Welcome to Politics Weekly Extra, I'm Jonathan Frieden.

Now there were plenty of people last autumn who did not think Joe Biden could win.

Not because they didn't think he was popular, it was more they worried that the people who

did support him might not be able to register their vote, that voting had been made so difficult

and so hard in certain parts of the country and with particular groups, that a whole

lot of people who did like Joe Biden wouldn't be able to make sure their support counted.

They were talking about voter suppression, well in the end Joe Biden of course did win

and there was great relief that he did because it seemed as if voter suppression had not

worked and that relief redoubled in January when there were those two Senate run-off elections

in Georgia which went the Democrats way and gave control of the Senate to that party.

And so people perhaps were tempted, maybe they still are, to sit back and think okay,

the threat of voter suppression has receded.

Well since then all over the United States, Republican health states are proposing bills

that would make voting even harder, putting up obstacles, particularly it said aimed

at disenfranchising African American voters.

The Democrats are trying to fight back at the federal level with a bill or a couple

of bills they are piloting through Congress hoping to get a majority in the House and in

the Senate and making it law.

So this is a battle royal across America about whether voting should be harder or made easier

which is why I wanted to talk to Janay Nelson, she's the Associate Director Council of

the Legal Defense Fund of America's oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP.

And I began our conversation by asking Janay Nelson about some of the deep history of

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