Give Us the Ballot The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America

Ari, thanks for joining us.

Your book is Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

Go check it out.

Ari Berman, welcome back to Pod Save America. Hey, John. Thank you very much for having me back.

The Trump administration added this question in March of 2018. And the problem is that the census is supposed to count everyone in America, not just every citizen, not just everyone who's here legally, everyone who is here, whether they are legal or not.

The census is really the basis for American political power. It is the survey that then determines how political power is allocated.

So if we have a census that doesn't count immigrants in large numbers, then states with a lot of immigrants, places like New York and California and some Republican states like Texas that are fast growing, that have a lot of immigrants, they are going to have less political power than places that are wider, more rural, and have fewer immigrants.

And basically what the federal court said was that this was pretextual, that Ross added this question for other reasons. And the other reasons included trying to diminish political power for areas with lots of immigrants, possibly trying to draw districts to exclude immigrants from counting altogether, that Ross, when he made this decision, consulted with people like Steve Bannon, people like Chris Kobach, the former secretary of state of Kansas, who are among the most anti-immigrant people in the country, the architect of the Trump administration's white nativist strategy.

I was in the Central Valley of California, Dan, where there are a lot of Latino immigrants, a lot of undocumented immigrants reporting on a story about the census in the spring of 2018. And I met a lot of undocumented immigrants. And I asked them, would you respond to the census if it had a question about U.S. citizenship? And they all told me no.

Ari Berman is a senior reporter at Mother Jones where he's done remarkable work covering voting rights and voter laws in the states over the past couple of years. He's the author of Give Us a Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

So Ari is the National Voting Rights Correspondent at Mother Jones and also the author of the terrific book Give Us the Ballot, A Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, which was published in 2015 and which former representative John Lewis described as a must read and a primer for every American.

So we will come back to that book, but today we're going to stay focused on Ari's book Give Us the Ballot...

Berman has been covering voting rights issues for many years and is the author of an earlier book called Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

He's the author of Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.

He's the author of Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. We'll be right back after a short break.

He's the author of Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, and the forthcoming book Minority Rule, The RightWing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It, which will be published in April.

Ari, in your book, Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, you take on the why, like why there's been an effort in the last 50 years to roll back the Voting Rights Act.

He's a writer and author of Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, preeminent voter suppression expert, but the good kind about how to fight it, not how to do it.