A look at new barriers at the ballot box
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Storytelling with a beat. Raw, intimate, real. Strap in. Subscribe to Snap Judgment wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. My guest today, journalist Ari Berman, has spent the last decade covering the battle over who gets to vote in America and who gets to write the rules that govern our elections. With just over four months until the midterm elections, he's tracking the latest wave of court rulings, lawsuits, and new laws that are reshaping how elections are run. In just the last week, the Supreme Court preserved mail-in voting in a 5-4 ruling, allowing Mississippi to count ballots postmarked by Election Day. Days later, the court struck down decades-old limits on campaign spending, a rule expected to reshape how our elections are financed.
That's only part of the story. In April, the court weakened what remained of the Voting Rights Act, after which states across the South quickly moved to redraw congressional maps. And the president wants Congress to revive a law that would require a passport or a birth certificate just to register to vote. Ari Berman is a national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and the author of several books, including Minority Rule and Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Ari Berman, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Hey, Tanya. Thank you so much for having me back.
OK, so last week, the court preserved mail-in voting by a single vote. Then two days later, they removed this decades-old limit on party spending. So essentially, it's a win for voters on one hand and a win for money on the other. What do these two rulings tell you together about where the court is taking our elections?
Well, the mail voting ruling was really an aberration because the Roberts Court has issued so many decisions weakening the right to vote and essentially destroying the Voting Rights Act. So it's almost like an asterisk. They were asked to do something with mail voting that was just insane. bridge too far. Remember, this was a law that was passed out of Mississippi that said that if your ballot was postmarked by Election Day, it could be received up to five days later. So it wasn't like it was a law that came out of California or some other liberal state. This was a very conservative state in Mississippi that was asking essentially the Supreme Court to Okay, that's why you call it an aberration, because your reporting suggested that this court had been moving steadily in one direction on this issue.
They have been. I mean, you look at, for example, the decision that essentially killed the Voting Rights Act. They weakened the last remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act in such a way that it has no power. And by extension, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important civil rights law of the 1960s, has no teeth left. And That's just the beginning of what they've done in terms of weakening democracy.
What recent Supreme Court rulings are changing midterm election rules?
You mentioned the campaign finance decision that struck down limits on how much parties can spend in coordination with candidates. So before there were limits on these type of expenditures, now there isn't, meaning that an individual can give a lot more money to a party than they can give to a candidate. Now the party can spend an unlimited amount on behalf of those candidates. And it's just another way in which wealthy individuals will have more influence in the political process. And the campaign finance decisions by the court are very similar to the decisions on the Voting Rights Act by the court, and that this wasn't the first decision by the Supreme Court, by the Roberts Court, that deregulated the campaign finance system in such a way that gives wealthy individuals far more power.
And it wasn't the first decision by the Roberts Court weakening voting rights act. This is now a decades-long project by the Roberts Court to give wealthy individuals more power in the political process. At the same time, they're giving voters less power in terms of their ability to elect their representatives and to be protected from racial discrimination in voting.
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