Whose Vote Counts, Explained | Full Episode | Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio | Netflix

[Leonardo DiCaprio] In 1776, 56 men signed a document claiming something radical: All men are created equal. A couple lines down, they went further. It says quite clearly in the Declaration of Independence that all governments derive "their just powers -from the consent of the governed.

" -And then we got the Constitution. The Constitution basically said, "Yeah, we think that those things are true, but we didn't mean it for everyone. " They want some level of democracy, but they own human beings.

[DiCaprio] Voting was a privilege almost exclusively for white men with property. [Anderson] In the founding Constitution, you will not find the right to vote. [DiCaprio] When George Washington was elected America's first president, at most, 20% of the governed were eligible to vote.

But that number grew. One of the great engines of American history is the struggle to decide and declare that voting was a right, not a privilege. [DiCaprio] First, Black men won the vote, then white women in 1920, then Native Americans.

And in 1971, the voting age dropped from 21 to 18. [cheering] By 2016, around 90% of everyone over 18 in America had the right to vote. But only 56% actually used it.

The United States lags behind most other developed countries in voter participation. Our democracy is broken. It's a rigged system, and people are angry.

People are upset. [DiCaprio] And the coronavirus pandemic has made the debate around voting inescapable. The mail ballots are corrupt.

Some are concerned that, well, if we allow this, there'll be, quote, "too many people who can vote. " Well, that's kind of a pathetic excuse. You do have to ask yourself, if someone doesn't really care enough to go down to the school gymnasium and cast a ballot, how eager should we be to get that person's vote?

[DiCaprio] It's an age-old battle in America, whether the vote should be for everybody, or just some people, whether it should be easy or hard. It's the world's oldest democracy, so why is the right to vote still a fight? The great right of all.

Our most important right, the right to vote. I'm so grateful to exercise my right as a voter again. We're willing to be beaten for democracy!

You beat people bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote! [John Lewis] Some people gave more than a little blood. -Some gave their very lives.

-[man] I don't want everybody to vote. Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. Don't boo.

Vote. This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. [theme music playing] [DiCaprio] America's never held an election quite like this one.

Given the deadly pandemic, states all over the country have extended the option to vote by mail. So there's a small number of states that have universal vote-by-mail. States like Colorado, Washington, Oregon.

[DiCaprio] Ballots are mailed to every registered voter, but in most states, you have to apply, like in Kansas. The ballot won't be sent to you until the signature on your request form is verified and matched with a signature that the state has on file with you. [DiCaprio] In some states, you need an excuse to vote by mail, and the pandemic doesn't count.

The rules that govern American elections are largely made by state politicians. That's how it's always been. Voting was always left to the states.

Different states can try different systems, and if they work, other states will copy them. [DiCaprio] And these partisan politicians can also set the rules for who has the right to vote at all. You know, I remember in 2016, when my wife ran for office, and I couldn't even vote for her.

Because I lived in Florida, I couldn't vote for my own wife. [DiCaprio] Florida had stripped the right to vote from all convicted felons for life. But from 2007 to 2011, 155,000 of them got it back from then-Republican Governor Charlie Crist through a nearly automatic process.

Then Rick Scott became governor. I'll never forget when the governor at the time, Rick Scott, he rolled back the clemency policies from the previous administration. [DiCaprio] Ex-felons now had to make their appeal in an in-person hearing.

People would basically go in front of the governor and his cabinet and beg the governor to restore their rights. I'm here to get my rights back so I can have a voice. And the governor would just deny so many people for no rhyme or reason.

I deny a full pardon. I deny a full pardon. I deny restoration of civil rights and deny the full pardon.

That whole process was an arbitrary process. [DiCaprio] Scott restored the right to vote to less than 4,000 ex-felons over eight years. And I remember thinking, "Wow, that's a lot of power to be able to decide which American citizen gets to vote and which American citizen don't get to vote.

" And I thought that was too much power for any politician to have. [DiCaprio] Rick Scott then won a seat in the Senate by a very thin margin. If he'd restored voting rights like his predecessor, he might have lost.

That's why expansions of the vote have faced resistance from the beginning. When America declared independence, New Jersey decided to let anyone with enough wealth vote. [Berkin] There were women who were widows.

There were free African Americans in New Jersey who said, "I own property. I'm going to vote. " And they did.

[DiCaprio] But then came concerns about voter fraud. Men cross-dressing to vote. Ineligible women voting by the carriageful.

After 30 years, New Jersey politicians stripped women and Black men of the right to vote, groups that also happened to be voting against them. Non-citizens could vote almost everywhere in early America, but over the decades, states took that right away, too. And when the federal government began to extend the right to vote to Black men in1867… The very next year, Florida passed a law that said those with a felony conviction could not vote.

[DiCaprio] The 15th Amendment banned states from restricting the right to vote on account of race. It doesn't say anything about getting arrested. What's also happening at this time, a rise of laws coming out of these states that criminalize Blackness, laws that only Black people are subjected to.

The main reason was to prevent newly-freed slaves from being able to actively participate in our democracy. [DiCaprio] And it wasn't just Florida. Felony disenfranchisement laws had spread all around the country.

White Democrats throughout the South enacted a patchwork of other laws designed to restrict the vote, so they could hold on to power. They did it by using the legacies of slavery, the legacies of the lack of wealth. [DiCaprio] Like taxes, you had to pay to vote, with exemptions if your grandfather voted.

Well, if you were a slave, this is the first generation after slavery, no one's grandfather, if you were Black, would have been permitted to vote. The legacies of the lack of access to education. [DiCaprio] Like understanding clauses and literacy tests.

The man who helped raise me talked about taking the literacy test. And his question was, "How high is up? " Yeah.

Those actually originated in the Northeast, and they targeted European immigrants who came from non-English-speaking countries. And so over and over again, we've seen voter suppression target communities. Sometimes it's racially-based, but always it's because those in power do not want to share that power.

[DiCaprio] The list went on. And whatever those policies didn't cover, we'd experience state-sanctioned violence. [Abrams] Voter suppression has existed in almost every state in our nation.

But the South was the most effective purveyor of voter suppression. [DiCaprio] The right to vote there was essentially destroyed. [Anderson] By 1940, only three percent of African-American adults in the South were registered to vote.

Three percent. [DiCaprio] In 1964, a Constitutional amendment banned poll taxes, but it took until the next year for the tide to break. Hundreds marched for the right to vote in Selma, Alabama, and the images of police brutally attacking protesters, including future Congressman John Lewis, finally shocked the nation and President Lyndon Johnson into action.

The right is onewhich no American true to our principles can deny. [applause] [Will] With the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the United States finally became, in the full sense of the word, a democracy. [DiCaprio] All these racist tactics became illegal, and crucially, states that had disenfranchised the most citizens now had to get pre-clearance from the federal government if they wanted to make voting harder.

The system worked, and it changed American politics forever. Starting in 1965, after the Voting Rights Act, we saw the emergence of basically a bipartisan consensus to make voting easier. [DiCaprio] Every time the Voting Rights Act was set to expire, the government reauthorized it.

[Reagan] As long as I'm in a position to uphold the Constitution, no barrier will come between our citizens and the voting booth. By reauthorizing this Act, Congress has reaffirmed its belief that all men are created equal. [DiCaprio] And there were new ideas to make voting easier, like making registration simpler.

In this country, we don't have a person to waste. [DiCaprio] Letting people vote before Election Day. They're voting for president today, under the state's new early voting program.

[DiCaprio] And expanding voting by mail. [newsman] Everyone eligible to vote in this election, 1. 4 million people, received mail-in ballots.

Georgia actually has one of the most expansive standards for vote-by-mail, and it was passed by Republicans when they took control in 2005. [DiCaprio] And in 2008… [Obama] If there is anyone out there who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. [DiCaprio] Record numbers of people who had been historically locked out of voting elected the nation's first Black president.

After President Obama got elected in 2008, that's where this bipartisan consensus kind of broke apart. [DiCaprio] Obama and the Democratic party had captured the growing diversity of America. Republicans hadn't.

Democrats in the South had been incentivized to suppress the vote. Now Republicans were. And in 2013, the Supreme Court made that a lot easier.

Today, the Supreme Court essentially knocked down one of the pillars of the Civil Rights Movement. The US Supreme Court has driven a stake through the heart of the most important Civil Rights law ever enacted, the Voting Rights Act. Today, the Supreme Court stuck a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act.

In a five-to-four ruling, the Court's conservatives said the areas covered by the Voting Rights Act had changed, but the law has not kept up. [DiCaprio] States and counties the Voting Rights Act had regulated could now change their election laws without federal pre-clearance. It sent a loud and clear message: The Supreme Court was not going to police voter suppression in the way in which courts had before.

[DiCaprio] Throughout this period, half of the United States enacted new restrictions on how people voted. Polling places closed, and lines at the polls grew… I feel like maybe it's intentional that it's so difficult to vote. [laughs] …with Black and Latino voters waiting 45% longer than white voters.

And while states always have to maintain the registration lists… Every state has this problem of what I call "slop" on the voter rolls. Additional names on the voter rolls. …the states now free of federal supervision purged 40% more names.

We saw much, much stricter ID laws become much more common. It sounds innocuous, and it's built on a lie. It's built on the lie of massive, rampant voter fraud.

A Los Angeles man today charged with voter fraud. -Voter fraud. -Voter fraud.

-Voter fraud. -Voter fraud. -Voter fraud.

-[all] Voter fraud. Voter fraud in the form of a non-citizen voting is also pretty frequent. [DiCaprio] President Trump and Kris Kobach claim that millions illegally voted in 2016, without any evidence.

If 11. 3% of aliens residing in the United States voted, you can probably conclude that a very high percentage voted for Hillary Clinton. Not a conspiracy theory, folks.

Millions and millions of people. [DiCaprio] Elections have been rigged in America's history. But it's politicians, not individual voters, who do it.

One election official admitted that, in 1948, he approved around 200 fraudulent votes on the orders of a Democratic political boss, so their candidate could win his Senate primary. The candidate? Future President Lyndon Johnson.

Election security has improved a lot since 1948. In 2017, Trump asked Kobach to lead a commission to look for evidence to back their claims of non-citizens illegally voting. There's never been a nationwide effort to do some sort of analysis of this scope and scale.

[DiCaprio] Eight months later, the president disbanded the commission that hadn't uncovered any fraud. One comprehensive study has found only 45 credible allegations of voter impersonation, the kind of fraud that voter ID laws are for. Spread that out over 16 years and over one billion votes cast.

And another analysis found that in three universal vote-by-mail states, there were only 372 cases of suspicious votes out of 14. 6 million mailed ballots. The evidence of voter fraud isscant to vanishing.

It's a minor problem in the United States, if a problem at all. [DiCaprio] But voter fraud doesn't need to be real for states to restrict the vote. In 2008, a lawsuit over Indiana's ID law went all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court had a choice between whether or not to say that restrictions on the right to vote… because they are a restriction on a fundamental right, have to meet a really high bar in order to be upheld. That's true with most fundamental rights. [DiCaprio] Like free speech.

In the USA, you can burn a flag, have a Neo-Nazi rally, and watch adult content all at once. The states can't restrict that unless they have a super, super, super compelling reason, which almost never exists. Instead, the Supreme Court adopted this balancing test, of, "Well, you know, what's the state's interest in preventing fraud even if there's no history of fraud?

" Frankly, the state of Indiana doesn't have to prove that voter impersonation or any particular type of fraud occurs frequently in order to legally justify the photo ID law that Indiana had. [DiCaprio] It's also hard to prove whether any one of these rules has swung an election. [Elias] People are always looking for the one thing that causes voters not to vote.

Voter suppression laws work in tandem with one another. Oftentimes these things come in pairs, or they come in groups of three or four. And it is the cumulative effect of each of these individual provisions that has a suppressive effect on voting.

I ran against the Secretary of State. [DiCaprio] Brian Kemp, who is both the candidate and in charge of the election. Under Secretary Kemp, more people have lost the right to vote in the state of Georgia.

He purged 1. 4 million voters, including nearly half a million people who should not have been removed from the rolls. He oversaw the closure of 214 polling places, which, according to independent analysis, meant between 54,000 and 85,000 people physically could not cast a ballot because they simply could not get to the place where the ballots had to be cast.

When it was my turn, after waiting three hours, I had difficulties with casting my vote because the machine kept glitching and it was pausing and freezing. And they told me there was nothing we could do about it. [DiCaprio] Under Georgia's Exact Match law, a registration with a slight spelling mismatch to government records, like a shortened name or missing accent, could be put on hold, and that happened to 53,000 people.

Eighty percent of those people were people of color, 70% of them were Black. The machinery of democracy should work for everyone everywhere, not just in certain places and not just on a certain day. [DiCaprio] Kemp won by 55,000 votes, which means it's just not clear if these tactics tipped the race.

It will forever be a question. And while we can't know the full impact of these policies around the country, we do know that the pandemic is making this problem so much worse. [Will] Obviously, this is an enormous problem, an unprecedented problem.

It will drive the country toward early voting, toward absentee voting, and toward voting by mail. [DiCaprio] But some states don't have early voting. Rules around mail-in voting, remember, are all over the place, and the huge influx of mail ballots are more likely to be rejected, especially if you're young.

If you vote by mail, you have a one to two-percent chance that your ballot won't count. But when you dig into that data further, what you find out is that not everyone's ballot has an equal chance of being rejected. [DiCaprio] Florida rejected less than one percent of mailed ballots in 2018, for voters over 65.

[Elias] But when you look at the other end of the age spectrum, at voters 18 to 21, they had a 5. 4% rejection rate. [DiCaprio] The most common reasons for rejection… The voter didn't sign where they needed to, or their signature didn't match the one on file, or the ballot didn't make it back to election officials on time.

And all this is getting much worse in 2020. NPR analyzed primary election data. It found at least 550,000 mail ballots were rejected, most of them from first-time absentee voters.

The US Postal Service, something we all rely on, is the center of a bitter battle. President Trump doubling down on his opposition to giving 25 billion dollars in needed funding to the US Postal Service. .

. [Trump] They need that money to have the post office work. .

. . in order to block  expanded mail-in voting for November's election because he believes it will benefit Democrats.

[DiCaprio] If you are voting by mail, you're probably going to need some stamps. And make absolutely sure you're following the instructions. Remember to sign in the right spot.

Get your vote in early, and if you're worried, avoid the mail. Most states have drop-off options. I didn't put mine in the mail because I have concerns about the US Postal Service right now.

[DiCaprio] All those extra mail ballots mean we can't expect results on Election Night. It might be Election Week, or Month. The lawsuits are already mounting, fighting over whose votes should get counted.

And for some people, they're still fighting for the right to vote at all. [chanting] Let my people vote! Let my people vote!

[DiCaprio] In 2018, alongside the candidates on Florida's ballot, voters could decide whether to restore the right to vote for former felons. Florida had disenfranchised 10% of its voting-age population, 20% of its Black voting-age population. How long did I have to endure this?

How long do people like me have to wait to be able to vote again? -[DiCaprio] It took building a movement. -[Meade] God, it was a grind, day-to-day.

I was on the campaign trail for well over four years. [DiCaprio] Desmond and the Florida Rights Restoration Committee needed hundreds of thousands of signatures. I put over 50,000 miles a year on my car, just driving from town to town, county to county.

[DiCaprio] Five-point-one million voters chose "Yes" to extending the right to vote -to 1. 4 million more. -[cheering] [newsman] Florida restored voting rights to nearly 1.

5 million former felons. They've paid their debt to society. Now let them vote.

Once they pay the price for what they've done, I think they ought to have their rights restored. In this political climate, where there is so much hate and fear, there were 5. 1 million votes that was based on love, forgiveness, and redemption.

[DiCaprio] After Florida's people voted to restore voting rights to felons, their elected officials had their own vote, requiring felons to first pay all their court fines, fees, and restitution, putting half of those newly eligible voters in flux. The new Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who had won by only 30,000 votes, cheered and called voting "a privilege. " Floridians overwhelmingly voted to enfranchise felons.

If people are still putting impediments in the way of the right to vote by these felons, shame on them, and that's up to the courts of Florida to make them stop. [DiCaprio] The Supreme Court refused to intervene. In dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote, "The court's inaction continues a trend of condoning disenfranchisement.

" I think the big question facing our democracy right now is whether the right to vote is slipping back. [DiCaprio] America is the world's oldest democracy. We still carry the weight of that old age.

If we really wanted everyone to vote, we could learn from those countries where more people do vote. Most have elections on weekends, not Tuesdays. In a few, voting is more than a right.

It's a duty, like jury duty. And almost all of them make voter registration entirely automatic. Some states have implemented automatic voter registration.

These ones let voters register on Election Day. And North Dakota doesn't have registration at all. But mostly, Americans need to deal with registration themselves in advance.

So don't wait. Do it now. Find out more information at vox.

com/vote. The people most likely to vote today look like those who didn't have to fight for the right to vote. Whiter.

Richer. Older. And that's not an accident.

If your vote didn't matter, why the hell are so many systems and people trying so hard to prevent you from voting? This right to vote has been a battlefield in American democracy. [DiCaprio] All of us may have been created equal, but we'll never actually be equal until we all vote.

[Meade] Moms and dads took their kids to vote with them during the Civil Rights era. [voice breaking] And how I get to do that now… How I get to take my family with me! -In 2020, we're making this personal!

-[man] Yes! [Meade] It is our time… -Yes! -…to finally have our voices heard.

-[woman] Yeah! -[man] Absolutely! -Our time!

-[all] Right now! -Our time! -[all] Right now!