The NPR Politics Podcast - The Supreme Court Is Expected To Make It Harder For People To Vote

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

The Supreme Court seems poised to uphold voting restrictions in Arizona, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to try to make it more difficult to vote for years to come. This comes at the same time as the House passed a bill expanding and protecting voting rights. Civil rights remain at the center of the debate over who has access to the vote. This episode: White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe, voting and disinformation reporter Miles Parks, and legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Howdy, this is Greg Cahoon in Greensboro, North Carolina. My family and I are at the old Woolworths Building, which is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum. This is where four students from NC A&T started the Greensboro sit-ins at a whites-only lunch counter in 1960. This podcast was recorded at 1153 a.m. on Thursday, March 4th, 2021. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, here's the show.

Wow, that's amazing. Greensboro, of course, I'm from North Carolina, so I have family in Greensboro, so know that very well. Yeah, special place. And it's appropriate for what we are talking about today. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting and disinformation. And I'm Nina Totenberg and I cover the courts. The Supreme Court heard arguments this week on a landmark voting rights case that could open the door for more states to pass laws which make it harder to vote.

Access to the ballot, the ability to vote, has long been at the heart of the civil rights fights in this country. Because oftentimes when you start peeling back the layers of some of these restrictions, who is less likely to have a voter ID, who may need to vote on the weekend because they're not going to be able to get off on a Tuesday. These types of restrictions fall harder on marginalized communities, people of color. And so that's why people will view this as a civil rights issue. Right, Nina? And it's very interesting. You're correct, of course. But it's very interesting that the whole notion of the right to vote as a central empowerment and a guarantee that would overcome those restrictions you were talking about, was embodied in the 1965

Voting Rights Act, which was without doubt the most successful civil rights piece of legislation in modern times. And it worked the way it was supposed to until 2013, when the Supreme Court, by a five to four vote, struck down the key provision of the act, which required places that had a history of discrimination to get permission from the Justice Department if they were going to change voting rules. And when the court struck that down, that meant it was sort of a green light to places that wanted to make it more difficult for certain groups of people to vote. And within days, that started to happen. And there was only one section left of the Voting Rights Act after that, one enforcement section left, and that's so-called

Section 2, which was at issue in the Supreme Court this week. And so what is this case about? Well, because this is the main enforcement provision left, and because the other enforcement provision had been what was used before, there's very little that the Supreme Court has said about what the criteria are for striking down a law or a regulation that might make it more difficult for certain groups of people to vote and what the standards are for evaluating that. This was a case from Arizona that involved two provisions, one barred counting a vote that was cast in the wrong precinct, and the other barred collection of absentee ballots, and in a state that has huge rural areas, for example, the Navajo Nation, is 27,000 square miles. And many people live nowhere near a post office, don't have a mailbox.

They're not on a postal route. And so barring collection by somebody other than a relative or a caregiver means, at least the civil rights groups claim it means, that many people will not be able to vote. Because if they have to go to the polls, they don't have a car. There's no way to do it. Yeah. And Nina, during the arguments, there was a moment that I saw, I'm wondering if you can kind of expound on it a little bit, where I think Justice Barrett was asking the Republicans, basically, why are you here? Why are you here? I mean, this, this, why are you, what, what role does the Republican Party play in this?

I'm interested in knowing why the RNC is in the case. So, you know, the DNC had standing and the district court said that it had standing to challenge the out-of-precinct policy because the policy placed a greater imperative on Democratic organizations to educate their voters and because the policy harmed its members who would have voted out of precinct. What's the interest of the Arizona RNC here in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct voter ballot disqualification rules on the books? Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.

And every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us. It's the difference between winning an election 50 to 49 and losing an election 50 to 49. She said that real quick. Never mind. It seems like she didn't want to go, because it seems like what he's saying is if it's easier for these Democrats to vote, that makes it harder for Republicans to win or people who are more likely to vote Democrat. Because for as long as any of us have been alive and sentient, until about eight or ten years ago, Republicans and Democrats, minus the Dixiecrats, were united in wanting to expand voting rights. And the whole thrust of what politicians said publicly was, we want more people to vote, not fewer people to vote. And now that is no longer true. The Republican Party is now the party of seeking to restrict voting, as Democrats would say, or as they say, making sure that there's no fraud in voting when there is no evidence of

massive fraud in voting. Right. We've been seeing this saying the quiet part out loud a lot more recently. I mean, you think it was it feels like 10 years ago, but something like six months ago, President Trump did an interview where he was talking about the reasons he opposed expanding funding for vote by mail efforts in response to the pandemic. And he said the same thing, basically, that if we do this, if they expand vote by mail, then Republicans will never win another election again. So we're seeing more and more of that. The key is, it's all premised around this idea that Democrats are voting illegally, which there's just no evidence to support that claim at a widespread level anywhere in the US. Nina, you listen to the arguments. Sometimes you can get a sense of where the court may be leaning, where the justices may be leaning by their questioning.

Did you get a sense of where this might be headed? Well, I think they're likely 5 unconstitutional in 2013. This part of the statute applies nationwide. So the question is, really, what do we look at to determine whether the restriction is fair or unfair? And there are a lot of examples you can look at now that are being enacted by particularly Republican-dominated state legislatures to restrict. And those are the kinds of things that are going to come back to the court. And if something, if a restriction falls, you know, disproportionately on the African American population, or, you know, the Hispanic population, is that, could that be considered a restriction

that should not be allowed? The conservatives on this court have not been very friendly to minority groups and their attempts to prove that things fall more heavily on them. You know, what will they think, for example, of the Georgia legislature, which is about to enact a law that makes it much more difficult to vote on Sundays. And when we can see, in fact, that Souls to the Polls is a program that has worked very well for the black community where people go to church on Sunday and then go vote. That's a great point because we're going to talk more about that. that, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about what's happening at the state levels on voting and what happened in the House in a move to try to expand voting rights. Some days reading a bunch of headlines just isn't enough. You need to let the news sink in. On Consider This, NPR's new daily news podcast, we can help you do that. Each day in about 10 minutes, you can find out not just what happened, but why and what it means. Consider this,

new episodes every weekday afternoon from NPR. And we're back. Just last night, the House passed a major election reform and voting rights bill. What's in this bill that passed? Just about everything, Aisha. If you have thought about anything that Democrats have ever mentioned about wanting to improve voting, it is in this bill. It has expanded access to early voting. It has expanded access to absentee voting. It has online voter registration being required of all states. Right now, only about 40 states allow online voter registration. And then beyond that, it also expands independent redistricting commissions, makes it so gerrymandering would be potentially less of an issue, is their idea. It also would overhaul our campaign finance system. So it has

a lot of things. The question is, you know, what is actually realistic in terms of becoming federal law at this point? So my memory may be a little bit bad, but I feel like something like this passed in the last Congress. Am I right about that? It passed in the House and didn't go anywhere in the Senate. Exactly. Yeah, this was kind of Democrats effort in 2018, when they retook the house to basically say voting rights are a priority. So they passed this bill called HR one, which is very similar to the bill they passed yesterday, had all of these voting reforms in it, and then it was just completely dead in a Mitch McConnell controlled

Senate. Obviously, everything's a little bit different right now because it's no longer a Mitch McConnell-controlled Senate. That being said, there is no real chance that this entire bill goes anywhere in the Senate, but it's definitely a possibility down the road that some of this becomes law through filibuster adjustments, but that's been happening in states since November when a lot of people voted. Now there's talk of a lot of new restrictions. Can you talk about where some states are headed with these new restrictions? Yeah. The Brennan Center for Justice has been tracking this issue, and they've counted over 250 bills circulating around the country that would in some way restrict voting access. We just saw one pass recently in Iowa that would cut down early voting by nine days, move up the time polls close on Election Day, make it so absentee ballots would need to be in by Election Day instead of just in the mail by the day before Election Day. So things like that are floating around, similar bills in Georgia, Florida. But then on the other side of the coin, there are a lot of

bills out there that would expand voting access. Basically, we're seeing what we thought we would see. We had all of these voting rule changes that were temporary last year as a response to the pandemic. It meant historic voter turnout, but it also meant that legislatures were going to come back into session and they would rethink a lot of these voting laws. And so now we're seeing some of those states, mostly with Republican legislatures, try to find a way to take back some of that voting access from voters. Nina, as you mentioned earlier, I would think that a lot of these, the restrictions and the expansions could be subject to litigation. Do you see that happening? nationally and bars not just intentional discrimination, but discrimination in voting that results in minority groups having less access to the vote. And we're just going to see how limited or expansive the Supreme Court wants to be about that. But here we have legislation that says

something more. It says we have a history in this country of depriving people of color, in particular, of the right to vote. And this law is to make sure that doesn't happen to them. And we'll see if the court is willing to be at all expansive in interpreting that or not. All right, let's leave it there for now. We'll be back tomorrow with our weekly roundup. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Myles Parks. I cover voting and disinformation. And I'm Nina Totenberg, and I cover the courts. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.