E-mail a friendMichael Waldman
original airdate November 1, 2006
One of the few senior aides who remained with President Clinton through both terms, Michael Waldman is a leading expert on the presidency and public communication. As chief speechwriter, he created more State of the Union and Inaugural Addresses than anyone else in history. Since leaving the White House, he's taught at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and written several books, including My Fellow Americans. Waldman became director of NYU's Brennan Center for Justice in '05.
Watch Michael Waldman's interview
Michael Waldman
Tavis: Michael Waldman is the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, and a former speech writer for President Bill Clinton. This week, he co-authored a piece on the Op-Ed pages of 'The New York Times' on the potential for voting irregularities come next Tuesday. The piece you might have seen was titled 'Remember to Vote, Hope It Counts.' Michael Waldman joins us from New York. Michael, nice to have you on the program.
Michael Waldman: My pleasure, thanks for having me.
Tavis: I knew exactly what you were - I figured, at least, I knew what you were getting at before I started reading the piece. But that headline, one could look at and think that Michael Waldman is a bit of a cynic.
Waldman: Well, I've been around long enough to be cynical; but hopeful at the same time, I think it's very important that people vote. I think it's very important that we demand that every vote be counted, and that we insist that politicians stop passing laws and setting rules that are gonna keep people from voting.
Tavis: All right, so for those who did not see the piece, what is the centerpiece of the argument that you make about why we should be so concerned about what happens just days from now?
Waldman: This is obviously a very critical election. And one of the things that people don't realize is that there are many new things about the way we'll be voting. There are going to be new voting machines, new rules for who can register to vote, and how voter registration happens, and whose names are on the voter lists. And because of the - all this change that's happening, there's been a lot of mischief; a lot of steps taken that amounts, we argue at least, to a silent disenfranchisement.
Tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who think they're registered to vote, who are, in fact, eligible to vote, who may show up and discover that they can't vote, or that there's problems at the polls.
Tavis: Now, I don't wanna sound cynical, here we go, back to that argument of cynicism. But when you suggest silent disenfranchisement, I could take that to read that something is afoot here; but nobody is intentionally - there is no effort with malice to stop folk from voting. But quite frankly, Michael, between the two of us, I don't believe that.
Waldman: Well, I don't think so either. I think that - look, some of the problems probably are the result of incompetence. You've got problems, for example, where 80 percent of the people now are voting with electronic voting machines for the first time. And there's a real potential with those machines for fraud. You could walk in with a Palm Pilot and hack a senate election. And I don't think that necessarily that's because someone in a back room somewhere wants that to happen.
But unfortunately, quite a few of these changes really do seem to be designed to keep people from registering, and people from voting. There are state laws, for example, cracking down on voter registration by nonprofit groups. You would think that people voting would be a good thing, and, and government should try to encourage it. But in states like Florida and Ohio and other states, they've passed laws that have imposed such heavy fines on voter registration groups for having the temerity to actually register voters that, for example, the League of Women Voters of Florida, a well-known subversive group...
Tavis: Right. (Laugh)
Waldman: Not exactly. Shut down its voter registration operations. And that could keep hundreds of thousands of people from getting to vote this year.
Tavis: All right, so all my naiveté set aside, what's behind efforts by states like Florida and others to stop folk from registering people to vote? What's behind that?
Waldman: Well, in the last election, there was a big upsurge in voting, and a big upsurge in people being registered by these nonpartisan groups. And I work for a nonprofit group. We're nonpartisan. I can leave it to your viewers' imagination why voters who might be people of color, why voters who might be older, who might be poorer, might be kept away from the polls.
The bottom line is it's bad for democracy whenever it happens. And just if you think about all these political parties spending all this money in a very minute, calculated way, figuring out who they're gonna get to the polls, you know about the 72-hour plan that the Republicans brag about. Well, it would be crazy to think that people aren't spending just as much time and money, or maybe even a fraction of it, thinking how to keep people away from the polls.
Tavis: All right, so we've talked now about the crackdown, for lack of a better word, on folk, organizations registering people to vote, number one. Number two you've already referenced a little earlier. These new computerized databases, new machines that folk are going to be using next Tuesday. Before I move to issue number three, stop for a second. How concerned are you about these machines next Tuesday?
Waldman: Well, the machines are a big concern, and it's interesting. They are a concern for, for people all across the political spectrum. They're new, they're easily hacked, and there are all kinds of just technical problems. There was a primary election in Maryland the other day, and we spoke to a bunch of reporters the next day, and they were all up in arms, because where a lot of them live in the suburbs of Washington DC, they couldn't vote in the morning because the computer card hadn't showed up.
The problem with the electronic machines is they could be much better. It really is an improvement to have electronic machines over the old hanging chad system, if there's a paper trail that is verifiable by the voter and audited, and if you ban these wireless components. That's the kind of reform that could really make it a much better system for everybody. Unfortunately right now, you don't have that. And so there are kinds of backup systems that people need to do.
Tavis, one of the real points here is that I urge your viewers to understand that if they come to the polls and there's a problem, make sure to try to vote, and make sure that you try to cast what's called a provisional ballot. Don't just walk away in frustration.
Because there will be opportunities, one hopes, to have these ballots counted. It may be a struggle. And a lot of these other things, even the anti-voter registration laws that I mentioned, they're not just bad policy. They're illegal. They're unconstitutional. The Brennan Center, where I work, represented the League of Women Voters to strike down that law in Florida, although the damage had mostly been done.
Tavis: What I just heard you say without actually saying it, is that even when the polls are closed next Tuesday, and even when the results are on their way to being certified, we might see a historic number of legal challenges to what happens or doesn't happen next Tuesday?
Waldman: Well, look, we all hope that the election's gonna work out great. And it is, in fact, the case that if there's a big landslide in one direction or another, chances are, people may not be as worried about these individual problems. But they should be, because every vote should count, and this is a system that needs fixing. The fact is we may have very close races.
There may be recounts. There may be all kinds of instances where these provisional ballots, where there's been a problem, will end up holding the balance in an election, and maybe even in who controls the Congress. So people need to keep pressing to have their voices heard and their votes counted, even if the polls close on Election Day.
Tavis: Issue three I wanna get to before our time runs out right quick. Voter ID cards. You mentioned earlier to people not to leave in frustration. My concern is a lot of folk might not show up to begin with, in frustration, because of these new voter ID requirements in certain states around the country.
Waldman: Well, you're right. And as you know, there is a wave of new, pernicious voter ID requirements, and they're really not about ID, because there are all kinds of ways of knowing who's voting, ranging from checking the signature to other things that are already in the law. These are requirements, in effect, to have a passport or a birth certificate when all is said and done, to be able to vote.
And, as we know, there are many people who don't have those things. Or a driver's license. It is a set of requirements to require people to produce documentation that they just don't have. And you're seeing that all across the country. And people say, 'Well, what's so terrible about showing ID? I had to show ID to get into the building I walked into today.'
And the answer is that the kinds of ID are expensive, they're things people don't have, and if you look at the birth certificate and those kind of things, all the documentation can cost between, say, $20 and $200. And the poll tax, when it was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966, even adjusted for inflation today, that only cost $8.97. So it really is a huge barrier. It really isn't about preventing fraud. It appears, unfortunately, to try to discourage some people from voting.
Tavis: This is an unfair question to ask you with 25 seconds to go, Michael, let me ask anyway. I have a hard time believing that a country that can build nuclear weapons and put men and women on the moon and circle the Earth's orbit, etcetera, etcetera, why can't we figure this out? If we were really serious about having a system that works on Election Day, why can't we do this?
Waldman: I think we can do it, and we should do it. And we need to stop these bad efforts to keep people from voting. But I really feel it's very important, over the next few years, that we come together and really insist that we have a system of universal voter registration in this country. It can be done. We're going all around the world, and we're pleased when people dip their fingers in the purple ink in Iraq.
We ought to be able to have a system here where everybody who's eligible, every citizen, gets to vote. And then we'll have a real working democracy, and we'll put democracy back at the center of our politics again.
Tavis: From the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, Professor Michael Waldman. Michael, thanks for the opportunity to talk to you, I appreciate it.
Waldman: My pleasure.
Tavis: Up next on this program, actor Ed Harris. 'Copying Beethoven,' his new film. Stay with us.
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