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Twenty years, six Super Bowl championships. The New England Patriots have. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are the greatest dynasty in NFL history. I'm Gary Myers. Join me for a new podcast, The Coach, Tom Brady, where I pulled back the curtain on the greatest run of sustained success by one player and one team in NFL history. The coach, Tom Brady, is available now listen and follow on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or whatever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of NPR Radio's HowStuffWorks. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there somewhere wandering around. So if you see her, bring her back and this is stuff you should have a rare top 10. Yeah.

Where we do all 10, although I'm sure we'll end up combining some and it'll be like eight or something weird like that. But we just don't even really do these anymore.

Oh, I see what you mean. No, no, it's been a while. This one's an important top ten too. This isn't like, you know, ten biggest things ever moved or anything like that.

Did we do that? No, I don't think we ever did. It's on HowStuffWorks. Yeah, it is.

Right. It's a real thing. Yeah.

Or maybe like ten heaviest objects ever moved or something. Maybe we'll do someday.

This is from our old website that we used to work for though HowStuffWorks. And this is and we've done stuff on different ways to suppress the vote and to rig the vote through gerrymandering and such efforts like that.

Oh we we did one specifically called our election laws designed to suppress voting. And yeah, that's a good one to go listen to as well.

It is because it's very sad. But in the United States, suppressing the vote and trying to keep people and certain people and certain demographics from voting is as old as voting itself.

Yeah, which is sad because everybody has this impression that, you know, and it's pure state in America. If you want to vote, if you say this is my my right and obligation and duty as a citizen, you can go vote and it shouldn't be all that hard. And you just go and you vote and your vote is counted and maybe your person wins, maybe they don't. But you voted and there shouldn't be any barriers to that. Voting is the the way that a democracy functions.

So the most democratic way for the democracy to function is to remove as many barriers as possible. Unfortunately, there are a lot of barriers that are put up that do make things harder for people to vote, which is what we're talking about here.

That's right. And they're not old barriers. The Brennan Center for Justice, which is a think tank in New York, and advocates for civil rights, especially around voting, they said since 2010, 25 states have passed new laws, making it more difficult for people to vote in the United States of America.

Yes. So and we should probably just come out and say, unfortunately to our Republican listeners, this is not one of those both sides do. What kind of things? This is largely Republican Republican controlled states and municipalities that create laws and regulations that do make it harder to vote. And the reason why on paper is because it's to combat voter fraud. The problem is this voter fraud has been shown many, many, many times over by many different studies, by by groups from both sides of the political spectrum, that it doesn't it doesn't really exist.

It exists in such miniscule amounts that it might as well not exist. That same Brennan Center check that you mentioned a second ago, they're big time into voting. They they did a study and they saw that between nine tenths of a percent to four, 100 thousandth of a percent. That's how the rate of overall voting fraud in the United States. And if you're like Brennan Center, I'll bet that's liberal. There was actually an exhaustive inquiry investigation launched in 2002 by John Ashcroft, who is Bush Jr's attorney general, if you'll remember, heck of a heck of a singer.

Remember when he sang about the eagle flying high?

Yeah, man, I remember that he was annoying feet with oil. Yeah. Yeah. So Ashcroft, his Justice Department, launched a really thorough investigation into voter fraud in the United States and out of examining hundreds of millions of ballots between I think, oh, I don't remember what years they looked at it over. They managed to bring charges on only 120 people and only 86 of those were convicted. So there's there's really no evidence that voter fraud exists.

And yet these solutions to voter fraud, voter fraud, which are obstacles and barriers to voting, are still established.

They're still supported, even though people are like voting fraud doesn't exist. They say, well, we still have to protect against it anyway. So we're going to make voting harder. And that's kind of the big problem that we're dealing with right now with this thing. And that's why a lot of people point to this and say this is voter suppression.

That's right. And in fact, even in our most recent election, if I remember correctly, Donald Trump launched an investigative body to look into the because he lost the popular vote by roughly three million votes.

And he said that there were at least. Three million illegal votes cast. That's why I lost that vote. Didn't he form a body to investigate that that just sort of quietly went away without any findings?

It did. There were like there were some findings, but they were, you know, and there was a report and it was actually kind of a scandalous report that said there's voter fraud everywhere. And then people said, well, can you show us your your work? And they said, no. And that's when it kind of faded often and nothing. That's right. So, yeah. So there's like we're show like it's been shown voter fraud, like basically doesn't exist.

And yes, any instance of voter fraud, especially purposeful voter fraud meant to to affect the outcome of the election, throw that person in jail, like take away their right to vote forever and maybe spank them on the bottom too. Like this is not it's not a good thing. No one's saying, like, who cares about voter fraud? What people are saying is that voter fraud virtually doesn't exist. So to institute all these draconian measures that make it harder for people to vote and seemingly weirdly make it harder for certain groups of people like minorities and poor people to vote.

That's that's a problem because no one is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. The number two, again, it seems to be voter suppression. And other people would say, well, why why would why would the GOP care if it's like, why would they do this thing?

And apparently, if you look at elections in general, the Republican Party tends to be favored when fewer people turn out, when a lot of when there's a large electorate that usually tends to favor the Democrats, when not that many people turn out to vote, the people who turn out to vote usually tend to be Republicans. So a lot of people point to the Republican controlled cities and states around the country and say, I think you're doing this to win, which makes it cheating and you're cheating by taking away people's ability to vote or making it hard enough that they just give up and don't vote.

That's right. So a lot of this is going to be historical as well. And I guess we should start with number 10, which is poll taxes. And early on, when voting kind of was in its early stages, they thought, you know, a really easy way to keep people from voting is to have them pay a tax to have to vote.

And it doesn't have to be exorbitant, but maybe just high enough to where most of the people that we don't want to vote can't afford it. Most of the Confederate, former Confederacy had these poll taxes. A lot of this stuff was in the South historically. Right. Unfortunately, Virginia charged about a buck fifty a year, which was about 11 bucks in today's dollars. So that's not a lot of money. But it had to be paid in cash.

And back then, if you were a sharecropper or if you were a farmer with a small farm, you bought most of your stuff on credit and you didn't have a lot of cash lying around. You might have had two or three dollars at any given point. Right.

And you hit it on the head when you said a lot of this happened or started out. A lot of voter suppression tactics started out in the South during reconstruction because all of a sudden there were a lot of black people who suddenly had the right to vote in the white dominated South. And so the the white establishment was at threat of being undermined, replaced by black people or people who are friendly to black interests. And they didn't want that. So they started instituting things like poll tax, but they had to do it in ways where it appeared like it applied to everybody.

So a poll tax applied to everybody, but then they would institute things like grandfather clauses, which literally said with poll taxes, if your grandfather was able to vote before the civil war, you're exempt. Well, black people didn't really have the right to vote, especially in the South before the Civil War. So it's impossible that their grandfather would have had that right with white people who might have been poor but couldn't afford to pay the poll tax. But we're probably going to vote in favor with white interests in the South during that election.

They would be exempted because their grandfather could vote before the civil war. And that's how that was done.

Yeah, and in other southern states, they had cumulative taxes on top of just being taxed. You had to do this several years in a row in order to earn that right to vote. So all of these things, you know, of course, this was eventually rendered illegal in 1964 with the ratification of the 24th Amendment. They said you can't do poll taxes anymore after 100 years.

We've determined it's not fair. Yeah, it took a couple of years to go all the way up until 1966. Dude, there were four states that still had laws on the books that had to be struck down in federal court. That poll taxes were OK. Yeah, which is crazy.

Another one that they did was literacy tests, which kind of went hand in hand. Again, a lot of this stuff started out in the the reconstruction and then Jim Crow South. And if you were black right after the Civil War. There is a really good chance that you couldn't read way more of a chance when compared to a white person, I'm not sure what the percentages is, but there were laws on the books that say it's illegal for you as a white person to teach your you're the people that you have enslaved to read or write.

It's illegal, like literacy among slaves is not is not legal. And so one way to prevent those people who were now franchised after the civil war from voting would be to say, well, you have to be literate to vote because and this is sneaky because if you're not literate, how can you possibly be an informed voter? You can't just come in and say, I want to vote for this person because I like their name. You have to be informed and to be informed, you have to be literate.

So we're going to test your literacy before we let you vote, right.

One good example is in South Carolina in the in 1882, where you couldn't even if you could manage to learn, if you really wanted to vote and you managed to learn to write down your name and and your your ballot, they said now you got to write down a ballot for each office. If you want to vote for governor and senator and anything else, then you have to to to be able to write down all of those and put it in the correct box labeled.

Right. That you probably can't read. And we're going to shuffle these boxes around, too.

So even if you have someone that wants to help you cast that vote, that's not going to be allowed to happen either. And, you know, forget the fact that people are have learning disabilities and sometimes have legitimate problems learning how to read, even if they want to learn how to read. It's like saying that you can't vote if you don't have arms to cast to cast a ballot. It's just it's outrageous.

And it gets even more outrageous if you go to Louisiana, where they had literal brainteasers that you had to be able to figure out in order to vote. And this one, I I'm sure if I sat down long enough, I could figure it out. Right. But not when I'm probably nervous about casting my first vote as a former enslaved person.

Right. So so this one in particular, and this one was instituted as more and more black people learn to read, which. So just buckle up for this one. Right. Every other word in this first line imprint, every third word in same line, but capitalize the fifth word that you write so you could conceivably, especially as a literate person, figure this out. It would take you a little while, but say that you went and you so you wrote all this stuff and then you got to the last part where it said capitalized the fifth word.

Then you went back and scratched out the small case, whatever that fifth word was, and capitalized that one. Or maybe you capitalized all the words and you had to go back and put them in lowercase.

The fact that these tests were administered by white poll workers and that they were typically subjective, meaning that if that poll worker decided you failed, you failed when you went back and scratch that out, you know, capitalized that fifth word, there was probably a 100 percent chance that that white poll worker who didn't want you voting in the first place was going to just say, sorry, you failed.

You can't vote.

Yeah. And you think, well, sure, but this was the 1400's. No, no. Some Southern states had these brainteaser tests all the way up until the mid 1960s when the Voting Rights Act finally said, you don't need to do a brainteaser to vote. That's illegal and it's kind of dumb.

Yeah. So, you know, there is a lot of a lot of chicanery, F3, I think, as John Oliver would put it, that was going on in the South. But I mean, one of the mechanisms that I think that that really got used that were that really just kind of probably the most effective one was just straight up violence like the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, a bunch of different groups, terrorist organizations grew up to terrorize black people and people who supported the rights of black people to send a message saying, like, no, we're the white power structure is going to be staying in power around here.

And we will go so far as to murder you and your family and make examples out of you to like leaving you in a tree as a signal to everybody else. This is what happens when you try to vote. This is what happens when you you try to register other people to vote. And it was a very long lasting legacy that went on from the end of the civil war up until, I believe Congress finally passed a law saying that, no, this is this is illegal.

You can't do this kind of thing. But it went on for decades like this. Yeah.

They finally made it a federal crime. And more than 3000 Klan members were indicted, only about 600 of those were actually convicted because, again, we're talking about juries in the south for the most part. Right. This seems like a good time to take a break.

And we'll pick back up with number seven right after this stuff with Joshua. So. Hey, everybody, it's your pals, Josh and Chuck, and we are here to tell you that the good people at Stanley, Black and Decker are celebrating the makers of the world, the men and women who build the world, who make, fix and create the world. Aren't they, Chuck?

That's right, because October is maker month in Stanley. Black and Decker wants to take this time to recognize and honor the people in these skilled trades profession.

Yeah. Did you know that right now there are 10 million global manufacturing jobs and three million trade jobs that are unfilled right here in the U.S. due to the skills gap? So there's no better time than now to consider a career in manufacturing or the trades. That's right.

Just check out Stanley Black and Decker Dotcom Slash Maker Month to see how they're inspiring makers through upskilling scholarship programs, steam education and more, and meet 31 amazing makers across the globe. And, you know, I mean, if our podcasting thing ever just dries up and blows away, I could see us doing jobs where we use our skills to build and fix and create things. Can't you, Chuck? Maybe.

But seriously, everyone, thank you to all the makers, doers and the bold thinkers out there. Your hard work does not go unnoticed. Stanley Black and Decker, proud to empower makers everywhere.

Hey, what's up? This is Adam Devine, Anders Holm, Blake Anderson and Kyle Newkirk, and you might recognize these sweet, sultry voices from the hit television program, Workaholics.

We also were on a major hit motion picture game over man heard.

And if you haven't, check it out, it's on Netflix. And we were sitting around and we were bored and quarantine.

We're always on these dumb calls and these do draw like I miss this dude. Yeah, I miss you guys. It's true. I do miss you guys a lot. I miss you guys so constantly.

So we thought, hey, you know what, our conversations this important told me these are important conversations we're having and the world needs to hear it.

So please do yourself a favor and listen to this is important on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Number seven. All right, so there's some just to give you a little historical background real quick, there's some there's reconstruction where black Americans become enfranchised. They have the right to vote in response to that. There's terror, there's Jim Crow laws. And then in response to the Jim Crow laws that that just overtly suppress the black vote, there was the Voting Rights Act.

And for a long time, the Voting Rights Act was really effective. And the reason why it was effective was because there is a section to it, Section five that said, hey, if you've ever, ever engaged in voter discrimination, you're on a statewide basis, on a systemic basis, you have to have us, the federal government, review any changes to the voting procedure in your state before you can implement them. And so any state that wanted to try to come up with some voter suppression tactic, it might be brilliant.

But if the federal government said no, they couldn't do it and so the vote would be saved in that respect. Well, in 2013, the Roberts court struck down Section five of the Voting Rights Act. So now we're seeing the results of that, where voter suppression tactics are starting to come back and they're starting to come back in like this avalanche of tactics where across the country, if you put them all together, it's a real problem. But the Voting Rights Act figured in dramatically to save the vote of people and the gutting of that Section five in 2013 by the Supreme Court did the exact opposite to it.

That's right. One tactic that they could use and use for many years was just making it and still use to some degree, making it difficult to register or to vote. Here are some of the things they used to do, is you have to keep reregistering many, many times. You have to have a street address with an actual name and number. And if you were an African-American living in the rural South, you may not have an actual street address on the dirt road next to the field that you farm.

You know, little things like this, these technicalities to meet these requirements to vote that they knew that African-Americans didn't have. And, you know, there were and are still literal conversations. Some of them these days are even on tape where you hear public officials talk about making it hard for black people to vote. And if we do this, this is how many people we think we can keep off the voter registration logs. It's just it's shameful.

And I'm surprised we're not screaming at this point. We're trying to keep it together. It wasn't just in the south, though. In the north and in the west in the early 1980s, there were immigrants and they didn't want immigrants voting. A lot of times ethnic and religious minorities. They didn't want voting. So in places in the north, in the west, like New Jersey and California, they made it tough for immigrants to vote by saying you have to have your your original naturalization papers at the polling place.

Or maybe we don't want maybe the interest of people who work in factories don't align with our. So here's what we'll do. Those people work long, 10 to 12 hour shifts, can't make it to the polls. So we're going to close the registration offices before those factories shut down every day to keep them from voting.

Yeah, and there are there are other ways, like, you know, that they went back to close these loopholes to like it was real public private partnership between the government and other groups. There were groups that were dedicated to kind of preserving white supremacy in the South, say that would that would boycott businesses that were they found out that those those employers gave their black employees time off during the day to go register to vote or to vote like you could lose your customer base if they found out that you were doing that with with black people or with your black employees.

So there were like even if you say, well, so what? It was hard to go register to vote, figure it out. It was disproportionately leveled at black voters. And even if you did figure it out, there were repercussions for figuring it out to.

Yeah, or in New York, if you know that a lot of Jewish people might vote in a more liberal way, hey, let's have registration times on Saturdays and Yom Kippur when we know that Jewish people won't be able to get out and register to vote.

Right. It's high time that we make, uh. Voting days, national holidays, I agree, Chuck, I agree it should be a paid holiday, a national paid holiday, or have it on Saturdays, do something, but make it less hard for sure.

Yeah, like people need to be allowed to vote. And we're not talking about voter fraud. We're talking about legal Americans. Right. Having the right and the ability to vote in as easy as possible.

Yes. And if you also say, well, if they really wanted to vote, they would they would find a way to do it. When's the last time you didn't log into a website because it required to factor authentication from your break.

And we're talking about having to take a bus across the county to register to vote when you have to be working in, your employer won't give you time off. So you have to take sick time to just go register to vote and then you have to do it all again to go vote. It's more problematic than it appears just when you're saying it out loud. That was a good burn burn. Thanks, man. Number six, straight up voter intimidation still happens to a large degree.

In 2004, it was reported that in Florida, in the state election there, they sent a plainclothes state troopers to the homes of 40 to 50 elderly black voters to question them for supposed election fraud.

And when they asked the state officials why they sent these state troopers, they said, well, we thought we thought it might be a more relaxed atmosphere to to come to their home and ask these elderly black voters about whether or not they participated in voter fraud, which, by the way, this investigation turned up absolutely no fraud whatsoever. So it didn't happen, which is like basically all investigations of voter fraud turn up no fraud whatsoever. And a lot of people say, well, these investigations are really just intimidation tactics.

And this one to me is one of the more despicable ones because it directly traces right back uninterrupted to the reconstruction era. And the fact that it's still going on today is just despicable to me. But they it is. And it's not just, you know, state troopers showing up at your house to ask you personally. There is a really famous case that our dear governor in Georgia, Brian Kemp, when he was secretary of state, because we need to remember he was secretary of state running an election that he was the one of the two candidates for governor.

And and a lot of people say, well, he did some shady stuff, which we'll talk about later. But when he was just straight up secretary of state, he oversaw the arrest of the equipment.

10 plus two were two African-American school board school board officials who were elected a couple of times in this one election in a runoff fair and square.

They were arrested and their supporters and campaign advisers were arrested and taken to jail and had mug shots of them put on the news because they were accused of voter fraud. And after years, the charges were finally dropped. Not a single person went to jail. No one was convicted. But a lot of people point to that and say, if you don't understand that as a clear message to African-American, not just voters, but also office holders, that they they shouldn't bother running.

You risk their lives are going to be ruined, then you're you're really missing the point here.

Yeah. In 2014, there was another intimidation tactic. And this is just, you know, these things that aren't technically illegal, but where candidates try and be very sneaky. And if they can, you know, if they can trick 100 voters into doing the wrong thing, then it's their their time has been well spent in their minds. Right. But Mitch McConnell's campaign sent out these mailers that were marked election violation notice, and it had the warning.

You are at risk of acting on fraudulent information and you start to read it. And what it is, is just basically here's my opposition candidate and we don't like what they say. So this is fraudulent information. All right. But they they dress it up in a way, sort of like the Publisher's Clearinghouse that makes, you know, our elderly citizens drive across the country thinking they've actually won real money. Right. This is the. Yeah, this is the opposite of that.

But using the same tricks basically is like you get a notice in the mail and these you know, it's usually preying on people that are that are older in our country, which is sad and awful.

And they get a notice in their mail that says, oh, my gosh, I'm at risk of acting on fraudulent information. Yeah. And, you know, they took this they were sued, but a federal judge said, no, I'm sorry, rejected basically.

Yeah. I mean, and also intimidation, too, can be official, like part of official policies, like some of those poll taxes in the South. They added the extra layer of keeping you from even trying by saying the only place you can go pay for the poll tax is that your sheriff's office. Right. You might say, especially if you're white. Well, big deal if you go to the sheriff's office. Well, imagine if you went to the sheriff's office and there was a really good chance that while you were there paying your poll tax so that you could go vote.

And for that reason only they said, hey, by the way, while you're here, you know, we've got this case open. Where were you on Tuesday night? And you would tell them and they would say, well, can you prove it? Just knowing that that was a possibility. And if you don't realize that was a possibility, I would urge you to to brush up on your Jim Crow South history would would dissuade a lot of people, I would guess, from going to pay that poll tax and then going to vote.

Remember when Homer Simpson thought he was on a boat and had to go to the police station to claim his prize? Yeah, that was a good one, though. Yeah, it was, uh, another one.

Number five is something that is still you mentioned Brian Kemp in Georgia pruning names from the voter rolls.

I thought that that was I thought that was a generous word that they used pruning, pruning, because it makes it seem like methodical and, you know, well-informed.

Yeah, well, this has happened time and time again before the 2000 election for president in Florida. Once again, state officials, a Republican controlled Florida, they hired a private firm to go through the registration rolls, delete names who were people who had died, who are registered multiple times in multiple places or convicted felons or declared mentally incompetent in court proceedings. And you might think, well, that's great, because, you know, you don't want a deceased people on voter rolls, which is true.

Totally. But what about when you make mistakes and you delete a lot of voters who are fully eligible to vote, then what happens? And the answer is nothing.

No, there's not. And by the time that it does turn out like, oh, we made a mistake, the election's long over. These these inquiries and the reports that they produce are usually a couple of years after the fact. But they in Georgia in particular, they found out that, again, the guy who oversaw the purging of the voter rolls was one of the two candidates in the election. Just basic ethics says you recuse yourself, you have nothing to do with this or you say, no, no, no, let's not do this or let's do it the right way, not let's purge this many people that we actually mistakenly removed 200000 people, removed their right to vote in this in this election, 200000.

And then just to add horrible irony to the whole thing, it was only by 55000 votes that that Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams in that gubernatorial election.

Yeah, that was a bitter pill here in Georgia because remember, it was like I think it was the week or it may even be on the eve of the election when they lobbied the charge that the Republican system had been hacked and that they were launching a case against Abram's to look into it. And then, you know, after the election, of course, they're like, oh, if we were wrong, they didn't hack us after all right.

Which again, who who said that they that they were hacked was the secretary of state, Brian Kemp, who was also running for governor against Stacey Abrams. Yeah, yeah.

About voter ID voter. Should we take a break? Oh yeah. Let's take a break. I'm pretty charged up here. All right.

We'll take a break and we'll talk about voter ID and in a few more things right after this.

My name's Joshua. Hi, I'm Bethany Van Delft, host of a new podcast, The 10 News, 10 Minutes of News and Fun for the new generation of Curious Thinkers.

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Nine Super Bowl appearances, six Super Bowl championships, the New England Patriots of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are the greatest dynasty in NFL history. I'm Gary Myers, NFL sports journalist for over 40 years. Join me for a new podcast, The Goat, Tom Brady.

I pull back the curtain on the greatest run of sustained success by one player and one team in NFL history with never before heard interviews with Bill Belichick, Bill Parcells, Robert Kraft, Tom Brady, senior coaches, friends, family, and, of course, the greatest of all time, Tom Brady.

The margin of error so slim. And there was a couple of plays in each of those games that if it goes our way, we win. And that's football. That's the way it works. And that's why it's hard to win Super Bowls.

The coach, Tom Brady, is available now. Listen and follow on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. So we talked a lot about voter ID, Chuck, in the voter suppression episode, which, again, go go listen to that, guys. It's a it's a good one as well.

But the upshot of it, there's that word again, the upshot of it is that if you require someone to show there that they are who they say they are, when when they go vote, you can make a good case that at the very least you're adding an obstacle or a barrier to voting.

But you could also say, well, if you have to pay for that, that technically constitutes a poll tax. And people say, oh, yeah, well, Section five of the Voting Rights Act doesn't exist anymore. So go sit on it. Ralph Malph.

Yeah, I mean, in some states it costs up to 60 bucks. That's that's unconscionable in that ID.

And, you know, sixty dollars for some people is their grocery money for the week when you live paycheck to paycheck. And again, you know, it's real easy to say, well, you know, just pay the money and go out and get your I.D. so you can vote if you really want to vote. That's a choice between that and putting food on the table for your kids. It's a barrier to voting, plain and simple.

Yeah. And also, I mean, there are plenty of states that rightly who require voter ID rightly offer free IDs that you can use to vote. Like that's definitely the way that it should be. But that's still, again, any time you require somebody to potentially take time off of work, that puts an enormous burden on like working like the working poor, like people who just can't afford to take time off work. They might be in a job where there's enough people who would love to have that job that if they take a sick day, their boss can be like, you know what, I know you weren't sick and you're fired.

This is the last straw. So your job could actually be on the line. Could be more than just a loss of hours. It could equal the loss of a job. And again, we live in a democratic country where the the barriers to democracy should be lowered, not raised, lowered. And yes, we should vigorously prosecute any instance of fraud. But because that hasn't been shown to exist, lowering the barriers so people can legally vote is not problematic.

And it's anti-democratic to do that, to raise them. It is.

And when you when you hear these these taped conversations, they're not talking about voter fraud.

They're saying, hey, we can get probably a two point five percent reduction of African-American voter turnout in this county if we do X and again, like we keep saying, African-American voter turnout, like when when I think Miami purged their voter rolls in, I don't remember exactly when it was, but there was a commission that did a report on it. And their purge affected 65 percent. Like 65 percent of the people who are deleted were black voters, even though those voters represented just twenty point four percent of the population, whereas only sixteen point six percent of the people who were purged were white, even though those people represented 77 percent of the public.

So, yeah, like if you if you look at studies of this stuff, it disproportionately impacts black voters, typically minority voters as a whole, but definitely black voters for sure. And that's not to say like the Republican Party just hates black people. The Republican Party knows that African-Americans typically tend to vote Democrat and they're a large group of people. So if you can make it harder for them to vote, you're probably going to affect the Democrats vote, not your vote.

Yeah, another thing that you can do is close the polling stations and limit polling hours in counties where you think it might help your vote. There are a bunch of swing states, North Carolina, Ohio and some other states that have cut early voting days or hours. There was a report in 2014 that said they're more likely to inconvenience black voters who like to vote early and in-person. Historically, in Maricopa County in Arizona, there were 400 voter voting locations.

In 2008 and 2016, there were 60.

This is a huge, huge problem, a huge problem. This is one one way that this is going on, making it harder to vote by making voting less available to people when it can totally be afforded. It's being pruned. And it's not just Texas, although Texas has some egregious stuff going on since 2000. Um, oh, I don't remember 2014. Maybe Texas has shut down 760 polling locations. Places to vote, 760, and they currently have on the on the agenda.

I don't know if it's been passed or if it's just been proposed or what, but if you want to vote by mail in ballot, the drop off locations in Texas has been reduced to one per county. They said that's it. Yeah, one place in our 254 counties there. There's one place in each of those counties where you can take your ballot to drop it off. The problem with this is that some Texas counties are enormous. Texas has a number of counties that are larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island put together.

They have something like one hundred and twenty counties that are larger than Rhode Island. Granted, Rhode Island small. But Rhode Island is a small state. These are counties in Texas we're talking about. And in one place in each of those counties, there's a place where you can drop off your your mail in ballot. That's that's that's a problem in a lot of people are just going bonkers over that one. Yeah.

And beyond closing polling places like having to. Maybe take two or three city buses to get to your place to vote, sure. When you finally get there, if you manage to go through all that trouble, which is, again, they're trying to to make you say, you know what, it's not worth the trouble. Yeah. Then you're met with, you know, five, six, seven hour lines all day long. Right. And this is what you get for your for your troubles to try and participate in American democracy.

Yeah.

So going on on your lunch break doesn't end up working out very well.

What about trickery? Number two? This is pretty awful. You talked about that one by the people. I don't know if it was Mitch McConnell's campaign or just a group supporting him or if it was one of the same, who knows, tricking people by saying you're about to act on fraudulent information or something that I mean, that's long standing. There is one I guarantee we talked about this before. I'm almost positive. But in 2008, someone in Virginia sent a flier out that looked like it was from the state board of Elections that said, if you're a Republican, you should vote on November 4th.

If you're a Democrat, you vote on November 5th, which is the day after the election, which is in one way hilarious. I mean, it's just hysterical that that somebody did that in another way, in the fact that it could have even if it didn't, but it could have impacted somebody's vote by purposefully confusing them. That's despicable. Again, that's a word I keep going to because I genuinely feel that way about going to any lengths to to deprive or fool someone out of voting.

Right. But if you get caught doing that, surely there is a massive debt to pay via jail time, like in Maryland in 2010, a robocall campaign during the gubernatorial election told thousands of voters in African-American neighborhoods that they could, quote, relax and stay at home that evening because Democratic incumbent Governor Martin O'Malley had already won the election.

Not true. The polls were closed. And this wasn't just Trickster's. This was Paul Shariq, who was the campaign manager for the Republican opponent who went ended up winning. And they caught him and he was charged and found guilty of four counts of election fraud. And you think, all right, throw the book at the guy. What did he get? What did he get? He got 30 days home detention, probation and community service. Right.

Which is really disappointing, not because that guy deserved worse, but because our federal the the penalties for federal election laws are breaking them that are meant to protect people's right to vote and punish people who try to deprive people of the right to vote. Those are federal laws and the penalties are supposed to be pretty stiff. So 30 days of house arrest at his house when he when really he made a name for himself is like, hey, I'll make sure that you're going to get elected as a campaign manager.

That's very disappointing for sure.

Well, because the message it sends is it's totally worth it to do this exact swing, swing an election, little community service, who cares?

And there's two guys who are I don't know what's going to happen to them, but they are they have a lot of charges against them right now. But for this, I believe the 2020 election, they they sponsored a bunch of robocalls, tens of thousands of robocalls in places like Michigan, Chicago, and I believe they were targeting African-American voters where it said if you vote by mail, your information is subject to be handed over to the police and run for any potential outstanding warrants.

Or it may be added to the mandatory vaccine list as if that exists. But just playing on people's deepest fears to try to prevent them from voting, to dissuade them from voting, you'd have to be a genuine scumbag of the highest order to do something like that. And they caught these two guys, Jacob Wall and Jack Burkman, doing just that. And as a matter of fact, they I guess when they registered these robocalls, they registered it to one of their phone numbers and then came out and blamed it on Democratic operatives because they wouldn't have possibly used their own phone number for this kind of thing.

Just to add a little cherry on top. I say all of this is alleged because they're charged with this right now, but they haven't been convicted, right?

Well, I'm sure they have some community service to look forward to. Yeah. And some house arrest.

So the final one on the list here is is a controversial one, to be sure. But whether or not you should be allowed to vote as a felon or as someone who has ever been convicted of a crime in many and this is one is kind of going the other way now. But for many, many years in many states, if you have ever been convicted of any crime, even if. You went to prison, served your time, got out, and we're leading a great beneficial life towards society.

You were not allowed to vote anymore, right. Which has started to become overturned, I think, in 2018. Yeah, in Florida. Florida's had this long standing disenfranchisement policy, which most people have accepted for four years. But then finally, some people came along and said, hey, this is really affecting a lot of people who want to vote who've who've, you know, served their time, who have become reformed. They want to be full citizens again.

Can we give them the right back to vote? And in twenty eighteen, that was on the on the ballot and Florida voters overwhelmingly said, yes, totally, let's do that. They have to have served their time and repaid all of their restitution. But we're going to give them the right to vote back. And it was a huge victory. And then there was a Republican lawmaker who said, well, wait a minute, this is kind of vague.

It says that they they have to have have have fulfilled all of their sentencing obligations. There's a lot of these people who are about to get their their right to vote back, who haven't paid all their fines and fees, which as it's been understood, traditionally, you have basically your lifetime to pay off the actual financial fees and restitution that come along with being convicted of a crime that that that you have to pay that off first. That's that's in the law and actually got passed in the Florida legislature, Republican controlled legislature, that you have to pay all of your fines and fees first before you can get enfranchised again.

And that's proving to be an enormous problem for a lot of the former convicts.

Yeah. So, you know, it continues to this day. I know we got on our soapbox and pretty passionate about this one, but we're both believers in the right to vote and to make it as easy as possible for eligible voters to vote.

I don't see any argument counter to that. Right. That's that's valid. Why wouldn't you and a great democracy want as many people to vote as possible?

Again, the only argument you will see again and again is voter fraud. And if you can show that voter fraud doesn't exist, then you just knock the legs out from under it and it's just exposed. Is voter suppression then?

So hopefully the more people who know about it, Chuck, the harder it is to do stuff like this. And I hope that that's the case because that's why we shared this, because I don't care what political persuasion you are, it's wrong to suppress the vote. It's just wrong. I'm sorry.

If you want to know more about voter suppression, you can go try to vote and see what happens. And since I said that, it's time for and by the way, go vote, go vote.

And, you know, I think by the time this comes out, most of the states registration will be shut down. But for the future, even if you voted in the last election, like I checked mine two or three times before every election, because I don't want to show up on Election Day at my polling place and be surprised to learn that I'm not on the roll or the register or that my polling places moved. Just check it, check it and check it and recheck it.

Yeah. And there's tons of websites out there that are legit websites that aren't affiliated with any party that can help you check that. And if you are registered to vote, please vote whoever you vote for. Just vote like it's important that you vote. So go be a good American and vote. And since I said that, finally, I think Chuck, it's time for Listener Mail.

This is from L.E. She says, Hey, guys, live in Kansas, work in Topeka. And I just listen to the episode on fallout shelters. I cannot begin to explain to you the nerdy level of excitement I felt while driving to a client meeting when I spotted a yellow sign with the three triangles, just as you said there would be in the episode. And I wanted so badly to stop and steal the sign off of the old brick, nondescript building.

But I didn't think that would bode well, since I work for the state and I was in a state license vehicle at the time, I think people would have just guessed that you were requisitioning taking it down. Yeah, that would have been state you would have had to keep the nerdy giddiness in check.

Not surprisingly, the shelter is just two blocks from the Capitol building downtown because we all know in a crisis situation, politicians like to make sure they are taken care of. First, love random history tidbits.

So you best believe I'm mentally cataloging and keep an eye out for more shelters in this area to randomly point out to my husband who have no idea what I'm talking about, any who thank you for your podcasts and for keeping me company on my hour commute, stay healthy and wear a mask because the coronavirus is, in fact real. And that is from Ellie T or L actually. I think so, Ellie.

Yep. LTE I'm going to try to suss out what kind of person L is. Did l spell any who with a WHL or an H. Oh, uh, well, what's your guess?

She's nerdy, giddy over fallout shelter. So I'm going to guess WHL, you are correct.

Yes. Yes. That was one word. And why WHL? Yeah, because I think that that that suggests a certain amount of attention to rules and details. Note that she didn't take the fallout shelter sign, even though she could have and any who? H.O. Oh, it's much more like whimsical and like I'll I'll take my shoes off and go downhill even though I'm in my fifties kind of thing.

Right. But she also believes that mask's save lives, you know. Right.

Attention to rule in details. Well, thanks a lot. Oh, that's fantastic. And we appreciate hearing from you. Kudos to to resisting temptation and yes, wear a mask and go vote. Boy, oh, boy. We have ticked a lot of people off with this episode. Chuck, if we've ticked you off, we want to hear from you. Be nice, but sure. Of course we want to hear from you. You can email us if you are happy with it.

You can email us to either way, send it off to Stuff podcast that I heart. Radio dot com. Stuff you should know is a production of radios HowStuffWorks for more podcasts, my radio is the radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On this season of unobscured, we will go back to the streets of Victorian White Whitechapel to follow the trail of Jack the Ripper will join the police in their attempts to solve a series of brazen and brutal murders as they try to make sense of the violence taking place right in their midst.

And we'll explore the alleys, yards and homes where a series of monstrous murders became the most infamous true crime story of modern history. Unobscured Season three premieres on Wednesday, October 7th. Subscribe today on Apple podcasts, I heart radio or wherever you listen to podcasts. Peace to the planet, Charlamagne, to God here, and it is a privilege and honor to be able to introduce to you a new podcast, Great Shot, No Chaser, hosted by a queen named Teslik Figueiro, debuting on my New Black Effect podcast network on I Heart Radio.

She is the hood whisperer in this game of politics and you won't take it. I she give it to you in a straight shot. No chaser. You've been warned. What you will be informed. This is Tesla, Fabro. You know that saying the truth is hard to swallow. Well, I have learned that the more you consume the truth, the easier it becomes to digest. The truth is an acquired taste. I'ma give you the truth.

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