- I think it's disingenuous not to recognize
that we are at a demographic inflection point.
We have reached the place where the communities
that have long been the victims of oppression
are now reaching a majority status.
And the tyranny of the minority that says
we're going to remain who we were,
because we don't like what we might become.
- It's an inconvenience that should not be
because of voter suppression.
You know, they want us to give up,
they want us not to vote.
If we got to stand in line for six hours, 11 hours,
we are going to vote.
And so nothing's going to stop us.
- The wave of voter suppression that we're witnessing now,
which is a reaction from groups that have wielded
political and social power
to the arrival and growing strength of newcomers.
And I think that's, you know,
there are people who are trying to hold back
the tides of history.
- What we're finding is that states that have failed
to respond to the pandemic and failed to address
the barriers that voters face,
you know,
these are the places where we're seeing
some of the most significant problems.
But in addition to those organizations that are fighting
to ensure access, we actually have, on the other side,
those who waved the flag of voter suppression.
- I try to distinguish voter suppression
from disenfranchisement.
Disenfranchisement is the legal prevention
of categories of persons from voting.
Women were disenfranchised,
African Americans were disenfranchised, of course.
Voter suppression is placing obstacles in the path of people
who are legally entitled to vote.
In a certain sense,
voter suppression is what you do when you'd like to
disenfranchise somebody, but legally and politically,
you can't quite do it.
Period from 1870 to World War One
is, I think, still the largest period, proportion-wise,
of immigration in our history.
That's when you start seeing all sorts of laws being passed
to make it harder for people to vote.
You start seeing stricter residency requirements
in the late 19th century,
literacy tests, requirements that you produce
your naturalization papers, poll taxes,
very complicated ballot arrangements.
You had to demonstrate that you could read and understand
a paragraph of the state's constitution.
- Ohio put in place a rule that restricted the number of
drop boxes to one per county.
We've seen suits in places like Virginia,
where operatives tried to deny access to absentee ballots
before the primary.
And then you've got states like Tennessee,
where it is literally a crime to distribute
absentee ballot applications.
It's a Class A misdemeanor.
- The notion of democracy is that the people will direct
their representatives to take action on their behalf.
But when the people fall silent,
when they don't participate in the process
what tends to happen is that those political leaders
decide that they will insert their own values
as opposed to reflecting the values
and the ideals of the people.
- It's people and institutions, and political parties
that are threatened that tend to respond by engaging
in voter suppression.
There's a remarkable parallel, I think,
between what happened in the early 20th century
and what has happened at the end of the 20th century
and the beginning of the 21st.
It is not a coincidence.
Our current period is one that follows in the wake
of the achievement by African Americans
of a substantial amount of political power.
The one clear commonality is that, to my knowledge,
nobody has ever tried to disenfranchise
or suppress
upper middle class white men.
We have been immune to that.
- I'm a Black woman from the Deep South.
I am steeped in the legacy of voter suppression,
but I'm also a part of a rising majority
that has the ability to break those systems of oppression
and say that we can all come in.
- These laws are generally designed
so that if you are a middle class person
with middle class amenities,
like a driver's license or a bank account,
these are not particular problems for you.
But if you are relatively poor, if you're young,
if you're elderly, these can keep you from exercising
what is formally a right
but basically is not treated as a right.
It's treated as a privilege.
The U.S. Constitution, as written, says nothing
about the right to vote.
The 15th Amendment does not say
Black people can vote.
And the 19th Amendment does not say women can vote.
It says you can't deny someone the right to vote
based on gender or race.
Suffrage was left to the states and the administration
of elections was left to the states.
- I think that the pandemic, in many ways, has exposed
how fractured our system is just, you know,
50 states, all different rules,
and at a moment when we really could have used
some national guidance and oversight, there hasn't been any.
- I think about democracy as the opportunity to have
direct engagement in the values and the policies
that govern and guide communities.
- I don't know of any country of any say, you know,
Western European country, you know, any developed country,
which has had such pervasive patterns
of voter suppression.
You know, democracy isn't very pretty every place else,
and there are mishaps, and there's corruption,
but nobody quite has
the problems that we've been having.