 Good morning. It's June the 1st, 2022. Thank you for joining us for American Issues, Take One. I'm Tim Apachele, your host, and today's title is A Voting Rights Bill, A Distant Memory. And before I go into the topic, I'd like to introduce our guest. Our special guest today is Jane Sugarmora. My co-host is Jay Fidel and, of course, Cynthia Lee Sinclair. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Kim. Jay, you know, we have, over since really 2020, since the election that Donald Trump lost in President Biden won, we've had a number of states in the country immediately pass what we would term as voter suppression bills. And I guess of all these voter suppression bills, what seems to be the most troubling aspect in your mind to what's been passed, and I'll ask this question later to probably Jane, but does it really, really have an impact on voter turnout and will it really matter that these states have passed these voter suppression bills? Only if the Democrats win the popular vote, then it'll matter. If the Republicans win, they won't say boo. There was a piece in the paper the other day about that, about some of these Trump candidates who won. And they didn't say anything about, you know, the possibility of voter fraud or irregularities at the polls. It's a one-way street, this kind of thing, these bills, these suppression bills. I think, you know, the insurrection was plan A, you know, denying the transfer of power. That's critical. It goes to the heart of democracy. But plan B is this voting thing. And what I find interesting is that we are not paying as much attention. There was no violence, you know, in all these bills. It's just votes by Republicans and Republican legislators with Republican governors around the country. And it doesn't attract as much attention as an insurrection does. But in fact, it's much more dangerous. Because, you know, they will muck up this election. And I don't necessarily mean that they will, you know, win the popular vote or that there's stuff in there that is calculated to win the popular vote. It's that two things. One is that they reserve the right to turn things over by way of an elected or, you know, managed secretary of state. And the second thing, and this is really important, is confusion. Confusion about the, about what's at stake, about the ballot, about going down, not going down. Confusion about interpreting the results. Confusion that will leak into the media. And before you know it, the news and thus public opinion will be festooned with all this confusion. I mean, it's really dangerous. Because if you can say that, you know, an insurrection and denying transfer of power is plan A. And plan B is not far behind. Voting is, think about it. You know, this is representative government, a republic. If you don't have voting and you don't have confidence in voting and clarity in voting and a lack of ambiguity in how it works and what it does, you cannot perform the constitutional duties of a republic or democracy. So, you know, what bothers me most is that these secretaries, these phony baloney secretaries of state have the power to turn it over. Not only that they do, but they might, and that will create confusion in the mind of the media and the public. All right. I'm going to follow up on that last point. Jane, good morning and welcome. See, Jane, Jane has mentioned secretaries of state. In a lot of these voter suppression bills, there seems to be an aspect of the appointment of, if you will, by part, not bipartisan, but a partisan appointees versus a public elected official for secretary of state. To what degree is that a concern? And would that actually, can we show a correlation that that would somehow hamper the fair and free election of any state? I think that, you know, I agree with Jane. I think if you appoint, you know, you make it partisan, you're going to have somebody in there who will take advantage of a situation, especially, you know, if it's a Republican and the Republicans are losing, you're going to have, you know, somebody in there. I think it takes away from the trustworthiness. It should be a nonpartisan person who is in control of these elections. And to me, you know, until, you know, what Trump started spreading the great lie or whatever, I didn't realize that there were people in the state government who could somehow set aside these elections. You know, it didn't occur to me that there was a person who could do that. And apparently, in some states, that's happening. And to me, that's frightening. That is really frightening. Yeah, it is. And I guess, you know, we're looking at two bills that have passed the House, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, and then the Voting Rights Bill, excuse me, the Freedom to Vote Act. I think Amy Klovischer sponsored that bill in the House. You know, those seem to be a national fix for some of these concerns that we have. But failing that, failing their passage in the Senate, what do you think can be done to correct these individual state bills that seem to be voter suppression bills? I think we're going to have to really start educating the voters. I mean, they're going to have to take back their country. And the problem is that you have a lot of apathy. You know, I've been involved in a lot of campaigns. And you know, people just figure, oh, well, you know, my vote doesn't count. You know, why should I go and vote? And what we're seeing, I think, in a lot of these elections, every vote does count. And even if your candidate doesn't win, it's important to go out and at least voice your choice and vote, you know, to express your choice for issues and for candidates who support certain issues. Because otherwise, you know, our democracy is just going to just go away. I like to hit on that point, voter apathy. Does it help that the media is communicating that these states have implemented these voter suppression elements in their state law? And would that discourage voters from saying, you know, it's a free and fair election, so I'll just stay home. Do you think there's any correlation to how the voters view what these bills are or are not? And since he's going to talk about what they are in about a minute. No, but you know, what I think is, you know, and I look at this as, you know, part of the Democratic party that, you know, has to go out and work with the community. And you know, to me, if I lived in one of those states, that would mean that I'd have to work harder to educate, you know, our, my constituency, my group, to say, hey, they've passed these laws. And so this means that we got to do certain things differently and we got to do it because if we don't, we're going to lose the right to vote. And I think that's, that's frightening. Amen. Yeah, good point. Cynthia, I know you have a long list of those states which have passed what I would consider some voter suppression elements. Why don't you go down some of the top, top states, I'm thinking Florida, Georgia, Montana, Texas, those kind of states and why don't you go ahead and describe some of the suppression elements that have passed in these states? Well, I think it's important first to realize that there's two actually classifications of these bills. There's restrictive bills, right, that are restricting the right to vote. Those are deadline for absentee ballots as sooner. Absentee ballots need to be notarized, eliminating mail return and drop boxes, eliminating senior exemptions for, you know, absentee ballots, stopping the Black churches Sunday voting souls to the polls things. They're closing them on Sunday. Is that real? Is that real? It is very real. That's in Georgia and it's already happened. Clearing the voter rolls, ID laws, and then making it harder to register. Now those are the restrictive bills, okay. Overall lawmakers have in 39 states have considered 393 restrictive bills for the 22 legislative session. And since 2021, 18 states have passed 34 restrictive voting laws that disproportionately affect people of color. So then we've got, okay, we've got the overall lawmakers in 27 states introduced 148 election interference bills in the 22 legislative session. And those are the ones like what Jane was just talking about that actually give them the ability to change what the votes are when they come in if they don't like the results. They've increased the ability for people to be criminally charged. It's going to be federal offenses. If you do anything that doesn't exactly follow these new laws. So even if it's a mistake, you can still be charged with a federal cost. States cannot create federal crimes, Cynthia. It would have to be a state crime. State crime. Sorry, I didn't mean to say federal. I meant to say not just a misdemeanor, right, but it's actually criminal. Melanie, Melanie. Say criminal. Thank you for that correction. So we've got six states that have already passed election interference laws. And that's what's scary. We've got 27 states that are still looking at 148 other bills, but there are six that have already passed. Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Oklahoma have already passed those laws. And that's what to me, I'm with Jane. That's the scariest part. The restriction stuff is one thing. We can overcome that by getting more people out to the polls, by getting more people informed about what's happening. But these other ones, these election interference bills, those are the ones that are so scary, because it takes the power out of the voters' hands. All right. Jay, I'm looking at the John R. Lewis bill and the Freedom to Vote Act. And I don't know. It just sometimes seems to me that, and I hate to pin this on Democrats, but when we come to the table with a bill, and I'm thinking of Build Back Better, that was originally a couple trillion, more than that, we seem to come in with the entire kitchen sink. For example, the John R. Lewis bill, there's a whole concept about reworking how gerrymandering is accomplished. That's an issue that's been tried to be tackled for decades. Gerrymandering has been taking place for hundreds of years in this country. Is it too much? Are these federal bills asking too much, and that's why they can't get passed? I mean, should it be broken down like they're proposing with Build Back Better, break it down in smaller chunks, so that you can get this stuff passed with some bipartisan agreement? That's one of the problems. I mean, I think the major problem, you know, Cynthia articulated a bunch of systems, a bunch of techniques of draconian methodologies that the Republicans have thought of, and a lot of those are in the last six or eight months. And I think they're designed to get around the voting rights bill, the John Lewis bill and the Freedom to Vote Act, which were never well-drafted. They were never really strong enough to do the job anyway. But the Republicans have been working on bills that respond to those provisions and get around them. So, I mean, even if those bills passed right now today, remember, they've been sitting there in the hopper for a year or more. And they haven't wrapped around the Republican approach, the Republican attacks. They're sitting pretty before being useless. And, you know, I worry about that. Everybody has this thing on in mind, well, we have a voting rights bill, it's going to fix everything. I'm here to tell you, it's not going to fix everything. It's not all that well-drafted. It was not drafted to really address the problem at the outset. And it certainly hasn't wrapped around the problem as the problem has evolved in so many states, including battleground states. So, I don't think it's a solution. I don't think it's a cure-all. And furthermore, I mean, that actually doesn't matter because I'm here to tell you that those bills are never, ever going to pass. We will never have voting rights. Okay, I want to make one other point. I have one other point. May I make one other point? Of course. Yesterday. You're my co-host. Yesterday on NPR was a very, very, very, very interesting program. About two sociologists, database guys, and I think it was in Stanford, who looked into the level of violence in the country before and after Roe v. Wade. And I think Cynthia can tell us, and Jane can tell us, that Roe v. Wade dampened violence in this country. Why? Because there weren't so many unwanted children. Unwanted children engage in crime. Unwanted children are loose on following the rules. They don't have good parenting. They're not wanted. Okay, so over the past 50 years, we've seen a diminishing amount of crime because of this. Now you can say, when do you get that fight out? Well, the answer is these guys did a very smart database analysis of crime and abortion since Roe v. Wade. Really, really interesting. Who could have figured that this would have happened in 1973? Nobody. Nobody would have figured that this would be a result of that Supreme Court case. So what I'm saying is that we have to look forward, just like those guys would have done had they been there thinking the same thoughts in 1973. So if we have good voting rights, there are all kinds of implications for the country. It goes beyond who wins that election. It goes beyond racial justice. It goes beyond social or economic justice. It's all of those things. And likewise, if we have no voting rights, as Jane says, we are ultimately going to lose our democracy. There will be some terrible changes for the lack of voting rights, just like there will be some terrible changes in crime for the lack of Roe v. Wade. You have to look down the passage. You have to see it 10, 20, 30, even 50 years from now. So the changes the Republicans have made, don't stop in November of 2022, nor do they stop in November of 2024. They go on. They're not going to be so easily reversed. And the lack of voting rights is going to be with us for a long time. It is going to change the country and our lives. We can't figure out right now, but I'm telling you, it will happen. All right, E.J., thank you. I'm reminded also that we have to look at Dr. Spock and his philosophy of being, allowing our children to be so permissive and not, stunt their growth of emotional well-being. All right, Jane, I digress. Jane, I'm looking at Florida Bill 90 or Georgia Senate Bill 202, and a lot of these have a common thread to them, and that is voter identification. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with expecting a state to verify someone's ability and the privilege to vote? I know it's a right, but if you're not registered to vote, what's wrong with asking for identification? You mean like a photo identification? Or a state ID or a driver's license? Yes. Is there anything wrong with that? I think they do it as a matter, of course, but when you think about it, the people who are homeless and the people who are disadvantaged, they probably don't have the wherewithal to have a photo ID. They don't have a driver's license because they don't have cars. And so it does discriminate. It is discriminatory. Well, let me address that because a lot of Democrats say exactly what you just stated. And I guess the question is, why can't we have a national effort to set aside funds for those who can't afford a state ID, who are injured or cannot, certainly don't have the ability to drive so they don't have a driver's license. Why can't we assist those and preserve their rights to vote with some kind of, I don't know, a fund of one type of another to assist them in that effort? Well, when you're talking about the homeless too, I mean, how do you give a photo ID to somebody who doesn't have a home and who doesn't have an address? And I guess, and that's a problem. And for people who are in that situation, it disenfranchises them. And to me, that's discriminatory. And so because of your socioeconomic level, because of your lack of resources, you're denied the right to vote. And that's just not right. Okay, that's the answer I was looking for. Thank you. One other question is, we have a lot of things in the headline, be it Roe v. Wade or the Texas shooting or the Buffalo, New York shooting. We have all these things that are gaining the attention of Americans in the headlines. Certainly Ukraine's part of that. To what degree should voter suppression bills before the midterms elections, should that be kind of rise to the top again? Or do you think it will? I am concerned that they will. I think, as you indicated to me, I'm looking at the Texas massacre and it again, it occurs to me, why would an 18-year-old need an assault rifle in this country? I mean, it's the stupidest. To me, that just begs the question, we need to stop this. We need to stop people in an 18-year-old from going out and getting an assault rifle because what do you do with an assault rifle? You don't use it for hunting. You don't use it for protection. You use it to kill people. And so why would you sell an assault rifle to an 18-year-old? And this has got to stop. And it disturbs me that people aren't more upset about it. Because it's not like this is the one thing- How do we become numb to it? I hope not. I hope not. I mean, it's clearly, that seems to be the case where hardly anyone's really talking about it in social circles. We see it on the news, but aren't we just tired of the umpteen shootings that seems to be commonplace? Well, I think that's why somebody has to kind of step up and demand that something gets done. And I think that we are reaching that point where people are shaking their heads and saying, there's something's got to be done. This can't keep happening. Well, I mean, on the same vein, is voter suppression issues that have been passed? Is that now become a nothing burger because we're just completely desensitized to what's going on? Yeah, that's what I'm concerned about because every time I hear about one of these bills passing, I'm thinking, what's happening in that state? Where are the thinking people who care about equality and the right to vote? Where are those people when these laws are getting passed to their state? You know, that just really bothers me that there's this silent group of people who aren't saying things so that these voter suppression bills can be passed to those states. Right. All right. Thank you. Hey, Cynthia, I saw your correspondence regarding this issue and certainly that voter suppressions have lost the headlines. To your recommendation, what should be done to bring it back up to our recognition of this country and the voters in this country? How do we do that? How do we get this thing back on the radar screen? Well, unfortunately, the people in Congress are the ones who have to do that, and they're not because now they're busy with gun legislation. That's never going to pass, ever. I agree we need to do something. I agree something should be done. Texas governor just rolled it back. It used to be 21 to get one of those rifles, and now it's 18. There's no background checks. You don't need a permit to carry in Texas. How we're going to roll that back right now between now and November is silly because we're not. That's a years-long process, I'm sure. What's the answer to the concern about voter suppression? What is the solution? Because we know we have two national bills that aren't going anywhere, thanks to Joe Manchin, and his inability to adjust or modify a filibuster. So if the two national bills aren't going anywhere, where do we go? I'm not sure where we can go, but we know it's bad because these bills where they can bias election reviews and all this other partisan stuff that's going on, they've already been studied, and they are absolutely, they lack transparency. They fail to satisfy basic security accuracy and reliability measures. How is it that they're allowed to go forward? We know that the Supreme Court has already gutted the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, both Section 2 and Section 5 were struck down by the Supreme Court and one in 2013 and then one again in 2021. So we don't have the courts on our side. All we can hope is that every court in every state is just going to flood the court system with nothing but challenges to these bills. And unless we do that in the states that this is happening in, it's not going to happen. One of the state representatives in Arizona, he's quoted as saying, we need to get back to the 1958 style of voting. I mean, yeah, let's go back to a different century. Why not? You're standing in line and not having mail-in ballots or anything. Okay, great. Paper ballots that are hand canceled, that's what he wants. We'll just say one more thing if it's okay. Sure. I think this is really important when we're talking about people being disenfranchised because of ID voter laws. The biggest people that are going to be disenfranchised because of that is the American Indians. I mean, our Native Americans are the ones. They don't have addresses. They don't have regular places where they can go for IDs. And here, Arizona had just passed not too long ago. I think it was 2018. I don't remember the exact number now. Where they passed something saying that they were going to be able to get around that. They were going to give more latitudes to the Native Americans in Arizona. And then all these new bills that are being passed in Arizona take all of it right back away again. All of it's gone. So I think that we think of people of color automatically. And then there's going to be a new thing in most of these states also where you have to prove citizenship. Yeah. So if you've been a Hispanic that's been living, see, even if you're second generation, but if you don't have your little slip that says you are a citizen, then they're going to make you find it, go get it and present it before they'll let you vote. You know, that's Texas bill. And I think the Brennan Legal Center is actually challenging that in court. So that is a proposal, but it is being challenged. So good point. Good for you to bring that up. To flood the courts at this point. That is our only hope to talk about it nonstop. Tell all of the people that you know in the media to stop talking 24 seven about the same thing and start getting so they can actually talk about maybe two or three subjects. They got an hour. We go through three or four in our half hour sometimes. They can start doing that instead of just this nonstop bombarding every single day 24 seven has been nothing but Uvaldi. Now granted, it's a horrible thing that happened, but why not throw in some gun rights stuff in there? Why not talk about some voting rights and how it will affect the gun rights? And, but they don't. So I think the media are just as much to blame. Yeah, I agree. All right. You know, I think we're coming to the end of our time for this program, but I want to go around the table and ask for your final thoughts. But before I do that, Jay, to Jane's point, that now more than ever that there needs to be get out the vote on education for voters that the system might be slightly stacked against them now that they weren't back in 2020. Is that the approach that's going to win the day? More motivation? And is it wedge issues that get people out to the voting booths or to their mail-in ballots? Is it Roe v. Wade? Is it gun reform? Are those issues certainly going to motivate or not motivate people to get engaged in 2022 midterms? Good question. And, you know, to trip on what Jane was saying seems to me that Republicans are never going to do that, right? They would like to undermine voting. They don't want voting. They're horrible. God will get them for that, but their own God. But, you know, the Democrats could. And the problem is the Democrats are in fragmentation now. I don't think a Democratic Party has a leader that we can recognize who gets up and talks that kind of rhetoric and says you've got to get out there and vote and tries to dispel the confusion because I was going to make the point in my closing remarks that we are going to have enormous confusion in the country. And when you have confusion, people say, the hell with this, I'm not going to vote. I'm out of here. It's not worth it. It doesn't count. So somebody's got to straighten all that out. Somebody's got to tell them, don't be confused. Here's the rules. Here's what you do and remember to vote, just like Jane said. But you've got to have somebody in a position of leadership and authority say that. And right now, I would say the Democratic Party nationally, the DNC hasn't done that. Cynthia, can you tell me who the chair of the DNC is? Never mind. Tim, can you tell me who it is? Jane, can you tell me who it is? Never mind. I'm busy laughing. Stop it. I'm not like Jane, but I can't see him. But my point is, it has to be a leader. And I don't think that Joe Biden shares the stage enough. He should have his arm around this leader. He should have his arm around the next Democratic candidate for president, too. That's another show. But the point is, we need that kind of leadership from the Democratic Party. And that's my answer to your question. All right, man. It's a good one. Thank you, Jane. Jane, your last thoughts on this topic. Rick, what do you think might be a solution here? Well, I agree with Jay that there's probably not a lot of strong leadership in the national party. But I'm part of a project that the DNC is part of. And I think I'm one. I'm told I'm one of about 200 people in the state of Hawaii. And we've been doing these postcards. And I'm familiar with that, actually. Right. So I'm on my sixth packet already of 50 cards. And now I'm sending postcards to Wisconsin, telling them to get out and register to vote. And so this is a DNC program. And it's going on in all 50 states. And we've got 200 people in the state of Hawaii writing these postcards. And so that kind of gives me some hope that some of these postcards, out of maybe the 300 postcards that I've written out, maybe if I can get 10 people to register to vote, I would have done my job. And if everybody else who's doing this continues to... And we've got, like I said, people in 50 states doing this. Hopefully, we can overcome some of these voters' suppression, no laws. You know, I have a couple of neighbors that are doing the exact same thing. And the comments they make is they get feedback saying, from a household in Iowa, how cool it is to get a postcard from Hawaii. So it actually has a little bit of panache to it when it's received in Iowa or Wisconsin or wherever. All right. Well, Jane, thank you very much for your last thoughts. Cynthia, your thoughts, please. Jamie Harrison is the head of the DNC. And I can't believe I could come up with this. Thank you. I'm glad we didn't end the show without knowing that. I knew it too, it was right on the tip of my tongue. Okay. So like Jay has said in many past shows, where are the lawyers? Where are the lawyers? I want them to flood the courts. That's, again, my same thing. Okay. So my last thing is our government is bold enough to force women to have a child they don't want, but too weak to ensure that they make it to recess alive. And I think that's just like, really says it. They're too weak to establish voting rights. They're too weak to get gun control, but boy, they're strong enough to make sure you have a child you don't want. All right. You know, thank you very much, Cynthia. You know, we have gone way over time, and I'm in the hot seat right now. So Jay, I hope you are okay with that. No, I'm not. I have to add one more point. I knew it. Go ahead. It's not only voting, it's sending money. And the problem is that, you know, social media has not been kind to us, and who knows what kind of players are behind it, but I get 500 crap email requests from money every day. And it goes back to your friend Jamie Harrison. I remember that name. You know, if the DNC would only tell me to whom I should send the money, so that I don't lose it, so it's not phishing, so it's not, you know, stealing my money, or misguiding my money, I would send money. And there's a tremendous amount of money out there that's unspent because of such confusion, which the DNC could resolve, and that money could change the result of the election. Money, sorry to say, you know, great country buys votes. It buys TV media and all that. So we have to address that. DNC has to address that. Alrighty, thank you, Jay. I'd like to thank our special guest, Jane Sugamora. I'd like to thank Cynthia Leeson-Claire, and of course I have to thank Jay Fidel, my co-host, for American Issues Take One. Please join us next Wednesday, 11 o'clock. I'm Tim Apachele, your host, and join us next week. Thank you. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.