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Sept. 8, 2025 10:16-10:35 - CSPAN

18:44

Washington Journal Ari Berman

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kimberly adams

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unidentified		But both of us are disappointed that this ridiculous work is doing.
		Are you proud to be honest sending a letter back to the United States?
		Yeah, he is felt very strongly about Trump.
		The children, yeah, feels very badly about it.
		Thank you, everybody.
		We have some plans to go to Japan and South Korea, Leva.
		South Canadian, I mean, Rose.
		But it's going to be very interesting what comes out.
		I think we may have learned something because when they come here and there's nobody that can do what they're supposed to be doing and they bring people, those people can also construct us.
		We don't stop the voting stuff.
		And something very interesting will come out of that.
		Thank you, everybody.
		The president, yesterday, coming up shortly here on C-SPAN, President Trump will be speaking to the White House Religious Liberty Commission, taking place today at the Museum of the Bible here in Washington, D.C. When that gets underway, be sure to follow our live coverage right here on C-SPAN.
		While we wait for the President's remarks, we'll show you a discussion from Washington Journal.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		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		Good morning, Kimberly.
unidentified		Thank you for having me.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What does it mean to be the national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What exactly do you cover?
unidentified		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.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So you have a new cover story publishing early next week called Project 2026, Trump's Plan to Hijack the Next Election.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What are your biggest concerns heading into the midterms?
unidentified		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 their maps mid-decade to give more seats to Republicans.
		We've never seen a president do anything like that before.
		Redistricting is supposed to happen at the beginning of the decade.
		The idea that it would just happen in the middle of the decade simply because Trump wants more seats in Congress is truly unprecedented.
		Issuing and threatening to issue executive orders to do things, like he says, try to ban mail voting, end voting machines.
		We've never seen a president do anything like this before.
		Sending federal troops into heavily Democratic cities, places like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., possibly Chicago next.
		That could be a prelude to having federal troops guard the polls, try to check people's IDs when they vote, potentially intimidate Democratic constituencies.
		So my overall concern is that Trump is a very authoritarian president, and he's now using his authoritarian tactics in a way to try to influence the next election to benefit his party in a way that is extremely unusual and disturbing for an American president to do.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So you've talked about the things that you say President Trump wants to do in the upcoming election, but has it actually gotten any harder to vote or to register to vote in recent years?
unidentified		Well, it has if you look at what has happened at the state level, because states have passed a lot of different policies from making it harder to obtain a mail ballot to making it harder to cast a mail ballot to making it more difficult to register to vote to cutting back on the amount of time that people have to vote to closing polling places, removing voters from the rolls.
		We've seen all of that in recent years from states like Texas and Georgia and Florida.
		But Trump wants to go further.
		He doesn't want this to just be a state issue.
		He wants this to be a national issue.
		He wants to nationalize these efforts to make it more difficult to vote.
		As he said, he wants to ban mail voting.
		He wants to eliminate voting machines.
		He's already issued an executive order that, for example, would require you to have a passport or birth certificate to be able to register to vote, something that millions of Americans don't have or don't have ready access to.
		So yes, it has become more difficult to vote in certain states in recent years, but Trump would like to go a lot further.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Now, you mentioned the action at the state level when it comes to voter registration and voter ID laws, but much of the way that we run our elections in this country is managed at the state level.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Does that provide any kind of insulation or backstop against some of these things that you're concerned about?
unidentified		Yes, depending on what state it is and what that state is doing.
		I mean, we've also seen efforts to make it harder to vote and to overturn elections at the state level as well.
		One of the examples that I cite in my piece is a North Carolina Supreme Court race from 2024, in which the Republican judicial candidate, Jefferson Griffin, spent months trying to overturn that election of the eventual Democratic Justice, Allison Riggs.
		And it was very much like what Trump tried to do in 2020, trying to overturn the election.
		But this time, Griffin was actually able to persuade both the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court to try to overturn that election before a federal judge, and interestingly enough, appointed by Donald Trump, stepped in and said the state board of election had to certify that election.
		So we've seen these kind of efforts at the state level as well.
		But yes, there is some level of insulation.
		And there is a tension here because Trump is trying to do these things on a federal level, require proof of citizenship to register to vote, allegedly trying to end mail voting, to ban voting machines.
		But the Constitution is very clear that the states, with some oversight from Congress, set rules for elections.
		And so when Trump is trying to do these kind of things through executive order, he's running into difficulties in the courts because they're saying that this power is something that the president doesn't actually have.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Just sticking with the states a little bit longer, is anything happening at the state level to protect election integrity, in your opinion?
unidentified		In certain states, yes.
		I mean, you had bipartisan coalitions in past elections who have stood up and prevented elections from being overturned.
		You had, for example, the Secretary of State of Georgia be very vocal in defending the integrity of the election in 2020.
		You've seen those coalitions hold in 2022 and 2024.
		So I think there has been a movement of election officials trying to say that the system is secure.
		There is no widespread voter fraud.
		People should feel confident that their ballots are secure.
		But we've also seen people who tried to overturn the 2020 election, take positions of power, first at the state level, serving as state election officials, serving on election boards that certify elections, serving in roles like Secretary of State, State Attorney General, things like that, governors.
		And now we've seen them at the federal level.
		I mean, people who worked to overturn the 2020 election are now serving in the highest roles of the federal government under a president who led the push to overturn the 2020 election.
		So, yes, states are doing things to try to protect the integrity of the election, but they are running into a federal government that is not trying to protect the integrity of the election.
		And that's a very big challenge for the states right now.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		You've made a couple of references to the president's efforts to get rid of mail-in voting.
		He posted about this on Truth Social saying, I am going to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots.
		And also, while we're at it, highly inaccurate, very expensive, and seriously controversial voting machines, which cost 10 times more than accurate and sophisticated watermark paper, which is faster and leaves no doubt at the end of the evening as to who won and who lost the election.
		Now, how important is mail-in voting in the United States right now?
unidentified		Very important.
		I mean, tens of millions of people use it.
		Fewer people use mail-in ballots than vote in person, and obviously it's gone down somewhat since the pandemic.
		But there are states like Oregon, like Washington, that do elections entirely by mail.
		There's also people that vote by mail in very high rates in swing states, places like Pennsylvania, places like Florida.
		Nearly a third of voters cast their ballots by mail in some of these key swing states, places like Arizona as well.
		And it's proved very safe.
		And the thing is, until President Trump tried to make an issue of mail voting and attack mail voting, it was actually used more by Republicans than Democrats.
		So mail voting has really been a bipartisan issue until recently.
		There's a lot of Republican constituencies that use mail voting, elderly people, more rural constituencies.
		These tend to be more Republican voters.
		And they use vote by mail because it's more convenient for them.
		It might be harder to get to a polling place.
		So people rely on mail voting.
		There's no evidence it leads to fraud.
		And there are some Republicans that are uncomfortable with Trump's attacks on mail voting because, like I said, a lot of Republicans use it.
		And one of the reasons why Republicans did better in 2024 was that they embraced all the different methods of voting.
		Trump and his allies softped their attacks in 2024.
		And they urged people to vote early, to vote by mail if that was most convenient to them.
		So trying to roll this back, which by the way, the president doesn't have the power to unilaterally do, it's not just something that's going to hurt Democrats.
		It's going to hurt all voters, including many Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		You wrote recently this story on Trump's orders.
		Missouri Republicans plan to gerrymander a black lawmaker out of office.
		This is one of several redistricting fights playing out across the country.
		Many people are familiar with what happened recently in Texas.
		Can you talk about what's happening in Missouri and what this might mean for the midterms?
unidentified		Yes.
		So first off, I just want to reiterate how unusual this is.
		Redistricting is supposed to happen at the beginning of the decade.
		So the idea that it's happening in the middle of the decade is extremely unusual.
		And the president basically going around state by state by state and saying, you need to do this is even more unusual.
		So we saw what happened in Texas where the president pressured Texas Republicans to draw a new congressional map that is expected to net Republicans five more seats.
		But that is not enough for the president.
		He is now going state by state by state.
		Missouri is the next state following Texas to do this.
		They just convened a special session last week.
		And what they're trying to do is they're trying to draw one additional Republican seat.
		They're doing this by attempting to dismantle the seat held by Representative Emmanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from the Kansas City area.
		He was a former mayor of Kansas City.
		He's represented basically an urban Kansas City district for 20 years.
		That district would now stretch all the way 200 miles to rural Missouri, and it would be a lot more Republican.
		And that way, Republicans would control 90% of seats in Missouri in a place where Trump only got 58% of the vote.
		So they would have many more seats than the Republicans support in the state.
		And Trump's not stopping with Missouri.
		He's allegedly bringing leaders from Kansas and Nebraska to the White House this week.
		He's leaning on Indiana.
		He's leaning on Florida.
		And again, this is just extremely unusual that the president would lean on these states to redraw their maps mid-decade.
		And Democrats are trying to respond.
		But this whole effort was really launched by the White House in an extremely unprecedented way.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		If you have a question for Ari Berman, who's a national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones, you can call in Democrats 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001.
		And Independents 202-748-8002.
		Before we go to calls, Ari, I want to point to another piece of yours.
		The nation's landmark voting rights law just turned 60.
		It may not survive Trump.
		You're talking about the Voting Rights Act.
		What do you mean?
unidentified		What I mean is that the Voting Rights Act is really on its last legs right now.
		It's been weakened in a number of different ways by the Supreme Court.
		This was a law that transformed American democracy, that helped so many people who were disenfranchised in the Jim Crow South register and cast ballots for the first time.
		It was supported for many years by a very large bipartisan coalition in Congress, but it's been steadily weakened by the courts.
		And right now, there is a case pending before the Supreme Court from Louisiana that would basically rule that districts that are drawn to help elect a person of color, such as a black member of Congress in Louisiana, may be unconstitutional under the Voting Rights Act.
		And given how weakened the Voting Rights Act has already been by the courts, this would essentially deal a deathblow to the Voting Rights Act.
		In conjunction with another case that could come before the Supreme Court, that could rule that private plaintiffs, groups like, for example, the ACLU or the NAACP, don't have the power to bring lawsuits to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
		Only the federal government could be able to do that.
		Well, the federal government doesn't bring that many lawsuits to enforce the Voting Rights Act.
		And also, if the federal government's hostile to the Voting Rights Act, like this current administration is, there would basically be no litigation under the Voting Rights Act.
		So it's very sad that a law that is 60 years old that transformed American democracy that had so much bipartisan support over the years is really on its last legs.
		And I think that if the Voting Rights Act suffers, American democracy is going to suffer as well.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from Mike in Heartland, Wisconsin, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Mike.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I just want to bring up more of a local issue that happened in Milwaukee where somebody cheated the election.
		And it's not the national election that we necessarily have to worry about.
		It's people cheating their local elections, which in turn affect the national election.
		This woman worked, she works for the City of Milwaukee Police Department.
		She and you could look this up.
		It's a pretty recent story.
		I would hope that you would look it up to maybe get better details.
		She listed a different address so she could vote in a different district.
		The district that she worked in, that there was something on the ballot to give her a 3% raise.
		Now they found out that it wasn't her primary address.
		So you have people now, and this is where voter ID laws would be a good thing, where 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.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		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		I mean, it's about someone that worked for the police department.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I think I've found it.
unidentified		Misrepresented.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		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 it's not happening and that voter ID is somehow suppressioned 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 a dealership.
		You need an ID.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so let's let Mr. Berman respond.
unidentified		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.

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