Ari Berman

(1.) Journalist ARI BERMAN. For more than a decade, he's covered voting rights and election law in America. He'll talk about a series of recent changes to how elections are run: a Supreme Court decision upholding states' power to count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, another striking down limits on coordinated party spending, a ruling that narrowed the Voting Rights Act, and redrawn congressional maps in several Southern states.

In his new book, Minority Rule, Berman connects the debates and compromises of the country's founders to contemporary politics. He says the founding fathers created a system that concentrated power in the hands of the elite and that today, institutions like the Electoral College and the Senate — designed as a check against the power of the majority — are having much the same effect.

Ari Berman says both the Supreme Court and the lower courts are working to dismantle the '65 law that's considered one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation ever enacted in the U.S.