Stuff You Should Know - 10 Voter Suppression Methods

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Voter suppression in the USA is as old as voting itself. Listen in to hear about 10 ways we stifle the vote. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's out there somewhere wandering around.

So if you see her, bring her back. And this is Stuff You Should Know. A rare top 10. Yeah, where we do all 10. Although I'm sure we'll end up combining some and it'll be like eight or something weird like that. But we just don't even really do these anymore. Oh, I see what you mean.

No, no, it's been a while. This one's an important top 10 too. This isn't like, you know, 10 biggest things ever moved or anything like that. Did we do that? No, I don't think we ever did. It's on How Stuff Works. Yeah, it is, right, it's a real thing.

Yeah, or maybe like 10 heaviest objects ever moved or something, maybe we'll do it someday. This is from our old website that we used to work for though, How Stuff Works. And this is, and we've done stuff on different ways to suppress the vote and to rig the vote through gerrymandering and such efforts like that. Well, we did one specifically called

Our Election Laws Designed to Suppress Voting. And that's a good one to go listen to as well. It is because it's very sad, but in the United States suppressing the vote and trying to keep people and certain people and certain demographics from voting is as old as voting itself. Yeah, which is sad because everybody has this impression

that, you know, and it's pure estate in America, if you want to vote, if you say this is my right and obligation and duty as a citizen, you can go vote and it shouldn't be all that hard and you just go and you vote and your vote is counted and maybe your person wins, maybe they don't, but you voted and there shouldn't be any barriers to that. Voting is the way that a democracy functions.

So the most democratic way for the democracy to function is to remove as many barriers as possible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of barriers that are put up that do make things harder for people to vote, which is what we're talking about here. That's right, and they're not old barriers. The Brennan Center for Justice, which is a think tank in New York

and advocates for civil rights, especially around voting, they said since 2010, 25 states have passed new laws, making it more difficult for people to vote in the United States of America. Yeah, so, and we should probably just come out and say unfortunately to our Republican listeners, this is not one of those both sides do it kind of things. This is largely Republican controlled states

and municipalities that create laws and regulations that do make it harder to vote. And the reason why on paper is because it's to combat voter fraud. The problem is this, voter fraud has been shown many, many, many times over by many different studies by groups from both sides of the political spectrum that it doesn't really exist.

It exists in such miniscule amounts that it might as well not exist. That same Brennan Center, Chuck, that you mentioned a second ago, they're big time into voting. They did a study and they saw that between nine, 10,000ths of a percent to four, 100,000ths of a percent. That's how the rate of overall voting fraud

in the United States. And if you're like Brennan Center, I'll bet that's liberal. There was actually an exhaustive inquiry investigation launched in 2002 by John Ashcroft, who is Bush Jr.'s attorney general, if you'll remember. Heck of a, heck of a singer. Remember when he sang about the eagle flying high? Yeah, man, I remember that.

He was anointing feet with oil. Yeah, yeah, that was him. So Ashcroft, his justice department launched a really thorough investigation into voter fraud in the United States and out of examining hundreds of millions of ballots between, I think, I don't remember what years they looked at it over. They managed to bring charges on only 120 people

and only 86 of those were convicted. So there's really no evidence that voter fraud exists. And yet these solutions to voter fraud, voter fraud, which are obstacles and barriers to voting, are still established, they're still supported. Even though people are like voting fraud doesn't exist, they say, well, we still have to protect against it anyway. So we're gonna make voting harder.

And that's kind of the big problem that we're dealing with right now with this thing. And this is why a lot of people point to this and say this is voter suppression. That's right. And in fact, even in our most recent election, if I remember correctly, Donald Trump launched an investigative body to look into the,

cause he lost a popular vote by roughly three million votes. And he said that there were at least three million illegal votes cast. That's why I lost that vote. Didn't he form a body to investigate that that just sort of quietly went away without any findings? It did. There were like, there were some findings,

but they were, you know, and there was a report and it was actually kind of a scandalous report that said there's voter fraud everywhere. And then people said, well, can you show us your work? And they said, no. And that's when it kind of faded off into nothing. That's right. So yeah, so there's, like we're show,

like it's been shown voter fraud, like basically doesn't exist. And yes, any instance of voter fraud, especially purposeful voter fraud, meant to affect the outcome of an election, throw that person in jail, like take away their right to vote forever and maybe spank them on the bottom too.

Like this is not, it's not a good thing. No one's saying like, who cares about voter fraud? What people are saying is that voter fraud virtually doesn't exist. So to institute all these draconian measures that make it harder for people to vote and seemingly weirdly make it harder for certain groups of people,

like minorities and poor people to vote, that's a problem because number one, it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. And number two, again, it seems to be voter suppression. And other people would say, well, why? Why would the GOP care if like, why would they do this then? And apparently if you look at elections in general, the Republican party tends to be favored

when fewer people turn out. When there's a large electorate, that usually tends to favor the Democrats. When not that many people turn out to vote, the people who turn out to vote usually tend to be Republicans. So a lot of people point to the Republican controlled cities and states around the country and say,

I think you're doing this to win, which makes it cheating. And you're cheating by taking away people's ability to vote or making it hard enough that they just give up and don't vote. That's right. So a lot of this is gonna be historical as well. And I guess we should start with number 10,

which is poll taxes. And early on when voting kind of was in its early stages, they thought, you know, a really easy way to keep people from voting is to have them pay a tax to have to vote. And it doesn't have to be exorbitant, but maybe just high enough to where most of the people

that we don't want to vote can't afford it. Most of the Confederate, former Confederacy had these poll taxes. A lot of this stuff was in the South historically, unfortunately, Virginia charged about a buck 50 a year, which was about 11 bucks in today's dollars. So that's not a lot of money, but it had to be paid in cash.

And back then, if you were a sharecropper or if you were a farmer with a small farm, you bought most of your stuff on credit and you didn't have a lot of cash line around. You might've had $2 or $3 at any given point. Right. And you hit it on the head when you said a lot of this happened or started out.

A lot of voter suppression tactics started out in the South during reconstruction because all of a sudden there were a lot of black people who suddenly had the right to vote in the white dominated South. And so the white establishment was at threat of being undermined or replaced by black people or people who are friendly to black interests

and they didn't want that. So they started instituting things like poll tax, but they had to do it in ways where it appeared like it applied to everybody. So poll tax applied to everybody, but then they would institute things like grandfather clauses, which literally said with poll taxes,

if your grandfather was able to vote before the civil war, you're exempt. Well, black people didn't really have the right to vote, especially in the South before the civil war. So it's impossible that their grandfather would have had that right with white people who might've been poor, but couldn't afford to pay the poll tax.

But we're probably gonna vote in favor with white interests in the South during that election. They would be exempted because their grandfather could vote before the civil war. And that's how that was done. Yeah. And in other Southern states, they had cumulative taxes on top of just being taxed.

You had to do this several years in a row in order to earn that right to vote. So all of these things, of course, this was eventually rendered illegal in 1964 with the ratification of the 24th Amendment. They said, you can't do poll taxes anymore. After 100 years, we've determined it's not fair. Yeah. And it took a couple of years too.

So all the way up until 1966, dude, there were four states that still had laws on the books that had to be struck down in federal court that poll taxes were okay. Yeah. Which is crazy. Another one that they did was literacy tests, which kind of went hand in hand. Again, a lot of this stuff started out

in the reconstruction and then Jim Crow South. And if you were black right after the civil war, there was a really good chance that you couldn't read. Way more of a chance when compared to a white person. I'm not sure what the percentages is, but there were laws on the books that said, it's illegal for you as a white person to teach the people that you have enslaved to read or write.

It's illegal. Like literacy among slaves is not legal. And so one way to prevent those people who were now franchised after the civil war from voting would be to say, well, you have to be literate to vote because, and this is sneaky, because if you're not literate,

how can you possibly be an informed voter? You can't just come in and say, I wanna vote for this person because I like their name. You have to be informed. And to be informed, you have to be literate. So we're gonna test your literacy before we let you vote. Right. One good example is in South Carolina in 1882,

where you couldn't, even if you could manage to learn, if you really wanted to vote and you managed to learn to write down your name and your ballot, they said, no, you gotta write down a ballot for each office. If you wanna vote for governor and senator and anything else, then you have to be able to write down all of those and put it in the correct box,

this labeled that you probably can't read. And we're gonna shuffle these boxes around too. So even if you have someone that wants to help you cast that vote, that's not gonna be allowed to happen either. And forget the fact that people have learning disabilities and sometimes have legitimate problems learning how to read, even if they wanna learn how to read. It's like saying that you can't vote

if you don't have arms to cast a ballot. It's outrageous and it gets even more outrageous if you go to Louisiana, where they had literal brain teasers that you had to be able to figure out in order to vote. And this one, I'm sure if I sat down long enough, I could figure it out, but not when I'm probably nervous

about casting my first vote as a former enslaved person. Right, so this one in particular, and this one was instituted as more and more black people learn to read, which, so just buckle up for this one. Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in same line, but capitalize the fifth word that you write.

So you could conceivably, especially as a literate person, figure this out and it would take you a little while. But say that you went and so you wrote all this stuff and then you got to the last part where it said capitalize the fifth word, then you went back and scratched out the small case, whatever that fifth word was,

and capitalize that one. Or maybe you capitalize all the words and you had to go back and put them in lower case. The fact that these tests were administered by white poll workers and that they were typically subjective, meaning that if that poll worker decided you failed, you failed, when you went back and scratched that out and made, you know, capitalize that fifth word,

there was probably a hundred percent chance that that white poll worker, who didn't want you voting in the first place, was going to just say, sorry, you failed, you can't vote. Yeah, and you'd think, well, sure, but this was the 1800s. No, no, some Southern states had these brain teaser tests all the way up until the mid 1960s

when the Voting Rights Act finally said, you don't need to do a brain teaser to vote. That's illegal and it's kind of dumb. Yeah, so, you know, there was a lot of, a lot of chicanery, effery, I think, as John Oliver would put it, that was going on in the South. But I mean, one of the mechanisms

that really got used, that really just kind of, but probably the most effective one was just straight up violence. Like the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Chamelea, a bunch of different groups, terrorist organizations grew up to terrorize black people and people who supported the rights of black people,

to send a message saying like, no, the white power structure is going to be staying in power around here, and we will go so far as to murder you and your family and make examples out of you to, like leaving you in a tree as a signal to everybody else, this is what happens when you try to vote. This is what happens when you try to register

other people to vote. And it was a very long lasting legacy that went on from the end of the Civil War up until I believe Congress finally passed a law saying that, no, this is illegal. You can't do this kind of thing, but it went on for decades like this. Yeah, they finally made it a federal crime

and more than 3,000 Klan members were indicted. Only about 600 of those were actually convicted because again, we're talking about juries in the South for the most part. This seems like a good time to take a break. Okay. And we'll pick back up with number seven right after this. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles,

stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

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Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you should know. Number seven.

Right. So there's some, just to give you a little historical background real quick. There's some, there's reconstruction where black Americans become enfranchised. They have the right to vote. In response to that, there's terror, there's Jim Crow laws. And then in response to the Jim Crow laws

that just overtly suppressed the black vote, there was the Voting Rights Act. And for a long time, the Voting Rights Act was really effective. And the reason why it was effective was because there was a section to it, section five, that said, hey, if you've ever, ever engaged in voter discrimination on a statewide basis,

on a systemic basis, you have to have us, the federal government, review any changes to the voting procedure in your state before you can implement them. And so any state that wanted to try to come up with some voter suppression tactic, it might be brilliant. But if the federal government said no, they couldn't do it. And so the vote would be saved in that respect.

Well, in 2013, the Roberts leg court struck down section five of the Voting Rights Act. So now we're seeing the results of that, where voter suppression tactics are starting to come back and they're starting to come back in like this avalanche of tactics where across the country, if you put them all together, it's a real problem. But the Voting Rights Act figured in dramatically

to save the vote of people. And the gutting of that section five in 2013 by the Supreme Court did the exact opposite to it. That's right. One tactic that they could use and use for many years was just making it, and still used to some degree, making it difficult to register or to vote. Here are some of the things they used to do

is you have to keep re-registering many, many times. You have to have a street address with an actual name and number. And if you were an African-American living in the rural South, you may not have an actual street address on the dirt road next to the field that you farm. Little things like this, these technicalities to meet these requirements to vote that they knew that

African-Americans didn't have. And we're in our still literal conversations. Some of them these days are even on tape where you hear public officials talk about making it hard for black people to vote. And if we do this, this is how many people we think we can keep off the voter registration logs. It's just shameful and I'm surprised we're not

screaming at this point. We're trying to keep it together. It wasn't just in the South, though. In the North and in the West, in the early 1900s, there were immigrants. And they didn't want immigrants voting a lot of times. Ethnic and religious minorities, they didn't want voting. So in places in the North and the West,

like New Jersey and California, they made it tough for immigrants to vote by saying you have to have your original naturalization papers at the polling place. Or maybe we don't want, maybe the interests of people who work in factories don't align with our. So here's what we'll do. Those people work long 10 to 12 hour shifts,

can't make it to the polls. So we're going to close the registration offices before those factories shut down every day to keep them from voting. And there were other ways that they went back to close these loopholes, too. Like it was a real public-private partnership between the government and other groups.

There were groups that were dedicated to preserving white supremacy in the South, say, that would boycott businesses where they found out that those employers gave their black employees time off during the day to go register to vote or to vote. You could lose your customer base if they found out that you were doing that with black people or with your black employees.

So there were like, even if you say, well, so what? It was hard to go register to vote, figure it out. It was disproportionately leveled at black voters. And even if you did figure it out, there were repercussions for figuring it out, too. Yeah, or in New York, if you know that a lot of Jewish people might vote in a more liberal way, hey, let's have registration times on Saturdays.

And Yom Kippur, when we know that Jewish people won't be able to get out and register to vote, it's high time that we make voting days national holidays. I agree, Chuck, I agree. It should be a paid holiday, a national paid holiday, or have it on Saturdays do something, but make it less hard for sure. Yeah, like people need to be allowed to vote.

And we're not talking about voter fraud. We're talking about legal Americans having the right and the ability to vote in as easy a way as possible. Yes, and if you also say, well, if they really wanted to vote, they would find a way to do it. When's the last time you didn't log into a website

because it required two-factor authentication? I'm gonna break. And we're talking about having to take a bus across the county to register to vote when you have to be working and your employer won't give you time off. So you have to take sick time to just go register to vote and then you have to do it all again to go vote.

It's more problematic than it appears just when you're saying it out loud. That was a good burn, sick burn. Thanks, man. Number six, straight up voter intimidation still happens to a large degree. In 2004, it was reported that in Florida in the state election there,

they sent plainclothes state troopers to the homes of 40 to 50 elderly black voters to question them for supposed election fraud. And that when they asked the state officials why they sent these state troopers, they said, well, we thought it might be a more relaxed atmosphere. To come to their home and ask these elderly black voters

about whether or not they participated in voter fraud, which by the way, this investigation turned up absolutely no fraud whatsoever. So it didn't happen. Which is like basically all investigations of voter fraud turn up no fraud whatsoever. And a lot of people say, well, these investigations are really just intimidation tactics.

And this one to me is one of the more despicable ones because it directly traces right back uninterrupted to the reconstruction era. And the fact that it's still going on today is just despicable to me. But it is and it's not just state troopers showing up at your house to ask you personally. There was a really famous case

that our dear governor in Georgia, Brian Kemp, when he was secretary of state, because we need to remember, he was secretary of state running an election that he was the one of the two candidates for governor in. And a lot of people say, well, he did some shady stuff which we'll talk about later. But when he was just straight up secretary of state,

he oversaw the arrest of the Quitman 10 plus two where two African-American school board officials who were elected a couple of times in this one election in a runoff, fair and square, they were arrested and their supporters and campaign advisors were arrested and taken to jail and had mugshots of them put on the news because they were accused of voter fraud.

And after years, the charges were finally dropped. Not a single person went to jail and no one was convicted. But a lot of people pointed to that and say, if you don't understand that as a clear message to African-American, not just voters, but also office holders that they shouldn't bother running or else their lives are gonna be ruined,

then you're really missing the point here. Yeah, in 2014, there was another intimidation tactic. And this is just these things that aren't technically illegal, but where candidates just try and be very sneaky. And if they can trick 100 voters into doing the wrong thing, then their time has been well spent in their minds.

But Mitch McConnell's campaign sent out these mailers that were marked election violation notice and it had the warning, you are at risk of acting on fraudulent information. And you start to read it and what it is is just basically here's my opposition candidate and we don't like what they say. So this is fraudulent information,

but they dress it up in a way sort of like the Publisher's Clearinghouse that makes our elderly citizens drive across the country thinking they've actually won real money. Right, this is the opposite. Yeah, this is the opposite of that. But using the same tricks basically is like, you get a notice in the mail and these,

it's usually preying on people that are older in our country, which is sad and awful. And they get a notice in their mail that says, oh, oh my gosh, I'm at risk of acting on fraudulent information. Yeah. And you know, they took this, they were sued, but a federal judge said, no, I'm sorry,

rejected basically. Yeah, and I mean, and also intimidation too can be official, like in part of official policies, like some of those poll taxes in the South, they added the extra layer of keeping you from even trying by saying the only place you can go pay for the poll tax is at your sheriff's office.

Right. You might say, especially if you're white, well, big deal, I have to go to the sheriff's office. Well, imagine if you went to the sheriff's office and there was a really good chance that while you were there, paying your poll tax so that you could go vote, and for that reason only, they said, hey, by the way, while you're here,

you know, we've got this case open, where were you on Tuesday night? And you would tell them and they would say, well, can you prove it? Just knowing that that was a possibility. And if you don't realize that was a possibility, I would urge you to brush up on your Jim Crow, South history, would dissuade a lot of people,

I would guess, from going to pay that poll tax and then going to vote. Remember when Homer Simpson thought he wanted to vote and had to go to the police station to claim his prize? Yeah. That was a good one though. Yeah, that was a good one. Another one, number five, is something that is still,

you mentioned Brian Kemp in Georgia, pruning names from the voter rolls. I thought that that was, I thought that that was a generous word that they used. Pruning. Pruning, because it makes it seem like methodical and, you know, well-informed. Yeah, well, this has happened time and time again

before the 2000 election for president in Florida, once again, state officials, Republican-controlled Florida, they hired a private firm to go through the registration rolls, delete names who were people who had died, who were registered multiple times in multiple places, or convicted felons, or declared mentally incompetent in court proceedings, and you might think, well, that's great, because, you know,

you don't want deceased people on voter rolls, which is true. Totally. But what about when you make mistakes and you delete a lot of voters who are fully eligible to vote? Then what happens? And the answer is nothing.

No, there's not. And by the time that it does turn out like, oh, we made a mistake, the elections long over, these inquiries in their reports that they produce are usually a couple of years after the fact. But in Georgia in particular, they found out that, again, the guy who oversaw the purging of the voter rolls

was one of the two candidates in the election. Just basic ethics says, you recuse yourself, you have nothing to do with this, or you say, no, no, no, let's not do this, or let's do it the right way, not let's purge this many people that we actually mistakenly removed 200,000 people, remove their right to vote in this election, 200,000.

And then, just to add horrible irony to the whole thing, it was only by 55,000 votes that Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams in that gubernatorial election. Yeah, that was a bitter pill here in Georgia because remember it was like, I think it was the week, or it may even be the eve of the election

when they lobbied the charge that the Republican system had been hacked and that they were launching a case against Abrams to look into it. And then, after the election, of course, they were like, oh, if we were wrong, they didn't hack us after all. Right, which again, who said that they were hacked

was that the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who was also running for governor against Stacey Abrams? Yeah, yeah. What about voter ID? Voter ID. Should we take a break? Oh yeah, let's take a break. I'm pretty charged up here. All right, we'll take a break

and we'll talk about voter ID and a few more things right after this. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friends' beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. You won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boybander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So we talked a lot about voter ID, Chuck, in the voter suppression episode, which again, go listen to that, guys. It's a good one as well. But the upshot of it, there's that word again,

the upshot of it is that if you require someone to show that they are who they say they are when they go vote, you can make a good case that at the very least, you're adding an obstacle or a barrier to voting. But you could also say,

well, if you have to pay for that, that technically constitutes a poll tax. And people say, oh yeah, well, section five of the Voting Rights Act doesn't exist anymore, so go sit on it. Ralph, Malf. Yeah, I mean, in some states,

it costs up to 60 bucks. That's unconscionable, man. That ID and, you know, $60 for some people is their grocery money for the week when you pay check to pay check. And again, you know, it's really easy to say,

well, you know, just pay the money and go out and get your ID so you can vote if you really want to vote. If it's a choice between that and putting food on the table for your kids, it's a barrier to voting, plain and simple. Yeah, and also, I mean, there are plenty of states

that rightly who require a voter ID rightly offer free IDs that you can use to vote. Like, that's definitely the way that it should be. But that's still, again, anytime you require somebody to potentially take time off of work, that puts an enormous burden

on like working, like the working poor, like people who just can't afford to take time off of work. They might be in a job where there's enough people who would love to have that job that if they take a sick day, their boss can be like, you know what?

I know you weren't sick and you're fired. This is the last straw. So your job could actually be on the line. It could be more than just a loss of hours. It could equal the loss of a job. And again, we live in a democratic country where the barriers to democracy should be lowered, not raised, lowered.

And yes, we should vigorously prosecute any instance of fraud, but because that hasn't been shown to exist, lowering the barrier so people can legally vote is not problematic. And it's anti-democratic to do that, to raise them. It is.

And when you hear these taped conversations, they're not talking about voter fraud. They're saying, hey, we can get probably a 2.5% reduction of African-American voter turnout in this county if we do X. And again, like we keep saying African-American voter turnout, like when I think Miami purged their voter rolls

in, I don't remember exactly when it was, but there was a commission that did a report on it. And their purge affected 65%, like 65% of the people who were deleted were black voters even though those voters represented just 20.4% of the population. Whereas only 16.6% of the people who were purged were white even though those people represented

77% of the public. So yeah, like if you look at studies of this stuff, it disproportionately impacts black voters, typically minority voters as a whole, but definitely black voters for sure. And that's not to say like the Republican Party just hates black people. The Republican Party knows that African-Americans

typically tend to vote Democrat, and they're a large group of people, so if you can make it harder for them to vote, you're probably going to affect the Democrats vote, not your vote. Yeah, another thing that you can do is close polling stations and limit polling hours in counties where you think it might help your vote.

There are a bunch of swing states, Arizona, Ohio, and some other states that have cut early voting days or hours. There was a report in 2014 that said they're more likely to inconvenience black voters who like to vote early and in person historically. In Maricopa County in Arizona, there were 400 voting locations in 2008.

In 2016, there were 60. This is a huge, huge problem. This is one way that this is going on, making it harder to vote by making voting less available to people. When it can totally be afforded, it's being pruned, and it's not just Texas, although Texas has some egregious stuff going on.

Since 2014, maybe, Texas has shut down 760 polling locations. Places to vote, 760. They currently have on the agenda, I don't know if it's been passed or if it's just been proposed or what, but if you want to vote by mail-in ballot, the drop-off locations in Texas has been reduced to one per county.

They said that's it. There's one place in our 254 counties, there's one place in each of those counties where you can take your ballot to drop it off. The problem with this is that some of Texas's counties are enormous. Texas has a number of counties that are larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island put together.

They have something like 120 counties that are larger than Rhode Island. Granted, Rhode Island is small, but Rhode Island is a small state. These are counties in Texas we're talking about, and in one place in each of those counties, there's a place where you can drop off your mail-in ballot. That's a problem,

and a lot of people are just going bonkers over that one. Yeah, and beyond closing polling places, like having to maybe take two or three city buses to get to your place to vote, when you finally get there, if you manage to go through all that trouble, which is, again, they're trying to make you say, you know what, it's not worth the trouble,

then you're met with, you know, five, six, seven-hour lines all day long, and this is what you get for your troubles to try and participate in American democracy. Yeah, so going on your lunch break doesn't end up working out very well. What about trickery number two? This is pretty awful.

You talked about that one by the people. I don't know if it was Mitch McConnell's campaign or just a group supporting him or if it was one in the same who knows. Tricking people by saying you're about to act on fraudulent information or something. I mean, that's longstanding. I'm guaranteed we talked about this before.

I'm almost positive, but in 2008, someone in Virginia sent a flyer out that looked like it was from the State Board of Elections that said, if you're a Republican, you should vote on November 4th. If you're a Democrat, you vote on November 5th, the day after the election, which is in one way hilarious.

I mean, it's just hysterical that somebody did that. In another way, in the fact that it could have, even if it didn't, but it could have impacted somebody's vote by purposefully confusing them, that's despicable. Again, that's a word I keep going to because I genuinely feel that way about going to any length to deprive or fool someone out of voting.

Right, but if you get caught doing that, surely there is a massive debt to pay via jail time, like in Maryland. In 2010, a robo-call campaign during the gubernatorial election told thousands of voters in African-American neighborhoods that they could, quote, relax and stay at home that evening because Democratic incumbent Governor Martin O'Malley

had already won the election. Not true, the polls were closed, and this wasn't just tricksters. This was Paul Shurik, who was the campaign manager for the Republican opponent who ended up winning, and they caught him, and he was charged and found guilty of four counts of election fraud, and you think, all right, throw the book at the guy.

What did he get? What did he get? He got 30 days home detention, probation, and community service. Right, which is really disappointing, not because that guy deserved worse, but because the penalties for federal election laws are breaking them that are meant to protect people's right to vote and punish people

who try to deprive people of their right to vote. Those are federal laws, and the penalties are supposed to be pretty stiff, so 30 days of house arrest at his house when really he made a name for himself as like, hey, I'll make sure that you're going to get elected as a campaign manager. That's very disappointing for sure.

Well, because the message it sends is, it's totally worth it to do this. Exactly. If we can swing an election, a little community service, who cares? There's two guys who are, I don't know what's going to happen to them, but they have a lot of charges against them right now,

but for this, I believe the 2020 election, they sponsored a bunch of robo-calls, tens of thousands of robo-calls in places like Michigan, Chicago, and I believe they were targeting African American voters where it said, if you vote by mail, your information is subject to be handed over to the police and run for any potential outstanding warrants,

or it may be added to the mandatory vaccine list as if that exists, but just playing on people's deepest fears to prevent them from voting, to dissuade them from voting, you'd have to be a genuine scumbag of the highest order to do something like that. And they caught these two guys,

Jacob Wall and Jack Berkman, doing just that. And as a matter of fact, I guess when they registered these robo-calls, they registered it to one of their phone numbers and then came out and blamed it on Democratic operatives because they wouldn't have possibly used their own phone number for this kind of thing, just to add a little cherry on top.

I should say all of this is a legend because they're charged with this right now, but they haven't been convicted. Right. Well, I'm sure they have some community service to look forward to. Yeah, and some house arrest. So the final one on the list here is a controversial one,

to be sure, but whether or not you should be allowed to vote as a felon or as someone who has ever been convicted of a crime. And this is the one that's kind of going the other way now, but for many, many years in many states, if you have ever been convicted of any crime, even if you went to prison, served your time, got out,

and were leading a great beneficial life toward society, you are not allowed to vote anymore. Right, which has started to become overturned. I think in 2018, yeah, in Florida, Florida's had this longstanding disenfranchisement policy, which most people have accepted for years, but then finally, some people came along and said, hey, this is really affecting a lot of people who want to vote,

who've served their time, who have become reformed. They want to be full citizens again. Can we give them the right back to vote? And in 2018, that was on the ballot, and Florida voters overwhelmingly said, yes, totally, let's do that. They have to have served their time and repaid all of their restitutions,

but we're going to give them the right to vote back. And it was a huge victory. And then there was a Republican lawmaker who said, well, wait a minute, this is kind of vague. It says that they have to have fulfilled all of their sentencing obligations. There's a lot of these people who are about to get their right to vote back,

who haven't paid all their fines and fees, which as it's been understood traditionally, you have basically your lifetime to pay off the actual financial fees and restitution that come along with being convicted of a crime. You have to pay that off first. That's in the law. And actually got passed in the Florida legislature,

Republican controlled legislature, that you have to pay all of your fines and fees first before you can get enfranchised again. And that's proving to be an enormous problem for a lot of the former convicts. Yeah, so it continues to this day. I know we got on our soapbox and pretty passionate about this one,

but we're both believers in the right to vote and to make it as easy as possible for eligible voters to vote. I don't see any argument counter to that. Right. That's valid. Why wouldn't you and a great democracy want as many people to vote as possible?

Again, the only argument you will see again and again is voter fraud. And if you can show that voter fraud doesn't exist, then you just knock the legs out from under it and it's just exposed as voter suppression then. So hopefully the more people who know about it, Chuck, the harder it is to do stuff like this. And I hope that that's the case

because that's why we share this, because I don't care what political persuasion you are. It's wrong to suppress the vote. It's just wrong. I'm sorry. If you want to know more about voter suppression, you can go try to vote and see what happens. And since I said that, it's time for...

And by the way, go vote. Go vote. And I think by the time this comes out, most of the state's registration will be shut down. But for the future, even if you voted in the last election, I check mine two or three times before every election because I don't want to show up on election day

at my polling place and be surprised to learn that I'm not on the roll or the register or that my polling place is moved. Just check it. Check it and check it and recheck it. Yeah, and there's tons of websites out there that are legit websites that aren't affiliated with any party that can help you check that. And if you are registered to vote, please vote.

Whoever you vote for, just vote. Like, it's important that you vote. So go be a good American and vote. And since I said that, finally, I think, Chuck, it's time for Listener Mail. This is from Ellie. She says, hey, guys, living Kansas, working Topeka, and I just listened to the episode on fallout shelters.

I cannot begin to explain to you the nerdy level of excitement I felt while driving to a client meeting when I spotted a yellow sign with the three triangles, just as you said there would be in the episode. Nice. I wanted so badly to stop and steal the sign off of the old brick nondescript building, but I didn't think that would bode well

since I worked for the state, and I was in a state-licensed vehicle at the time. I think people would have just guessed that you were requisitioning it or taking it down. Yeah, it would have looked official. You would have had to keep the nerdy giddiness in check. Not surprisingly, the shelter is just two blocks from the Capitol building downtown

because we all know in a crisis situation politicians like to make sure they're taking care of first. Love random history tidbits, so you best believe I'm mentally cataloging and keeping an eye out for more shelters in this area to randomly point out to my husband who have no idea what I'm talking about. Anywho, thank you for your podcast

and for keeping me company on my hour commute. Stay healthy and wear a mask because the coronavirus is in fact real, and that is from L-E-T, or L, actually, I think. So E-L-L-E? Yep, L-T. I'm going to try to suss out what kind of person L is. Did L spell anywho with a W-H-O or an H-O-O?

Well, what's your guess? She's nerdy giddy over fallout shelters, so I'm going to guess W-H-O. You are correct. Yes. Yes, thank you. Always one word, A-N-Y-W-H-O. Yeah, because I think that that suggests

a certain amount of attention to rules and details. Note that she didn't take the fallout shelter sign even though she could have, and anywho-H-O-O is much more like Whimsicle and like, I'll take my shoes off and roll down a hill even though I'm in my 50s kind of thing. Right, but she also believes that masks save lives, so, you know. Right.

Attention to rule and details. Well, thanks a lot, L. That's fantastic, and we appreciate hearing from you. Kudos to resisting temptation. And yes, wear a mask and go vote. Boy, oh boy. We've ticked a lot of people off with this episode, Chuck.

If we've ticked you off, we want to hear from you. Be nice, but sure, of course we want to hear from you. You can email us, and if you are happy with it, you can email us too. Either way, send it off to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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