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|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Today, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratzios, will testify before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on President Trump's artificial intelligence strategy. | |
| And on Thursday, watch C-SPAN's live all-day coverage of the September 11th commemoration services for the National 9-11 Memorial in New York City, the National 9-11 Pentagon Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. | ||
| Watch live this week on the C-SPAN networks or on C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app. | ||
| Also, head over to C-SPAN.org for scheduling information or to watch live or on demand anytime. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered. | ||
| We're funded by these television companies and more, including Mediacom. | ||
| This is binging. | ||
| That's Buffering. | ||
| This is a meetup. | ||
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| Power home, power struggle, security detection. | ||
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| This is Mediacom, and this is where it's at. | ||
| Mediacom supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Ari Berman, who's the National Voting Rights Correspondent at Mother Jones Magazine. | ||
| Welcome to Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning, Kimberly. | |
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| What does it mean to be the national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones? | ||
| What exactly do you cover? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I cover voting rights in all its various forms, which used to be a pretty obscure beat, but has now gotten a lot more attention given the news. | |
| So I cover changes around voting laws, efforts to make it more difficult to vote, things like gerrymandering that have been in the news, anything that affects voting in the election system. | ||
| That's what I cover. | ||
| I've also written three books, Herding Donkeys, Give Us the Ballot, and Minority Rule. | ||
| So I do a mix of shorter and longer form journalism. | ||
| So you have a new cover story publishing early next week called Project 2026, Trump's Plan to Hijack the Next Election. | ||
| What are your biggest concerns heading into the midterms? | ||
|
unidentified
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My biggest concern is that Trump is preparing and is in the process of interfering in the midterms in a way that no other president, Republican or Democrat, has ever done before. | |
| We've seen Trump in recent weeks lean on states to redraw. | ||
| We'll leave this recorded program here. | ||
| You can finish watching it, though, if you go to our website, c-span.org. | ||
| Live now to remarks from President Trump. | ||
| Well, I'll speak to them. | ||
| And I'll look at the battery factory that you actually since I've told. | ||
| And you know, when they're building batteries, if you don't have people in this country right now that know about batteries, maybe we should help them along. | ||
| Let them get the company and train our research to do some real complex things, whether it's battery manufacturing or computer manufacturing or building things. | ||
| So we're going to look at that whole situation. | ||
| We have a lot of industries that we don't have anymore, and we're going to have to praise people. | ||
| The way you praise people, they don't know what they're doing is let it stay for a little while and help. | ||
| So I'm going to look at that. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is a very interesting situation that took place in Florida. | |
| And we heard about it yesterday. | ||
| At the same time, Tom ICO came right because they were here illegally. | ||
| But we do have to work something out where we bring in experts so that our people can be friends and that they can do it themselves. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Well, we have a great relationship with South. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's really difficult. | |
| You know, we can say it's great yet. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I'm going to look at it because I understand exactly what they're doing. | |
| It really is if you have a flat token. | ||
| Well, I love it. | ||
| First of all, the two players have unbelievable talent. | ||
| They just seem that they hit the ball harder than I've ever seen before. | ||
| Incredible talent. | ||
| And I enjoyed it. | ||
| And I used to go all the time, and, you know, lately it's a little bit more difficult to go. | ||
| I really enjoyed it. | ||
| They were really nice. | ||
| The fans were really nice. | ||
| I didn't know what to expect. | ||
|
unidentified
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Usually you would say that would be somewhat progressive, as they say nowadays. | |
| Yeah, sometimes some people are talking liberal, but when these are words they like to use, progressive. | ||
| But they were great. | ||
| The bands were great. | ||
| Luxa had a free single pack on straight up. | ||
|
unidentified
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You have always sat up in the middle of the fans and was not really giving you anything that's strong. | |
| Does that make you be less comfortable up there? | ||
| Well, nobody was comfortable as Western to me. | ||
| That has to do with the pipeline that, you know, Deutsche Big Tube and lots of other things. | ||
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unidentified
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But I'm not happy. | |
| I'm not happy. | ||
| I'm not happy about the whole situation. | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| It doesn't affect us because it's not how it's going. | ||
| But they're losing. | ||
| I used to tell you 5,000 losing 7,000. | ||
| When you play the lesson, 7,000 votes every single week. | ||
| And such a horrible waste of humanity. | ||
| So, no, I am not thrilled with what's happening. | ||
| I think it's going to get settled. | ||
| So I settled seven wars. | ||
| This, I would have said, would have been maybe the easiest one to settle of all. | ||
| But with war, you never know what you're getting. | ||
| But we're going to get it. | ||
| I believe we're going to get it settled. | ||
| But I am not happy with that. | ||
| I'm not happy with everything happening in that war. | ||
| It's just such a waste of great humanity. | ||
|
unidentified
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I have to find out what you think is the greatest option for me to warn you. | |
| As of right now, what do you think is the greatest option of the BPL? | ||
| Well, we're going to see. | ||
| I mean, we have some very injustice discussions. | ||
| You know, Europe, European leaders are coming over to a country on Monday or Tuesday and individually. | ||
| And I think we're going to get that settled. | ||
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unidentified
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I think we're going to get it settled. | |
| They're all coming after. | ||
| You can't lose. | ||
| You know, when they're losing five to seven thousand total a week for no reason, gas again is settled. | ||
| Of all of the wars, whether it's the Congo or Rwanda, they said it was impossible to settle. | ||
| You look at every one of them. | ||
| I mean, every one of these wars were impossible. | ||
| I got every one of them settled. | ||
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unidentified
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Seven of them. | |
| Seven. | ||
| This was the one I really told GDP, but it's not. | ||
| But I think it's going to get settled. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're also reporting and asking a lot of free money in the biking company with about 4,000 parts. | |
| What's the mission of the party on the campus? | ||
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unidentified
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Are you the only thing that's at the bottom of the autoface scandal? | |
| Well, I think the AutoPen is one of the great scandals of our time. | ||
| The AutoPen was our president, or to put it a different way, whoever operated the AutoPen was our president. | ||
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unidentified
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And you are not allowed, because you're not allowed. | |
| And they gave a pardon to the unselect committee. | ||
| After the unselect committee realized that that whole situation was a hoax, it was all their fault, including Nancy Pelosi turning down security and all this, turning down cold. | ||
| It all came out bad for them. | ||
| They burned everything. | ||
| They got rid of everything. | ||
| And there's absolutely nothing there. | ||
| It's all gone. | ||
| And that was based on an Auto Pen. | ||
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unidentified
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You know, they gave those tempers and concrete among the unselected committee. | |
| They gave a pardon. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think it's a tremendous game. | ||
|
unidentified
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What do you think the media would say if you parting your team office and go out of those people who want to know? | |
| Well, it would have been a big story. | ||
| I like this thing. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is going to be the battle. | |
| I mean, multiple models on a market coming. | ||
| Yeah, and where would it separate you to where? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I haven't. | |
| When did this happen? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, I see, yeah, I see the video. | |
| I'll know all about it by tomorrow morning. | ||
| Well, we're going to go someplace. | ||
|
unidentified
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Look, DC now is 100%. | |
| I don't want to say 100, but it's pretty close to 100% healthy, happy, thriving. | ||
| It's a crime-free zone. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know that. | |
| You know, you could go out to dinner tonight and give you a glass of hits. | ||
| And most likely will not be harmed. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know that. | |
| You won't be peaked to hell. | ||
| Well, there's very little. | ||
| Within a week. | ||
| Within a week, there will be nothing. | ||
| Do you agree with me? | ||
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unidentified
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I feel like someone all in the right. | |
| I can't find something. | ||
| It's a safe place now. | ||
|
unidentified
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But you've been talking a lot about Chicago on there for now. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Chicago's a suffering. | ||
| Chicago last week was nine people killed and 28 people were shot. | ||
| A week before it was seven people were killed and 37 people were shot. | ||
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unidentified
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The week before that it was the same kind of thing. | |
| Chicago is a very dangerous place. | ||
| And we have a governor that doesn't care about crime. | ||
| I guess we could solve Chicago very quickly, but we're going to make a decision as to where we go over the next day or two. | ||
| When you look at what happened to DC in a short period of time, honestly, it's amazing. | ||
| Over a period of 12 days, in other words, on the 12th day, we had to be crime just about solved. | ||
| Right now, people are walking down. | ||
| They're going out right now to restaurants all over DC. | ||
| Whereas if you go back a year ago, or six months ago, nobody was solving it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Nobody. | |
| We did it in 12 days. | ||
|
unidentified
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Now it's better than it was in 12 days. | |
| We'll make it even better. | ||
| And then we're also going to clean it up. | ||
| We're going to clean up the city. | ||
| We're going to make some great improvements to the roads because it can be on all of the cotton signs. | ||
| You have signs in there, but up for 30, 40 years, they're worn out. | ||
|
unidentified
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It looks like hell. | |
| We're going to redo the signs. | ||
| We're going to put up new signs. | ||
| It's going to look good. | ||
| And within a six-month period, we'll go to it. | ||
| You have essentially a crime screen folks. | ||
|
unidentified
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So here we are on a nice Sunday evening. | |
| If you'd like, we're successful. | ||
|
unidentified
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If you'd like, you could go out and you just have dinner on me, but you wouldn't do that. | |
| But you could have dinner on me if you'd like. | ||
| Go ahead, what else? | ||
|
unidentified
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Sir, Master Russia, when do you plan to be present to the next as long as you're doing it? | |
| But my secondary. | ||
| Look, we're gonna get it done. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Russia-Ukraine situation, we're gonna get it done. | |
| I am confident we're gonna get it done. | ||
| Think of it. | ||
| I got seven done, all of which were impossible to do. | ||
| If you look at any one of the seven, you know them, I don't have to go through them. | ||
| Many of them were impossible. | ||
| One was 31 years, 10 million people filmed. | ||
| One was 34 years with 8 million people. | ||
| How about the Congo? | ||
| They lost 9 million people and went on for years with a lot of them. | ||
| All seven. | ||
| Everybody happy. | ||
| The ones that I thought would have been for me the easiest because of booth. | ||
| I thought that was very down that raper we're gonna get it done. | ||
| I think we're going to have a deal. | ||
| It's a hell of a problem. | ||
| Again, it's a problem we want to solve for the Pennsylvania Israel for everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
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But it's a problem we're gonna get done. | |
| So they have hospitals. | ||
| It should be a little bit less disappointing because some, you know, they tend to die, right? | ||
| They tend to die, even though they're young people aren't there. | ||
| They die. | ||
| Young people don't die. | ||
| Young people stay alive. | ||
|
unidentified
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But with this whole thing, they tend to die. | |
| But we have, let's say, 20 people and we have about 38 bodies. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is bodies. | |
| And the problem is all. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think we're going to get them all. | |
| No, I'm surprised because I knew him. | ||
| I liked him. | ||
|
unidentified
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And now Jeffrey's got a little bit surprised. | |
| I found him to be a very nice man, actually. | ||
| He does very well today. | ||
|
unidentified
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Probably Bob. | |
| And once he kicks in, once our policies kick in, the price of meat will be going down. | ||
| Just like the price of eggs went down and the price of a lot of other clothes we had is going down. | ||
| People go down. | ||
| Energy has gone way down. | ||
|
unidentified
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The price of gasoline has gone really. | |
| I mean, I think he'll be hitting $2. | ||
| And it was $4.50 a little while ago. | ||
| So energy's gone way down. | ||
| That brings everything up to them. | ||
| But Beef has gone, as you know, for other reasons, the price of peace and cheese has gone up a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
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It'll be comfortable. | |
| Before you went to a last spot, in the Oval Office, he said that the first lady wasn't doing the ambulance. | ||
| He said he came home and said he spoke to the earth and support the boat today. | ||
| I can't bring anything to come down. | ||
| The first lady actually got along great with her price, as I did. | ||
| But we're disappointed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Both of us are disappointed at this ridiculous warfare. | |
| Are you proud of her sending a letter to the city? | ||
| Yeah, he is not. | ||
| He's felt very strongly about the children. | ||
| Yeah, feels very badly about it. | ||
| Thank everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
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We have some tough plans, quote-unquote man, you know, have a tough plan. | |
| But it's going to be very interesting what comes out. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think they may have learned something. | |
| They come here, and there's nobody that can do it. | ||
|
unidentified
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thank you everybody those were the latest comments from president trump We returned now to our scheduled program already in progress. | |
| You would have caught that, that no, you can't vote here, and we wouldn't have to deal with investigations and all this stuff. | ||
| And I would appreciate it if I could maybe respond to your response. | ||
| Can you give me a little bit more information about this case in Milwaukee? | ||
| I am trying to find a link for it. | ||
| Can you just give me a little bit more information? | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, it's about someone that worked for the police department. | |
| I think I've found it. | ||
| Okay, let's look at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's coverage of this. | ||
| Milwaukee police employee charged with election fraud for lying about her address according to a complaint. | ||
| This is a story from August 25th. | ||
| I'll just read a little bit of it to give some key points here. | ||
| The Milwaukee Police Department's former Community Relations Engagement and Recruitment Director has been criminally charged with election fraud. | ||
| Marcy Patterson, 45, has been living outside the city of Milwaukee, but voting in Milwaukee elections and using her 80-year-old mother's Milwaukee address to receive increased pay according to a criminal complaint filed August 25th in Milwaukee County Circuit Court. | ||
| And it looks like she was living in a different town at the time, according to prosecutors. | ||
| And she's charged with one count of election fraud, voting by a disqualified person, which is a class one felony and punishable by not more than $10,000 or imprisoned up to three and a half years or both. | ||
| She resigned on July 21st from her job with the police department. | ||
| Okay, and what was your question again, Mike, just so we can let Mr. Berman respond? | ||
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unidentified
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I'd like just like to hear his opinion on that. | |
| I mean, the Democrats really like to push that there's not as much fraud as they think and that, you know, that it's not happening and that voter ID is somehow suppression to certain groups of people when we need IDs to get on a plane, buy alcohol, all these things, rent a car, all these things, just to buy a car from the dealership. | ||
| You need an ID. | ||
| Okay, so let's let Mr. Berman respond. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I'm not familiar with this specific story. | |
| I was on vacation at the end of August, so that might be why I missed it. | ||
| I should point out Wisconsin has a voter ID law like Mike wants. | ||
| So they have the kind of security that he's calling for. | ||
| And they caught this. | ||
| So that showed in this sense that the system worked. | ||
| I think no one's arguing. | ||
| I'm certainly not arguing that there's no voter fraud, that it never happens. | ||
| There clearly are cases where it occurs. | ||
| This seems like a fairly unusual case in that someone was trying to vote in such a way that directly benefited him or her, which is usually not something that is directly on the ballot. | ||
| But I think that the idea is not that it never occurs, but that it doesn't occur in the numbers that some people are suggesting, where people are saying there's tens of thousands or millions of fraudulent votes. | ||
| Like, for example, the president has claimed that's the kind of fraud that has never been proven to actually occur, where both Democratic and Republican officials and nonpartisan people have looked into this and they've never been able to substantiate those kind of claims. | ||
| And so I would just say this seems like an isolated case. | ||
| It seems like an unusual case. | ||
| It was something that was caught and Wisconsin has the kind of election security laws that, by and large, Republicans actually want. | ||
| Mike, I know you wanted to respond. | ||
|
unidentified
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I do just want to say that the reason why Wisconsin has strong voting laws is because we have a somewhat decent Republican legislator that actually puts forward stuff like this. | |
| And we have Democrats that lead Milwaukee that there's always a late voter dump every election. | ||
| They're the last county to finally finish things. | ||
| Everyone else, Madison. | ||
| And we have Republicans that stand up for stuff like this, where the Democrats in my state are the ones that are pushing the idea that strong RID laws are somehow suppressive. | ||
| So that's where we come from in Wisconsin. | ||
| And maybe you should keep in touch with Wisconsin. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Any further thoughts, Mr. Berman, before we move on? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I just want to say I've been to Wisconsin many times to report on Elections era, so I'm quite familiar with the voting laws in the state. | |
| The reason why Milwaukee has its results come in late is because they're not actually able to process mail ballots until Election Day. | ||
| And so they get all the votes on Election Day and they get all the mail ballots. | ||
| And it takes time to be able to do that given the volume of votes in that state. | ||
| They have asked the Republican-controlled legislature to allow them to process these mail ballots ahead of time, like happens in many other states, including Republican-controlled states like Georgia and Florida. | ||
| But they are unable to do so. | ||
| Therefore, it's really, interestingly enough, the Republican legislature's fault that Milwaukee has to report so late. | ||
| And so this is the kind of thing where there could be bipartisan agreement. | ||
| If both parties were interested in striking some kind of deal, there could be bipartisan agreement so that votes would be counted earlier and there wouldn't be these kind of conspiracy theories about quote-unquote vote dumps and things like that. | ||
| But unfortunately, in some states like Wisconsin, those bipartisan deals have not been made. | ||
| Anne is in Bar Harbor, Maine on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Anne. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hi, thank you so very much for this very important topic. | |
| I know that the guest is addressing structural and systemic significant photo suppression. | ||
| I would like to address societal voter suppression in terms of the notion that voting is an individual exercise in personal expression instead of a strategic joint exercise in taking power. | ||
| And so that potential Democratic voters on the left follow, you know, pipe dreams and purity tests and Pied Pipers, while Republican right-wing voters hold their nose, vote for Donald Trump, and win the Supreme Court. | ||
| And this drives me a little crazy. | ||
| Any thoughts, Mr. Berman? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I mean, I think I would have to look at more specifics to really understand what Ann is talking about. | |
| But I do think that generally speaking, Republican voters think more long term about the impact of the election and less about who the specific candidate is. | ||
| As Ann mentioned, a lot of Republicans, particularly in 2016, didn't like Trump, but they held their nose and voted for him because they cared about things like the Supreme Court. | ||
| And that had a huge impact on American politics because Trump has been able to appoint three people to the Supreme Court. | ||
| And that has given Republicans a 6-3 majority on the court. | ||
| That has helped their party in a lot of different ways, including ruling in the middle of the 2024 election that Trump didn't have to stand trial for inciting the insurrection on January 6th, which I believe had a huge impact on how the election went. | ||
| Whereas Democrats tend to be more focused on individual candidates and the merits of those individual candidates and the personalities of those individual candidates. | ||
| And so, in that sense, I think it's true that Democrats are more focused on who the candidate is and what they represent and whether they check all these different boxes for the voters. | ||
| Whereas Republicans are willing, not all of them, but some of them are willing to accept some flaws in their candidates to achieve bigger things that they want. | ||
| For example, like being able to control a majority on the Supreme Court. | ||
| I definitely think that's a fair point. | ||
| David is in Chadburn, North Carolina, on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call. | ||
| Mr. Barbara, I was had a question. | ||
| I remember back in the 2020 election, there were some several. | ||
| I remember one person in particular, they had the voting booths out where you could do your mail-in voting. | ||
| And the person was at the box just standing there for seemed like five, ten minutes, dropping letter after vote after vote after vote after vote into the machine. | ||
| And, you know, another thing would be like, David, did you mean a voting machine or a drop-off box for mail-in ballots? | ||
| I'm sorry, a drop box. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| My concern is mail-in voting. | ||
| The box was there, and she was standing there, just kept putting in the votes in the box, of course, you know, a drop box. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, you know, you see all these votes that come in for the election for Biden, and there was like more votes than anyone in the people in America, the voting people allowed to vote in America. | ||
| And I was just wondering, Mr. Barbarin, what are your thoughts about that? | ||
| I know you said you felt like there was a small percentage of fraud, but without ID, how do you feel about ID, I guess would be my question. | ||
| How do you feel about ID, voter ID? | ||
| Well, North Carolina has a voter ID requirement. | ||
| So that is another state where if people vote by mail, they're going to have to provide some form of ID, and that's going to be checked by election officials. | ||
| And in some states, you're able, for example, to collect mail-in ballots from communities that are not able to get to the polls that easily. | ||
| For example, you might be able to collect it from elderly voters or from people from disabilities. | ||
| You can take those mail ballots, you can put them in a drop box, but election officials are going to confirm all that information. | ||
| They're going to make sure that people are who they say they are in the end. | ||
| And North Carolina, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, has not had a long history of fraud with some exceptions. | ||
| And so I'm not opposed to ID as long as it's something that everyone can get. | ||
| And for 90% of the public, it's not going to be a big deal because they have a driver's license or some form of ID. | ||
| But I think for the 10% that don't, for one reason or another, it can be burdensome because if you don't have an ID, you often have to have underlying documents like a birth certificate. | ||
| That can be harder to obtain. | ||
| It can cost money to obtain. | ||
| There are people that don't drive or that are elderly that no longer drive, that may not have access to these kinds of things. | ||
| So I think it's not a big deal for most people, but for a small subset of people, it could be a bigger deal. | ||
| I think there has to be some kind of safety net for those people to make the IDs readily accessible. | ||
| We've seen in some states, for example, have required IDs, but then have closed DMV offices, for example, or don't have a lot of DMVs. | ||
| In states like Texas, for example, that are quite big, you might have to drive 200 miles to be able to get in an ID. | ||
| So it can be burdensome for some people. | ||
| I don't think it's the only problem with our election system. | ||
| I think there are things that are bigger deals, for example, banning mail voting, cutting the number of polling places, those kinds of things I think would be much more burdensome than an ID law. | ||
| But I do think for a small subset of the population, it can be a burden. | ||
| George is in Purcellville, Virginia, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, George. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| I've been in election office for about 20 years in Virginia. | ||
| And I always think if all the states do the way Virginia does it, we'd be in pretty good shape. | ||
| We get, say, paper ballots, we may start with 2,000 paper ballots and we get 1,500 cast. | ||
| We have to show we have 500 ballots left over. | ||
| There's spoiled ballots and things like that. | ||
| But it seems like a good system. | ||
| And people show an ID to vote. | ||
| That doesn't seem to be a problem. | ||
| And I just figure it's a great system. | ||
| And I don't know why these other places have so many problems. | ||
| I think the one concern is ballot harvesting when people go to a nursing home and gather a bunch of ballots. | ||
| I don't know if that's a legitimate way to vote. | ||
| But thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| You're the best. | ||
| I send you a little bit of money now and then. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Go ahead, Mr. Berman. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was George who was calling, right? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
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I want to thank him for his election work. | |
| It's really important to have people volunteer to take these kinds of positions. | ||
| It's often unglamorous work. | ||
| It's become more difficult in recent years. | ||
| But, you know, our election system functions by ordinary people doing things like becoming poll workers, becoming election officials. | ||
| So I always want to thank people that do that kind of work. | ||
| And yeah, Virginia has a good system. | ||
| They have a lot of time to vote early. | ||
| They have security measures in place to try to make sure people say they are who are voting. | ||
| It's a system that both Republicans and Democrats have done well under. | ||
| I think there's a misperception that if you make it easier to vote or you change voting laws, that it's going to help one party or another. | ||
| But we've seen in Virginia them adopt a number of election reforms. | ||
| And in recent years, Republicans have done well in high turnout elections in Virginia. | ||
| And Democrats have done well in high turnout elections in Virginia. | ||
| So the idea that if a lot of people vote, it's going to benefit one party or another, I think is an increasingly outdated idea. | ||
| So I do think that that's one state that people could look to in terms of having well-run elections. | ||
| And I appreciate the caller for making that point. | ||
| You were referencing the importance of volunteering and the poll workers that we have across the country and the other election workers. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about the United States Election Assistance Commission, which you've also written about, and the role that they play in the elections? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they basically advise states on voting procedures. | |
| They issue guidance to the states and they help states with things like funding, that kind of thing. | ||
| They're basically a resource for the states that came out of the 2000 election in Florida, where there are a lot of voting problems. | ||
| And the idea was that there should be some kind of federal agency that would interlink with the states for best practices. | ||
| Now, recent years, Trump has tried to change the Election Assistance Commission. | ||
| For example, he issued this executive order in March that I said would require proof of citizenship to register to vote for federal elections, things like a passport or a birth certificate, so not just your ID, but documents that fewer people have or carry around with them to be able to register to vote. | ||
| He wanted that to go through the Election Assistance Commission. | ||
| He also issued a part of the executive order that didn't get that much of attention that called for rescinding certification on current voting machines and calling on them to adopt new technology, which interestingly enough is not actually available. | ||
| So basically, states were going to be required to adopt voting technology that is not possible for them to actually be able to adopt. | ||
| And experts worried that would then be something that Trump would use to claim there was fraud in the election. | ||
| And that also went through the Election Assistance Commission. | ||
| So this is an example of a pretty obscure government agency that not a lot of people know about, but that has become quite important in terms of how our elections are run and how these fights over voting are playing out right now. | ||
| David is in Los Angeles, California on our line for independence. | ||
| Good morning, David. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, hi, Ari. | |
| I just wanted to make a couple factual statements and clear up some misinformation. | ||
| In California, a lot of the Trump supporters say that illegal immigrants are voting. | ||
| The problem with that is in order to register to vote in California, you have to have a social security number. | ||
| You can actually go online and prove that. | ||
| And they don't give social security numbers to illegal immigrants. | ||
| I had to register my mother to vote, and we ended up having to register her. | ||
| And I typoed one of her social security numbers, and it rejected it. | ||
| So there is obviously a misinformation about understanding the difference between voting and registering to vote. | ||
| So the mail-in ballots, in order to receive a mail-in ballot, you have to be a registered voter. | ||
| That's another bit of misinformation. | ||
| People think they're just mailing out these ballots. | ||
| They're not. | ||
| You have to actually be a registered voter, which means you have to have a social security number. | ||
| So this is a lot of the misinformation that's going on out there. | ||
| And lastly, I just want to point out, having a mail-in ballot is probably one of the most informed ways that you can vote. | ||
| I was able to sit down at the table, dinner table, and go through every single candidate, every single measure, and study and reference and educate myself. | ||
| And it's some of the most informed voting I've ever done. | ||
| Just wanted to point that out. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Your thoughts, Mr. Berman? | ||
| The caller made a number of good points. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| There's been a lot of misinformation out there about people voting illegally. | ||
| President Trump claimed a very high profile that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because 3 million people voted illegally in California, that 3 million undocumented immigrants cast ballots. | ||
| That was subsequently looked into. | ||
| No one was ever able to substantiate anything like that. | ||
| It doesn't actually make any rational sense why someone who's here, presumably, if they are here legally, they're here to work and provide a better life for their family, that they would risk deportation, time in jail, simply to cast a ballot. | ||
| So there's no evidence of it. | ||
| It also doesn't make any kind of rational sense from a cost-benefit analysis. | ||
| And it also is a good point about mail voting, that there are procedures in there to confirm who people are and why they should be receiving a mail ballot and why their ballot is counted in the first place. | ||
| I think people think that there's no rules around mail-in voting, but people's identities are confirmed by mail simply like they're confirmed through voting in person. | ||
| It's just that you're voting in a different kind of method. | ||
| And then, lastly, the point about having more time to vote by mail. | ||
| I think that's certainly true. | ||
| I think all of us have stepped in the voting booth, even someone like me who's a national voting rights correspondent. | ||
| And there's been things on the ballot that we might not know that much about. | ||
| There might be some obscure local resolution that we don't know that much about. | ||
| And you always say, Oh, I wish I had more time to research that. | ||
| I didn't realize that was going to be on the other side of the ballot, for example. | ||
| And mail voting gives you that kind of benefit. | ||
| So I always tell people to vote the way that they're most comfortable with. | ||
| But I think the voting system works best when people have as many options as possible. | ||
| That's kind of true in life itself. | ||
| That if you need more time or you can't make it to the polls, mail voting is a great option. | ||
| Early voting is also a great option if you don't have time to vote usually on a Tuesday in November, which is a workday for many people. | ||
| You have time to vote early. | ||
| You might be able to vote on the weekend, or you might be able to vote sometime during the week when it's less busy. | ||
| Or if you like to vote in person on Election Day, you can still do that. | ||
| No one's saying you can't do that, but we're increasingly moving to a system where the majority of people are voting before Election Day. | ||
| And I think it's really important to point that out: that more options is something that will ultimately lead to higher turnout and a better democracy as a result. | ||
| Jim is in Florescent, Missouri, on our line for Republicans. | ||
| Good morning, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| I don't know if you have the ability to pull up a map of the state of Illinois, but I'd like to ask Ari what his thoughts are. | ||
| Because I'm in Missouri, but Illinois is right across the river. | ||
| They've got 14 Democrat seats, three Republican seats in that state. | ||
| So the ratio there is about 83%. | ||
| If Missouri changes their gerrymandered districts, it would go from about 75 to 87, 88. | ||
| And how come you haven't commented on a lot of the Democrat areas that are heavily gerrymandered, like the state of Illinois? | ||
| Some states out east are 100% Democrats, like Massachusetts. | ||
| So you tell me there's no Republicans in Massachusetts. | ||
| Where were you when they were doing this? | ||
| But you're here now to complain about what the Republicans are doing. | ||
| All they're doing is pushing back a little bit on what the Democrats have done for years. | ||
| Go ahead, Mr. Berman. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, Kimberly, I have to say, I think there's a distinction between redistricting or gerrymandering as it happens after the census, which is when it's supposed to happen, which both red and blue states do. | |
| Yes, Illinois is absolutely gerrymandered, but other Republican states are gerrymandered as well. | ||
| That's within their rights to do as long as it doesn't violate other voting rights laws. | ||
| What I'm saying is this kind of mid-decade gerrymandering is very, very dangerous. | ||
| What red states are now doing, they are redrawing maps they themselves drew at the beginning of the decade simply because President Trump wants them to redraw them. | ||
| And that is very ahistorical, very dangerous. | ||
| I believe it's going to lead to a race to the bottom in both red and blue states. | ||
| And you're going to get a situation in red states, there's going to be virtually no Democratic representation. | ||
| In blue states, there's going to be virtually no Republican representation. | ||
| It's going to be very hard to find any kind of middle ground. | ||
| Moderates are going to be squeezed as a result. | ||
| And so think people are pointing, for example, to Illinois, but Illinois drew those maps at the beginning of the decade. | ||
| That doesn't mean they're defensible, but they follow the normal process. | ||
| This is an abnormal process that is going on now. | ||
| And Missouri Republicans drew those maps in 2021. | ||
| They made the determination that those were the maps they wanted. | ||
| And they're simply redrawing the maps now because President Trump has leaned on them and pressured them. | ||
| And to me, that is a form of election interference by the President of the United States that goes beyond simple redrawing of the maps that happens at the beginning of a decade in both red and blue states. | ||
| And so I think we have to draw a distinction between redistricting as it happens after the census and mid-decade gerrymandering to benefit one party, which is basically unprecedented for the president of the United States to call on state by state by state to do something like this. | ||
| Cecilia is in Birmingham, Alabama on our line for Democrats. | ||
| Good morning, Cecilia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Yeah, I wanted to ask about the voting machines that add up the votes in each state. | ||
| Is there any particular oversight on the voting machines that add up the votes for each state? | ||
| Because I had been hearing that some of these voting machines can be hacked. | ||
| Mr. Berman, do you have any thoughts on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, generally speaking, I can at least attest to the way it works in New York. | |
| I don't know every other state, but generally speaking, in most states, voting machines have paper backups, meaning that you cast your ballot in the machine. | ||
| In New York, you put it in your machine, and then you get a receipt to show that you voted. | ||
| And so it's a voting machine with a paper backup. | ||
| And I think that's the best way to do it. | ||
| If we moved to pure paper balloting, that would introduce a level of human error that is not available with voting machines. | ||
| So it would take longer and there would inevitably be mistakes. | ||
| But if we moved to voting machines with no paper backups, then people would have less certainty that their ballots would be counted. | ||
| So generally speaking, these machines are secure. | ||
| Sometimes what happens is election officials will have voter registration lists, something like that, that might be targeted. | ||
| That is one of my concerns that I point out in my article, that there have been efforts by the Russians, by the Chinese, by the Iranians to access voting machine equipment. | ||
| Maybe it might not be the results themselves, but voter registration lists, something like that. | ||
| One of the things the Trump administration has done is it's cut back efforts to prevent foreign election interference, things that were worked on at a bipartisan level in both the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations. | ||
| And I think it's worrisome at a time when the world is becoming more dangerous, that our cyber security efforts are becoming more porous. | ||
| That is something that worries both Democratic and Republican election officials. | ||
| And I think it's something that has had bipartisan support in the past, and it's unfortunately become politicized under this administration. | ||
| The idea of protecting us against foreign election interference. | ||
| Well, that's all the time that we have for this segment. | ||
| Thank you so much to Ari Berman, who's a national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones Magazine, also author of the book Minority Rule, the right-wing attack on the will of the people and the fight to resist it. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Kim Really. | |
| I appreciate it. | ||
| Congressman Cohen, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| It's good C-SPAN still funded by the government. | ||
| It is not funded by the government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Well, I thought you didn't get any money from the government at all. | ||
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|
unidentified
|
What a disappointment to Elon Musk. | |
| I'm sure he liked to doge to you. | ||
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| Love C-SPAN. | ||
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| You know, I wish we could have a thousand C-SPANs across the media spectrum. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unfortunately, we don't. | |
| I think C-SPAN is a huge, huge asset to America. | ||
| Not just the coverage that we get of both chambers on one and two, but programs like Washington Journal that allow policymakers, lawmakers, personalities to come on and have this question time during Washington Journal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's a huge benefit. | |
| I hope that all these streaming services carry C-SPAN as well because it's an important service to the American people. | ||
| I'm actually thrilled that this time in Washington Journal, I'm getting a lot of really substantive questions from across the political aisle. | ||
| Our country would be a better place if every American just watched one hour a week. | ||
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| So thank you for your service. | ||
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| And Senator Eric Schmidt of Missouri and Representative Riley Moore of West Virginia, speaking at the Edmund Burke Foundation's National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And later, another chance to watch QA with cable TV pioneer John Malone. | ||
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