Voter Suppression in the Twenty-First Century

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2018

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the November midterm elections, Stacey Abrams, a gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, arrived at her polling place to cast a vote for herself, only to have a poll worker claim that she had already filed for an absentee ballot. Carol Anderson’s book “One Person, No Vote” explores how measures designed to purge voters rolls or limit voting have targeted Democratic and particularly minority voters. Anderson sees voter-identification laws and a wide range of bureaucratic snafus as successors to the more blatantly racist measures that existed before the Voting Rights Act; she describes the resurgence of voter suppression as an expression of white rage. “It is not what we think of in terms of Charlottesville and the tiki torches,” she tells David Remnick. “It's the kind of methodical, systematic, bureaucratic power that undermines African-Americans’ advances." White Americans, she says, see themselves as trapped in a kind of “zero sum” situation, in which all advances for people of color must come at whites’ expense. Plus, the staff writer Jon Lee Anderson journeys up the Madre de Dios River in the Peruvian Amazon to observe as the Mashco Piro—one of the few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes—begin a fraught, possibly fatal engagement with the outside world.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
0:10.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Maybe at no time since the heyday of the civil rights movement has voting rights been so much in the news.
0:20.2	For some years now, and especially since the Supreme Court struck down elements of has voting rights been so much in the news? For some years now, and especially since
0:22.2	the Supreme Court struck down elements of the Voting Rights Act back in 2013, many states have made
0:28.0	voting harder and less accessible. The measures they adopt are usually presented as ways to prevent
0:33.6	voter fraud, but largely, if not entirely, these measures have been targeted
0:38.3	at Democrats, and in particular, black voters who mostly lean Democratic.
0:43.4	A deep analysis of voter suppression was published recently, and it was entitled, One Person, No,
0:49.2	Vote. The author is Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University, and in her view, race and racism remain at the dead center of the problems around voting. Dr. Anderson, thanks for joining us.
1:02.0	Yes, hi.
1:03.0	Now, you're talking to me now from Atlanta, and when we heard that Stacey Abrams, who was running for governor of Georgia, herself was almost
1:12.1	blocked from voting this November. We heard that it was only when a poll worker told her that
1:18.4	she'd already voted absentee. And in the end, the only way she was able to cast her vote in her
1:23.1	telling was that she understood voting laws and she was able to advocate for herself and probably the
1:29.5	TV cameras trailing behind her didn't hurt her case either. But that should give us some sense
1:35.1	of how complicated things were in Georgia, no?
1:38.3	Oh, absolutely. And deliberately complicated. So in the areas around Atlanta and in Atlanta, there was a four-and-a-half-hour wait time
1:51.1	because they didn't have the power cords for the voting machines.
1:56.1	In the Atlanta University Center, which is where you have Moorehouse and Spelman and Clark Atlanta,
2:03.3	there were two working machines where there were supposed to be nine working machines.
2:08.8	These are predominantly black areas.
2:10.6	Yes.
	...

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