Will your Vote Count?

NYU's Brennan Center director, Michael Waldman, discusses the potential for widespread voting irregularities on Election Day.

Michael 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.

Read the full transcript