Ari Berman is the author of
Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle For Voting Rights In America. From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:
GROSS: Ari Berman, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Before we talk state by state and get into specifics, is it a coincidence that there are voters being purged or asked for IDs that many citizens don't have in several states?
ARI BERMAN: It's not a coincidence. And let me just give you the big picture of what's happening with voting rights right now. So since the 2010 election, 24 states have implemented new restrictions on voting. So nearly half the states in the country have tightened their voting laws to do things like require strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot or make it more difficult to register to vote or to cut back on early voting periods or to close polling places or to purge the voting rolls. And many of these restrictions on voting are playing out now in the 2018 elections in critical states like Georgia, North Dakota, Kansas, et cetera, where there are very close elections.
GROSS: So is it a coincidence that all this is happening?
BERMAN: It's not a coincidence. This has really been a major strategy within the Republican Party. After the 2008 election, when Republicans gained control of a number of really important states in 2010, they began to introduce a wave of new restrictions to tighten access to the ballot. Then those efforts were basically given a green light by the Supreme Court when it removed a critical part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 in the Shelby County v. Holder decision and said that those states with the longest histories of discrimination no longer had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That allowed states in the South that previously had to prove their voting changes with the federal government - places like Texas and Georgia and North Carolina and Alabama - to implement these new restrictions on voting. So I think you're seeing a national effort by the Republican Party to try to restrict voting rights, and it's...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
Ari Berman is the author of Give Us The Ballot: The Modern Struggle For Voting Rights In America. From the transcript of his Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross: