Fresh Air - The Future Of Free And Fair Elections

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Before 2026's midterms, President Trump wants to ban mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines, and change voting rules. Legal expert Richard Hasen discusses the future of free and fair elections in America. "What's it going to mean to have to stand up to the government to make sure that people have their right to vote?" Hasen says. "I think it's very unlikely that the president would say the elections are canceled, but there's lots of things he could do with his power, with the military, with his power over federal government machinery that can make it very difficult for some people to vote."    Also, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Patrick Ryan's novel Buckeye. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. This is fresh air. I'm Tanya Mosley. The 26 midterms are a little over a year away, but questions about election integrity are already front and center. Just this week, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department is quietly working to build a national voter role. By collecting sensitive voter data from states,

a move experts warn could be used to revive false claims of widespread fraud and undermine confidence in future elections. And recently, President Trump has openly proposed using executive power to ban both mail-in ballots and electronic voting machines. My guest today, law scholar Richard Hassan, has warned in a recent op-ed then an order like that would not only be against the law, it would wield, as he writes,

the machinery of government to sow doubt, undermine trust, and tilt the election playing field. Those warnings echo a broader wave of concern. Earlier this week, Mother Jones also published a report on what it's calling Project 2026, a coordinated effort by Trump and his allies to rewrite voting rules, redraw congressional maps, and pressure state and federal officials who are responsible for overseeing elections. It all raises a profound question. Are our democratic institutions strong enough to withstand that kind of strain? Richard Hassan teaches law and political science at UCLA, where he directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project. He is also the author of numerous books on election law and democracy, including his most recent, a real right to vote, how a constitutional amendment can safeguard American democracy.

Our interview was recorded on Tuesday. Richard Hassan, welcome to fresh air. It's so great to be with you. I want to start with the latest news. The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department is requesting voter information, that social security numbers, drivers, license info, from more than 30 states in order to assess whether undocumented immigrants are voting illegally. As a legal scholar, what is your reaction to this news?

Well, I think we need to set the stage a little bit here and understand how, elections are run in the United States. So in most other democracies, there's a national nonpartisan authority that runs elections. They have a national role of voters. In most of those countries, there's a national identity card, which can be used to determine citizenship. In the United States, we have the opposite. We have a hyper-decentralized system. So it's not even just at the state level, although states do maintain statewide voter registration databases as a federal law that came after 2000 that requires that. But most of our elections are run on the county level. So you may have different machines, you may have different forms of the ballot, all different

kinds of rules for how to reconcile problems with the ballot. These may vary when you cross a county line. So starting with the premise that we have a very decentralized system, we don't have a national registry of citizens. We don't have a national registry of voters. If states refuse to hand over that data, what legal recourse do they have? Well, so because states are the ones that primarily are in control of their voting rules and voting machinery, it could end up in court where the Trump administration could try to compel the information and then it would have to be sorted out in the courts. you're seeing at least some Republican states cooperating with the Justice Department. We've already seen some disputes. For example, out here in Orange County, California, there's been a dispute about the local county registrar not turning over all the information.

He's redacted information to protect voter privacy that was demanded for some kind of investigation that DOJ wants to do. And that is already in court. So we might see battles in court fighting over this, but there are going to be some states, particularly Republican states, that are probably now going to be willing to turn this over, even though during the first Trump administration, there was a lot of resistance even from Republicans. And I should point out one of the main reasons why we don't have a national documentary proof of citizenship law today in this country, it already passed the House. Yes. We don't have it because Mitch McConnell in the Senate and some other Republican senators believe that we should have this decentralized system. They're worried that if Trump can create these national rules for elections while there's a Republican president, Democrats could do something else later. I want to talk a little bit more about many of the other things that are also happening in tandem with this latest news.

So beyond questions about data collection, there are also proposals that change. the very way that Americans will cast their vote. So President Trump just recently said that we should get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines. And he claims that they're not only inaccurate. He also says that they're expensive and more expensive than paper ballots. First, can a president actually do this? Does a president have the power to do this? And is there any truth behind those claims about accuracy and expense? Yeah. After he wrote this truth social post about mail and ballots and voting machines, he then had another post more recently where he said, we're going to have national voter ID. So here's the thing, a president's tweet or truth,

whatever they call it on truth social. That's not a royal edict. It's not as though Trump is a king who can say, you know, here is what it should be, so it shall be written, so it shall be done. That's true. But many of the things that he's written on those social media platforms, he's gone on to try to enact. Sure. And so he's already true. tried to do an executive order on voting. So he's tried to get a federal agency to do more to require documentary proof of citizenship. He's directed his Department of Justice to potentially sue states that do certain things with their mail-in ballots. And he's threatening and says there's going to be another executive order. Here's what the Constitution says. In Article 1, Section 4,

It says that states can set the manner for the conduct of congressional elections subject to Congress's override. The president has no role in any of this. The president's role is to faithfully execute the laws. That's what's in Article 2 of the Constitution, which speaks to the president's powers. Is there any truth, though, to his claims that these voting machines are inaccurate and that mail-in ballots are expensive? I mean, you mentioned those changes in 2000 with the addition of, the voting machines, those machines are very old. They're now 25 years old. Is there any legitimacy to his claims? Well, let's first talk about mail-in balloting. Is there fraud with mail-in ballots?

There's very little election fraud in the United States. And the way we know is that any even hint that there's a fraud problem is investigated. And it turns out, I would say, since the 1960s, especially since the 1980s, we've had very clean elections in the United States. Very few instances of fraud. When it does happen, it's often election officials who are committing fraud, not voters, so voter fraud's a bad name. But it is true that there are sometimes manipulation of mail-in ballots, but it's still quite rare. Usually happens in a small local election where people are not paying very much attention. We know that if you think to the 2020 election, That was the election during COVID.

That's when many millions of more people moved to mail and ballots because they didn't want to show up at the polling place because they didn't want to get sick, hard to get poll workers. So we did a lot of voting by mail. Trump claimed in hundreds of tweets that there was fraud in the elections. It was thoroughly investigated. There were over 60 lawsuits, no proof of any significant fraud anywhere in the country. and it was so investigated by journalists, by election officials, in court cases. And so there's a small problem with fraud in this country. But it's not significant enough.

To swing a presidential election would require a massive amount of fraud that would be very hard to hide and would be very – so if you intercepted hundreds of people's ballots, well, those people would complain. They would go to vote and they would say, sorry, you already voted because states have records. They can look because, oh, you already voted. You can't vote again. Well, I didn't vote. You know, this is how we find out when there are these rare instances of fraud. There are safeguards in place. Can we talk a little bit about the role of state leaders, governors, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and the role that they play in elections, you've noted that even well-meaning election officials, like secretaries of state, for instance, may tilt towards a party. I'm thinking about this in the larger scope of President Trump targeting Democratic states for instance. Can you say more about that? So not only do we have a decentralized system of elections where things are on the state and then the county level, we also don't have a nonpartisan system of

elections in much of this country. So we sometimes have election officials like the Secretary of State who might be elected as a Democrat or Republican. Sometimes we have county boards that determine the results, you know, certify here's what the vote count is. Sometimes those are partisan boards that are Democratic or Republican. For the most part, I think most people who are involved in elections in this country have an allegiance to make sure that this count is accurate, that we're going to have a free and fair election. But of course, if you're a Secretary of State and you're a Democrat or you're a Republican, you might, in a close case, be swayed even subconsciously by what would be a secretary.

in the interest of your party. I think it's really interesting that you were pushing several years ago for sort of a national system. But now you think that our system is probably the best for it to be decentralized. Can you just restate, like, what has changed your mind? So the reason that I no longer want a national, non-partisan system of election administration in the United States is because our democracy is so weak. and because the Supreme Court in particular has given the president so much power

by things like the rulings on the immunity that the president has, the unitary executive theory that seems to be giving the president the power to fire or interfere with independent agencies, that it's too much power in the hands of a person who might not have American democracy at heart. So so much of our system, so much of the restraint that we've seen from prior presidents, it turns out was not legally compelled, even though many of us thought that that's what the constitutional law is required, but that it was a matter of norms and Trump's willing to bust those norms. And even if Trump has gone, there may be another person who comes along

as president who's going to try to abuse this power again. And so long as our country has this vulnerability, decentralizing power can serve as a way to try to minimize the influence of an authoritarian-leaning president against an election system. So Mother Jones recently published this article by investigative journalist Ari Berman, and it raises this scenario that President Trump will use unrest as a pretext to declare martial law and even suspend the 26 midterms. From a constitutional and legal perspective, does a president actually have the power to delay or cancel an election? The president has no power to do anything related to elections, much less

cancel them, reschedule them. What the president can do is do things that could disrupt the election. So here's what I'm worried about, not necessarily declaring martial law. What if the president sends the National Guard into black cities, right? Milwaukee. Which we are already seeing. Right. But at the time of elections, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, claiming some national emergency. There was just a recent statement made by Clayton Mitchell, who's an ally of Trump in all of his voter fraud claims. And she said he could declare some kind of national emergency and do something to try to nationalize the elections. The president has no power to do this, but that doesn't mean he won't try. Because, you know, I think he's done a lot

of things already that he doesn't have the power to do. And so, you know, what's it going to mean to have to stand up to the government to make sure that people have their right to vote. I mean, we had this very commonly in southern states before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but the idea that you would have to fight against government resistance that is trying to disenfranchise people, I think people would take to the streets because that is really a direct attack on democracy. if you interfere with people's ability to vote. But I think it's very unlikely that the president would say

the elections are canceled. But there's lots of things he could do with his power with the military, with his power over federal government machinery that can make it very difficult for some people to vote. And he's got an incentive to do this, which is that if Democrats take back control of Congress, they're going to make the remaining years of his term

much more difficult. And so the stakes are very high, much higher than we normally think of a midterm election. Yeah. I want to put all of this in context just to understand where we are in history. Has there ever been a serious attempt in U.S. history to delay a federal election? Even during the Civil War, we held elections. Yes. So the idea that you, and, you know, there was talk about this during COVID.

You know, I remember getting a lot of questions from journalists about delaying elections. I mean, that's a very dangerous thing. Trump recently had some kind of Oval Office meeting that was open to the press with Zelensky. And over in Ukraine, the war is raging. And so they've had to postpone their elections. And Trump started talking about that. You know, he's a little curious about that, just like he's a little curious about, hmm, maybe I could run for a third term.

You know, people are saying I could. I probably won't, but maybe I will. You know, so I've been researching a new book, and I went back, and I was looking in the 1970s at Republican ballot security measures, which was ways to try to, you know, I think, suppress the vote of people who were likely to vote for Democrats, particularly in minority communities. And one of the things it said in this manual that I was looking at from 1976 is that just the publicity of saying you're going to do this stuff can deter people from voting and can be demobilizing. I mean, this was a selling point of this, is it would discourage people who might otherwise be on the fence about whether it's worth the hassle of voting? That's your concern right now.

Yes. This discussion that we're having right now, the statements that the president is making in this very moment, that is impacting people's ideas and thoughts about their ability to vote and the integrity of their vote. Well, think about this, right? We all have to vote in order for democracy to work, and yet there's a cost to voting. You have to figure out where your polling place is. You have to make sure you're registered to vote. Being registered to vote is the biggest impediment for people who are non-voters, because they never register so they never vote. If you're told that, oh, well, there might be ice at the polls, or you're told that, you know, there's going to be a big hassle.

Yeah. It could be demobilized. Now, it can cut both ways. One of the things that's happening I think is underappreciated by the media is that because there is a shift in the composition of the Republican Party towards voters who are lower income and less educated, both whites and minority voters, lower income, less educated, those are the people who are most affected by laws that make it harder to register and vote. And so this in some ways may be self-defeating. I think it's generally demobilizing for people when there's all this fighting over elections and when there's these threats. But I think the intent, at least part of Trump's intent, is to discourage people from voting. And also, if Democrats actually win, it's a way of trying to delegitimize democratic victories and claim that they're somehow illegitimate.

Can we talk a little bit about tampering? So we know because we've seen it, the U.S. intelligence agency warns that Russian influence. operations, including disinformation and online tactics aimed at sowing distrust, intensify before, during, and after elections. So as technology becomes more sophisticated, how significant are foreign threats to our voting system? So I think it's very important here to distinguish between the information environment where I think there's lots of disinformation is going to be out there.

Right. Misinformation and disinformation. Yeah, online and everything, yes. So that I think is going to happen, and I think we're going to see more of it in part because Trump has dismantled some of the security, cybersecurity and other intelligence that was used to stop some of this and to publicize, you know, not just Russians but Chinese and Iranian and other countries that are trying to influence elections. That's one thing. But the word tampering sounds like you're talking about tampering with voting machines.

Our voting machines are pretty secure, and back in 2016, there was an incident where the Russian government seemed to probe a state's voter registration database and didn't do anything, and the purpose seemed to be just to cast doubt on the integrity of the system. We might see that again. It would be very hard for another country to mess with our registration system and for people not to notice. Again, you thought you registered to vote, you go and you're not registered, you'd know it. complain. Like, we would find out about that. And the way our voting machines, the ones that tabulate votes, those are not the kinds of things that are easily manipulated by foreign entities. You know, they're not connected to a single computer brain where, you know, somebody could hack in and, you know, make the vote totals change or something like that. And if, even if the machines

were hacked, and I'm not an expert on computer science, but I've talked to computer scientists about this. The best way to deal with the potential for someone, and could be someone domestic, it doesn't have to be a foreign interference, someone domestically trying to mess with the way the voting machines count the ballots is that we do these partial hand counts to make sure that things line up. And if they don't, then we investigate. And occasionally there are problems. They almost always turn out to be some kind of human error or some kind of glitch, not somebody intentionally messing with those machines. So I think it's much more likely that we're going to see influence campaigns to try to influence how Americans vote. Our guest today is Richard Hassan,

an election law scholar who has been writing about the risks facing American democracy. As we head into the 2026 midterms, we'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mooseley, and this is fresh air. Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and I'm talking with Richard Hassan, the Gary T. Schwartz-Indow chair and Law and Professor of Political Science at UCLA, where he directs the Safeguarding Democracy Project. His book, A Real Right to Vote, How a Constitutional Amendment can safeguard American Democracy, was published last year.

Hassan is the author of several books about elections in democracy. He is currently working on a book tracing the arc of American democracy from 1964 to 2024. This interview was recorded yesterday. Professor Hassan, I want to talk about redistricting. What just happened in Texas,

what is being proposed, and up before voters in California, developments in other states. But before we get to those examples, I think I want to go through a little bit of like walking through how congressional and state legislative redistricting usually works in the United States. So what sets the process in motion and what standards have to be followed? Every 10 years, the Constitution says we have to count all the people. That's called the census.

After we do that, every state gets a certain number of members of Congress. There's 435 members of Congress. Every state gets at least one. But beyond that, whether California gets 50, or 40 or 70 depends on relative population. And so it changes because people move out of California, they move into Texas, Texas gets another congressional seat. And this happens every 10 years. So then somebody in each state, and state law determines who this is, has to draw up a number of districts with the same number of people in them. Supreme Court has said, you've got to have the same number of people in each congressional district. And of course, that's an approximation because we don't know exactly how many people are there. Now, in California, California voters passed an initiative

that basically says there's going to be a commission made up of Democrats, Republicans, and independents, and it's very complicated about how they do it, but they draw the district lines. In many other states, it is not an independent commission that draws the lines. It's the state legislature that draws the lines. And when state legislatures draw the lines, they tend to draw the lines to favor their own party. So how you draw the lines determines how much relative power Democrats and Republicans have. And we just saw this in Texas. So Republicans there redrew their congressional map mid-decade, so it wasn't after the census. This is not against the law, but I mean, are there legal checks to stop legislatures from redrawing maps purely for

partisan gain? So first, there are state constraints. So for example, most states say you have to draw districts so they're all in one piece. You can't draw like little islands and connect them. Some states say they have to be compact. You can't draw weird-shaped districts. But then there are also federal rules. I've mentioned one already, equal population. There's another rule that's in Section 2, the Voting Rights Act. And that says that minority voters have to have the same opportunity as other voters

to participate in the political process to elect representatives of their choice. The Voting Rights Act, Section 2, has been more responsible than anything else for the election of candidates, supported by black, Latino, Native American and Asian Americans that are in large populations in, this is not just for Congress, but also for state and local legislatures. So they've got to comply with Section 2. Also, they can't make race the most predominant thing they do when they draw their lines. And that creates some tension with Section 2 because they have to take race into account, but they can't take race into account too much.

And the Supreme Court is currently considering how to deal with that. But what they are allowed to do, thanks to a Supreme Court decision in 2019, called Rucho v. Common Cause, is they can draw however they want their lines to favor their political party. So in Rucho, the Supreme Court said that partisan gerrymandering claims cannot be heard in federal court because the court does not have a standard to know when taking party into account goes too far. Can you explain Proposition 50 in California, which goes to voters very soon? How would it change the system? So California, because of a couple of voter initiatives, chooses its congressional districts through an independent commission. What Proposition 50 would do is it would say only for congressional elections and only for the next three congressional elections, 26, 28, and 2030, before the next census, California is not going to use the commission. drawn lines for Congress. It's instead going to use lines that have been passed by the state legislature. And these lines would create up to five additional democratic seats, which would

somewhat negate what was going on in Texas with the Texas gerrymandering. Can we talk about the integrity of the Voting Rights Act? I know one legal scholar said the laws protections have experienced death by a thousand cuts over the last few decades. How would you characterize it at this moment? Well, the Supreme Court killed off one key part of the Voting Rights Act back in 2013 in the Shelby County case where they said that the rule that said that states with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to get federal approval before they could change their voting rules to show that they wouldn't make minority voters worse off. So Section 5 is essentially gone in the United States. What was left was Section 2. That's the part

that says that minority voters should have the fair chance of getting their share of political power in this country. The Supreme Court has been whittling away and whittling away at Section 2 for the last few decades. And now, in a case out of Louisiana, it is possible that the Supreme Court is going to declare Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. And I'd say if that happens, many of the most prominent members of Congress who represent minority communities could be gerrymandered out of their seats because there would no longer be a section. 2 constraint on how district lines are drawn. If the Supreme Court rules to basically gut Section 2, where does that leave the Voting Rights

Act? Well, there are still parts of the Voting Rights Act that would still be in effect, for example, the parts that require bilingual ballots for people. There's a part of the Voting Rights Act that bans literacy tests nationwide. These two could be attacked, but gutting Section 2 wouldn't directly affect these. But the two big parts of the Voting Rights Act historically were Section 5 and Section 2. And I think that if we ended up with the Supreme Court holding now that Section 2 is unconstitutional, that it could potentially spur a new civil rights movement in this country

because it would essentially change what has been understood to be the law for decades. There's also another attack on the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court may well hear, which would stop private plaintiffs like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from being able to sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act, leaving it only to the Department of Justice. And we know historically, over 90% of Voting Rights Act cases have been brought by private groups, not by the Department of Justice. Based on the makeup of the Supreme Court currently and their decisions,

what is the likelihood of these decisions being made? So the Louisiana case, which is currently before the court, it's called Louisiana versus Calais. So Louisiana had to draw its congressional districts. And voting rights plaintiffs brought a lawsuit and said, you have to draw a second congressional district where blacks have an opportunity to elect their candidate of choice. And so Louisiana did that, but they drew it in such a way that was oddly shaped to otherwise protect their Republican incumbents. So then there's a follow-on lawsuit, claiming, when you drew those districts now to comply with the Voting Rights Act, you made race the most important thing, and that's unconstitutional under the Equal

Protection Clause. And so when Louisiana v. Calais was argued back in March, the question before the court was, was race the most important thing, or was this all about partisanship? But at the end of the Supreme Court's term in June, rather than decide the case, the court said, we're going to rehear this case next year. And we have more. more things we want to hear about, but we'll tell you about them later. Very unusual for the Supreme Court. So now, October 15th, Supreme Court's going to hear argument in this case again, and it's a huge, huge question. You don't tee up such a question unless there are at least some justice is interested in doing this. So there are a number of possibilities. One is the Supreme

Court punts the issue because they have lots of ways to not decide it, and maybe they just signal Voting Rights Act end is coming soon, or they could strike down the voting rights. Act right before midterm election, throwing the midterm elections potentially into chaos as there's more redistricting potentially being done, or, and this is what I think is most likely, they rewrite how Section 2 is understood. They don't strike it down, but they so weaken it that it becomes potentially ineffective over time. This is kind of what I call the John Roberts special. Chief Justice Roberts likes to do things that look like they're minimal, but in fact they have huge repercussions.

I guess it feels like it comes out of the blue for me that we would see the death and decimation of the Voting Rights Act. But perhaps it had always been clear that we were headed in this direction? Let me take you back to 1982. That's when Congress passed today's version of Section 2 that really expanded minority voting rights. Yes. The point person in the Reagan administration who was fighting against the expansion of the Voting Rights Act was named. John Roberts. Justice Alito, when he applied to work in the Justice Department, in the 1980s, we know this from papers that were released in connection with his confirmation, he wrote about

how he didn't like the one-person-one-vote cases, the cases that require equal population and district. So this has been an interest of some of the conservative justices on the court for sometime. And the big surprise was actually in 2022 when Roberts joined the Liberals and Justice Kavanaugh in upholding Alabama's district. And I think part of that was because Alabama was so blatantly trying to go against precedent without actually saying that that's what they were doing. But Justice Kavanaugh, in that 22 case called Allen v. Milligan, he wrote a separate opinion, a concurrence, where he said, you know, maybe time's up. And let's hear some briefing on that. And of course, There were the other conservers on the court, Alito Barrett, Gorsuch, and Thomas, who are ready to say now that the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional or needs to be watered down.

So they know how to weaken, make toothless the Voting Rights Act without actually striking it down if that's what they want to do. If you're just joining us, we're talking with Richard Hassan, a professor of law and political science at UCLA and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Today we're talking to Richard Hassan about the pressures on American democracy, from voting restrictions and gerrymandering to the potential misuse of federal power in the upcoming elections. Our interview was recorded yesterday. Professor Hassan, I want to talk about third-term talk.

So we know the 22nd Amendment flatly bans anyone from being elected. president more than twice, but President Trump has occasionally hinted that there might be ways that he can work around that. How fail-safe is that two-term limit? So I think the Constitution's 22nd Amendment is clear. No more than two terms. That should be the end of it. However, before this Supreme Court, are there arguments that could be made to try to get around that? We've already heard people trying to make those arguments. How could it have? happen? For example, the next ticket is Vance Trump rather than Trump Vance. Yes, he's already floated that, and then he would take over at some point. Well, Vance would

then resign. Yes. I mean, I think of this is very far-fetched. Also, think about the president's age. Also, think about the fact that Barack Obama could then be running against Donald Trump. Right, because what goes for Republicans would also go for Democrats. Unless it's a Republican-only rule, yes, I think that would be right. You know, it's only a rule that applies to two consecutive term presidents and not to one where there's an interruption. I mean, we can talk about this. I think the main purpose of this talk is twofold. Number one, it drives liberals crazy because they're already worried, rightly so, about Trump's authoritarian tendencies and how he's interfering with elections, and this would just be more of that. So it's meant to

put on the table things that seem like they're off the table. But the other thing it does is it makes Trump less of a lame duck? He's a second-term president. He's old. He's also unpopular now. It's really unlikely he'd be elected. But with him talking about that, well, then the news is not filled with speculation. Will it be Vance? Will it be Rubio? Who will be the Republican nominee next time? And so it's a way for him to not cede his power. How much damage does it do to democracy when every election is framed as good and evil, with one side portrayed as cheating. Can you talk about that larger impact?

So I think that this is one of the greatest dangers for American democracy is that when elections are existential, people are willing to do more extreme things. I mean, think back to all of the people in 2020, Republicans who believe the false claims that that election was stolen. Well, if you really believe the election was stolen, you might take desperate measures to make sure, whether that's violence

or manipulating voting outcomes, because you're trying to stop the cheating, right? Remember the expression, the Roger Stone expression, stop the steel. Yes. I mean, we could call it Orwellian, but, you know, this is beyond Orwellian. It is a propaganda campaign meant to weaponize one party's base against democracy by claiming that their democracy. democracy has been taken from them. And in fact, if you looked at polling around the 2020 election, it was Republicans more than Democrats who thought that democracy was in danger because they had been fed lies by Trump and others. And so I think it is corrosive of our democracy and it's going to take a lot of rebuilding of trust and a lot of safeguards in our system,

like those audits of ballots and transparency of processes and protection for voters in order to get us back to where we were before the Trump era started in 2016. Why doesn't the Constitution protect our right to vote? Well, back at the time of the Constitution, when it was drafted in the 1780s, there was no universal voting. There was white men with property who were. allowed to vote. And there was no agreement on who could vote, and so it was left to each state. And then eventually, we had direct election of senators. But even then, in the 17th Amendment,

states still decide who was qualified to vote. And for president, you may remember the Bush v. Gore case that ended the disputed 2000 election. The hanging chairs, yeah. Right. So the Supreme Court said in that case that the people don't have the right to vote for president. they only get that right because states have given it to them. And states could take it back at any time. So a state legislature could pass a law. It says, you know what, we're not going to let you vote for president anymore in the state. We're going to decide who gets the electoral college votes ourselves.

And so our right to vote in the Constitution is very precarious. And much of that right is based on Supreme Court cases that the court decided in the 1960s in the so-called Warren Court era, cases that at some point this conservative Supreme Court might choose to re-examine. So we really need, if we want to have a 21st century democracy, we need a 21st century right to vote in our Constitution. I was really struck by you saying that you believe we're entering another era of the civil rights movement. There are other civil liberties that are also at stake. What would that look like? Well, I think it would look something like the 1960s. I think it would be massive

public protests, it would mean that there would be the election of people who want change. You know, the last time the Constitution was amended, the last proposed Constitution Amendment was in 1971 when there couldn't be discrimination against 18-year-olds. You know, throughout American history, we've amended the Constitution, right? 27 times we've amended the Constitution. It's time for a 28th Amendment. It's time to revitalize American democracy. The reason that other countries have greater voting rights protections in their constitutions

is because their constitutions are newer, they're younger. Our Constitution was written at a time when we had slaves. It was written at a time when the thought that women could vote was not taken seriously. In fact, in 1875, the Supreme Court said, no, the Constitution doesn't protect women's right to vote. And it took 40 years of organizing in order to get the national. 19th Amendment passed. By the time we get to 1920 and the passage of the 19th Amendment, which bars discrimination voting on the basis of sex, over 30 states had amended their state constitutions to allow women to vote. And so I think about that, that it's going to take

a long-term popular movement for going to revitalize this democracy. Do you have faith in our lawmakers? I have faith in the American people, that there's enough of a commitment to democracy that if our leaders won't step up and actually protect democracy, that the people are going to demand it and demand new leaders if we don't get the leadership we need on free and fair elections and protection of our voting rights. Professor Rick Hassan, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been great to talk to you.

Richard Hassan is a professor of law and political science at UCLA and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. The first big novel of the fall publishing season is out, and our book critic Marine Corrigan is on it. Here's her review of Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Once in a while mistakes happen.

I mention this mistake because it testifies to something powerful about Patrick Ryan's new novel, Buckye. When I made a late request for an advance review, copy of Buckeye. The copy I received looked fine, but when I opened it, I realized it was mistakenly bound backwards. The title page was at the very end of this over 450-page novel. So as a kind of brain exercise, I began reading Buckeye backwards, my head moving from right to left. By page nine, I was already so caught up in the world Ryan creates. Buckeye could have been misprinted

upside down and sideways, and I still wouldn't have been able to put it down. As its title indicates, Buckeye is set in Ohio, in a fictional small town called Bono Mi. The story, which focuses on two married couples, stretches from pre-World War II to the close of the 20th century. Margaret Salt is married to Felix, a closeted gay man who kind of maybe harbors the unarticulated hope that marriage might render his same-sex desires dormant. When the novel opens, Margaret, who's a red-headed, green-eyed looker, walks into the town hardware store where Cal Jenkins works and demands that he turn on the radio. There's commotion on the streets outside, and especially since her husband Felix is serving in the Navy, Margaret wants to know what's happening. It turns out that Germany has just surrendered to the Allies. Hearing the news, Margaret grabs Cal by his shoulders and kisses him, and Cal, a good husband and new father, likes it. From that impulsive moment, all sorts of complications and secrets sprout, while this teaser of a plot

summary may make Buckeye seem like the stuff of vintage soap operas, the atmosphere of this novel is wry and contemplative rather than melodramatic. Ryan, whose previous books include the standout, 2016 short-story collection, The Dream Life of Astronauts, as well as three YA novels, ambitiously aims here to write an American epic, and he has the chops to do so. Ryan's omniscient narrator takes turns experiencing events from the four main character's points of view, always subtly underscoring how contingency shapes our lives. for instance, was born with one leg two inches shorter than the other, two inches that would keep him out of World War II and put him in Margaret's path. Cal's wife Becky discovered in childhood

that she has the ability to communicate with the dead, a gift that will prove to be a grim comfort during the Vietnam War. Chapters roam fluidly here from flashbacks to Margaret's tough start in life in an orphanage, to a Herman Woke-like section, chronicling the torpedoing of that cargo ship Felix is serving on. Felix meets the love of his life on that ship, a fellow sailor who quotes St. Thomas Aquinas to him, saying, the things that we love, tell us what we are. The decades-long aftermath of silent grief that Felix must endure after the loss of that relationship is the anguished emotional core of this novel. What Ryan captures in Buckeye is both the sweep of history

and the mostly mundane particularity of everyday life. If there's a flaw to find in this overwhelming novel, it may be that the characters are a bit too uniformly eloquent and self-aware. But really, why complain about two. many epiphanies when they're expressed as beautifully as this. I leave you with our narrator describing Felix in old age, realizing something about time. What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it, we save it, we while it away, we waste it, we kill it, we regret what we've done with it, we give it away, we want it back. Felix saw it so clear.

all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities. More time, more air, more Duke Ellington. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Buckeye. by Patrick Ryan. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, former military linguist Reality Winner. She was working at the NSA in 2017 when she leaked a classified document describing Russian cyber attacks

targeting the 2016 elections. We'll talk with Winner about her arrest, her trial, imprisonment, and current life, which she writes about in her new memoir. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews,

follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorock, Anne-Marie Baldinato, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Dea Chaliner, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Susan Yacundi directed today's show.

With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. Support for NPR, and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org.