Whose Vote Counts

>> Long lines as folks wait for their polling place.

>> They've made it so difficult for people to vote here.

Just asking too much of people to come out with this virus going on.

♪ ♪ >> JELANI COBB: It was a major election in the middle of a pandemic.

>> There's been confusion around what actually is allowed.

>> It was difficult to request an absentee ballot.

>> I didn't even know how to do it.

>> I didn't know about that option, to vote through the absentee voting.

>> Mail ballots, they cheat, okay, people cheat.

Mail ballots are fraudulent in many cases.

>> COBB: Absentee ballots delayed in the mail.

>> I request an absentee ballot... >> But it didn't come in time.

>> It never came.

>> So I was forced to go and vote.

>> At one of the five polling stations.

>> COBB: Voters forced to choose between their health and their civic duty.

>> Those lines are long in Wisconsin despite the state's "Safer at Home" order.

>> It is unethical.

>> It was such a putrid decision.

>> People are going to die because of this.

>> COBB: Claims of voter suppression... >> Any ballots received after April 13 will be rejected.

>> 750 ballots so far have been rejected.

>> I'm really frustrated because my vote won't count.

>> It was the most blatant form of voter suppression.

>> COBB: Was this all a view of things to come?

>> I just can't imagine that somebody would do that in this country.

>> COBB: In the impending presidential election?

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I'm a journalist and historian.

I've been studying American elections for years.

But I've never seen anything like this moment.

The threat of a constitutional crisis over an election, where the votes of many Americans, especially people of color, may not count.

First off, were you able to vote?

>> You know, I was not.

But I had a absentee ballot.

>> COBB: These people wanted to vote this past April in the battleground state of Wisconsin.

A primary that would turn out to be a telling dress rehearsal for the election chaos the rest of the country is now engulfed in.

>> We're seeing elected officials, specifically on the Republican side, that are playing politics with people's lives.

>> COBB: I started focusing on the state because of its pivotal and deeply partisan nature.

It's split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats, and it gave Donald Trump the presidency in 2016 by the exceedingly thin margin of 22,000 votes.

It's a microcosm of America these days.

♪ ♪ >> I do believe that there is an attack on our democracy right now... >> COBB: Along with colleagues at Columbia Journalism Investigations, we began doing remote interviews there when the pandemic was just taking hold.

>> We don't need to be trying to have an election in the middle of a pandemic.

>> COBB: With reporters from the "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel" and "USA Today," we examined the voting, especially absentee ballots.

How they were used and counted, and the political and legal fights around them.

We sent a crew to Wisconsin to understand what had been happening on the ground.

>> Is someone on your end recording the Zoom call?

>> I don't think so.

>> COBB: Our starting point-- March 17, the day Wisconsin said the coronavirus pandemic would not affect its upcoming primary election, scheduled for just three weeks away.

You getting me okay?

>> Your audio's fine, Jelani, on this side.

>> COBB: The job of making that happen fell to numerous appointed officials, like Neil Albrecht.

On March 17, when the governor announced that the election would proceed as scheduled, what was your immediate reaction?

>> I would say profound disappointment.

We were hearing advisements from health officials, that any sort of community gathering was risky to the public.

♪ ♪ Most government closed, most businesses closed.

But we in the election commission continued to come into work each day.

♪ ♪ We continued to invest 14-, 16-, 18-hour workdays, all with the hope that that election ultimately would be postponed.

♪ ♪ (cows mooing) (cars whizzing by) >> COBB: As we traveled the state, we met other local officials who had similar concerns about going through with voting.

>> We had real conversations in my house, "What does this look like?"

So there we go, one COVID-free safety zone.

And then what if somebody did get COVID, what does that look like?

We were fully prepared for me to potentially have to sleep down here if I had to, so that-- because I can't afford to get sick.

♪ ♪ (horse trotting) ♪ ♪ >> COBB: 90 minutes away in suburban Oconomowoc, municipal clerk Diane Coenen explained what she tried to do to prepare her town's polling station.

>> I thought, "I'm gonna have some problems, how am I gonna solve them early on?"

So I started calling different companies and asking them if they could supply me with 1,000 masks or 1,000 sets of gloves, everything I could think of, and I started ordering it.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: Every state runs its own election process.

And as Wisconsin was moving forward, others were pulling back.

>> States across the country have postponed their primary elections because of the coronavirus pandemic, but not Wisconsin.

>> COBB: Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat who'd been elected on a razor-thin margin, had wanted to delay.

But he ran into a roadblock, with the Republican-controlled legislature.

>> I tried for a couple weeks to convince the legislature to change it around, make it an all-mail ballot or at least push it out to a different date.

>> COBB: What did they say?

What specifically did they say in response to those proposals?

>> Well, basically, they felt that it was important to have the election.

There was basically no interest.

And they certainly weren't interested in a mail ballot.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: I asked the Republican party chair in Wisconsin to explain his thinking at the time, why they were so intent on in-person voting.

>> We believed that with the right amount of preparation, we could hold a safe election.

It was really my job as chairman of the party to make sure that all the rules were followed, that we preserved the integrity of our vote, um, because, you know, changing things at the last minute, changing the laws on the fly can lead to so many problems.

>> Wisconsin is the only state stupid enough to have an election April 7.

>> COBB: Over the coming days, Wisconsin would be skewered in the national media.

A Democratic governor and a Republican legislature were forcing people out in a pandemic, endangering public health.

>> I don't know that I've ever seen anything as reckless and irresponsible to public health.

>> Bernie Sanders saying holding this election amid the coronavirus outbreak is dangerous.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: We went to places in the state that were being hardest hit by the virus-- densely populated urban areas, Madison, Green Bay, and especially Milwaukee.

All lean Democratic, with large communities of color.

♪ ♪ >> Milwaukee is incredibly segregated.

And so when people say "the north side," that's really code for black folks, when people say "the south side" that's code for Latinx folks.

>> COBB: I looked up Angela Lang, a source of mine who was a voting rights activist in Milwaukee.

>> People were going to get sick and those people were probably going to be Black and brown people who are disproportionately impacted by the virus and also that's the same group of people that can make and break an election.

And we're seeing those things collide.

♪ ♪ >> Hi, this is Ben Wikler, with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin calling for David, is this David?

>> COBB: With their constituents at risk from in-person voting, Democrats began pushing for something that would ignite a political firestorm: an absentee ballot drive.

>> Can we count on you to remind three friends to return their absentee ballots before Election Day?

We decided to go 100% virtual and to focus 100% on helping people cast absentee ballots.

Our volunteers reached out millions of times with text messages, with phone calls, with posts on social media, reaching out to people that they knew in their own lives.

And those contacts help people to navigate a system that was designed to shut them out, and help people to cast absentee votes.

It was a giant risk, because so few people had ever voted absentee in our state.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: Claire Woodall Vogg was second-in-command at the Milwaukee Election Commission when the absentee ballot requests started coming in.

>> Started to notice our inbox was really filling up.

And I texted our election services coordinator, Mike, and said, "Hey dude, where are you?"

Like, it's... not slowing down, there's no end in sight."

♪ ♪ I just couldn't sleep thinking about how fast the requests were coming in, and ever since then nothing has been normal.

♪ ♪ >> Started off as several hundred a day, quickly transitioned to several thousand, and then got up to as many as 10,000 in a single day, in a system that had really previously been designed to accommodate maybe several hundred requests in a day.

>> COBB: The crush of absentee ballot applications added chaos to an election that included not just a presidential primary, but thousands of local races as well.

>> I'm Jill Karofsky, I'm running for the Supreme Court... >> COBB: One of them was a closely watched contest for a seat on the state Supreme Court.

>> My dad Dan Kelly is a great judge.

>> There was a tremendous amount of advertising, a record amount of campaign spending happening in that race to try to control the ideological balance of the court.

>> COBB: With the election underway, I interviewed both candidates.

>> Wisconsin has been considered one of the key pivotal states for the election in November.

So I think that there's been a whole lot of attention paid to the state because of that.

>> Meet Jill Karofsky, trial court judge.

>> Wisconsin is very, very likely to be the tipping point of the presidential election in November.

And if there is litigation about the election in November, that litigation is going to end up at the steps of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: With so much at stake in Wisconsin, the national parties joined the fight.

What they would do here would be a harbinger for the coming presidential election.

The Democratic National Committee filed one of several lawsuits to make absentee voting easier.

Seeking to loosen requirements like voter I.D., and witness signatures.

Things that historically have been obstacles, especially for people of color.

>> The DNC filed the initial lawsuit when it became clear that there were going to be serious problems with availability for voting.

>> COBB: Marc Elias is the DNC's top lawyer.

What exactly is at stake?

And I mean this on the granular level, there are multiple, dozens of lawsuits, what's being fought over?

>> Most of what's being fought over is the ability for voters to have access to the polls, and for the votes to count.

A lot of the litigation we're seeing in 2020 is, "Are mail-in ballots going to be rejected for technical reasons, or are we gonna enfranchise voters?"

>> We'll guide you through requesting an absentee ballot online... >> COBB: For Republicans though, this all spelled trouble.

It tapped into a fear that the push for absentee ballots would favor democratic turn out, and Wisconsin became their early battleground to resist it.

Justin Clark, the Trump campaign's senior counsel, led the Republican strategy in Wisconsin.

>> When you radically change the way people vote, what ends up happening is you create confusion, you create chaos, and you disenfranchise voters, because you're not allowing them to vote in the way they traditionally would.

>> COBB: So when we talked with people in Milwaukee and thereabouts, what we got was a lot of the opposite, that people felt that their vote was being suppressed by having to go out and potentially contract the illness by going to a polling place.

>> I think people's concerns about contracting illnesses are... are definitely valid.

But here's the problem, when you try to fundamentally alter a system by which people vote, right before an election, like Governor Evers did, you run into a real problem, because what you're doing is gonna-- you're necessarily gonna lessen the number of people of vote, because of that chaos, because of that confusion.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: As the legal battles worked their way through the courts, judges ruled against the Democrats' position one decision after another.

And on the ground, local election officials struggled to keep up.

>> You know, every day, we're getting alerts, this changed, or this changed, the judge said we can't do this, now the judge says we can do that.

And so the challenge, really, is making sure that all the clerks are aware.

So you have polling locations across the state, and they're all local.

So in these smaller communities, we know who the locals are.

At the end of the day, when you look at the problems, they're in the large urban areas.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: Areas like Milwaukee, where we'd been talking to anxious voters.

>> I kind of debated back and forth between going to the polls, not going to the polls.

>> I was too afraid that, what if I got sick, what would that look like for me?

>> That decision, to me, felt like voter suppression, that they wanted to scare people, they didn't want people to go out and vote, but I know I needed to.

>> I'm not gonna feed into what they want us to do, which is not vote.

♪ ♪ I just felt like, you know, we're in 2020 but it felt like 1867.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: "1867."

When I heard Melody McCurtis say that, the drama in Wisconsin came into sharp focus.

I heard the expression of a present day reality, and a historical sentiment.

She was drawing a line straight back to the post-Civil War era, when African Americans risked their lives for the right to vote... ♪ ♪ ...in places like Montgomery, Alabama, home of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

>> The first lesson that Black people had to navigate in this country was that voting is dangerous.

Voting is going to be met with violent resistance, particularly in regions where there are enough Black people to actually have impacts on outcomes.

>> COBB: Bryan Stevenson is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, which created the National Memorial.

>> Throughout that hundred-year history between the end of Reconstruction and the civil rights movement, the inability to vote is what shaped Black life.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: The memorial is informally known as the "national lynching museum," and it's filled with thousands of names of Black Americans, many of them killed amid the push for voting rights.

♪ ♪ >> The violence that takes place, the trauma that takes place, the lynching that takes place, the mass migration of Black people from the Deep South to the North and the West that takes place, which will also have political implications, it's all a result of this violent opposition to allowing Black people to vote.

>> COBB: The violence was combined with other things-- poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses-- to prevent Black people from voting in the Jim Crow South.

The long struggle came to a head in 1965 with the march from Selma to Montgomery, which the future congressman John Lewis helped organize.

>> We are marching today to dramatize to the nation and dramatize to the world that hundreds of thousands of Negro citizens are denied the right to vote.

(whistle blowing) >> You are ordered to disperse.

This march will not continue.

>> COBB: It became known as Bloody Sunday.

(crowd shouting, screaming) The violence was broadcast into living rooms across the country... ...arousing the national conscience in the same way images of George Floyd's death would 55 years later.

(shouting continues) Within months, it led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act.

The law barred voting discrimination and originally targeted seven southern states that had a pattern of disenfranchisement.

It required them to get federal approval for any voting law changes.

That provision was called Section 5.

>> It says that any time the laws were changed that... dealing with voting, they had to first be submitted to the attorney general of the United States, or submitted to a three-judge district court in Washington, D.C.

So Section 5 was a very powerful tool to keep those in power from suppressing the right to vote.

>> COBB: Hank Sanders was elected a state senator in Alabama thanks to the Voting Rights Act.

>> All of a sudden the possibility of inclusion began to just grow.

And it took many years though before you had a substantial amount of African Americans elected to office.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: Within a year of its passage, a quarter of a million African Americans had registered to vote.

By 1968, 385 Black people had been elected to office across the South.

By 1985, that number would grow to nearly 4,000.

But by then, there was also a growing backlash that would give rise to new challenges and place new obstacles in front of Black voters.

(birds twittering) >> When you don't want somebody to vote, you create various kinds of things.

Now we'd come with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, they couldn't deny it outright, so you find ways to try to suppress it.

>> COBB: One of these ways would be through challenging Black voters' absentee ballots, through accusations of fraud.

>> It's one thing to be attacked by the local power structure.

>> COBB: Hank Sanders represented the defendants in one such case, brought by the U.S. Attorney in Alabama at the time, Jeff Sessions.

>> The U.S. attorney and others refer to these as the voter fraud cases.

We decided that they were voter persecution cases.

>> COBB: Sanders' clients were voting rights activists-- Albert Turner, who had marched with John Lewis in Selma... >> This is Bloody Sunday.

Albert, you can see, that's him right there.

>> COBB: And his wife, Evelyn.

They had been helping Black residents fill out their ballots, and mailing them.

>> Both of us was indicted, myself and my wife, and another friend, Spencer Hogue, were indicted on 29 counts of what is called vote fraud.

>> COBB: The Turners were facing decades in prison.

>> It was my impression that Jeff Sessions thought that those legal cases would stop Black folks from not only using absentee voting, but would stop Black folks from voting in the numbers that Black people were voting.

At every chance he got, he was talking about voter fraud, voter fraud.

>> COBB: Sessions denied that the case was racially motivated and insisted what the Turners did was illegal.

In the end, the jury found nothing they did had broken the law.

But the idea that absentee ballots were susceptible to widespread fraud would live on.

I talked about it with author Ari Berman, who's written extensively on voting rights.

>> So this is a very old argument, voter fraud.

I mean, there are cases of voter fraud here and there.

But it doesn't happen in the numbers necessary to show that there's some sort of great conspiracy out there to steal elections through voter fraud.

>> COBB: He pointed to a critical time in the early 2000s, when the idea began to take off inside the George W. Bush administration.

>> Up to that point, the Department of Justice, particularly the voting section of the Department of Justice, was focused on enforcing the Voting Rights Act.

And when people in the Bush administration got in there, very ideological, very right-wing people, they began to change the mandate of the Department of Justice from instead of protecting voters who are facing disenfranchisement, they started talking about voter fraud.

And they started bringing all these cases to try to find these cases of voter fraud.

The seeds of all of that were laid by Hans von Spakovsky and other conservative activists dating all the way back to the 2000s and the George W. Bush Justice Department.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: Hans Von Spakovsky, he's a former Justice Department lawyer and an architect of the Republican position on voter fraud, and a frequent speaker at events like CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, where I met him last winter.

>> Well, I can't do an interview right now, 'cause I've got another...

I've got another one I've got to go to.

>> COBB: All right.

Thank you.

♪ ♪ We sat down in September for an at-times tense interview.

Can you talk a little bit about your ideas around voter fraud and election integrity?

>> Well, I got interested in this topic in the 1990s, when I was first a poll watcher.

But when I was at the Justice Department, I worked in the civil rights division and my job there was enforcing federal voting rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act.

>> COBB: So we have this concern about voter fraud.

People on the other side of this equation have frequently said, we have an issue with voter suppression in the United States, not an issue with voter fraud.

>> Well, voter suppression is a made-up term that's used by those who oppose very common sense measures to make sure that, one, yeah, everybody who's eligible is able to vote.

But second, that their vote isn't diluted or stolen through administrative error or fraud.

>> COBB: So to make sure I understand this clearly, you're saying that voter suppression does not happen in the United States?

>> What I'm saying is that's a made-up term.

Okay, we do have... we do have discriminatory conduct that sometimes happens still in the voting context and that's what the Voting Rights Act... >> COBB: But isn't that the same thing?

>> ...that's what the Voting Rights Act was intended to stop, and it does.

>> COBB: Under the banner of combatting voter fraud, Von Spakovsky has spent years advocating for restrictions on voting, such as laws requiring official I.D.

in order to register or cast a ballot-- outraging many Democrats.

>> There has been, for some number of years, a virus in the Republican party, about wild claims of voter fraud and the need for suppressive laws.

People like Mr. Spakovsky, he played a role in advocating within the conservative movement or the Republican Party.

That virus has now mutated and has become much, much more concerning because it is now orthodoxy within the Republican Party.

>> COBB: How did that happen?

>> So I think, you know, you can look at various moments in history, but to me, the critical moment was the election of President Obama and the ensuing internal civil war within the Republican Party about what to do about it.

>> I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear... >> COBB: On one hand, Obama's election was the fulfillment of the dreams of those who marched in Selma; but like the Voting Rights Act itself, a backlash followed.

>> Congratulations, Mr. President.

(cheers and applause) >> COBB: In 2010, Republicans swept the midterm elections.

>> We're talking about uncharted territory tonight.

Gone from the Democrats to the Republicans.

>> COBB: In Wisconsin, for decades considered a bastion of progressive politics, Republicans won both houses of the legislature.

And a conservative Republican governor was elected.

>> You've given us a mandate for true reform and I appreciate that.

I will not let you down.

(cheers and applause) >> COBB: Scott Walker led an onslaught of voting changes in the state.

>> You can use your certified birth certificate, a paystub... >> COBB: One of the first was a law requiring identification to vote.

Kathy Bernier was elected to the state assembly the year Governor Walker took office.

She was a leading proponent of the voter I.D.

legislation.

>> I signed on as a co-sponsor of photo I.D.

to help with the election administration and to make sure people are who they say they are.

We didn't really have very good checks and balances in place.

We didn't really have a verification of, is this the person?

My dad, who was a Democrat, he said, "Well, what's wrong with that?

You should be able to prove who you are when you go to vote."

Actually, in my district, it is not a partisan issue.

A lot of Democrats believe you too should provide identification that you are who you say you are.

>> That law required a voter to have one of about six or seven forms of approved photo I.D.

Legislators knew at the time the law was passed, that some Wisconsinites didn't have those forms of I.D., they knew it was on the order of several hundred thousand people, and they knew that people of color were even less likely to have those kinds of I.D.

Most estimates were that Black and Hispanic voters in Wisconsin were twice as likely as white voters not to have one of the approved forms of identification.

>> COBB: Civil rights groups went to court to challenge the law, which was one of the most restrictive in the nation, and was endorsed by Hans von Spakovsky.

>> ...like Indiana, which have had photo I.D.

laws in place now for more than six years.

>> COBB: How did it come to be that so many people who have the historic experience of being denied access to the ballot, believe that they're being discriminated against contrary to your opinion?

>> Well, actually, that's not true of the majority of African Americans, if you look at the polling, they agree with other Americans that voter I.D.

is a common sense reform.

Yeah, it's true that the leaders of some civil rights organizations and others disagree with that, but the evidence, the facts, the turnout in elections in states that have put in I.D.

laws show that it does not keep people out of the polls.

>> COBB: In all these studies that we looked at... We clashed over the competing studies and arguments around all of this.

>> Almost every... With a few... no, with a few exceptions, almost every lawsuit that's been filed have been unable to show that, in fact, it keeps people out of the polls.

>> COBB: And I pushed him on the implications of what he was saying.

Do you think that Congressman John Lewis, who was bludgeoned in the attempt to secure the right to vote, was wrong?

>> On this particular issue with voter I.D.?

Yes, he was wrong.

>> Each and every voter I.D.

law is a real threat to voting rights in America.

Make no mistake, these voter I.D.

laws are a poll tax.

I know... >> COBB: John Lewis spoke with such passion about voter I.D.

laws, not just because he thought they were wrong, but because his life's work was under attack.

>> The right to vote is precious.

Almost sacred.

>> COBB: Other states would follow Wisconsin with their own voter I.D.

laws.

And then came efforts to dismantle the fundamental provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

It came to a head right where it started, in Alabama.

Where commissioners in Shelby County had sued the Justice Department, saying that discrimination was no longer the problem it had been in the 1960s, and the law had outlived its purpose.

Butch Ellis was the county attorney.

>> I think the Voting Rights Act made a tremendous change.

I think you've got to give the Voting Rights Act credit for some of the changes that's occurred through the South.

There's also been a social evolution, that independently of voting issues has led to... better dialog between the races, and more compatibility between the races.

It's just, the conditions that we were faced with in 1965 no longer exist.

They absolutely do not exist.

>> COBB: On top of that, Ellis said, even making small changes like the location of a polling place, required time-consuming paperwork and costly legal fees-- a hardship for the county.

>> It was.

It was not just a bureaucratic burden.

It was a financial burden.

It was a practical burden, and it was an unnecessary burden.

And it was just not justified by the facts.

>> It's considered one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed.

But by five to four, the U.S. Supreme Court today took the teeth out of a law enacted nearly 50 years ago.

>> COBB: In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Shelby County.

>> Today's ruling means those covered states are now free from federal oversight.

They can immediately change their voting laws and their procedures without having to come here to Washington to get approval first.

>> I always thought that since the voting rights struggle came to a head in Alabama, in Selma, Alabama, that they wanted a case from Alabama for symbolic purposes, for symbolism to... to gut the Voting Rights Act.

>> Today's decision apparently clears the way for several high profile laws to take effect, including stricter voter I.D.

requirements in Alabama... >> COBB: The Shelby decision did send a powerful signal, and soon changes to voting laws began taking place all over the country-- in Southern states and beyond.

In Wisconsin, Scott Walker and the Republicans began passing a flurry of new voting laws.

>> Most of the bills that I've worked on have been making sure that dates and times, and process and procedures, are in place.

I've also worked with the election commission on a number of issues that we bring forward with election fraud.

The important part is that we have the safeguards in place to make sure that people have confidence in the electoral process, and that our electoral process has integrity.

>> COBB: What Republicans began in 2011 with voter I.D.

grew and grew.

>> We have seen a lot of changes to election law over the past ten years, always having to provide proof of residence when you register to vote.

If you want to register by mail, a required copy of your I.D., or a copy of your energy bill or a copy of your bank statement.

>> COBB: Half a dozen changes after the Shelby decision... >> Not allowing someone to vouch for another voter.

>> COBB: ...that critics say have made voting harder... >> Or requiring a witness address for an absentee ballot.

>> COBB: ...especially for communities of color.

>> The elimination of late-arriving absentee ballots, or a change in the deadline to request an absentee ballot, a change in the number of hours we could have for early voting.

You almost have to be an attorney in order to understand how to register and vote successfully in Wisconsin.

>> COBB: That was the landscape in the days leading up to the April 7th election, as more than 1.3 million voters in Wisconsin were requesting absentee ballots.

In Milwaukee, home to the state's heaviest concentration of Black voters, the pandemic was steadily shutting down the election system itself.

♪ ♪ >> The really significant shifts that we began to see were a closure of many of the sites that we used for voting and a mass exodus of our election workers due to concern about the pandemic.

At one time, we talked about reducing sites to maybe from 180 to 120.

Then we talked about reducing those to 45, and then it finally came down to five voting centers for in-person voting on Election Day.

♪ ♪ >> Good morning, folks, and thanks for joining us on this Monday, April 6.

>> COVID-19 cases across the state continues to climb.

>> COBB: On the morning of April 6, less than 24 hours before the polls opened, Governor Evers made a last-ditch attempt to postpone the election.

>> Earlier today I signed executive order 74, to suspend in-person voting for the spring election until June 9.

There has been some that said, "Well, why'd you wait until the last minute?"

Well, the response was, "If I would've done it three weeks before, it would've been the same result."

I felt it important to work with the legislature, I thought that was our best chance and it just didn't happen politically.

>> There's election confusion... >> Been a rollercoaster in the last few hours... >> That day before the election was the most momentous pre-election day that I've ever covered.

>> COBB: Patrick Marley is one of the state's preeminent political reporters, and we talked to him a lot as things were playing out.

>> Here you have the governor in the morning trying to issue an order to delay the election.

Republican lawmakers almost immediately sue, and then at the end of the day, the state Supreme Court says, "This election will continue."

>> The presidential primary here is a go tomorrow.

>> The polls will be open at 7:00 a.m. >> COBB: Just hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt another blow to the Democrats.

They would not intercede to extend the deadline for absentee ballots.

>> The U.S. Supreme Court comes in and says, "Well, you have to have a postmark requirement.

The ballots must be postmarked by Election Day, otherwise somebody could cast their ballot on the day after the election.

>> The U.S. Supreme Court weighing in late in a 5-4 ruling... >> I was making dinner for my two kids when I learned about the United States Supreme Court case and it was just a little while after learning about the Wisconsin state Supreme Court case, and I said to them, "I don't know that we have a path to win this election, I'm not seeing it right now."

>> COBB: That closely watched contest between Jill Karofsky and Daniel Kelly was hanging in the balance.

>> And we woke up the next day and I saw a sight I didn't ever imagine seeing.

>> Wisconsin is moving forward with its election this morning.

>> These brave, brave people who went to the polls in Milwaukee despite the pandemic.

>> Take a look at how long the lines already are in Milwaukee of voters waiting to cast their ballot.

>> COBB: It would take a week for election officials to tally the ballots.

>> I don't think there is a clerk in the state of Wisconsin that didn't see an entire shift in how we conduct elections on April 7.

For us, 80% of our voters voted by mail, 20% voted in person.

Normally it would be the exact opposite.

>> The big state race that everyone was keeping an eye on.

>> COBB: Then, on April 13, surprising news... >> Judge Jill Karofsky has won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

>> COBB: The Democrats' favorite, Jill Karofsky, had won, the unexpected result of a wave of absentee ballots.

>> My campaign manager called and he said, "If you're in fleece and jeans," which is what I was in, "You need to put something nicer on because you're about to go on TV, and you're going to be the... You're going to be the next justice on the Wisconsin State Supreme Court."

I'm celebrating social distance wise... (cheers and applause) ...with my friends and my colleagues.

The final margin was over ten points.

And if someone had told me before the election that we were going to win by more than ten points, I would have told them they were absolutely crazy.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: But the victory belied an unsettling fact.

With our colleagues at Columbia Journalism Investigations, and the "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel" and "USA Today," we examined the results.

We found that over 23,000 Wisconsin voters had their ballots rejected.

♪ ♪ Can you talk about the role the safeguards may play in the confusion about how to vote by mail?

>> Sure.

Every safeguard that's put in place, you know, well- intentioned it may be, is another thing that a voter has to deal with or another thing that an election official has to deal with.

Those are real hurdles for people, particularly in a pandemic.

>> COBB: Just over 10% of those rejected ballots were from Milwaukee.

Neil Albrecht took us to the room where they're kept.

>> We would normally see only a small handful of these for any election because of how bolded the requirement is.

They have to sign, date it.

And then the witness signs, provides their address as well.

And then that's what's required for the ballot to be counted on election day.

In this box, these are all ballots that were received by the election commission on April 10, but were postmarked after the April 7 election day.

Because it wasn't postmarked by April 7, it wasn't counted in the election.

>> COBB: Some of the rejected ballots were from one neighborhood-- Metcalfe Park.

♪ ♪ >> Metcalfe Park is the neighborhood in the center of Milwaukee, right in the heart.

It's an African American community.

♪ ♪ In Metcalfe Park, our median income is $24,000.

We are a severely poor community.

>> COBB: Melody McCurtis and her mother, Danell Cross, founded a community organization called Metcalfe Park Bridges.

(indistinct chatter) We found the names of residents who had their ballots rejected and showed them to Melody and Danell.

>> So why don't you guys look at that and see what you make of it?

♪ ♪ >> Hold on, hold on, hold on.

(Melody gasps) >> Look who got rejected.

(Danell gasps) Right there.

>> Okay...

I hate the thought of telling them that they didn't get counted.

>> It's a lot of names on here that, that are pretty active in the community, that we're in a relationship with.

Like a lady on here that's a senior.

She's so vibrant.

She's one of the fanciest ladies in the neighborhood and all of this.

>> Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

I know she's not on here.

>> Yeah, she is.

>> Oh my goodness... >> There's another young man that won a basketball tournament last year, he said that he felt like his vote didn't matter, right?

And for him not to be counted, it just... it's-it's doing something to me.

>> The April election brought it all out.

It snatched the covers off of it.

Now we actually understand how much work it goes into disenfranchising people.

♪ ♪ >> Many people spent their entire evening at a voting location.

>> COBB: Many of the same kinds of problems showed up in other states that held elections in the months that followed.

>> Just 170 of Kentucky's 3,700 locations will be up and running today.

>> Voters who started lining up to vote before 7:00 a.m. were still lining up at midnight.

>> COBB: People waited in line for hours.

>> With some people waiting five to six hours to cast their votes.

>> COBB: Machines that wouldn't accept ballots... >> As many as 75% of the ballots did not go through the first time.

>> Voters who were locked out of the polls pounded on doors.

>> Open that door!

Open that door!

Open that door!

Open that door!

>> Our votes matter!

>> COBB: In our months of reporting, election officials told us they were underfunded and overworked, and increasingly fearful of what would happen in November.

And their fears are well-founded: based on our review of years of voting records, more than a million votes might go uncounted in the upcoming election.

>> As we look at this, the projected numbers of absentee ballots that are rejected are higher than the margin of victory for the president in Michigan in 2016.

Maybe 50,000 votes in a state doesn't mean much to the presidential election.

Maybe it's an all blue, an all red state.

But somebody that's running for mayor in that state, you know, losing... you know, losing ten, 15 votes can make the difference for them.

So the potential for this to, you know, alter races around the country is absolutely on the table.

>> It's a very bad system, it's going to lead to a tremendouse fraud and we're trying to stop it.

>> COBB: Against this backdrop, Republicans, led by President Trump, have been relentlessly attacking absentee ballots.

>> Voting by mail is wrought with fraud and abuse and people don't get their ballots.

People steal them out of mailboxes.

People print them, and then they sign them, and they give them in.

>> COBB: Hearing the constant refrain of fraud led me back to Hans von Spakovsky.

He keeps a database of alleged voter fraud cases that fuel the Republican's claims.

But when our reporting team examined it, we found it included misleading and overstated information-- charges that von Spakovsky said are false, and he insisted that the database shows a wide variety of election fraud cases.

>> Well, most important thing for you to understand is just a sampling of cases, okay?

It is not a comprehensive list.

I don't have the time, the resources to do any kind of comprehensive list.

And, in fact... >> COBB: Sure, but... but how do you find these cases?

>> We find them through newspaper accounts of people getting convicted.

We find them through press releases from law enforcement officials, state attorney generals and others.

Sometimes people send us court judgments, convictions, and other information like that.

You know, folks on one side of this are constantly saying, "Oh, there's no massive voter fraud in the United States."

And I don't claim that there is massive voter fraud in United States.

In fact, I think the correct assessment of this is going back to the Jimmy Carter, James Baker Commission.

You know, what they said was that voter fraud does occur in the U.S. and it could make a difference in a close election.

>> COBB: A few days before we interviewed von Spakovsky, one of the most prominent Republican lawyers, Ben Ginsburg, who oversaw the 2000 Bush-Gore recount, publicly criticized the database and rejected the notion that fraud was a big problem.

>> He has no idea what he's talking about.

I mean he even made the most basic error of referring to our database, which is just a sampling of cases.

>> COBB: We talked to Hans von Spakovsky about this, and he said, "He has no idea what he's talking about.

He's never had any actions, never done anything in the area of trying to investigate or go after election fraud."

And what's your response to that?

>> I...

I think that's not a fair statement.

I've been involved in recounts and contests, which all involve kicking open the hood of the American engine to look at what happens in polling places.

I can tell you from that experience and being the co-chairman of a presidential commission on election administration in 2013 and 2014, where we looked for this, that the widespread fraud that would allow a conclusion of elections are rigged is not there.

The evidence does not show that.

>> COBB: Mm-hmm.

How did this come to be so prominent a part of the conversation if, as you say, there's been scant evidence?

>> As the country has become more divided, fraud and voter suppression have become part of each party's get out the vote mechanism, and inspiration and motivation to get its voters out.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: With COVID-19 cases rising throughout Wisconsin, that's exactly what Melody McCurtis and her mother have been doing.

>> For April 7, a lot of people was not able to vote, so that's why we trying to avoid this.

And we not trying to have April 7 happen again.

>> I was born on Bloody Sunday.

My auntie marched with Martin Luther King.

Our family was always about activism.

>> Our goal for today is gonna be getting people registered to vote, and then also having people request their absentee ballots.

>> Voting is really... it's really on the bottom, right, when you're dealing with life, and, and trying to provide for you and your children.

Hey, how you doin'?

We're with Metcalfe Park Community Bridges, we're here to see if you need help with registering to vote.

We're going door to door.

We're providing printed literature in there with phone numbers for folks to call us if they need help registering to vote so that they feel empowered to vote.

Voting is the direct reflection of our neighborhood's ability to thrive, right?

When you vote folks in office, you have a say so on what you want your community to be.

♪ ♪ >> COBB: Melody was expressing a fundamental principle about democracy: one person, one vote.

♪ ♪ I thought a lot about this idea when I paid a visit to Black Lives Matter Plaza earlier this fall.

Seeing the White House behind a chain link fence,... the fence itself a memorial to African Americans killed by police... ...made me think about the connections between Wisconsin, the country's history of disenfranchisement, and the coronavirus.

♪ ♪ It's tempting to see them as three distinct concerns, but they're inextricably linked to a legacy of inequality and an ongoing struggle.

♪ ♪ >> Go to pbs.org/frontline for more on the impact of the landmark Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act.

>> You know, we're in 2020 but it felt like 1867.

>> And more reporting from our partners Columbia Journalism Investigations and the USA Today Network on how the pandemic could impact voter turnout.

Connect with FRONTLINE on Facebook and Twitter, and watch anytime on the PBS Video App or pbs.org/frontline.

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org >> For more on this and other "Frontline" programs, visit our website at pbs.org/frontline.