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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone, and now we turn back to voting. Nearly 28 million people have already voted as of Saturday, six times the amount of votes cast this time during the 2016 election, according to the US elections project run by the University of Florida. President Trump keeps refusing to say simply that he will respect the election results if he loses and peacefully turn over power.

That would be unique, but election-related violence wouldn't as The New Yorker writer and Columbia University Journalism School professor Jelani Cobb points out in The New Yorker. Jelani is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. He has a new documentary called Whose Vote Counts, made in collaboration with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism that will air on PBS on Frontline tomorrow night. Thanks for some time today, Jelani, welcome back to WNYC.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you.

Brian: Let's start with the documentary. You take us back to a particular Democratic primary from before Biden was the nominee and just as the pandemic was beginning, the Wisconsin primary, could you remind us why you revisit that election?

Jelani: I think that when the coronavirus emerged, we were already in the midst of working on this documentary, and it quickly became apparent that the storyline of voter suppression and the traditional mechanisms that we knew it, that have emerged in the seven years since the Shelby v. Holder case, a Supreme Court decision really hobbled the Voting Rights Act. That was only going to be part of the story and that another part of it was going to be the way in which the pandemic itself became a factor in voter suppression.

On April 7th, when we saw the primary, like everyone else did, other states were pulling back, rescheduling, postponing, coming up with whatever mechanism of accommodation they could find to grapple with the fact that it was really dangerous for people to come out in public or to be engaged in any kind of interaction that would be required to cast a ballot. Wisconsin went in the opposite direction. Not only did they hold an in-person election, but the Republican Party there fought and went to court successfully, I might add, to force the electorate to come out in person and vote on April 7th.

Those horrific images we saw of lines that were blocks and blocks long and people were standing all that time, hours on line just to go into a situation that was dangerous in its own right to cast their ballots. Those were just searing and we realized that we were looking at something that potentially had big implications for the coming presidential elections.

Brian: What do you think the lessons are from Wisconsin that can still be applied today for the election that's in progress to minimize any attempts at voter suppression from being successful?

Jelani: One of the things that happened in April was that we were roughly a month into the pandemic. We didn't know all that was going on. We didn't know the lay of the land. The Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, who we interview in the film, talked about watching the newscast and realizing a month before everything shut down, more than a month before, that this was going to be a big thing and there's going to be a real serious problem for the United States. He started pushing the Democratic Party in Wisconsin, started pushing for absentee ballots then. They were way ahead of the curve in terms of dealing with the COVID crisis.

Now, we've seen a lot of the same, people saying, "Request your absentee ballots" on Instagram. On my Instagram account, I was just scrolling through and all of a sudden I got a message that says, "Click this link to request an absentee ballot," and so on. Now they're also pushing people to say, "If you haven't already mailed in your ballot, make sure you do so. You want to get it in because [unintelligible 00:05:31] time is possible, and also come up with your early voting plan, if that's going to be the way that you approach it." I think that that's been a lot of what we've seen.

One of the other things I think is really crucial and can't be emphasized enough is for people to be really meticulous and detail-oriented in filling out their ballots because there are every year and every election the ballots that are not counted because they didn't fill it out correctly or they didn't place it within the envelope the way that it was supposed to be or didn't find the ballot, which is one of the big things or signed the envelope, which is one of the big things that happens. You want to be able to make sure that you have all of those things taken care of before you put your ballot back in the mail or drop it back off in a dropbox or take it to your local election center.

Brian: I haven't seen the documentary yet, but I gather that part of it is not just about the role today of absentee and mail-in ballots, but kind of a historic role. People may know you as a journalist because they read you in The New Yorker and you're a journalism professor, but you're also a historian, you used to be a history professor, I know, at Emory and elsewhere. What would you like to take us back to in history with respect to absentee or mail-in voting?

Jelani: Yes, sure. You're correct, this is a historic issue, a historic concern. I will add one quick correction, which is that my colleagues at Spelman College would kill me if I didn't accentuate that I was a professor at Spelman, which is a fine institution where I have lots of friends and colleagues, but I taught at Spelman. The real central point here I think is you can see, as early as 1981, we were starting to see the ideas around absentee balloting being used and the language of voter fraud being used as a mechanism to suppress votes.

That came in the person of Jeff Sessions, who was then the US attorney in Alabama and prosecuted Albert Turner, who was a former activist who had marched on the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis to fight for a Voting Rights Act in the first place. They were prosecuted for helping people fill out absentee ballots, African-Americans helping them fill out absentee ballots, and helping them get them mailed.

This was construed as voter fraud. They were acquitted on all these charges, but that was the earliest instance that we saw that this specific tactic was being used. Of course, the rhetoric around alleged voter fraud has continued and really grown exponentially since then. People have used the idea that there are fraudulent ballots. We hear in the President's rhetoric a lot, as a means of saying that we should not use mail-in or absentee ballots. I have to also say there is just glancingly little evidence that this is actually the case.

Brian: Let me just say one of your recent New Yorker articles also for a chilling piece of history, you wrote, "The United States is considered one of the most stable democracies in the world, but it has a long, mostly forgotten history of election-related violence." What were you referring to?

Jelani: There's a history of things that I think people have segregated, forgive the pun, segregated the history of electoral violence to Black people. They'll go, "Oh, I know that Black people were attacked in the south as a means of preventing them from voting," and so on. I specifically did not emphasize that in that piece because I wanted to talk about the fact that there is a history of partisan violence in this country as well. Clashes between Whigs and Democrats, clashes between the American Party or the Know-Nothings and immigrant voters, attempts to drive people away from the polls, but all those things have happened in this country.

I make reference to one case in Philadelphia, where an entire block is burned down because people were trying to burn down the center, a Whig headquarters, which was the political party, the major American political party that proceeded the Republicans. That has happened in this country. As I mentioned in that piece, let's say, a lot of times the general public thinks of the past as just these kinds of static, isolated incidents that happened and we moved on from. Historians tend to look at the past as indicators of what could happen again under the right circumstances. We should not at all just take for granted the idea that we would not return to the days where we saw partisan electoral violence in the course of our election.

Brian: Chilling, but hopefully, preventative to know it. Armed with some knowledge of history, from my guest, Jelani Cobb, historian and journalism professor at the Columbia University, School of Journalism now and a New Yorker writer, with his always great stuff in the New Yorker, and now, the reporter on a documentary that premieres on PBS tomorrow on Frontline called Whose Vote Counts. Jelani, thanks for some time today.

Jelani: Thank you.

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