Ari Berman, a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is working on a book about voting rights since 1965. He has written extensively about American politics, foreign policy and the intersection of money and politics. His stories have also appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and The Guardian, and he is a frequent guest and political commentator on MSNBC, C-Span and NPR. His first book, Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics, was published in October 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux—for whom he is now working on a history of voting rights. He graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a degree in journalism and political science.
the ticket. do you have sympathy with that charge? i think it is a problem in america we have elections run by partisan actors particularly when those partisan actors are themselves on the ballot. in other western democracies, elections are run by professional nonpartisan staff. i think that s probably the best practice. but, you know, brian kemp is not alone. chris kobach, the secretary of state for kansas, was running for governor there. we had to sue him to stop him from preventing one out of eight new voter registration applicants from getting on the rolls in that state this year. other states have seen problems, too. states that are sometimes seen as critical states in the battle for the senate. missouri, we had to sue to top them from failing to comply with our obligations under the federal motor law. purge voters without providing notice, similar to what brian kemp is doing. this is not a coincidence, that
we don t have the time to do this. i m pleased that the it s not you don t purge voters. but you re saying do it right. don t do it at the 11th hour and wait until the election time. very interesting. so you re not apologist about cleaning the rolls. but you want to do it where people are protected if i m hearing you correctly. that s correct. you know, there s no time any supervisor in any state wants to tag a voter and says show me your papers and have them show up to be a u.s. born citizen. that s not fair to us. the only place we ve received the information is from the department of state. and the information is obviously incorrect. and the supervisors are not complying with the direction of the governor and the secretary of state has requested. now, judith, this happened after a five minute conversation between the then secretary of state and the governor. five minute conversation. that s right. i mean, this is clearly the smoking gun evidence of this
ed, this process must be reversed. yeah. you know, reverend, there s a big effort in this country by the conservatives to destroy and defund public education. this, of course, is hurt penguin minority communities. state budgets are being chipped away. in wisconsin, they took a billion dollars from public education. what does this mean? a lot of republicans are saying that they re going to model what scott walker has done in wisconsin and they re going to do this and move forward with this rad come agenda to knock out public education in america? what does this mean? is this a bellwether night? it is. it s a radical agenda because you have a tax on public education and public health and public work, they want to purge workers from the table. purge voters from the roles. so it becomes the middle class loses in this.
this, of course, is hurt penguin minority communities. state budgets are being chipped away. in wisconsin, they took a billion dollars from public education. what does this mean? a lot of republicans are saying that they re going to model what scott walker has done in wisconsin and they re going to do this and move forward with this rad come agenda to knock out public education in america? what does this mean? is this a bellwether night? it is. it s a radical agenda because you have a tax on public education and public health and public work, they want to purge workers from the table. purge voters from the roles. so it becomes the middle class loses in this. profit is up and the wage is down and worker is busted. so while we ve taken a blow tonight, we ve been dogged down. the ground is no place for the champions. we got to get back up and keep fighting. i think the workers rights to