2/5/2021 Fighting for Voting Rights, Again – BillMoyers.com MOYERS ON DEMOCRACY Fighting for Voting Rights, Again Bill Moyers talk with John Bonifaz and Ben Clements of Free Speech for People BY BILLMOYERS.COM TEAM | OCTOBER 28, 2020 Moyers on Democracy Bill Moyers talks with John Bonifaz… Cookie policy 8.5K ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. This election season is being waged in the middle of a pandemic of Covid-19 and an epidemic of voter suppression. The first kills people. The second kills democracy. We have seen the courage of front-line workers confronting the virus. But we have heard too little of the front-line fighters for voting rights. You’ll hear two in this episode as Bill Moyers talks with John Bonifaz and Ben Clements. They lead the non-profit organization Free Speech for People whose mission includes defending the integrity of our elections. John Bonifaz has been on the frontlines of key voting rights battles for more than 20 years. He co-founded Free Speech for People and serves as its President. Ben Clements chairs the Board of Directors as well as its https://billmoyers.com/story/fighting-for-voting-rights-again/ 1/22 2/5/2021 Fighting for Voting Rights, Again – BillMoyers.com legal committee. A former prosecutor, he served as Chief Legal Counsel to the governor of Massachusetts and is a founding partner of the law firm, Clements Law in Boston. Here to talk with John Bonifaz and Ben Clements is Bill Moyers. BILL MOYERS: Hi Ben. Hi John. It’s good to be with both of you. Thank you so much for coming. Where is our right to vote most seriously threatened right now? Ben? BEN CLEMENTS: Well, at this point, a perfect storm of threats. We have a Republican Party that has been engaged in a decades-long campaign of voter suppression. And attempting to essentially disenfranchise certain groups in society that they view as their political opponents. We’ve had a consent decree that was holding back the Republican Party from some of those tactics for a couple of decades that expired just in time for the 2020 election. And we have an out-of-control president and presidential candidate who has no limit to what he is willing to do to interfere with the vote from threatening public violence, from federal armed forces, to encouraging vigilante violence. The pandemic has added a whole new layer of threats that Donald Trump has taken advantage of by interfering with vote by mail. So I think it’s that storm of pressures and interferences that undermines and threatens the right to vote and threatens our democracy all across the country. BILL MOYERS: John, how do you fight on so many fronts at once? JOHN BONIFAZ: Well, we do it with a dedicated team, as well as those who we reach out to in the law-firm community who are ready to help us on these litigation battles. We see people all over the country who are vigilant in standing up for the right to vote and for our democracy. It’s not solely a fight for lawyers, it’s a fight for all of us as people who care about the promise of democracy and the promise of free and fair elections for all. The right to vote is a fight https://billmoyers.com/story/fighting-for-voting-rights-again/ 2/22 2/5/2021 Fighting for Voting Rights, Again – BillMoyers.com that the engaged citizenry is focused on. Democracy is on the line with this election. The right to vote is on the ballot. And they’re ready to ensure that democracy is protected in all the ways that we need to do that, including public protests that may take place if this president is declared the loser but refuses to accept the results. BILL MOYERS: Just this week, on Monday night the Supreme Court ruled five to three for Wisconsin Republicans who want to block the counting of votes postmarked before Election Day but received up to six days after it. Democrats and civil rights groups wanted the extension because of the pandemic. They wanted to vote under safer conditions. Wisconsin’s a hot spot. Earlier this year, during the primary in Wisconsin, 80,000 votes postmarked in time, after the election, these votes were counted. For next weeks’ election, now such late ballots will be rejected. What does this portend for voting rights that the court took the side of the Republican legislature in Wisconsin? JOHN BONIFAZ: Well, it certainly says we have a broken election system, where we have such a decentralized way in which we run our elections. Where it’s really up to where you live and whether your vote is going to be protected. It makes no sense, Bill, to have this state by state or even locality-by-locality-jurisdiction decision making over how votes are counted, whether they’re going to be counted in a way that ensures that everyone’s franchise is protected. And really what this show is that unfortunately, until we have a uniform, standard, all across the country in how we count our votes, until we have a constitutional amendment affirming the right to vote, these battles are going to be state by state and locality by locality. And the courts are going to be engaged. And this Supreme Court is in the way in many of these cases. They’re interfering with ensuring that everyone’s votes are going to be properly counted. https://billmoyers.com/story/fighting-for-voting-rights-again/ 3/22 2/5/2021 Fighting for Voting Rights, Again – BillMoyers.com BILL MOYERS: And all five conservatives on the court say they’re obliged to defer to state officials on election decisions. Justice Kavanaugh, for example, said, federal judges don’t know better than state legislators about how to run elections during a pandemic. That didn’t stop them in 2000, of course, when they stopped the counting in Florida and put George Bush in the White House. He also argued that “States need to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of the election.” An election can’t be flipped until the last vote is counted. BEN CLEMENTS: And you’re exactly right to tie it back to Bush v. Gore. Because I mentioned earlier the decades’ long history of voter suppression by the Republican Party. Unfortunately, we have a long history going back at least to Bush v. Gore and earlier of a Supreme Court controlled by Republican appointees who appear equally loyal to the Republican Party’s agenda with voting as are elected Republicans. And that’s exactly what Kavanaugh is voicing there. He’s not talking about flipping elections, that’s how he says it. But what he’s talking about is discounting certain votes. And those votes, we all know, are the votes that are mailed in and not received by the deadline. And Donald Trump has made a calculation that Brett Kavanaugh fully gets, that those are more likely to be Democratic votes than Republican votes. In fact, it’s more than just a calculation. Trump has assured that to be the case by essentially discouraging his own supporters to use vote by mail and discrediting vote by mail. This is a really dangerous situation where you have a Supreme Court pretending to be deferring to state legislatures, and actually engaging in aggressive activism to influence the election by giving less weight to certain types of votes. And that’s exactly what they’re doing in that Wisconsin case and in a lot of these cases where they’ve struck down efforts of lower courts to preserve the franchise in spite of the https://billmoyers.com/story/fighting-for-voting-rights-again/ 4/22 2/5/2021 Fighting for Voting Rights, Again – BillMoyers.com obstacles faced by voters in the pandemic and in this situation of Donald Trump undermining the United States Mail. JOHN BONIFAZ: There’s also a problem, Bill, underlying that ruling and some other rulings that court has issued on this matter with respect to vote by mail, which is this idea that we need to have the results on election night after the votes are cast on Election Day in person. BILL MOYERS: Let me interrupt you to read from the decision. Those states, says Kavanaugh, also want to be able to definitely announce the results of the election on election night or as soon as possible thereafter, as if that’s a constitutional mandate. JOHN BONIFAZ: There’s nothing in the constitution that requires that. In fact, the constitution would say very clearly that the right to vote needs to be protected, and all votes need to be properly counted. So really, what we’re dealing here with is a complete misunderstanding with respect to how we should be conducting our elections today. It’s not about Election Day, it’s about election season. And the votes that are going to come in in this process are going to have to be counted regardless of whether that counting process goes beyond election night. BILL MOYERS: I like that term, “election season,” because the very idea of calling an election on the night it’s held is absurd if all the votes aren’t counted. An election is a process of casting and then counting votes. And it’s not over until the last vote is counted, even if that’s days after voting day.