This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For millions of people in this country,

the election of 2020 was stolen. That's a Trumpian article of faith. And faith is the right

term because there's no empirical evidence at all to support such a claim. And yet electoral fraud,

rigged votes are central to the Republican Party's message. No sooner had Joe Biden won the election

than Republican state legislatures

began introducing measures to make voting much more difficult. In Arizona, one proposed bill would

require absentee ballots to be notarized, and other bills would prohibit drop boxes for ballots

in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia,

and Missouri would remove COVID-19 as any reason to vote by mail, and the list, well, it goes on.

These measures, there's no doubt, are going to hit black voters and communities of color most directly,

and Stacey Abrams of Georgia, perhaps the

most visible voting rights activist in the country, calls this wave of state legislation Jim Crow in a

suit and tie. Now, Congress has introduced or reintroduced a bill called HR1, and the intent there

is to make voting as easy as possible.

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and he's been writing about voting rights

for many years.

Jolani, I think it's fair to say that there is an enormous national battle going on about

voting rights.

On the one hand, you have many states like Georgia that are

trying to enact what you and I might call anti-voting rights legislation. And in Congress, we have

H.R.1, which is a huge bill that would create national automatic voter registration. It would expand

...