Voting rights and voter access are major issues across the U.S. right now, with names being removed from the voter rolls, poll locations reduced due to the pandemic, and a heated partisan debate over vote-by-mail.

Today, Esty spends the hour with Greg Palast to discuss voter access in 2020 through the lens of his new book, How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanished Voters. They talk about Black voter disenfranchisement, the importance of Wisconsin and Michigan in the 2016 election and this year, mail-in voting and absentee ballots during the pandemic, Republican gerrymandering, and provisional ballots and the votes that don’t get counted.

Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Plume, 2004), Armed Madhouse (Plume, 2007), and most recently How Trump Stole 2020: The Hunt for America’s Vanished Voters (Seven Stories Press, 2020). He has done investigative reporting for BBC Television, The Guardian, Democracy Now!, and Rolling Stone. He directed the film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Case of the Stolen Election, available here.

Cover photo by Tiffany Tertipes on Unsplash