eliminate same day of voter registration, all of these changes that a federal court later rules targets black voters, in the court's words, with almost surgical precision. So you have this incredible dichotomy of Roberts basically saying things have changed dramatically in the south and the Southern states rushing to adopt new versions of very old tactics that have the same effect of trying to discriminate against minority voters. And so I think history, both immediately and then in the years after, really show how misguided Roberts was. Either he was extremely naive about how much progress we had made, or he was acutely aware of what he was doing and wanted to see this exact result.

So what's striking about that is even if you assume that he's correct in his description of the evolution America has made, and you don't believe that the motivation was grounded in race. It's certainly the case that there's a partisan motivation to the games that these states would be playing, right? I mean, I don't believe that's exclusively it. I think there's good data to show that it's not exclusively partisan. But even if you put away the race for a second, it's certainly the case that we see these techniques being deployed in ways that will have predictable partisan consequences. And the question I want to struggle with in this part of our conversation is why shouldn't that be enough? Why isn't it enough to imagine states deploying techniques that they know will make it harder for Republicans to vote or make it harder for Democrats to vote so that they can rig the system against their opponents? Why doesn't that violate a principle of equality, too?

Well, I think it should. And I think it's very hard to make distinctions between race and party when they're so correlated. Right now, I mean, the Republican Party is an overwhelmingly white party right now. The Democratic Party is far more diverse. African Americans tend to vote 90% Democratic. Latinos in most states tend to vote 60 to 70% Democratic. Asian Americans, too. Then there are other correlators. Obviously, young voters, irregardless of race, are more likely to vote for one party or another. And then obviously, young voters of color are far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. And so, I mean, I kind of go back and forth on this, too, because I agree that on the one hand, why should it matter that if people are being discriminated against, shouldn't that be enough? And on the other hand, I can't help but noticing that the same people over and over are bearing the brunt of these tactics that for some reason or another, it seems like it's always white officials trying to prevent voters of color in one form or another from participating in the political process. So I think there's a lot of party there. But you can't also ignore the racial dynamics of this, too. But there was a lot of evidence before the Supreme Court that this was going on. And not to mention the fact, Larry, that the Congress renewed the Voting Rights act in 2006 by a vote of, I think it was 390 and 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate. I mean, so not only was Roberts ignoring history, but he was ignoring the act of Congress. And of course, Antonin Scalia famously said during oral arguments in the Shelby county case, well, that's just attributable to a phenomenon that I call the phenomenon of racial entitlement. That when you give entitlements to people, of course they'll never take them away. So of course the Congress voted to restore the Voting Rights act because it's just become yet another racial entitlement, which was a really crazy way of looking at a law that ended the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the south for nearly a century. And of course, Roberts really avoided that kind of language in his opinion. But I think what Scalia said really gets to the motivations of trying to weaken this law.

Okay, so let's think about some of the techniques. For example, voter IDs. Now, of course there's a claim that you need to have IDs to make sure that people are entitled to vote. And the claim was grounded in an assertion that there was a lot of voter fraud. There's almost no evidence of voter fraud. And all of this is pretty well understood now that the phenomenon, it's kind of bizarre to even imagine, but the phenomenon of like people registering to vote in four or five different places and then driving around on election day to multiply their franchise effect is just fantasy. But let's think about the way voter ID laws burden parties or people differently. If it's the same rule for everybody, how does it actually have a different effect on different groups of people?

So I think it's important to realize that it's not just about having id, it's about having certain types of id. So I mentioned, for example, in Texas, how you could vote with a gun permit but not a student id. Well, that's clearly burdening some people more than others. But I mean, generally speaking, the kind of IDs that are considered acceptable IDs are things like driver's licenses and pay passports and other kinds of government issued id. And I think there's a sort of a conception that everyone has these IDs, so what's the big deal? And it's certainly true that most people do have them. If you look at surveys, about 85 to 90% of the public has a government issued ID. That still leaves over 21 million people that don't have those forms of ID. That could be up to 5 to 10% of registered voters and not insignificant number in places like Texas or Wisconsin. So we're not talking about theoretical voters, we're talking about registered voters, people who are voting in the past who don't have these forms of id. And then you have to ask who doesn't have them? People who don't have these documents. They might live in urban areas and not drive, so they might not need these documents. They might be poor and not be able to afford them. They might be more transient, so they don't have documents. Or they have a document that's no longer valid. For example, if you live in Illinois, but you move to Wisconsin, you can't use your Illinois ID to vote. So again, it's not like you don't have an id. You can still board a plane or buy liquor with your Illinois ID or Sudafed, but you can't actually use it to vote in Wisconsin. And so we're seeing that this tends to skew certain demographics more than others, that younger people are less likely to have them. People of color who have both racial and socioeconomic historical disadvantages, they're less likely to have them. Poorer people who just have less access to documentation in general, they're less likely to have this id. So I mean, it tends to hurt people that are poorer. Racial minority groups, younger, those people, broadly speaking. And grand work we're categorizing people here, but broadly speaking, they tend to be more sympathetic to one party than another. So it's certainly true that there are also gonna be, for example, elderly people could be disenfranchised by this. That tends to be a stronger Republican constituency. But I think the Republican Party, broadly speaking, has made a determination that voter ID laws are gonna hurt Democratic leaning voters more than Republican leaning voters, and that it'll just shave enough of a percentage off. It's not gonna block 20% of the electorate for from voting. But if it blocks 2 to 3% of people from voting in a very important swing state in a very important election, then you can kind of see the impact.

Okay, that's very clear. Let's think about another technique, the technique of vote purging or purging of the electorate rolls. How is that working and how does that affect people differently?

It works differently in different states because there's different ways to purge the voter rolls. But I'll just give you an example of something that Ohio did. For example, Ohio instituted a policy where if you didn't vote over a certain period of time, I think it was a six year period, you were purged from the voting rolls. And this is interesting because generally speaking, the idea is that you should only be purged from the voting rolls if you move or die or do something to render you ineligible. But now they're trying to come up with new criteria for how to remove people. And one way they're saying as a criteria is for some reason or other, not voting. And that is a little bit alarming, because let's say you decide to vote in 2012, for some reason or other, you don't like the candidates, you sit out to elections, you decide you're gonna show up again to vote in 2018, you can then be removed from the voter rolls, but you haven't actually done anything. You haven't moved, you haven't died, you haven't done anything to change anything, and you show up. And in most states, it's too late. Because unless a state has something like election day registration, where you can register and vote at the same time, once you're purged, if you show up and vote, it's too late. There is no remedy. So that's just one version of voter purging. There are other ways people are purged from the rolls, for example. There are. There are things like people will be flagged as being registered in two states, even if it's erroneously, and you'll be removed from the rolls. Or there'll be things where, like, you'll be sent a mailer and you don't respond to the mailer, and then you'll be removed from the rolls. Things like that that are being done. And this seems to be a tactic that is increasing rather than decreasing if you look at the numbers.

But some of those seem to be more inherently biased against certain groups than others. So, for example, name match purging, which looks to whether the name is perfectly correlated with a name on an id, for example, or between two different government systems, is more likely to throw people off who might have Latino names, where sometimes there's a hyphen, sometimes there's a space. That inconsistency in some of these jurisdictions is enough to throw you off the voting rolls. Or common names, which you might think African American communities have a higher incidence of relatively common names that then get correlated because you have a BA Williams and a B. Williams, and the filter for determining that there's a match is very, very low. And so therefore a whole bunch of people get thrown off. They. These would be techniques that if your job was to make sure that the maximum number of Democrats were thrown off at the minimum cost to Republicans, being thrown off would be an effective technique to deploy, is that right?

It would be. And you look at Georgia, for example, where they had this exact match system that was used in the 2018 election, where the information on your registration form had to exactly match your information on state databases, or you were put on what was called a pending registration list. And you got a letter basically saying there was a problem with your registration, you could still actually vote in person. But a lot of people got these notices, and they thought, well, if I have a notice that something's wrong with my registration, I'm not gonna be able to vote. It was very confusing to people. And it turned out that 53,000 people were put on this pending registration list in Georgia weeks before the 2018 election. And it was a policy that. That was enforced by the Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, who, of course, was also running for governor. So, I mean, he was enforcing a policy that was also benefiting him, a situation that wouldn't even be allowed in most democracies because the guy running the election would never actually be a candidate in the election as well. But it turned out that of that exact match list, 80% were people of color, because a lot of times it was different. It was African Americans, it was Latinos, it was Asian Americans, it was newer immigrants that had names that were unfamiliar to the largely elderly, largely white election officials in the state of Georgia. And so they were entering these names incorrectly, for example, or they were not including a hyphen or something like that. And then people didn't do anything wrong, and they were flagged on this exact match list. So it was either one of those things that had the intent to do this, or it was one of the things that just in practice did it. But it had a wildly disproportionate effect on some voters compared to others.

Okay, let's think about access to voting technology. You wrote quite effectively leading up to the 2018 election about the reduction in voting machines across certain jurisdictions. Across in Georgia and other southern jurisdictions. What's the pattern that we can observe there?

Reduction in voting machines or reduction in polling places?

Polling places. I'm sorry.

What we saw is there was a study after the Shelby county decision that gutted the Voting Rights act, and they found this was before the 2016 election, that there were nearly 1,000 fewer polling places in jurisdictions that were previously subject to the Voting Rights act, which is a really high number of polling places to be cut. And then, of course, we saw in states like Georgia, they closed 214 polling places since the 2012 election. This is actually a pretty obvious one, which is that most people tend to vote in the same place. And first off, if your polling place is no longer there, it's going to be confusing to figure out where to vote. Secondly, if there are fewer polling places, but the same number of Voters logic would have it that there are going to be longer lines at the polls. And of course, these closings didn't happen everywhere. They tended to, for example, happen in black and Latino and other areas where both, I think they were targeted because of race. But also these were poor areas to begin with that were the most likely to have to close a polling place if there was some sort of financial crisis in a city or a town. And so we have a country where certainly some people vote by mail, but most people still vote in person. And the wait times are dramatically different, that surveys show that African Americans and Hispanics wait nearly twice as long to vote as whites. And so we just have an unequal voting system in this country. And one of the ways it's unequal is because resources, both in terms of polling places and then of course of actually voting machines, they are allocated in a way that favors whites over other groups.

Favors whites over the other groups, or of course, because of the partisan division of race, favors Republicans over Democrats. Right.

I mean, however you want to look at it, that's the net effect.

Yeah, but I want to push on this a little bit because I'm just wondering about the right strategy going forward. So we've got a Supreme Court that's obviously has a very happy view of race relations in America, not one that I think has much connection to reality, but that's their view. And so they're going to be very skeptical of efforts to leverage a belief that race discrimination is going on into aggressive remedies to address race discrimination. But if the Constitution gives you another foundation to begin to insist on equality not on the basis of race, but just on the basis of equality, would it maybe make sense to think about deploying that foundation too? So, for example, Article 1 of the Constitution, of course just governing federal elections, but there's a pretty effective bleed over gives Congress a pretty powerful authority to intervene, to correct or to regulate in contexts where states would be deploying election systems contrary to Congress's view of what the appropriate way to do it is. So if Congress took a view that said the fox guarding the henhouse has got to make sure that the system is just as easy for the hens as for the fox. Or less obscurely, if Republicans are administering the voting system in a state, then it's gotta be as easy for Democrats to vote as for Republicans in a practical sense, not in a formal sense. And the same thing the other way around. If Democrats are running the system in a state, then you, then you can't deploy devices that make it harder for Republicans to vote than for Democrats. The principle of equality is a principle that's broader than race or sex or sexual orientation or age. It's a fundamental principle. And if we could deploy that principle and rely on it, would it make, could it make better sense or could it make more effective legislation to achieve what is our objective, which is that every American has an equal freedom to vote?

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, Larry, but that power that Congress has, hasn't it been seldom used in that kind of way?

It has, but for no good reason.

I think I'm thinking, for example, of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment Right, which in fact allowed you to take away congressional representation, I believe, from states that were not complying with the 14th Amendment. But that was never used. It was a threat that was lurking out there, but they never actually enforced it and it became meaningless. And of course, then part of the problem with congressional oversight is, okay, you have a Democratic House right now, they're passing all of these bills, and then you have Mitch McConnell running the Senate, and they can't even get the most basic stuff done. I mean, they can't even get, right now bipartisan election security legislation that's co sponsored by conservative Republicans from Oklahoma that can't even get passed right now. So how are you gonna have more sweeping remedies? And so I think broadly speaking, you're correct. I just wonder how it would work in practice. And then with regards to the Supreme Court, I just worry that if you tried to make a different kind of argument, they would just say, well, this is just a new version of the same kind of thing that you want us to do. And this was kind of the thing in the gerrymandering cases that happened recently where they were trying to challenge gerrymandering on First Amendment grounds because the Court is actually the Court's. Conservatives have tried to use the First Amendment in a very expansive way. You know this better than I have to give rights to corporations and other people that generally speaking, aren't thought to fall under the First Amendment. So they're saying, well, maybe gerrymandering should fall under the First Amendment. Maybe we should take it away from the context of race and the 14th and 15th amendment and actually think of this as the first amendment, which is totally neutral with regards to race. But then you still had people like John Roberts saying, well, you're just asking for proportional representation by another name. You're just asking us to pick winners and losers. You want us to be the Democratic court or the Republican Court, and we don't wanna be that. Of course, they have been the Republican court over and over and over, but we'll leave that aside. So I just think we're dealing with an extremely cynical Supreme Court right now that's gonna do whatever they want, knowing that there is no accountability to them other than some sort of popular backlash, which no one really knows how that affects them. So with regards to the court, I just don't know what you do about the court when they want to do what they want to do. But I'm glad that people like you are thinking of innovative strategies right now.

Well, I mean, so the constitution in Article 1, Section 4, says that the times, places and manners of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof. But then it says, but Congress may at any time by law, make or alter such regulations. Okay, so that's a pretty broad plenary power that Congress has to override whatever the state is doing as to the time, place, and manner of holding elections. And whereas I agree with you that the Court has resisted in the gerrymandering context, the shift from race to a more neutral platform like the First Amendment, and that fight still, still up in the air, we're not sure where that's going to land. It would be very difficult for the Court to say, oh, when the Constitution says Congress can alter the regulations, it can only alter the regulations if you show racial discrimination or intentional racial. I mean, this had nothing to do with racial discrimination. It was just giving Congress a way to make sure that the elections would be ones that Congress was confident was actually consistent with the value of the Constitution. And when the Supreme Court reviewed the power in the context of a case called Classic versus the United States, which was a case really addressing the question whether voting fraud rules could apply in the context of a primary, the Court was quite clear that Congress had broad power to assure equality in the context of that provision of the Constitution. And it just seems to me that you might be right. The cynical view might be the correct view, but it would be a much harder argument to resist if it didn't force people to have to affirm that people are acting on the basis of racial motivations. Even if you and I believe that's in fact what is going on. Let's just attack from a different foundation. They're acting from a motivation not to create any equal freedoms to vote in a republic. That's got to be a violation of a foundational principle.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a strong argument. It kind of remains to be seen how it would actually work in practice with the current Congress that we have. But I think it's a strong, practical and also philosophical argument. I'm of the belief that it's not going to be one thing that gets us out of this mess. I think it's going to require an all hands on deck strategy. I think in some ways what we're seeing at the state level, with states being incubators of change, passing more progressive legislation, passing more expansive legislation, is another model. I mean, the problem with that, of course, is that if you are a Georgia or Texas, you're not going to get election day registration or you're not going to get automatic registration. But what we're seeing, I think, is that when I started covering this issue in 2011, it was all bad things that were happening and there wasn't any sort of affirmative agenda that I saw anywhere for how to combat voter suppression. And now I think you're starting to see it, and I don't think you're seeing it in enough places. And I think it's still falling too often along partisan lines. But I do think you're seeing the fact that states are now taking more expansive action to make it easier to register, to vote, to make it easier to cast a ballot, to ensure more opportunity. And one of the things we saw in the 2018 election was that eight states passed ballot initiatives to either make it easier to vote or to crack down on gerrymandering. And these were very, very popular initiatives. I mean, they passed by 60 something percent of the vote in places like Missouri that were quite conservative. And what that tells me is that there's actually fairly broad support in this country for a pro democracy agenda, that there are certain things that are going to remain popular. I think voter ID laws are always going to be popular because most people have those forms of id. But other things like automatic registration and election day registration or independent redistricting, those kind of things are restoring voting rights to ex felons. Those kind of things are very, very popular. And in fact, when the Pew Research center asked people, do you think the government should be doing everything it can to encourage people to vote? Two thirds of the public said yes. And so I think we have the beginnings of a pro democracy movement in this country. The question is how to then get it so that it doesn't just break down along the usual partisan lines when it gets higher up in the process.

This is a great point. I mean, 2018 saw more reform passed at the state level than at any moment in American history, even during the Progressive era. And what's striking about those movements at the state level is that they were almost uniformly nonpartisan. Indeed, like in the Michigan redistricting movement. Katie Fahey, who's going to be one of the guests on this podcast, had an almost militant, nonpartisan stance inside of that movement. You were not allowed to utter the word Democrat or Republican, like, they were just acting as citizens to create a democracy that all citizens could believe in. And I think that that dynamic of, like, citizens believing we ought to create a democracy where we all can participate equally is universal at the grassroots level. And it's only when you get to the higher levels of, like, the United States Senate with the dark Lord Mitch McConnell, who views all of these questions in a purely instrumental way, like, does this help the Republicans win or does this hurt the Democrats, that you begin to see this issue rendered in a deeply partisan way. And I think the best part of that story is to think about what happened in Florida. They have a ballot measure in Florida to enfranchise ex felons. And Florida, which is a pretty important swing state, but very strong Republican support, I think this passes in the 60% range to bring, at one point, potentially 1.5 million new voters to the rolls in Florida. Obviously, that would have significant partisan effect, but Republicans voted for it because they thought it was right. It wasn't about, is it going to help my team? It's just, is it right? And now to see what the legislature, the politicians, the higher ups have done is really extraordinary because now they've begun to say, well, you can vote only after you've paid all your fines or the taxes that were imposed against you because of your crime, which, of course, is a pretty effective poll tax for the people who've just been given the right to vote again.

Yeah, I mean, it was a remarkable story. I mean, the amendment in Florida passed by 64% at a time when both the governor's race and the Senate race were basically 50, 50 elections. And remember, it passed with 64% at a time when 1.5 million ex felons couldn't vote for it. So the constituencies most affected by the policy weren't even able to vote for it, which makes it even more remarkable that it got a 64% support. So, I mean, basically every time you had a ballot initiative before the voters that asked them, do you want democracy to work for more people? It passed, no matter the partisan dynamics of the state, which I think is a really, really remarkable. And didn't even get enough attention at the time. The problem is the fragility of these initiatives themselves, because in most states, there's nothing to stop the legislatures from coming back and undoing what the voters did. And I think legislators are, especially in Republican controlled states, but not exclusively, are more likely to do this, A, because they're mad they were bypassed in the first place, so they're mad that the voters are weighing in on stuff that they believe should be under their purview and that secondly, then they don't like the substance of it. And in Florida, the system's been working just fine for the people in power. They got elected under a system in which over a million people were disenfranchised. So they don't want to take the risk of allowing more people to vote. And they don't think there's going to be enough of a backlash if they try to undo rights for people, because it means that the constituencies most affected by it aren't going to be able to vote in the first place. They won't be able to vote them out of office. And so I'm hoping in Florida that there will be a bipartisan backlash to this. I mean, one of the things we saw in Florida, one of the reasons this passed, was that you had groups like the Koch Brothers and the Christian Coalition joining forces with the aclu. So you had coalitions that would never exist if you had a D or an R by their names. But when you made it issue based, you could actually gain some sort of consensus. And that consensus won't exist on a lot of things. I mean, the ACLU and the Koch Brothers don't agree on most things, but they agreed to agree on this. And I would hope those same forces would work on trying to push back against what the legislature's doing here. Because I mean, just in a practical effect, in Florida, the governor's race was decided by 30,000 votes and the Senate race was decided by 10,000 votes in 2018. And by all indications, 2020 is going to be just as close. And then you have a situation where 1.4 million people were in line to get their voting rights back. And if that's a substantially smaller number, potentially massively smaller number. I mean, they're saying 700,000 people or more could be disenfranchised just by requiring you to pay fines, fees, or previous restitution because so many people owe these fines as a result of how our criminal justice system works. That's going to significantly change both the politics of Florida, but also just undermine exactly what people thought they were voting for.

So are you covering the legal fights around this? This is not something I've focused on, but it.

Well, the governor hasn't actually signed the bill yet, so there hasn't been a legal fight yet. But I mean, there will be a legal fight. The problem again, is just the courts are very shaky. I think that's one reason why people decided to pass these ballot initiatives in the first place, because the courts are not responding to the will of the people. I mean, it's not altogether that different from what was happening with voting rights in the 1960s, where courts were taking an incredibly long time to rule on things like literacy tests and poll taxes. And so you needed congressional action, you needed presidential action to get things out of the courts and to the people and through the legislative process. And now we have a situation where the courts have been taken over by conservatives. The legislative process in Congress is split and dysfunctional to the point where you really can't pass legislation because of the state Senate. And so really, one of the only tools available to people right now are these ballot initiatives at the local level. And I think that's a very powerful tool. But only half the states in the country allow ballot initiatives, citizen initiated ballot initiatives. And then what are the mechanisms to be able to make sure that the will of the people is actually thwarted? So when you think about it, and I know this is something you've studied a lot, Larry, there are not a lot of avenues for democratic participation when so many other parts of democracy are being cut off.

Okay, so the promise in this podcast is always to end with suggestions of what people can do. So if there are people listening to this who want to join a movement to assure equal freedom to vote or even to remedy the wrong created by what Shelby county had done, what are the two or three things you think they should do?

One thing that people can tangibly do is focus on state and local elections, because a lot of the voter suppression, a lot of the gerrymandering took place at the state legislative level. And we're going to have elections in 2020 that will then determine who draws districts in 2021 for the next decade. And even though a lot of these state legislatures are very, very heavily gerrymandered, you're not talking about that many votes. It's very hard to affect a presidential election. But a key legislative race in Wisconsin could be determined by 15,000 votes. We saw that the Virginia legislature in 2017. Control of it came down to essentially drawing straws. Cuz two candidates were Tied. And so one thing I always say is that, you know, if you, if you're outrage and you want to get involved, state and local elections are a much more effective way to actually make a difference than national ones. So that's one thing. The second thing I would say is that I think there are a lot of opportunities to push for reforms. For example, in 2015, only one state had automatic voter registration. The idea that if you interact with the DMV or other public agencies, you'll be automatically registered to vote. And this is really important because over 50 million Americans aren't even registered to vote, which means they're not even part of the political process in any meaningful sense. Well, now 15 states have automatic registration, and by the time this airs, it could be 17 or 18. And so that's just an example of a reform that was really on nobody's radar a few years ago that has started to get critical mass. And so I think that's another thing that I think people can and lobby their state legislatures, then they can start to learn more. And it's not just that policy, but that's just an example of one policy that's happening at the state level. And the third thing I will say is that I think this is a little bit less tangible, but just understanding how all of this is connected, that I think if you just look at, for example, voter suppression, but you don't consider gerrymandering, or you don't consider the amount of money in the political system, or you don't consider what's going on with efforts to manipulate the 2020 census, you only get one side of the picture. You only get one part of the story. I think you've done a really good job, Larry, in showing how all of this is connected, how the amount of money in the system undermines the ability of people to have a meaningful vote. But I think it's really important people understand this is all connected, because if we just solve one of these problems, but we let all of them linger, then it's harder to have a meaningful democracy. And I think that can be overwhelming people because they think, oh my God, I don't just have to deal with suppression, I have to deal with gerrymandering, I have to deal with money in politics, I have to deal with the census. That's going to be way too much. And that's true. It's a lot to chew off. At the same time, I think if you understand that these things are all connected, it makes it easier to then think of a pro democracy agenda that will encompass all of these things.

Yeah, I think that's really important, and especially that you think about it in a context where you can appeal to people on the basis of principle, which, again, I think is happening at the local level. You quote Paul Weirisch, who was the first director of the Heritage foundation, at an event where he was talking about voter rights. I think it's called the Lenin of social conservatism. And he says in his speech, quote, I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They had never been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. So that's a view that's motivated by the idea that we should not create a democracy where every citizen who is qualified has an equal freedom to vote, that we ought to rig the system to make sure that our side wins and their side loses. I think that in any context where people are not being paid to take one side or the other, if you put that view up and you said, how many people agree with that? It would be very hard to raise your hand and say, I agree with that, and defend it. And that if you can't defend that view, then you should be on the side of arguing in favor of systems that make sure everybody can participate equally. And then once that's true, then we can have arguments about how to persuade people to join our side or to persuade them not to join their side so that we get the substantive policies we want. This is the foundation of democracy. We shouldn't be fighting about whether the rules are going to be applying fairly or equally. I'm grateful for the work you've done, too. I think your book really, really compelling in grabbing the story and telling it in a way that makes it accessible. And that's exactly what has to happen. And I'm grateful that you would spend this hour plus trying to work out some of the details so that in the slow democracy movement, more people can join, understanding and hopefully activism. Thank you, Ari.

Thank you so much, Larry. And I've learned so much from your work, and it's been so influential in terms of how I think about these issues. So it's great to be able to talk to you and I'm excited about your book. I have a galley on my desk right now, so I will be reading it soon.

This has been an episode of the third season of the podcast Another Way. I'm Larry Lessig. These podcasts are brought to you by citizens us. You can find the podcast at our website. And there's a place there, too, to give comments or feedbacks or ideas or topics or people to talk to in the course of this season of the podcast. Subtitle for this season is POTUS 1. And the objective is to describe the reforms that we need to make sure that we have a democracy, and to ask the question of the presidential candidates whether they will stand up for these reforms. This week, the subject has been voting rights. Voting rights, of course, is one of the core domains of reform that we will be talking about in the course of this season. Stay tuned next week for another presidential candidate talking about his plans for reform. This is Larry Lessig. Thank you very much for listening.