Barbara McQuade [00:00:07]: Welcome to a special Talking Feds: Sisters in Law episode. I'm Barb McQuade. Last week, Joyce Vance, Jill Wine-Banks and I sat down at our virtual Sisters in Law coffee table to have a conversation with Vanita Gupta and Pam Karlan in honor of the hundredth anniversary of women's suffrage to talk about voting rights.
This week, Joyce, Jill and I continue our conversations on the topic with Sherrilyn Ifill. She's the president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. We talked with Sherrilyn about the duties we share as a legal profession to protect the rule of law. The right to vote is so precious, and every vote counts. I remember a time about 10 years ago, my husband and I were out in our front yard, assembling a trampoline.
It was for our kids, and a candidate for county commissioner came by, knocking on doors to talk to voters. My husband and I actually had planned to vote for his opponent, but he stopped and not only talked with us, but he helped us with the trampoline.
He probably spent about 20 minutes with us. And as we were there, we said, we feel bad wasting your time. And he said, it's not a waste of time at all. Let me tell you about my views and my position on issues. So we listened, and you bet he convinced us to vote for him. We did each vote for him, and he won by exactly one vote. I sometimes question whether my memory is accurate on that and I've gone back to check and he truly did win by one vote. He is now a state rep in our state house. And so, I think that story just demonstrates why every vote really counts. And it's so important that everybody is able to exercise their right to vote.
So we're going to talk about that with Sherrilyn Ifill later today – but first, I wanted to talk to my Sisters in Law about what they’re working on as the calendar shifts to September. I know I’m focusing now on my teaching, some online, some in person. How about you, Joyce? What have you been up to?
Joyce Vance [00:02:01]: Well we went back to school I guess this is the start of our third week, so I teach law at the university of alabama. I’m all remote this semester, which has been a real learning curve. But fringe benefit, I can walk out into our backyard on breaks and go visit with my chickens. We’ve acquired a flock of six chickens during quarantine, so that’s a little bit of a diversion.
Barbara McQuade [00:02:23]: It’s been such a COVID thing, I see all kinds of new puppies and kittens around my neighborhood, but not new chickens. Why chickens?
Joyce Vance [00:02:30]: So apparently, chickens are a thing. I did it because our youngest child asked if he could have them, and he’s a high school senior. He’s been phenomenal about — we’ve had to quarantine because we have a kid with a primary immune system disorder, and this child, the youngest one has voluntarily given up a lot of things, has been uncomplaining, so I thought the least I could do is hatch some chicks for him.
Barbara McQuade [00:02:51]: And does he eat the eggs?
Joyce Vance [00:02:53]: We’re months away from eggs right now, and they’re gonna be really expensive, you know? When I think about the work I did in the yard, and building coops so that we can have these very pampered chickens. But they’re very sweet, and they have personalities and they have names. I'm learning a lot of things about chickens that I didn't know, so it’s all for the good.
Barbara McQuade [00:03:12]: How about you, Jill? What have you been up to these days?
Jill Wine-Banks [00:03:14]: Well I don’t have pampered chickens, but I am now the pampered chef. I interrupted tonight my canning of peaches. Last year I didn’t do any because the peaches were terrible last year, but this year they’re really good, and so I’m making spiced peaches and if I have enough left over I might make peach chutney or peach preserves.
Barbara McQuade [00:03:36]: Alright so we’ve got chickens and we’ve got peaches, we’ve got you covered. And so, let’s tune in to our conversation with Sherrilyn.
Jill Wine-Banks [00:03:44]: Welcome Sherilyn. We're really thrilled to have you.
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:03:47]: I am absolutely honored.
Jill Wine-Banks [00:03:49]: We are going to have a wonderful discussion with you. And so we want to talk about some of the things that you at the Legal Defense Fund might be doing around voting.
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:03:59]: So, voting is always a priority at LDF and addressing voter suppression has been kind of part of the lifeblood of the organization. And I say that because I think people feel in some ways like what they are seeing in voter suppression is new. What is new about it is the way in which really, since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County versus Holder in 2013, what used to be thought of as a kind of a regional issue, focused mostly although not exclusively in the South, has really become a national issue.
The Supreme Court lifting that preclearance requirement from the voting rights act actually ended up opening up and nationalizing what had been a local problem. And so the kinds of voter suppression that we used to see in places like Alabama and Georgia and North Carolina and Louisiana, we still see.
But now we also see it in Pennsylvania and Kansas and North Dakota and Wisconsin. And so we have been prioritizing voting rights for a very long time. I began my career as a voting rights lawyer at LDF several decades ago. And this year we have been conscious of this election being held without the protections of the voting rights act.
And without the engagement of a Department of Justice, which has always been such a powerful, important partner in this space. So we have really pushed voting work to the forefront. And then of course, we all got thrown by a loop in February and March when the COVID pandemic came upon us. And we ended up having to kind of open an entire new front of voting litigation around trying to expand access to absentee voting because of COVID.
Joyce Vance [00:05:34]: Sherrilyn, when you mentioned the loss of DOJ as a partner in this work, can you give our listeners some idea of what that really means? What kind of work are you used to doing with DOJ? And perhaps more importantly, does DOJ still have a voting rights section and what kind of work is it doing?
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:05:51]: Well I haven't heard from it, so I don't know if it's a closely guarded secret if they, if they actually are doing something. As I said, I've been a voting rights litigator for many years. And in all that time, including during Republican administrations, when I first started out, there was a Republican administration, George H.W. Bush in the white house.
And I recall that the first case I developed and filed on my own, as a voting rights lawyer at LDF was a case called Houston Lawyers’ Association v. Texas, challenging the way trial court judges were elected in Harris County, Texas. The companion case was a case called Chisom v. Roemer, which was the case challenging the way Supreme Court judges in Louisiana were elected.
And both of those cases were moving up through the system, through the fifth circuit and to the Supreme Court at the same time and were argued on the same day. I didn't get to argue the case, but then director council of the Legal Defense Fund argued the case. I did get to sit at counsel table, which was great, but it was my case.
And I remember the conversations that we had about the oral argument with the solicitor general's office because the solicitor general was also arguing that day because the Department of Justice had intervened in the Chisom case and the Louisiana judges case. And I remember the conversations about the argument, we were on the same side.
Now, the solicitor general wasn't prepared to argue quite in the way that we were, and to make all of the arguments that we were going to make, well we were on the same side and that solicitor general was Ken Starr. So it's important for me that people understand that what we're seeing today with the justice department, the complete abdication of civil rights space is not because it's partisan. That's not the reason. This is a very particular kind of stance that this department of justice has taken since Trump was elected with Jeff Sessions, dare I say Matthew Whitaker, and then Bill Barr, where they have completely absented themselves from this field.
So, this is important. I mean, at the end of the day, LDF does incredible work and our partner civil rights organizations do incredible work, but if you pull us all together, we don't have 10,000 lawyers like the department of justice. And so, we are playing whack-a-mole with limited resources trying to do this work.
Barbara McQuade [00:08:00]: Sherrilyn, you are an inspiration to litigators and students who aspire to be litigators, because you're using the law as a tool to achieve justice. But I wonder to what extent we could improve this, the situation through a new voting rights act. I know some have advocated for a John Lewis voting rights act to do more of a legislative fix for Shelby County. Do you think there's space for that? And could that be more effective than having to file a lawsuit every time you want to fix some remedy?
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:08:28]: Absolutely Barb. I mean there just is, it's of paramount importance. You know, if you've ever spent time reading the senate report that accompanied the legislation, the original voting rights act legislation, which if you litigate for the voting rights act, you've read that senate reports kind of regarded as the definitive document that tells us what Congress was thinking when they enacted the voting rights act. And what the Senate said in that report about section five of the voting rights act and the pre-clearance requirement, was that the act was designed to get not just at existing discrimination, but what the Senate report called “ingenious new methods of voting discrimination.”
So it was this incredible forward-looking statute. They understood that, that it would shapeshift, right. As a great civil rights activist once told us about racism, it's a shapeshift, right. They knew that Southern jurisdictions would come up with new ways of voter suppression that they hadn't even thought of in 1965.
So they created the preclearance provision to get out ahead of that, right. So that they could stop the discrimination before it happens. And that of course is why the voting rights act was regarded as really the most effective civil rights legislation that passed in the 1960s, because it was the only one that created a mechanism that would allow you to stop discrimination before it happened, by requiring other jurisdictions to submit any voting changes they wanted to make to a federal authority to determine the effect on minority voters.
So, yes, yes. In light of the Supreme court having gutted section five in the Shelby County v. Holder case, what we need is a new pre-clearance formula — this time a national pre-clearance formula, because the problem is now national, that will allow us to not have to litigate these cases, but that would understand that we should be able to examine voting changes right at the beginning to determine what their effect is and determine whether they have potentially a discriminatory effect.
And for all the people who have waxed about the greatness of John Lewis, particularly in the United States Congress and particularly in the Senate, I would like to see them step up and honor his legacy by being prepared to pass legislation to correct the mistakes of the Shelby County decision. And to put that tool back in our hands.
Barbara McQuade [00:10:36]: Yeah. They were all very happy to post a picture of themselves on Twitter with John Lewis, you know, good trouble...
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:10:43]: Or a picture of Elijah Cummings, whatever they had on hand.
Barbara McQuade [00:10:46]: Right. Put your money where your mouth is, right.
Jill Wine-Banks [00:10:48]: So Sherilyn. If a new law was passed, and the department of justice had any power to approve or disapprove, would we in this administration have any confidence that that would be effective? This is a new world, completely different than as you've described when you worked with the department where you were on the same side. Now we could expect, I think, that William Barr would certainly not disapprove of any trick to suppress the vote. So how would it help? How, how could it be phrased in a way that we would all say yes, that's the right way to go?
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:11:26]: Well I think two things. First of all, I think it's quite appropriate for us to presume the requirement of integrity in the department of justice, which sadly it's lacking at this point. But what I do presume is that if we have a Congress, particularly a Senate is prepared to pass a new voting rights act, It is also a Senate that is prepared to do their job of oversight of the department of justice, which is their job.
And if they are doing their job correctly, and the Senate still has the power of the purse, you know, they have the power to control, in many ways, what federal agencies over which they have oversight do, and they can exercise more control than we have seen. So we would expect that we would have a Senate that was prepared to exercise that control.
Let us also remember that there are two submissions to make, potential submissions to make under the old preclearance requirement. One was to the United States attorney general and the other was to the DC district court. The point of pre-clearance was that it had to go to a federal authority. It was not exclusively the department of justice.
And so a renewed voting rights act could also imagine that there would be another federal authority in the, under the old section five regime, it was the DC district court. One could imagine making either allowance or requirement with a certain time period, right? If not submitted within a certain time period, or if one has not received action or an investigation within a time period, that it automatically goes to another federal authority.
There are all kinds of plays to make it work so that it is an effective tool, but I also think that not in my lifetime will I give up the idea that we can allow something called the department of justice, right. That we can also allow the pain and the work that it took to stand up a civil rights division in the department of justice in 1957, that is also part of the civil rights movement we should remember. And accept the idea that Bill Barr or Jeff Sessions are allowed to simply advocate their responsibility of enforcement of the nation's civil rights laws.
And so I think that still has to be part and parcel of any effort to address the issue of voter suppression in this country.
Jill Wine-Banks [00:13:22]: I wish that could happen. I just fear right now that we're in a situation where the Senate will do nothing to hold Barr accountable and that Barr will certainly take every advantage of any power he has to say, ‘Oh yeah, that's, that's fine. That change is fine.’
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:13:38]: Well, this Senate is not going to obviously pass the voting rights act either, or they would have done it. Right. It would have passed the house sometime ago. So were obviously dreaming a dream of a, of a different world, at least in the Senate space, in which there might be a different kind of will and leadership that we do not have now. And so that, one imagines that if there is an amendment to the act, we would be talking about a different political landscape.
Joyce Vance [00:13:59]: But Sherrilyn helped us understand how we got there because every time that the voting rights act has been re-upped, it's been on a bipartisan vote. Republicans and Democrats have both voted to keep the act in place.
And that's because when we're talking about voting, we're not talking about the political act of voting, you know, the decision that we make about who to pull the lever for. We're talking about the right to vote, which is something that transcends party politics, something that Republicans have always voted for in the past and suddenly won't.
So what happened? Do you have a diagnosis for what changed here?
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:14:36]: I do. And it wasn't the flip of a switch from one day to another, democracy unravels over time. And I think that too often, too many have failed to see the warning signs of the unraveling of our democracy in really important ways.
You are absolutely right Joyce, the voting rights act was always a bipartisan piece of legislation, when it was enacted and every time that it was reauthorized as well, the presidents who signed it, it's reauthorization are, you know, Reagan and George W. Bush and the reauthorization in 2006, as you know, was that the house vote was 396 to 33.
The Senate vote was 98 to zero. This was never a partisan bill, but I think that the unraveling of our core democratic values has long been happening. And Mr. Trump is a symptom of that unraveling. He is not the beginning of that unraveling. And unfortunately, part of that unraveling is that there are a set of elected leaders who value power at all costs above everything. That even the pretense and the veneer, which there used to be, of trying to aspire to certain democratic values.
Where there was an effort by leaders, no matter what their political party, to articulate the values of equality, of racial equality and justice, no matter what. And yet we see now that there isn't that interest, in that even articulation, where we will have the president of the United States telling members of the United States Congress, they should go back to the countries that they're from, all American United States Congress people, and we will hear nothing.
Nothing from Republican members of the United States Congress. So what we have seen unravel hasn't happened over time. I have suggested that our silence about the little things has led to the unraveling of the big things. You know, when president Obama was still in office, after the Shelby County decision, and states like Texas rushed to pass their voter ID law, the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, as you well know Joyce, and you'll remember Joyce that very day.
I think it was the Texas attorney general, who said, we're now going to voter ID law back up on the books. They all rushed to do this. When I talk about the Texas voter ID law being discriminatory, it's not because I'm saying it because I'm a civil rights lawyer saying it because it was found by a federal judge that the law was designed to discriminate against African American and Latino voters.
It was the most restrictive voter ID law in the country. We all know that our clients who went to HBCU couldn't use their university ID, you couldn’t use your tribal ID. You couldn't use certain kinds of government employment ID, which the thinking was that they're more likely to be held by people who are black and Latino, but you could use your concealed gun carry permit, right?
When North Carolina passed their omnibus voter suppression law, it was the fourth circuit that found that the law was enacted with surgical precision to try and disenfranchise African American voters. That's not an opinion of a civil rights lawyer or advocate. These are the findings of federal courts.
And Wisconsin's voter ID law also was found to be discriminatory. And this is when Obama was still president. Where was the outrage? Were people then talking about white supremacy, or did it take Charlottesville and people walking with swastikas and giving Nazi salutes for people to understand that white supremacy was on the rise in this country.
I think, and I said at the time, that when whole legislatures are meeting for the purpose of suppressing the political participation of their fellow citizens based on race, that we should be sounding the alarm on white supremacy. So that was 2013, 2014 when these ID laws were coming to the fore. And yet there was not national outrage.
We were outraged, civil rights lawyers were outraged by it. We were talking about it, our communities were talking about it, but it was not the subject of discussion in mainstream media and so forth as it is today. In fact, when you said the words white supremacy, then it was like you were being slightly indelicate.
You really weren't allowed to say that until after Charlottesville. So it's our failure to have captured the — understood the danger that we were in, in those moments, that led us to this moment. And has led to the walking away from the voting rights act. All of these people who used to come down to Selma with John Lewis. John Lewis, so gracious, every year would bring his colleagues down for a tour, the faith and politics group, tour of civil rights sites, he’d take them to Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was killed.
He'd take them to the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham, where the four little girls were killed and he would wind them up in Selma and you've seen them. I've seen them. I'm, I'm there every year. Steve Scalise and Kevin McCarthy, they were all there laying wreaths on the Edmund Pettus bridge. And yet these are the same people who did not vote to amend the voting rights act despite John Lewis’ pleas, and who have been lock-step and refuse to lift their voices to speak to what they know are supposed to be the professed democratic values of this country. So I think there's enough blame to go around, and I'm quite exorcised about it. I really, as a lawyer, I've been quite hard on my own profession to be frank, because I really believe that our profession has failed to step up.
I think that many aspects of our profession, particularly since Trump was elected have covered themselves in glory, I think. Civil rights lawyers and civil liberties activists. And I think the Sisters in Law, and so many of you who have stepped up, spoken out. The former U S attorneys who have come forward and said, this is outrageous.
It's been a beautiful thing to see, but it's been a small group. It's gotten bigger, right? More people have been signing petitions and so forth. But I do think that there is some truth and reconciliation that this profession will need to do with itself in this period that try to diagnose what happened. We happened.
And it's vital that we take responsibility as lawyers. I'm putting myself in the group, although as a civil rights lawyer I feel like I have been sounding the alarm for some time, but I took the same oath as everyone else in the profession. And I believe as I think Barb said, I believe in the rule of law, I've committed my life to using the law to try to make change.
But that means, for me it always meant that we were going to play by the same rules. And so even this morning, I think Joyce, you tweeted about it. You know, you see what came out of the Senate committee about Paul Manafort. And we look at transcripts that in any other state circumstance, if you all were prosecuting a case, it would be no question that it was obstruction of justice.
And yet I watched for years, people wrung their hands saying, is it obstruction of justice? Now, if the president tries to fire the person who's investigating, you know, all of this stuff, that's, you know, if the president tweets a veiled threat about the father-in-law of someone who’s going to testify before Congress.
All of this hand wringing, as though these were actual questions, when you and I know that if just a few blocks down from here, we went to the federal courthouse in Baltimore and they were prosecuting an alleged gang leader, these same transcripts, you know, with different names and fit to the situation, there would be no question about what people thought was happening. So our profession has some work to do. And I think that's part of the story of how we got here.
Barbara McQuade [00:21:33]: Sherrilyn, your thoughts there make me wonder what else is going on out there right now that maybe some of us are blind to. And one of the things I know you're working on right now is litigation involving voting rights for people with felony convictions, which is a perhaps slightly less subtle way to attack the voting rights of minorities. But maybe you can share some thoughts about that litigation.
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:21:56]: Yeah, sure. And here's one of these extraordinary stories, right? That a ballot initiative is the voters in Florida about restoring the vote to formerly incarcerated people, and the people of Florida vote overwhelmingly for this ballot initiative that would restore voting rights to the formerly incarcerated people in Florida, and very quickly the Republicans in the legislature and the governor come together and pass a bill that says, not so fast.
First, you have to pay all your fees and fines, right? And there are people who have allocated fees and fines that some calculate into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, some calculate into the millions, some calculate into just the thousands, or the hundreds, but there are, of course, many people, most people who are formerly incarcerated, who simply don't have the ability to pay those fees and fines.
And so now we've actually taken ourselves back to something that feels like, I don't know, 1964, where we had poll taxes, right? Where you had to pay in certain jurisdictions to vote. It's really been a dream team of lawyers, the campaign legal center, the SPLC, the ACLU, and LDF that litigated this case in Florida.
This was a full virtual trial. I think it was the first voting rights trial of the pandemic conducted virtually and really done excellently. We got a great decision from the trial court judge who called it a pay for vote scheme very clearly. And then we get a stay order from the 11th circuit, and of course then the Supreme court does what it does, which is, has been doing in a number of these cases where they will not lift the stay.
So, you know, we went back for our en banc argument this morning. That's one of them, the other piece, I think, Barbara, that illuminates this is the COVID piece. I thought there should be a little bit more, a little bit more excitement about this, right? So we're in the middle of a global pandemic. And we know what the statistics are.
We know that African Americans and Latinos are particularly subject and vulnerable to COVID infection and COVID death. In Milwaukee, the week of the primary election, when African-Americans constitute 28% of the population of Milwaukee, African-Americans constituted 70% of COVID deaths. So when that case was making its way to the Supreme court, in which the district court had suggested a very modest adjustment, which would have allowed votes to be counted that were postmarked on election day, but didn't get there by election day, absentee votes.
And the Supreme court kind of turned a blind eye to it and Purcell the case and basically said, it's too close to the elections and kind of tried and they're procuring opinion to say, you know, and that's the only thing this case is about. This is not a case about what kinds of adjustments should be made and so forth.
And then this has happened to us in Alabama with a case that we filed asking Alabama to relax. There are very onerous absentee voter requirements; Alabama requires that if you can vote absentee, you have to have two third-party witnesses sign your ballot, or it has to be notarized and you have to have a copy of your government issued photo ID.
And, and of course the ever eloquent secretary of state of Alabama said, you know what? They can just go to Kinko's. So you know, in this case, we represent people who are particularly subject to COVID, who have preexisting conditions. We brought, brought claims not only under the voting rights act, but also under the Americans with disabilities act.
So now what you're imagining is a regime in which you would have to interact with three people. I mean, we have people who are not seeing their children and their grandchildren, because they fear contracting COVID, but now they should engage with two third party witnesses to sign their ballot and go to Kinko's to get a copy of their government issued photo ID so that they can vote absentee.
Right? It's insanity. Excellent decision from Judge Abdul Kallon recognizes this is an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote. Same thing, goes up to the circuit. Same problem. Supreme court says, you know, we're not gonna, we're not going to take this on. I'm kind of surprised that people are not exorcized by this, compelling people to take their life in their hands to exercise their right as full citizens and cast a ballot.
And frankly, outside the civil rights community, I don't hear the outcry about these cases. I just don't. And we're coming to the November election, we maybe, we see that in the Southern States, we're beginning to see the spike in COVID cases, and we may see yet another one in October.
Yes, of course it is also inspiring to see lines and lines of voters in Wisconsin in the primary and in Georgia, particularly of black voters, to fully participate as full citizens in this democracy, no matter what. It lifts me, and it gives me the encouragement I need to fight this out every day. But it also is outrageous that the choice should have to be made and that we should not be making every accommodation so that people do not have to take their life in their hands to vote.
And I want to take my hat off to the young attorneys in our office who have been litigating these cases in Louisiana, in Arkansas, in Alabama and South Carolina, all of us are affected by COVID. Many of them have young children that they now have to teach every day, because now they're all homeschoolers.
They're worried about their families. They're worried about their parents. They are working their butts off, you know, the courts have not closed, even if we're not physically in them. They are carrying these heavy dockets. They're working on these cases 24/7 to try and ensure we don't compel black people to take on COVID and have to imperil their lives.
I don't hear the rest of the profession talking about what an outrage this is. And I want to push a conversation within our profession in which perhaps the profession takes on a better understanding and reimagination of who we are compelled to be in moments of democratic crisis.
Joyce Vance [00:27:18]: That makes so much sense to me that some of the obligation here belongs to lawyers. That is maybe a longer term process than either you or I would like to see, and like you I'm real concerned about what's going to happen come November.
And I remember being in Selma this year, we were in Selma together. It was one of the last big gatherings that I went to before we all began to quarantine for the pandemic. And as I was walking out of the church, an older gentleman and a young woman who was with him, sort of flagged me, and I went over and spoke with them, and he had been one of the original marchers across the bridge.
And he told me a story about how he had trouble voting. The last time he had gone in to vote, there had been a problem with his name being on the rolls. And he was really disturbed and he didn't know what to do. And it was wonderful because in the moment, surrounded by a lot of the young lawyers and other workers that you're talking about, we were able to come up with a fix for him.
And someone actually picked him up and took him to vote in the primary a few days later. And he voted with no problem. What do people do now? Those sorts of problems that we've always had in elections are compounded by the pandemic. Do you have suggestions for what people do to make sure that they can vote, and what those of us in the community, lawyers and nonlawyers alike, what can we do to support this election?
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:28:37]: Absolutely. I'm so glad you asked that question, and I love you're bringing this up because you are one of the people who understands that voter suppression also happens quite intensely on election day, just because of all of the hitches and problems and negligence that can happen, and the process that has to be troubleshot in real time. I spent the November 2016 central election in Alabama, right. People are like, why are you there?
Joyce Vance [00:29:02]: We may have talked to time or two that day!
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:29:05]: We might, we might have, right. Getting thrown off the polling place site, I recall. And so, and because we understand that you've got to do it in real time and I have this experience of, you know, the couple who've been married for 30 years, lived in the same house for 25 years.
They both go into the polling place. They come out and he says, ‘I don't get it. Her name was on the roll, my name wasn’t on the roll.’ You know, ‘did they let you know why?’ ‘They told me I had to vote provisionally, you know, whatever it was, I was on an inactive list and so forth.’ So we recognize that this is really important.
And we started this work pretty intensely this year. And we're trying to really troubleshoot all of those minute issues that you're talking about. So let's describe just a few more of them before I talk about the protocol. Issues of voting machines not working. We saw this in 2018 and 2016.
We saw it in South Carolina, we saw it in Texas, people saying that they cast their ballots for the Democrats, but the machine switched to Republicans. We troubleshoot that in real time, we call the County election board, I recall in 2018 in Richland County, South Carolina, there was apparently a problem with the machines that needed to be, what they said, was ‘recalibrated.’
The problem was, they only had five technicians for 150 polling places or 150 machines or whatever it was, right? So we've been really zeroed in on the technician issue. Are there enough technicians, especially for places that have taken on new voting machines as they did in Georgia during the primary.
That some of these machines do break and they have to be fixed in real time. So you have those kinds of minute calculations that are important, but what we've been emphasizing for people is how much you have to prepare to vote this year. This is not the year where you can just decide on the night of November 2nd, you know what?
I decided I really liked that candidate, and I think I'm gonna vote tomorrow. This is not that year. This is the year in which if you intend to vote, first of all, you must vote. And second of all, you must decide that early on that you can prepare. So if you're going to vote absentee and you haven't ordered your absentee ballot yet, and I'm saying this to all of you on the podcast, do it today.
I ordered my absentee ballot already. Get online and do it, so that you can get that ballot back in time to get it back to the board of elections. Even if there are post office slow downs, get the ballot as soon as you possibly can. Now, of course, this is not the fix for everyone because not everybody's made up their mind about every race already, and we should be allowed to have the time we need.
Even if you've made up your mind about the president, maybe you haven't made up your mind about the three judges you should vote for, or the DA candidate, or the school board. Right. Maybe you're not ready to do that. Um, if you're not going to absentee vote, you need to know when early voting begins in your jurisdiction. We need as many people to take advantage of early voting as possible in order to avoid problems and long lines on election day.
So find out when early voting starts. I think the earliest starts at the end of September, early October. Find out when it is, make sure that you're planning to early vote, look online and make sure you know where your polling place is and that there haven't been any last minute polling place changes so that you can accommodate yourself to them.
So get out to early vote. If you're going to vote in person, either by early voting or even a vote on November 3rd. The other reason that you can't just get up and decide you're going to vote is that you gotta have PPE. You have to have a mask and you have to have gloves. So that means you have to prepare yourself and your family members to vote.
It's great if you're going to do it, but if your, if your grandma or your mom or your aunt is gonna vote in person, you want to make sure that that person who votes is voting safely. So everyone has to have a mask and gloves. I put out an appeal to black churches and I've asked them to take responsibility for PPE at in-person election sites. That no one should be entering the polling place because they don't have a mask or because they don't have gloves.
And so making sure that people are equipped and outfitted. Here's the last thing, the other way you have to prepare to vote is, we need people to be looking at the ballot at least a week before election day. And frankly, hopefully more so that you can educate yourself about the candidates.
One of the other reasons we get long lines is not only because of machine malfunction, not only because of lack of allocation of enough polling places (particularly the African American and Latino polling sites), all of those failures may well happen. But what also happens is people are reading the ballot for the first time when they go. So they're reading the long constitutional amendment, right? They're reading the bond issue that's about supporting the local library or public pools or whatever it is, or they're trying to figure out which of these three candidates for judge they're going to pull the lever for.
And this year, we're really requiring people to take it a step further and to be ready to vote, to be really prepared to vote, which means you've looked at the sample ballot. You know what that constitutional amendment is asking, you know which way you're going to vote on it when you get into the booth.
You know who the three judges are you’re going to pick. You know, who you're voting for the day. And we are insisting that people vote up and down the ballot, not just for the president, for every single office that's on that ballot. But that means we're being called again to a higher level of citizenship, in which we prepare ourselves to vote by educating ourselves about who's on the ballot before we get to the polling place, and having a plan for how we're going to vote so that we can get in and get out of there as quickly as possible during this pandemic. You don't want to be hanging out in the polling place, and you don't want to be spending all that time in the voting booth.
So all of this is what's necessary. The last thing I'll say, Joyce, is we need more poll workers. We need more poll workers and they need to be younger. In the Milwaukee primary earlier this year, one of the reasons that we had such long lines is because although Milwaukee would normally have 180 polling places, there were only five open.
There were only five open, largely because so many of the poll workers had called out and were not coming in. We can understand that, we're all used to most of our poll workers being elderly, being our seniors, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, when seniors are particularly vulnerable to COVID infection, COVID death. We want to protect our seniors.
So we need to have more poll workers who are in their twenties or thirties or forties. You get paid to poll work that day, we need you to sign up. You can go to workelections.com, it's a great site: workelections.com and you can find your jurisdiction and how you can sign up to be trained to be a poll worker on election day.
Sometimes they call it election judge, if you ordered your ballot in Maryland, it will ask if you want to be an election judge. That's the same thing as a poll worker. We need more people to sign up to be poll workers so that more polling places can be open. And that also helps us not have long lines, get people in and out, and able to vote safe.
Jill Wine-Banks [00:35:18]: The other thing that gets people not to be in a long line is of course, absentee voting. And we have seen an unprecedented attack on the US postal service by this administration. And so I would like you to, if you could just briefly, I know we've taken a lot of your time and we are grateful because it's been a phenomenal discussion, but could you just address some of the issues that we're facing that are voter suppression efforts through attacks on the post office?
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:35:46]: It is unlike anything I've ever seen, the attacks on the United States postal service. And I kind of feel like I've seen a lot of voter suppression, so it's quite sobering and quite alarming. Like many of you, I've never seen a locked postal box. I haven't seen postal boxes lined up on trucks, the decision to get rid of 671 letter sorting machines.
And to engage in all of this activity, this so-called efficiency activity right in the lead up to the election, astonishing. And of course it comes in the midst of what has been essentially a campaign by the president of the United States over the past two months to discredit absentee voting. You suggest that there is something illegal about absentee voting to distort and present misinformation on social media, both Twitter and Facebook, about absentee voting to suggest that it's some kind of new innovation in voting as though it hasn't been with us for decades, and to suggest that it carries the patina of illegality, despite the fact that he himself — don't think he voted until he was 41 — but since he's been in voting has been voting absentee more often than not, as have many of the members his cabinet.
So you first have this drum beat, this drum beat on social media to discredit absentee voting, and to talk about how this is going to quote unquote, ‘rig the election,’ and to talk about the ways in which we can't trust mail-in ballots and that we can't trust absentee ballots, and people are going to ballot harvest and all of these, this parade of horribles that the president has been rolling out without any evidence that there is any widespread voter fraud, even in the absentee context. Then suddenly we get a new postmaster general. We get very quickly the deputy who has been there for a very long time resigning, which was a sign.
And we get this incredible turnover in which the new postmaster general essentially purges those who have institutional experience, and begins a new set of measures that he describes, or that are described on his behalf, as being designed to produce efficiencies in the post office.
We get the reduction in the letter-sorting machines, we get the reduction in the boxes, and then we hear from the post office itself that they want states to know that they may not be able to deliver ballots on time to meet the existing state election law deadlines. It is, it is absolutely astonishing. It is unconscionable. It is anti-democratic, the United States house will be having an oversight hearing on Monday on August 24th with the postmaster general. I hope that it will be asking piercing questions so that we can get information that we need.
I suspect there will be litigation and there already is some litigation coming from a variety of upfront about this. We've all been looking intensely at it, I spent most of my weekend, looking at it and we're just deeply concerned. Obviously we're concerned about people who are not receiving their medication on time, people whose social security checks, stimulus checks and others will be held up. Well, we are also very concerned about voting.
Jill Wine-Banks [00:38:50]: Thank you, Sherrilyn. This has been a most amazing conversation, and we want to thank you and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund for all they do, to make sure that every vote counts and that everyone can vote. Thank you from all of us.
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:39:06]: Thank you. It was, it really was just an absolute pleasure and honor to talk with all of you.
Barbara McQuade [00:39:10]: Keep fighting for us, Sherrilyn!
Sherrilyn Ifill [00:39:12]: I will, I will. Keep speaking out, you guys, your voices are just so important and, and game-changing, and I've always said that that's the key is that it has to come from so many different levels of our profession, and people are hungry for knowledge and you all are out there every night, helping people understand and assess what they see. People have a great instinct for knowing what is right and what is wrong. And so many people since 2016, have known that like, all of these things are wrong, but they need to understand how and why.
And people want to have that information. There's a hunger for it. And I salute all of you for providing that information for people, and helping people understand that their instincts about what is wrong is fully backed up by the truth, by the law, by the practice, as you have known it.
Joyce Vance [00:39:56]: I cannot think of a better way to celebrate 100 years of women getting the right to vote than by having this conversation with the three of you. And we've spoken, of course, with our good friends, Vanita Gupta and Pam Karlan as well. I think women are the future of this country, and certainly when it comes to voting we fought hard, and clearly from these conversations, we're going to continue that fight.
Barbara McQuade [00:40:22]: Well, that's it for the show this week. Thank you so much Sherrilyn, and thanks to my fellow Sisters in Law for hosting this episode with me. I loved celebrating the hundred year anniversary of women's right to vote with my friends. And to everyone listening, don't forget to vote. Register for your absentee ballot and vote early in this critical election year. And I hope to see you next time for a future episode of Talking Feds.
This episode was produced by Jennifer Bassett, with production assistance by Matt McArdle. Our editor is Justin Wright. Thanks to Harry Litman, the host of Talking Feds, for having us on the show. And of course, a very special thanks to the amazing Phillip Glass for his music.
