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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's time to predict the hot trends for 2022 and from the looks of it, this year is about to be a hot mess. According to Forbes, 2022 fashion will be marked by patchwork denim, tube tops, and visible bras.
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Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, if you think that sounds horrifying, just take a look at the hot new trend in state legislative action. Voter suppression. Oh, yes. Blocking the ballot is back in a big way and this year, voting restrictions have been newly reimagined with even more boldness, as legislators have introduced new bills, allowing partisan actors to entirely invalidate election results. What's hot? Purges, ID requirements, and partisan challenges at the polls. What's not? Early voting days, mail-in ballots, and robust participation by diverse citizens. With me now is Ari Berman, a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering voting rights. He's also the author of Give Us The Ballot. Welcome back to the takeaway, Ari.
Ari Berman: Hey Melissa, happy new year. Thanks for having me back.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Is it a happy new year? What in the world?
Ari Berman: Happy doesn't seem like the right word right now between the virus spiking and democracy at risk. I don't know if happy new year's the right thing, but I think it's going to be an eventful new year in any case.
Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. I was being a little silly there, but also not. This idea of the sheer number of bills, just the wave of legislative action emerging and of course, this is something you and I have been talking about for years now. It is not brand new, but it does seem to be remixed going into 2022, this voter suppression effort. What is new in these bills that are waiting for us?
Ari Berman: That's right. It's not new, this attack on voting rights, but it's a dramatic intensification of an existing trend. I think the best way to think about it is we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection and since the insurrection, the Republican party has had a single minded focus on trying to achieve the goals of the insurrection through other means. They were unable to overturn the last election so they're doing everything they can to rig the next election and if that doesn't work to try to overturn it after the fact in a way they couldn't do in 2020.
I think what's new is first off, just the scope of the measures restricting voting access. It's not like there's one thing that states like Georgia or Texas or Florida are doing. They're attacking voting rights in a lot of different ways. These bills have 15, 16, 18, 20 different ways in which they undermine voting access, which is a lot, and then what's particularly new is the fact that they're actually looking at overturning elections, actually prohibiting election officials from doing their jobs, potentially laying the groundwork to throw out votes if their preferred candidate doesn't win.
That's a direct response to what Donald Trump tried to do on January 6th and it's now written the laws in states like Georgia that they have this authority to potentially take over local election operations to potentially throughout votes in a way that really wasn't on the table in 2020.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to dig into that for a second because that is something-- it feels different, like not just along a continuum, but a different class of interference than say voter ID restrictions, which we know from the research shows us that it has this big impact on particular communities and individuals, but we are talking about people actually making it to the polls, going through all of that, finding their voter IDs, actually casting the ballot, but then having it invalidated by someone who is partisan?
Ari Berman: If all of the voter suppression efforts don't work, the ultimate voter suppression is to just say, if the votes aren't cast for our guys, we're going to throw them out. Now that's not to say that that's actually going to happen, but in some places like Georgia, they've laid the groundwork for that possibility. For example, in Georgia, the state board of election, where the secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Donald Trump in 2020, is no longer chair and voting member of the state election board. That election board can take over up to four counties in Georgia where they view them as underperforming.
They've already started a performance review in Fulton County, Georgia, and Atlanta, the most democratic county in the state. At the same time, in at least nine counties in Georgia, local boards of election the ones that certify election results, the one that count election results. They have essentially disbanded bipartisan election boards and replaced them with all Republican election boards and in some places, black women have been purged from these boards and replaced by white Republicans who are spouting Donald Trump's stolen election claims.
Alot of really scary stuff is happening at the local level that hasn't really gotten a lot of attention, but when it comes time to votes actually being counted, there's a real question about whether these partisan election officials are going to follow the will of the voters.
Melissa Harris-Perry: When you start talking about Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, it's hard not to come to John Lewis, the late and extraordinary John Lewis, and there is a John Lewis Voting Rights Act sitting still stalled in the US Congress. Is there any possibility of that moving?
Ari Berman: I think Senate Democrats are going to finally make this a major priority and the President of the United States is finally going to make this a major priority in 2022. I think the story of 2021 was a story of asymmetric warfare, where Republicans in the states were passing all of these new restrictions on voting and elections and version laws on civil majority party-line votes but Democrats couldn't protect voting rights on simple majority party-line votes because of the filibuster and so now Senate Democrats say they're going to try to change the filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation.
We'll see if that actually happens, but they are going to make an effort to do this but I think it's very important to note, we are running out of time. We are now in 2022, so it's no longer an abstract concept. The election is around the corner. It takes time to change voting laws. It takes time to change redistricting maps and so Democrats have a very, very narrow window to act. It would've been a lot easier to act in 2021. Now, if they act in 2022, they have very little time to do so to protect voters and to protect voting access before war voters actually cast ballots for the midterm elections.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. He's also author of Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Thanks so much, Ari.
Ari Berman: Thanks so much, Melissa. Always great to talk to you.
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