It's great to welcome Tom Hartman back to the program today. Tom is of course, host
of the Tom Hartman program and author of [inaudible],
the new book, the hidden history of the war on voting, who stole your vote and how to
get it back. Uh, Tom, always great to have you on.
Thank you, David. It's always great to be on your show.
So let's start with, um, there have been efforts to suppress the vote for politically motivated
reasons. Really going all the way back to the beginning when the electoral college was
established as the system that would determine who the president is. I, I think many in our
audience know the last 10 or 15 years of voter suppression tactics. But what did it look
like more towards the beginning of the United States electing presidents?
Well, it was pretty sweeping. I mean, women were not allowed to vote at all. Uh, Abigail
Adams wrote a letter to John when he was at the constitutional convention, uh, saying,
don't forget the ladies. And he sent back a letter saying we will not surrender our
male prerogatives. And she said, then we will phone that a rebellion which didn't go anywhere.
And, and of course, people of color couldn't vote. And in several States, even white men
who were not property owners couldn't vote. Most of those laws, those were all state laws.
Most of those got blown up by, you know, by the Andrew Jackson presidency. It's a fascinating
story that probably longer you want to get into. But um, you know, in the beginning of
the Republican and you had conservatives like John Adams arguing that men who didn't own
property should not be allowed vote. Uh, he was out voted in the constitutional convention.
So there's not a property prohibition in the constitution, but you know, voter suppression
or rule by a, an elite white male majority, uh, has a long, long history in this country.
After the ratification of the 15th amendment, there were still mechanisms to prevent black
Americans from voting, although they may be unfamiliar to some in the audience. Can you
talk a little bit about how that worked?
Well, you know, the, this is post civil war post, you know, the amendment that said that
basically you may not prevent someone for voting based on their, on their previous condition
of servitude or their race. Um, we went into what's referred to as the Jim Crow era where
um, black people were forced to take literacy tests, you know, recite the, the, the entire
constitution or you know, name all 26 members of the South Carolina house of representatives
or whatever. And uh, and there, there were poll taxes. I mean, there were all kinds of
strategies that were used to disenfranchise the black vote by large and some of those
were also used to disenfranchise the poor white vote as well.
When we look today at the ways and strategies and tactics that are used to hold down turnout,
there's this conventional wisdom that's often cited that may or may not actually be that
wise about when the turnout is lower, it tends to favor a more conservative candidate. If
it's within a primary, it favors the more conservative candidate within the primary.
If it's an election between a Democrat and a Republican, it tends to favor the Democrat,
uh, the, the Republican rather over the Democrat. Is this true? And historically, did, uh, suppressing
the vote help the right more than the left or was it an equal opportunity thing? At different
points in history
throughout history, suppressing the vote has helped the right more than the left because
the right represents the elite interests. And the simple fact of the matter is if voting
requires you to leave work for a half a day and go someplace and do something and jump
through a bunch of hoops and particularly prove your identity and things like that,
um, then people who are wealthier, uh, who will tend to have salary jobs rather than
hourly jobs. Uh, people who live in, in areas where there's an abundance of access to, to
polling places, typically white suburbs, uh, find it very easy to vote. It's not all that
inconvenient. Um, whereas people who are hourly workers find it far more inconvenient, far
more expensive to vote, and so they tend not to, um, as much. Now, on the other hand, you
know, no easy solution to that is what we've done in Oregon and Washington state, which
is male and voting. And we've seen a substantial increase in voter participation as a consequence
of that.
Yeah. Oh, of the, of the sort of status quo legacy elements of the voting system that
exists today. So the electoral college of course is one of them, but also a vote voting
hours voting happening on a Tuesday. It not being a day that a lot of people have off,
uh, the limits on voting by mail and online voting, which some other countries have already
put in place. Is there one factor, uh, whose change would most greatly and franchise, uh,
some significant number of, or
people, uh, yeah, voter suppression. I mean, this, the voter suppression has become the
GoTo strategy of the Republican party. Uh, particularly since 2000. It's been completely
reinvented from the old caging of the 60s or the intimidation in the 60s when, uh, William
Rehnquist stood outside polling places in rural Arizona, native American, Hispanic polling
places and challenged voters and snarled at people, which is how he worked his way up
to being chief justice in the U S Supreme court. So he could, and George Bush the election
in 2000, um, the, it's gotten quite sophisticated and there's this huge thing called Redshift
where we see, uh, exit polls, which are the gold standard around the world. We overthrew
a government in Ukraine because there was a discrepancy between the exit polls and the
actual government Elekta produced election results. I lived in Germany for, for a year.
People in Germany vote on paper as they do in all the European countries, and it takes
two, three, four days to count the vote.
But they issue the results typically, uh, you know, unless the elections within a half
point tight, they issue the results the evening of, you know, right after the polls close
and they do it based on exit polls. Uh, the Carter center uses exit polls. The UN uses
exit polls to determine when elections are fair and honest and accurate. And in 2000,
the exit poll showed that clearly that Al Gore won Florida, not just one floor of it,
one floor by tens of thousands of votes. Um, but the actual vote count shifted toward the
red toward, toward the Republican party and gave the election to George W. Bush. Um, this,
uh, turns out was because Jeb Bush, George, his brother had acquired a felon list from
the state where George was the governor from George, basically from Texas. And compared
that felon list with the voter list in Florida. Now, the felon list in Texas was more than
half African American and Hispanic and African Americans and Hispanics, um, largely representing
a name pool that in the case of African Americans is, is Anglo names.
They're the, the, the people who own slaves in this country are principally Irish, English
and scotch, and, uh, Hispanics, all of their names that are derived from Spanish or the
vast majority of them. So when you compare a, uh, whereas on the other hand, Caucasians
have names that come from Scandinavian languages, Baltic languages, you know, Russian cheque,
uh, you know, Slovenian. There's, there's literally dozens and dozens and dozens. So
there's huge diversity of names. So if you take a Texas felon list and compare it with
a Florida list, what's going to happen is you're going to get a lot of overlap in names
between among African Americans and Hispanics. And Jeb Bush was successful in throwing anywhere
from 30 to 90,000 African Americans and a lot of Hispanics off the voting rolls in Florida
in that 2000 election in 2002. With the help of Tom, before we move on, just to be clear
for the audience understands, these are not people that were felons in Texas who went
and voted in Florida.
These were merely people sharing the name. That's correct. Although the assertion that
Katherine Harris made was that, you know, they were felons from Texas who had moved
to Florida in order to vote. Um, um, so, uh, in 2002 with the help America vote act, the,
uh, the Republicans wrote into that act, this thing called the provisional ballot. And,
uh, Greg palace calls these placebo ballots, which I think is a great name for them. Um,
if you show up to vote and you've been purged from the list like happened in Florida in
2000 with Jeb Bush, if you show up to vote, um, now since 2002, and you're not on the
voting rolls, they say, well, I don't see how the voting rolls here, but here's a ballot
anyway. It's a provisional ballot. But you can vote on this and you vote and you think
you voted. And so, well, you know, you turn that in not knowing that provisional ballots
are only counted in the case of an election being contested in court.
That's it. That's the only time. So your vote will not be counted. And even when it's contested
in court, if in the three to five day window after the election, you didn't go to the secretary
of state's office and prove who you were and show your birth certificate. And ID and, and,
and, uh, proof of identity and residency and proof that you were registered to vote. If
you don't do that, your votes still won't be counted. And most people have no idea that
provisional ballots are never counted. So they walk out of the voting place and they
say to the exit pollster, well, I voted for Hillary Clinton this time and the pollster
writes that down. And this is why, um, by almost 5% margin, the exit polls in Florida,
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and uh, Oh, there was at least one other state, um, show that
Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump.
And yet the official tallies showed that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton this red shift,
which, which happened in about, as I recall, 15 or 16 States, but it was huge in those
States. This Redshift was purely originally back in the early two thousands. You know,
I used to talk about this, that we all thought it was rig voting machines, but it's not happening
in blue States. It's only happening in States controlled by Republican secretaries of state.
And it's becoming quite obvious now that what we're looking at as the result of these massive
voter purges. Um, where, you know, again, the exit polls showed Stacy April's one Georgia
substantially and yet Brian campus, the governor. Why? Because he was also the secretary of
state and he threw hundreds of thousands over a million over the previous four or five years,
um, voters in Georgia, mostly people of color off the rolls.
And now, just in the last week, Greg palace just finished this lawsuit. Um, Brian camp
in Georgia provided his Georgia voter list to the governor of Michigan back in the day.
You know, when it was Rick Snyder, this is a couple of years ago, and Rick's and, but
the Michigan secretary, is it Michigan is still aggressively purging these, these people
from the voting rolls. I mean, it's just, it's insane. It's there. They're saying, Oh
yeah, well they live in Georgia, but they come up to Michigan to vote and it's double
voting. And so we've got to get them off the rolls. And we see this in red state after
red state after red state. And it is the reason, the only reason, in my opinion, why Republicans
control the Senate, why they control the white house, uh, why they have control the white
house. Since 2002, uh, in, in every election, the exit poll showed that John Kerry in Ohio
wiped out George W. Bush.
Um, just like they showed that in 2000, you know, Al Gore won Florida. The exit polls
showed Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump. Um, this and it's the only reason that they
control the Senate. We see this in multiple States, the red States in particular. So this,
this is the big, you know, this is the elephant in the room. This is the thing that we need
to deal with and we need to be waking people up in educating them to this. And so to the
point where, you know, probably 95% of Americans don't know what a, what a provisional ballot
means to the point where if somebody hands you a provisional ballot, you freak out to
the point that you grab a Bullhorn and start yelling. You know, that you call the newspapers.
I mean we need to start a counter-revolution to this, uh, very, very sneaky slick thing
that these Republicans have been doing since 2000.
So this is kind of a good entry point to the last thing I wanted to touch on in the limited
time we have left, which is, uh, whether Wisconsin goes to Hillary or Trump becomes at least
under 20 sixteens numbers irrelevant if we have a national popular vote rather than the
electoral college. So my question is, how important do you see that, uh, activism about
trying to get a national popular vote? Is it, is it a few tile effort? Because we know
that outside of something like the national popular vote interstate compact, that actually
changing the way that elections work at the constitutional level would be very difficult,
particularly when the Republican party has won several presidential elections because
we go by the electoral college rather than the popular vote. Is that where our activism
should be or is it not a good use of activism capital, so to speak?
Um, in addition to fighting provisional ballots or even eliminating the whole concept and
which is simply at law, it's part of our health and our help America vote act of 2002 and
this gets fixed by the way, by HR one to a large extent. Um, but outside of that, yes.
Uh, and national popular vote.com is where you can find all the information on this compact.
And so far you've got States representing 170 electoral votes who have signed on to
this. Um, it takes two, what are the two 82 92 70. Thank you. 272 when the, when the presidency.
And so when you get enough States to equal 270 electoral votes, then basically you've
wiped out the electoral college. And that's a whole lot easier than doing it through the
process of a constitutional amendment. There've been 29,000 attempts to move to amend the
constitution since the founding of our public and only 27 of them succeeded.
But, uh, you know, Virginia now is back in democratic hands and it looks like they're
going to, they're going to join this thing. Um, you know, we still have, you know, 110
electoral votes to get, and we've already got the big States like California in New
York. Our Republicans are fighting this like crazy. In fact, they're proposing legislation,
a center right now to say that your electors have to vote. The whole idea of faithless
electors gets blown out of the water. The electors have to vote, which is their way
of, of legislatively eliminating the possibility of the national interstate com compact to
do this. Yeah,
totally trying to a kneecap. The, the entire effort. The book is the hidden history of
the war on voting. Who stole your vote and how to get it [inaudible]
back. We've been speaking with the books author and also a host of the Tom Hartman program.
Tom Hartman. Tom, really appreciate your time today. Thanks David. It's great being with
t