A look at new barriers at the ballot box

**Tonya Mosley** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosely. My guest today, journalist Ari Berman, has spent the last decade covering the battle over who gets to vote in America and who gets to write the rules that govern our elections. With just over four months until the midterm elections, he's tracking the latest wave of court rulings, lawsuits, and new laws that are reshaping how elections are run.
In just the last week, the Supreme Court preserved mail-in voting in a five-to-four ruling, allowing Mississippi to count ballots postmarked by election day. Days later, the court struck down decades-old limits on campaign spending, a rule expected to reshape how our elections are financed. That's only part of the story. In April, the court weakened what remained of the Voting Rights Act, after which states across the South quickly moved to redraw congressional maps. And the president wants Congress to revive a law that would require a passport or a birth certificate just to register to vote.
Ari Berman is a National Voting Rights Correspondent for Mother Jones and the author of several books including Minority Rule and Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Ari Berman, welcome back to Fresh Air.

**Ari Berman** (1:14)
Hey Tonya, thank you so much for having me back.

**Tonya Mosley** (1:17)
Okay, so last week the court preserved Melon Voting by a single vote. Then two days later, they removed this decades old limit on party spending. So essentially, it's a win for voters on one hand and a win for money on the other.
What do these two rulings tell you together about where the court is taking our elections?

**Ari Berman** (1:37)
Well, the Melon Voting ruling was really an aberration because the Roberts Court has issued so many decisions weakening the right to vote. And essentially, destroying the voting rights out. So it's almost like an asterisk. They were asked to do something with mail voting that was just a bridge too far. Remember, this was a law that was passed out of Mississippi that said that if your ballot was postmarked by election day, it could be received up to five days later. So it wasn't like it was a law that came out of California or some other liberal state. This was a very conservative state in Mississippi that was asking, essentially, the Supreme Court to maintain the status quo. So while that is a victory for voters, it's not like it was a term on the whole by the Supreme Court that gave a lot of victories to democracy. There were far more defeats for democracy than there were victories in this last term.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:37)
Okay. That's why you call it an aberration because your reporting suggested that this court had been moving steadily in one direction on this issue.

**Ari Berman** (2:44)
They have been. I mean, you look at, for example, the decision that essentially killed the Voting Rights Act. They weakened the last remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act in such a way that it has no power. By extension, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important civil rights law of the 1960s has no teeth left.
That's just the beginning of what they've done in terms of weakening democracy. You mentioned the campaign finance decision. That struck down limits on how much parties can spend in coordination with candidates. So before there were limits on these type of expenditures, now there isn't, meaning that an individual can give a lot more money to a party than they can give to a candidate. Now the party can spend an unlimited amount on behalf of those candidates, and it's just another way in which wealthy individuals will have more influence in the political process. And the campaign finance decisions by the court are very similar to the decisions on the Voting Rights Act by the court, and that this wasn't the first decision by the Supreme Court, by the Roberts Court that deregulated the campaign finance system in such a way that gives wealthy individuals far more power, and it wasn't the first decision by the Roberts Court weakening the Voting Rights Act. This is now a decades-long project by the Roberts Court to give wealthy individuals more power in the political process. At the same time, they're giving voters less power in terms of their ability to elect their representatives and to be protected from racial discrimination in voting.

**Tonya Mosley** (4:23)
Let's break down for a moment more about the campaign finance ruling because I was just thinking about the gubernatorial race in California, for instance. Tom Steyer, very wealthy individual, spent more than 200 million of his own money running for governor. He didn't make it out of the primary. We're not necessarily saying the more money you have, the more sway you will have in being able to determine the outcome of an election. But it does play a big role in campaigns itself. I'm guessing the lawyers, the organizers, the voter databases, turnout operations, all that stuff. Can you just break it down what the potential ramifications of this could be?