123: The Battle Over Your Right to Vote

Life of the Law

The polls got it wrong. What matters in the end, on election day, is who has the right to vote and who goes to the polls to cast their ballot. Due to strict voter ID laws, not all Americans are allowed to vote on election day. In fact, some 21 million are prevented from voting simply because they don't have the required ID or paperwork when they go to the polls. The Government Accounting Office reports that can shift the election outcome in some states by 2-3 percentage points.

In our most recent episode GOVERNMENT GHOST reporter Megan Marrelli told the story of one American who could not cast a ballot or vote for much of his adult life because he did not have a birth certificate to get a government issued photo ID.

This week on Life of the Law, our team meets IN-STUDIO with Wendy Weiser, Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law to talk about the battle now taking place in state legislatures and in the courts to further restrict who can vote.

According to a report in the NY Times, "In Georgia, which ended a program in September (2017) that had canceled or marked for purging roughly 35,000 registered voters, two-thirds of them African Americans. That purge was based on a data-matching program that had flagged registrations for errors as niggling as a missing apostrophe or missed hyphen."

Wendy Weiser joins Life of the Law's Advisory Board Members Osagie Obasogie, Professor at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Jessica McKellar, Software Engineer and author; Tony Gannon, Life of the Law's Senior Producer and Nancy Mullane, Life of the Law's Executive Producer.

Production Notes:In-Studio: The Battle over your Right to Vote -- was produced by Nancy Mullane and Tony Gannon. Special thanks to Wendy Weiser, Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice and our Advisory Board Members Osagie Obasogie and Jessica McKellar. Our Post Production Editors are Kirsten Jusewicz-Haidle and Rachael Cain. Music in this episode was by Ian Coss. Katie McMurran was our engineer at the studios of KQED in San Francisco. We had engineering support from Ivan Kuraev at Argot Studios in New York City. This episode of Life of the Law was funded in part by grants from theLaw and Society Association, and theNational Science Foundation. © Copyright 2017 Life of the Law. All rights reserved. Suggested Reading and Viewing:

ACLU – Oppose Voter ID Legislation Fact Sheet US Government Accountability Office -Issues Related to State Voter Identification Laws 2014 (Reissued 2015) Brennan Center for Justice – New Voting Restrictions in America Brennan Center or Justice – Research on Voter ID

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