What's good, family? You were listening to a special bonus episode of Code Switch.

This week, we've been talking about voting because there are some big elections coming up all around the country next month with some really important ballot initiatives.

And you probably heard a lot of chatter about how we vote from new voter maps to mail in ballots to a Supreme Court case that could effectively shred what's left of the Voting Rights Act.

And if you're behind on any of that, you can just highlight our episode from earlier this week.

But today we're talking to a guest who has been trying to sound the alarm and beating the drum to mix metaphors on the dangers of this push to weaken the vote or take it away from folks altogether.

Because she says it's one of the most consistent moves in the modern authoritarian's playbook.

My name is Stacey Abrams, and I serve as the founder of American Pride Rises Network and the Ten Steps Campaign.

The Ten Steps Campaign is really about naming the patterns of autocracy and making

sure that we can recognize it, because if we can recognize it, we can fight it. But if we presume

its inevitability, that's when we lose. Stacey Abrams is a lawyer. She's one of the most high-profile

voting rights activists in the United States, and she made a little bit of history. Back in 2018, she was the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, which made her

the first black woman nominee of one of the two major parties for state governorship. We wanted to get

Stacey on the horn to walk us through why she thinks we need to be paying more attention to this

erosion of voting rights because she says

whether we have an actual functioning democracy in the future might literally depend on

shoring up voting rights in the next election cycle or two. Here's our conversation with Stacey.

Jerry Manor has always been this sort of tool and a toolkit of politicians, you know, since

the beginning of the Republic, really.

Why is this happening so much more aggressively now?

In elections, race is the strongest predictor of political leanings, more than gender,

more than geography, race is the strongest predictor. And therefore, we have in this country since 1965 been very intentional

about saying that politicians cannot use your race against you. They cannot weaponize race as a

...