The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network Podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. Between the federal government’s coverup of the Epstein Files, President Trump’s catastrophic decision to plunge the US into a war with Iran, an economy that is crushing working people while hurling money at billionaire oligarchs and corporations, and the daily litany of rampant and jaw-droppingly blatant corruption throughout the Trump administration. Even Trump’s base of supporters is fracturing, and Republicans are fixing to get slammed in the upcoming midterm elections. And perhaps that explains why Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are obsessively focused on attacking voter rights, rigging the electoral system, and preemptively casting doubt on the election results before the elections even happen. On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate began debating the Save America Act, which voting rights advocates describe as the worst voter suppression bill that Congress has seriously considered passing.

Renowned journalists and voting rights correspondent Ari Berman writes in Mother Jones. Trump calls the bill his number one priority and claims that it will “guarantee the midterms for Republicans.” Today, I am grateful to be speaking with Ari Berman himself. Ari, thank you so much for joining us on The Real News. I want to start by asking the big blunt question. Many Democrats and Democratic voters have been watching in horror and disbelief what the Second Trump administration is doing and how congressional Republicans are enabling it every step of the way. And they are hopefully expecting to make them pay in the midterms. So as one of the foremost experts on the state of voting rights in America today, what do people need to know about the steps that Trump and Republicans are taking to ensure that that doesn’t happen?

Ari Berman:

Hey, Maximilian. Well, thank you so much for having me. Generally speaking, if you look big picture, what is different now than what the Trump administration or any previous administration has tried to do is the second Trump administration is trying to use the full weight of the federal government to try to interfere in a midterm election. Normally what presidents do in a midterm is they try to make the case for their party, even though they’re not on the ballot. Trump isn’t doing that at all. He’s not trying to make any affirmative case for his party. He is just trying to mess with the mechanics of voting in every way he can. First, he tried to lean on states to gerrymander mid-decade to give Republicans more seats that work to an extent, but Democrats fought back and that is now more of a wash. So now he’s saying he wants to take control of the voting process.

That can mean a number of different things, but basically what it boils down to is the President trying to give himself or his administration the power that it doesn’t actually have because the Constitution gives the President very little power when it comes to voting and elections because the founding father is feared. A king like want to be dictator like Trump trying to control elections. So they gave the power to the states with some oversight with Congress. So there’s really this battle between people’s desire to vote the people they don’t like out of office. The Constitution’s guarantees that states control their own elections. And then what Trump is trying to do, which is to subvert all of that and basically trying to give himself king-like power to rule by fiat to say, “This is how you vote, this is how you can’t vote. This is where vote should be counted.

This is where vote shouldn’t be counted. This is where vote should be thrown out. This is where voting machines should be ceized. This is where mail voting should stop and doing everything he can try to change voting mechanisms to prevent Republicans from losing in

Maximillian Alvarez:

2026.” I want to ask just a quick clarifying question because Trump can make all these pronouncements that he wants, and one of which has been, “We’re going to nationalize the elections.” So I guess for folks who are watching this or listening to this who have heard that, could you just explain a little more what the hell he means by that and what protections are currently in place to prevent that?

Ari Berman:

Well, I’m not exactly sure that he himself knows what that means. I think that’s just something that he would like to do. I mean, I think when he talks about it, he means things like no mail-in ballots, for example, or no electronic voting machines, proof of citizenship to register to vote. Some of the stuff that’s in the SAVE Act, some of the stuff that’s not in the SAVE Act, but he can’t do that by fiat. I mean, he tried to do an executive order already to effectuate some of these policies. For example, to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. That was blocked largely in court because the court said the constitution is very clear that states with oversight from Congress run elections. So time and time again, he is trying to claim powers for himself that he doesn’t have. And my feeling about all of this is don’t give Trump more power than he already has.

I get why people are fearful of these pronouncements, but at the end of the day, they’re just pronouncements. The thing that worries me though are the actions. So things like seizing the ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. I think that’s the kind of thing that he has in mind when he says, nationalize the voting, that his administration basically goes in wherever they don’t want, wherever they’re trying to re-litigate losses in 2020, wherever they’re trying to put more pressure on local officials to bend to their will. That’s where they’re trying to interfere. And the Fulton County thing was really, really unprecedented. The idea that you would go in, use the power of the FBI to seize ballots from an election that took place six years earlier, that you would dispatch the director of national intelligence to watch the raid, that you would put the FBI agents who participated in the raid on the phone with the President of the United States.

I mean, that’s flat out straight out of the Kremlin authoritarian playbook. And so I think that’s the kind of thing that’s unnerving to people. At the end of the day, will Trump be able to take over voting nationally? I don’t think so. Will he be able to take over voting in 15 places, like he said? I think it’s very unlikely, but definitely it’s something that we have to keep monitoring and be concerned about.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And speaking of things we need to be concerned about, let’s focus in on the SAVE Act or the Save America Act, which you’ve previously referred to in your reporting as the Show Us Your Papers Bill. So for folks watching and listening to this, what is the SAVE Act? What will it do if it’s passed into law and how close are we to having it be passed into law?

Ari Berman:

Well, it really has three major parts which are now being expanded into more parts. But essentially the centerpiece of it is this show your papers requirement that you have a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote. That is very burdensome because there’s lots of different data points on this. One data point is 21 million Americans don’t have ready access to their citizenship documents. I would argue that understates the number because unlike a driver’s license, for example, most people do not carry around their passports or their birth certificates with them. A lot of people don’t know where their birth certificate is even if they have one and half of all Americans don’t have a passport. So these are not things that 95% of people have easy access to whenever they’re going to register to vote. They’re not things that you ever needed before. Right now, the way it works is if when you register to vote, you show some form of identification to prove who you are.

The idea that you can just show up and vote with no identification is a lie that doesn’t happen in any actual state, but this is much more burdensome. And then there’s of course groups that have a harder problem. There’s 69 million women that have changed their last name, and therefore their birth certificate has a different name than their other documents. And so they could have a problem registering to vote. You have to show your documentation in person at an election’s office. That means that rural people could have to drive up to eight hours to be able to register to vote. So there are burdens to this law that don’t seem that obvious. Then they have added a national voter ID provision to it. I think just for messaging purposes, so they could say you need an ID to do all of these things. Why don’t you need an ID to vote?

Of course, things like buying liquor, getting on a plane, those are not constitutional rights like voting is, but also before you ever vote, you have to register. And so the registration part is much more burdensome than the voting requirements. Then also the third part of it is requiring states to hand over their voter roles to the Department of Homeland Security, which is very worrisome because basically the Department of Homeland Security has said they’re going to run it through these databases that are not designed for that purpose. They’re going to wrongly flag a lot of Americans, particularly naturalized citizens as non-citizens, and they’re going to purge them from the voter roll. So that is something that a lot of states, even red states are resistant about doing. Then they want to amend the bill in the Senate to essentially ban mail-in voting, which is unpopular even among many Republicans, and then add all these things relating to transgender people playing sports, which of course has absolutely nothing to do with a debate over elections.

So I think that there’s sort of two major problems with this. One is that the bill itself is terrible and it would disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans and many more people would be affected than I think they would expect to. And the second thing is, why is the Senate doing this now? There’s so much other stuff happening right now. I mean, there’s an invasion of Iran that’s going terrible. Gas prices are skyrocketing. The economy is tanking. Over and over, voters say their main concern is the high cost of things, the lack of affordability, inflation. The Senate’s not addressing any of that. They are now spending weeks debating what is essentially a MAGA fever dream from Trump. And so both on the substance and then just the timing and the procedure and the context, everything about this is crazy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to pick up on the MAGA fever dream part real quick because I want to be as good faith and rigorous as we can be. But if anyone is watching this saying like, “Well, we got to protect the integrity of our elections.” I heard that China is trying to interfere or they tried to interfere in the 2020 elections or all these illegal immigrants are voting, yada, yada, yada. Can you just address that head on? Is this based on any real demonstrable problem that we have in this country?

Ari Berman:

No. And then there’s just the fact that this is all just based on a lie, which is that non-citizens are registering in voting in substantial numbers in American elections. And there’s been so much data on this because states routinely audit their voter roles. Utah just audited their voter roles. They looked at 2.1 million registered voters. They found one non-citizen registered and zero non-citizens have voted. When Georgia, North Carolina, big states with millions of voters looked at their voter roles, they came to the same conclusion. Every once in a while, someone ends up improperly on the voter rules through some form or another. Maybe they have green cards, for example, so they have some level of documentation. They don’t realize that they’re not supposed to be able to register. They’re not supposed to be able to cast a ballot.That happens every once in a while, but nowhere near the frequency.

I mean, you’re talking about a handful of cases, not like Ted Cruz is saying that Democrats brought in 12 million people illegally so they could register them to vote. First off, just from a common sense perspective, the people that are here with or without documentation who are immigrants, they’re coming here for a better life. Voting is the last thing that they would be concerned about doing. The idea that if you are here, whether with or without documentation, that you would sacrifice the possibility of becoming a citizen, risk jail time, deportation, just to register and vote. It doesn’t make any rational sense and it’s not backed up by any numbers. But I mean, they’re trying to cause a hysteria so that they can do two things. They can have a hard line immigration agenda. We saw what that led to in Minneapolis, and they can have a hard line voting agenda so they can further Trump’s goal of taking over the voting.

So this whole lie about non-citizens voting, it’s a twofer for them. It’s attempted to accomplish two things, make their base afraid of the changing demographics of the country, and then build support for restrictive, repressive policies that try to make the country more white and try to make the electorate more white. At the end of the day, this is what it’s about. And I think that’s why they haven’t had a whole lot of success in ultimately pushing this forward because it’s not a popular agenda at the end of the day, even if specific parts of what they’re trying to do may be popular.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s just so wild to me as a second generation Mexican American who came of age in the ’90s and early aughts as a deep red conservative. We were a conservative family. I’ve been hearing this crap since I was a kid, that Democrats are bringing in all these illegals to vote for them in elections. And even then when we were on the right, that didn’t make sense to me for all the reasons that you’re saying. But I wanted to hook this back into the third provision in the SAVE Act that you mentioned that would require states to hand over their voter roles, including sensitive personal information to the Department of Homeland Security. And when you mix that in with people like Steve Bannon calling for ICE to surround the polls and stuff like that, it really seems like there’s a MAGA type effort here to use the might of the state to create a mass voter intimidation effect so that even people who can vote legally are afraid to go because they’re worried that doing so will mean that they’re on some database with DHS.

Ari Berman:

For sure. Yeah, absolutely. And that to me is probably the most important part of the bill that hasn’t gotten very much coverage, so I’m glad you brought it up. The Department of Justice has been trying to get these voter rolls. They’ve now sued 29 states to try to get them, and they haven’t gotten very many. Only about 10 states have handed over their information. So the majority of states haven’t done it. A lot of red states haven’t done it because they want to preserve their own security over their own state voter roles. But the interesting thing is that DOJ was basically being somewhat coy about whether they were going to give this information to the Department of Homeland Security. And then the SAFe America Act just flat out said it’s going straight to the Department of Homeland Security, meaning that it has nothing to do with anything related to the integrity of the election because that’s not the role of the Department of Homeland Security.

What the Department of Homeland Security has is this other database, which is also called SAVE very confusingly. And what SAVE does is it’s a database of people, immigrants who have interacted with the federal government. It’s not updated to flag, for example, when someone becomes naturalized. So if you run a bunch of people’s information through that database, what’s going to happen is it’s going to wrongly flag people, particularly naturalized citizens who at one point may not have been citizens as ineligible to vote, and then they’re going to be purged from the voter roles. And so I think that’s really worrisome. It’s very worrisome, A, that the Department of Homeland Security or any part of the government would have a national database of voters, which could be easily hacked, easily weaponized by the likes of Bannon, Stephen Miller, whoever it might be. And then the fact that there’s real real consequences to this.

And being purged is different than having to require documentation because when you have to require documentation, people have to go through hoops to get it, but they know they have to have it. Often if you’re purged, you show up, you don’t even realize that you’ve been removed from the voter rules. Maybe you get a letter, maybe you don’t. So many people don’t open this kind of mail. And if your state doesn’t have, for example, election day registration, you have no recourse to be able to cast a ballot. So I do think that that is a part of the bill that is really, really problematic, that hasn’t gotten enough coverage. And I think it’s yet another reason why the SAVE Act is a really bad piece of legislation.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and let’s not forget, as you yourself have reported in Mother Jones, and as folks may recall, the government in a true gangster style shakedown basically offered Minnesota, the state of Minnesota, a deal where they would reduce the horrific ICE presence in the state in exchange for the state handing over its voting rules. So how much more obvious do we need to get with

Ari Berman:

Their

Maximillian Alvarez:

Intentions here?

Ari Berman:

Exactly. I mean, that was a true shakedown. I mean, they were basically tying a massive operation that led to the deaths of two Americans and widespread chaos to the fact that they were trying to achieve some kind of political objective. And there was a lot of outcry about it. And I think that set the DOJ’s efforts back significantly, including with Republicans who said that these things should not be linked. And not only that, but it led to a lot of concern about ICE being dispatched to the polls. Steve Bannon called for that. The administration has had to walk that back, but I mean, we have no guarantees that that will or won’t happen. And even if they say it won’t happen, I mean, what’s to stop them from changing course and doing it? Now, there are prohibitions on what ICE or other law enforcement can do at the polls.

There are prohibitions against that. The question is, will the Trump administration order those prohibitions? And the things that concern me are not so much what Trump is trying to do months out from the election, which can be litigated, which can be organized. It’s the last minute things that suddenly there’s ICE operations in battleground states or battleground districts in the run up to the election. Suddenly there’s ice at the polls. Suddenly they’re trying to stop mail voting or seize voting machines or doing things that would certainly be challenged in court, but that are difficult to challenge as people are voting or as people go to the polls. And so that’s the kind of thing that I think we should expect the administration to try to do more of as it gets closer to the election. And right now, I think they’re just sort of thinking of, let’s throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, and then we’ll see what we still need to do in the run up to November.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, you started to touch on what I wanted to ask you about here in the final question, then I know I got to let you go. But we know, as we said earlier, that Trump is still trying to support the outright lie that the 2020 election was stolen. And as you mentioned, in February, accompanied by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, the FBI seizes 700 boxes of ballots and other sensitive materials from election offices in Fulton County, Georgia. So I wanted to just push on that a little bit more and ask you how likely is it that Trump and his administration will take even more extreme measures, like manufacture some national emergency and try to strong arm federal control over the elections anyway, and what can be done to stop them?

Ari Berman:

Well, they’re already talking about doing it. I mean, you already have election deniers that are close to the president drafting executive orders to allow Trump to declare a national emergency based on the lie that China interfered in the election. I mean, who knows? They could pick any country and try to manufacture it, whether it’s Iran, Venezuela, whomever they don’t like at a given day. So I mean, the stuff about 2020 is not just re-litigating the past, it has real ramifications for future elections. And I think absolutely the goal is to try to get Trump to declare a national emergency and therefore believe that you can somehow circumvent judicial review to take control of voting. Again, I think that’s going to be harder for the administration to pull off than they might think that is something that would absolutely be challenged in the courts. I think even the conservative dominate judiciary would be skeptical of that.

Look at the tariff decision, for example. They basically said the president can’t just cite these measures to just unilaterally impose tariffs. There would be even more of a stretch. A lot of the things that they’re actually telling him to cite with the same authority he cited over tariffs. That’s even more of a stretch when it comes to voting because these things have nothing to do with voting. So I think first off, there would be a lot of skepticism of the idea that there was foreign interference in the election. Nothing has proven that, nothing has shown that. And then secondly, it would then be another case of the president trying to usurp the power of the states and the Congress. And so will they try to do it? I think we have to expect that they will in some form or another. Will they succeed? I’m a lot more skeptical of that.

And again, this gets back to our earlier point, which just because the president says he’s doing something doesn’t mean it’s actually going to happen. So when that day comes, and that could happen relatively soon that Trump says, “I’m declaring a national emergency deceased voting machines.” I mean, it’s going to seem very dictatorial. It will be very dictatorial whether or not he can actually assume the powers of a dictator though, that is a more open question.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just a final kind of question on that, I mean, what are you seeing and hearing on the legislative side to the grassroots organizing side? Anything we can leave viewers and listeners with about who’s taking this threat seriously and what can people watching and listening to this do to prepare for that potential dictatorial reality?

Ari Berman:

Well, ultimately, elections are run at the state level, and that’s even more true in a midterm election when things are so diffuse. And so I think that people should be putting pressure on their state officials, whether it’s their governors, secretary of states, state’s attorney generals, local party, county chairs, things like that, to make sure that they run a smooth election. And I think that even states rights used to be a Republican thing. The Republicans used to be very proud of the fact that states controlled their elections. And to me, that is the biggest saving grace of the midterms is that the states have this authority. And so just making sure that states run elections like they’ve always been run. No one’s asking anyone to do anything different than what has always happened in every election throughout American history, which is make sure that people can vote and make sure that those votes are fairly counted.

It’s the Trump administration that’s trying to subvert that. And so there’s lots of different avenues to try to fight them on this, whether it’s at the local level. In Congress, I mean, quite frankly, Trump has not persuaded Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE Act. He persuaded them to put the SAVE Act up for a debate. That has had certainly a cost. It is allowing a lot of lies to flourish, but it’s not going to pass. And so at the end of the day, Trump is not winning this fight. And I think that’s the important thing for people to note that it may seem like he is because everything is so terrible. But if you look at tangible things that he’s actually been able to do when it comes to voting, I mean, other than seizing the ballots in Fulton County, he hasn’t been very successful.

His executive order has been blocked in court. His number one priority is not going to pass the Senate. He can’t unilaterally change state and local voting laws. And so I get that as the president becomes more unpopular, his actions will become more extreme, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be any more successful.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real News Network Podcast. And thank you to our guest, Ari Berman, National Voting Rights correspondent for Mother Jones. You can find more of Ari’s reporting and the links that we provided in the show notes. Follow him, support Mother Jones. We need their work now more than ever. And if you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with the people in your circles, your friends, family, your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other.