| No Images? Click here   Crystal Mason spent the midterm elections glued to the television in federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas.Two years earlier, Mason mistakenly voted while on supervised release for a felony conviction, and the punishment was severe. She was sentenced to five years in state prison in March, not including 10 months in federal prison because she violated the terms of her supervised release.Mason’s case sparked national outrage because of the severity of her sentence. But it also underscores a larger point about who we allow to vote in America. Blocking people like Mason from voting isn’t just about stripping their political power — it’s about exiling them from the core of our community.In “Shut Out,” a new three-part podcast from HuffPost, we look at the many different ways officials nationwide exclude people from voting. How do politicians justify these kind of restrictions? And in a country where we believe that everyone has an equal say in democracy, why are we so willing to accept these barriers? Here is Sam Levine, HuffPost's voting rights reporter, on how and why we produced this podcast.Why a podcast about voting rights?I'm conscious of how grandiose and dramatic this sounds, but our ability to vote is really at the core of our democracy. Every single political debate we have, whether it's about immigration or taxes or healthcare, depends on the people who we put in office. And who we put in office depends on how easy it is for us to express our preferences at the ballot box.This year, the fight over the right to vote blew up into a major battle on the campaign trail. But these recent battles are really a continuation of a deeply-rooted struggle in the United States over who gets to have a say in the political arena. We wanted to trace that historical legacy and explain how two major recent developments -- a 2013 Supreme Court decision and the rise of voter fraud claims -- have intensified the fight.This year we saw some remarkably close elections, which illustrate why barriers to the ballot, even small ones, can make a big difference. As the 2020 election approaches, the fight over voting is only going to intensify. We hope this podcast can be a foundation to explain how we got here.What’s one thing most listeners will be surprised to learn from this podcast?I think many people will be surprised to learn about the history of disenfranchising people with felony convictions in the United States. Many people just assume that once you're convicted of a felony in the United States, you can't vote again. But that's not true -- the rules vary widely by state and are really confusing.We also wanted to challenge our listeners to think about the justification for stripping someone with a felony conviction of their right to vote. Even a criminal justice expert we talked to said for many years, he didn't think about felon disenfranchisement policies. We want our readers to think about why, for so long, it was relatively uncontroversial that we stripped people with felony convictions of the right to vote. Why is that?What was most challenging in creating this podcast?Many of the restrictions we explored in the podcast were complicated and it wasn't always easy to explain how they blocked people from voting. They didn't explicitly bar people from casting a ballot. But we looked at them through the lens of individual voters who were impacted in 2018 and were able to see just how cumbersome they could be. In Georgia, for example, the state's exact match policy flagged 53,000 people who could still vote if they showed up at the polls with ID. But Marsha Appling-Nunez, one voter who was affected by the policy, explained to us just how confused and unsure she was about whether she could vote on election day. That's the kind of nuanced voter suppression we wanted to dive into.Anything else you’d like to add?This podcast is a new kind of experiment for us, so I hope people will give it a listen and email me (samuel.levine@huffpost.com) what they liked and didn't like and what they'd like to learn more about. We're hoping to do more episodes as the fight over voting rights continues.
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