All right.
Welcome, everybody.
Good evening.
How are we doing?
Excellent.
Nice to see you all.
I'm very impressed.
It's 70 degrees, and you're
inside, so bless you.
We've spent a long time
working on this great event.
We're so delighted to
have Michael Waldman here,
but I do know the weather
is very, very enticing.
Welcome to CSREA's annual
Third Rail Lecture.
For those of you who don't
know what CSREA's about-- some
of you I recognize,
but some seem
like you haven't been at too
many CSREA events-- we're
a campus-wide research center
devoted to the study of race
and ethnicity in America.
We try to build
scholarly community
across various disciplines,
foster public conversations,
and enhance knowledge
on pivotal issues,
and hopefully, this
is our aspiration,
contribute to the national
and local community efforts
to create a more just society.
But the Third Lecture series
is a very special part
of our mission.
It features respected
scholars and researchers
who can excessively
address some of the most
thorny and contentious
political, social, and cultural
issues related to
race and ethnicity
in contemporary society.
Obviously, voting rights
is one of these topics,
along with affirmative action,
welfare policy, and immigration
law.
These are the kinds of topics
we like to tackle with the Third
Rail Lecture series.
So we're very lucky to have
Michael Waldman here tonight
to give our Third Annual
Third Rail Lecture
series on his new book
called, The Fight to Vote.
Before I go any
further, though, I
want to extend a very
special thanks to Jody Rich
and to Brad Brockman,
who recommended
Michael Waldman, who I've known
for years on Twitter and the TV
and following the
Brennan Center.
A number of my ex-students have
been employed by your unit.
But I was very thrilled for them
to consider a faculty research
grant to bring him.
And I said, no, no, no, no.
He's Third Rail material.
We're going to move him
right on out of the grants
into Third Rail.
So I want to thank them both
for bringing us together.
Tonight, after Mr.
Waldman speaks,
we'll have a brief
Q&A. There's going
to be a lovely reception
and a book signing.
And tomorrow, for those of you
who have time, in the morning,
there is a research seminar
called, "Digging for Democracy,
Using Archival Research
to Tell America's Story."
And this will be from 10:00 to
11:30 in Pembroke Hall, room
202, 10:00 to 11:30
tomorrow, research seminar
on using archives to
tell America's story.
So let me give a
brief introduction
to Michael Waldman.
I'd be here a very
long time if I told you
all the things he's done.
So you'll have to Google
him for the full scope.
But for the moment,
Michael Waldman
is the president of the
Brennan Center for Justice
at the NYU School of Law, a
nonpartisan law and policy
institute that
focuses on improving
the systems of
democracy and justice.
He's a constitutional
lawyer and writer
and an expert on the presidency
and American democracy.
The Brennan Center is
a leading legal voice
on election law, constitutional
law, government reform,
and racial justice.
In 2012, it helped lead
the successful effort
to block laws that could have
made it harder for 5,000,000
eligible citizens to vote.
Waldman has led the
Center since 2005.
He's the author of The Fight
to Vote, newly published,
on the history of
the long struggle
to win voting rights
for all Americans.
It's receiving
widespread praise for
its masterful and
compelling treatment
over the struggle over voting
rights in the US history.
He's the author of
several previous books--
The Second Amendment, A
Return to Common Sense,
POTUS Speaks, Who Robbed
America-- that's a long book,
I'm sure-- and The Citizen's
Guide to the S&L Scandal.
But Mr. Waldman also
appears frequently
on television and
radio to discuss
public policy, the
presidency, and the law,
and writes frequently, not
only in these longer texts,
but in media outlets, such
as the New York Times,
Politico, Washington
Post, among others.
Please join me in welcoming
Mr. Michael Waldman to Brown.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Professor Rose.
It is just such a
wonderful honor and treat
for me to be here, to be here
at Brown, to be here with you,
talking about this
incredibly important topic.
The work you do and
that the Center does
is so vital and so much at
the heart of what is troubling
the country and so much at
the center of our thoughts
and so much a part of why I'm
hopeful about the direction
of justice and democracy
and equality in America.
And it's a really great
pleasure to be with you.
And thank you to Professor
Jody Rich and Brad,
and to see so many
people I know,
because it's a treat also to
see Susanna, my daughter, who
works with all of you on
so many of these issues.
And so it's just a
great thing to be here.
And the Brennan Center
gives me the privilege
of working on these
issues of racial justice,
of equality, of making sure that
the institutions actually live
up to our ideals every day.
I actually get to work on
this in a tangible way day in
and day out.
And that is a kind of thing
that is rare and really lucky.
I'll be talking a little
bit about it tomorrow
and how we use
the ability to dig
through the archives
of American history,
especially online,
to make our case.
The Brennan Center is sort
of partly a think tank,
and it's partly a
legal advocacy group,
and it's partly a
communications hub.
And we work as we see it on
reforming and revitalizing
the systems of democracy
and justice in America
so that they live up
to these basic ideals.
We were started by the
clerks and the family
of the late, great Supreme
Court Justice, William Brennan,
20 years ago, after
he left the bench.
And he was one of the leading
progressive civil rights
and civil liberties justices
in American history.
And we don't follow his
decisions to the letter.
But we try to follow his spirit.
He believed, first
off, at the heart
of the law was the central
concept of human dignity
and that the Constitution,
as he saw it,
should not be read
as a static document,
but as a living
document, something
that had to fit the
needs and address
the concerns of each generation.
So that's what we do
at the Brennan Center.
We work, as the professor said,
on criminal justice reform
and mass incarceration.
We're very focused on
and part of the drive
to address the fact that,
as you know undoubtedly,
we have 5% of the
world's population
and 25% of the world's
prison population,
with massive racial economic
and social consequences.
We work also on dealing with
the egregious, growing role
of big money in
American politics.
We are leading the
constitutional jurisprudential
drive to actually
overturn Citizens United
and other misguided
Supreme Court
decisions over
the next 10 years,
fighting for constitutional
change in that context.
And probably most
prominently, we
work on this issue
of the right to vote
and making sure that every
eligible American actually
has the ability
to cast a ballot,
to have that vote
mean something,
to have our democracy work.
And that's why I
wrote this book.
People say, well, why
did you do this now?
It's a very challenging
time for our democracy.
In so many ways,
the institutions
of American governance feel
as if they're under siege.
And that was true
and certainly felt
true even before this election.
This presidential
election this year,
we're going to have in 17
states, new laws on the books
that make it harder
for people to vote
for the first time in a high
turnout national election.
17 states for the first time.
It's the first time to have
that since the Jim Crow era.
It's the first
presidential election
in half a century without
the full strength protection
of the Voting Rights Act.
And that comes
also at a time when
there are numerous other
challenges to the vote
and to the power and the
meaning of that vote.
I mentioned Citizens United.
It's changed the role of
money in American politics
in new and disturbing ways.
In the last election,
2014, the top 100 donors
gave more than the 4.75
million small donors combined.
That is a level of
concentrated political wealth
we have not seen since the
Gilded Age in the United
States.
Add to that the problems
of gerrymandering,
the drawing of the lines to
entrench political parties
or incumbents, the general
decrepitude of the way
our voting machines and
everything else work,
in many, many ways,
the institutions
of American
democracy are ailing.
And it's not a surprise
that in the last election,
voter turnout plunged to its
lowest level in 72 years.
And that was during World
War II, when a lot of people
were overseas.
So this really-- they had an
excuse, at least, and we don't.
So the question that
I wanted to ask,
the question that I
wanted to understand,
the question I wanted to teach
people about and write about
was, why is this happening now?
And has it always been this way?
And looking back,
as this book does,
on the whole sweep
of American history
and what it can teach us
about today, these fights,
the fact that people have to
fight to exercise their right
to vote, these fights
are consequential,
and they are fierce.
But they are not new.
In fact, this fight
to vote has been
at the heart of American
history from the very beginning.
It's been at the
center of debates
from the very beginning.
It's very often
been in the middle
of the partisan
political contests
from the very beginning.
At every step of the
way, some Americans
have had to demand their
place at the table,
have had to insist on their full
participation in our democracy.
And at every step
of the way, others
have fought to stop them.
And it turns out
that, of course,
first of all-- no surprise,
given what you all
study here-- this emphatically
touches in profound ways
on the issues of
race, ethnicity,
and identity in our country.
It also goes to issues beyond
that, in that we've always
understood that issues of
wealth and economic power
are also inextricably bound
up with the meaningful vote,
a meaningful democracy.
We've understood from the
beginning, going back again
to the start, that the
formal right to vote,
as important as it is, means
not a whole lot if there
is the ability to manipulate the
rules so that that right loses
its effectiveness.
And it's interestingly been
the case, too, at this moment,
that it has been a fight
waged very often, not
only by citizens demanding
their voice be heard,
or even activists working
to organize social change,
but just as often, and in
somewhat surprising ways,
political insiders, partisans
who are often acting
for cynical or
self-interested reasons,
but have actually played an
unusual and surprising role
in the expansion of democracy.
So that is, in so many ways,
the great American story.
We were the first
nation, certainly
on a continent-wide scale, that
would come close to considering
itself a democracy.
But we've had to struggle
to recreate that democracy
in every generation.
It started, as I said,
at the very beginning.
The book starts with the
Declaration of Independence,
with all of its contradictions.
It starts with Thomas Jefferson
writing the Declaration
of Independence, sitting
there writing that government
was legitimate
only, as he wrote,
when it rests on the
consent of the governed.
And of course, at
the moment he's
writing that, he
is being attended
to by a 14-year-old slave
boy named Bob Hemings,
Sally Hemings's brother.
The contradictions were there.
But the power of
the idea of consent
of the governed as the basis
of American institutions
was very powerful.
And even though it was
not the reality then,
even though they knew it
was not the reality then,
it took on a life of its
own and was something
to which people could appeal
endlessly as an aspiration.
Now, the rule at the time
was that only white men
who owned property could vote.
That was it.
That was the rule handed
down from England.
It was basically a tradition.
Each of the colonies
and then each
of the states-- they
were independent states--
could set their own rules.
But that was, by
and large, the rule.
But even then-- and
voting, I should
say-- I'm going to
constantly come back
to Rhode Island and
its checkered role
in American history
on these issues.
Not many people voted.
There was a lot of violence.
There was a lot of
fraud and corruption.
And stealing elections
in the period
before the Revolution was
known as Rhode Island-ism,
because it was so colorful here
and was so advanced a practice.
Even then, the idea that only
white men who owned property
could vote was controversial.
One of the things
that was fun for me,
because I work on
these issues day in
and day out in fighting
for voting rights,
but I learned a lot about the
kind of heroes and villains
of American history.
And some of them were
people I had heard of
or that we've all heard of
playing maybe new roles.
And others were people I
didn't know anything about.
Ben Franklin was one of them.
In 1776, Ben Franklin led
a working man's revolt
in Pennsylvania, where the
non-property-owning men
of the newly independent
state demanded voting rights
and demanded an end to
the property requirement.
It was one of the only places
where the Revolution really
looked like what we
would think of as
like a revolution, the
crowds, angry crowds,
storming the state house.
And Ben Franklin led this.
He wrote the Constitution of
the new state of Pennsylvania,
that had no property
requirement for voting.
And he said, this is
the argument he made.
He said, there's a man who
owns a jackass worth $50.
The jackass-- so he can
vote-- the jackass dies.
The man is older, he is
wiser, he has better knowledge
of government, but
the jackass is dead,
so the man cannot vote.
Who, therefore, he asked,
has the right of suffrage?
The man or his jackass?
That seemed pretty
persuasive to people,
so they ended the property
requirement in Pennsylvania.
John Adams, one of
the other founders,
spoke for a different tradition.
He was aghast at the idea
of wider voting rights,
because he saw precisely what
it meant and what would happen.
He said, new claims will arise.
He was urged to do this
up in Massachusetts.
He said, women will
demand the right to vote.
Lads will think their interest
insufficiently attended to,
and they will demand
the right to vote.
And then, he said, who hath
not a farthing to their name
will think themselves worthy of
an equal voice in government,
and they will demand
the right to vote.
He said, there will
be no end of it.
And that's exactly
what happened.
That's a fairly decent
summary of the book,
but also of the next 240
years of American history.
The idea of democracy
built and built.
And the very first breakthrough
for a wider suffrage
in the United States
came with the movement
to end that property
requirement for voting.
And it's really interesting.
Given the context of
today's political debates,
the very first voting rights
victory in the United States
was won by angry, white,
working-class men, people
who today, might be
voting for Donald Trump.
And it was in the period
known as Jacksonian democracy,
the property
requirement was ended.
And this is one of
the places where
I say that the interplay
between activism and citizen
empowerment and politicians
and political parties
can offer surprises.
Because the institution
that waged and won
this fight was the Democratic
Party, the new political party,
which was the first mass
political party in the world.
And one of the leading
figures was the governor
of New York, Martin Van Buren.
And now, Martin Van
Buren was no firebrand.
He was kind of a legendary-- he
was called the little magician,
and he was kind of a
legendarily slippery figure.
One of the state senators
bet another one in Albany.
He said, I will
bet you that I can
get Van Buren to give a straight
answer to a simple question.
And he took the bet.
And he went up to Van Buren,
and he said, Mr. Van Buren,
is it true that the
sun rises in the east?
And Van Buren said, seeing as
how I never arise that early,
I cannot speak from my
personal experience.
So I don't know
the answer to that.
But he was the person who
fought in very passionate terms
to expand voting rights.
And you saw in states
all across the country,
in the new states coming
in, that there was now
an idea that democracy,
to be legitimate,
needed to rest on a much
wider base of support
and participation.
And democracy and voting
became almost a fad.
It became very, very deeply
participatory, something
that people without
education, without money,
spent a great deal of
their energy and time on.
But one of the things
that won't surprise you,
as you look at the history, is
it is not all in one direction.
It's quite complex.
First of all, in
a few places that
had women or
African-Americans being
able to vote, during this
time, withdrew that right.
New Jersey, in New
Jersey, women were
allowed to vote until 1809.
And there was voter fraud.
Some men dressed up as women
and went from polling place
to polling place.
So given this voter fraud,
of course, what they did was
they disenfranchised
the actual women,
not the men dressed as women.
But that was withdrawn.
And in other places where
black men were allowed to vote,
that was pretty much
taken away also,
as slavery became even more and
more entrenched in the 1800s.
And one of the
last places and one
of the great fights over
this fight for the right
to vote for those
without property actually
took place here in Providence.
I don't know if anybody's
heard this of this.
Have you heard of the Dorr War?
So in 1841-- there are some
Dorr War fans over there,
but probably most people
haven't heard of it.
I had not heard of it.
So as I said, by
the 1840s, the idea
that only the wealthy could
be trusted with the ballot
was gone.
But Rhode Island
was the hold-out.
They still used the charter
that the British King
had given the state.
And only white men who
owned property could vote.
And people argued that that
violated the Constitution,
and there was a
movement to change that.
And it was led by a guy
named Thomas Dorr, who
was a wealthy son of a factory
owner, went to Harvard.
He was very passionate,
but he also was
sort of full of
himself and saw himself
as the leader of what it was
called the People's Party.
And they created their own
constitutional convention
and staged their own election
without a property requirement
and voted for a new
constitution that did not
have the property requirement.
This was in 1841.
But it gets interesting
and complicated.
Frederick Douglass,
the great abolitionist,
was just starting his career.
He was an escaped slave, an
incredibly thinker and orator
up in Massachusetts.
Made his first trip
out of Massachusetts
to Providence to get
involved in this fight.
And he asked to speak to
the People's Convention,
and they told him no.
And their version
of voting rights
excluded African-American men.
So he came and sided
with, what was called,
the Law and Order Party,
because it turned out,
there already was a governor.
Dorr was elected governor,
but there was another guy
was already the governor.
So there were two governments
here in Rhode Island.
So Dorr went off on the road.
He went down to Washington to
meet with the President, John
Tyler, and to ask them
to recognize and send
troops and recognize the
new government of Rhode
Island, which was on the
verge of a civil war.
And Tyler was from Virginia.
And the last thing they wanted
was the federal government
meddling in voting
rights in the states.
So he sent him off, and
Dorr was very despondent.
And he went up to New York.
And in New York, he
was hailed in theaters
and by the Democratic
Party machine there.
And he got his energy back.
And he came back to Providence
and arrived at the train
station, waving a sword
and declaring that they
were going to seize power.
And they stole some
cannons and brought them
across the cobblestone
streets to assault
the state armory on
behalf of voting rights.
And they fired the cannons,
and it was raining,
and they didn't work.
And they were quickly routed.
And he had to leave the state.
And he was eventually
arrested for treason
to Rhode Island, was the
crime, and imprisoned.
And the Supreme Court,
among other things--
one of the other
threads is that,
with very rare exceptions,
the courts, and especially
the Supreme Court, have stayed
out of the fight for democracy
in America.
For those of us who are lawyers,
this is a bit of a surprise.
We revere the institution.
We think of it as the
bulwark of liberty.
But it stayed the hell out
of the issue of democracy,
especially starting with the
Dorr War, where they issued
a ruling called Luther
v. Borden, which
said that if something
was a political question,
they were just going
to stay out of it.
So the Dorr War was a little
bit of a comic opera interlude.
But this idea that
democracy was the way to go
became at the heart of
Americans' sense of themselves.
And of course, it
called the question
of who was excluded from that?
And that led to the
next great fight
over voting and
voting rights, which
was the aftermath of slavery
and African-Americans.
The Civil War changed
so many things.
And one of the lessons
throughout history
is that it's frequently military
conflict that has helped lead
to the expansion of
voting rights for a lot
of different reasons, including
people demanding and deserving
their seat at the table, because
they've served in the military.
At the end of the Civil
War, Frederick Douglass
and the other
abolitionists said, now,
the next fight is to
enfranchise the former slaves.
And Abraham Lincoln
was against this.
Lincoln had always been
against voting rights
for African-American men.
He'd been publicly against it.
But the war changed
Lincoln on this,
as on so many other things.
By the end of the Civil
War, 1 in 10 Union soldiers
was a black man.
When Lincoln gave his famous
second inaugural address,
half the audience were
African-American men and women,
many of them in uniform.
And Lincoln was
moved and changed,
and his original plans
for Reconstruction
did not enfranchise
the former slaves.
But three days
after the surrender
at Appomattox in
April of 1865, Lincoln
gave a speech from the second
floor window of the White
House, where he set out for the
first time in detail his plans
for Reconstruction.
And it was a long speech.
But in the middle of the
speech, he said, by the way,
I've been criticized for
not extending the right
to vote to black men, and I
now agree with this criticism.
I think that those who served in
the military, who are educated
should have the right to vote.
And actually, at
a cabinet meeting,
he indicated he was going
to go all the way, that he
was going to go further.
And I say it was a long speech.
At least one person
in the audience
understood the significance
of what Lincoln said.
John Wilkes Booth was there.
And historians tell us
that he gasped and said,
that means citizenship.
That is the last speech
he will ever give.
And when Lincoln said
that about voting,
he tried to-- Wilkes
Booth tried to get
the guy standing next to him
to shoot Lincoln on the spot.
And he refused.
So Booth vowed, well, then I
will put him through myself,
and two days later, went to
Ford's Theater and did that.
And look, Booth--
I'm not saying Booth
was a big fan of Abraham
Lincoln before that.
The previous plan
had been to kidnap
him, which didn't seem like
a very workable scheme.
But it was the spark
that led him to murder.
And this issue of voting
rights for black men
was at the heart of
American politics
and at the heart
of their debates
over reconstruction in a way
that we don't really realize.
The 13th Amendment,
ending slavery,
had left in place the
provision of the Constitution
that said that African-Americans
were only 3/5 of a person.
So what that meant was
the Southern states
were not enfranchising
those people,
but they still were counting.
And when the Southern states
came back into the Union,
they would once again
have the ability
to take it over and dominate.
The 14th Amendment
tried to address that.
In one of the provisions,
we know the 14th Amendment,
with its grand phrases
about equal protection
of the law and due process.
But to them, one of
the big parts of it
that they thought was going
to be most significant
was it said, to the extent
that you disenfranchise voters,
you lose representation
in Congress.
But even that wasn't enough.
So in the 15th Amendment,
the Republican Party
pushed through a
constitutional provision
prohibiting discrimination
in voting based on race.
It was very much a mix of
idealism and party politics.
Again, the identity
of which party
is the good guy and the bad guy
in this changes around a lot.
The Republican party was
the pro-voting rights
party for most of
American history,
and certainly at that moment.
And what many people
forgot for many years,
and even now, many
people don't know,
is the 15th Amendment for
awhile was massively successful.
There was a flowering of
democracy in the South.
Voter participation rates
among black men reached 90%.
Hundreds were elected to
legislatures, to Congress,
as lieutenant governor,
as governor, and senator,
from Southern states.
And then, as you
undoubtedly know,
it was crushed,
first by violence,
by terrorism, by
the Ku Klux Klan
and the Knights of
the White Camellia
and other terrorist groups.
The Klan was basically
an auxiliary,
a military auxiliary,
of the Democratic party.
The Republican Party
and the Union troops
were there to defend
the voting rights,
but the Klan was working
for the Democrats
and terrorized black
voters in the South
and really drove people
away from the polls.
And then there was a cowardly
deal, where the North basically
gave up.
And in exchange for
the White House,
the Republican Party agreed that
it would withdraw their troops.
And as you know, the
Jim Crow era followed.
There was a suppression
of the vote by black men,
gradual at first, and
then in the 1890s,
in the constitutions
of the Southern states.
And it was an almost
a complete withdrawal
of the right to vote.
And that fact, that
solid South, as it
was called, of an
all-white Democratic Party,
with very little democracy
and very little democratic
participation at
all in the South,
was the central fact
in American government
for decades and
decades and decades,
basically well
until my lifetime.
And so that story was covered
up in many significant ways.
It was only really re-discovered
by historians like C. Vann
Woodward and John Hope
Franklin, and others,
during the Civil Rights era,
to realize the true story
of Reconstruction.
What a lot of
people don't realize
is, something similar happened
in the North, not as bad.
But there was a
similar crackdown
on voting rights because
of new waves of immigrants
and new demographic change
and new forms of ethnicity
and religion.
The Northern cities were
now filled with immigrants.
They were not from
Mexico, the way
you might hear people
talking about today.
They were from Ireland and
Italy and Russia and Europe.
But the established, blue blood
elite of the time had so many
of the same anxieties about
demographic change and voting
by immigrants that
you might hear today.
John Adams's great grandson
said that universal suffrage
will lead to the dictatorship
of the Celtic proletariat
in the North, the African
proletariat in the South,
and the Chinese
proletariat in the West.
The editor of The
Nation magazine
was a strong opponent
of voting rights
and thought they should
reinstate the property
requirement.
Walt Whitman wrote articles
opposing democracy,
because they were so worried
about what the immigrants were
going to do.
And they put in place a bunch
of policies to make it harder
in the North and the West
for working-class people
and immigrants to vote.
Some of them looked
neutral on their face.
The existence of
voter registration
was only applied to cities,
not in the countryside,
because the cities were
where the Democrats
and the immigrants were.
California, the
California constitution,
said that nobody born
in China could vote.
And that was a very big
part of the population.
And the courts ruled
that that did not
violate the 15th Amendment,
because it wasn't about race.
It was about where
you were born.
Theoretically, a missionary
who was born in China
could come home, and they
couldn't vote either.
It was transparently absurd.
But the 15th Amendment
was riddled with loopholes
like this.
And they knew it at the time.
And it was never used to
strike down the Jim Crow
laws of that period.
So the late 1800s is a really
important period for us
to understand.
Democracy in America does not
only move in one direction.
It's broadly expanded.
It's broadly been strengthened.
But there have been times
where it's moved backwards.
And the late 1800s was a
very big moment in that way,
adding to this another
new factor, which
will be familiar
to us now, which
was the role of money in
politics, which had previously
not been significant, but the
flood of money from the Gilded
Age, robber barons, which became
how they paid for campaigns
and made the vote
less meaningful,
and introduced a great
deal of corruption.
So things went backwards.
The period right after
that is another moment
which might offer
lessons for us today.
We call it the Progressive Era.
And it doesn't get
as much attention
as a lot of other times.
The Progressive Era was this
response to the corruption
and the inequality of the
Gilded Age in America.
And we know about it as the
time when government first
began doing things.
And they passed food
and drug regulation
and other-- antitrust laws, the
beginnings of the modern state.
But to the Americans
of the time,
they saw expanding the vote
and expanding democracy
as a critical response
to what they'd
seen as the degradation
of American democracy.
They felt government was rigged.
They felt that their
votes didn't count,
that big money was dominating,
that demographic and economic
change was surging around
them, and that the institutions
of public life
weren't keeping up.
It was a very similar
set of concerns to today.
And they felt that restoring
and revitalizing democracy
was one of the key answers.
One of the amendments
to the Constitution
that dealt with
this, I mentioned
that the courts did not play
a big role throughout most
of American history.
There were actually-- and the
original Constitution did not
refer to the right to vote.
But there have been five
separate constitutional
amendments that explicitly
talk about there being a right
to vote and others
that basically
are talking about that.
One of them was
the 17th Amendment,
which we don't give
much attention to.
That was the one that said
that you have the right
to vote for a senator.
Previously, senators had
been chosen by the state
legislature of the states.
And that was their version
of campaign finance reform,
because they felt that the
state legislatures were
corrupt and owned by, as
they said, the interests.
And back to Rhode Island,
one of the key things
was a really well-known
article, a muckraking article,
called, "A State for Sale,"
about how corrupt politics were
in Rhode Island, as one
of the rationales for why
you needed the 17th Amendment.
The other great
breakthrough for democracy
during the Progressive Era is
something we tend to skip over.
It's the 19th Amendment,
giving the right
to vote to women, in which
women won the right to vote.
And I say we skip over it,
because even I just did.
I implied that it was
given to the women, right?
It turns out-- and this
is a set of stories
that I just did
not know, and most
of the people who work with
me, who work on voting rights
and are women, did not know.
The fight to vote, for women,
was every bit as fierce
and fiercely contested as
the voting rights fights
that came before and after.
So you might know that in
1848 was the Seneca Falls
declaration.
That was the grand
statement that women
should have the right to vote.
But not a whole lot happened
after that, and for decades.
They called it the doldrums.
Nothing happened.
And it was not
until 1911, a group
of young women in
their 20s decided
to take it much further.
They had been graduate students,
many of them in England,
where the suffrage movement
was very controversial and very
dramatic and
intense and violent.
And they were over there,
and they came back.
And there were just
a handful of them,
and they were in their late 20s.
And they said, we're going to
do something bold and audacious.
We're going to actually pass
a constitutional amendment
to extend the right
to vote to women.
And the older women in
the suffrage movement
were emphatically
not wild about this.
They kind of let them
go do their thing.
Three months later,
after they started this,
Woodrow Wilson got off the
train in Washington, DC, the day
before his inauguration as
President of the United States.
And he expected to be
greeted by a big throng.
And he looked around, and there
was nobody there, basically,
nobody there.
There was the Princeton
glee club, and that was it.
They belted out a song.
And the New York Times reported
that they made up in enthusiasm
what they lacked in numbers.
The Times was a good
democratic paper, even then.
And finally, Wilson's aide
said, where are all the people?
And the host
sheepishly explained
that they were all down at
Pennsylvania Avenue, where
there was a march for
women's voting rights,
for the 19th Amendment.
5,000 women marching
down Pennsylvania Avenue,
lead by on a white
horse, a young woman,
a 27-year-old woman,
named Inez Milholland.
She was on a white horse,
dressed as a Greek goddess,
carrying a banner at
the head of the parade.
And I was especially
struck by this,
because she was a recent
graduate of NYU law school, who
was very active in radical
legal circles in New York,
at the time.
But Inez Milholland was leading
the parade on her horse,
and 5,000 women.
And surrounding
them on either side
were 100,000 men,
many of them drunk.
They were there
for the inaugural.
And the men began throwing
things, cursing, and spitting.
They broke through the lines
and assaulted the women.
They beat them up.
100 women were sent
to the hospital.
They had to fight their way
down to the end of Pennsylvania
Avenue.
This was a big deal.
It was massively covered.
It overshadowed the coverage
of the inauguration.
The police chief of
Washington, DC had to resign.
There were investigations,
and public opinion
swung for the first time in
support of women's voting
rights because of this
publicized violence directed
against a march of peaceful
citizens demanding their right.
And of course, I
read about this,
and everybody hears
about this, and says,
that sounds just like Selma.
It was 50 years before
Selma, and it was basically
the same dynamic.
And it still took
four more years
to get the 19th
Amendment passed.
And so many of the tactics
and strategies of protest
were pioneered and
originated by those women.
And it's important, again,
the complexity of this,
to note that history is
not all heroes and villains
and not all morally unambiguous.
The black women were
told they could not
march at the front of the
parade, by the organizers.
And Ida B Wells, the great
journalist from Chicago,
said, I'm ignoring that,
and jumped into the parade
from the side, but had
been ordered not to.
And because they felt that with
a Democratic president, whose
political base was the
segregationist South,
they could not have
an integrated parade.
And the tactics that
they used included--
they picketed the White
House for two years
straight, hunger strikes,
they formed a political party,
there were referenda, all these
things that were used later.
And in 1920, the 19th
Amendment was ratified.
And it's an amazing thing.
This is before Gandhi
used these things.
These are the Martin
Luther King and John
Lewis of that
movement, and they're
unknown to almost
everybody today
who works on voting rights.
Inez Milholland, who was--
a civil liberties professor
at NYU Law School, who,
until quite recently,
was the Inez Milholland
professor of civil liberties,
and frankly, neither he
nor anybody else, nor we,
knew who she was.
We thought she was a
donor to the law school.
And imagine my surprise, when
she was on this white horse.
The fight for voting
rights, in many ways,
took a backseat after that
to the other expansions
of democracy and expansions of
equality, economic equality,
that you had during
the New Deal.
But again, World
War II, especially,
began to empower the returning
veterans who were black.
And the armed
forces were formally
desegregated after that.
And that helped, again,
to create pressure
as part of the civil
rights movement
to win the greatest victory
of all, which was the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.
And I won't go into
too much detail
on that, because that's a
story that's better known.
The Voting Rights
Act was so important,
not only because of the way
it guaranteed meaningfully
the right to vote for
African-Americans,
but it signaled a whole wave
of democratizing changes,
so that non-English speakers
and immigrants were really,
effectively guaranteed
the right to vote.
The Constitution was amended
to end the poll tax, which
was one of the Jim Crow devices
used to keep African-Americans
from voting, but also
affected poor whites.
The voting age
was lowered to 18,
just as John Adams
worried it would be.
The story of Selma and
of the Voting Rights Act,
you know that there was
incredible suppression
of the vote, that there
were courageous citizens who
marched on Edmund Pettus Bridge
in the worst place in the South
to try to vote, who were met
with violence from the police
and the white community.
And you know that
they were organized
by locals and by national groups
that came in, led by Dr. King,
in a conscious effort to
dramatize for the country
the fight.
And you know that this led to
an explosion of public disgust
and pressure that led
eventually to Lyndon Johnson,
a week later, going before
Congress and saying to them,
embracing the slogan of
the civil rights movement,
we shall overcome.
And I could talk about it.
But there's a lot of debate over
what level of responsibility
different actors have.
I mean, it turns out that
the interplay between Johnson
and King is so much more
interesting than the movie
Selma made it.
How many of you have
seen the movie Selma?
That was, I thought, a very
one-dimensional portrayal
of Johnson, especially.
And what's interesting
is, so many
of the conversations between
King and Johnson were taped.
And there are these two
brilliant politicians
circling around each other,
neither telling the full story.
They met three
days before Selma.
Johnson never told
King that he'd,
over the objection of
his Justice Department,
ordered them to draft
the Voting Rights Act,
and that they'd negotiated it
already with the Republicans.
And King never told
Johnson, by the way,
on Sunday, turn on your TV.
We're marching in Selma.
They talked past each other.
But it was an incredible moment.
And unlike the Reconstruction
of the 1800s, it worked.
Voting rights in
Mississippi, for example,
African-American registration
rates went from 7% in 1964
to 60% four years
later, to 78% by 1998.
And so for me, when I was your
age, these issues were done.
Put your pencils down.
This was not a particularly
controversial topic.
Everybody agreed, everybody,
one person, one vote,
that that's how
it should be done.
A lot has changed in
the last 15 years,
and I'll quickly run through it.
I mentioned, at the beginning,
that we're in an intense time.
Starting with the
recount in Florida
in 2000, where the election
came down to one state,
and it was basically a tie.
And people realized,
partisans realized,
that you could really win a
presidential election based,
not just on the arguments
you make to the swing voters,
but if you could
turn out your vote
or suppress the other side's
vote, even in marginal ways,
it could make a big difference.
And Florida was a mess.
It showed how easy it was
to manipulate the system.
There were all
kinds of problems.
But among the
bottom line findings
is that millions of
people showed up to vote
and either couldn't
vote or voted
and they thought their vote
was going for somebody else.
But that African-Americans
were four times more
likely to have their ballots
rejected, for whatever reason,
than white voters in Florida.
And that fact alone elected
George W Bush president,
assuming voting patterns
to be what they were.
There began to be a
concerted political strategy
to restrict voting rights
in a way we had not
seen in a long time.
And I say, sometimes one party
or another is the good guy,
bad guy.
This is a conservative
Republican Party strategy
to assert that there's a great
deal of voter fraud, which
is nonsensical.
As a statistical
matter, the only type
of voter fraud that any of
these new laws would touch
is in-person impersonation
at the polling place.
And as a statistical
matter, you are
more likely to be hit by
lightning in the United States
than to commit in-person
voter impersonation.
Everybody agrees with that.
But it built and built.
There was a scandal
that a lot of people don't
remember under George W.
Bush, where the top
United States government
prosecutors all over
the country were fired.
And nobody knew why.
And it turned out that they
were fired, in many instances,
because they'd been
ordered by the White
House or the senior political
appointees of the Justice
Department to bring voter
fraud cases, where there wasn't
any evidence of voter fraud.
And when these Republican
prosecutors refused,
they were fired.
And this was a big, brief,
quickly forgotten scandal.
The attorney general
of the United States,
Alberto Gonzales, had to
resign in the scandal.
But at the same time that
there was this new effort
to restrict the vote
and bound up with it,
there was surging changes in
the makeup of the electorate
and the demography of the
country and rapid increase,
as we all know, in voting
by people of color,
culminating in the
campaign of 2008,
the election of
Barack Obama, and very
polarized racial
voting patterns that
happened even before Obama ran.
But now, the share
of the electorate
that was communities of color
was growing and growing.
And that led to more and
more, in effect, panic
on the part of a lot of white,
incumbent politicians, who
were looking for ways to change
the rules to make that harder
to happen.
It was basically held
in abeyance until 2011,
when a great number of state
legislatures changed hands.
And as was described
by the professor,
states all across the
country passed new laws
to make it harder to vote.
These laws were
wide in their scope.
They cut back on early
voting, but especially
on the day when
African-American voters voted,
the Sunday before the polls.
It's called souls to the polls.
It's a very widely-used day for
organizing churches to vote.
But cutbacks in early voting
and repealing same-day voter
registration, laws to make
it harder, much harder,
to wage voter
registration drives,
which is the way poor
people are registered more
than anything else.
We represented the
Brennan Center,
the League of Women
Voters of Florida,
a well-known Trotskyist
organization.
And it is not.
That was a joke.
They're wearing pearls when they
go do the voter registration.
And they had to shut down their
voter registration operation
for fear of criminal
penalties, basically,
if someone made a mistake,
and voter ID laws,
which you probably
have heard about.
Now, I should say, I'm
not against voter ID.
I'm actually for
voter ID, in the sense
that I think there's been a
lot of misconduct in elections,
and I think it's
not crazy for people
to have to be who
they say they are,
and not crazy to ask
people to prove it.
I'm against, and
we fight against,
and the Brennan
Center is among those
leading the fight against,
requiring forms of ID
that lots of people do not have.
And about 11% of eligible
voters in the United States
don't have a driver's license
or the other very specific forms
of identification
that these new laws,
in a very partisan and
mischievous way, are requiring.
I'll say that Rhode Island
passed a voter ID law.
It was new, but it had a much
wider range of acceptable IDs.
And it has not,
as far as I know,
caused significant
disenfranchisement or problems.
But that's not what
most of these laws did.
We went to court.
The voting rights
groups went to court.
We exposed this in public.
Our study showing that 5,000,000
people could lose the right
to vote was the lead story
in the New York Times.
It helped to foster a
major national debate.
And by the time we went to
court in the spring of 2012,
every one of the worst new
laws was blocked or blunted
or postponed or repealed.
So there really wasn't
a problem for people
voting in a significant
way on election day.
But then the Supreme
Court entered the fray.
And I said the Supreme Court
has mostly stayed out of it
throughout history, not now.
Under John Roberts and
this five-vote, strongly
conservative, and
interventionist majority,
they intervened
especially energetically
on issues relating to democracy.
In 2010, they had done the
Citizens United decision,
knocking down a century
of campaign finance law.
And in 2013, they gutted, they
declared unconstitutional,
the heart of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.
This had been the most
successful civil rights
law in American history.
It's a case called
Shelby County.
And the spirit of
the decision was
articulated by Justice
Scalia in the courtroom.
He said that he thought
that the Voting Rights
Act was a little more, quote,
"than a racial entitlement."
And people gasped.
You can hear the tape.
People in the courtroom gasped.
He didn't write the opinion.
Chief Justice Roberts
wrote the opinion.
And what Roberts said was this.
He said that, in effect,
talking about disenfranchisement
in the South, he said,
that was then, this is now.
He pointed out that black
voting rates were now
higher in the South than
white voting rights.
And so the things,
he said, had changed.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a
powerful and rather famous
now dissent in that case.
She said, well, that's like
standing in a rainstorm,
holding an umbrella, and saying,
well, I'm not getting wet,
so therefore, I must
not need the umbrella,
and putting away the umbrella.
And she predicted
that there would
be quickly disenfranchisement
that followed.
So who was right?
So two hours after the
Shelby County ruling,
the state of Texas implemented
its new voter ID law.
And 608,000 registered
voters in Texas,
according to federal
courts, lost their right
to vote two hours later.
Disproportionately,
African-American and Latino
and also young.
And this is kind
of a famous law,
because it's so
blatantly crafted.
This is the law where you cannot
use your University of Texas
student ID as your
government ID,
but you can use your
concealed carry gun permit.
Who does that help?
One of the voters
who lost their right
to vote two hours
after the ruling
was a woman named
Sammie Louise Bates.
And she grew up in Mississippi.
She remembered counting out
the money for her grandmother
to pay the poll tax.
She moved to Detroit
and then Chicago.
It's sort of a classic
story of the great migration
of African-Americans from the
South to the industrial cities
in the North.
She went to college.
She worked, and then she
retired and moved to Texas,
and lives on Social
Security and nothing else.
She's voted since she was 21.
She's done everything right.
And she lost the right
to vote like that.
And we asked her, in
the sworn testimony,
why didn't you just get your
birth certificate, which
she needed to have
to get the paperwork.
She didn't have a
driver's license.
And she said, well,
that costs $42.
I needed to put those $42
where they would do most good.
You can't eat a
birth certificate.
And she was the lead witness
in the federal trial brought
by the Brennan Center and
the Justice Department
and a few other groups.
And the judge found, from
her testimony and others,
that the law was illegal.
It was unconstitutional.
It was discriminatory,
deliberately discriminatory,
and said it was overturned.
That ruling was upheld last
year by the most conservative
federal appeals
court in the country.
And the law is
still on the books,
because the wheels of
justice grind very slowly.
The state of Texas is taking
its sweet time about appealing.
And it's still in effect.
And all across the
country, these laws
are going to be in effect now,
this time for the first time.
And we don't know what
the impact is going to be.
But there's now new data showing
that the GAO, the Government
Accountability Office, the
nonpartisan think tank, used
by Republicans and
Democrats in Congress,
reporting to Congress, found
that these new voter ID
laws do suppress turnout,
but not among everybody,
among African-Americans.
So that's the situation now.
We don't know what
the impact is.
There is, however, hope,
not only because there's
a response, not only because the
courts are finally stepping up,
and we're waiting
for the Supreme Court
to again-- not only because
this is becoming a voting
issue, a public issue,
but because, partly
because, of the understanding
of what's going on,
there is a simultaneous,
positive wave of reform
to enfranchise more
people and to fix the way
we register voters,
and do other things.
That's happening
at the same moment
as these disenfranchising steps.
I'll tell you about two things.
The biggest change
that could happen,
that could make the
biggest difference,
is if we change
the way we register
voters in the United States.
If we had a move to
automatic voter registration,
so that everybody's eligible
to vote, is on the rolls,
it would add 50,000,000
people to the rolls.
It would cost less.
And for people who are
really worried about fraud,
it would stop that, too.
Well, the Brennan Center
first put the proposal out
for that about eight years ago.
And it is now very
encouragingly,
in the last year,
starting to move big
all across the country.
Oregon, California, passed
automatic voter registration
last year.
West Virginia, three weeks
ago, Republican and Democratic
officials-- it's a very
conservative state-- passed it.
We think Vermont is going
to in the next few days.
Illinois is probably
going to move on it.
President Obama spoke
about it in front
of the Illinois legislature.
People are talking about doing
it here all over the country.
This would make a
huge difference,
and interestingly,
it has Republican,
as well as Democratic, support.
Because it just is a much
better way to run a railroad.
It's how other
democracies do it.
Our voter registration
rolls really
are filled with names of dead
people and double entries
and errors, and stuff like that.
So it solves the problems
of left and right,
and it would enfranchise
so many people.
The other positive
development is also
something that happened
here in Rhode Island
before anywhere else.
One of the worst
disenfranchisements
we have is the
denial of the right
to vote for people who have
had a criminal conviction.
It's actually in
the Constitution.
It's authorized in
the 14th Amendment.
But the way it's played out is
tremendously racially unjust.
And as there's an understanding
among more and more people
about the consequences
of mass incarceration,
more and more people
of left and right
see this as one of the ancillary
side consequences of that.
And there is a move all across
the country to fix this.
We work very
closely on this with
the evangelical conservatives.
Rand Paul is one of the
champions in Congress on this.
And in Rhode Island,
putting the lie to the idea
that voters would be against
this, about eight years ago,
the voters of Rhode Island
ended felony disenfranchisement
in the state.
And one of the-- and
these are for people
who are back in the community.
They're working.
They're paying taxes.
And a couple of years
ago, one of the people
who had their voting rights
restored, thanks to the Rhode
Island law, actually came to
work at the Brennan Center
as a legal intern, because
he's in law school now.
So this is actually a positive
movement where left and right
are coming together.
So there's a lot happening.
We don't know what November
is going to be like.
But we know this is going
to be at the heart of what
people are talking about.
We know that three weeks ago,
in Maricopa County, Arizona,
there were long
lines, because they
closed 70% of the polls,
where the Voting Rights
Act would have stopped it,
in heavily Hispanic Maricopa
County.
We know that in Wisconsin,
during the primary,
there was chaos at
the polling place.
And we know that New York
had all kinds of problems,
even pre-dating the current law.
But we also know that
people are engaged.
They're fighting.
They're voting over this.
It's easy to get lost in the
push and pull and to say,
well, sure some people
are always grabbing,
and others are pushing
back, and both sides
have some moral equivalence.
But I think that
the notion embodied
in that idea, the
consent of the governed,
based on political
equality, is the heart
of the American ideal, is
more powerful than that.
So John Adams was right
There is no end of it.
It's never going to be solved.
It's always going to be a fight.
It's always going
to be a fight that
has to be waged by all
of us, by all of you.
And all of us and
all of you are going
to have to write
the next chapter.
So there's a lot to draw on
in this history on the fight
to vote.
So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
