Today, Explained - The Purge

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

More than 50,000 voters in Georgia have found themselves on a “pending list.” One candidate for governor is responsible for it. The other is fighting it. The outcome could turn Georgia purple and make Stacey Abrams the first black woman to run an American state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Patricia Murphy. I'm a writer for The Daily Beast. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia, and I've been reporting on the Georgia governor's race. And that's a pretty good one, right? It looks like it's going to be exciting and historic either way. So it's historic because Stacey Abrams, who is the Democratic nominee, is the first woman of color to be a nominee for a statewide election like the governor's race in Georgia. The race itself is also a lot closer than many governor's races that we've seen in recent years. The Republican Party has really dominated statewide elections since 2002. And this is really the closest governor's race or statewide election that we've seen in some time. Tell me a bit more about Stacey Abrams, her background, her policies, all that. Stacey Abrams was minority leader in the Georgia State House,

the highest ranking African-American official in the state. She's a well-known quantity in the state of Georgia and has chosen in this race to diverge from past Democratic nominees for governor. Most of the times when you see somebody running statewide in Georgia, especially for the governor's office, it's sort of a battle between two centrists. And she's a very outspoken progressive. By electing a progressive in 2018, we can prevent another decade of gerrymandering, expand Medicaid, decriminalize poverty, and protect voting rights. And that's just the beginning. She's a really just no kidding progressive, I would say. And so that's different for this state as well.

Tell me about the guy standing in the other corner, Brian Kemp. So Brian Kemp is a conservative Republican. He has been the Secretary of State since 2010, elected in 2010 rather. During the course of the Republican nominating process, Kemp came blazing out of the gates with a television ad that most of your listeners have probably seen. It was him polishing his rifle next to a teenage boy, and he was joking with him about dating his daughter. I'm Brian Kemp. This is Jake.

Two things if you're going gonna date one of my daughters. Respect. And? A healthy appreciation for the Second Amendment, sir. And so the image of a nominee and a gun sort of set the tone for the Brian Kemp campaign. The lieutenant governor of Georgia was expected to be the nominee and Kemp came kind of out of nowhere with the support of Donald Trump. Suddenly, in a race that is typically between two centrists, we have an extremely conservative Republican and a very progressive Democrat battling out in a state that is kind of seen as trending more purple. So it'll be a fascinating test case this year and then for 2020 as well. It sounds like these two candidates present a really clear choice for Georgia voters and that there isn't even that much overlap on their policy positions. Is there one policy that really synthesizes both of their platforms?

You don't have to look far. The issue of voting rights is the issue that Kemp has been working on as Georgia's Secretary of State. Stacey Abrams has run a nonprofit to register new Georgia voters in the state for many years. This has been the issue for both of these two candidates for the last eight to ten years at least. And it has really become a flashpoint in the race itself. Look no further than voting rights and you will see the DNA of each of these candidates. What has Brian Kemp done in terms of voting rights since he's been Secretary of State? So he has done a lot to make it easier to register to vote online in a lot of cases.

He created online voter registration, which has been very helpful to younger voters in the state and anybody with access to a computer. However, the most sort of visible things that he's done as secretary of state has been a purge of the voter rules in the name of voter integrity and integrity of the ballot. I think hardworking Georgians should decide who their governor is, not people here illegally like my opponent wants.

Atlanta is a very transient city. It's not unusual to have a lot of people coming and going and moving out of the state. So he has said it's a necessary thing to do to clean up the voter rolls, to make sure that there aren't people on the rolls who shouldn't be. But there's a lot of concern among minority rights groups that if you're purging more than a million people from the rolls, which she has done, that you are going to invariably purge people who are registered voters and legal voters. And is there any evidence that that's happening in Georgia?

There has already been some evidence, a lot of local reporting, that people have just checked their registration online and they're not on there and they don't know why. And because they've been voting, they haven't changed their name. Nothing really is different. And why am I not able to vote anymore? What has gotten a lot of attention recently has been the state's exact match law. What's that? That was a law that was passed in 2017 by the Georgia legislature and really championed by Brian Kemp. And it says that when you register to vote or if during these voter purges, if your voter registration does not match exactly your existing government documents, now you're on a pending voter list

and you need to do more to prove to the Secretary of State's office that you are who you say you are. Now, basically, your registration is put on hold and you may not be able to vote. We're not talking about major details like your address. We're talking about simple misspellings, a rogue hyphen, a nickname on one form and your full name on another. And there was an AP report that there are about 53,000 voters on that list. And of that, 80 percent of those are people of color. That obviously raised a lot of red flags for civil rights groups in the states. I've spoken with voters who are on that pending list, and they don't know exactly what to do to get themselves off the pending list. And so going into election day, there's concern there's not enough time to get these people's

pending status taken care of. And even in that case, the people on the list don't know either what they're supposed to do, or they don't know what's wrong. They've called different state offices, and they're not getting the response to sort of get this resolved. So that's the concern that's going on in the state right now. Because Brian Kemp championed that legislation, and Stacey Abrams opposed that legislation, it's obviously become a big flashpoint in the race itself. Where exactly did this idea for an exact match standard come from? Is that homegrown in Georgia? In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act. We'll hear argument first this morning in case 1296, Shelby County versus Holder. That

required states like Georgia to get pre-approval to make any changes having to do with access to voting. Any racial discrimination in voting is too much. But our country has changed in the past 50 years. Once the Supreme Court struck down that language, Georgia was free to go ahead and make changes to the code. This decision represents a serious setback for voting rights and has the potential to negatively affect millions of Americans across the country.

And so the Secretary of State's office, along with the Republican legislature, put the exact match language into the code and passed it in 2017. So that's where it came from. So what exactly will exact match mean for voters on November 6th? Anybody whose voter registration document, you know, that you fill out when you're getting a new driver's license or if you've actually filled out a voter registration application. If the name on that document does not match existing state documents in your name, then those have been put on a pending list. Asian Americans, if their last name is listed first or first listed last, you could also point to women who are either married or divorced and choose to change their name. I can give you an example of a young woman I spoke with. She's a new citizen. She was sworn in as a U.S. citizen earlier this year. When she checked, the Secretary of State's office to see if she was registered was flagged as pending.

She thinks that's because she is Latina and she, on previous government documents, had listed her mother's name as a part of her last name. On her voter registration, she listed it as her middle name. She thinks that's why it's been flagged, although she doesn't know. So what does that suggest? It's mostly women and minorities that this is going to affect? Yes, and the EAP report sort of backed that up. 80% of the names on the pending list are people of color. They didn't break it down by gender,

but there's good reason to think that women who changed their names in that period also would probably be people who were flagged. And so the AP report backed up what Democrats were worried about in the first place, was that even though the law applies to everybody, it has ended up applying differently to groups of people with names that are not traditional Western male names. Sounds like me and my super hard to spell last name might have a hard time voting in Georgia right now. What's the point of this? What's the argument being made for doing this? The argument being made for doing it by Brian Kemp himself is that it's about voter integrity,

that there should be no problem if you're just using your name, you should match up with who you are in the state database. Anyone who meets the requirements that's on the pending list, all they have to do is do the same thing that you and I at home have to do. Go to your polling location, show your government ID, and you can vote. It doesn't really allow for the fact that the state database could be wrong, or that your names are being transposed or you've changed your name and somehow it's just not getting matched up. Ryan Kemp is both the Secretary of State and the Republican nominee for governor, both a candidate and the person who's going to certify the ballots. That has been raised to me as a real concern among voters to say, I just don't

know that this standard is being applied fairly, nor that the votes will be counted fairly. And that's when you get into just a huge, huge problem in a state where people are losing confidence that their votes are going to be counted. Yeah, that sounds bananas. Just to be clear here, the candidate for governor will have to certify the election if his opposition comes out with more votes. And at the same time, he is promoting legislation that is making it harder for people to vote. Yes. He says he's making it harder for illegal voters to vote. Is there a history of a problem with illegal voting in Georgia? There's not a significant history of a problem with illegal voting in Georgia. I think this

is a national talking point in a push for tighter access to the polls. There's really very little independent reporting that there's any kind of massive voter fraud or any significant voter fraud or any insignificant voter fraud happening. How does Stacey Abrams feel about her fate as the possible governor of Georgia being in the hands of her opponent? She's called on him to resign his position. She says it frequently, almost every chance she gets that he should have resigned. Quote, Brian Kemp needs to resign his position so that Georgia voters can have confidence that their secretary of state competently and impartially oversee this election. There's also, I think, a very fine line that she needs to walk in not making Georgia voters feel like there's

no point in voting, that their vote won't be counted anyway. So what's the point of going to the polls? And so when I have gone to report and visited with Abrams volunteers or volunteers for the Democratic Party, they're telling me that they talk to people on the phone to call and say, have you registered to vote? Are you voting early? And they've heard from voters to say, why should I vote? I don't even think my vote's going to be counted. So it's an area that can be really tricky for the Democrats, but it's kind of most important for the state itself

to make sure that those votes are counted properly. It's also really important to know that Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp have been on the opposite sides of the voting rights issue for years and years and years. He very recently has accused her of trying to register undocumented immigrants to vote. So my question is, why are you encouraging people to break the law for you in this election? Of bringing in outside agitators who he says are responsible for making accusations about the nature of the exact match law. This is not their first rodeo, and it's not the first fight they've had over this.

This is a man who had someone arrested for helping her blind father cast a ballot. He raided the offices of organizations to stop them from registering voters. That type of voter suppression feeds the narrative because voter suppression isn't only about blocking the vote. It's also about creating an atmosphere of fear, making people worry that their votes won't count. So they're really going back to where they've always been on this issue. For the Georgia governor's race to come down to a worry about voting rights, for a law that he championed, the same law that she opposed and voted against.

In many ways, this is where, you know, the governor's race was always going to end up. This disconnect between Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams on voter laws feels very much of the moment, Georgia 2018. But it has everything to do with history. That's next on Today Explained. Maybe you've heard of a guy named Jad Abumrad. He's like the godfather of podcasts. He's the only guy who's ever won a MacArthur Genius Award for making podcasts. He makes Radiolab. He makes More Perfect.

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It's also known as praying the gay away. It's treatment to turn gay people straight. In this new podcast, Unerased, people who have been through this process tell their stories. It's being made by Jad, which means you should listen. Unerased, hear the trailer now. Subscribe.

New episodes start coming out on November 2nd. How long has this kind of voter suppression, voter purging, whatever it might be called, been going on in Georgia? It sounds like this isn't the first incident. I mean, to be very honest, and it's not a flippy answer, it really is as old as the state itself and the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act and Jim Crow laws. It is so deeply embedded in the state concerns about unequal access to the polls for African Americans versus white Georgians. And it's something that was at one time very on the open and very deliberate. And then it's newly in the headlines nationally right now, but it's a story that has never ended in Georgia. How bad were things before the Voting Rights Act?

I mean, my goodness, you know, there were poll taxes. Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, people stood in unmovable line. Sometimes people were asked to cut the number of jelly beans in a jar. Literacy tests. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, college professors flunked the so-called literacy test. Voter intimidation at the polls, either overt or more subversive. Many people were jailed, beaten, and some was even killed for trying to register and vote. Georgia also used to count counties instead of people in statewide elections.

It was called the county unit system. It was largely seen as a way for rural, more white counties to count more in statewide elections. And that changed in 1962 as civil rights leaders raised many objections to it because it really was seen as being a deliberate way to have less influence from Georgia's more populous, more diverse counties in the Atlanta metro area in particular. So how did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 change the situation in Georgia?

Well, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 changed a lot in Georgia. It not only required full and equal access to the polls for every citizen of the state, it also codified into law that the Department of Justice needs to give preclearance to the state of Georgia for any changes that the state makes, either in access to the polls or any legislation having to do with voting. There was a change to that in 2013 when the Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Voting Rights Act that said the Department of Justice would not need to give preapproval to those kinds of changes. So now the court is saying the test you had in place is outdated. It goes back to 1965.

So much has changed. Our culture has changed. Our society has changed. If you're going to do this, you have to rewrite the test, if you will. And certainly we've seen a number of changes to legislation in Georgia having to do with voting, including the exact match law in 2017. All of that's happened since the Supreme Court struck down that portion of the law. Have there been voter suppression tactics used in recent years in Georgia?

Outright voter suppression is not something that we hear about in kind of in modern times in Georgia. However, as the election in Georgia draws closer, as early voting has started, we've heard just smaller examples of groups not having equal access to the polls. There was a group of African American voters on their way to the polls in North Georgia from a senior center. We've got a rally inside. People are singing and chanting. You're on your way to the polls.

We're on our way to the polls. Just as we get ready to pull off, the bus gets stopped. The director of the center came out and stop flagged the bus down. That's when we were told that someone had passed by, saw the seniors getting on the bus, called the county commissioner's office. The county administrator had called the director and said those folks need to get off the bus now. The bus was stopped. News Channel 6 spoke with Jefferson County Administrator Adam Brad about why seniors were told

after getting on the bus that they had to get off before going to vote. That's a political event. We're during early voting in a very contentious election. That's a political event, and we don't allow that. You just don't like to see a large group of any minority on a bus stop from voting. It just is something that, in a state with our history, for African Americans, just brings it back. We did get a letter from the Secretary of State's office, and they did say that it's under investigation. How do people in Georgia feel about these laws right now? I mean, you've got Brian Kemp, who's the guy behind them, and you've got Stacey Abrams, who's fighting them.

Where do the people stand on this? Well, I think as with a lot of things across the country, how you see this issue has a lot to do with your partisan affiliation and probably your life experience, to be fair. If somebody has been living in Georgia their whole life, they're white. It's never been a problem to vote. It's not something that really raises a red flag for them. For African-Americans, some people that I interviewed for a recent story talked about being the first or only black kid in their high school the year that Georgia schools were integrated. Their chemistry teacher who was white didn't give

them the homework assignments, so they failed chemistry. This is very real personal recent history for a number of African-Americans. And so to believe that they could be on the list because their name is unusual, or to see groups, Latinos or Asian Americans or African Americans, affected differently by a law that the Secretary of State is pushing. It just, I think, increases their anxiety about the vote and also, in some cases, makes them less likely to vote, which in itself is sort of an indirect form of voter suppression. But I think it has a lot to do with your life experience as to whether you're really personally worried about it. So who do you think is going to win?

I have no idea. Nobody knows. It's not been seen as viable for a Democrat to be elected governor in Georgia, at least since 2002. So the fact that it's even close is a real testament to the changing nature of the state and the changing nature of the state's politics. Testament to the voter turnout operation that CeCe Abrams has been building for the last decade. And kind of a testament to the changing politics in the state. The fact that she could be elected governor, I don't think it's a situation that maybe even she herself would have believed possible four years ago. Even if she didn't win, it's a major change in the state that she could win. And that in itself is going to be notable no matter what happens on Election Day.

Patricia Murphy is a writer for The Daily Beast. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Caitlin Tiffany and Ashley Carmen, it's been a week. We've been talking about your Verge podcast, Why'd You Push That Button, about all the conflicts that technology presents every day. Caitlin, yesterday we heard about one of your favorites from the archives. Ashley, you're up.

So we have a bunch of episodes, but one of my favorites is kind of nerdy. It's about why you ignored someone's Facebook event invite. So I don't know if you realize this. One, a surprising number of people didn't realize that if you click on the Facebook event and look at it, other people can see that you've seen it. Yeah. We actually talked to a Facebook product manager who explains why that dang scene receipt exists. Because it's ruining lives. I can't tell you. You have those in the podcast. Where do I find it? Oh, all the places you normally find a podcast. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Cast, Stitcher,

Google it. Cool. Google it. Why'd you push that button? Thanks, Caitlin. Thanks, Ashley. Bye-bye.