🔸 Anne Applebaum: Stacey Abrams is one of the leading experts on the topic of voter registration and voter suppression.
Her work has helped me understand that voter suppression isn’t a single thing or a law,
but rather a thousand little cuts and changes,
maybe designed to discourage just a few voters
but which can make a big difference when elections are as close as ours.
She’s the founder of "Fair Fight",
the voting-rights organization,
and she twice ran for governor of Georgia.
She’s also the lead organizer of a campaign to fight authoritarianism called the
"10 Steps Campaign".
Stacey, what do you make of Dawn’s story?
🔸Stacey Abrams: There are three components to voter suppression:
Can you register and stay on the rolls?
Can you cast a ballot?
And does that ballot get counted?
And what she is describing is that third barrier.
What we have seen happen over the last decade and a half, since the erosion of the Voting Rights Act,
is this wholesa
... Show more...🔸 Anne Applebaum: Stacey Abrams is one of the leading experts on the topic of voter registration and voter suppression.
Her work has helped me understand that voter suppression isn’t a single thing or a law,
but rather a thousand little cuts and changes,
maybe designed to discourage just a few voters
but which can make a big difference when elections are as close as ours.
She’s the founder of "Fair Fight",
the voting-rights organization,
and she twice ran for governor of Georgia.
She’s also the lead organizer of a campaign to fight authoritarianism called the
"10 Steps Campaign".
Stacey, what do you make of Dawn’s story?
🔸Stacey Abrams: There are three components to voter suppression:
Can you register and stay on the rolls?
Can you cast a ballot?
And does that ballot get counted?
And what she is describing is that third barrier.
What we have seen happen over the last decade and a half, since the erosion of the Voting Rights Act,
is this wholesale attack on all three of those points of entry to democracy.
Can you register and stay on the rolls?
Can you cast a ballot?
She covered both of those hurdles, but she got tripped up by:
Does your ballot count?
And in Georgia, in Texas, across this country, in Florida, North Carolina,
we are watching this dramatic acceleration of voter suppression
and, sadly, it is going to be the most effective tool used by authoritarians to thwart the will of the people in the next few years.
🔸Applebaum: Okay. Let’s start with #gerrymandering,
the redrawing of voter-district boundaries.
It’s a topic that is not remotely new in America.
The word itself comes from Eldridge Gerry, who, while governor of Massachusetts in 1812,
designed a voting district that supposedly looked like a salamander,
hence gerrymander.
So it’s very old practice, but this year, I think for the first time,
we have an American president who has asked state governors to create new voter districts
and even put quite heavy pressure on some of them in order to give his party an advantage in the midterm.
This is now a national project,
as opposed to something that happens locally,
and it’s also out of season and out of order,
because usually voter boundary changes are made after a census.
Now Governor [Greg] Abbott of Texas has already agreed to change boundaries in Texas,
even without a census.
Am I right that this is new?
That the federal government’s involvement in this is different and maybe more dangerous?
🔸Abrams: There have been maps that have been redrawn in between census years, in between redistricting,
but those had been exclusively court-ordered.
When lines were drawn that did not conform,
the court would take some time to look at these maps.
Georgia, almost every single cycle after the Voting Rights Act,
had to have its maps adjudicated by a court,
and that was true for a lot of southern states.
And so it is not the case that there had never been redrawn districts.
It had usually been that those districts were redrawn because the court said,
You didn’t do it right the first time.
But what we are seeing now, and what you’ve just described,
is unprecedented.
We have never had a president of the United States explicitly state that the line should be redrawn,
not based on population,
but based on voter outcome.
And when you do that, when you decide that the districts are not designed to allow voters to elect their leaders,
it is designed to allow leaders to elect their voters
—that is a shift of power,
and it is exactly what redistricting is designed to preclude.
