How the electoral college gave us January 6th

Ari Berman has been exposing the GOP War on Voting since 2011. Now he’s back with a new book about the greatest threat to our democracy – MINORITY RULE.

I have to apologize to Ari Berman.

You've certainly should know Ari's work exposing the "GOP War on Voting" both in his book GIVE US THE BALLOT and as Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent. So you probably also get why I was genuinely stoked when he not only agreed to be our first guest on our new earlyworm podcast "How are you feeling about democracy?" but also told me that he a new book that will be out April 23rd.

It's called MINORITY RULE, and it's awesome.

I convinced Ari that we should have a quick catch-up Kiki about voting rights (my words) before we talked about the book later in spring. But I couldn't help myself.

The opening of MINORITY RULE is so riveting and clarifying about this mess we're in that I couldn't help myself. I had to ask Ari a bit about it. I also leaned awkwardly into exploring the concept of minority rule in general, since I've just escaped a decade of living minority rule in Michigan.

The whole transcript is below, and I think that's a more enjoyable way to check out the podcast than listening to my yimmer, though Ari is a joy to hear. And maybe you don't have the same evolutionary aversion to the sound of my voice as I do.

Either way, the show is packed with information about the crises our democracy faces at the federal and state level. Ari goes into detail about the depraved disregard for democracy we see in laboratories of autocracy, such as Texas and Florida. And we even get into the hope that's coming from the heartland, thanks mostly to the growing number of voters in our urban centers.

But I also want to call out something I gleaned from MINORITY RULE that hadn't occurred to this ass before, how the electoral college made January 6th possible.

Ari explained:

Trump kept saying, "I need 11,000 votes here. I need 10,000 votes there." But if it had been a popular vote election that Joe Biden won by seven million votes, then it would have been impossible for him to try to overturn the results. How could Trump have gone state by state by state to try to change seven million votes? So it was the unique nature of the Electoral College that allowed Trump to be elected in the first place in 2016. And then it allowed him to try to overturn the results or give him the opening to try to overturn the results in 2020.

Ari has an unmatched gift for summing up the challenges we are facing with the unflinching eye and moral clarity that democracy deserves. It was an honor to speak with him. So please share this podcast everywhere and buy MINORITY RULE (or tell your library to!) so he'll come back and discuss the book.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jason Sattler: Ari Berman, how are you feeling about democracy? 

Ari Berman: That's a loaded question these days. Especially these days, that's a loaded question. 

Jason Sattler: A loaded in a bad way... Or a loaded in a good way? 

Ari Berman: It feels like we have a, it feels like we have, there's a gun pointed at the head of democracy right now. And the, the question is, is the bullet going to hit the heart?

That's kind of how I'm feeling.

[Announcer]
How are you feeling about democracy? The podcast that asks, how are you feeling about democracy? Hosted by the guy who asks you how you're feeling about democracy, earlyworm's Jason Sattler.

Jason Sattler: This is Jason Sattler. If you know me at all, it's probably as LOLGOP on the website that used to be Twitter and all 50 of the new apps that are trying to be Twitter. You probably didn't expect me to sound more like the pesky neighbor from every 60s sitcom than Edward R. Murrow. But what I lack in voice, I make up for with my cutting -edge references to pop culture.

On with the show. The GOP's War on Voting. The first time I saw those words, I was reading Rolling Stone. It was 2011. Hundreds of laws had been passed in the aftermath of Barack Obama's 2008 victory. They were all limiting the right to vote, including the first wave of voter ID laws, but it didn't quite hit me until I saw that headline.

Republicans had given up on winning elections by persuading voters, and were instead trying to keep them from the polls. The G. O. P. War on Voting. That piece in Rolling Stone was by Ari Berman. Ari had just finished his first book, Herding Donkeys. It's the best book I've ever read, maybe because it's the only one, about the rise of the Obama coalition and Howard Dean's 50 state strategy.

Ari documented the G. O. P. 's attempt to use voter suppression to win the presidency in 2012 as it happened, and Republicans helped him. 

[Audio clip from 2012: Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai] 

Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania. Done.

Jason Sattler: 2012 didn't work out the way Republicans hoped. Give us the ballot. Ari's fantastic book about the modern struggle for voting rights followed in 2015. Then came 2016, you may remember it, and just about everything Ari had been warning about came true. Almost eight years later, facing a crisis that could determine the fate of our democracy, Ari is back with a new book, Minority Rule, and the title is both a thesis and an answer to how we got to this point.

Pre order it now to have it in your hands on April 23rd. It was a huge honor to have Ari on this first podcast. Let us know how you feel about the conversation.

[Audio clip from 1980: Paul Weyrich, Co-Founder of the Heritage Foundation] 

Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo goo syndrome. Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Jason Sattler: Ari, we haven't spoken, I think, in years, and you probably have no idea what I've been up to, but I now know what you've been up to because I've seen a copy of your book, Minority Rule, a preview of it, and it is astounding. It's going to be The most important book of the year just to understand how we got to this point, but what is what is it?

Do you think that people need to understand about the background of minority rule before they start to read your book? 

Ari Berman: I think what's really important to understand is that the crisis that we face is Much deeper and older than Donald Trump. Donald Trump is of course a unique threat to American democracy, he is unprecedented in so many ways. I mean, trying to overturn free and fair elections, facing 91 criminal charges. I mean, we've never had a president who was indicted once, let alone four or five times. We've never had a president who tried to overthrow an election, let alone incite an insurrection. So, I mean, there's many ways in which Donald Trump is a unique threat.

To American democracy, but we also have to understand that Donald Trump is a product of a broken political system He is a guy that was able to be elected in the first place because of the antiquated nature of our political system and his MAGA coalition is also a remnant of our antiquated political system.

We have a political system that was created a long time ago by a number of people that weren't that crazy about democracy that wanted only white male property owners to vote, and created many other restrictions on democracy in terms of our institutions. And the country has democratized a lot since then, but we still have a situation where a candidate can win the electoral college, but lose the popular vote.

We still have a situation in which Senators from small white rural states have far more power than Senators from large more diverse, urban states We still have a congress that can be swung by gerrymandering. We still have a Supreme Court that has been a product of multiple broken institutions in terms of how we elect presidents and how we elect senators.

So I think we have to understand that, yes, Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy. But the reason why Donald Trump has been so successful and remains such a threat to American democracy is the fact that so much of our democratic system isn't as democratic as we actually think it is.

Jason Sattler: Without digging too much into the book, I will just have to. I'll just point to one fact that I just was astounding. It's like, I never heard anyone point this out, but January 6th wouldn't have been possible without the Electoral College. That's just something that hadn't occurred to me before because if someone had lost by, was it 7 million votes in general, and there was a popular vote, there wouldn't even be a contention.

But basically, that is what enabled whole scam that led people to D.C. that day. I hadn't thought of that before. Is that something that that you were thinking when you were watching those events unfold? 

Ari Berman: Yeah, that's that's what I was thinking the entire time that Donald Trump was trying to change the election.

He kept saying, "I need 11,000 votes here. I need 10,000 votes there." But if it had been a popular vote election that Joe Biden won by seven million votes, then it would have been impossible for him to try to overturn the results. How could Trump have gone state by state by state to try to change seven million votes? So it was the unique nature of the Electoral College that allowed Trump to be elected in the first place in 2016. And then it allowed him to try to overturn the results or give him the opening to try to overturn the results in 2020.

And that's an example of where we're just taking the system as it is as opposed to asking, "Why is the system remaining this way?"

I mean, you have a young daughter, Jason. When I tried to explain the electoral college to my nine year old, she looked at me like I was crazy. I mean, she's a fan of basketball and she understands that the team that scores the most points wins the game. And it would be very hard to explain to her that, listen, the. a not just against basic democratic notions of one person one vote, but they just go against basic common sense and what we're doing is we're focusing on a smaller and smaller and smaller group of swing states that are that also, by the way, are whiter, more Republican, the country as a whole, and we're excluding the vast majority of Americans from participating in our presidential elections. And to me, that should be outrageous, whether you're a Democrat in California or a Republican in Wyoming. 

Jason Sattler: Something that kind of cheered my heart is a comment from Robin Voss, who is the Republican Speaker of the Assembly in Wisconsin. After a long, terrible battle to finally get Wisconsin to something resembling fair maps he basically said, "I regret to report to you that this means we could actually lose the legislature. It's possible that we could not be in power to next year.”

And that’s something that hadn't been possible for, I think, now almost 14 years because of what Republicans did in Wisconsin.

Are you cheered at all by what you see going on in Wisconsin? And more so, I think that there is one place that undeniably you should be cheered by. And that's, that's Michigan, of course. And I don't want to brag. But yeah, is this hopeful at all or is this are we just kind of like is this kind of just being too happy with the scraps where we're being fed.

Ari Berman: Yeah, I do think that's a really good point, which is that the states have changed significantly. I mean when I started covering voting rights back in 2011, so many of the key swing states were just solidly red, and they were laboratories of autocracy. They were pioneering new ways to try to curb political participation, and that was Wisconsin, that was Michigan, that was Ohio, that was so many places.

And that was really the only story that you could tell, and the pendulum over the course of the decade has changed a lot in these states. I think voters became aware of the Anti democratic actions that were taking place in these states and they became emboldened to try to do something about it 

And you look at Michigan . I mean Michigan was a state where Republicans routinely got a minority of votes, but won a majority of seats. It was a state that was home to the flint water crisis. It was home to you know, Rick Snyder, the DeVos family. I mean it was it was a bastion of hard right Republicanism.

Jason Sattler: We voted in 2012 to get rid of our Emergency Manager Law . The legislature basically went back a few months later and just said, "Nah, we're, we're not going to listen to the voters who overwhelmingly said let's bring it back. And nothing happened 

Ari Berman: Exactly. They just were routinely overriding the will of the voters in Michigan. And then people got together and said we want to change the system.

And so Michigan luckily was one of those two dozen states that have, ballot initiatives that allow you to change the state constitution. And so short order, they passed a ballot initiative to put in an independent redistricting commission, which led to fair maps for the first time in a long time.

They dramatically expanded voting access through things like automatic voter registration, election day registration, early voting. They passed other initiatives on other issues, things like, recreational marijuana, enshrining. protections for reproductive rights that had been blocked in other states.

And so, Michigan has transformed dramatically from a state that was kind of a Republican led laboratory for autocracy to a place that's much more of a laboratory for democracy, where it's not just controlled by Democrats with a big " D," but it's a place where small "d" democrats have had a lot of influence.

And I think that that's the kind of thing that they're trying to do in Wisconsin right now. And Wisconsin has also changed a lot. When I first started covering Wisconsin, it was Scott Walker and the Republican legislature. And it was again, the national model, for Republicans to try to curb democracy.

And then Scott Walker got voted out. The state Supreme Court changed. Now it looks like the redistricting maps. are going to change as well. And so Wisconsin's a much more competitive state than it was a decade ago. And so I think the hopeful thing here is that states are changing. While Washington is gripped by paralysis and everyone's concerned about Trump, a lot of exciting, interesting things are happening at the state level that may not be getting as much attention.

Jason Sattler: And there really is just so much work to be done. Another thing that you pointed out that I was kind of shocked by is that Scott Walker and Republicans in Wisconsin instituted 33 separate things that made it harder to vote or made the vote less representative of what Wisconsin actually looked like.

What I'm asking here is: Can that possibly swing this election to Trump, all of the kind of screwball stuff that Republicans have done over the last decade and a half to make it harder to vote? 

Ari Berman: Yeah, I mean, that's one thing I'm really worried about in 2024 that's not getting a lot of attention. I mean, so many states passed new restrictions on voting following the insurrection.

I think this, I call it the insurrection through other means. It was an attempt, instead of trying to overturn the election, to change the voting laws to benefit Republicans in places like Georgia and Florida. And this is the first presidential election in which these laws will go into effect. So, I mean, in some places, The election laws have gotten better, like in Michigan, and some swing states have gotten better.

In other swing states, there's divided government, like in Wisconsin, Arizona, for example. So, they can't pass any new restrictions on voting, and the restrictions that are in effect have been in effect for a while. So I think people are getting better at trying to counteract them. But certainly in, in a number of states, there's new restrictions that are going to affect the election , and there's different laws for, uh, for mail ballots, or there's different laws for early voting or there just different laws for how ballots are counted.

And Trump could exploit these things. Once again, I mean, on the federal level, there has been some Trump Proofing of the system and that the electoral count act, which was very antiquated and vague has been updated and changed to make it harder for state legislatures, for example to overturn the will of state voters. But still there's still lots of avenues, whether through state election boards or county election boards to try to swing the election after the effect or just to try to change it beforehand.

You don't need to rig the election if you can just tamp down, turn out a certain amount. So I think we're going to see a bigger impact in 2024 than we saw in 2022 for some of these restrictions because it's going to be a larger electorate, presidential elections, people turn out who don't turn out in other midterms or other elections, they only turn on every four years. And so I think that It's going to be interesting to see how this has an effect on the flip side You can look at a place like Michigan. Michigan put in place all these policies to increase voter turnout Things like for the first time they had no excuse absentee voting. They have automatic registration. They had election day registration. You saw, for example, tons of young people registering to vote through election day registration. Michigan had the highest youth turnout in the country in 2022. Had the highest voter turnout for a midterm in 2022. So I think that was an example of you make it easier to vote and more people do it.

Jason Sattler: Let's contrast this and talk about how this is a problem that's much bigger than Trump. Let's talk a little bit about Texas. And you wrote back back in the days before Mother Jones, you were writing at the nation. And there was a there was a piece that just blew my mind where you were talking about Texas's Jim Crow era voting laws that weren't necessarily the result of the Voting Rights Act being overturned.

It's just the history of of voting rights never really coming to Texas. I think a really good example of this is Vote Beat sent a reporter named Natalia Contreras to register to vote. She is a voting rights reporter. It took her three times and she still, and on the third time she successfully registered to vote, the other two, if she just dropped the ball, most voters would have.

Who would do that three times? This is designed to keep people from voting. This whole kind of idea that Texas isn't a red state. It's a non voting state. It's bigger than that… It's a purposely non-voting state, isn't it?

Ari Berman: Yeah, I mean I was shocked when I look and looked into some of the laws in Texas. Texas is one of the biggest states in the country and it's one of the only states that has no online voter registration. So, I mean you you literally cannot go online to register to vote which is such an antiquated concept in the year 2024. 

People say, "Well, why don't you just go out and register them to vote?" And the reason why they're not registered is because registration is made so purposely difficult in Texas. So not only is there no online registration in Texas, but to register voters, you actually have to be deputized by the state. and you have to do this. County by county by county. Texas has 254 counties. So if you want to register voters in multiple counties, you have to get registered, deputized, in multiple counties. Meaning that if you wanted to register voters in every county in Texas, you would have to be deputized in 254 different counties. And this is something that you have to be trained by the state. It happens under penalty of perjury and It only lasts every two years. So you would have to get deputized again, 254 times every two years. And a lot of the times these, these trainings happen once a month, you know, maybe at the county courthouse and in some far flung locale. And so the net effect of this is it just makes statewide voter registration drives nearly impossible.

And you've seen when there's. political campaigns with momentum, things like Beto's campaign, for example. They are able to register voters, but they're able to register many fewer voters than would have been registered in other places. You contrast that with a place like Georgia, which has had automatic registration for a number of years now because voting rights groups sued and, and got that to be instituted.

Georgia, they're just automatically registering people to vote when they go to the DMV. They have 98 percent of people registered. While Texas has 3 million unregistered voters. And so the mechanics of how voting works matters a lot more than people think. It's about more than, you know, whether you have an idea or not.

There are deeper issues here that go a long way towards deciding who is even able to vote in the first place. And if you're not registered, you're obviously not voting. That's the first step to being, to being able to vote. And Texas just cuts it off right there. 

Jason Sattler: I think people need to understand how aggressively anti-voting Ron DeSantis is Florida. The state is very good on counting votes. But the way he particularly has cracked down on voting is kind of unique in history.

Ari Berman: I do and I mean it just goes to show you talking again about states being laboratories of autocracy. I mean, that just perfectly summarizes Florida under dissenters and you don't even have to be charismatic To do this as because we're we obviously saw that DeSantis is not charismatic or likable, but he effectively understood how to wield power there.

And he's done a number of unprecedented things. The Florida legislature actually passed redistricting maps that were relatively fair to black voters, and DeSantis overruled the Republican legislature and implemented his own maps that dismantled the majority black districts, which has never happened before in Florida history.

He's also cracked down on voter registration drives. But I think the the the the thing that that I think It has been most outrageous, just the way they've gone after voting rights for people with past felony convictions that in Florida, this was one of the big success stories in 2018 that 64 percent of Floridians.

So across the political divide decided to restore voting rights, people with past felony convictions. That was a huge deal because Florida had 1.4 million people that couldn't vote because of the criminal justice system there. And it was disproportionately targeted at black voters. It was a felon disenfranchisement law that dated all the way back to Jim Crow.

And the hope was that, you know, over a million people were going to get the right to vote back. But then the Florida legislature, with DeSantis blessing, said that no, actually, you have to pay all fines, fees and restitution to be able to get your voting rights back. Well, people owe crazy amounts of money under Florida system and will never be able to pay back a lot of the fines and fees that they owe .

So that just right off the bat cut the number of people that were eligible to vote from 1. 4 million to 700,000. So half the people that thought they were going to get their voting rights back did not. And then, there's no way to check. If you're eligible to vote. And so what was happening in Florida as people were told they're eligible to vote, it turned out maybe they weren't.

And then DeSantis started charging them with voter fraud. And you had people who were made examples of it. DeSantis had this whole election police task force and he said, you know, we found rampant voter fraud in Texas. And this was, you know, more than often Black voters who were told they were eligible to vote. Then police showed up at their house and said we're arresting you and, and people were like, " What did I do?" And they said, " You voted." And people could not, I mean, people could not believe it. I mean, if you want to see a scene that was straight out of the Jim Crow era. You could watch the videos of some of this stuff happening.

And I think it's just created a chilling atmosphere for political participation in the state that one way to get people not to vote is to disenfranchise them. Another way to get them not to vote is just to create a climate of fear where you say, I'm just not going to participate at all because the barriers or the risks are too high.

And I think DeSantis has accomplished both in the state of Florida. So it's another state that is a lot redder than what it otherwise should be based on the demographics. 

Jason Sattler: It's not an easy thing to do, and it's not your job, but if you were someone who just cares about democracy as this election nears, what are the kind of things that you would be focused on as an individual?

You know, I know that this, following your work, I see the systematic stuff matters just so much more than anything and any individual can do is why it's so powerful. You know, these are small margins, so an activated democracy could potentially save a democracy because the margins are so slim.

Is there anything you think people should be focused on as we start to look towards November? 

Ari Berman: Well, I always tell people to get involved locally, that there's gotta be something happening in your state. Where you can have an impact because people are always outraged about what's happening in Wisconsin or what's happening in Texas or what's happening in Georgia.

And obviously we should be outraged about those things, but there's more than likely something that can be done in your own state where you could have a bigger impact. So there's likely a local race you can get involved in or a congressional race you can get involved in, or maybe a swing state next door, maybe a statewide race.

What every state is doing is transferable to another state right now, so all state battles are national battles right now, so when a state does something bad, that is a model for other states to follow, but when a state does something good, that also becomes a model that other states that want to go in a better direction can follow, so I would say start locally, and that might not be the presidential race, it might be a local race, but those matter a lot too, and then I think long term, we need to be thinking about that.

What kind of democracy do we ideally want to build that maintaining the status quo is very important, making sure we don't go backwards because we can go backwards a lot, a lot more than we already have depending on the result in 2024. But even if we, even if we don't go backwards, we need to go forwards as well, that there's a lot of ways the system needs to change.

And so I think it's really. time to start building a new movement for deep structural reform and understanding that it's not going to be something that's done in one election cycle. It's not going to be something that's done in four years. But I think that people who want a better democracy have to think about how the right is organized and the right is organized over a 40, 50 year period to accomplish things like overturning Roe v. Wade or gutting the Voting Rights Act. And I think that People that care about democracy need to think about kind of what's their 40-to-50-year plan for fixing democracy because it honestly, I hope it doesn't take that long, but it might. And so you have to be prepared to act in the short term, but also think long term as well.

Jason Sattler: So Ari, it is so great to know what you've been up to and it is, I can't wait for everybody to see this book. Stay tuned. just what everybody needs to be reading in the summer of 2024. Thank you, Ari Berman, for joining us. 

Ari Berman: Great to talk.

Jason Sattler: Well, that's the first “How are you feeling about democracy? This is Jason Sattler for earlyworm. I want to thank our sponsors, the members of the earlyworm society on Patreon. Join us there. Let's find some ways to feel better about democracy.