Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Fight To Vote 20160528

Regarding president obama should he be labeled correctly that he is not calling the terrorists islamic terrorist . I like what seth myers said about this. This is and hogwarts and president obama is not harry potter. Calling it islamic terrorism doesnt make it go away. The president s argument is isis sees itself as representation of all muslims which is absurd and by calling them islamic terrorists we are just feeding that isis narrative. That is a pretty good argument. However, isis is muslim for the simple fact they call themselves muslim but just because isis is muslim doesnt mean islam is isis. That is where we get tripped up. To say that these actions which are so beyond the pale of anything that could conceivably be called normative islam, that they have anything to do with representing the ideas, views, actions, thoughts of the worlds 1. 6 billion muslims is ridiculous. Host you are speaking at the la times festival of books but your wife is also speaking. Guest that is right, the worlds first micro lending platform, go and check it out, 25 to africa, 98. 5 payback rate, almost 1 billion, 25 increments, Fastest Growing nonprofit in the world. Host she has written a book about this. Guest it is called clay water brick. It is not just about the experience of creating kiva but how to think about poverty, how to think about the poor not as the poor but as entrepreneurs who dont have the opportunity and need that. Host appreciate you being on booktv. When i tune into it on the weekends, usually an author talking about a new release. Watching nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. On cspan they can have a longer conversation and delve into the subject. Booktv weekends, they bring you author after author after author that spotlight the work and fascinating people. I love booktv and i am a cspan fan. You are watching booktv on cspan2. Next up, author michael waldman, the history of Voting Rights in the United States from the founding of the country to presentday issues, from Voter Registration, fraud and Campaign Finance. Thank you so much, Trevor Morrison and everybody at nyu school of law. It is a wonderful institution. I say that as has been mentioned as a proud graduate among the many things i am proudest of his having made good use of orientation. The first year i met my wife liz who is here as well, thank you so much to the faculty, members of the law school to our board of directors which includes dean morrison and others, and thank you to the entire nyu community, a remarkably creative and energetic and mold breaking Academic Institution at a very high level and that is rare and we are grateful for your continuing in that tradition. The great dean of the Law School Long ago, Arthur Vanderbilt once said reform is not for the short winded and that is a tradition we take on. Hopefully not tonight. Really grateful to all of you for being here. As we launch the discussion of my new book the fight to vote, this book reflects not only the research and work i have had a chance to do but the work of the center for justice. You heard a little bit about it. We are privileged to be partly a think tank and partly a Legal Advocacy Group and partly Communications Hub devoted not to the precise specifics of Justice Brennan and his jurisprudence, but his e those that the law above all else must respect Human Dignity and the constitution above all else must be understood as a charter for each generation, we are able to take this charge, we have 20 years at the law school, we are in the fight for Voting Rights and money and politics and the drive to end mass incarceration, this book is part of the battle of ideas, reflect that. I am asked a lot, why do this book now . Why do this book now . This is without question one of the most of all to us, challenging moments for our democracy in many years, we the this is a topsyturvy election with deep public anger and the system manifesting itself in many ways in many directions but the selection we will see 16 states with new voting laws to make it harder to vote for the First Time Since the jim crow era. In effect in a high turnout president ial election. This will be the first president ial election since the United States Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights act, the most successful civil rights statute the country ever had. It is an election where the consequences of Citizens United and other misguided decisions by the Supreme Court are beginning to be felt more and more and more especially at the level below the presidency. In the last Election Voter turnout in the United States dropped to the lowest level in 7 decades. There are pressures on our democracy of the time a kind we have not seen for a long time. There are pressures on the question of his Voice Matters and whether the right to vote is a meaningful thing in a way we have not seen for a long time. The question i wanted to ask in researching and writing this book is was it always this way . Why now . How does this moment compared to the past . What is a usable and learnable history we can draw from . Heres what i found . Todays controversies and fights are intense, they are controversial, they are consequential, but they are not new. This fight to vote has been at the heart of American Life from the beginning. It is a debate that has been at the center of american politics including elections from the beginning. The fight to vote didnt start this year or last year. It didnt start 50 years ago at selma. It has been going on for 240 years from the beginning. It has been long and rowdy and partisan every step of the way and it has always been about more. Than the formal rules of who can pass about it. It is entangled with the role of wealth and money, with class, with the race, and with the many ways politicians and their friends and allies have figured out to rig the fools from the beginning to benefit their cause or their side. How does that story start . The book starts with Thomas Jefferson in philadelphia in the heat of revolution writing the declaration of independences preamble. Of course we know this was a time of insurrection. He wrote memorably that government was only legitimate if it rested on the consent of the governed and of course he wrote while being attended by a 14yearold slave, sally hemmingss brother. The contradictions of american democracy were present at that very moment. At that time, the colonies, america was anything but a democracy. The colonists said they rebelled against britain didnt think that much about who could vote. But the rules were pretty fixed. To vote you had to be a white man who owns property, a certain set amount of property, an amount fixed in the middle ages but the revolution began to break that certainty. The idea that you needed the consent of the governed began to take on a life of its own and even during the revolution, there was a debate about this. It was controversial. Benjamin franklin let a workingmans revolt in pennsylvania. One of the only times there was an actual in the streets pitchfork wielding mob revolution in the American Revolution demanding the right to vote for all men regardless of whether they owned property. Franklin said today a man owns a jackass worth 50 and he is entitled to vote. But before the next election the jackass dies, the man loses his right to vote. Informed me, in who is the right of suffrage . In man or in the jackass . He may not have said jackass either but that is the quote. There are people who understood immediately things have to change. Through every step of the way, some americans have demanded their voice at the table and demanded the right to expand democracy others thought to hold them back, then and now. John adams was aghast at the idea of expanding the right to vote to men without property. He said he was urged to do this in massachusetts and he said it is a terrible idea. Women will demand to vote. Lads will think their rights not enough attended to and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice with every other in all acts of state. There will be no end of it. And he was right. That is pretty good predictions of what happened over the next two centuries. I will talk longer now that my watch is no longer on the podium. The first breakthrough was on the role of wealth, the same debates we are having now over Citizens United. The move to break this idea to be a Property Owner to vote, was a move to enfranchise whites men without property, in effect the White Working Class loomed so large in this election. It was led not by citizens movements but suave political insiders like Martin Van Buren in new york. Van buren, one state senator bet another state senator i bet i can get van buren to give an answer to a question, he asked does the sun rise in the east . Van buren said, as i never awake that early i couldnt say for sure. He was the one who won the right to vote for men without property. There were people fighting to prevent that as well. John randolph of roanoke, exhumed recently by conservative intellectuals, fought against adding to the voting rolls and his motto, i am an aristocrat. I love liberty, i hate equality. He prevented virginia from expanding Voting Rights but by the middle of the 1800s the United States was the most profound democracy the world had ever seen, for the first time mass Political Parties with high voter turnout. Democracy was sort of a fad. It began to feed on itself when people interested there were more people who were left out. The next great breakthrough came during and after the civil war. A war when hundreds of thousands of africanamericans served the union army, when lincoln gave his inaugural address a large part of the audience were africanamericans in uniform. Lincoln for his whole career was opposed to Voting Rights, his first stab at reconstruction, disenfranchise former slaves and enfranchised those who had taken up arms against the country but he changed, he began to change. Two days after the surrender of the south at appomattox lincoln gave his first speech, his big speech about what he wanted to have happened during reconstruction on the second floor window of the white house and he said i have been criticized on this voting issue, people criticized me for not in franchising the former slaves. I now agree, i think people who served in uniform or educated should be able to vote and he gave indications he was going to go further. One member of the audience understood the significance of this Voting Rights shift. John wilkes booth gasped and said that means citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever give. He tried to get the guy next to him to try to shoot lincoln on the spot and when he refused then i will do it and two days later he went to fords theater. That set off the spark. We all know the story, the tragic story of what happened next. The Republican Party, devoted to Voting Rights act, more than the democrats in most of the countrys history pushed through the 15th amendment to give Voting Rights to former slaves. There was a flowering of democracy in the south. Turnout rates among african men in the south approached 90 , hundreds of africanamericans served in congress or the Legislature Even as governor. But a violent response from the ku klux klan and cynical and cowardly deals pulling the army back to the barracks ended that. We know there was a brutal crackdown on voting in the south. It didnt happen right away but by the end. Enfranchisement of africanamericans. In the north similar things happened. The cities of the north were crowded with immigrants, not from mexico, from ireland and italy and europe. This terrified and alarmed the established protestant powers that be at the time. They tried to succeed in crashing down on voting these cities by the immigrant workingclass. John adamss greatgrandson said universal suffrage can only mean in plain english the government of ignorance and place. It means a european and especially celtic proletariat on the atlantic coast, african proletariat on the shores of the gulf, the chinese proletariat in california. That is what they were worried about. They passed a variety of rules that began to suppress turnout among the working class in the north. This period is important to understand not merely because of things like walt whitman writing articles denouncing universal suffrage which is a little too scary but because it reminds us that for all the progress in the general positive direction, that is what happened then. At the same time you had another factor, a new factor, the massive flood of Campaign Money from robber barons of the gilded age from the 1 of that gilded age. By the end of the 1900s democracy was really reeling, moving backwards. What happened next . Is the 20th century began, a lesson for us. There was a response. A period of reform and revitalization we call the progressive era. It focused more than people realize on the question of democracy. They pass two constitutional amendments dealing with voting. The first was their version, one of their versions of Campaign Finance reform. It was the 17th amendment to give the vote to citizens of the United States senate because they felt state legislatures were deeply corrupt in the pockets of the business of the time and Teddy Roosevelt and so many others, but the other which we often overlook has a very significant response, part of their idea you deal with power of new power of money with the vote, it is very easy because we think about women gaining the right to vote, look at textbook, women got the right to vote, it is passed over but it was every bit as fiercely thought, creatively agitated and hard as later gains were. It is a story i learned, amazing to know so many of us dont know this story. Senator falls happened in 1848 when they first said we should have the right to vote but not a lot happened, not until 19101112 that young women, many of them graduate students in england with the Suffrage Movement came back and said we will do something audacious, we will try to pass a constitutional amendment. The day before his president ial inaugural, Woodrow Wilson got off the train in washington dc and nobody was there to greet him. The princeton glee club, the new york times, charitable way to say it is they made up and enthusiasm what they lacked in numbers and wilson and his aides said where are all the people . They were told they were down on pennsylvania avenue. 5000 women were marching for womens suffrage in a remarkable parade. Many in preposterous costumes at least to our eyes. Leading that parade, this is at nyu school of law, leading that parade on a white horse dressed in the costume of a greek goddess and carrying a banner was a dazzling young woman. Her name was ines mulholland. A recent graduate of nyu school of law, a labor lawyer, agitator with a professorship named off of her, nobody knows who she actually was. And 5000 women arrayed behind her and lining pennsylvania avenue, 100,000 men, many of them drunk, they were there for the inauguration. The men started throwing things, they broke through the lines, they assaulted women. 100 women were sent to the hospital, they fought their way it was a huge deal as you can imagine, widely publicized. Police chief in washington dc had to resign his job. It dominated coverage of Woodrow Wilsons inaugural and Public Opinions swung in support of womens suffrage as it had not before. It was just like selma. 50 years later. It still took 5 years of hunger strikes and pickets and electoral advocacy before in the end Woodrow Wilson his Political Base was the south and didnt think there should be any monkeying around with Voting Rights, wilson backed womens suffrage, and the names of those leaders, we dont know them. They were the Martin Luther king and john lewis of that movement. The 20th century was a time of continued democratic expansion, the great instance when the courts finally got involved and set out the standard that you needed one person one vote all culminating in the 1960s, in the great triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement especially in 1965 in the Voting Rights act. That story has been told so many times especially we had a recent anniversary. You have seen it in movies, the recent movie selma. The story is even more complex and interesting than you might imagine. Martin luther king proclaims to a meeting in soma in january in 1965 we will bring a voting bill into being on the streets of selma and it was the pressure of those courageous activists willing to risk their lives and safety that forced the National Government to act but as you know it was this incredibly elaborate dance between these viscerally talented leaders, king and johnson. I read about it at length in the book where king they would meet repeatedly, johnson would say i am for Voting Rights but not yet, not right now, we have to pass the Great Society and king would push and johnson would get worked up and tell king how important it was to pass Voting Rights and king would talk about the political benefits that would come if they did. Johnson was secretly drafting the Voting Rights act and negotiating with republicans and never told king. King was preparing to march in selma and never told johnson. You all know the violence televised, the national revolts and that followed johnsons moment of courage where he stood up and said we shall overcome and the incredible change that happened in the south since then. Voting rights soaring immediately after that and so many other things followed. The end of the poll tax, constitutional amendment to end the poll tax, the vote going to 18yearolds, new laws on Campaign Financing and other things, the basic rules of american democracy were set and the last 15 years have seen a change, last 15 years of seen new pressures and the beginnings of the slide back to the point where i feel strongly we are in a potential Tipping Point where things could really go wrong. What happened . As i said in some eras has been progressive, in other eras it has been conservative, sometimes democrat, sometimes republicans who push back on this stuff. At this moment there is a concerted political strategy by the conservative movement to restrict voting and restrict the rules of democracy and away we have not seen in a long time. They take their cue from something said by paul wyrick. Dont know how many of you remember him. He was among other things found at the Heritage Foundation and the organization hour, the American Legislative Exchange council, and in a key moment in 1980 Ronald Reagan speaking to the evangelicals as the modern conservative coalition formed, he said i want to be clear, we dont want everybody to be able to vote. We do worse when everybody is able to vote. That has become the mantra, spoken or unspoken that guided too much recent activity. In 2011 screaming about voter fraud, as a factual matter the kind of voter impersonation being described is vanishingly rare. You are more likely to be killed by lightning than to commit in person voter impersonation in the United States. 19 state Legislature Passed 24 new laws making it harder for people to vote for the First Time Since the jane crow error. These laws are often mischievous in their intent. I am for voter id personally. I think it is right to ask people to prove who they are but not for requiring people to show id they dont have. 11 of eligible voters dont have the kind of id being required. The law in texas which they are involved in challenging and the court, declared illegal by federal courts, you cannot use university is a texas government id but you can use your concealed carry gun permit. What a coincidence. The partisan intent is clear. We have seen these laws magnify their impacts when the Supreme Court entered the fray. Throughout most of the countrys history i was still somewhat surprised. The court stayed out of this fight over democracy. We had so many constitutional amendments to secure the right to vote but under John Robertson during the time of Justice Antonin Scalia this court was tremendously activists in case after case and you know one of the most significant was Shelby County which gutted the heart of the Voting Rights act and which reflected the spirit of antonin scalia, articulated during the argument when he said the Voting Rights act was merely a, quote, racial entitlement. You can hear we have tapes in the Supreme Court you can hear the gasps. The texas law was rushed through two hours after the Shelby County decision. Other states as well. On top of this the Supreme Court has created a situation where money, as it did in the late 1800s speak so loudly that it risks the power of the vote. We have gerrymandering, both parties gerrymander and have from the beginning. The new role of big money is quite significant. Since Citizens United, a small handful of megadonors genuinely have transformed Campaign Finance. In the last election the top 100 donors gave more than the other 4. 75 million small donors combined. There is a level of concentration, the we havent seen since the days of jpmorgan and the robber barons. Those are the recent trends, the scary trends. Why am i optimistic . Why do i find myself energized by this moment . The answer is there is more agitation, more concern, more wide understanding of the ways in which the system is broken than we have had in a long long time. The book talks about this. In this election you have candidates from all over the place whether it is Bernie Sanders talking about Campaign Finance reform is a central issue, donald trump, with all the other things he is doing on the one hand saying he is the only candidate on the republican side who cant be bought by contributions, gladly embracing the endorsement of the person who wrote all the Voter Suppression laws out of kansas, Hillary Clinton putting forward the most detailed and ambitious plans for voting reform and Campaign Finance reform than any major Party Candidate has put forward in years and years and years. This is on the electorates mind and the politicians mind, we also see just as in the progressive era, around the country the single biggest change would be to move away from our ramshackle Voter Registration system. If we had universal automatic registration of everyone 18 and eligible to vote it would be transformative. It would add tens of millions of people and cost less and curb potential for fraud and it is starting to happen all over the country. Oregon past versions of this, new jersey legislature, Chris Christie vetoed it, but it may be overridden. May be on the ballot of arizona, considering it in illinois, it will happen and it will make a huge difference in american privacy. Money is politics, there is a wide bipartisan cross partisan repulsion and other cases. The Supreme Court opening will lead to a National Debate on what we expect out of the Supreme Court and we see not only a focus on the constitutional doctrine but new and creative versions of Public Financing into the reforms that could make a big difference here and now. We have the best system in the country right now if you are in new york city to match small contributions. Seattle just enacted, we dont know how it will work yet, and even more creative system that gave vouchers to voters to give to candidates. There is a ferment across the country and even on gerrymandering, even on redistricting, the hardest nut to crack, you are seeing change. The Supreme Courts, little noticed opinion in june blessed the nonpartisan redistricting in place in arizona and california, since then. And and this is happening there is a fight over this, core issues of american democracy are being debated and engaged in a way we havent seen in years, last week the Utah State Senate voted to repeal the 17th amendment. They want to end right to vote for senators. This is a fight that will go on and on. John adams was right. There will be no end to it but that is the american story. It is the chapter we are all writing next. That is what the book is about. Thank you for your attention. Now we will try to move the podium. One of the things that is a thrill for me is to have a chance to work with some of the countrys most Effective Advocates and deeply knowledgeable experts on these issues of democracy at the Brennan Center but the challenge for me is i have to keep up. I am thrilled that myrna perez will join the conversation. One of the things that is the prevailing theme of the book is that every deck in our nations history there has been a push and pull over the right to vote. The book acknowledges, those who are recent studies, for about 50 years, the right to vote should be accessible to all and probably, what was going on then, created for the future. It is true, a concerted push, political drive to restrict Voting Rights and knockdown the Campaign Finance laws. These were not artisan issues. The last time the Voting Rights act was brought before congress it was signed into law by george w. Bush and pass the senate 980. Campaign finance reform, john mccain was one of the great champions, the last president ial candidate to take Public Financing. It is firm and fixed in this polarized moment actually have not been. Why wasnt there was this sort of broad consensus . Among the reasons, seems like the right thing to do but also seems it didnt necessarily affect one side or the other in partisan calculations. In the south part of the consequence of the Voting Rights act, there were many more people of color elected, the white voters moved to the Republican Party that strengthened the Republican Party as well so one of the lessons is parties will look for their own self interest either in the countrys interest or not. Enlightened selfinterest is something we ought to seek. It has also been the case that people have taken the stuff for granted. When the florida recount happened and we all learned 537 folks votes was all it took to win the presidency in one state that was a wakeup call, turnout was going to matter more than anything before. When i was working on the Clinton White house the idea that swing voters were what people thought about was really not wrong but starting in 2000, partisans of both parties, the turnout mattered a lot, that you could win in a tight, tight, evenly matched partisan environment by suppressing the other sides vote. This is an artifact of political shifts over the longterm. The country is changing so much and not at all unusual that when there is change that has something to lose, does everything it can to hold on. This is true in 1800 when the federalists tried to change the voting laws because the jeffersonians were voting and took away the vote to vote for president and a lot of state and when you look at the rise of voting by people of color, those are the states that are most likely to have these new voting laws. And in the longterm contested shift we can expect to see these fights. One way that was interesting, politicians have been manipulating the rules of the game, as a voting lawyer, the 15th amendment and Voting Rights act dont protect people against partisan machinations. Given the entanglement of money, artisan and race, how is it our courts score, politics are able to separate . As you know in some of these cases the defense, we are not discriminating against africanamericans, we are only discriminating against democrats so that is okay because that is the way the game is played. Democrats did it to us whenever they could. I think one of the things that is so interesting. As i mentioned, at the beginning they didnt think much about who could vote but if you go back and look at the constitutional convention, the notes James Madison took which were secrets, were not supposed to be made public for a long time, the people spoke very frankly, madison and his colleagues were very concerned about precisely this kind of manipulation. There is a provision in the constitution call the elections clause that says while the state set voting rules congress and the federal government explicitly have power to override those rules and that is one of the only places in the constitution where the federal government is given that power. Madison was very worried state legislators would rig the voting rules to favor their own side. You cant even imagine what it was going to be. The things they were thinking about things we would later call gerrymandering, changing district lines are passing laws to make it harder for your opponent to vote. There were Different Things in those days losing a polling place from one to another and no one could find it but it was the same idea so one of the things we need to do is recover that notion that the constitution actually addresses precisely these kinds of shenanigans by partisans trying to read the rules to benefit themselves on their own side. That is present throughout American History and there are strong legal and constitutional bases for regulating that even beyond the Voting Rights act which was focused necessarily on one particular thing which was Racial Discrimination in states with a history of discrimination. There are a lot of colorful heroes and villains in the book, but the courts at best are a bit player, a bit player, most people who know the history of the jurisprudence around the court, my question is the best allowed progress to happen, responsible for some of the rollback and given that, does that shed light on how to view the upcoming vacancy . For those of us who grew up thinking the courts and the Supreme Court would always be there is a bulwark, tribute of liberty and protecting democracy, it is startling to realize that very rarely has happened in American History. From the beginning the courts washed their hands of trying to advance the goals of democracy. There was a case in the 1840s, it comes out of one of the forgotten but colorful battles over Voting Rights where rhode island was one of the last states that still had property requirements, and there was a revolt in rhode island and there were two governors, when elected by an electorate with property requirements and one without and waved the sword around, pulled the cannons and tried to fire on the state armory but it was raining so the cannon didnt work, like a comic opera. It all went up to the Supreme Court and they said which one is the real governor of rhode island . The Supreme Court washed its hands and said this is a political question, we are not getting into this. In a way, that was kind of funny. It was terrifying later when the Supreme Court similarly refused to help africanamerican voters in the south who sued repeatedly and had cases to the Supreme Court in the 1890s and 1900s and the Supreme Court opinion that Oliver Wendell holmes, the great justice said this is terrible but nothing we can do about it. It is an awful opinion to read. The courts washed their hands of it. In some ways it was a distressing retreat from their responsibility but also a way of saying this is up to the higher power in this country which is the people so the people passed constitutional amendments 5 times explicitly expanding the right to vote so the people made these fights through their voices in elections. I dont know the we expect the court if there is a new Supreme Court justice it is not that we want that justice to be aggressively charging in, undoing, remaking the landscape, what we want is for the court to stay out of the way with the Voting Rights act and Campaign Finance laws. And the election that surrounds its is to use the cliche a teachable moment where this is going to be debated in a way it has not been debated a long time. If you think of the robert bork nomination, effectively revolving around roe versus wade and the right to privacy or the Thurgood Marshall is the Thurgood Marshall nomination being about civil rights of the brandeis nomination there was a lot of antisemitism but it was really about the progress of controls, all those things will be part of this but this will be about the democracy occasion as much as anything else. I will invite my audience to step up to the mic and ask questions. I will ask michael one more question but i do encourage all members who are interested in talking, start making your way in line. Michael, you talked about Popular Support that was needed to be generated to pass the constitutional amendment ending the poll tax but since then the court has digitally interpreted the coal tax. Many laws that have been thought to be found like poll taxes have not been given credence, any reaction to that . An interesting story about the amendment and what happened since. Constitutional amendment to end the poll tax was not supported by the Civil Rights Movement. The naacp and other groups opposed it, saying we dont need to pass an amendment, this could be done by statute. It was a white supremacist who passed it. Or pushed it. But you are right that even then courts had not taken the logical implication which is there should be no financial barrier and extended it to the places and ways it ought to be. In the case in texas that the Brennan Center has helped to bring challenging that voter id law, the lead witness which we were proud to have brought into the case was an elderly woman named Sammy Louise Bates and she was born in mississippi. She remembered vividly tapping out the poll tax for her mother, she moved to chicago and detroit, went to college, worked her whole life, moved to texas and lives on Social Security now. Two hours after the Supreme Courts as the Voting Rights act and its corporate protections were no longer needed texas passed this law or implemented the law and instantly 608,000 eligible voters on the books in texas suddenly were no longer able to vote and she was one of them and she gave testimony and was asked why didnt you just get your birth certificate . Remember, she just lives on Social Security. She said i had to put 42 where that would do the most good. You cant eat a birth certificate. That was very powerful and the judge in that case ruled that this was in effect the poll tax but the very conservative court of appeals in federal courts, although upholding the ruling that it was illegal said no, the poll tax just means a poll tax. This very issue of wealth, what a democracy based on one person one vote and the inevitable inequalities of a marketbased economy, we saw it in the beginning with poll tax and Campaign Finance issue now but it cannot be untangled and i would not expect the courts ever to be the ones to solve it for us. Right there, you are first. I was partners with the Brennan Center among many other civil rights organizations. I found a classaction lawsuit in the year 2000 challenging new york state, name of the case was hayden. As a result of Research Done by a group of men we discovered two states, four states, prisoners retain the right to vote. That was massachusetts, vermont and utah. Threatened only two states left on maine and vermont. Anyhow we challenged disenfranchisement on the grounds that it was discriminatory because demographics of the population of the prison population in america so essentially what they were doing was taking away voting power for communities of poor people of color because that is where the majority of prisoners came from. So this went to the Second Circuit court of appeals and ten judges split down the middle 55, that was the end of that initiative to change disenfranchisement. What i wanted to know, prisoners are citizens. They dont lose their citizenship while they are in prison. Prisoners in maine and vermont, prisoner citizens in maine and vermont have the right to vote even though they said commit the same crimes as people in the other 48 states. How does america maintain this sense of exceptionalism, champions of democracy and fairness and justice and continue this charade of stripping people of their right to vote . Thank you for what you did and for your determination over all these years and thank you for the question. This issue of felony disenfranchisement is both one of the longrunning ansari stories in American History but also one where there is on so many of these other areas unexpected room for optimism and hope. My colleague is deeply involved in this and i invite you to join in the conversation. There are 21 2 Million People in this country. They cant vote because of a criminal conviction. Taxation without representation. This is at a time there is a wide awareness now in our country the criminal Justice System has expanded beyond where it ought to. We have 5 of the worlds population, 25 of the worlds prison population, that isnt necessary in any way to keep our communities safe. Not only voting by people who are currently incarcerated but people who are back in the community and interestingly it has not been in the courts, have not been friendly largely to these kinds of cases but in the court of Public Opinion where the evangelical community and many conservatives work with Voting Rights advocates and members of congress who are most outspoken on this is rand paul in kentucky, there are now two states, you still have a lifetime ban on voting, but the most significant of which is florida. Of the things i am proud of at the Brennan Center was two weeks ago we won a victory in maryland where we drafted legislation, folks on the ground were able to get it through the legislature, the governor vetoed it and we overrode the veto, starting at the maryland primary there will be 40,000 people who have criminal convictions and eligible to vote and what this tells me is this is a long fight, a winable fight and the fight that if we continue to be smart and strategic about where we make the case or the claim we are going to bring other people along so i have a map, i know where i want to go next. Who has got the next i am from pacific radio. Two questions. As you know, voting turnout since 1960 has declined in general throughout the United States. Aside from the issues you have raised, great to hear somebody more optimistic than people i am normally around talking about this, there is a great tendency among voters, one of the tropes we see in this election is how it is being manifested by those supporting trump and those supporting sanders. I wonder how that reflects itself and you name 16 states where the loss of disenfranchisement, varying ways effective or not effective or in motion, how are they playing out in this election . Let me answer those questions in reverse order. We dont really know the degree to which these new laws dampen turnout. We at least i am very careful not to make overly broad claims because a lot of things affect turnout. Who the candidate is and everything else. Having said that there is increasing evidence that they do dampen turnout. The Government Accountability office, highly respected nonpartisan think tank used by both parties in congress looked at for example the strictest voter id laws and found they do depress turnout but especially the minority community. There are other stories that suggest a bigger impact. I hope there is not a depressive impact on turnout. The bigger question is why so few americans vote, it is only since 1960 turnout is low, turnout has been low and bumped at low levels. Since the beginning of the 20th century, bylaws and rules but partly up result of political culture. One thing that surprised me as i read the history, wrote the book, was the degree to which turnout was so high in the 19th century at a time of great party mobilization, the Political Parties were engines of participation in the engines of turnout and there was a fraud then but that wasnt the reason the numbers were so high. If we could find a way to energize and engage people now around organizing and activity and daytoday life that will boost turnout but it is a longterm problem. We have highly gerrymandered electoral districts with sorting people into likeminded areas so a lot of places there wont be electoral competition no matter what you do and there is gerrymandering on top of it and we have a two party system in the United States. If we were in europe it would be the trump party, rightwing populist party, the rubio bush party, the Hillary Clinton party, the Bernie Sanders party and more voices would feel represented. These are longstanding trends but the low turnout wasnt last weekend wasnt it has been going on for a long time. A lot of it also we have to take some responsibility. And take advantage of freedoms and rights we do have. In back . My name is tara brown, long time fan of the centers work, my question is going back to a point of optimism and what you spoke out with regards to expanding Voter Registration and development you have seen in oregon and california specifically i am really interested in what strategies led to those changes, was a grassroots . Applying pressure against existing power, was it electoral change and Political Leadership . Was it a litigation strategy and do you see those are replicable in other states Going Forward . It was not a litigation strategy. It was a combination of grassroots organizing and enlightened leadership from public officials. The way it started in oregon was a member of the state legislature who we worked with became secretary of state and through some rather flukey scandals found herself governor and pushed this group, but a tremendous coalition in oregon, california, the coalition was pushing this and the secretary of state took the lead. And a bit of a surprise to those of us old enough to remember, it wasnt clear if governor gerri brown was going to sign the law and among the reasons we had confidence that he would was a videotape that was easy to find, five minutes on the internet of him at the Democratic Convention in 1992 demanding this exact law and decrying anyone who would stand in its way. This is one of those things where this push and pull throughout history it isnt only the marchers on the street or the coalitions but the people but often also Party Insiders or elected officials whose sense of the public interest, that is what you can see across the country. All right. When you mention the challenge of energizing the electorate to vote a lot of times i notice no one mentions the fact that we need to reinstitute civics in the education system. If we were able to do that we would increase voter turnout but one question i ask is where is the federal government dropping the ball in terms of subsidizing the initiative to get those results soon rather than 10 or 20 years later. The Brennan Center has done an excellent study on this issue which is available on our website, brennancenter. Org. Especially in a changing country i dont know how we can expect to have a coherent social ethos and workable democracy if we dont teach each generation what the history is and the ideals are and it is true that civics in school, pushed out by all the other things and there is a tremendous loss in this issue of fighting for the right to vote, fighting for justice