Jon Ward's Conversation with Stacey Abrams, Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés
Jon Ward of Yahoo News has a conversation with Stacey Abrams, Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés about the documentary from Amazon Studios, “All In: Fight for Democracy." and more.
Video Transcript
JON WARD: Hi, I'm Jon Ward, senior political reporter with Yahoo News. Welcome to this Yahoo News interview with Stacey Abrams and the creators of a new film, "All In The Fight For Democracy." I'm going to be talking today with Abrams, the founder of Fair Fight Action, who's become a national political figure over the past few years, and with Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes, two celebrated and accomplished filmmakers who co-directed and co-produced the film. Before we jump in, here's a quick clip from the movie, which is going to be released September 9 by Amazon Studios in select theaters and on September 18 on Amazon Prime.
- Ladies and gentlemen, Stacey Abrams.
STACEY ABRAMS: When I started running for governor, we anticipated that voter suppression was going to be instrumental in Brian Kemp's campaign. And we were right.
- We've been in line for five hours.
- They said you've already voted, looks like several days ago. No, I would have remembered that.
STACEY ABRAMS: Thousands of people were told no and didn't have the authority to demand better.
- The lines are insane. We had precinct consolidation, non-training of local election officials.
STACEY ABRAMS: I knew something had gone horribly wrong. The system that is supposed to protect our democracy didn't work the way it was supposed to.
JON WARD: And here's Stacey, Liz, and Lisa. All of you, thank you so much for joining us. I wanted to start with Lisa with a very basic question. How do we define voter suppression? What is it and what is it not?
LISA CORTES: Well, I think it all comes down to are you able to register? Are you able to cast your vote? And will your ballot be counted? And if you are facing obstacles in exercising this most important right, then that is voter suppression.
JON WARD: Liz, I wanted to ask you--
LISA CORTES: [INAUDIBLE]
JON WARD: Liz, I wanted to ask you about this film. You placed Stacey Abrams' story at the middle of it. But it's really a history of the last several decades of voting rights and voter suppression. What was the evolution of putting Stacey's life story and her political career at the center of the film?
LIZ GARBUS: We didn't do that, Jon. She doesn't know that. No, I mean, look, when Stacey and-- we first met, Stacey said this is not a film about me, right? And it wasn't because of some modesty. It was about the fact that if you reduce it to one person's story, you're not telling-- you're not showing the whole picture.
Stacey's election is hundreds of years in the making. It's the product of struggles and battles and life and death of folks who have come before her. But at the same time, as filmmakers, you need a person to connect to. You want that beating heart in the film that you can kind of take that ride with. So it was a balancing act of that story of 2018 in Georgia, interweaving it with the historical currents and stories and heroes and villains that put-- that created that moment.
And when Lisa and I first showed her the rough cut, we sat there biting our nails because it wasn't-- it's not the Stacey Abrams film. But, of course, her story is in there. And Stacey, I think she can speak about this, but understood why we did that. And certainly, certainly, it is the small story illuminating the larger one.
JON WARD: And Stacey, I'm going to get to you in a minute. Don't worry. But Lisa, can you take us through that larger narrative, the historical narrative that you guys are telling? You've got Stacey's story interspersed with the larger story. Take the viewers through what that larger narrative is and what the story is that you're trying to tell.
LISA CORTES: Well, one of the things that we do in the film is to make history fun, is to toggle back between the past and the present. So when we look at the inception of this country and 6% of the population is mostly white, land-owning men are able to vote. We see that from the beginning, this right that we all should have been granted from that shining city on the hill, that franchisement was not extended to everyone.
There is a great moment post-Civil War with the promise of reconstruction, the election of representatives of African descent. And then there is the retrenchment that follows very quickly that is the Ku Klux Klan, its lynchings, its violence, its intimidation to keep people of color from voting. There is this one golden moment, then, with the passage-- and I'm moving through history very quickly-- in 1965, the passage of the civil-- the Voting Rights Act.
But what we also show in our film is simultaneously there are forces who at that time who set an agenda that comes to fruition to pull back the access. So post-Obama's election, we then see the intense gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, with Shelby County v Holder. Fast forward to this present moment, where all of us are asking how did we arrive at a moment when we have a president talking about that there will be law enforcement at the polls, where Native Americans are being told that because you don't have an address, you cannot vote because your voter ID is not accepted. This is all part of a continuum that is in our unfortunate DNA.
JON WARD: Stacey, Lisa mentioned the 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby versus Holder. A lot of the film seemed to kind of track along the lines of Carol Anderson's book "One Person, No Vote," which is one of the prominent books about that decision and the impacts of that decision. Can you talk about what that decision brought about, and sort of also the other major developments over the last 20 years that have put up more obstacles to voting for people?
STACEY ABRAMS: Sure. As Lisa pointed out, you had these three tent-pole moments in our history that preceded 1965. And that was the inception of our country, that basically said only white men who own land could be considered voters, the 15th Amendment that let Black men vote, the 19th Amendment that let white women vote. And so it was the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that actually for the first time said American citizens have the right to vote. And the constraints based on race, gender, other constraints were no longer going to be permissible.
And it took 10 years even for the Voting Rights Act to really reach full strength. 1975, the inclusion of Arizona in particular, because that was a state that was the most egregious users of still using literacy tests against Native Americans and Latinos. And so you had this moment in 1965 to 1975 where we finally had as close as America has ever been to full enfranchisement of its eligible voters.
Fast forward to 2005, 2006, you started to see the first burgeoning attempts at restriction. Indiana and Georgia passed laws to require restrictive IDs. And then you had this watershed moment of the election of Barack Obama, which led states like North Carolina and Wisconsin and other states to start retrenching and start pulling back things like Sunday voting and early voting. But it hit its peak in 2013, because what Shelby said was that each of these drips, each of these moments of attack, that they were insufficient to achieve the whole goal of reversing progress. And that could only be done by gutting the Voting Rights Act.
And that's what the Roberts court did. By gutting that voting? Rights Act, they allowed every single state, whether they had been part of the Confederacy in the 1800s or whether they were newcomers to the pernicious nature of voter suppression, they were all welcome now. And that's why we saw within hours the state of Texas passing laws to restrict access to the right to vote. It accelerated.
We saw more than 1,600 precincts shut down. We've seen more than 11-- sorry, 19 million voters purged. We've seen this acceleration of every single instrument of perfidy of voter suppression take on just warp speed, because those who are-- who are using voter suppression in this era, they are mimicking past eras. But what they are doing is a precision attack based on demography. And where they see pockets of people who are finally coming not only into their power, but into the population for that power to matter, they're doing their best to block them in their tracks, and more importantly, to permanently push back against the notion that democracy works for all.
JON WARD: I wanted to ask you also, Stacey, President Trump just recently encouraged voters during a trip in North Carolina to vote by mail and then go vote in person. This is the President of the United States encouraging people to attempt to commit fraud through the elections, which is sort of an attempt by him to say there's voter fraud out there. Now go do it. What are the possible impacts, though, of his comments here? And I'm thinking in terms of lines, but what else might there be?
STACEY ABRAMS: Well, let's remember, in 2017, Trump convened his Voter Fraud Task Force that was so ineffectual and so unnecessary they disbanded rather than issuing a report that would have validated what everyone knows-- there is no voter fraud of any real measure in the United States. Well, if you fast forward to 2020 to his comments yesterday, what he decided was if there is no voter fraud, I'll make it up. And this, I think, is in common cause with most of his presidency. He is going to create the chaos if it doesn't exist on its own.
The real consequences will be possibly longer lines, with people who were getting in line to commit a crime, urged to do so by the president. You're going to have others who decide it's not worth it. They're going to decide that this is such a chaotic space, I'm just going to stay out of it.
And what's most worrisome to me is that people who didn't-- were not the intended targets of his language, were not the voters he was trying to encourage, but are low information about how the process works, which is most Americans, that you're going to have good intentioned people who are voting for the first time who are drawn to this process because they want to do what's right, are going to be captured and are going to be disproportionately and discriminatorally treated, because they were not the intended targets. But when you tell a lie and everyone can hear it, it doesn't matter if they know they weren't the ones who were supposed to hear it.
JON WARD: Liz or Lisa, I want to talk to you about the section of the film that talks about voter ID. There's a guy named Hans von Spakovsky, who-- that name is, you would think it was a concoction of a fiction writer, but it's a real person-- a real person with the real name. But it's quite a name. He's one of the prominent advocates for the idea of voter fraud.
And him and Kris Kobach were actually in a 2018 trial in Kansas, where they were called upon by a court of law to bring about evidence of voter fraud and could not do so. But you had him in the film. I thought that was an interesting move. I think it's great anytime you have a film on something controversial to have people from as many parts of the conversation as possible. How did you guys get him to be a part of the film?
LIZ GARBUS: We asked. And he said yes. And you know what, I'd say that's to his credit. I mean, we also asked Mr. Kobach. We asked Mr. Kemp.
There are a lot of people we went to who we would have loved to allow them the space to provide arguments or counter arguments and to look at the facts that we had assembled. But actually, Hans was the only one of those I listed who did so. And he answered the questions honestly, although it's the blame that he puts on not being able to issue that report is not being able to get information from the states, but which we fairly represent.
But by his own admission, they had a database of 1,300 cases of voter fraud, which anybody can do the math. It's just statistically irrelevant. So you know I thought it was important to hear it from him that that was what they were able to do, even with the power of the president behind them.
JON WARD: Yeah, you mentioned 1,300 cases. I'll help people do the math. I mean, I think you have this graphic in your story or in your movie. 146 million total registered voters, 2,000 total election alleged fraud cases, and 10 cases of voter impersonation. One person from the Brennan Center called this a molecular fraction of the total votes cast nationwide. That database is also over several decades.
And I think the question here is when you talk about 10 cases of voter impersonation, Lisa, you look at something like voter ID. Voter ID is targeted at trying to stop one thing, and that's voter impersonation. And yet that was most of the laws that were passed starting in the mid-2000s under Bush. What do you think people need to understand about-- if they're saying I want our elections to be secure and I want us to have full access, I want everybody to have access. Are those two things mutually exclusive, secure elections and free elections?
LISA CORTES: I think when we look at voter ID, what we-- one of the stories we continuously kind of harped upon was in Texas, where you can have-- your ID for purchasing a gun is acceptable, but your student ID is not. So I think right there, it speaks to this grave inequity about the ID and its-- who it is targeted in terms of their ability to show up and have access to the vote.
JON WARD: Yeah, I agree with that. And Stacey, on the issue of secure elections, I want to talk about something else as well. We're hearing about purges. Purges are where state-- secretaries of state go in and take people off the voter rolls. And in states like Ohio and your own state of Georgia, those secretaries who are, by and large across the country partisan officials, are removing people from the rolls for not voting in successive elections, usually.
But there is-- to the issue of having free elections but also secure elections, there is a solution for this, I think, in the form of automatic registration, where the state registers people rather than individuals or groups or parties. Can you talk about why automatic registration would check both those boxes of more participation and secure elections?
STACEY ABRAMS: The United States is a singularity among most democratized, industrialized nations. We are one of the few countries that requires citizens to take ownership of registration. In almost every other mature democracy, it is an automatic process, in part because of the complicated nature of registration by individual.
You have to know the laws where you live. You have to know the timetables. You have to know the rules for being on or off of those rolls.
And automatic registration simplifies access. It doesn't guarantee participation. It doesn't create more voter fraud. It simply says this is a prerequisite of being an American. You're a citizen. You're registered.
And automatic registration removes the necessity of voter purges. It also removes the necessity of voters getting to the polling place and suddenly realizing oops, I should have known on September 29 that was my last day to get to have a voice, because my job moved me here on October 31. And so part of the responsibility is that this brings America into alignment with itself.
We have 50 different democracies operating right now, where each state gets set its own rules and gets to determine who gets to enter. If we had automatic registration, you could move anywhere. You would add onto this piece same-day registration, which means if I move from Indiana to North Dakota, I just walk in.
In fact, the North Dakota's a bad example, because they don't register voters. If I move from Indiana-- if I move from North Dakota to Indiana, I could go in and I could register because I'm automatically allowed to vote because of my citizenship. And my registration just lets them know where I'm voting from at this point. That is a simple solution that works for almost every nation.
And the United States is not a leader on this. We are an outlier. And, in fact, we are well behind most nations on solving this problem.
JON WARD: Yeah, and I think The Voting Rights Lab, if I've got their name right-- they're a group that I'm using as a resource a lot these days-- by their count, I think they said that there are 16 states and the District of Columbia that now have automatic registration, which is up from a few years ago. I wanted to end on this, Stacey. We've seen protests over the last several months, starting with after the death of-- the killing of George Floyd in late May.
How do we bring the energy that brings people to the streets into our political institutions, which is a-- which is a passion of mine, the institutions of our democracy, the institutions that make our politics work that actually are really necessary for lasting change. How do we translate the energy into those more boring and less sexy things, the institutions that are a part of our politics?
STACEY ABRAMS: We begin by telling the truth, that voting is not a magic pill. This is not going to change your world. A single election will not transform anything. But it creates the pathway for change. It is not a simple solution, but it is the only process that guarantees us the ability to influence what happens next.
My parents raised me to understand you protest in the streets and you protest at the ballot box and then you participate in the profit. A lot of P's, but it works, because what it means is that you recognize protesting in the streets is absolutely necessary to declare our vision. Protesting at the ballot box is how we declare who is going to be responsible for executing that vision. And the participation throughout is how we hold them accountable.
But the change we need to make will never stop being undone by those who do not want it. And that's why we have to think of voting as a constant obligation. But it's also our constant possibility and our power to get these things done.
Evil doesn't go away because you beat it at-- in an election. It just regroups and shows up somewhere else. So we've got to be wherever it is to fight back. And sometimes, the good we want is overshadowed unless we're there to lift the shadows and say here it is again.
I think of voting as not just an obligation, but an opportunity to shape the world I want. And I need people who see the same vision to use their power to make it so.
JON WARD: Well, Stacey, Liz, and Lisa, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you to those of you who watched. The film, again, is "All In The Fight For Democracy." It's out September 9 in select theaters and September 18 on your home computer on Amazon Prime.
If you're not registered to vote, don't wait to do it. Log onto your state's voter portal today. And make sure you're registered to vote. Thank you again, ladies.
STACEY ABRAMS: Thank you.
LISA CORTES: Thank you.
