Voter Suppression in the Twenty-First Century
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2018
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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.
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| 0:48.9 | This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:54.1 | Maybe at no time since the heyday of the civil |
| 0:57.4 | rights movement has voting rights been so much in the news. For some years now, and especially |
| 1:02.8 | since the Supreme Court struck down elements of the Voting Rights Act back in 2013, many |
| 1:08.2 | states have made voting harder and less accessible. The measures they adopt are |
| 1:13.0 | usually presented as ways to prevent voter fraud, but largely, if not entirely. These |
| 1:18.3 | measures have been targeted at Democrats, and in particular, black voters who mostly lean Democratic. |
| 1:24.5 | A deep analysis of voter suppression was published recently, and it was entitled, One Person, No Vote. |
| 1:31.1 | The author is Carol Anderson, a professor at Emory University, and in her view, race and racism |
| 1:37.1 | remain at the dead center of the problems around voting. |
| 1:41.3 | Dr. Anderson, thanks for joining us. |
| 1:43.3 | Yes, hi. |
| 1:46.1 | Now, you're talking to me now from Atlanta, and when we heard that Stacey Abrams, who was running for governor of Georgia, |
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