Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we head into the 2022 midterm elections, there are at least two things at stake. One is normal and one is not. The normal one is control of Congress based on who shows up to vote that happens every election year. The abnormal one, and Heads Up America, democracy itself may be at stake as many Republican states change their election laws to give their party more power over whether elections that they lose are even certified. This is the big lie, stop the steel movement distributed to many state capitals, not just Republicans in Congress, or January 6 rioters.

In just a minute, we'll talk to New York Times correspondent, Nick Corasaniti, who counted 216 bills in 41 states to give state legislatures more power over elections officials. After the 2020 census, there is also the specter of stealing seats through racist redistricting. The Justice Department yesterday filed suit against Texas for allegedly violating what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Why? The state's population grew by 4 million people in the last decade, 90% of that population growth was among people of color, mostly Latinos, but here's Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta yesterday on some of the ways that the new Texas congressional map denies Latinos their rightful voting cloud.

Vanita Gupta: For example, Texas will gain two new congressional seats because of its population growth, almost all of which is due to growth in the state's minority population. However, Texas has designed both of those new seats to have white voting majorities. The Congressional plan also deliberately reconfigured a West Texas district to eliminate the opportunity for Latino voters to elect a representative of their choice. This is the third time in three decades where Texas has eliminated a Latino electoral opportunity in this same district, despite previous court determinations that this violates the law.

Brian Lehrer: That's Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta yesterday. Many of you probably heard Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, his clips from that news conference that have been widely played. I pulled Vanita Gupta because I thought she got so specific there. The Associate Attorney General, Texas, his defense is that the Biden Justice Department is using the courts to get more seats for Democrats. "No, we're not doing this. You're doing this." Let's talk about all this with Nick Corasaniti, national politics correspondent for The New York Times.

Thanks for coming on, Nick. Welcome to WNYC.

Nick Corasaniti: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get right to it. You wrote an article in June, called "How Republican States Are Expanding Their Power Over Elections." 216 bills in 41 states, and includes a line that says, "GOP lawmakers have made it easier to overturn election results." Can you give me one example of that to start out?

Nick Corasaniti: Yes. The best example would actually probably be in Arkansas. While Republicans there were angered by a loss of a two or three-term local elected official in the state assembly, who lost by less than 100 votes, there was some errors that had been made by election officials in counting, but they were corrected. The results were still held up, but still, local Republicans in Arkansas pushed ahead and created a state board of election commissioners, which is comprised of six Republicans and one Democrat, so clearly leans Republican.

They're empowered to both investigate and institute corrective action on a bunch of things relating to elections, from registration, to counting ballots, to certifying elections. What you could see is coming down the road, and the next election, if say, something happens that Republicans don't like, this state board of election commissioners, which is again comprised of six Republicans and one Democrat, could refuse to count some ballots, could refuse to certify the election, and therefore throw it into chaos.

There's another law in Arkansas, that allows that same state board of election commissioners to take over a county board of elections if they're deemed to be not running properly and making mistakes, malfeasance, corruption, anything like that. That's something that we've seen in other states like Georgia, but in totality, the package of bills in Arkansas could really allow for the partisan legislature to really meddle with results.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting and scary. You mentioned Georgia. That article that you wrote in June begins with a story from Troup County, Georgia, where a woman named Lonnie Hollis was kicked off the local election board. Who is Lonnie Hollis, and why should we care? Tell us that story.

Nick Corasaniti: Lonnie Hollis is a member of the Troup County Election Board, and Troup is a county West-ish Georgia. She'd been on the board since 2013, a very active member of the community, really, really knows local election law, and was a big advocate for pushing for greater ballot access in a county that's largely rural, pretty much run by Republicans, but has a significant Black voting-age population. She was pushing for things like better hours, a new policing to serve the parts of the county where the Black voters live, and had been very vocal about all this.

After the 2020 election, there was a host of these local bills in Georgia, that passed at the state legislature but deal specifically with different counties. She's known as Miss Lonnie, throughout Georgia, is one of these bills, specifically dealing with Troup County, allowed the Republican-controlled Board of Commissioners to restructure the board of elections as they see fit.

What they did is they just simply removed Miss Lonnie from that board, and while it is still a Republican-controlled board, so this isn't necessarily as much of an outright power grab, it removes one of the most important and vocal voices representing a very proportionately large Black voting-age population in Troup County and all their concerns from the board of elections. Simple concerns about polling hours, polling locations, things like that. They no longer have that voice on the board of elections in Troup County.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it's important to point out that that's part of Georgia's new election law, the same controversial one that caused Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta this year because they saw it as so racist. The same law that strips the Georgia secretary of state, currently Brad Raffensperger, of the power to certify a statewide election, and gives it to the partisan lawmakers themselves?

Nick Corasaniti: This is actually slightly different. Within that SB202, which is the Georgia's new election law that caused the All-Star Game to be moved, there are provisions for the state legislature through the state elections board to take over County Boards of Elections. That process is ongoing right now in Fulton County, which is the biggest County in Georgia, home to Atlanta, and is very concerning to a lot of both Democrats and good government groups and democracy advocates who see that as a potential power grab.

What happened to Miss Lonnie and to some of these other more rural counties in Georgia that have large Black voting-age populations, were this local legislation. Basically, a member of the State Legislature whose district touches these counties can introduce a bill that deals with this county, and then state legislature votes on it. We're actually seeing that right now in Gwinnett County, which is, it's the second-largest county in Georgia, and the most diverse, and in the special redistricting session that's going on right now, the lone Republican state senator who has a part of Gwinnett County in his district introduced a bill looking to restructure the Board of Commissioners there. This is a county that in 2017, was all Republican, now, it's all-Democrat, and almost all elected officials of color at the border commission level. They're trying to use the state legislature which leans Republican to pass a bill that would restructure that board of commissioners in Georgia.

Brian Lehrer: That's an even more stark example, really.

Nick Corasaniti: Yes. It's this weird quirk in the Georgia legislature where you can use the power of the state legislature, which, through both gerrymandering and just the sorting of voters in Georgia, is always going to be Republican, despite the state leaning bluer and bluer, using that state legislature slant to impose some Republican wills on these counties that are either Democratic, in the case of Gwinnett, or Republican, but with some key Democratic voices on the board in the case of Troup County.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote that that kind of thing is happening in at least 10 counties in Georgia. Let's take another state, another example that you give in that article, Kansas, where election disputes will now have to be settled with the approval of the legislature, not just the Secretary of State, and you give the example from there of the security of voting by mail. Can you go into that story a little bit?

Nick Corasaniti: This is actually going to become I think something that we have to pay attention to this year. What happened in Kansas is, the secretary of state there had been pretty vocal in stating that vote by mail is safe. It's secure. Our elections in Kansas are going off smoothly, securely, free, and fair. Despite President Trump's, or former President Trump's obsession with voting by mail, calling it rigs, spreading lots of false accusations about it, and that irritated some Republicans in the state legislature there.

What they did is they created a bill that said that in election lawsuits, which some sometimes can be seeking relief for-- we can use the example in the 2020 election of the issues with the post office. A lot of lawsuits were centered around okay, mail-in ballots aren't probably going to make it in time with normal estimates because the poster office was struggling in the pandemic with meeting deadlines, plus there had been cuts made by former postmaster Joy. They would file a lawsuit seeking, say, seven days of relief after election day for any ballot that was postmarked by election day. Meaning it had been put in the mail in time for election day to still be counted. When that lawsuit would be filed, and I'm just speaking hypothetically here, this isn't exactly what happened in Kansas, the secretary of state would be on one side, the plaintiffs would be on the other, and sometimes they'd enter into a consent agreement and a compromise and say okay, we'll do three days.

What the Kansas legislature has done is removed the secretary of state's ability to unilaterally make that decision. If they wanted to enter into a settlement where there could be some relief, maybe not exactly what the plaintiffs were seeking, but something beyond what the state had originally said due to unique circumstances, now that needs the consent of the partisan legislature. That clearly gives again partisan legislatures in states more oversight over election administration.

When I was talking to the executive director of the honest elections project for a story I did over the weekend, he had told me that that's actually something that they want to explore deeper, and are more concerned about as there's just more election litigation now, it's just a reality of our elections. They want to see this brought to more states so that secretaries of state, election officials who are often working the best interest of elections don't have this ability to unilaterally agree to changes and make sure that the legislature holds their authority over those changes.

Brian Lehrer: Let's notice we have some time for phone calls as we talked to Nick Corasaniti, National Politics correspondent for the New York Times, covering, well, I'll just cite again this article headline of his from June. He's got a lot of other recent articles on this just from the last week or so, but that one from June that puts it so clearly is how Republican states are expanding their power over elections.

Listeners, we can take a few phone calls on the changes to state election laws being made in Republican states. The change, how election disputes are settled, worst case scenario, things like Trump's big lie about a stolen election could have enough political support that real election losses get flipped to fake election wins for the GOP. That's the ultimate fear.

He's also writing about declining enthusiasm among the democratic base, which we'll get to, in the context 2022, and yesterday's lawsuit by the justice department against Texas for alleged racist gerrymandering to deny mostly Latino growth areas, their rightful political power with new district lines. 212-433, WNYC. Anyone listening in Texas today, you can call in. 212-433-9692. Or anyone else, or you can always tweet @BrianLehrer.

Let me get to this nightmare scenario and why people care about what happens at the detail level of local elections boards and state legislatures when the national media usually focuses on Washington. How much can you tell if in these examples that you've given of the states Arkansas, Kansas, Georgia, and obviously there are others, if they would really overturn real election results that the Republicans lose, based on power grabs if the facts don't support them. The Republican states actually resisted that or felt that they didn't have the legal authority to do that in the case of Trump. Here's just a few seconds of the famous phone call in which Trump explicitly tried to get Georgia secretary of state, Raffensperger, to find exactly enough votes that didn't really exist to flip that state's result.

Trump: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have because we won the state.

Brian Lehrer: Trump on the phone with Raffensperger. They didn't win the state. These people taking power in Georgia and other states who report on. Nick, does it seem that they would really throw electoral democracy out the window and just make this stuff up?

Nick Corasaniti: Well, that would certainly be the the extreme end of it. I don't think we've seen concrete evidence that that's going to happen, but I think what's causing a massive amount of concern for Democrats and voting rights groups, civil rights groups, is some of the people running for office in these states, and especially secretaries of state and state legislatures, are big proponents of the stop the steel movement. In Georgia, for example, from that call you just referenced that was secretary of state Raffensperger who repeatedly stood up to efforts by the Trump administration saying, "No, our elections were fair. What you're asking for is false and illegal, and you just don't have those around 12,000 votes here."

Jody Hice, who's a a member of Congress who's running for secretary of state, was one of the members who voted to overturn the election, and has constantly spread some of those falsehoods about the 2020 election. There's concern that if someone like Jody Hice were to get this secretary, were to win and be the secretary of state in Georgia, that their past statements could lead them to possibly try and overturn an election had it gone the wrong way, or another person that there's a couple candidates in Michigan running for secretary of state, who have similarly been supportive of the stop the steel movement and the big lie. If those people were to be in place, I think it would heighten concerns.

Basically what we see now is a expanding and tweaking of the architecture and infrastructure of American election systems, and a systemic, if not removing of the guardrails, possibly like fending them to a point where they could break. I also think it's important to note that we haven't yet come to this inflection point where something could be overturned. It's more we saw the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Guardrails held due to officials like secretary Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, and also some of these laws, and both of those things are under attack right now.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Matt in Queens with I think pushback on the idea that this is so threatening to democracy.

Matt, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Matt: I appreciate you taking my call. Certainly, like everyone else, I believe in free and fair elections, and equitable distribution of the electoral map. The fundamental point that has to be raised is that the state legislature is a constitutionally have the authority to basically make the rules in their state. One of the greatest hows of the last election was that things were being certified or changed, of course due to COVID and due to mailing issues. Whereas I guess if every state wants to do it their way, it's okay, but the state legislature is the final arbiter, and what the motives are is something else.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that question, though, I think is in play. Whether the state legislatures are the final arbiters of election laws, and certainly some of the disputes that we saw last year in the context of COVID, was whether governors could unilaterally say everybody can do mail and ballots this year, or whether that needs state legislature approval in a state of emergency situation like that. In many cases, the state legislatures will be checked by the courts. They will. The courts do have authority to look at what the state legislatures do and decide whether these violate voting rights laws or anything else.

Nick, do you want to weigh in on that analysis at all?

Nick Corasaniti: Well, it's definitely true that the state legislatures are the ones who are given the authority to make election laws as they see fit. There has been efforts to erode election officials role in either implementing those asking for emergency authority. What happened in the 2020 election with regards to COVID was an emergency situation. There are provisions in state constitutions, again the go state by state, like you mentioned, where the governor can be given emergency authority, and that is what happens. I think who knows where we'll be in 2022 or 2024 with regards to either the pandemic or some other situation. I think that's where this fight has been over state legislatures, and what I'm looking at is everything state legislatures are doing. You're 100% right, that they are in a lot of states, the ones who set the rules of the elections, and these are the rules that they're setting right now.

Brian Lehrer: Julie, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Julie.

Julie: Hi. Okay. I'm really glad you're having this show today. It's a really perfect time to be having it because, but what I'm really surprised about is that there's no mention of the Freedom to Vote Act, which must be passed before Congress goes to recess. Because if it is not passed because of the way that the wheels of government turn slowly, we are going to be having a real problem in the next election because of the state's shenanigans have been happening with the Republicans at the state level.

People need to call Schumer and call Gilland and encourage everybody in every state to call your senators and tell them to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. The only way to get it through at this point is to also end the filibuster or modify it, because this is a third iteration of this Act, and it seems like it might pass at this point because what mansion said he could do getting the 10 Republicans to pass the last iteration of this bill did not happen. He might be more flexible now, but still the only way to really get this through is to end the filibuster, and it has to have to happen and not enough light is getting shown on this issue. Everybody's going away for the holidays.

There's a protest happening in Washington today that friends of mine are leaving New York City to go to, but it's the small group of people who know what's happening. The-- I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. Julie, your points are very clear, and let's talk about them. There are bills in Congress, you reported on a new one, just the other day, Nick, and my guest is New York Times' national political correspondent, Nick Corasaniti, covering all these election law changes and proposed election law changes, especially in Republican states. Can anything get through? I looked past that article, to be perfectly honest, because I thought, okay, here's another initiative by Democrats and Congress to try to protect voting rights as they see them, but nothing like that gets through Congress these days. What is there?

Nick Corasaniti: Well, I think what you're referring to is the effort to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887. You're right, there has been pretty unified, either all 50 or 49 of the 50 Republican senators in Congress who are opposed to any changes to federal voting legislation, arguing it would be a federal takeover of state elections. There's been no movement from Republicans willing to work with Senator Manchin on any kind of compromise, and both Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema have publicly said that they will not entertain any kind of changes to the filibuster. It seems like everything is dead in the water, at least as of now.

With this Electoral Count Act of 1887 revision, it's one of the more esoteric election reforms, but it's also a little bit more critical in terms of preventing election subversion, just briefly what-- the bill hasn't been written yet, but the idea is that it reformed this law that's very old, pretty unspecific. The warped reading of it was how former President Trump and his allies were looking to overturn the election on January 6th. Specifically with Mike Pence, throwing out votes, state legislatures, sending alternate states of elections at electors and things like that. What this rewriting would seek to do would be to say that the vice president does not have that power. The vice president's role is just ministerial, and that they would severely limit the grants to which a lawmaker could object to counting state's electoral college votes.

The only reason I think that this could have more of a chance of success than, say the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis voting right through Authorization Act, is that this has a lot of support from outside conservatives and Republicans. We listed a bunch of them in the article who view it as like a necessary updating of the electoral code that has no real impact on states authorities to run their own elections. This is just changing within federal government what they're allowed to do. It's an important updating in a law that's, at the moment, very unspecific.

Now, I think you're right, that there's just been this unified opposition to change anything relating to voting in Congress. This is unlikely to be an exception, but there is more movement behind reform to the Electoral Count Act outside of Congress on both sides of the [unintelligible 00:25:25] than there is for other voting reforms.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Of course the caller, Julie, mentioned the other voting rights Acts that have been floundering at the moment, even ones that Joe Manchin said he might be able to get Democrats or some Republicans on-board for. I think as we start to run out of time, that it's really telling what Julie from Brooklyn asked the other listeners to do. She didn't say call Mitch McConnell and read him the Riot Act. She didn't say call Lindsey Graham, call Ted Cruz. She said, call Schumer and Gilland, the Democrats from her state.

One more piece of this from your reporting, as we look to the congressional midterms, you wrote an article last week called Democrats Struggle to energize their base as frustration mounts. Maybe she was an example of a Democrat frustrated that her democratic elected officials aren't doing enough. Who's frustrated with what, and what are the implications that you wrote about for 2022?

Nick Corasaniti: Well, voting rights is one of the, I think, many frustrations that I wrote about with three of my colleagues in that story. I spent a lot of time talking to civil rights leaders, voting rights activists who have feel like they've been read the same lines from the white house, basically since these new voting laws started with Georgia back in the spring. It's a growing sense of frustration that there's the urgency that they feel is needed to protect voting rights, isn't being met with the same urgency as, say, passing the bipartisan infrastructure, now law, and then also the build back better economic plan. They feel that if the rhetoric, which says, this is the greatest assault on voting rights and our democracy in decades, isn't matching the action, then what did they vote for, and who are the leaders who they thought would protect those rights?

I think there's frustration there, and it similarly fits into broader frustrations within the democratic base that a lot of their issues, be it immigration, climate change, feel like they're mired in this partisan in fighting that we've seen over build-back better that we saw over the infrastructure bill rather than coming together to a quick consensus, understanding that you only have so much of an opportunity to make change, and to get the agenda through before the 2022 mid-terms, and they don't see a lot done.

One other thing that makes us harder is infrastructure isn't something that is immediately felt by voters. There's not all of a sudden going to be a bridge, a bridge takes a while to build. I think that is also another thing that's frustrating. A lot of the base is that they voted to both see change in the white house, but once they won Georgia and had full control, there was a limited window of opportunity here to get things done, and there's just not a long list right now.

Brian Lehrer: I guess the Democrats led by Biden will have to make the case to the base next year, that we did big things that were doable. Infrastructure is a big thing, but it doesn't make the heart go pitter pat. The build back better bill, probably the most transformative economic equality piece of legislation or package of pieces of legislation since LBJ, they may be able to get that through because it's allowed to bypass the filibuster. There's that, and for all these other things, immigration, abortion rights, criminal justice reform, voting rights, they're not going to get them through without abolishing the filibuster, and Joe Manchin won't vote to abolish the filibuster so they can't do it, but Biden is going to have to convince the base and all the Democrats running for Congress in their districts, especially swing districts, are going to have to convince the base that they did the maximum that they could politically do and have people believe that. At the same time, strike whatever balance they strike in energizing the base and appealing to swing voters. I think that's some of the scenario for the election to come.

Nick Corasaniti, national politics reporter for the New York Times, very interesting, very detailed as you went state by state, very bracing stuff about GOP attempts to control elections state by state, more with the threat that they'll do it for partisan purposes, not around the real election results. Thank you for talking it through with us.

Nick Corasaniti: Yes. Thanks for having me.

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