Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, discussed safeguarding elections in 2024 and beyond on Tuesday night in the Memorial Union.
His talk was part of the annual Manatt-Phelps lecture, the “most prominent lecture” that the political science department puts on every year, according to the political science department chair, Alex Tuckness.
“It allows us to bring in really high-profile people who are able to speak on events we think the campus is interested in and wants to learn more about,” Tuckness said.
Director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics, Karen M. Kedrowski, added that the lecture brings distinguished speakers with expertise, including President Joe Biden in 2006.
“The Manatts and the Phelps’ are very concerned about American democracy and really loved the idea of bringing in somebody who could talk about the very rapidly changing landscape around election laws and what their impacts are on voters,” Kedrowski said.
Waldman’s lecture focused on election subversion, which involves attempts to interfere with or undermine elections, including manipulating vote counts or suppressing voters.
“I believe we, right now, are in a great fight for the future of American democracy,” Waldman said. “The stakes really are that high right now. There are pressures and strains on our democratic system of both kinds that we have not seen in many years.”
Waldman began his lecture by looking at the roots of American politics, highlighting historical struggles for democracy. He noted that Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence stated, “Government is legitimate only when it rests on the consent of the governed.”
Waldman referenced his book “The Fight to Vote” and how many people fought for their voice in democracy while others resisted changes to maintain power for the privileged.
“I wrote a book called ‘The Fight to Vote’ about this history because it took a fight to get the right to vote,” Waldman said. “The very first great voting rights victory was won by angry white working-class men in the period known as Jacksonian democracy when they eliminated the property requirement for voting.”
Waldman noted the struggle for women’s voting rights was “a victory every bit as hard fought as any civil rights victory that followed.”
“[Women] pioneered tactics of protest, hunger strikes, the first ever march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, ballot measures, all these other things,” Waldman said.
Black men’s struggle for voting rights continued from the Civil War until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Waldman said that then, for the first time, Americans had a “true, real multi-racial democracy that included everybody.”
Waldman highlighted that all the victories for voting rights were achieved by “people on the streets or people passing legislation.” However, he said there was a setback in 2013 due to a Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder.
He quoted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, “Throwing out the Voting Rights Act is like standing in a rainstorm or holding an umbrella and not getting wet and saying you don’t need an umbrella because you’re not getting wet.”
“In other words, these advances happened because they were under the umbrella of federal legal protection under the Voting Rights Act,” Waldman said. “And within hours, she was proven right within our states all across the country, and especially in the south, implemented laws to make it harder for people to vote, but especially to make it harder for people of color.”
Waldman touched on the 2020 election and how, despite the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, bipartisan efforts were made to ensure people could vote safely. Examples include universal voting by mail and early in-person voting.
“It was a civic mobilization, involving churches, involving business, involving labor, involving government and it was not for a party,” Waldman said. “It was not for a candidate. It was for having an election. It was for democracy. And by election day, despite the pandemic, it was the highest voter turnout since 1900.”
Waldman then addressed the “false claims” about the 2020 election, the rise of misinformation and what it could mean for the upcoming election.
Waldman said the issue of how we run our elections and “whether they are real and whether they are fair” is front and center this year.
“How are we going to make sure that our system holds together in the face of this?” Waldman said. “What can we do to protect our system against this kind of election subversion?”
Waldman’s first suggestion was to stand up for election officials–who are generally responsible for overseeing the election and voting process–calling them American heroes and saying “they want to run a fair election.”
He also suggested standing up against disinformation and understanding that non-citizen voting is “vanishingly rare” in the United States.
Waldman emphasized fact-checking information and proposed reforming the Supreme Court to include “binding ethics rules” and 18-year term limits for justices.
“We need to find, once again, the ability to enact bipartisan, bold reforms to fix our system, to fix the problems, so that these things don’t happen again, and to continue that story and expanding American democracy,” Waldman said. “We’re not going to suddenly have a time where people aren’t fighting about our democracy, but we can get back to a point where the voice of the people turns out to be what matters to us.”
