Background reading:

• “College Students Already Faced Barriers to Voting—And States Are Adding More” — Barbara Rodriguez, The 19th
• “Hurricanes and Voter Purges Leave Voters High and Dry” — Ava Slocum and Alina Arsenault

Transcript:

00:00:13 Michele Goodwin:

Welcome to Fifteen Minutes of Feminism, part of our On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine platform. As you know, we report, rebel and we tell it just like it is. On our shows, we center your concerns about rebuilding our nation and advancing the promise of equality. And as you know in Fifteen Minutes of Feminism, we count the minutes in our own feminist turf and we jump right in. And in this episode, we are talking about voter suppression and the 2024 elections with Anthony Michael Kreis. You know him because he has been with us before. 

He is a professor of law and political science with Georgia State University. His research examines the relationship between social change in the law focusing on the relationship between the American political history and the development of law over time. And he’s been joining us to breakdown what’s been happening in the Trump trials, he’s been talking with us about the elections, and in this one we’re diving right in about what we can expect on both of those counts for 2024 and we are only weeks away. Sit back and take a listen.

Anthony, as per usual, it is such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for joining us and of course these are really urgent times. We’ve had presidential debates. After one of them we saw a candidate, the lead candidate for the Democratic Party, step down, that’s current President Joe Biden, and within 24 hours he had announced that he endorses Kamala Harris who is the Vice President. And then we’ve seen another debate, a debate that many have said is really a tale of two different, cities, countries, in many different ways. The current vice president has called Mr. Trump unserious. 

At the same time, Mr. Trump in the debate has claimed that there are cats and dogs being eaten by people in Springfield and the results have been quite harmful to the people of Springfield where there are families that have been threatened, where there have been bomb threats and violence directed at individuals. There’s so much to explore over a short period of time, so let’s just get to it. You’re based in Georgia, which has had some of the most consequential and widely reported instances of voter suppression, which is another backdrop beyond these debates. Does voter suppression both this year and also in recent years, I’m wondering what are you seeing? What’s happening on the ground in Georgia? What do we know?

00:03:09 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Well, I think that we’re really in, and as you I think correctly identified, a really perilous moment in our politics. And in large part because the kind of, I guess, dynamics, which lend to incidents of political violence and voter suppression and the rest. You know, the kind of motivations that people might have to engage in that seem to be laid out with increasing kind of I guess, well, let’s just put it this way, Donald Trump seems to not be really doing his part to cool things, cool the temperature down, right? It’s just ratcheting it up, ratcheting it up, ratcheting it up. 

And I think you know while that part is very much cultural, and there’s a lot to talk about on that, right, we could have days to talk about that, the other side of the coin is that there are people who are now attempting to grab these kind of structural institutions that have oversight power of elections and attempting to kind of rework some of the rules in Donald Trump’s favor. And part of that is, I think, coming from a place that’s also not unrelated to that cultural phenomenon, right, because so much of these allegations that came out of Georgia and some of these other swing states in 2020 about voter fraud, and allegations of wrongdoing and misconduct were really focused on places of Black political power, right? 

And so, there are, you know, some of these, the big lie and the election conspiracies that we saw lodged towards major metro areas, but in particular Atlanta and Fulton County, right? These conspiracy theories cannot be disaggregated from the racial cultural dynamics that, you know, we’ve already, that we kind of very loosely brushed on like the things that are happening in Springfield, Ohio. 

00:04:58 Michele Goodwin:

Well, it looks like, four years ago we did an episode in October of 2020 that was Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Voting Rights and Voter Suppression. I had Kristen Clarke on that episode, Judge Glenda Hatchett, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson and so one could say, well, okay that was four years maybe we’re doing better now. But here’s a headline, Lone Democrat on Georgia Election Board Issues ‘Chaos’ Warning. What is that about? Can you give us some insight in terms of what the concerns are that are being raised in Georgia? And really after that across the country? 

00:05:41 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Yeah. So, as a result of kind of, you know, conspiratorial dynamics and you know these baseless claims, evidence-free claims of voter fraud and voter irregularities, the General Assembly in Georgia did some, you know, legislating that cracked down on the availability of drop boxes for voters to use, the ability to easily get a vote-by-mail ballot was, you know, that kind of ease that people had in 2020 was made harder. So, there were, in fact, you know measures that were taken and put into statutory law that made voting slightly harder in Georgia. 

But the thing that’s happening now, because that was all settled really more or less in 2021 and we haven’t had, you know, wide overhauls for the most part, but there are two kind of important things that have occurred. Which are, one, a sustained effort by individuals who want to challenge the eligibility of voters and go to local county boards of election and say I have this list of a thousand people who I don’t think actually live here. And oftentimes, you know, they’re getting data from these non-reputable sources and trying to make claims that are essentially evidence-free, or very thin on evidence, that people who are registered to vote are not, in fact, eligible to vote and should be stricken off the rolls. 

So, we have that. But I think the new phenomenon is with the state board of election where we had, you know, in Georgia we had basically a board that was moderate Republicans and there was a Democratic Party appointee and you know they were pretty much kind of steadying the course and not rocking the boat. They were doing what they were supposed to do as a state elections board, which is to promulgate rules to effectuate state law and make it uniform in terms of practice and policies from county to county. And they, I think, were very much aligned kind of ideologically with Brad Raffensperger, who is our secretary of state, who a lot of people might remember was the subject of a phone call from Donald Trump for 11,000 of us who changed. 

You know, Brad Raffensperger I think a lot of people have serious criticisms of him, to the extent that he supported some of these restrictive voting laws in 2021, but he’s also not an election denier either, right? So, he’s not a perfect person from a voting rights perspective, in my view, but he’s not a conspiracy theorist, right? He counts the…

00:08:15 Michele Goodwin:

He’s not going to give away however many votes were requested of him by the former president on the recorded call that we’ve played on this podcast and that has been heard on other major networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, and all others. 

00:08:33 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s he’s not going, you know, he’s not going to, to give credence to this idea that, you know, Venezuelan dictators are changing tallies and there’s, you know, Italian satellites that are doing god knows what. I mean, that is not something he’s going to tolerate and he’s not going to give refuge to these kinds of just nutcase conspiracy theories. So, that was kind of…

00:09:04 Michele Goodwin:

All right, so he’s not, and we’ve seen that and so, in fact, there is still ongoing litigation. It’s not over, even though there was the investigation with regards to Fani Willis. That’s still ongoing, that hasn’t stopped, right?

00:09:20 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Yeah, that, the criminal case is still, well, right now it’s tied up in the appellate process in the Georgia Court of Appeals, but that is still very much an alive case, although it’ll take some time to actually get to trial, or anywhere near a trial. So, that’s still ongoing and he was certainly a key, and will be a key, part of that in also probably a federal trial too. But you know the way that the state board of election runs, right, there’s a gubernatorial appointment, there is an appointment from the state senate, the state of House of Representatives, and then each major political party gets an appointment too. 

And you know once you start to have some people roll off the board their replacements, partic, you know, the governor’s appointment and the Democratic Party’s appointment were very much still that kind of old board mindset, right? They’re not, they’re not going to, they’re not going to lean into conspiracy theories, right. They are very much by the book and trying to make elections easy to administer and equal from county to county or jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some of the new memberships post-turnover are much more inclined to, if not outright, believe some of these conspiracy theories, they’re willing to kind of entertain them, right? Or at least entertain the people or make people who believe that the vote or election was stolen in 2020 to give them…

00:10:45 Michele Goodwin:

Sure. 

00:10:48 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Yeah.

00:10:49 Michele Goodwin:

So, as that’s taking place there are people who are deeply affected by this and Georgia is not alone, right? We are seeing in other places where the same kind of conspiratorial type of thinking is taking place and at the end of the day we’re talking about a kind of voter suppression, a voter suppression, it’s not a kind of, but a voter suppression that still challenges the right to vote of certain communities in this country, and that has historically been Black people, Black and Brown people. It’s undeniable, right? 

We’ve seen this in video footage, we see it in photographs of the civil rights era, we knew this coming out of slavery and into reconstruction, we know it in Georgia given the amount of polling places that have shuttered making it more difficult, we know the Georgia laws that now deny people the ability to get a piece of bread or a cup of water as they’re standing in line. We know that in Georgia, but not only in Georgia are there people who can be in and out in five minutes voting while at the same time there are people who live in communities where they may be in line three, four, five, six hours at a time and Georgia is not alone. 

There was a report from CNN that at least 11 states have enacted restrictive voting laws this year and that was published in just June of 2024. So, what you’re talking about in terms of what’s happening in Georgia, we also see happening in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. And according to this report from CNN, the laws restricting voting includes action such as curbing access to mail-in voting, implementing stricter voter ID requirements for voter registration or in-person voting, per their report. 

And according to other data, at least four states have enacted five laws directed at election interference including making it a crime for an election official to send an unsolicited mail ballot in a place like Arkansas and other places that have enacted, such strict requirements like that of Florida, Georgia, your state, and South Dakota. So, before I let you go, because 15 minutes goes really quickly counted in feminist terms, but what’s motivating the proliferation of these laws?

00:13:29 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Well, I think a large part of it is, is just really race. I think it’s the new budding coalition that Joe Biden forged in 2020, which brought together a realignment of sorts, where you have, you know, voters in the urban centers of the United States coming together with voters in the suburban parts of the country, you know, which normally or historically, you know, since the Reagan Revolution, you had a bit of a split, right, between urban and suburban voters. And now that you see this coalition forging, and largely along educational lines too, right, that’s a big part of this, you know, there is just a disbelief that, that kind of realignment was happening. 

And part of the reason why Georgia was so hyperfocused by Donald Trump, or Donald Trump was hyperfocused on it, I think it was just because of disbelief that you could have white suburban voters in Atlanta Metro, in the Atlanta Metro Area, forming a coalition with Black voters who are about 30 percent of the electorate and who came out in, you know, great numbers to support Joe Biden. And so, the idea that, like, Georgia, right, this state that I guess Republicans just thought they would never lose in their lifetimes, the fact that it’s now competitive and in fact out of reach is, I think, a huge, it’s a huge shift in our politics. 

And so, of course, that dynamic is being replicated everywhere, right? Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Montgomery County, or you look at Michigan and you know the Detroit suburbs. I mean, this is something that we’re seeing, you know, it’s not sectional in a way, right? It is a national phenomenon and I think that, that realignment is causing a lot of consternation among Donald Trump and his supporters, and it’s helped fuel the conspiracy theories, and it’s something that I think that Donald Trump has tried to capitalize and has made worse by amplifying some of worst actors amongst us. 

00:15:31 Michele Goodwin:

And you’re so prescient in terms of what you’ve just offered and you’re not alone, right? Sean Morales-Doyle recently, in the LA Times, wrote too, just to the point that you made, that it’s too simple to say that voter suppression laws spring solely from naked Republican partisanship, that they also arise from racial animus. And so, as we close out, and just before we do, you know, we always ask about silver linings, but it’s hard Michael in the face of this. But you have been interviewed by many different platforms and one of the things that you’ve talked about, recently you’ve said, who can defend voting rights now? 

An appeals court ruling sharply limited lawsuits looking, looking ahead to, to the election, right? So, there’s the sort of question that, you know, earlier this year civil rights groups chose not to appeal a ruling from a lower court. That it determined that only the federal government, and not private citizens or civil rights groups, could enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How is this going to impact the legal landscape around voter suppression? And I know that this is an issue that you’ve spoken to.

00:16:50 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Yeah, I think the lesson here is the courts are not going to do the job that people once expected them to do. And you know not only do you have the Eighth Circuit’s opinion that really limited, in many respects, the ability to enforce the Voting Rights Act, but that we have recently the Fifth Circuit is going to hear a case out of Mississippi about election rules too and that could potentially affect this year’s voting. Now, of course, if the Supreme Court upholds it’s, you know, sticks to its word on this principle called the Purcell principle, right, which basically says you can’t change election rules too close to an election, hopefully, you know, that won’t, the potential catastrophe to mix things up and mess things up won’t come to fruition, but the danger is there. 

And so, I think the lesson is that courts and litigation aren’t the end all be all, in fact sometimes it might be more dangerous to pursue a litigation strategy than it is to pursue different strategies that the key here is getting people to register to vote and to vote. 

00:17:48 Michele Goodwin:

With that then Professor Anthony Michael Kreis, we reached that point of our show where we ask about silver linings. And you know as they say for some people it’s hard to ferret that out in a time such as this where we’re at a time that is incredibly unusual. It’s the first time in our nation’s history that we have a candidate for one of the major parties who happens to be a Black woman who is also of Indian heritage. 

For some people, it’s a dream that they could not have imagined before. At the same time, for Donald Trump he has a dream of that people could not have imagined before for millions and millions of people. And yet at the same time, there are so many millions of Americans that feel as if there is a very deep divide in our country. How out of all of this can we find something to be hopeful about or a silver lining?

00:18:55 Anthony Michael Kreis:

It’s really hard sometimes. But I do think the one thing that I find to be incredibly hopeful is, you know, for all the kind of just deeply divisive things that have been said by, particularly by Donald Trump and JD Vance, and you know that seems to just plaque us every day, right, the bitter back and forth between everybody. You know, the one thing I think that I find hopeful is when you look at the interests of people, particularly young voters, and I hate to bring up Taylor Swift right now, but I will, which is when she endorsed Kamala Harris and included a link to, right, the government’s voting registration website hundreds of thousands of people clicked that link. 

Now, who knows how many registrations actually came out of that, but it shows a deep interest in actually learning and potentially registering to vote. And we see a huge number of people who are now first time, or registering to be first time, voters in this election and I think that, right, for me, as somebody who cares about the law of democracy, more people voting is always good. And so, I just think that, that intense interest in getting involved in the process, right, you have hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country too who have signed up to work on particularly, I think, on Kamala Harris’s campaign, right. 

There’s this great enthusiasm as she announced her decision to run. I mean hundreds of thousands of people signed up and that’s really great. Like civic engagement is something that we need more of and the fact that there is such intense interest and you know, to me, like that’s the greatest thing that we could ask for right now. 

00:20:36 Michele Goodwin:

With that I want to thank you so much for joining us today and the myriad of times that you’ve shared your wisdom on our show. Our listeners love hearing from you, so thank you so much for joining us. I very much look forward to the next time.

00:20:53 Anthony Michael Kreis:

Thank you. 

00:20:55 Michele Goodwin:

Guests and listeners, that’s it for today’s episode of On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine. I want to thank each of you for tuning in for the full story and engaging with us. We hope you’ll join us again for our next episode where you know we’ll be reporting, rebelling, and telling it just like it is. For more information about what we discussed today, head to msmagazine.com and be sure to subscribe. 

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This has been your host Michele Goodwin reporting, rebelling, and telling it just like it is. On the Issues with Michele Goodwin is a Ms. Magazine joint production. Michele Goodwin and Kathy Spillar are our executive producers. Our producers for this episode are Roxy Szal, Oliver Haug, and also Allison Whelan. Our social media content producer is Sophia Panigrahi. The creative vision behind our work includes art and design by Brandi Phipps, editing by Natalie Holland, and music by Chris J. Lee.