Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central. My guest to right is
Speaker 1: the chair of African American Studies at Emory University and
Speaker 1: a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is
Speaker 1: called One Person, No Vote, How vote suppression is destroying
Speaker 1: Our democracy. Please welcome Carol Anderson. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thanks doll Marts. Thank you. It's so wonderful having you here. Um.
Speaker 1: You wrote a book called White Rage, which was a
Speaker 1: New York Times bestseller, where you spoke in depth about
Speaker 1: how America is dealing with an issue that it really
Speaker 1: hasn't dealgued completely, which is the rage that many white
Speaker 1: people feel that what appears to be America changing. This
Speaker 1: book is is, I guess, based in some way off
Speaker 1: of that, and yet it's a completely different topic. One
Speaker 1: per some no votes, voter suppression destroying our democracy? How
Speaker 1: bad and how big do you believe voter suppression actually is?
Speaker 1: I think it is massive. Um. We have had millions
Speaker 1: of people blocked from voting. We have had millions purge
Speaker 1: from the roles who had been on the voter rolls.
Speaker 1: The purging and the voter suppression has been so intense
Speaker 1: that we have Donald Trump in the White House right now,
Speaker 1: that's the power of voter suppression. The the numbers in
Speaker 1: in the election, especially in and around the black vote,
Speaker 1: were really interesting. You saw in key states and swing
Speaker 1: states where voter turnout dropped from may have been like
Speaker 1: seventy eight thousand people turning out and dropped to below
Speaker 1: fifty thou or you know, you saw, you saw drastic drops. Now,
Speaker 1: some people have argued that that was because Hillary Clinton
Speaker 1: didn't motivate black voters to come out. But you've looked
Speaker 1: at the data, You've analyzed a lot of the information,
Speaker 1: and it's seems like there's been a systematic effort to
Speaker 1: remove people of color from the voting world. But why
Speaker 1: why people of color though, and I believe why people
Speaker 1: of color Besides being just snide and saying it's been
Speaker 1: that way for a long time, it's because that after
Speaker 1: the two thousand and eight election with Barack Obama, Barack
Speaker 1: Obama brought fifteen million new voters to the polls with
Speaker 1: that incredible ground game. They were overwhelmingly black, Latino, young, poor,
Speaker 1: and and with that then the Republican Party that has
Speaker 1: moved further and further to the right and has become
Speaker 1: more and more White Um and and their policies have
Speaker 1: become more right wing. They don't have policies that resonate
Speaker 1: with the growing diversity of America. And so instead of
Speaker 1: thinking about how do we reform this party so that
Speaker 1: it resonates with America, that our policies are really strong
Speaker 1: and talk about benefiting more Americans, instead, what they decided
Speaker 1: to do was to suppress the vote. There was there's
Speaker 1: some really scary parts of the book where I read
Speaker 1: about things I never knew before. I knew about the
Speaker 1: larger picture of voter suppressions in certain states, in certain places,
Speaker 1: but you read about how so many people have been
Speaker 1: stripped of their rights. Now, the argument the other way
Speaker 1: from people like Chris Koback, you know, from Donald Trump
Speaker 1: and his team has been we're protecting democracy. That's why
Speaker 1: we scrub people of votes roles. If they've died, if
Speaker 1: they no longer respond to mail, then why are we
Speaker 1: keeping on keeping them on the votes roles? How do
Speaker 1: you respond to that? And I respond to that because
Speaker 1: one of the ways that this works and the guy
Speaker 1: is so effective, is that they're able to use that
Speaker 1: cover of being reasonable. You know, we're just keeping the
Speaker 1: voter rolls up. But when you really look at what
Speaker 1: they're doing is that those the people that they're scrubbing.
Speaker 1: They're not scrubbing people who have moved or who have died. Overwhelmingly,
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly who they're scrubbing are people who are African Americans,
Speaker 1: people who are young, people who are poor. And they're
Speaker 1: doing it by the character uristics. Um. So they can't say, oh,
Speaker 1: we don't want black people to vote, because there's still
Speaker 1: this thing called the fifteenth Amendment. Although the Voting Rights
Speaker 1: Act got gutted by the Supreme Court, there's still this
Speaker 1: thing called the fifteenth Amendment. So what they do is
Speaker 1: they go after the characteristics of a people, societally imposed characteristics.
Speaker 1: They go after those things like, um, if you move
Speaker 1: a lot, and we know that people move a lot,
Speaker 1: particularly if you're poor, you don't stay in the same house, right,
Speaker 1: that moving then becomes a reason to to knock people
Speaker 1: off the rolls, they say. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that we also know characteristics is that, um, young people, minorities,
Speaker 1: they don't and students, they don't vote regularly. So they
Speaker 1: start knocking people off the rolls for not voting regularly.
Speaker 1: And so they use those characteristics, and those are the
Speaker 1: characteristics of people who don't overwhelmingly vote for Republicans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you when you look at the numbers and you
Speaker 1: look at how impactful this could actually be, the argument
Speaker 1: is always met with, yes, but look at how much
Speaker 1: votes of fraud there is. Now. We talked briefly about this,
Speaker 1: but overwhelmingly most Americans believe that voter fraud is a
Speaker 1: very definite threat. Absolutely, and that has been a well
Speaker 1: cultivated myth. Um it has born. It was borne up
Speaker 1: out of the two thousand election, that horrible election with
Speaker 1: hanging chads, and that myth of massive rampant voter fraud
Speaker 1: coming out of the city's uh stealing our elections. Except
Speaker 1: when they really went hunting for it, they couldn't find it.
Speaker 1: Um Justin Levitt, a law professor out of California, he
Speaker 1: looked and he went from two thousand and two thousand
Speaker 1: and fourteen out of one billion votes, he was able
Speaker 1: to identify thirty one cases, thirty one out of one
Speaker 1: billion votes of voter impersonation fraud. When Chris Kolbach, the
Speaker 1: Secretary of State that you mentioned who helped um head
Speaker 1: up Trump's election and integrity Commission um in their report,
Speaker 1: which was all about when Trump said five million voters
Speaker 1: have come in and I would have won the popular vote.
Speaker 1: By the way, thank you, thank you. It's not as
Speaker 1: good as yours, you know, when he said, you know,
Speaker 1: he's got five million. Then they went hunting and they
Speaker 1: couldn't find it. I mean, the pages are blank when
Speaker 1: it says voter fraud. His commission is looking blank pages,
Speaker 1: it's not there. When Greg Abbott out of Texas is
Speaker 1: arguing for voter I D and Judge Ramos is saying, okay,
Speaker 1: you've got rampant voter fraud. Where where? And he's like,
Speaker 1: it's rampant. She's like, where how many? Is a lot rampant?
Speaker 1: How many too? And I like, is that rampant? The
Speaker 1: The argument I've seen a lot of people parrots with
Speaker 1: with a lot of confidence is it's not suppression. What
Speaker 1: we're doing is making sure that the integral t of
Speaker 1: our election is maintained. And so they say, we're not
Speaker 1: purging people or we're not restricting them from voting. We're
Speaker 1: just saying that everyone needs a vote to I D. Now,
Speaker 1: I understand it. But if you were explaining to someone
Speaker 1: who is genuinely well intentioned, someone says, I don't understand
Speaker 1: why is it so so hard or why is it
Speaker 1: so difficult for for the government to say, Well, why
Speaker 1: is it so bad for the government to say everyone
Speaker 1: should have a vote to I D that is issued
Speaker 1: by the government or at the d m V. Why
Speaker 1: why is that so much to ask? Okay, and so
Speaker 1: let me just give you a couple of examples about
Speaker 1: how that really works. Because part of again the way
Speaker 1: that it sounds so reasonable because you need an I D.
Speaker 1: You know what Trump said, you need an ID to
Speaker 1: go buy groceries. But as we all know, it doesn't
Speaker 1: quite work that way. So, for instance, in Alabama, Alabama
Speaker 1: said you've got to have a government issued photo I
Speaker 1: D and then said, but your public housing I D
Speaker 1: does not count. Now, Alabama's a poor state, They've got
Speaker 1: lots of public housing. Of those on public housing in
Speaker 1: public housing in Alabama are African American. For many, that's
Speaker 1: the only idea they have. So you automatically wiped away
Speaker 1: that type of government issued photo I D because public
Speaker 1: housing is government issued. Then Alabama shut down the Department
Speaker 1: of Motor Vehicles in the Black Belt counties, and so
Speaker 1: now people are going to have to go fifty miles
Speaker 1: to get a driver's license. But if you don't drive,
Speaker 1: how are you going to go fifty miles and you
Speaker 1: don't have public transportation. So what you do is you
Speaker 1: create an obstacle, and then you create an obstacle to
Speaker 1: the obstacle, and you make it so difficult for people
Speaker 1: who are already working their hardest to make it to
Speaker 1: now be able to just access their basic right to vote.
Speaker 1: We see this in state after state, North Carolina, the
Speaker 1: fourth circuits that you have targeted Frican Americans with nearly
Speaker 1: surgical precision. So these states, they make it sound innocuous, Oh,
Speaker 1: you need an I D. But it's not in the
Speaker 1: I D. In Indiana, you need to have a driver's
Speaker 1: license to get a birth certificate, but to get a
Speaker 1: birth certificate you need a driver's license. That's brilliant, it's
Speaker 1: genuinely really Let's look to the future. Yes, we have
Speaker 1: elections coming up. You have midterms happening in America. You
Speaker 1: also have the presidential election which will be on its
Speaker 1: way shortly after that. Is there anything people on the
Speaker 1: ground can do, what can people do to protect their votes? Yes? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: so there are several things. UM. One is you have
Speaker 1: to register to vote, and there are organizations that are
Speaker 1: on the ground helping people like get the identification, get
Speaker 1: the documents they need in order to get the identification.
Speaker 1: Organizations like vote writers that are that are doing that work. UM. Also,
Speaker 1: when you're registered, check your UM the Secretaries of States
Speaker 1: voter registration page to make sure you're registered to vote,
Speaker 1: because they are notorious for purging people off the list
Speaker 1: even well closely close to an election. So you think
Speaker 1: that you're registered to vote, you go in to vote
Speaker 1: and boom, your name is nowhere there, and then you're
Speaker 1: getting the run around. So that checking regularly. I check
Speaker 1: every week and then I print off a copy so
Speaker 1: that I've got documentation that I am actually registered to
Speaker 1: vote and that this is my polling place. I say,
Speaker 1: I think the other thing is really important is to
Speaker 1: help others so that you're volunteering, you're you know, you've
Speaker 1: got election poll workers, and you're you're paying attention to
Speaker 1: what's happening at the polls when somebody is getting the
Speaker 1: run around. I think that that is really important as well.
Speaker 1: In their organizations like the Lawyer's Committee that's that's doing
Speaker 1: that incredible work. So that's what we can do and register.
Speaker 1: The deadline is coming up in early October. Register to
Speaker 1: vote because we cannot be part of the solution if
Speaker 1: we're just sitting there on and not participating. With Doctor
Speaker 1: v Show, One Question, No Vote is available now. Scary
Speaker 1: and fascinating Carolinas and everybody The Daily Show with Governora
Speaker 1: Ear's edition. Watching The Daily Show weeknights at eleven ten
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