Advisory Opinions - How to Commit Voter Fraud?

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Last week, President Trump encouraged North Carolina voters to test their state's election security. David and Sarah discuss how, exactly, someone commits voter fraud, and what voters need to know as we close in on this November's election. But that's not all: Sarah gives us the latest on the state of the race and how the Trump campaign lost its cash advantage. Plus, David has some thoughts on Tenet. Show Notes: -The New York Times on “How Trump's Billion-Dollar Campaign Lost Its Cash Advantage” -Sign up for Sarah's newsletter The Sweep Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Happy tastes good. You ready? I was born ready. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This is David French with a very disgruntled Sarah Isker. I am. I am. I'm disgruntled. It's true. So why? Tell the people why you're disgruntled, Sarah. Because we normally tape this at noon and you said, Hey, can we tape it early? Like 10 30. And I said, okay, but I had planned childcare around noon. So now I need to figure out

childcare around 10 30. Can we do 10 45? And you said, sure. And it is now 11 20. 1045? And you said, sure. And it is now 1120. And I've been sitting here since 1045. Well, maybe I just got the time zones mixed up because it's 1020 where I am. Nope. Nope. That's not what happened. Okay. All right. Well, normally listeners, Sarah is in a, so this will be a new experience because normally Sarah is very excited and happy to start the advisory opinions podcast. So this might be 40 minutes ago. I was very excited 40 minutes ago. So this will be a new experience for all of us. But here's, here's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about the state of the race. It's post labor day. So that

now means stretch run. We just had a new sweep newsletter out where you talked about Minnesota. So I want to talk about Minnesota. And as I've said many times, subscribe to the sweep newsletter, go to thedispatch.com, become a member. But even if you're not a member, you can get the sweep on free on Monday. It's awesome. Subscribe to it. So we're going to talk about the state of the race. We're going to talk about what was the way you put it, Sarah? Oh, so suddenly how to commit voter fraud. Yes, I would. I would like to teach everyone how to commit voter fraud. OK, that sounds very responsible and something that like every major social media platform might remove this podcast for. But assuming it stays alive,

then we're also going to talk about the glories and joys of campaign finance law and also a legal complaint filed against what seem to be, but may not be, local news agencies that we're trying to label them as essentially political action committees. And then we're going to end up with a little discussion of Christopher Nolan, the awesome, the wonderful Christopher Nolan, because I saw Tenet over the weekend, and I, Sarah, have thoughts. I'm excited. I have lots of questions. No spoilers, though, but I have lots of questions. I would, though, but I have lots of questions. I would have to understand the movie to spoil it.

That's my understanding of it as well. Yes. So no worries about that. All right. So let's start. So, Sarah, I am, let's pretend for a moment that I'm Chuck Todd and you're on Meet the Press and you are. You kind of have a Chuck Todd thing going, facial hair-wise. A little bit, a little bit, although he's got more hair up top.

But so I'm Chuck Todd. I have brought you in. You're sitting at the table, and you are, it says, Sarah Isger, election analyst. And I say, Sarah, it is now post-Labor Day. Everyone would say that this is now the stretch run of the presidential campaign. We have fewer than 60 days remaining. What is the state of the race? Remarkably stable, David. Chuck, whatever your name is.

Chuck, thank you. Chuck, sorry. So early ballots, absentee ballots have already gone out in North Carolina. So the race is quite literally on now. And the race has been remarkably stable. There, you know, Biden is still very much in the lead and he's leading with voters who Trump had either been leading with or is still leading with, but by a much narrower margin. You look at the senior vote. It's incredible to me just how that like flipped overnight, but then has been stable since March. Even the white male vote, you know, something Trump led by 21 points is down to roughly 12 points. And that's been actually pretty stable. So, you know, Biden right now is in a very comfortable position. You wouldn't want to trade positions

if you were the Biden team. That being said, you know, a 60 days is still a long time in theory, as we've seen in 2020, Lord knows SMOD could happen any day now. Two, there are some concerning signs. For Biden. For Biden. Pennsylvania is remarkably close given it's Pennsylvania. And compared to past elections, Pennsylvania was basically a state that Republicans had all but given up on. And then in 2016, Trump won by a very narrow margin. And it's still looking very narrow. And Pennsylvania has so many electoral votes.

You know, I've said before that if Biden wins Florida on election night, this whole thing's largely wrapped up. But it would be such a strange world if somehow Biden won Florida because the senior vote switched, but lost Pennsylvania because of this, you know, non-college educated white male vote that's still pretty heavily Trump. I mean, that like my mind would be blown by that, but it is at least feasible in 2020 that that could happen. So, Sarah, I've got a feasible thing that could happen. Biden wins Florida. Biden wins Arizona. Yep. Biden loses Pennsylvania and Biden loses Minnesota. Yeah. Wouldn't that be just wild? Talk Minnesota a little bit with us. Yeah, wouldn't that be just wild? Talk Minnesota a little bit with us.

So Minnesota is a little like Texas and Georgia, but in reverse. It's a state that is so traditionally blue that no one's ever contested it before, including in 2016. But then Trump only lost Minnesota by, what was it, 1.5%? I mean, something very, very close. So the Trump campaign is going into Minnesota. It's the only pickup state. Now, this is a little annoying to me whenever I hear like, oh, Trump's on defense everywhere. Yes, because he won. Of course you're on defense. Like the point is you just need to replicate what you did last time. So that's how incumbents do things usually. But nevertheless, it is the only pickup state for Republicans.

Look, is it likely to be picked up? No. But I would say it's more likely to be picked up than Texas is for the Democrats to be picked up. And it's more likely than Georgia, although it's probably more similar to Georgia. Minnesota, and Andrew did some great reporting in the sweep on this. Minnesota is not your normal progressive East Coast, West Coast state. It has this weird history with the labor, the labor party was what it was called. And now it's the Democratic Farm Labor Party. And, you know, it's a very Amy Klobuchar Democratic Party.

They are, you know, union based, working class, labor farmer party. And that just isn't fitting in that well with the modern Democratic Party as it kind of shifts the same way the Republican Party is shifting. And some people are getting left out of those shifts. On the left, it's somehow Minnesota. And so there is an opportunity for Trump to get in there and win it. Now, let me tell you the more likely scenario, which is exactly what's happening in Texas and Georgia, which is you force the other party to spend money there.

And you don't have to spend that much money to force them to spend maybe more money. And so you're trying to have a net benefit of them spending more money than you so that they're spending less money in Pennsylvania, Florida, etc. That is working. Biden and his team are having to spend money there. Here's the only problem with it being Minnesota. Minnesota's media market bleeds into Wisconsin. So even when you're spending money in Minnesota, you're getting a double bounce and you're spending it in Wisconsin. So it's not as pure a waste of money as Texas or Georgia. Right. So it seems to me that, Right. So, you know, it seems to me that so I can't remember which of the Nates was it Silver or Cohen who.

It is hard to keep track. Yeah. Like the dueling Nates, the Jets's going to happen in the election? Because we all know, you know, Trump won with a minority of the popular vote. And it looks like there's an interesting sort of math issue. Just the larger the popular vote gets, the probability of Trump pulling off the same thing again shrinks. And so with each percentage point beyond, say, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, the math just really doesn't work in his favor. And it's interesting to me that you see that in some of the swing state polling. The swing state polling, by by and large with an exception like Arizona seems to be narrower than the national polling.

Yes. But not by a lot, not by a lot. And there's a point at which the national polling number just gets large, so large, if it does, which it probably won't increase that much, but if it does, that it just swamps whatever could happen in the states. Yeah, so when you see the national numbers at around seven to nine, Biden up seven to nine points, what you're seeing is in the state polls that Biden's up

roughly four to six points then. Right. And you're right. It is sort of like the rise and fall of the tide. They're not the same number, but they rise and fall together. Usually, with oddly, Arizona being an exception, where Biden's way outkicking what would be the normal Arizona coverage. Yeah. Arizona is like nearly gone.

It's strange. And then other states like Pennsylvania, where it's much closer than the popular vote would predict. But by and large, yes, those things are moving in tandem, I would say. Yeah. So if you're a Biden supporter and you're seeing this thing narrow to four, that's when, like if the national top line poll number starts to narrow to four, the national top line poll number starts to narrow to four, that's when you start getting nervous, I would say. If it's staying seven, between seven and nine, again, you would not in a million years want to switch places with Trump in that circumstance. But so, okay, we've got three

debates coming up. Each one of them will be hyped as an opportunity to totally shift the momentum of the race. They rarely do. Yeah, I was, okay. I just, I was just going to feed you on that. Well, don't you love though, like that everything that we talk about, I'm like, it doesn't matter much.

It doesn't matter much. Nope, that doesn't matter much. Like this is the whole sweeping analogy, right? Like everything can matter a little, but nothing, there is nothing that is game changing. Even those October surprises, we're talking about moving 2%. It's just that moving 2% in a close race can be the race.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, you know, I'm reminded of in 2016, if you looked at the polls following each one of the debates, they were pretty resounding to say that Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the debates. They didn't really alter the dynamic of the race much at all. The only time I saw a debate, there are two times in my life where I had an actual perception that the dynamics of a race were at least starting to be altered by debate. One was the first 1984 debate. Sarah, I'm sure you remember

that well. Yes, yes. I enjoyed it in my diapers. First 1984, when Reagan came out of the gate, and he just didn't seem in command at all. And so it created maybe more of a news cycle than anything else that he then dispelled immediately in the next debate by saying he wasn't going to hold the relative lack of youth and an experience of his opponent against him. One of the all time great lines. It's tremendous. And then it was it was so funny how even in the moment like Twitter didn't exist, like the the snap news cycle judgment didn't exist in the same way that it does now. But it was sort of like all the air still. You could watch the air go out of the balloon of that boomlet following the first Mondale debate.

And when Mondale laughed at it, that was sort of like. And then the first debate in 2012 when Romney was very sharp, very tough. Obama seemed back on his heels. You felt, and there was some reflection in the polling, but those are the only times I have really seen a presidential debate land in that way. Am I wrong? Am I missing something? I mean, and let's also be clear that the Reagan one was still back when you could have these landslide outcomes. So maybe if he hadn't had that other debate performance, it could have made a difference. In 2012, I actually think even if that had been the only debate, there had been no makeup, Obama still would have won. It was not going to shift things that much. And we don't live in a world

where there's these huge voter swings between elections. It's going to be pretty consistent. And we're talking about moving things 2% to 4% each election for right now. Maybe that will change in 10 years, but it's not going to change now. But speaking of expectations around debates, but it's not going to change now. But speaking of expectations around debates, here's a fun number for you. 47% of registered voters predict Trump will win the debate compared with just 41% who picked Biden, which actually means that people who are planning to vote for Biden expect him to lose the debate against Trump. Could you imagine being in a better place than Joe Biden? Like if the debates weren't going to matter already, they sure don't matter when your own voters don't think you're going to win

and don't care. You know, that's it just raises once again, the strategic decision to sort of talk down Biden's mental competence relentlessly, constantly from day one. that's, it's a really interesting decision because I've always been used to in prior years that going into debates, you talk up. Oh my goodness. I mean, Hillary has been on the stage so many times. I mean, I'll be like, you know, I'm just, I'm just a novice at politics. I'm the outsider. I've never been on the stage. And so that if you can just hold your own, you're like, oh, look, the emperor has no clothes.

But this is a completely 180 degree different strategy. So, okay, this was hilarious to me when I saw it. Jason Miller, who's a senior strategist for the campaign, he was on the campaign in 2016, was slated to be communications director for the White House, gave this saddest of sad quotes. Biden has been debating for a half century. He is very good. It's like he knows there's no point in trying to even the expectations, but he's just going to go through the motions because you know you have to. But look, I do think the strategy is unusual to lower expectations for your opponent. But in this case, if Biden then does have any sort of slip, it will be chalked up to that.

It will be magnified. And so that could work really well. But the downside is if he turns in something like he did at the DNC nomination acceptance speech, then it really blows you out of the water. But there's a big difference between Biden delivering a teleprompter speech and doing it. I like I don't know why the expectations were quite so low for that. The reason that expectations matter in debates is because they are much, much, much, much harder. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, infinitely harder than reading a teleprompter speech, although we should note that Trump couldn't accurately read his teleprompter speech at the onset of the pandemic, which caused some problems internationally.

Couldn't or chose not to, but regardless. Well, that's, you know, yeah, touche. Yeah. So, you know, so we've got the three debates. We've got the one vice presidential debate, which I'm just going to go on record saying, sweep all you want. That one wouldn't matter. Nope. So we've got the three debates. We've got the one vice presidential debate and then no other reasonably foreseeable big events other than possibly a late October surprise on a vaccine announcement. Which this year in particular, anything that's happening in late October, you're going to have such a real percentage of ballots already in. Right.

And they're going to be the ones most heavily favoring Biden so that the people who are left were your voters anyway, if you're Trump. Yeah, I mean, I would love for there to be a vaccine by late October. There's also just the practical reality that there might be an announcement of a vaccine coming next month, or, you know, I can imagine that sort of thing. I don't know that we're six weeks away from a vaccine hitting the market. So let me throw out one possibility and get your reaction to it. And

then we can move on to the incredibly exciting and fascinating and amazing world of campaign finance. Listeners, Just if you're driving and you're not wearing your seatbelt, buckle up. So here's the other one. The Durham probe nets three significant indictments on October 10th. Good Lord. Who's he inviting though? I don't know. I'm just, you know, I'm spinning out, spinning out a thing. Well, let's see. Well, maybe three is ambitious. Feels very ambitious. Okay. There's a significant indictment on October 10th that is going to send the entire right side of the media spectrum into an absolute frenzy about Obama, Biden, Obamagate, Russia again, blah, blah, blah.

Does that make an impact? Yeah, probably. I think that would increase turnout among Trump voters. Right. By a material amount? Potentially in some of these states. You're looking at Florida seniors. Could that turn some Florida seniors who were going to stay home? Yeah, I could see that. But again, it'd have to be a major indictment that everyone hears about that's meaningful, that's tied somehow to Obama-Biden. For instance, indicting Jim Comey, I am actually not sure that would make a huge difference.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I mean, considering that there's a strong argument that Jim Comey is one of the reasons why Donald Trump is president to begin with. Now, let me just be very clear. Not in a million years do I think Jim Comey is getting indicted for anything, nor could he be, et cetera, et cetera. I'm giving an example of someone who would be a household name, but not relevant. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or Brennan, which, I mean, I don't think these things are going to happen. But if they did, I'm just trying to imagine sort of the major that some of the things could really, truly move the needle.

So let's move on. So I want to push the how to commit voter fraud aspect this to later until so that we get the guts of the podcast in before we're banned on every major platform. So let's move on to campaign finance. I love campaign finance. Yes. A really interesting extended piece in the New York Times about the state of the Trump campaign team that Trump campaign war chest, indicating that it has spent a giant, giant pile of money to get to this moment and that it has may have less money for the stretch run than anticipated. As you read that article, I've got I've got sort of two questions about it. One, did anything about that article surprise you in any way or did you read that article, I've got sort of two questions about it. One, did anything about that article surprise you in any way, or did you feel that as you were reading it that there had been, that the New York Times was sort of missing any part of the strategic

calculus? That's question number one, and then I'll save question number two for later. So I remember back in 2012, something that the Obama campaign did that was surprising to everyone is they ran a ton of television in the late spring of 2012 against Romney, really defining who he is. And that had never been done before. You save your money for those last 60 days and you blow it out. and it turned out to be strategically brilliant of the obama campaign because basically then they didn't need to run a campaign for the last 60 days they had to find mit romney's out of touch so when the 47 thing happened that was it and by the way that's similar to the biden strategy here by the trump campaign uh you know set it up as if he has any stumble that he can't be president and then wait for the stumble it It hasn't happened yet, but it could. And that was what the Romney thing was. He's out of touch. So all they were waiting for was him to say one out of touch thing and he handed it to them. So that's all to say we do have

precedent for blowing a ton of money in a very smart way that ends up looking back to be just a brilliant use of early money spent. And that's what the Trump campaign is arguing that they did, was during coronavirus, they were bleeding out, and so they were spending a ton of money sort of propping up what, you know, as the president has said, against the fake media and being attacked so much. Right.

There was a couple problems with that in my view. One, it didn't work, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't worth trying, by the way. And I guess you can't run the opposite of what would have happened if he hadn't spent the money, but nothing in the polls says that that money was helped. Right. That being said, it doesn't mean you don't try.

If they could have prevented the bleeding, they would be in much better shape today and it would have been worth spending the money. Just because your strategy doesn't work doesn't mean it's not a strategy. to. And even the Trump campaign acknowledges that's not what the money was going to, even though they sort of like in one breath say it is what it was going to. It was going to fundraising. So when you look at small dollar fundraising, it can cost 80 cents to raise a dollar. And it can cost a ton of money to find new donors. And look, if you get a new donor and they invest in your campaign, even if they invest $5 in your campaign, they are far more likely to go out and vote. So you are doing more than just raising money. You're getting a new voter who feels that they've committed to the campaign. So again, I'm not saying that that's a strategically stupid thing

to spend money on. But of course, the point of raising money in general is to have money to spend on the campaign. So if you've spent all your money raising that money, you're not going to get enough people to win an election through that. Yeah. Who are committed to voting for you. And two, and maybe this is me being cynical, And two, and maybe this is me being cynical, those donor lists are worth a lot of money after an election. And so one can't help but wonder whether there's a huge incentive to spend a billion dollars, David. That's what we're talking about here. A billion dollars creating the most valuable donor list in history. You know, I have enough experience with nonprofit fundraising, years and years and years of

experience with nonprofit fundraising, which is different, but related to campaign fundraising. Totally. Building a list is expensive. Milking a list is lucrative. Yep. And, you know, those two things exist side by side. And there's actually, you know, going back years and years and years ago from the advent of direct mail. Now you've moved a lot more of this online, but direct mail still exists. There are actually, you know, places like the Leadership Institute and others that were training conservative fundraisers would generate charts and graphs that showed you if you invest X and direct mail now, it might be a loss leader.

And then it might be a loss leader for a while, but then eventually the numbers just take hold and you have basically a money generating engine. And I agree with you completely. When I looked at that, I thought, ah, list building. They were in the expensive part of list building there. And spending hundreds of millions. And for three years, it looks like. They did it from the day after the election. It's called prospecting, like gold, you know, like prospecting for gold.

And so they've been prospecting for new donors for three years. It's a very, very expensive thing to do. But in theory, they could hit that list and basically turn on the spigot and have all this money coming out in the last 60 days. it and have all this money coming out in the last 60 days. But they haven't turned in their August numbers, which is very suspicious because the Biden campaign was only too happy to announce theirs. So we don't have the August numbers. We don't have the cash on hand numbers. That's odd. And of course, as you get closer and closer to election day, the money becomes less valuable because there's fewer things you can do with it. Right. So there was an aspect of this that I thought was interesting that, you know, campaigns file extremely comprehensive disclosures that outline all of the different ways in which

the money is spent. And this is, you know, a lot of these disclosure requirements are backed, not just by civil law, backed by criminal law. For example, one of the multiple reasons why Michael Cohen is in jail is related to the Pornstar hush money payout scheme and campaign disclosure rules. Okay, so the campaign has disclosed a giant pile of expenditures, but interestingly enough, there is a disclosure in there that is just pulling it up. There's a disclosure in there that's fascinating that essentially takes a giant chuck of money and removes it from scrutiny. Yeah, basically they send $200 million to an LLC. You disclose the fact that you spent the money on the LLC, but you don't have to then say,

disclose anything about how the LLC spent the money and who the LLC gave the money to. This is, you know, tale as old as time when it comes to campaign finance loopholes and goes to my, you know, I can do a whole song and dance on money is like water. It will find all of the cracks and all of these campaign finance laws. Every time they come up with a new one, the money finds a way like life in Jurassic Park. Yeah. And so it's $227 million funneled into an LLC where essentially the trail

goes dark on this money. You don't know how that $227 million is spent. Now, this is something, an FEC complaint was filed against the Alexander Ocasio-Cortez campaign for very, very, very similar behavior. This is stuff that happens. It happens on a five-parts basis. And if we're going to, heck, Sarah, let's just do this. If you're going to do a voting fraud 101, I'm going to do a grifting 101. And this is grifting 101. Now, it could be the case that that $227 million was spent entirely on the up and up. It doesn't, just because it's moved into the shadow world does not mean by necessity that is being misallocated. I'm not, I'm not going to say that.

I don't, it's in the shadow world. I don't know. But one of the things you'll see with campaigns and nonprofits and nonprofits like universities, like nonprofit advocacy organizations, is they will hire LLCs, they will hire outside corporations to essentially conduct part of the operation of the institution. And sometimes those LLCs or outside corporations have similar, some of the same individuals involved as are involved in the nonprofit. So a person who is, say, a senior executive in the nonprofit might be a senior executive in the LLC. senior executive in the nonprofit might be a senior executive in the LLC.

And they might could say, well, look, if you look at my form 990, I only made $50,000 from the nonprofit. Look at the sacrifice that I am undertaking. Well, wait a minute. What about that $4 million line item to GriftCo LLC? Well, I don't have to disclose that. This is all over the place, Sarah. Yeah, it's incredibly common in campaigns, especially what you're describing as multiple revenue streams for individuals, where you get a minimal salary from the campaign directly, but then you also run the direct mail and you run the media buy. So you're getting kickbacks from both of those. And that's not going to show up, uh, exactly on the report. Here's the problem. Every campaign has to do this to some extent, you know, you're going to pay your law firm for legal fees. Your law firm, uh, pays a printing, um, printing shop to print briefs. Well, all that's going to show up on the FEC report

is that you paid the law firm. The law firm then is not going to have to report that they paid an outside printing shop to print briefs for the court. Well, we don't care about that because you paid the law firm. We're assuming that included in what you paid the law firm would have covered printing fees

and insurance for the building for the law firm and all the other bills that the law firm has to pay. So that's on one end of the extreme. And then you have the grift end of the extreme. And then for most campaigns, it's something in between. You know, you may not want to disclose that you're spending money to do opposition research on your own candidate. And so you're going to run that through a top organization that then hires an opposition research organization to do that. So that way, these reporters and it's people's jobs to go through every line of those FEC reports, but it's getting less and less valuable to do so because campaigns, basically anything that's remotely interesting, they're putting through another organization. So the days where you would

say like, oh, this campaign spent $400 on Chick-fil-A. I mean, those are going to be gone soon because there's no reason to have that on your FEC report anymore. Instead, you hire someone to buy the Chick-fil-A for you, basically. It's not good. I am, in general, in favor of no-limits, full-disclosure-type campaign finance systems. Virginia, Texas, a bunch of states do this right now. But you have to have actual disclosure. And that's what's tough. So are you saying that if Trump ran the porn star payments through an LLC called Hushco, then we wouldn't be, Michael Cohen might be in jail for less time? Well, maybe, maybe.

All right. Well, so shall we move on to voter fraud? Oh, one other piece on the election law front. Okay. So speaking of gray areas, there's this other lawsuit that's been filed against these media pop-ups. Oh, yes, yes. Why did I, I, thank you.

So here's what, it's almost the exact same idea, just applied in a different area of campaign finance law, which is you don't like the news coverage you're getting? By God, start a news organization. This would run through a PAC, not the campaign itself usually, but it's the same idea. And you start this news organization and does that now get, do they need to file as a covered entity under the federal election commission rules or are they covered by the first amendment because now they're a news organization? And again, huge gray area here because right now the FEC says that, you know, you're covered, meaning you need to file with the FEC if you are paid for by a political entity, campaign, or candidate, and your purpose is political and not news gathering. Well, David, let's say that you're

not getting, you know, directly the money from the campaign or candidate. That would be, no one needs to do that as part of it. But I mean, let's talk about any news organization right now. Is their purpose news gathering or is it partisan? And do we really want to be making that distinction with our election laws? Yeah, that is, it strikes me as opening Pandora's box. I mean, an awful lot of news organizations are intentionally what you would call either their pure opinion outlets or their opinion journalism, their journalism from their partisan press. I mean, you know, one of the things that is a lot of folks don't realize is that

this sort of idea that there's such a thing as a mainstream media and that mainstream media is supposed to be like this, basically like the umpire at a baseball game or, you know, the referee at a basketball game was kind of a short-lived artifact in America. I was just going to say, it was relatively novel to begin with. Yeah. And sort of a Walter Cronkite, you know, World War II type invention that certainly didn't exist at the turn of the century and definitely not before that. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, for years and years, for the typical pattern of American life was the partisan press. I mean, you know, you can sometimes see sort of legacies of that in

the names of newspapers. Like there are papers that have like the name Democrat in them. And why? Not because they were more for democracy. They were Democratic papers, you know, and this was, you know, this was actually a big problem, Sarah, in the run up to the Civil War was the existence of the partisan press and how the partisan press was stoking anger and fury and fear and rage, particularly in the Confederate States. And so- And we see how that turned out. Oh, didn't that turn out well? Yeah. So we have had this partisan press for a very long time. And, you know, to say that election rules can tamp that down, look, I recognize as well as anybody that partisan press has negative consequences on

American life and culture. But there's also such a thing as the First Amendment. And I sense some First Amendment alarm bells going off here and that's why I don't think that a complaint against these sort of partisan pop-up entities is going to ultimately go anywhere. Right, so look, I agree. If there is a media outlet, quote unquote, owned or controlled by,

which is the operative language in the FEC statute, owned or controlled by a political party, operative language in the FEC statute, owned or controlled by a political party committee or candidate, okay, fine. But as long as their money is not coming from a political party, or sorry, they're not owned or controlled by a political party committee or candidate, you know, both sides are able to do it. Both sides are doing it. You know, the complaint refers to a memo. So the outside group is called ACRONYM. And they had a memo out that said, we are launching a for-profit digital media company building out online news properties in seven battleground states. Democrats are losing the

media war online to the Republican Party and the Trump campaign, and it lays out the plans for it. It's for profit, David. And they're doing it in battleground states, as you would expect someone who is partisan to do. But again, like, so what? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, this is where, you know, some historical perspective really helps. And this is where you know some historical perspective really sort of really helps um and this is where some public civic knowledge can really help it's uh and i'm aware on the right of you know far more uh shall we call it interesting media websites that run much closer to the line than this and are not publicly anything. And you can basically pay

to have your story put on those websites. Hmm. So it's not the... So the news site is not owned or controlled by a party or candidate, but the story is paid for by the party or candidate. Yeah, there's an interesting financial tale to be told once we emerge from some of the morass that we're in now in right-wing media. So I just don't see how courts are possibly going to

adjudicate these things without just saying bright line, owned or controlled by a party or candidate, anything else as just has to be First Amendment protection. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It strikes me that the value, I think the actual intent of filing a lawsuit like this is, many times it's not to actually win the case. I mean, you litigate the case in good faith to pass Rule 11 requirements, but the actual goal is to highlight the partisanship of the targeted newspapers. It's to put them in the news cycle as being just democratic operative owned and democratic operative operated to discredit them. So this is a complaint at the Federal Election Commission in matter of

Courier Newsroom. I will be watching it closely. The FEC doesn't do much anyway, but just in case they do. Let's take a moment and thank our sponsor, Gabby Insurance. We're all looking for ways to save money, especially now. When's the last time you looked at how much you're spending every month on car insurance, on homeowner's insurance? Now's the time to check out Gabby and see about getting a lower rate for the exact same coverage you already have. Gabby takes the pain out of shopping for insurance by giving you an apples to apples comparison of your current coverage with 40 of the top insurance providers like Progressive, Nationwide, and Travelers.

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Oh my gosh. Like I'm actually legit thinking Twitter is gonna like yank this thing now, but no, no. Well, I have a sense of where this is going. So take us down this road, Sarah. So last week, President Trump, all these headlines flew around

about how he had just encouraged his voters to commit voter fraud. I want to read you what he said. And then I actually do want to have a conversation about how to commit voter fraud and lots of things about it. So here's what he said. On your ballots, if you get the unsolicited ballots, send it in and then go make about it. So here's what he said. On your ballots,

if you get the unsolicited ballots, send it in and then go make sure it counted. And then if it doesn't tabulate, you vote, you just vote. And then if they tabulate it very late, which they shouldn't be doing, they'll see you voted so it won't count. So send it in early and then go and vote.

And if it's not tabulated, you vote and the vote is going to count. And you can't let them take your vote away. These people are playing dirty politics. You know, I'm not saying that's the most clear statement in the world, but it actually, for the president, is actually pretty clear. He is not telling people to vote twice. He's saying, turn in your absentee ballot, and then if you show up to vote, they'll see you voted, and so it won't count, he says. He's not saying try to get away with something. Now, let me read you North Carolina election law. It is a class one felony for a voter, quote, with intent to commit a fraud to register or vote at more than one precinct or more than one time in

the same primary or election. This kind of gets to the heart of voter fraud, David. I think in almost every state, certainly every state that I've ever worked in, with intent to commit a fraud is in every statute. And that is why, on the one hand, I don't like it when people say, you know, well, the only fraud in our elections is 0.00003%. And then when you ask what that's based on,

it's based on convictions for voter fraud. Because this isn't like robbery. When we talk about how many robberies there were in the country, we don't use convictions for robbery. We use people who say they were robbed because their stuff is missing. Right. The problem with voter fraud is we don't have missing stuff. You don't know whether it was voter fraud or a mistake or just their signature didn't match because they had a stroke. And so we don't count that as voter fraud.

So the only numbers we have for sure are convictions for voter fraud. So, for instance, Georgia. Georgia had 150,000 people come in to vote in person after they had requested an absentee ballot. Mm-hmm. I mean, David, that would seem like an absurd number. And voter, pro-voter fraud people would say, look, that's 150,000 examples of voter fraud in Georgia. No, it's not. Because a lot of those people never got their absentee ballot, what I've called ballot failure rates, which are incredibly high, where you request an absentee ballot, it never shows up for who knows what reason.

Or they got their ballot and they decided not to turn it in because they thought they were going to be out of town, but then it turns out they're going to be here. So they're just going to go vote in person. Or on election day, they remembered that they never turned in their absentee ballot. They have no idea whether they've missed the deadline or not. So they just go vote in person. So that's 150,000 people who most likely did some version of that. Now, a thousand of those votes were counted twice, as in they did turn in their absentee ballot and then they went to go vote. Okay, now we're getting closer to voter fraud, right? Their votes were counted twice because Georgia sucks at knowing who already voted. So first of all, Georgia should have a system in place to prevent that. We have computers right now, David. This isn't back in the Tammany Hall era. There are ways to prevent that. But okay, they didn't. And you shouldn't vote twice. I was very confused as a child.

I thought if someone left their keys in their car, it wasn't stealing a car because they left their keys in the car. And my dad had to inform me about, nope, that's still stealing a car, even if the person was dumb. So Georgia was dumb, but nevertheless, you stole their car. But for those thousand people,

how are you going to prove that they had the intent to commit voter fraud, David, at trial? Right, right. How many of those are you going to charge with voter fraud? Because one can imagine, and I'm going to use North Carolina as an example here, because I don't remember how soon in Georgia you could request an absentee ballot. But in North Carolina, the ballots are already out. So I get my ballot, you know, today. I turn

it back in next week. I put it in the mail. And then 45 days from now, I don't remember that I did that. It was not a memorable part of my day. It's been 45 days. I'm just not sure. And, you know, I just assume that my state has a system whereby like they'll know that I voted. And it's certainly not my intention to vote twice, but I do want to make sure that I vote. I voted in every election since 1960, and I'll be damned if I'm not voting in this one. So I go vote.

That person cannot be convicted of voter fraud. They did not have the intent. I mean, you put the state in a tough position because in theory, the state could launch in a voter fraud investigation of 1,000 people and could obtain emails, obtain phone records, and try to see if someone said, hey, Jim, I really want Trump

to win. I'm voting twice. And if they found that, yeah, you can pursue voter fraud. But the state's resources and ability to do that are pretty limited. And so what they end up doing are they end up often pursuing the low hanging fruit or the people who their fraud is obvious or brazen. I mean, their intent was obvious or the fraud was, although they didn't announce intent, the fraud itself looks from the facts pretty brazen. And that's one of the reasons. Let's go through some of those uh first of all i want to walk you through wisconsin pennsylvania and florida absentee ballot so voting twice is hard uh meaning like most states actually do have a system and even in georgia like only a thousand people slipped through the cracks that was outside the margin of any race in georgia for this election. So not to worry, Georgians, everything was fine. Okay. Wisconsin, in order

to get an absentee ballot, you need to provide a copy of your acceptable photo ID with the request for the absentee ballot. That would be pretty hard to fake a whole bunch of licenses. So you basically need a whole college fake ID system going. They exist, Sarah. They exist. That's right. And then you would request those. And then your signature, of course, must match that signature. Then you have to have a witness signature.

This would be pretty hard. Pennsylvania, registered voters can apply for a mail-in ballot online with a valid Pennsylvania driver's license or photo ID. Then you place your ballot in the secrecy envelope, and then you put the secrecy envelope into the official envelope and be sure to sign the declaration. Florida, you need your name, address, your date of birth, and your signature. By the way, if they find that your signature does not match, they will notify you, and you have two days after the election to come back. Now, why do I mention all this?

Because this guy wrote a story in the New York Post about how he commits voter fraud. Mm-hmm. I read this. My eyes just rolled into the back of my head. Okay, first of all, yes, he committed voter fraud. No question. He has acknowledged he has committed a crime.

And he's like, this can happen anywhere, and they can steal the presidential election. No, dude, your system for committing voter fraud sucked. And honestly, if you had done it just a little bit more, you would have gotten caught. Here's his system. So, you know, there's the inner envelope and the outer envelope and then the ballot inside. Well, it's he was smart enough to know he couldn't fake the signature and he couldn't fake the outer envelope because there's a whole bunch of security stuff on that. Sorry, the security envelope.

So instead, what he did was have a steam system in his house where he steamed the outer envelope. Then he steamed the security envelope and he had printed ballots. And he would then take out the ballot that that person had done and put in his fake ballot. That is voter fraud. It is illegal. But boy, is that hard to do at scale. And if you did it only in one precinct, the numbers would start to look screwy and they would notice the numbers. There's a reason that almost every voter fraud prosecution is at a very small city council, county sheriff type level. Because yes, it's pretty easy to steam open some envelopes and fake, let's call it, let's be generous, let's call it 200. You're

going to do 200 of these and they take like 20 minutes a piece. That's actually quite a bit of time and quite a bit of risk, by the way. Yeah. Quite a bit of money, quite a bit of money to pay someone to take that risk money that could go to other things. And especially at these small elections, it's not like you have a billion dollars to spend on this. You've got, you know, some tens of thousands of dollars to spend on this. tens of thousands of dollars to spend on this. Yeah. So it's just really hard to do at scale. Here's what is easier. And that is, so in North Carolina, for instance, remember they had to redo their election. So here's what that guy was doing. Ballot harvesting is illegal in North Carolina. It's not illegal in some states. What he was actually charged with was ballot

harvesting, which by itself is not voter fraud. Right. It may be illegal in your state. It just depends on the law of the jurisdiction. That's right. But there's nothing in it that says you were tampering with ballots. But if it's illegal in North Carolina, we can assume he probably did it for some nefarious reason. And here's what I believe he was doing. There's some evidence he was collecting unfinished ballots and then actually filling those out. Like, yeah, that's ballot tampering. That's bad. But again, hard. You have to convince someone that their ballot, which they haven't marked yet, they need to give to you and that you'll mark it. Like, there's not that many people that are going to do that. No. Okay. But in ballot harvesting,

do that. No. Okay. But in ballot harvesting, in theory, what you can do is collect all the ballots from an area that you know is really heavily for your opponent and throw away those ballots. And you're going to throw away some number of your guys' ballots. You don't want to do it in a purplish precinct, but you know, go to a precinct like DC or something where, you know, it's an 80% vote, even though DC doesn't matter. So you need to find precincts in states that do matter. And then you throw away all those ballots and you just take some of the loss for your guy. Okay. I guess I see a problem there, but not, you know, not that many voters are going to give their ballot to a total stranger. And if you go by, basically what happens is that eventually the way that a bunch of these get caught. So for instance, in Texas, this guy sent in 600 applications for absentee

ballots for real people. Well, then the state of Texas sends you a nice little thing that says, you've requested an absentee ballot. It's on its way. And some of those 600 people were like, say what now? No, I didn't. And the same thing happens, for instance, if they try to go vote in person

and they're told, oh, you already voted. Maybe one person doesn't throw a huge hissy fit about that. But I promise if you do that for 100 people, some percentage of that 100 people throw a huge hissy fit about that, but I promise if you do that for a hundred people, some percentage of that hundred people will throw a hissy fit and the state will say, wait a second, that's odd. That's all happening in this one precinct that all of a sudden we have people swearing on an affidavit that they did not vote absentee. They did not request an absentee ballot. And now someone has voted in their name. We're going to go find that person,

and we're going to figure out what they did. It's just why voter fraud, while everyone can say it's relatively easy, first of all, voter ID laws make it very hard. It's why voter ID laws have a pretty good effect when it comes to preventing voter fraud. In Wisconsin, you have to turn in your ID to get an absentee ballot. But even if you manage to commit voter fraud, it's pretty easy to get caught if you do it at a scale large enough to actually affect an election. It's not that hard to do it at a very small scale and not get caught, but then you're not affecting the election. Yeah, there's an interesting, so I've always thought of elections as having, there's a margin of fraud,

which is very, very, very, very, very, very small, very, very small. And then there's a margin of error, voter error, which is orders of magnitude actually larger than the margin of fraud. And we saw that, for example, in the Bush v. Corp race that to this day, only God knows who should have won that race because it was so far within the margin of error, of voter error, that we just can't really know. And the other thing is, if you want to make fraud significant, you're actually more cost efficient at just doing a legal get out the vote operation. And that is the nut of it. The amount of money it takes to convince people to take this risk is pretty large. If you go read Means of Ascent and the amount of money that the Johnson campaign allegedly was paying folks along

the border to collect ballots, it's expensive per ballot. And by the way, ballot harvesting, even in California, the state famous for ballot harvesting, it is illegal to get paid by the ballot there for exactly this reason. The incentives get pretty bad, but it also can be very expensive. Yeah, and there's this long, this legend in Eastern Kentucky that was called walking around money.

And that people would give operatives just big stacks of cash and you'd go into the hollers and the hills and you would hand out potential voters here's 20 bucks head down to the precinct and you know you constantly heard rumors that stuff spending 20 bucks for per voter would be like on the low end. And you're sitting there risking, you know, you're risking a conviction. All it takes is one person to say he paid me 20 bucks to vote. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that one of the things that one of the reasons why I have a greater confidence in the integrity of the election from it is that. To try to influence a national election through voter fraud is far less efficient and far more dangerous than trying to influence a national election through legal means.

We're just better at catching it now than we were. We have more safeguards. just better at catching it now than we were. We have more safeguards. So I'm far, I'm far, actually far less worried about outright corruption going into 2020 and mail-in ballots, et cetera, than I am the kind of stuff that tainted the mail-in ballot process in say the New York primary, the Kentucky primary, which was a whole bunch of people weren't super experienced with mail-in ballots, not doing it quite right. And if 3% of the people don't do it quite right, then in a close election, you can have a problem, as you've outlined. And that's not a voter fraud problem. That is a, I don't know how to do this problem. Yeah. And, you know, can I, a fun little constitutional question that has not been answered. What happens when a state does not turn in its electors for the electoral college? Are we then, do you need to hit 270?

Or do you just need to hit then the number of members, a majority of the members of the electoral college who have been named in time? Yeah. Now that's an interesting, that is a very interesting question. Now, one of the things that I'm less, one of the reasons why I'm less worried about that is because so many of our red and blue states, they're not all, I mean, in a close election, I mean, at an extreme level, this could be a real issue. But the vast majority of our states are kind of under, the large majority of Americans are under kind of unified one party rule now. And so those kinds of intrastate battles are not going to happen. But again, in extreme circumstances, there are people who have done election scenario planning exercises

around a highly contested close election in 2020 and have said there are circumstances in our states where you could have a governor send a slate of electors and the legislature send a slate of electors, and then what happens? So you can imagine we're at a place where So you can imagine we're at a place where sort of apocalyptic or constitutional crisis style scenarios are, for the first time in my adult life, foreseeable, even if they're not probable, if that makes sense. Definitely. Yeah. Okay. I have questions about Tenet.

Okay. I want to start with the really practical questions. Yes. Where did you go? How was the social distancing? Were masks required? Tell us about the ambiance of your experience. So I went to the Thoroughbred Carmike 20 Cinema in Franklin, Tennessee.

The Dine-In Theater, which, by the way, is pre-pandemic, was like the best place I'd ever been to see a movie. Reclining chairs, you know, all of this stuff. Great dry-rubbed wings that they would serve you with an Oreo milkshake. Doesn't get better. But anyway. Not saucy nugs. These were actual wings.

These were actual wings, not the abomination that causes desolation known as boneless wings, saucy chicken nuggets. But anyway, so it's a big theater. They only had it was one of these theaters where you have to reserve a seat ahead of time. And and so you had a reserve seat and they had mandatory spacing. So only it looked to me from the Fandango board that less than half the theater was available. And then did people have to wear a mask or because they serve food, no mask? The rule was total masking unless you're actually in the act of eating. See, I don't like that, but okay. Yeah, but that's the rule.

You can eat popcorn over two hours. Well, of course. But over the course of you're never closer than six feet to somebody. So I was never closer than 10 feet to somebody. And so I actually felt I would say 70 percent of the audience just sort of scanning did not have food at all. They were in masks. It was kind of funny, though. The guy who was sitting next to me and next is generous, I think at least 10 to 15 feet away from me. He came in and he lifted up his mask and he sucked down some Coke or whatever. And it got caught in his throat. So he starts coughing and you could hear an audible like disgruntlement through the theater. But I was right by him and I knew that he just got it caught in his throat. But he was like, oh, no, everybody hates me now. It was kind of funny. You are the virus. Okay. So next, I have heard that Tenet has audio problems or it's difficult to hear or understand.

Okay. So some people can understand Russian and Scottish and whatever accented English better than other people. I gotcha. I am not one of those people who can understand it super great, I am not one of those people can understand it super great, especially when uttered over explosions and machine gun fire. OK, so there were chunks of dialogue that you just I think you just have to see it again and just try to tune out like the chaos and bloodshed and all of that's happening around and laser in on the dialogue to get it. And there was like big background music or, you know, even if they're on a ship and they're in the ocean, Nolan makes it a total audio visual experience. So you're hearing the ship just, just crashing the way it's crashing while they're talking. So yeah,

there were some, there were some issues. So that seems that on the one hand, I've been told I must see it in theaters, but on the other hand, that makes it sound like I might enjoy watching it at home with subtitles. Yes to both. Okay. So maybe both. Yeah. So no, go ahead. Go ahead. So I did not like the movie Inception. What am I going to think of Tenet? Okay, first, we have to deal with the Inception piece of this. I didn't like it. It was beautiful.

It was lovely. I just, like, I found the plot kind of boring. Okay. Okay. Okay. But like, I loved Interstellar. Okay, all right. We're cooking with Diesel now. All right.

I'm wondering what movie it's more like, if that makes sense. Let me put it this way. And Dunkirk, I've watched Dunkirk a couple times now. Let me put it this way. And Dunkirk, I've watched Dunkirk a couple times now. I certainly liked it more the second time I watched it. And I liked it more than Inception.

But Interstellar is my favorite. So I would put it on complexity, more of an Interstellar. On sort of like understanding what just happened here, more of an interstellar, on sort of like understanding what just happened here, more of an interstellar, on sort of the visual majesty of it, more of an inception. Okay, I like the visual majesty of inception. That wasn't my problem with it.

Yeah, but I will tell you this, you'll walk out of the theater and you'll say, I got it mostly yeah but I need to think I need to think about this and there's this moment very early and and it's in the previews so I'm not giving away a spoiler where one of the scientists who's involved in sort of explaining what's happening says don't try to understand it, just feel it. And it was like, when you get that, like, I don't need to know all the nuances. Once I get the guts of what's happening, it's super cool. But then if you're the kind of person who says,

oh, I'm now putting together the jigsaw puzzle of the scene from 45 minutes ago, I'm now putting together the jigsaw puzzle of the scene from 45 minutes ago, which you can do. You can do that. You can go, oh, yeah, okay, this is fitting. Sometimes you'll lose the very next thing that happens, which you have to then fit 10 minutes later. I'm not going to like this movie.

No, you're going to like it. You're going to like it. I'm basing it my Christopher Nolan rankings because I'm leaving out to like this movie. No, you're going to like it. You're going to like it. So, and actually, so I'm basing it, my Christopher Nolan rankings, because I'm leaving out The Dark Knight, which was by far his best movie to me, because he doesn't seem to have ever made another movie like that. Mm-hmm.

And I think that was because he was taking a story that already existed and Nolan-ing the story. Yeah. So I'm not counting that. I just want to make clear, though, that The Dark Knight is the best, but of the sort of his, I think Interstellar is the story. Yeah. So I'm not counting that. I just want to make clear, though, that The Dark Knight is the best, but of the sort of his,

I think Interstellar is the best. Yeah, I'm not going to like this because I don't... When I go to a movie... Let me rephrase. I love documentaries. I like learning new information. I do.

I like good documentaries, yeah. Yeah, I like nonfiction books. I actually don't get very into fiction books. So this is all part of my personality. When it comes though to a fiction movie, I'm not looking to put together a scene from 45 minutes ago, like a jigsaw puzzle. I like plots that move forward in time

and where characters have meaning and purpose. I go to the movies for a movie experience, not a, like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't just, this already sounds like Well, okay. So can I, can I make the case for this movie on that basis? Yes. Can I make the case for this movie on that basis? Yes. Okay, so John David Washington, the lead, and Robert Pattinson, the co-lead, are really good.

Washington is awesome. He's awesome. I mean, he's so good in this movie. And Pattinson, who annoyed the heck out of me, and I'm just about to, I'm going to admit, go ahead and admit, I saw the Twilight movies, but who annoyed the heck out of me in the Twilight movies, loved him in this. Absolutely loved him in this. I think the two guys are really, really good. The female lead is really interesting. She's 6'3". She's 6'3", and they

make this really interesting choice where, you know, normally when you have these shorter action lead male stars, you don't notice the height disparity. You notice the height disparity. So, you know from this movie that she's tall. And so anyway, she's very good. I think that the actors are very, very good. And the relationship between Washington and Pattinson really evolves in an interesting, very interesting way. So I thought all of that was really good. But look, I'm Nolan.

I'm like, I'm pro-Nolan. I have not gone to a Nolan experience that I have not, that was really good, but look, I'm, I'm Nolan. I'm like, I'm pro Nolan. I have not gone to a Nolan experience that I have not a really enjoyed the heck out of it. And B thought a lot about it afterwards. And tenant is no exception to that. No, I don't put it in the Pantheon the way I have dark night, dark night rises. Um, my, my Pantheon for him is Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk. Yeah. I think those movies just, and I loved Batman Begins,

but Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises just go to a whole different level. So I don't put it there. I put it more where I put Inception, which is super memorable, great time at the movies that I can't wait to see again. That's where I put it. But not like life-changing, like, you know, the Dark Knight movies. I mean, come on. Like I put the Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises in my top five of all time films. So. Okay. Well, this, uh, Scott really wants to go. And so I think we're going to try to find like an afternoon when other people won't

be there, et cetera, et cetera, leave the brisket at home. So we're, we're making plans around it, but I think I'm going to be annoyed for how much planning we're going to have to do. And then I'm not going to like the movie. But as this, the, as the scientist said, don't try to fully understand it, just experience it and you will not be disappointed. And then think about it after. Then think about it. But I have to end with one last question, Sarah.

Are you still disgruntled? I'm actually really curious to see if people are writing like, I can tell you were disgruntled. Don't do the podcast when you're unhappy with David. It's not as fun. Wait, whoa, whoa. Hold on. Time out. Unhappy with David? I thought it was Caleb this whole time. Caleb is a perfect angel and has never done any wrong.

Oh, please. Okay. All right. Now I'm disgruntled. Okay. So, well, thank you all for listening. This has been Advisory Opinions. And please, again, go to Apple Podcasts. Please rate us. Please give us five stars and leave us a nice comment. We really appreciate it and helps us out a great deal. And go check out thedispatch.com and please subscribe to The Sweep. And if you become a paying member, you get Sarah's follow-up weekly newsletter to The Sweep, The Mop-Up, which I still think should have been The Vacuum, but...

David's only pitching my newsletter to you guys to make up for my disgruntlement. I know. Well, I started that right off the bat. I know. It was impressive. I knew what you were doing and I appreciated it nonetheless. Well, thank you guys for listening. This has been Advisory Opinions and we'll be back later this week. Thank you.