I'm Fashikir.

I'm Amanda Lippen.

And this is Battleground, a podcast from the Recount and I Heart Radio.

Listen every Thursday as we answered the questions about politics you didn't even know you should be asking.

Our guest this week is Ari Berman. He's a senior reporter of Mother Jones and author of the Great Book on Voting Rights.

Give us the ballot, the modern struggles for voting rights in America.

We are talking voter suppression.

So my question for us is how fucked are we?

How screwed up is our democracy?

How broken is this system?

Well, Amanda, the hard thing about voting rights as a conversation is that the conservative strategy is to really make you cynical, to make you depressed, to make you feel disenfranchised, to throw up your hands and say, this is some bullshit.

And I'm not going to participate.

I mean, we run into this in ways big and small. Like when you're talking about, do you have a plan to vote? You never want to talk about how you might have to plan to wait in line.

You never want to mention how it could take you a couple hours.

You never want to talk about the barriers to entry and in a lot of places, those are real.

I think it's a real tension that comes into play, especially for Democrats who are trying to be pro-democracy without inspiring people to feel disillusioned about democracy.

Yeah, and I think we'll have this conversation. We'll get into it with Ari.

There's a tension of fighting back on the right wing efforts to suppress the vote, but also fighting on our side, not getting too wrapped up into that such that we forget that what we really need to be focused on is expanding vote, like making it easier for people.

And to be talking about that, right, things like a voting rights holiday is a good thing.

Let's push for it. Let's try to get it done and give people a vision of exactly why we believe what we believe I've worked on voting rights for a while and at the ACLU is one of the areas that actually drew me into that organization.

And for people who are kind of entering into this conversation without a lot of history on voting rights, I tend to group things around these three P's and I'll just share them with you.

And it's not meant to capture everything, but one is the place. When I say place, where do you vote? And when we talk about voter repression, there's lots of fights over partisan gerrymandering that if you are of certain voter in a certain place, we can move you to vote in a different place.

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