ALI VELSHI (HOST): So, Angelo, America is not a country that requires citizens to carry their proof of citizenship with them. It’s just the way it is. I think some countries do. Some of them are authoritarian, but some are not. I usually like to point out Estonia, where they’ve got a national ID. It’s digital. You don’t lose it. And if you lose it, it’s easy to get a new one and you don’t pay for it. That’s not the case with a birth certificate. If you can’t find your birth certificate or your naturalization certificate or your passport, it’s super hard and expensive to replace them, and voting may not be the reason why people do that. You can do a national ID if you want. I don’t think Americans would go for that sort of thing. But if you were to do it, at least the onus should be on the government to provide that at low or zero cost.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): That’s right. I mean, and that’s been mentioned already. There are lots of things we can do to make voting simpler. And it’s also worth noting that voting is supposed to be done locally, right? The mere fact that Trump has managed to even hijack the narrative around this is rather extraordinary because it’s not his job. It’s not his job. So that should be the first tell that something’s amiss here.
And there are other clues going on. I mean, you know, there are lots of ways that we can make this easier and simpler. But I should also note that on the flip side, instead of investing and thinking about that, they’ve done something even more dangerous and insidious, and there are clues. If you look at the State of the Union, who was there? Nick Shirley. This is one of these crops of investigative influencers that, you know, he was largely responsible for creating a target on Minnesota’s back by producing viralized content that the administration said, well, see that? Look at all that. We have to go in there and crack down on this.
They’re doing this with votes too. They’re going to take that exact scenario that you set up. All of the basic administrative discrepancies, the gaps that exist, the real things that we could fix, and actual — not fraud or malfeasance, just general day-to-day. People are busy. The economy is bad. You don’t have time to get your document. You know? And they’re going to take that that vulnerability, and they’re going to scandalize it and sensationalize it.
We’re going to deal with a drumbeat of people just like that being validated by the federal government and then reverberated and amplified through this massive, right-wing echo chamber to create an hysteria around voting, and around this idea of voter fraud when in fact, it’s exactly what you just said. Basic, I don’t have my document. I don’t have my birth certificate. It actually just — I lost it. It evaporated. It got wet. I mean, there’s a million reasons for it. And that system, the fact that he was there is a clue to what we can expect going forward.
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