INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD L. HASEN

Author of A Real Right to Vote, Election Meltdown, Cheap Speech, and The Voting Wars

President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., looking on

            “Louisiana v. Callais will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies by ending the protections of Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation.  It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy …. It protects Alito’s core consistency:  aggrieved white Republican voters.  It’s a disaster for American democracy.”

Richard L. Hasen, Slate, April 29, 2026 (same day as U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais)

            On May 1, 2026, I had the following conversation with Richard L. Hasen, Professor of Law at UCLA, director of UCLA Law’s Safeguarding Democracy Project:

RITKES: You view the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais as a disaster. You’ve written several books on the right to vote and already have some essays out addressing this ruling. Can you give us some background on the ruling and how it relates to the 1965 Voting Rights Act?

HASEN: Sure. To understand what the court did, we have to go back to 1965, when there was mass disenfranchisement of black voters in the South and of other voters around the country. In 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and it had an immediate positive effect. For example, in Mississippi, the registration rate among black voters was 6.7% in 1964, and it was almost 60% in 1968. That’s dramatic. And the first wave of the Act really did provide for voter enfranchisement. However, there was still a problem with the fair distribution of political power in this country. There were many places like Mobile, Alabama, where they elected their city council members at large. [In an “at large” election system, candidates must reside in the district they want to represent, but are elected by voters of the entire city, not just the voters who live in the same district as the candidates.  Thus, there are no true “districts”; instead, every seat on the governing body represents the entire jurisdiction.  Courts have repeatedly recognized that at-large elections can discriminate against communities of color.]  

 There were more white voters than black voters; they preferred different candidates, and the whites had all the power. At first, there was an attempt to try to litigate this as a constitutional matter, but the Supreme Court said that unless there was proof of intent to discriminate, there could be no constitutional claim. In response, in 1982, Congress amended Section Two of the Voting Rights Act to provide that minority voters have the same opportunity as other voters to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. These voters need only show discriminatory effect, not also discriminatory intent. And since the 1980s, the Voting Rights Act has been a key catalyst in getting minority preferred candidates in Congress, in state legislatures, and in local bodies like city councils and school boards. What the Supreme Court did in the Louisiana v. Calllais case is complete a project that has been part of the conservative Roberts Court’s agenda for many years, which is to weaken the Section Two protections now to the point that they are a dead letter.

So, what I expect we’re going to see in this country is far less representation for minority voter interest in Congress, in states, and in local bodies, and a bleaching.  It’s going to look a lot whiter because, once again, minority voters are not going to have a fair chance to elect their candidates of choice.

RITKES: In your essay in Slate, the day the court ruled in Callais, you wrote that stripping away minority voting rights has been on Roberts’ agenda from when he was a young lawyer.

“John Roberts was a 26-year-old staffer working in the Reagan Department of Justice. His main job was to oppose efforts to strengthen Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. He fought against Section Two of the Act, saying this was a quota system that would lead to proportional representation. Of course, Section Two never led to anything like proportionate representation for minority voters. It just gave them a fair chance. He eventually gets on the Supreme Court. In 2013, he wrote an opinion in a case that killed one of the two main provisions of the Voting Rights Act. He said that time was up; this was based on old data, and you couldn’t use it anymore, because there’s always Section Two. And then, of course, in Callais , they finished the job by rendering Section Two a dead letter.”

HASEN: Right. I’m working on a book now on the history of American democracy from 1964 to 2024. As part of that book, I’ve been looking at the papers of the Reagan administration and the Reagan campaigns, and especially the work of John Roberts. John Roberts was a 26-year-old staffer working in the Reagan Department of Justice. His main job for the first part of his tenure there was to oppose efforts to strengthen Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. He fought against Section Two of the Act, saying this was a quota system that would lead to proportional representation. Of course, Section Two never led to anything like proportional representation for minority voters. It just gave them a fair chance to elect their preferred candidates. Roberts lost that battle when Senator Bob Dole, a moderate Republican, came in, fostered a compromise, and got it through the Senate.

But Roberts is a patient man. He eventually got on the Supreme Court. In 2013, he wrote an opinion in a case called Shelby County vs. Holder, which killed one of the two main provisions of the Voting Rights Act — the part that required jurisdictions with a history of race discrimination in voting to get federal approval before they made changes to their voting laws to make sure those laws wouldn’t make protected minority voters worse off. He said that time was up; this law was based on old data, and you couldn’t use it anymore, because there’s always Section Two. And then, of course, in Callais , they finished the job by essentially rendering Section Two a dead letter. It is a double whammy for the Voting Rights Act.

RITKES:  In 2013, wasn’t Roberts also claiming that there’s no longer racial discrimination in this country anymore, that there’s no more prejudice?

HASEN:  He said that although there are pockets of racism, things have changed in the South. That’s literally what John Roberts wrote, and that was echoed in the Louisiana vs. Callais case. The conservative justices on the Supreme Court, all appointed by Republican presidents, seem to think that racism is something that America sees only in the rear-view mirror, and it’s not a current problem today. And if you take that view, and you take the view that the parts of the Constitution that were written after the Civil War were actually to protect freed slaves, in fact, it works against any kind of race-conscious legislation that could help them. The irony there would be laughable if it were not so pernicious.

John Lewis (center), 1963, in a Nashville, Tennessee jail after
being arrested in a civil rights protest

RITKES: Isn’t that the same argument they’ve used to attack affirmative action?

HASEN:  Yes. Justice Alito, in his majority opinion in the Callais case, begins by quoting some of the other recent cases to say that it’s very rare for the Supreme Court to uphold any race-conscious laws. He says, and I’m paraphrasing, “Well, you could have such a law if, for example, you’re trying to separate prisoners because there are gang fights based on ethnic participation in gangs.” He said that you can use race if you’re trying to end intentional discrimination, although in a number of other cases, he’s made proving intentional discrimination much harder. And then he asked whether complying with Section Two could justify this, and he says yes, properly construed, Section Two would be a compelling interest, but he construed it so that it had no power. Justice Elena Kagan, dissenting for the three liberal justices all appointed by Democrats, said that this was the end of the Voting Rights Act.

She said it was rendered a dead letter. I don’t think it was hyperbole. She spent 50 pages explaining the history and how the court has turned the law on its head, and made a situation where we’re already seeing states like Alabama and Louisiana trying to weaken the power of minority voters in the upcoming congressional elections.

RITKES:  What exactly does Section Two say, and how does Callais put yet another nail in the coffin of voting rights after the 2013 case you mentioned?

HASEN:  As I mentioned, Congress was trying to respond to the problem the Supreme Court created when it required proof of intent to discriminate to show dilution of voting power against minorities. Section Two says that there’s a violation when minority voters have less opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

It wasn’t until the 1986 Supreme Court case of Thornburg v. Gingles that the court developed an operational test to determine when minority voters can bring such claims in the redistricting context. And basically, that test was: is there a concentrated group of minority voters who live in the same area, who prefer the same candidates for office, but who are usually outvoted by the white majority, and if that happens, then the court has to look at the totality of circumstances to figure out if minority voters have less opportunity to participate in the process.

So in the Callais case, Justice Alito said he was updating or tweaking the Gingles factors, and he imposed such a crazy standard that essentially makes it impossible to prove dilution. So instead of the Gingles standard, minority voters would have to show that random computer algorithms would have drawn districts benefiting minority voters, and the state didn’t do so. And even if minority voters can show that, then the state can come back and defend and say, “Well, we were doing this for partisan reasons, not racial reasons.” The framework completely ignores the fact that race and party overlap. And so when you discriminate against Democrats in a state like Louisiana, where 90% of black voters vote for the Democratic Party, you are necessarily discriminating against Black voters.

RITKES:  So, you start with a redistricting map, and then voters become disenfranchised because they lose their representation. Then, voters file a lawsuit, and the burden of proving intent to discriminate falls on the voter bringing the lawsuit. Is that how it plays out?

HASEN:  Since the 1960s, and cases that the Supreme Court decided beginning with Baker vs. Carr, states have had to redraw their districts for Congress, for state legislatures, and for local bodies every 10 years after the census, because they have to ensure that voting districts have equal populations. And so a state will come up with a plan — they’ll say we’re going to implement this for the next decade, and then if the plan reduces the power of minority voters, typically that would lead to a lawsuit that was challenged and argued that you could have drawn these districts that would have protected minority voters, and you didn’t. Now, before 2013, districts with a history of race discrimination — like Louisiana and Alabama — had to get federal approval for that law, and they had to show that it wouldn’t dilute the power of minority voters. That protection was gone after Shelby County.

RITKES:   Now, if a new map shuts out African American voters, Republicans can defend their new map claiming the intent was to deprive Democrats of a seat, which is now legal — as long as it can’t be proven that the intent was to deny African Americans the right to vote — is that how it would work?

HASEN:  That’s correct. But I also think the Democrats will have incentives to break up some of these districts to spread out reliable Democratic voters and get more Democratic seats. I think it’s not just going to be an issue of Republicans diluting the power of minority voters.

RITKES:  Do you think Democrats will be able to do that in red states?

HASEN:  No, they don’t control the redistricting process there, but in places like New York or California, there might be opportunities to create more Democratic districts that don’t necessarily protect minority voters in the same way.

RITKES:  What kinds of things were going on, particularly in the South in the ’60s, that discouraged or outright prevented African American voters and other minorities from voting?

HASEN: Many members of minority groups were prevented from even registering to vote. For those who could register, there would be literacy tests, and there might be a poll tax that would have to be paid, and if you didn’t pay the poll tax, it would accrue until the next election, and so it would get larger and larger. All kinds of tests or devices were used for voting that were engineered to prevent voting. In addition to all of that, there was violence. There was the Ku Klux Klan. There were all kinds of methods used by local officials to stop these voters from having a chance to cast their ballot.

RITKES:  Did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 address some of those things?

HASEN:  The 1965 Voting Rights Act sent federal registrars down to register voters for federal elections; state officials wouldn’t do it. It sent election observers down, and it imposed the requirement of Section Five — that states with a history of discrimination couldn’t change their voting rules without getting federal approval, and so they couldn’t make things worse. In 1965, it was seen as a temporary measure to require this pre-approval, but then in subsequent years, in 1970, 1975, and 1982, and in 2006, Congress kept extending the period of preclearance, of requiring states to do this. And Roberts said in 2013 that it went too far, because the formula that was used to determine which states were engaged in discrimination was based on data from the 1960s.

RITKES: Is this fixable, or is this the end of democracy in this country?

HASEN:  I don’t think it’s the end of democracy in this country, even though it is quite a blow to free and fair elections. What I would say is that this case is most significant as a case of statutory interpretation, where the court says, “Here’s what the Voting Rights Act means.” Congress could come and rewrite the Voting Rights Act and make it very clear that it’s trying to impose a different test. And then the Supreme Court would have to face the question, “Is this constitutional?” So that would be a way to try to challenge the Supreme Court. There’s been more talk about changing the Supreme Court, adding justices, imposing term limits, or other changes. There seems to be growing frustration with the Supreme Court’s views on democracy. We didn’t talk about the Citizens United case, which raised the ease of contributing big money to American elections. We didn’t talk about some of the constitutional rulings where the court made it hard for any voter to challenge a strict voter identification law. You put all these things together, add in Trump vs. United States, giving the president broad immunity from prosecution, and you can see how the court has been damaging democracy.

RITKES:  When Biden took office in 2021, he set up a commission to examine adding seats to the Supreme Court, appointing a Republican and a conservative Democrat to look into it, and then nothing came of it.

HASEN:  It’s even worse than the way you describe it, because he just asked about Supreme Court reform. And the reform that the report ended up suggesting was not to expand the court. And in fact, even though it was very mild, some Republican appointees dissented from what the report said.  Biden never had the appetite for reform. I think he was living in an earlier era where the court was not seen as much of a political actor. And I think it’s worth pointing out that this is the first time in at least modern US history, where all the conservatives on the court were appointed by one party, the Republican party, and all the liberals were appointed by another party, the Democratic party, and the ideological predisposition of Republican justices lines up with a political agenda that helps the Republican party, whether that’s by design or by accident.

RITKES:   You mentioned in your essay that Callais could kick off a whole new civil rights movement and generate a new discussion about U.S. Supreme Court reform. What are your thoughts about that?

HASEN:  I do think that’s going to be a sharp reaction among Democrats to what the Supreme Court has done. Whether it would be enough to get Supreme Court reform and voting rights at the top of the agenda, it’s hard to say. Right now, even though Democrats appear likely to win control of Congress, even if they also win the Senate, Donald Trump is president. The earliest that could be reformed would be 2029, and it would probably require Democrats changing the filibuster rules, which, in the past, they have been reluctant to do. So, we’ll see.

RITKES:  You’ve been writing, teaching, speaking, and publishing books about voting and elections for many years. How did you get interested in this area?

HASEN:  I started in a PhD program at UCLA. Initially, I was studying Middle Eastern politics. I decided to make a change, went to law school, and ended up completing both the law degree and the political science PhD. I focused on areas where law and politics come together. One of those places is in the area of election law. Quite a small field, but when I was a student at UCLA, there was one of the few professors in the country, Dan Lowenstein, teaching that course. I took that course, loved it, and I started teaching that course. I eventually came across the textbook that Lowenstein authored, and the field grew, especially after the disputed 2000 election. And so today, election law is a course that is taught around the country, and the issues of democracy are so contested that it becomes a really vital area to study.

RITKES:  In your latest book, A Real Right to Vote, the word “Real” on the cover of the book is in red, implying that the right to vote is not absolute in this country.  I always thought of it as an iron-clad right. Is it?

HASEN:  If you look at the U.S. Constitution, the initial Constitution, it didn’t give anyone the right to vote for president. That was done through state legislatures. It didn’t give anyone the right to vote for the Senate — that power was also given to state legislatures. It took the 17th Amendment in the 20th century to get direct election of U.S. Senators. And who could vote in the House according to the initial Constitution?  Whoever a state allows to vote in state elections can also vote in federal elections. So, it was left to the states, which resulted in lots of disenfranchisement — of blacks, of women, of immigrants, of non-property owners so there was no protection for who could vote in the initial Constitution. It was really left to the states. And then, as we amended the Constitution in relation to voting, none of those amendments contained an affirmative right to vote.

Instead, everything is framed in the negative. If you’re going to hold an election, the 15th Amendment tells us you can’t discriminate based on race. If you’re going to hold an election, the 19th Amendment tells us you can’t discriminate based on gender, and so on. And so the right to vote is not fully protected, and in the disputed 2000 election, in the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush vs. Gore, which ended that dispute, the court says that voters don’t have the right to vote for president. Even though state legislatures have given it to them, they can take it away at any time for a future election. So that shows you how weak our constitutional protections are, especially compared to other, more modern constitutions, where there is protection for the right to vote built into the constitution.

RITKES:  In your book, you present your own draft of a constitutional amendment, and it’s simply worded — all citizens shall have the right to vote in all elections– which seems pretty clear and simple. How is it possible that we don’t have that?

HASEN:  The last time a constitutional amendment was proposed and ratified was in 1971, the 26th Amendment, which bars discrimination in voting on the basis of age between 18 and 21-year-olds. (There’s the 27th Amendment, but it was actually proposed in the 1790s.) We’ve lost our muscle memory when it comes to passing constitutional amendments, and we’re living in a very polarized time. To get a constitutional amendment, the normal path is that they would have to get approval of two-thirds of each house of Congress, and then three-quarters of state legislatures would have to ratify it. It’s hard to think of even an amendment that says we all love apple pie making it through right now, much less something that would strongly protect voting rights when the parties seem to be engaged in a constant battle over what it means to have a right to vote and what it means to have a democracy in this country.

RITKES:  It was reported that California is going to have a ballot measure requiring photo ID to vote in person, a four-digit PIN for mail-in ballots, and proof that each registered voter is a U.S. citizen. The Republicans have been trying to do this with the Save America Act, which actually passed Congress. If this were to pass in California, what would be the impact of this?

HASEN: First thing I should say is the Save America Act passed in the House, but it’s stalled in the Senate. So it’s not likely to become law at any point in the near future.

The measure that is going to be on the November 2026 ballot is related to voter ID.  That measure is so poorly written that even supporters of voter ID should be reluctant to endorse it. It’s not clear how citizenship is going to be checked. It’s not clear what counts as a valid ID. It’s not clear whether everyone would need to re-register to vote in the state to provide that identification number that would then somehow be checked by state officials. The whole measure is one page, and I’ve never seen a set of statutes imposing voter ID or imposing citizenship requirements that was so simple and simplistic.

RITKES: Isn’t this a blatant effort to discourage people from voting or discourage minorities from voting?

“Both Democrats and Republicans are living in an outdated era where both sides think that if you make voting harder, that’s necessarily going to hurt Democrats. I don’t think that’s the case, especially if you look at the changing coalition that supported Donald Trump in the 2024 elections.”

HASEN: I think that it’s going on the ballot to incentivize Republicans to turn out to vote because voter ID is very popular, especially with Republicans. It’s the same reason abortion measures are sometimes put on the ballot, or measures that might increase prison time, or measures that might raise the minimum wage. Sometimes these things are on the ballot more to excite voters than to actually pass.

RITKES:  If it were to succeed, isn’t it something that Republicans would want, because it would discourage people from coming to the polls?

HASEN: It might be, but I think that both Democrats and Republicans are living in an outdated era where both sides think that if you make voting harder, that’s necessarily going to hurt Democrats. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, especially if you look at the changing coalition that supported Donald Trump in the 2024 elections. Many more working-class voters, especially white voters, are starting to gravitate towards the Republican Party, and college-educated white voters towards the Democratic Party. Those are the people who are going to have the easiest time getting an ID. And so, although it might well be motivated by a desire to reduce the votes of Democrats, I’m not sure it would actually have that effect.

RITKES: Trump did several things after the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections, such as seizing ballots in Georgia and seizing voting machines in Puerto Rico. What is he trying to accomplish, and what is the effect of taking these kinds of actions after an election’s already over?

HASEN:  Well, we don’t know for sure because they haven’t really told us, but one possibility is that this is an attempt to do a dry run to try to interfere with how elections are going to be conducted in the 2026 election. Seizing ballots would be an extremely dangerous thing if it were to happen, and I’m very hopeful that it’s not going to happen in the upcoming elections. But this is where we are today. Another possibility is that it’s just leaning into Donald Trump’s fantasies about the 2020 election being stolen, since the ballots that were seized then were ballots that were in the 2020 election itself.  Or it could be an attempt to further undermine people’s confidence in the integrity of the process. This seems to be something Donald Trump wants to do, especially if the next election results in Democratic victories. He could be trying to undermine the legitimacy of those elections by claiming that if Democrats win, it’s because they cheated.

RITKES: What forms of voter suppression do you anticipate Republicans doing before and during the 2026 elections?

HASEN: Well, I think what we’re seeing now is state-level applications of the Save America Act, especially documentary proof of citizenship laws. These are laws that require people, before they’re allowed to register to vote, to provide some documentary proof of citizenship. For example, a birth certificate, a naturalization certificate, or a passport. These laws, unlike voter ID laws, have been shown to have a pretty big effect on the ability of people to participate in the process. We know that thousands of people will be disenfranchised by these laws, especially poor people who don’t have passports and others who don’t have easy access, like students, to their birth certificates, and people who change their names, such as married people. All of these present challenges for many voters. I think that these kinds of laws, as well as some states making mail-in balloting more difficult, are what we’re likely to see between now and the 2026 elections.

RITKES:  Are there states right now that require proof of citizenship?

HASEN:  Yes.  Arizona is one, and more states are coming on board with these requirements. For some of them, it won’t be put into effect until 2028.

RITKES:  Is there anything that can be done to stop these things?

HASEN:  There are lawsuits against some of them, but these lawsuits have not all been successful, and I think that states, given the direction of the court, are in fact going to continue passing these things.

RITKES:  What would be the effect of Trump sending ICE to the polling places?

HASEN: I’m not really worried about that, in part because of what we saw in Minnesota. I think it would provoke a counterreaction that would be counterproductive. If Trump wants to mess with the elections, it would be far more likely that he would do it on the back end, when votes are being tabulated and results certified, than to do it on the front end, like trying to stop people from going to the polls.

RITKES:  Despite constitutional amendments and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we still have some uncertainty that comes up in presidential elections. How would your proposed constitutional amendment address this uncertainty?

HASEN:  I would have a process by which people would more easily be registered to vote, where people would be better protected from court decisions that would try to take away those rights by putting these protections in the Constitution, as well as setting up a system where we could have both identification of voters and verification of their eligibility with these registration requirements.

RITKES: You point out in your book that six senators representing California, Texas, and New York represent the same number of people as the 62 senators from the smallest 31 states.

HASEN: Incredibly, the equal power of each senator is something in the Constitution that can’t be changed by a constitutional amendment. So you might have to amend the Constitution first to allow for that part to be amended, and then amend the Constitution.

RITKES: What was the rationale behind nullifying the popular vote and leaving it to the Electoral College, and how has this been a problem through the years?

HASEN: If you go back to the initial Constitution, it was written at a time when there were slave states and free states, and the slave states were worried about being overrun, and so it was a compromise to use the Electoral College. And of course, at the same time, it was not voters in each state who were voting for president. It was instead the state legislatures choosing the electors. Now, of course, we have a popular vote for president, but it doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter that you might have millions more people who prefer one candidate. If those votes are not in the right states, then that candidate could lose the Electoral College. There are entire books written on Electoral College reform. I only scratch the surface in my book on that topic. I can recommend a book by Jesse Wegman that recently addresses this question in much more depth. There are many factors involving the U.S. Constitution that we would not think of today as democratic, but because our Constitution is so old and so difficult to amend, they are still with us.

RITKES:   You point out in your book A Real Right to Vote that the U.S. Supreme Court has been more of a foe of voting rights than a friend. Is there any basis to hope that the Supreme Court would ever become a friend to voting rights, and is there any way to bring that about?

HASEN:  I don’t think the focus should be on the Supreme Court. I think the focus should be on how we can change the Constitution to give us greater voting protection, which is why I advocate for a Constitutional Amendment. The courts have often dragged their feet on voting. It’s Congress, the representative body of the people, through amendments to the Constitution, that has moved us towards more democracy. And I think if change is going to happen—and the audience for my book is people thinking about this now, but also a generation from now —there’s going to be a point in time when it might be in the interest of both political parties to protect the right to vote. I want to provide that roadmap for when the time is right.

RITKES:  In your book, Election Meltdown, you talk about Trump’s claims during the 2016 Republican primaries that the election might be rigged or stolen. You talk about the race for governor in Georgia in 2018 between Stacy Abrams and Brian Kemp, who, as secretary of state, stripped 50,000 voters from the rolls, and I think Abrams lost that race by less than 50,000 votes. Some Democrats, such as Sherrod Brown of Ohio, were saying the election was stolen. You state that Democrats should not call the Georgia governor’s race stolen. Why is that?

HASEN:  I should first say that I don’t agree with you that the registrar of voters was likely removing Democratic voters and that that made the difference in the outcome of the election. Voter purges happen regularly because people move or die. And while there’s some reason to believe that the effort was targeted by Republicans in Georgia to make it easier for Republicans to win the election, it’s not as though there was proof that there was any change in rules or disenfranchisement that actually led to Stacy Abrams losing the election. And the reason I was critical of Abrams is that I foresaw exactly what we later heard from Donald Trump, which is that when you start claiming elections are stolen or rigged without good evidence, you undermine people’s confidence in the process. And now there’s great concern about whether we can hold free and fair elections in the United States.

I think you have to reserve the language of stolen elections to when you can really show that elections are, in fact, being manipulated so that the election losers become the election winners. Using loose talk like this is just going to further undermine people’s confidence in a process that already is under so much stress and strain.

RITKES:  You mention a column by Jonah Goldberg, who wrote that voting should be harder, not easier, because people should have to show they’re sufficiently informed to be able to vote. What are your thoughts about this argument?

HASEN: I think that there are two ways of thinking about voting on a philosophical basis in this country. One, which is the one I subscribe to and I think is more associated with the left and politics, is that voting is about the allocation of power among political equals and that it’s not for us to say that someone is not smart enough or doesn’t speak English well enough or comes from too poor a background to be able to vote. And then there’s the idea that Goldberg puts out there more associated with the right, that voting is about picking the best candidates or making the best choice. And if that’s the case, then maybe you want to limit the franchise. He said, and again I’m paraphrasing, ” Let’s make it harder for everybody, let’s make it a gauntlet so that only people who care enough would do it.” And it seems to me that is the wrong way to think about a right that should be a central part of what it is to be a democracy, which is that we all have an equal say in who is going to represent us in Congress and in other areas.

RITKES:  After Trump’s first term, after the publication of Project 2025, and after Trump was caught asking for 11,000 more votes in Georgia, do you have a concern that the public possesses adequate information or judgment to make an informed decision when voting?

HASEN: I do think that there’s a lot of stress and strain on the information environment. I wrote about that in the 2022 book called Cheap Speech, and I think it’s a constant battle to try to figure out how we can ensure that we can have robust campaigns so that people can get the reliable information they need to make choices consistent with their values and their interests.  The current environment makes it very easy to spread false information and doesn’t really provide a kind of self-correcting marketplace of ideas.  And yet we don’t want to give the power to the government to regulate speech, because if we do that and that power falls into the wrong hands, we could be in even worse shape than we are right now.

RITKES:  Thank you so much, Rick. I appreciate the great work you’re doing, and your analysis of the current Supreme Court decision in Callais.

HASEN: It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

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