Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall Podcast.

Today we have a special episode of the podcast.

It's part of our 10-part series at TPM. For those of you who are just

listeners to the podcast, that is the news website. Yeah, that is our website.

That's what that's what we do.

Yeah, it's an exciting time of TPM. It's an ambitious project, something we haven't quite done,

maybe ever before, or at least not a while. Yeah, never at this scale.

So it is a 10-part series on voting rights and democracy that we

kicked off in July and is going to run through just after the election So we are taking the period of the election when obviously people

are focused on voting in elections as a key time to kind of dig into these issues because

they are extremely important to our contemporary

politics. Voting rights are under threat and siege today in a way that they have not been in decades.

Certainly the sort of the rollback that you see is something that we have not seen really since for more than a century,

although obviously the state of voting rights in say 1950 was dramatically

worse than it is today since a big chunk of the population, mainly in the South,

was not allowed to vote at all.

So what we're going to do during this series, and most of the series will be the articles that

we publish on the website.

We're also going to do a number of episodes of the podcast that either are interviews with people who have written the different articles or people who are just key figures,

experts, activists, and so forth in this broader topic of democracy and voting rights. So today we're going to talk to

Gregory Downs who's a professor of history at UC Davis and he has written a fascinating article on voting rights, basically voting rights

during the 19th century and we're going to get into all the details in a few minutes.

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