How voting laws could influence Alabama's Senate election

Voters in Alabama are deciding Tuesday who will fill the state's vacant Senate seat.

The state dependably swings red, but the race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones is close after multiple sexual misconduct allegations surfaced against Moore.

But how easy will it be for the state's eligible voters to cast their ballots? As Vann R. Newkirk II writes in The Atlantic, "For Jones to win with such thin margins, he'll need to turn out black voters. But doing so will mean confronting the state's fraught history of voter suppression."

MPR News host Kerri Miller spoke with Newkirk about the Senate election, and the long history of voter suppression in Alabama.