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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. If you were listening yesterday, you know that our 30 issues election series has started 10 straight days on democracy in peril. Yesterday was part one, when is election fraud actually a problem, and when is claiming it, a fraud in itself? We had that conversation. Now, part two, how to achieve and then keep ballot access for all? Think about the arc of American history, only white male property owners were allowed to vote at first.

Eventually, we had the constitutional amendments and the Voting Rights Act that gave women and Americans of color the right to vote. We've expanded election day to include early voting, drop boxes, voting by mail for more people, and more, but there have always been the forces of reaction too, obviously, working tirelessly to suppress the vote. Especially these days, Republicans trying to make it harder for Democrats, and that usually means finding ways to make it harder for Black people and other people of color.

They found enough allies on the John Roberts Supreme Court to weaken the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County decision in 2013. Remember, that was called Shelby County versus Holder. Holder was Obama's Attorney General, and southern states have been trying to capitalize on those new rights to deny voting rights in the almost decade since. Another challenge to what remains of the Voting Rights Act is before the court right now, and the phony claim of a stolen election is also being used as an excuse to limit voting in the name of preventing fraud.

With that background, we arrive at 30 Issues in 30 Days, Issue 17, how to achieve ballot access for all eligible voters, and how to keep it from being stripped away. Our very special guest for this is Ari Berman, senior reporter at Mother Jones, covering voting rights. He's the author of the seminal book from 2015, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Ari, great to have you with us on the show again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ari Berman: Hey, Brian, great to talk to you again. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start, before we get to today's voter rights versus voter suppression struggles, because we'd love to talk history when it applies, and you've got so much good history in your book? Can we start with a longer view on American history, and mention how at first only white male property owners could vote. How do you see the original rules, and what began to give other people the ballot in the early days of the country?

Ari Berman: Yes, absolutely, Brian. American democracy was very exclusionary, at the beginning. On the one hand, we had this lofty rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal," but when it came to designing who could and couldn't participate, almost all Americans were excluded from participation. Only white male property owners could vote at the beginning of the Republic. That meant that in the first presidential election, only 6% of Americans cast ballots because white men who didn't own property couldn't vote.

Women who were half the country couldn't vote, African Americans who were enslaved in most places, were not able to vote. Native Americans weren't even considered citizens of the country. We had, from the very beginning of this country, a democracy that was not a democracy for most Americans. Then it gradually expanded. It first expanded to give voting rights to white men who didn't own property, and then, of course, we saw a huge expansion after the civil war, giving voting rights to Black men.

That right was expanded, but then it was severely constricted during the fall, and after the fall of reconstruction, and eventually, women got the right to vote in 1920, but that was largely a right that was enjoyed by white women. It really wasn't until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that all Americans finally got the right to vote, regardless of race, gender, color, et cetera. That's about, I don't know, 250 years for American history in

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Brian Lehrer: Yes, in a minute and a half. That's pretty good. Well, take us one layer deeper on a piece of that, because, after the civil wars, you said the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, gave Black men the right to vote. No women had the right to vote until 1920 19th Amendment, but the 15th Amendment in 1870, and yet, we do usually talk about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as really enfranchising Black Americans, we don't see the 15th Amendment in 1870 as that much of a milestone anymore. Remind us, what did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 actually change on paper, and in the real world?

Ari Berman: Well, it's amazing, Brian, because basically, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was passed to enforce the protections of the 15th amendment of 1870. Essentially, 100 years later had to pass an entirely new law, to enforce a constitutional amendment that had not been enforced throughout the Jim Crow South. Because what happened was, even though the 15th Amendment said that the right to vote shall not be denied based on race or color, the right to vote was denied, based on race or color throughout the Jim Crow South after Reconstruction ended.

The way that happened was, that things like literacy tests and poll taxes were passed in places like Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, et cetera. They were on the face of it, race-neutral, they didn't say, "We're going to disenfranchise all African-Americans based on the wordings of the statutes," but in practice, that's what they did. That's what happened in the segregated south, through things like poll taxes and literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. By the way, a lot of those things were also adopted in the north, in places like New York City, which also had literacy tests, up until the 1960s.

What the Voting Rights Act did, was it struck down all of those suppressive devices, the literacy tests, the poll taxes, et cetera, in the States, the longest histories of discrimination, which was largely in the south, but not exclusively, the Voting Rights Act, a lot people don't remember, applied to three counties in New York City, when it was passed in 1965, who also had poll taxes and literacy tests on the books. Then what it did, is it set the federal government to the south to actually be able to enforce the law, first to register Black voters who had not been able to register for decades.

Then over a longer period of time, what the Voting Rights Act did, is it required those states with the longest histories of discrimination, largely in the south, but also parts of the West and other parts of the country to have to approve their voting changes with the federal government so that if you struck down one literacy tests, they wouldn't just pass a new one that would have the same effect or the same impact or outcome of trying to disenfranchise Black voters or other voters of color.

Brian Lehrer: In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, '65, as we just said, the Voting Rights Act, and three years later, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States, in no small measure as a backlash to those laws. When talking about the Supreme Court, we focus so much these days on the fact that Trump got to appoint three justices out of the current nine, we forget that Richard Nixon got to appoint four. What were the implications of that, for voting rights?

Ari Berman: It began what became a major shift on the court. Nixon appointed some very conservative justices, like William Rehnquist, he also appointed some relatively moderate justices. Remember, John Paul Stevens was a Nixon appointee. It wasn't necessarily the same kind of conservative counter-revolution that you would later see with the justices that were appointed by Trump, but certainly, what Nixon did is he shifted the Warren Court, which was a court that protected all sorts of rights, not just voting rights, but it really led to a revolution in the law in terms of protecting rights for previously disadvantaged marginalized communities.

That began to shift the court to the right, and it shifted steadily to the right. It went from being the Burger Court, that's who was chief justice under Nixon to then becoming the Rehnquist Court in the subsequent years, Reagan, Bush Won, et cetera. Then that became the Roberts Court, and now, I guess it's technically still the Roberts Court, but really, what it is, it's the What Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett Court, because they are in control in terms of the majority now. The Supreme Court, since the Nixon era, has moved steadily to the right, and as it's moved steadily to the right, it's become increasingly hostile to things like the Voting Rights Act.

You could always count on the Supreme Court, even under Nixon, to largely be supportive of the Voting Rights Act. That's no longer the case. That really changed with first, the justices that George W. Bush appointed, John Roberts and Sam Alito, and then certainly, it's become much more hostile to voting rights with adding Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett.

Brian Lehrer: I should say, Chief Justice John Roberts does not come off well in your book, including his role before he was on the court as an assistant to the Attorney General in the Reagan administration when Roberts was only in his 20s, he helped lead the charge against some voting rights codifications back then in the 1980s, although they lost. Can you tell that story a little bit?

Ari Berman: Yes, it's amazing that John Roberts has become the moderate on the current Supreme Court because he was really a foot soldier in The Reagan Revolution when it came to trying to restrict the voting rights. Parts of the Voting Rights Act were due to expire in the early 1980s, and there also was a Supreme Court case that had weakened the Voting Rights Act, and there was a big fight between the Reagan administration and the Congress over how to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and how strong to make the law once it was reauthorized.

Roberts really led the issue as a young lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, he was tasked with taking a very hard-line position on the Voting Rights Act. In his words he wrote that, "Violations of the Voting Rights Act should not be made too easy to prove." He said it would turn the country basically make the right to vote a racial entitlement, things like that. He wrote [unintelligible 00:10:55] of 25 memos arguing against a strong reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Roberts actually lost that fight.

One of the reasons he lost that fight is because he had Republicans in the Congress like Senator Bob Dole of Kansas who stood up to protect voting rights, and actually took on Ronald Reagan in the Republican administration. There was a very strong bipartisan majority in Congress for the Voting Rights Act, but I think what happened is Roberts lost that fight in the Reagan administration, but then he took up that fight when he joined the Supreme Court, and he was joined by the other Conservative justices on the Supreme Court.

It was Roberts who basically 30-something years later wrote the decision in Shelby County versus Holder that guarded the heart of the Voting Rights Act. I think you can absolutely draw a line from the activism of a young John Roberts in the 1980s against the Voting Rights Act, and then the work of Chief Justice John Roberts guarding the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and then in the subsequent decisions that have weakened the Voting Rights Act since then.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us we are in Issue 17 in our 30 issues in 30 days election series. This is Part 2 out of 10 that we're doing now on democracy in peril. Remember in the summer we did a series of call-ins asking you what your biggest midterm election issues were. Overwhelmingly Number 1 was democracy in peril. We're actually doing 10 different slices of democracy in peril over 10 consecutive shows. This is Number 2, how to achieve and then keep ballot access for all.

We can take your phone calls, your questions, your comments, your observations, your experiences from any generation about the expanding and contracting of ballot access in this country. For Ari Berman from Mother Jones, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in this Country. 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692, or Tweet @BrianLehrer.

Thank you for that deep history so far. We're coming up to the present, but we're not there yet, because I want you to keep giving us a big sweep of history view of not just what's going on now which is so many people being anxious about the contracting of voting rights which some people are trying to enact, but you frame the debate around the Voting Rights Act since it was passed in 1965 as between two competing camps. One that was for mere access to the ballot and one that was a broader policing of the election system. Can you explain that tension and where the push for progress since 1965 has really lied?

Ari Berman: Yes. At first, the question of the Voting Rights Act is, would Black voters who had been disenfranchised for decades, some cases centuries, would they be able to register to vote? That was the first thing the Voting Rights Act was concerned about. Was getting Black voters and then other voters of color, Hispanics in places like Texas registered to vote. That was a very successful effort. Once that happened in the years following the Voting Rights Act, the question then was, would there be actual shifts in political power? Would the registration of Black voters, Latino voters, et cetera lead to shifts in political representation in places across the South, but also places across the North as well?

That was really the second major battle of the Voting Rights Act was, was there a right to representation, what should political representation look like, and how would the country change as a result of these newly enfranchised communities? One of the things that really struck me when I was researching my book Give Us the Ballot was how long it took to see real shifts in representation, how long it took to elect the first Black mayors or the first Black city council members, or the first Black county commissioners. In places like Alabama this didn't happen right away, in some cases it took until the 1980s, the 1990s.

You still hear stories of places that have just now elected the first Black city council member, the first Latino city council member, and so there was this big fight over representation when it came to the Voting Rights Act. Then there were people, critics of the Voting Rights Act that argued that the Voting Rights Act had gone too far. That it was supposed to open up the political process, but it wasn't supposed to guarantee any kind of outcomes, and that using the Voting Rights Act to try to elect Black members of Congress or Latino members of Congress or to local offices that that was becoming a form of affirmative action in the electoral sphere.

That's a tension that remains today. We just heard this, I'm sure you're going to ask about this, but we just heard this, when the Supreme Court heard a case about redistricting in Alabama which was, what rights does the Voting Rights Act protect. Does it just protect the right to vote, or is the right to vote broadly constructed to also mean the right to be represented in your community as well?

Brian Lehrer: Right. We will touch on that later. We'll also touch on that in our segment in this series tomorrow which is going to be essentially or explicitly about districting, but let's talk about where some of our current ways of expanding the vote come from. Early voting, drop boxes, voting by mail, we also have voter registration at motor vehicles bureaus in lots of places. That's relatively new. How recent is anything that detach voting from just one election day and waiting at your local polling place, or that put voter registration in front of people as a choice more easily?

Ari Berman: It's been a steady expansion of voting rights. There hasn't really been one moment. The biggest change was the 1993 National Voter Registration Act which was the first real major piece of voting rights legislation that was passed since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That, as you said, allowed people to register to vote at a motor vehicle offices and other public agencies. That was really important because what was happening is after the Voting Rights Act, a lot of people got registered immediately, but then it started to become difficult to register again that you would have to register only at the county courthouse for example, and registration deadlines would be very sweeping, isn't it?

You had to re-register before elections, and so the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 was meant to make voter registration as easy and as accessible as possible. A lot of people registered to vote as a result of that. Now, we take for granted that you can register to vote at the [unintelligible 00:17:59] places, but then it also became clear that we were moving away from just voting on one Tuesday November. The reason why we vote on a Tuesday November is because that's why farmers used to bring their crops to the market in the 1800s. It's a pretty antiquated system right now.

We're no longer primarily agrarian society where people are basing trips to the market on a Tuesday in November, and so states began to think about, "How can we make voting more convenient?" They had different ideas. Some states said, "We need to give people more time to vote. We have to make it so that people have a week of early voting or two weeks of early voting, or we have to make it so that people have different options to vote, that we want to make it so that people can vote by mail."

That was something that was primarily done out west but then spread to more places. Some states said that registration deadlines were too burdensome, so they had the ability to register at the polls in election day, what was known as election day registration. It was different states experimenting with things, and I think what happened was people started realizing the more options that you give people, the more convenient it is, and so more states became open at looking at early voting or looking at expanding voter registration or adopting mail voting, although, obviously, that really exploded during the pandemic.

The interesting thing is, Brian, before 2020 a lot of these things were far more bipartisan than they are now. Republicans supported early voting in a lot of states. Places like Florida helped pioneer early voting. A lot of Republicans supported vote by mail in Western states. Whether it was Arizona or Washington State or Oregon. A lot of Republicans supported things like election day registration in Minnesota and in Wisconsin, states that have had those things in the 1970s. Really, it's only been in the last decade that the whole question of how we vote, and the voting laws have become so partisan and so politicized.

Brian Lehrer: Is it fair to say that's where the current battle lives? How much to expand access versus how much to roll back those recent expansions?

Ari Berman: I think there's two real battles. The first is access to the polls, whether we should expand access to the ballot or restrict access to the ballot. The second battle, of course, is over how we should treat elections, whether we should certify elections or not, and that is really, really new. That was really something that we had not discussed in this country very much at all until the 2020 election.

There had been times, of course, 2000 elections in Florida, where the election had been incredibly close, and there was lots of litigation, the courts ultimately decided that. That has happened before in our history. There's the idea that one candidate would lose, claim the election was stolen, then half his side tried to overthrow the election, which is what Trump did in 2020. That was really unprecedented, whereas the battles over ballot access, those have existed for a long time, but they've intensified in recent years.

Brian Lehrer: That's going to be another separate segment in this Democracy in Peril series, the way votes are counted and elections are certified under attack. Let me take a question for you from a listener via Twitter. The listener asks, "The 2020 election had the largest voter turnout in history, our state-sponsored voter repression actions actually helping to increase voter participation."

Ari Berman: The thing is that a lot of the restrictions on voting were passed after the 2020 election in response to that increased turnout. In 2020, we had the highest voter turnout in 120 years, which I think was a remarkable achievement during the pandemic. I think reflected not just the interest in the election, but also the fact that so many different people made such concerted efforts to make sure that people could vote safely during a really unprecedented time in American history. If you look at all the states that changed their voting laws in the last year, we had 21 states passed 42 restrictive voting laws since the beginning of 2021.

In places like Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Texas, this was in response in many cases, to the increased voter turnout. You'd think that in a democracy, people would believe that higher participation was something to be encouraged but instead, it was a threat to the people that found themselves in many cases on the losing end of the election. I think that a lot of the conspiracy theories that we heard about the election being stolen were in fact, in response to the belief that voter turnout shouldn't be that high, and that we shouldn't make it that easy to vote. In fact, instead of trying to make that high turnout we saw in 2020 the new normal, we should do everything we can to make sure that it never happened again.

Brian Lehrer: This is so interesting so far, I think. With Ari Berman as we look at history and look at today, and preview tomorrow here in our Democracy in Peril section of our 30 Issues election series. We're talking about access to the ballot, plain and simple. Ari Berman from Mother Jones, who wrote the seminal book in 2015, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

When we continue in a minute, we'll take your phone calls for him and more tweets. I want to talk to you more, Ari, about the Georgia voting law, which you just referenced. There was so much backlash to it as a voter suppression law. However, early voting in Georgia, for this election started yesterday, one of the earliest early-voting states in the country. There are other reasons that people push back on looking at that as voter suppression. We'll talk about Georgia law and a lot more as we continue. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, where we're trying hard to be a pro-democracy show on a pro-democracy station. In an era when democracy is in peril, we're doing 10 parts of our 30 Issues election series on Democracy in Peril. This is part two, how to achieve and then, keep ballot access for all with Ari Berman from Mother Jones, and author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Michael calling from Puerto Rico, you're on WNYC. Hello, from New York, Michael.

Michael: Thank you. I wanted to mention and actually provoke the gentleman from Mother Jones to talk about how the full implementation of the Voting Rights Act was never realized in American territory. I just want to bring in that unique perspective.

Brian Lehrer: Ari, you got that?

Ari Berman: That's a really interesting point. I think there's this larger question of the rights of citizenship in places like Puerto Rico, and the odd distinction of, do they or do they not have the protection of US laws. Also, I know it's a complicated question in places like Puerto Rico, but the whole question of statehood. The fact, also, that because Puerto Rico is not a formal state, it does not have protections under the Voting Rights Act that it would have if it was a state.

I don't want to speak for Puerto Ricans because I know this is a divided issue down there, but there are obviously people that would like for Puerto Rico to become a state and to have representation in the Congress, and then, to be able to enjoy the benefits of things like the Voting Rights Act. Right now, the Congress skews more heavily white, more heavily rural, but in particular, the Senate skews much more heavily white and heavily rural than it would if Washington DC and Puerto Rico would have become US states.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go north from Puerto Rico. Anne asks, "What do you think about the Georgia Law debate? Is it as restrictive as all that early voting in the state?" As I said before the break, began yesterday. That's a lot of early voting. The new law includes a minimum number of weekend days where voting would be required, but the backlash to the law had businesses boycotting the state. Atlanta lost the baseball All-Star game last year as part of that boycott. Did the Georgia Law get a bad rep undeservedly at first or in any way in your opinion?

Ari Berman: I think it's complicated because the Georgia Law had a lot of different parts of it. Some were good, a lot were bad that restricted voting rights. When it comes to what the Georgia Law did, it did a bunch of different things. It cut the amount of time that people had to request and return mail ballots. It prohibited election officials from sending mail ballots to all voters. It got rid of or dramatically curtail the use of drop boxes. It added new requirements for mail ballots. It made it easier to challenge the registration of voters. It restructured in some cases, how elections are run and certified. Even when the law was being debated, there were changes to it.

Initially, Georgia Republicans had wanted to cut early voting and they had wanted to eliminate Sunday voting, which is when Black churches hold souls to the polls, voter mobilization drives. There was a backlash to that. Then, instead of cutting early voting, they expanded early voting, partly because early voting was so popular including among many Republicans. That was one good thing the law did. I think one reason we're seeing higher turnout in early voting is because the law made mail voting a lot harder. Clearly, we're in a different phase of the pandemic. A lot more people are going to vote in person anyway, but it's also true that mail voting is a lot more difficult than it was previously in Georgia.

We did a story earlier in the year looking at the municipal election in Georgia in November of 2021. We found that mail ballots were rejected at a rate 45 times higher in that municipal election in 2021 than they were in November 2020 general election. Clearly, there's been some impact of the law in terms of mail voting. There's been a lot of challenges with voter eligibility in the run-up to the election. If more people are voting in person, that could lead to longer lines at the polls. We saw some long lines yesterday. That could lead to potentially people leaving the polls. Then, there's also the possibility that people will have their ballots challenged after the fact.

I don't think you can really judge the voting law based on one day of early voting. I think we're going to see potentially, some positives from the law if more people decide to vote early, but I think there's also going to be a lot of parts of the law that are restrictive, that are going to cause people if not to vote, then have a more difficult time casting ballots.

Brian Lehrer: Nacio in Park Slope has a history question. You're on WNYC. Hi, Nacio.

Nacio: Hello. I'm interested in Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which says that if people or states suppress people's right to vote, they will lose representation in the House of Representatives. In Section 5 it says that the Congress will have the right to enforce this law. This gives real consequences for people who decide to try to take the vote away from people. With the Republicans being concerned about voter integrity and the Democrats being in favor of expanding voting rights isn't this the time to challenge the Congress to live up to his responsibility to define this law?

Brian Lehrer: Really, interesting question. A piece of the Constitution of the 14th Amendment really two pieces he cites section two and section five that we never hear about and I'm really unfamiliar with Ari, are you?

Ari Berman: Yes, that's a really good point by Nacio. Section two of the 14th Amendment was basically passed to ensure compliance with it so that if states did not comply with the guarantees of citizenship for African Americans that were granted in the Constitution under the 14th Amendment, they could have representation taken away. The problem is Congress never enforced this law and it's really one of the great tragedies of American history that you had states violently and then through other means overthrow reconstruction and overthrow integrated government in the South.

Then they didn't lose representation for it, even though they should have under section two of the 14th Amendment and that was either because there was just no political will to enforce it or no one could figure out what criteria to use to be able to measure voter disenfranchisement. It was absolutely true that under the statutes that existed in the Constitution, there should have been consequences and penalties for the states that thwarted the promise of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

You can make the argument today that the same people that supported the effort to try to overturn the 2020 election should face similar penalties. Representative states that tried to overthrow the last election could in fact see their representation reduced in the federal government if the 14th Amendment was enforced. Unfortunately, it's never been enforced today and I think it's very, very disturbing that there are people that either tried to violently overthrow American democracy or supported the violent overthrow of American democracy that not only have not been held accountable for it but actually could be rewarded for it in terms of being elected to office in 2022.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We're almost out of time couple of more questions. How did Republicans come to focus so much on voter fraud, including mostly exaggerations of the threat of voter fraud as a way to suppress the vote? This well predates Donald Trump's campaigns, right?

Ari Berman: Yes. I would argue the real turning point was the election of Barack Obama, the first black president who inspired this huge coalition, not just of black voters, but of young voters, voters of color more broadly and that was viewed as the coalition of the ascendant. I think Republicans saw the riding on the wall and they saw the demographics of the country changing and they saw the election of things like the first black president and they said, If we don't change something, we're going to be a perpetual minority party.

One of the things they tried to change was the country's voting laws in the states that they controlled. In particular, after the 2010 election, they were in a position to control all of these key states, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, et cetera, et cetera. In short order, they began changing voting laws to try to make it harder for democratic constituencies to be able to vote.

This effort does predate trump it predates Trump by about a decade, but it definitely accelerated under Donald Trump. The Republican party became far more anti-democratic under Trump than it was before. I would argue that the voter suppression elements of the Republican Party were relatively fringe elements before Trump. Now they are front and center with Trump. I think that the Republican party was radicalizing against democracy before Trump I think that's one reason why Trump became president in the first place.

The anti-democratic transformation of the Republican party dramatically accelerated under Trump and became concerned with not just making it harder to vote, but actually trying to overturn elections that combination of two voter suppression on the front end and then voter suppression on the back end, that's what's so chilling about this moment in American history right now.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Tomorrow we will focus explicitly on what may be the biggest threat right now, which is the way that vote counting and election certification is coming under attack. Last question, as we look to the possibility of continuing to expand voting rights in this country because I think we've established in this conversation that it's really going in both directions. There's the voter suppression push, but there's also the voter expansion push that has given us early voting drop boxes, mail-in voting same-day registration, motor vehicles, bureau registration, all those things we talked about.

My last question is how else would you like to see ballot access expanded? Some countries have mandatory voting. We discuss universal mail-in access as a current debate. There's the prospect of online voting, but concerns about hacking by Russia and whoever else. Keep that under the surface for now, maybe rightfully so. What would the frontiers to push ballot access be for you now at the top of your list?

Ari Berman: Well, I think it would be just to make voting as convenient as possible and to give people as many options as possible. To take the things that are working well in different states and try to put them in as many states as possible. Whether that's a combination of making it easy to vote by mail, but also making it easy to vote in person, but also making it easy to register to vote.

Then making sure that while we do that there's a reasonable safeguard so people feel like their votes are going to be counted and then certified. I think what's really missing here, Brian, though, is all of the actions at the state level and that we don't have any new federal protections for voting rights. I think that there are a lot of good things in the voting rights bills that Congress considered in the last session, both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

I think the failure by Democrats, particularly because of Joe Mansion and Kyrsten Sinema not to support changes to the filibuster, the failure to pass voting rights legislation, I think is going to have a real big impact on the election system, particularly if some of these election deniers are elected in 2022 because I think Democrats had a very unique moment in American history when the right to vote was under assault to protect voting rights in the same way that there was a moment in 1965 to protect voting rights.

They failed to seize that moment. Now we're really becoming to America where, when it comes to democracy, where some states are moving in a direction to expand voting rights some states are moving in a direction to restrict voting rights. My fear is that that's going to continue without the federal government stepping in to make sure that every American has the equal right to vote, no matter of what state they live in and no matter who's elected in their states.

Brian Lehrer: Ari Berman, senior reporter at Mother Jones Magazine, covering voting rights, he's the Author of the Seminal Book from 2015, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Very important conversation. Ari, thank you so much for coming on today.

Ari Berman: Thanks so much, Brian. Great to talk to you as always.

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