About Voter Suppression than ahead of the upcoming 2020 election. In this moment following ongoing unconscionable tragedies of Racial Injustice in our country i have more hope than ever that are declaration of black lives matter and our protests in support of freedom for all will be unrelenting in bringing about equitable and longoverdue change. We feel incredibly fortunate that tonights guest is one of the foremost experts on Voting Rights. Leader Stacey Abrams is a political leader, the first black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States. In the race for governor of georgia in 2018 she won more votes than any other democrat in the states history. Stacey abrams made history as the first black woman to deliver a response to the state of the union in 2019. There is no doubt her history making efforts are far from over. In her new book our time is now, power, permits and the fight for fair america she draws on Extensive Research to offer concrete solutions to end Voter Suppression and empower citizens. Former us secretary of state Madeleine Albright called the book and essential toolkit for citizens of all backgrounds who believe as i do that democracy is not a spectator sport. Tonight Stacey Abrams will be on with aaron haynes. She was previously the National Brighter on race for the associated press. We are so grateful for her participation this evening. You can submit them using the q and a button, also included a link where you are definitely going to want to purchase an autographed copy of our time is now. Im excited to listen to and learn from these extraordinary women. Thanks again for joining us and please welcome Stacey Abrams and errin haines into your home. Thank you so much and thank you so much for what i hope is going to be a robust conversation with somebody who covered for a long time and could not want to hear more from in this moment in our democracy facing what i feel is the most consequential election of our time. Welcome, Stacey Abrams. Weve got to stop meeting like this. Good to see you again. I feel i am a native of atlanta not to start this conversation without talking about, delay the front of the pandemic but nonetheless turned out to be a debacle of democracy. You see what is responsible for that. You and others predicted this not yesterday, not last week, not last month but two years ago, earlier than that. With your assessment is from yesterday. Everyone is tuning in. There was a combination of incompetence and malfeasance. Lets start with malfeasance. This is a state that has for the last decade practiced Voter Suppression as an art form. In the 2018 election it was put in sharp relief, the newly and i generated secretary of state brian kemp arrested 12 people for having the audacity to use absentee ballots to win an election. They followed the rules, did what they were supposed to and because they were africanamerican, they were arrested and charged with 120 felonies. They spent 3 years with their lives torn apart, lost their jobs, lost their seats on the school board. The school board election, their lives were destroyed, one woman committed suicide. That began at least in my window, the most recent for Voter Suppression. You fast forward to 2018, brian camp has been secretary of state for eight years, purged 1. 4 million voters, the closure of 214 precincts. He has been the architect of egregious systems that hills 553,000 applications for Voter Registration hostage. And multiple infractions. He then used the power to run for governor and was replaced by brad ratzenberger. Brad comes into play. The fair fight organization, to the states, would never be undone. Would never be the governor in 2018, if democracy didnt work. There was an issue of flipping where people put in their votes and the person they selected, namely me, i am not brian kemp. I want to frame that for this reason. Malfeasance doesnt disappear because it goes underground. What happened in part was the same structures that have been problematic for the last decade reared their ugly head again yesterday. Then on top of it, incompetence. Than what brian kemp said when he was secretary of state and what brad ratzenberger said, the superintendent of elections, to invest those elections. They are all on the county. The law gives certain responsibilities but what brad ratzenberger did was refuse to do his job. Counties, not just large ones like the two largest in the state but smaller counties, republican counties all experienced terrible results, 170 million. 170 million spent on brandnew machines. My organization, a Progressive Group worked with a hyper conservative group to tell him this was a bad idea. I can agree with charles koch on an issue it is deeply problematic and yet he purchased the machine and failed to do the most basic, responsible behaviors to make sure everyone in charge of administering those machines knew how to do it, make enough machines available and what we saw happen were three things which absentee ballot income increased dramatically because we are in the midst of a pandemic in georgia allows those ballots. He did one good thing of saying applications should be made available to every voter, that was good and he fended out the program to a company in arizona that was woefully behind in sending out those ballots including thousands of people who never received them. He failed to manage and train appropriately counties that give them her investment they needed. The most populous county on saturday said we need 250 extra people to meet the basic need of our increased turnout. The state did nothing, the states that it wasnt their fault, not their issue. Instead he spent 400, 000 doing an advertisement thanking himself or buying these machines. That could have paid for 1600 poll workers who could have reduced the 7hour lines people stood in. The third issue is we had fewer polling places, fewer workers, not only with resources that would have provided for that, he did nothing to ensure that communities who desperately needed to be able to vote would be able to do so. Incompetence and malfeasance come together and make Voter Suppression not only a disaster but a solvable problem. Move the people with bad hearts the change the law to make them do good, you have to demand those elected to these offices to be secretaries of state, do their job and that happened yesterday in georgia. You made so many points and because you saw what was coming, you were not surprised by what we saw yesterday although it did and should alarm the rest of the country but to your point, you are somebody that pushes back, it is not normal for voters to be in line for hours to cast a ballot, what i was struck by was the number of black voters in georgia who showed up with what amounted to survival kits, bottle of water, extra phone chargers, stadium chairs, snacks, they were ready to be in line and expected to be in line for a long time. They did not expect casting a ballot to be an in and out process. What does that tell you about how much the hours long way to been normalized particularly in black communities . Guest absolutely. The Brennan Center did a fantastic study if you want to go to their website, really good analysis of the poll tax assessed against black and brown communities through long wait times. In 2018 georgia had the single largest wait time for africanamerican voters in the country, average of 4 hours. What happened yesterday was people have gotten used to it because they got used to being under resourced, got used to having secretary of state point a finger at the county in the county that points the finger back, the constitution does not mention the county. The constitution gives the responsibility to the secretary of state but what we saw yesterday was people reacting to long lines in early voting because we have so many new voters entering the process and that is the one bright spot i want to hold onto. We saw new voters showing up over the process of this election and they strained the system. The point of having leadership is look at what is happening and you scale to meet the moment and for africanamerican voters who comprise 32 of the voting population in the state they knew they would be voting in communities where they would be least likely to be resourced, most likely to be pushed out of the system because of false we found existing in the databases. My father, i was trying to track his absentee ballot. I put him into a voter page managed by the secretary of state, he didnt exist, they put in the wrong birthday form but i had to get a lawyer to help me figure it out. My absentee ballot arrived but the return envelope was sealed shut and i couldnt open it so i had to vote in person. We have normalized as africanamericans, communities of, poor communities have normalized the maltreatment we receive and casting a vote and that should not happen in a democracy but we often forget access to that democracy didnt become real for many people until 68 or 1970. We have a much shorter period of access than we have had of malfeasance. The living memory of that malfeasance continues to not just galvanize us to show up prepared but lowered our expectations of what we deserve. Host absolutely. Thinking about that, i am wondering, what the georgia primary revealed about what Voter Suppression could look like across the country in 2020 and voter depression for that matter . Guest Voter Suppression is three things. Bottom line is an eligible voter denied access to the right to vote. There are three ways it happens. You register upset about malfeasance as well. Can you register and stay on the role, can you access the ballot and does your ballot get counted. The United States is one of few industrialized democracy eyes to nations that is delegated to 50 different states the authority to create their own versions of democracy. The rules differ from state to state and that is one of the reasons Voter Suppression is so insidious and so pervasive because it looks different depending on where you are. We know the challenges i spoke of with secretaries of state yesterday the same time we were having the election in georgia, South Carolina had their election as did nevada and they both experienced because republican secretaries of state who made it more difficult for voters to cast their vote primarily so we know that around the country Voter Suppression is alive and well. Fair fight action created a i have a Second Organization called fair fight 2020, Political Organization that has targeted 18 battleground states in the 2020 election where we know some version of Voter Suppression is going to come to fruition. We saw that play out in wisconsin, the Republican Legislature in the midst of the pandemic forced voters to stand in line in long lines where they shut down hundreds of precincts and refused to allow normal use of absentee ballots so people could stay home and be safe. We know what this predicts for 2020, the november election, the obligation to understand the need to scale up the resources. States are not going to be able to do this alone. More people are energized, more people are excited, more people are terrified, more people are going to show up but we have to put guardrails on the system so no bad actors take a bad secretary of state has the authority to deny access to the right to vote to anyone who is eligible. Those are things we can accomplish and i will talk through the details but the reality is i want people to be aware and be angry but i also want folks to understand there is a way through this and a way to make it right. Host i also wonder, speaking directly to voters, what do you say to somebody who doesnt have confidence their vote will count in november, how do you get folks to vote when they are reading the kinds of headlines coming out of georgia . Guest Voter Suppression is most effective not by blocking access to the right to vote, it is most effective when it convinces entire communities it is not worth trying. One of the reasons post 2018 i decided to focus my attention on Voter Protection and amplifying the issue of Voter Suppression, i spent 11 years in the legislature watching people tell me that their votes didnt count, didnt matter if they participated. They were denied healthcare because georgia is one of the state that refuses to expand medicaid. They are losing access to reproductive choice because georgia is one of the states the past a forced pregnancy bill that outlawed abortion after a certain time. They are facing environmental challenges that are being completely ignored by those in charge. What is happening in georgia is happening across the country but what also happens, we had a respite. We had the two year tenure of the Obama Administration and we saw glimpses of what was possible, and that is what we have to hold 2. What is even more important to me is what we saw in 2018 but i didnt become governor but we triple the turnout of latino voters, of Asian American voters, increased Youth Participation by 139 , increased black participation by 40 , increased white participation for the First Time Since bill clinton ran in georgia and those metrics, those numbers prove people still have hope, they want more. And an affirmative obligation, if you try, it will work. What we shouldnt do is say if you try will work instantly and i will be well. That is the unfortunate message people took from the 2008 election which is why in 2010 we reset back by a decade. Now our responsibility is to say it is going to work but it is going to take time, it is going to be tedious, there will be setbacks and it will require our relentless and affirmative engagement every single time. We are pushing against people who want to hold onto power so desperately they are willing to break the machinery of democracy to do so and our responsibility, those of us in elected office who want to stand for elected office, those who just believe in america our affirmative obligation is to acknowledge those who feel depressed, who feel suppressed and legitimate being pushed out of the system. It is our job to tell them why it is happening and how they can get back in and for us to carve a path. Adding to that, the remarkable expansion of the electorate you were able to accomplish in 2018 even though you did not become governor, i did not see you lost because you did not concede. Particularly vulnerable populations like the elderly and africanamerican voters. I would add, under yumminess, the native american population. We watch what happened to the now foundation that the husband dies rates of Covid Infection and death despite the population is as a percentage of the nation. We know whats happening to those who have the coexisting not only are they people of color but they are impoverished or they are working for. The challenge is that the only way we get through and recover from the pandemic and its devastating Public Health crisis, the economic collapse and the lack of faith in our system because we have watched our leaders, the federal leaders lied to us about what is happening. The fact we had to lionize a man simply for telling us the truth in dr. Fauci is emblematic of just how broken our country is at this moment, but we are still here and particularly for communities without of the bozo foldable and police resilient, the only way through is through voting. The only way through is to elect new leadership and to elect new representation. Representation that sees us and that listens to us. Its part of the responsibility each of us holds to not give in to the press of evil. Thats Strong Language to use but there is nothing that is less evil than watching people died when you know you can do something about it. In fact, when you accelerate it because of your deliberate inaction, and thats what were watching happen. I believe the solution is twofold. Number one, we need the u. S. Senate to pass the heroes act. The heroes act will allocate 3. 6 billion to our elections across the country. Thats 3. 6 billion will pay for vote by mail. You will hear all these stories about how vote by mail is fraudulent and its rife with fraud. The only fraud report about recently when it comes to mail in ballots, the fact donald trump, his press secretary, the two of them have been using false addresses and that made to be an issue product of that is a diminutive issue. We know the Heritage Institute has said that they been able to amalgamate 1300 cases im being really generous since 2000 of voter fraud of any country that set of 625 million votes cast. We know voter fraud isnt real but we know about her suppression is. Being able to vote by mail can be made real if we have the heroes act and the dollars because 34 states already have no excuse absentee ballot. As we saw in georgia yesterday having the right to do something doesnt mean it works out. The resources necessary to skip up the volume of voters will likely have in the pandemic requires early investment thats what heres heroes act needs t. We have to remember as many of us should vote for momus possible but their people have no choice. Native americans often cannot vote from all because they do not have regular addresses. They do not have regular mail pickup and thats why sometimes they need ballot collection which is allowing them to gather the absentee ballot, gather ballots and turned it in. But we also meet in person voting. We need inperson voting for those who are disabled, those of language barriers, for those who are homeless or web been displaced by covid. We need it for those who attempted to vote