Ari Berman on Voter Suppression and Coronavirus

CounterSpin

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This week on CounterSpin: From targeted "voter ID" laws to purging people from the rolls to fighting vote by mail, Republicans are making ever-bolder attempts to suppress voting—expanding the franchise doesn't work in their favor, Donald Trump unabashedly stated recently. It's a patently anti-democratic project by definition, but corporate media's business-as-usual, partisan framing reduces a struggle over a fundament of societal participation to jockeying between elephants and donkeys. It's a failure of the greatest magnitude, and no amount of ponderous, prize-winning books written in the aftermath will substitute for tough reporting done now to protect the integrity of the vote going into one of the most monumental presidential elections in the country's history. We'll talk about that with Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, and a senior reporter on the voting rights beat at Mother Jones.

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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of unemployment numbers, and coronavirus in Vietnam.

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Featured image: Poll worker wearing protective gear during the Wisconsin primary (cc photo: Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting).