Advisory Opinions - Voting in a Pandemic

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, joins David and Sarah to discuss how you pull off an election during a pandemic. Rachel makes the case for why states need to start thinking about how coronavirus may impact November now, and expand absentee voting and drive-thru voting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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take the best from one side of the world and mix it with the other and you can shop that whole world right here in our aisles find it all here with more ways to save at real canadian superstore you ready i was born ready. Welcome to the Advisory Opinions Podcast. This is David French with Sarah Isger. And we have a guest for you today. As I'm going to say, as you'll hear me say many times over the course of this podcast, this is a guest that I know and Sarah doesn't know, even though I thought Sarah knew everybody. But you're going to really, really appreciate this guest, Rachel Kleinfeld.

Introduce her in just a second. Sarah, she knew her stuff. I mean, you told me, you sent me her article, and I was like, yeah, this is the perfect topic to talk about non-in-person voting heading into November, especially on the heels of Wisconsin. But I thought we were going to have sort of a, you know, male voting good, in-person voting bad in the age of pandemic. And instead, I just feel like I experienced a PhD level class in voting behaviors. And she's just so, so knowledgeable. Also, I love that she's in New Mexico by way of Alaska. So we get this really

Western perspective and feel. And she's coming to us from this adobe house, which looks beautiful. And she, I mean, spoiler alert for the end, she's cooking with green chili. Well, and not to have any intra-dispatch rivalry. But so Jonah and his Remnant podcast had Lyman Stone on. And I would urge you to listen to all of that podcast. It was absolutely phenomenal. This podcast is every bit as good as the Lyman Stone podcast, but on a different topic, mail-in voting and the integrity election in 2020, in November. And it was fantastic. So without further ado, let's hear from Rachel. So as listeners know, Sarah knows everybody, but I know some people too.

And one of the people I know is my friend Rachel Kleinfeld, who's a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance program at the Carnegie Endowment, a member of the Bipartisan National Task Force on Election Crisis. More importantly, a person I've gotten to know really over the last almost four years now, as I've been working with Rachel with a group of people, we're trying to do something about the problem of polarization in the United States. And I've gotten to know some awesome people from every corner of the American ideological spectrum. And Rachel is just one of the most thoughtful, interesting, informed, knowledgeable people I know. And we're going to talk about something that a lot of listeners have been asking us about.

And that is, what do we do about an election in a pandemic? Specifically, what do we do about what specifically is mail-in balloting a viable alternative to all of us gathering at once. And I don't know about you guys, but at my polling place, I don't think I've ever seen a volunteer poll worker less than 70 years old. And so God bless them. I mean, God bless them for doing it. But I don't want to expose them to a potentially deadly disease. So what do we do? And Rachel had a piece in National Review which had a two-part solution, drive up voting and mail-in voting. And before we go into questions, Rachel, why don't you just sort of first welcome and why don't you lay out what you said in National Review, make the case, and then we're going to respond with

a Trump tweet. Absolutely. So first of all, thrilled to be here, David, and see your podcasting bunker there. And in terms of the arguments, I study democracy all over the world and look at how you build the system and how you make the system work globally, and then what that means for America. And what you see globally is two things, that pandemic can cause really low turnout, just extraordinarily low turnout in elections, like in Spain and France. It can also cause illegitimate elections because of that low turnout affecting certain voters. Clearly, the elderly are going to be real scared to come to polls and possibly other groups. And so when you have certain groups that are systematically kept from the polls, you get less trust. America right now, which has always been a very high trust country, trust is one of the just lifebloods. I call it the immune system of democracy.

If you have trust in your democracy, your democracy can function. America is at historically low levels of trust right now. And so when you have an illegitimate election that affects your trust, it really, really hurts your democracy. So we were looking at what do you do about that? And mail-in and drive-through are two obvious solutions. It's not a brand new solution. So I think a lot of people in the media have just heard about this. And so suddenly it's like, oh my God, there's mail-in voting. It's a brand new thing. There's been incremental change in our voting system ever

since the founders. So already you have almost a quarter of our voters voting by mail. That was 2016. You had, I think it was 23% of voters voting by mail, 33 million ballots by mail. So not brand new. We're talking about what do you do with the other three quarters of the system. But America didn't even have a secret ballot until 1890. We didn't have direct elections for senators until about then, too. So we've been changing our voting system over time. We introduced absentee voting for military overseas, which is a jag who served overseas. You've probably done that kind of voting.

I've been overseas. And vote by mail started 20 years ago in Oregon as the first state to fully adopt it. But since then, you have about five states that are all by mail from Democratic Hawaii to Utah, very Republican Utah. Alaska, where I'm from, is almost half its voters vote by mail. So this has been pretty incremental and it's been pretty state-based and pretty voter demanded in terms of how it's moved forward. And I think that's good. And what we're talking about now is just taking the next step to ensure that in a COVID-19 election where people would have to crowd together. And as you said, the poll workers are old.

The majority of poll workers are over 60 in our country and a very large plurality are over 70. You know, it's all the little old ladies from the League of Women Voters who are coming out. And as you said, you know, God bless them. I don't want to get them all sick. And so we're talking about a one-time change that would allow voters to alter their voting situation bit by bit. And if it works well, some states might keep it, but if they can make it a one-time change, it does not have to be a long-term thing. So, Sarah, you have a Trump tweet, right? I do. The president's actually tweeted several times about this. He's brought it up at the daily

briefings. Let me run through a couple of them. So at the briefing, one thing that was funny was he started by saying, I think mail-in voting is horrible. It's corrupt. The reporter said, you voted by mail in Florida's election last month, didn't you? And the president said, sure, I can vote by mail. And the reporter said, how do you reconcile that? And the president said, because I'm allowed to. But more to the point, perhaps, he has said, absentee ballots are a great way to vote for many senior citizens, military, and others who can't get to the polls on election day. These ballots are very different from 100% mail-in voting, which is, quote,

ripe for fraud, in various all caps for some of those words, and shouldn't be allowed. He also said they had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again, referring to some of the money that Democrats had tried to put into one of the coronavirus bills. So a couple of questions in here. One, I think it would be helpful. You talked about the five states that do all mail-in, but perhaps running through the other, where mail ballots stand in this country. Some require witness requirements. Some have no excuse absentee. And then to get to some of the fraud point and then the partisan point, which I thought you made pretty well in your article as well.

Sure. There's a lot to unpack in those tweets. So, you know, Trump has voted absentee. Mike Pence has voted absentee. Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary for Trump right now, has voted absentee 15 times over the last 15 years. So this is not uncommon. That's partially because mail-in ballots are actually quite common in our country. So as I said, in 2016, you had about a quarter of the country voting by mail. Um, you've got five states that are completely vote by mail. Now completely does not actually mean a hundred percent. What it means is that I, I am, um, from Alaska, but I lived recently in Colorado. Colorado is one of these vote by mail states.

And what it means is that everybody gets mailed their ballot. In some places you might mail it back. In some places, you might drive it to a little box that looks like a post office box and you drop it off. And then there's always a couple of polls open for people who just really want to go to the polls. You know, some of them have disabilities or you actually get the sticker in the mail. So, you know, you get the sticker either way. Well, that answers my only objection. You really need the gold star right on your chest. Someone can pin it on. So it's basically about flipping how many get absentee versus how many are in person.

You're flipping it. So five states all vote in. There's five more where voters can request a permanent vote by mail already. And these are big states, California, New Jersey, also states that lean left and right. Arizona does it, Montana, Minnesota. So those five are really close to being able to make the shift. They already have these permanent vote by mail roles. They already do a lot of their elections online.

Sorry, through mail. Online, totally different thing. 20 more states do some votes by mail. So Alaska, where I'm from, Anchorage, which is the biggest municipality, does vote by mail. That's 40% of all the voters. New Mexico... And when you say they do vote by mail, do you still mean it is automatically mailed to you, or you need to request it? It's automatically mailed to you in certain elections, so not all of them. So in New Mexico,

where I'm from, where I live now, a lot of municipal elections are all vote by mail. So those 20 states, that's how they do it. Some elections are entirely by mail, some you go to the polls. And so they have the machinery in place to do it. So what you're really talking about is about 20 states where they have absentee ballot requirements. So you could, every state has absentee ballot, but where you either have to have a witness or a notary and you often need a reason and COVID-19 is not a reason. So in those 20 states, you're talking about a pretty major change. In the majority of states, you're talking about a fairly minor change. Should I go on to fraud? Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a couple of issues on the fraud point. One is the integrity of the

ballot itself. And then I think a lot of people who are, so there's sort of this subculture on, mainly online, anytime you're going to say subculture nowadays, you're often going to then say mainly online, that is really steeped in the sort of the hyping of vote fraud as a problem in this country. And they're going to zero in on two words, ballot harvesting. So to talk about mail-in ballots and the different measures to ensure their integrity in general, and then if you could kind of move on and talk about what is ballot harvesting, because I guarantee you not everyone listening knows what it is. And it is not, and that is not something that automatically goes along with a mail-in vote

system. That is, in other words, you don't get ballot harvesting automatically along with mail-in voting. So anyway, that sets it up. Go. Okay. Well, so first of all, you know, people are absolutely within their rights to be concerned about their ballot. It's our most sacred, it's the most sacred thing we can do as citizens is to vote. And so we need our votes to matter and be counted. There's a lot of things that can interfere with that. And fraud is only one of those things that can interfere with our ability to vote. But I think we should just address head on that people should be able to vote without fear of fraud. It's really important. Mail-in balloting is really not

much more subject to fraud than what we already have. And in fact, in the states that have been doing it the longest and the most, it's much safer than a lot of what we already have because they've worked on systems to make it safer. And if other states started now, they could also work on the system. So let me just say that since 2000, when Oregon started voting by mail, they've cast about 100 million votes in Oregon. 12 cases of fraud have been proven. So 12 out of 100 million. I'm not a math major, but that's really it's really small. But in fairness, to push back on that a little, you mean proven in a court of law, which is extremely hard legally to convict in those cases. They're rarely brought because of the time and energy that it takes versus the crime itself. And B, they're really hard to convict. So to say there's only been 12 to me

is one of the least effective arguments. Fair. Since in the last 20 years, Heritage Foundation has started to collect cases of fraud. They're concerned about it. They've looked for them. They found about a thousand cases of fraud, most of them individual, out of 138 million votes. So you're just looking at these vanishingly small numbers. It's not just that it's about proving them in a court of law. A lot of these cases of fraud, a lot of the thousands, so vanishingly small amount, a lot of these cases are not systemic. So for instance, in Utah, when Utah started voting by mail, they did find one of the few systemic cases of fraud. That systemic case was that parents were signing their kids ballots when their kids were out on mission. Because so many kids in Utah, kids, you know,

they're over 18, they go on mission, their parents are still thinking of them as youngsters and they're signing their ballots. There are ways to catch these things. So in the states that have been doing vote by mail the longest, Colorado, where I used to vote, Utah is starting it now. What they have are two things to really prevent fraud, and they're pretty darn good. One is ballot tracking. That means that every single ballot is printed with a barcode. Every voter only gets one barcode. So if you are a voter and you say, hey, my ballot was lost in the mail, a new one is sent out with the exact same barcode. The machines can only tabulate one. So you don't get to vote twice. You don't get someone stealing your

vote and sending it in. There's also signature matching. Now, the best states have machines that match signatures. They have your signature on. Now, the best states have machines that match signatures. They have your vote, your signature on file. They match it through the computer. And after a couple of cases in Florida and there's another state that I'm forgetting right now, where there was, there seemed to be a kind of systemic attempt to throw out the signatures of Black voters. They started to allow those voters to say whether that was really their signature or not. So there was this kind of secondary catch where the computer says it's not your signature or a forensic expert says it's not your signature.

They get back in contact with the voter. The voter gets to say, actually, that is my signature. I had a stroke and now my signature is different or what have you. So they're really good at catching these things. In Utah, the reason they knew there was this parental problem was because the signatures were being caught and people were actually calling the homes and saying, hey, do you know it's a felony to do this? That's the other, so you've got ballot tracking through a barcode. You've got signature matching. The third step here is that in every state that has all vote by mail, it's a felony to impersonate another voter. The fines are huge. So even if you don't get jail time, which in most states you can get five years of jail time for

this, people have been convicted and sent to jail. In Oregon, the fine is $25,000. I mean, these are serious. So this is not something taken lightly. And the cases are just vanishingly small. Now, ballot harvesting is something different. And I think we should talk about it. Ballot harvesting is happening without vote by mail. It's happening in current elections, and it's happened in the past. It's also rare, but it happened in North Carolina's ninth. That's probably the most recent in 2018, where a Republican operative was gathering absentee ballots. And that's what harvesting is, when you have somebody going around gathering ballots and changing them or influencing the voters. It's happened most frequently in nursing homes. And you can imagine why.

You've got a lot of folks who are perhaps influenceable and someone goes in and there's been special laws passed in Texas, for instance, bipartisan laws passed specifically about nursing homes and not influencing those people. If we did vote by mail in this election, first of all, you're not going to get random folks walking through nursing homes, collecting ballots. It's just, that's the one place you are not going to get anyone doing ballot harvesting. It's just not allowed right now. Nursing homes are on lockdown. It could happen. The best vote-by-mail systems, which there's still time to set up, check for systemic things like that. That's why we caught the one in North Carolina. It's why we caught one in New York 40 years ago, which is when we started becoming aware of the issue.

So basically, the earlier you start moving your state toward this, the better you can put systems in place that catch, you know, signature tracking, the ballot tracking, and systems that basically computerize, look at are there anomalies. One of the big anomalies that they find with ballot harvesting, for instance, is people vote for one part of the electoral ballot and not the rest. So, you know, you might see a lot of votes for county commissioner and not for president. That's weird. That just doesn't happen. Or for president and nothing down ballot, that also

tends to set off the computers. So these are things that are pretty easy to deal with. They're extraordinarily rare. I feel like I've talked a long time, but you also mentioned the partisan issue. And I do think that it's worth addressing this partisan issue because it's a really large misconception. Yeah, there's been this assumption, and David and I have touched on this, that even if it's true, I don't find it to be a good reason that this system would favor one party over another. And that, you know, increasing turnout always favors Democrats and decreasing turnout always favors Republicans. And by definition, mail ballots will increase turnout.

Therefore, to the president's point, Republicans will never win again. So that's a reason we should try to suppress turnout during a pandemic. Wait, which... I don't... Yeah, I mean, I don't find that to be an okay reason for anyone to be saying, but to your point that you've made, it might not even be true. Yeah. Sorry, David, did you have? No, I was just going to say, I was going to echo what Sarah said, to say, well,

Republicans should be opposed to more people voting because if more people vote, Republicans lose is not a compelling argument to me at all. It should be that if more people voting because if more people vote, Republicans lose is not a compelling argument to me at all. It should be that if more people vote and Republicans lose, Republicans need to think through their message to the more people who vote as opposed to trying to suppress the number of voters. So that's not a persuasive argument to me or Sarah, but there are an awful lot of people who that's a pretty persuasive argument that, hey, if more people vote, then we're going to have, you know, we're going to lose our country. You know, I think and I think the flip side that they would argue is those people who were increasing turnout are low information voters. High information voters

were already voting. So what they're really saying is they don't want to keep increasing low information voters who are simply showing up and hitting the, you know, all Democrat ticket, but don't really know what's going on. And, you know, I think that's the most generous explanation. Yeah, that's that's the most charitable. So I agree with you about the basic point. Democracy should be about enfranchising voters, not winning by picking your voters. And I know David, I know, is a sports fan. And that's not how we play team games, right? You don't say, oh, my team always seems to lose this game. So I'm going to change the playing field until my team wins this game. Not how you play, you know, football, baseball, and pick your sport. Unless you're my Houston Astros,

in which case that's exactly what they did. Okay, fair point. New Mexicans would feel good about an outlier argument for Texas. We've had a very long standing rivalry. But you're also right that it's not true. And this is the part that I find the most interesting, is that there's this assumption and a lot of voting behavior has to do with, a lot of voting rights behavior has to do with really strategy on both sides of the aisle. And let's just be honest about that. But first of all, there's very little proof that it would happen differently. That would be the case in general.

But in this particular election, it is particularly likely to be untrue. So this particular election, the people least likely to come out to the polls are elderly voters. We know that elderly voters lean Republican. And so making it scary for them or impossible for them to vote, if they're in nursing homes or what have you, is particularly bad for Republicans. But we also know that low information voters tend to be angry at both parties, and they tend to want anti-establishment candidates. And the Knight

Foundation just did this big poll of low information voters, where they found out that actually increasing the vote in general will help Democrats, as Democrats have been assuming. Nationally, they'll win the popular vote by more, but they'll probably lose the electoral college. Because in swing states, Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, more non-voters say they want to vote for Trump. And that's not at all surprising. They want the anti-establishment candidate. Non-voters tend to want the anti-establishment candidate. It's why you got 12 percent of Bernie Sanders voters in 2016 voting for Trump in the general election after voting for Sanders in the primary. So we know in Florida, elderly voters using vote by mail and absentee voting in 2016 helped that state stave off a real challenge to their state governorship and helped Republicans in that state by very high turnout. So it just doesn't make sense from a strategic argument for this particular election. So I love that you, in your piece, you know, there's sort of this like,

look, vote by mail isn't all bad regardless. But for this specific election is really the argument that you've tried to be most persuasive on. So if I can dive into some of the logistical problems that people are pointing out. So Greg Walden in Oregon says, quote, I mean, we have a statewide database in my state of Oregon. It took a long time to get that up and perfected so that people couldn't vote from multiple counties or register in multiple counties. And there's also people who have said that there will be a problem on the back end, meaning we won't have the results of the election on election night as people now expect to do. Although certainly to your historical point, that's a new expectation, all things considered. Yeah. So basically what we're talking about, there's 30 states that are pretty close to this already. And for them, it's a fairly incremental change. And then you've got about 18 to 20 where

this is, it's a big change. And we need to be honest about that. And I think we need to be honest about how far they can move. I don't think that those 18 states can move entirely to vote by mail. What you're talking about is just changing the proportion. Now, a lot of this is going to be done by the voters for these states. So even if a politician makes no decisions at all, that's what happened in Wisconsin. The politicians couldn't figure out what they wanted. There was a big gridlock. The courts were all over the place and changing the rules right up to the very last minute. And what you had was a million extra voters requesting absentee ballots. And the state wasn't ready for it. A million extra voters was five times the number of absentee ballots

they'd had to deal with before. And so suddenly they're inundated. They're not ready. They don't even mail out about 10,000 ballots, 9,000 some odd. So people don't even have the ballots. So that's what's going to happen in some of those 30 states, whether or not we do any preparation. So we might as well do the preparation because those states, you don't have the, you don't have a witness and you don't have an excuse. You can, you can ask for an absentee. I just asked for one last week, actually here in New Mexico. So those states have to prepare. They really don't have an excuse. They know that the voters are going to start doing this. The other 18 states are going to be tougher.

And even them, some of them are already changing the rules and should be aware. New York is one of those states. Erie County is allowing voters to change their rules. Connecticut's one of those states. It's loosening. The hardest are going to be Texas, Kentucky. These are states where elections are run by municipalities. Each municipality has its own database.

Each municipality has its own procurement ability for ballots. That is a tough problem. It's not impossible, but it is tough. And it means that they need to start now. And it might end up being municipality by municipality, which isn't horrible, right? In a big state like Texas, if you have your major urban areas figuring out how to do vote by mail, and a lot of rural areas that are still doing polls, from a coronavirus perspective, there's room for distancing. You have fewer people to poll. That's not a horrible outcome,

and that's probably the outcome that we should be looking for. In terms of what they need to do, they need to order the ballots, right? There's a set number of companies that are used to printing ballots. They need to order paper. They're literally trying to gear up extra hires right now, expecting the influx. But the sooner they know how many states are going to be ordering ballots, the earlier they can hire the workers. Guess what? We have a huge unemployment problem right now. There's a lot of people who would love to go work for these companies. You know, this is not an impossible challenge. This is just a challenge of planning.

They need to order the machines, you know, and there's time to order those machines. But they need to start now. Can I get dystopian for a minute? Yes. So I'm always thinking, especially in a low trust time with high degrees of negative polarization, I think if you're going to do word association and you say, and your options are either Republican or Democrat, and here's your option. We want more people to vote Democrat. That's the word association that is dominating American politics right now. We want more people to vote Democrat. So I could easily imagine a situation where in the run up to 2020, you have blue states, which are very populous, you know, with large populations who are spending a lot of energy,

time and effort to get more people, greater access,-in, drive-through, you name it, appropriating money to do it. And then a lot of red states, and you mentioned two, Texas and Kentucky, who are not doing that. And I could easily imagine a scenario in which the vote score, the popular vote score is run up in these blue states that allow much – have greater access to voting. And the vote score and loses the popular vote, especially if they lose the popular vote by even more than last time. There's a practical part of me that says this is something that's difficult for us to sustain. Can I also add in a problem, though, that you're not thinking of that Rachel hasn't talked about either But you're, David, talking about also registering millions of new people,

which will be impossible right now. There are a lot of dystopian situations, no matter which direction you go in, right? I mean, say we do nothing. You have millions of people in 30 states requesting absentee ballots, and those states overwhelmed, not sending the ballots out, people disenfranchised, the polls not there. I mean, and what we learned from Wisconsin, it wasn't just that Milwaukee lost so many poll workers that they had to go from 180 to five polling stations. Green Bay, which is the third biggest city, had to go down to two polling stations. You Bay, which is the third biggest city, had to go down to two polling stations. They don't even talk about that really in the national news,

but it was just a universal. If you were over 60 and a poll worker, you did not want to show up to the polls. So the dystopian status quo is pretty dystopian in terms of the number of people who feel that the election is illegitimate. I think it is slightly less dystopian in terms of the number of people who feel that the election is illegitimate. I think it is slightly less dystopian to not have large voter registration drives, simply because those people aren't clamoring to vote anyway. That's why they haven't registered.

It's not a great thing. I think more people should vote. But just in terms of the legitimacy factor, if you're a low information voter and you're not wanting to vote and you're not getting out, you know, you're not doing the things you need to do, you're also probably not clamoring for the vote. David's situation, I think, is the most dystopian. I'm always going to come up with the most dystopian. My guess is that it would run even differently than that, though, David, in that the municipalities in a place like Texas probably would move to closer, more vote by mail situation. And so you'd have this highly, you know, you were saying about the COVID-19 preparations in Tennessee, that municipalities did one thing, and then the state did a different thing. I think you would see that kind of differential.

Municipalities in a lot of these places are democratic. And so if the Republicans don't get their act together in the red states, they actually might not just lose, you know, gain the electoral college and lose the popular vote, they actually might just lose lose, you know, gain the electoral college and lose the popular vote. They actually might just lose in their own states. And so I would hope that that would be a reason for bipartisanship and this sort of press to realize that, you know, you could lose in a very red state if you don't allow your people to vote more easily from home. So we have some lawsuits in some of these states, one of which I found pretty interesting. The ACLU just filed a lawsuit, I believe, yesterday in Georgia, arguing that the stamp that you need to mail in your ballot is, in fact, a poll tax and in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Wondering if you have thoughts on, again, this gets into the weeds logistically, but whether states need to pay for the postage back?

I mean, in Colorado, it was just a no postage back. You know, the state paid for it and it was just a franked letter already and you just dropped it off. You can also drop these off, right? You can have, if the ACLU prevails in this argument, which I'm not going to take a legal stand on, ACLU prevails in this argument, which I'm not going to take a legal stand on, it would be easy enough to set up these mailbox-like things. It's just that they cost money, right? All of this stuff costs money. Now, nationally, we know that, or sorry, not nationally, in the past, historically, we know that vote by mail saves states money. Colorado saves about $6 per voter. Once you've got it up and running, it saves states money on each vote. But it takes money to get it up and running. And that's why those of us who are saying this is a change that

needs to be made are asking for the federal government to appropriate money for the states to make these changes. They can order the machines, they can order the signature matching, they can do the franking, the mailing back and make it free and easy. But you can always set up drop-off locations. That's also the drive-through part of this. In some states, you know, I live in New Mexico. There's a lot of Native Americans who don't have addresses for all sorts of reasons. I used to live in Alaska where a lot of Native Americans didn't have addresses. You're going to have to have some polling stations and you're going to have to have some drop-off locations. So that none of these things seem to me deadly to the idea. What they

suggest to me is you better start planning yesterday, but definitely today. Okay, what about in Texas, the state Democratic Party filed a lawsuit just to change the absentee ballot rules so that the pandemic would qualify as an excuse. So not move to all-male, but just increase the ability to request an absentee ballot. Is that acceptable to you or not enough? Yeah, that's what, so a lot of us who are arguing that states should move, that's the kind of thing we're recommending in these states where it's going to be particularly hard. Now, that still means they need to plan. If they don't plan, they're going to end up like Wisconsin, because a lot of people are likely to request those absentee ballots. If they don't plan, they're going to end up like Wisconsin, because a lot of people are

likely to request those absentee ballots. But to say, look, COVID-19 should be an excuse. You should be able to request your ballot ahead of time, and then you should be able to mail it back is kind of the simplest change. The other change that some of those states need to make, the other two changes, one is to get rid of witness or notary requirements. Obviously, if you're sheltered in place and you're single, you don't have a witness. You certainly don't have a notary. Which Wisconsin had. Exactly, which Wisconsin had until a judge struck it down. And then by the time the judge struck it down,

there was barely time to mail them back. And you just don't want that. It just screws with the whole legitimacy of the election. And the last thing is a number of states have laws that say you can't count absentee ballots until election day. And that just slows everything down. Now, I actually think it's a good thing to slow things down a little bit. There is no reason voters need to find out on election day, you know, other than for the reporters' frantic coverage. It would be good for our democracy. I have a friend who works on the Internet, and he says what we need is more friction on the Internet, that a lot of this vitriol and craziness on the internet happens because there's so little friction. You just hit

play, you know, you just hit the button and things send out into the world. There are lots of emails I wish I had, you know, more friction on before they sent them out. Same with voting. It would be nice, especially in all these close elections our country is having, for people not to expect election day results and not to think that slower results meant that there was a problem or a cover-up or a conspiracy. Just give people time to breathe, give people time to make sure the vote counts are accurate. I see that as a feature, not a bug, in this system. The other feature, not a bug, is paper trails, by the way. A lot of these states that don't have mail-in voting or that make it really hard to do mail-in voting, like Texas and Kentucky, also have paperless machines. There's a really high correlation between the states that

have paperless machines and the states that don't allow, that make you have excuses for absentee ballots. Well, paperless machines are a real problem for hacking, for just digital problems, just glitches in the computer. You're a voter. You don't know what comes out the other side. And those glitches are real. I've had friends who work in the sort of voter assurance standpoint where they're looking at the voting machines and they find that some of those voting machines are just voting. In New Mexico, we have had all Democratic or all Republican voting. So you can just hit one button and it goes all the way down the line. And they were voting the opposite way. The machines were voting the opposite way. Big problem. But it was just a glitch. So paperless ballots are a real problem. And mail-in voting

actually helps those states to have a paper trail. So there's some positive things. To me, that's one of the best firewalls against fraud is if you have systematic fraud, not necessarily, you000, 20,000, 50,000, whatever it is, fake signatures where an investigator can go back to the actual human being who allegedly signed and say, is this you? Is this not you? It seems to me just from a logistics of fraud standpoint, not that I am, I do not claim to be an expert in the logistics of fraud. But from a common sense standpoint, the ability to affect an election at scale fraudulently when you have an actual signature that has to match another signature is very difficult,

very, very difficult for that to happen. And I feel like there's just sort of you, people say the word fraud. And as soon as the word fraud or phrases like ballot harvesting, which sound sinister, it's like you're growing your own ballots and harvesting them. That when you use those words, people, a certain part of a person's brain activates. I don't want that. I don't want that. And I think the most powerful point or one of the powerful points you make is, look, we're staring a version of a dystopian election in the face right now. Unless this thing goes away, just goes away, which we don't have strong confidence that's just going to go away. Unless this thing goes away, which we don't have strong confidence that's just going to go away.

Unless this thing goes away, we are staring a dystopian situation in the face. And by the way, in a very low trust time already. And so are you seeing any indication from some of the more reluctant legislatures? And I'm sure it's too soon after the Wisconsin mess to really make a judgment. But are you seeing much indication from some of the more reluctant legislatures that they might be willing to do something yet? Or is it just not really permeated and penetrated into that community? There's a lot of froth right now, you know, a lot of discussion, a lot, especially post Wisconsin. I'm not sure, and my guess is there's gonna be a lot of follow the leader.

I mean, as long as you've got Trump tweeting out that this is bad for Republicans, there's gonna be a lot of strategic decision making here, which is actually not strategic, in my opinion. I mean, I actually think it's shooting themselves in the foot in a lot of ways. But I'm hopeful that some people will actually look at the data. Some people will start getting their hands on this Knight Foundation study and thinking,

oh, my gosh, this could actually be good for us. Maybe we should give it a run. You know, while I prefer people thinking that the playing field should simply be level and more people should vote, I'm happy to have them make the change on strategic grounds that they think both sides think it will help them win. I would just like to see the change made, because I agree. I think we're looking in the face of an extraordinarily problematic election in a low trust society. And by the way, in New Mexico, it's the gun stores that are running out of ammunition and guns. You know, we've also run out of toilet paper, but there's runs on

more than that. You know, I'm in the West and and this could be a very volatile time if people are shut in their homes for a long time and then they feel there's been a low legitimacy election. And the stakes are quite high. And so I think for the good of our democracy in our country, but also, frankly, for the strategic thinking of both parties, there's this is a real toss up election and everybody should be moving in this direction. Well, Sarah, you know, Texas pretty well. If it looks like Houston is getting its act together on mass turnout operations. I have a feeling that Republicans in Texas will not want Houston to dictate the fate of the state or Austin. You end up with an odd situation here, which is what we saw happen in Wisconsin. And you've talked about this quite a bit. But as you get closer and people didn't prepare and then they see the consequences of not preparing and then you add in the court problems, of not preparing. And then you add in the court problems. What the Supreme Court's opinion really in that Wisconsin case was signaling was we're not going to have the courts be the ones to make

these last minute changes to the rules. You set the rules in advance, you prepare for them, and then we play by those rules. And so I think what you're talking about would make a lot of sense if I thought that that could happen far enough in advance. But what you saw talking about would make a lot of sense if I thought that that could happen far enough in advance. But what you saw in Wisconsin is in some ways the most likely scenario, which is all of a sudden it's two weeks out from election day and everyone realizes this is a mess and then tries to fix things. I mean, if you remember for the week before Wisconsin, it was actually the DNC and the Democratic State Party versus the Democratic governor versus the Republicans. And it was only then the day before that the Democratic

governor sort of switched sides and joined with the rest of the Democrats. And that's where the court stepped in and was like, look, sorry, you're just too late. You can't, you know, he didn't have the legal authority to change it on his own, first of all. But second of all, we're not going to change the absentee ballot rules, you know, with hours before the election. And so, yeah, what you're saying would make a lot of sense. But legally speaking, I think it's far more likely that you end up with another Wisconsin. So the Wisconsin was a perfect example of a snafu for all who know. I'm not going to say it on your podcast. Situation normal. But what you're talking about is the Purcell rule, which is there's this strong preference that judges shouldn't change election rules close to the election day because it confuses voters.

That seems to me a very good general rule. good general rule. In Wisconsin, it was even more messed up than you're talking about because a local judge did, a state judge did change the rules. So they were partially changed. The Supreme Court accepted part of the change. So if I was a voter in Wisconsin who wasn't paying a huge amount of attention, because for instance, I was dealing with being recently laid off, dealing with children at home, trying to, you know, go grocery shopping with my gloves on and my new homemade mask that I sewed, right? Like a normal person, you're like, wait, the judge said now we can put our ballot in now and the state legislators are even, you know, so it was not the Purcell rule because the judges had already changed things. And then you were just

talking about how much are you going to allow that change? Basically, right now we have seven months. Seven months is a lot of time. It's not an endless amount of time, but it's enough time that if you started laying out the rules and you started prepping voters and you started calling your ballot companies and so on, you could make this happen in an orderly way. What I fear is what you fear, that for strategic reasons or for gridlocked reasons, depending on your state. Now, an awful lot of states, I should add, are trifecta states. That means that the governor and the legislative bodies are all one party or the other. That's nearly all states right now. I can't remember the exact number, but it's a vast majority. And so you wouldn't see a Wisconsin situation. What you would see is more strategic reasons rather than snafu reasons. But for strategic reasons, they say,

oh, we can't do anything. We're not doing anything. We're not doing anything. And then they change things two weeks before, and it's just a god awful mess. That seems not unlikely. And I think it's really up to voters of both parties to say, we don't want that, actually. This is our most sacred duty as citizens, and we would like our government to act in a responsible way. Now, to tell you how monolithic our state governments are becoming, there's only one state in the union after 2018 that had a divided legislature. Only one state out of 50. That's remarkable. And you're exactly right. The number of trifectas only went up in after the 2018 election. So there's a lot

of states with a huge number of Americans. I believe the large majority of Americans are living under this trifecta state government. And I mean, putting my dystopian cap on, I think you're going to see movement over the next several months that is 90 percent strategic and 10 percent idealistic. Yeah, which is why I'm pushing the reality that, you know, this is good for Republicans. We think it's good for Trump. You know, it might not be good for Republicans if Mitt Romney was the candidate. Right. If you had a more normal candidate, you're you're low. That's nothing against Romney. It's just that you're low information, low trust voters aren't going to come out for a normal candidate, but they come out for obvious reasons, we are really, really, really focused on the crisis we have in America. But this is not an American-only crisis, and you're seeing much higher death rates in parts of Europe. And what's your assessment? This is something you look at all the time. What's your assessment and what's happening overseas, especially in these countries that don't have control over this epidemic yet? So I'm concerned. I wrote a piece in the American Interest last week looking at authoritarian versus democratic countries and who was handling it better. And the punchline of the piece is that it's just not a useful breakdown anymore,

that what matters much more are things like trust and capacity of the country to organize itself, which also has something to do with trust. Low-trust societies, of which the United States is one, are doing worse. A lot of Europe has become low-trust, a lot of developed democracies, but not all of them. Italy famously has been low- for a long time. France. Some authoritarian countries are low trust, but not all. China is the most highly trusted country by its citizens of any country and has been for a long time. You can say the Chinese people are misguided or what have you,

but they trust their government by and large to the right thing in a way that we don't. And that means that their society is functioning better and is able to come out of this faster. The high trust societies, whether they're authoritarian like China and Singapore or democratic like South Korea, Germany, Austria, what they were able to do was very quickly implement measures that got a hold of the virus, quarantined, checked for the spread of it, managed to relax privacy rules, which is an issue and a real one, but they could basically move one step ahead of the virus by saying, hey, you've gotten in touch with these people who have it, you need to self-quarantine now. And by doing that, they're now able to open their economies

much more quickly. And they're not having the mass unemployment that we're facing right now. I mean, I just saw the numbers this morning. It's so upsetting and worrisome. I worry that we're not going to have any small and medium businesses anymore. I don't know how any restaurateur is going to survive. What does that do for democracy? We know globally that democracies require a strong middle class that's separate from the government. We are going to have command and control economies because we've got shortages and you move into command and control when you've got major shortages. And we're going to have so many people out of work that you create a kind of Weimar Germany situation of anger. The young people are already less attracted to the democratic system. And so I see this very worrisome set of trends globally for democracy. And I think trust is really at the heart of it. And there are ways to change it. This is not like saying, is it raining, right? This is like saying, what can we do to make change here? There's human agency involved. And there's a lot we can do to have our societies be more cooperative and more functional so that we don't, you know, imagine if China's economy is up and running, doing its thing

and not spreading the pandemic, really crucially, you don't want your economy running and everybody dying. You know, pregnant women are at risk too. There's a lot of groups at risk that aren't just the elderly, which people seem to forget. But if their economy is up and running, if Germany's economy is up and running, Austria's economy, these are major economies and America is not. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, you know, let me, let me, I was, I was talking through with somebody who's been, I was talking with somebody who's yesterday has been talking to folks in the White House and, and a lot of smart folks in the administration are seeing a lot of the same concerns you just expressed. And here's another one that I would

add on top of it. I think as this continues and the number of deaths per day is now reaching almost 2,000, which hopefully this is the peak, God willing, hopefully this is the peak. But you can't keep that up for a while without it creating a real culture change. And here's one of my concerns. One of my concerns is that as if we ease up, the people who are going to, the class of Americans who are able to work from home, who are super high information people, who are going to have the resources to sort of avoid danger are going to be doing that. And the class of Americans who really don't have the resources and means to avoid danger, to maintain, to make a living, to maintain their standard of living are going to be thrust into danger. And I feel like you could begin to see some real class tension

on that basis as well. I think that we have not yet begun to appreciate, unless by miracle we get this under control much faster than we anticipate, we've not yet begun to understand the cultural and political changes we're about to experience. I agree. I mean, that's why I brought up Weimar. And as a Jewish American, I don't bring that up lightly. I mean, I think that this is a really dangerous moment when you have those kinds of differentials. Now, we already know that the virus is killing Black people at much higher rates and Hispanics. Hispanics are being laid off at vastly higher rates and young people, people under 30, are being laid off at vastly higher rates. And poor people are also being hit really

hard. So you have a population of poor people under 30 who are already disenfranchised in various ways who are really angry at how this is being handled, that is not a good situation for a democracy. You have other people who are white, who have pre-existing conditions, perhaps, who are living in rural areas, who are facing major, you know, their cities have already been shutting down, their rural, their towns have already been shutting down for a generation. Now they're really shut down. You know, their dollar store is closed or what have you. What's happening there, you're probably seeing higher rates of diseases of despair, which were already on the rise, right?

Suicide, alcoholism, probably not substance abuse because they probably can't get it as easily. But, you know, so you're seeing hardship across different groups that are already facing so much hardship. And then you're seeing those of us who are living, you know, with two refrigerators and a freezer. You know, we live in New Mexico. I told my husband we had too much green chili in the house and we couldn't have any more green chili because our fridge was full. He bought an extra freezer. So, you know, we have an extra freezer that is now being denuded of green chili and filled with other things. We live in that kind of a house. The ability to keep ourselves safe

is much greater. And the disproportionality is, I think, going to cause, it's going to just be blatantly obvious if this continues. And a democracy can't handle that, even if there isn't violence, even if there isn't riots, the anger at a democratic system that is so highly disparate in the outcomes for its citizens means people lose faith. And that can take a lot of really negative forms. Well, that is a dark note to end on. But I do think that you need to tell us your favorite green chili recipe. So we go out on something a little happier or just your favorite recipe overall. What is the thing that you have learned to cook or really enjoyed cooking in your quarantine time with your extra freezer?

Oh, I'm a big cook. So we've been having, I just made a red chili pozole yesterday. I made a green chili pozole last week. You know, we're going through the chili of all sorts. I made enchiladas that were so spicy that even my husband couldn't eat them. So those have to be dialed back a little bit. And before this all started, I had a sourdough starter from Alaska. It's 100 some years old.

And we have been having a lot of sourdough. So, yeah, it's been good from an eating perspective, I must say. David, do you all have a favorite recipe that you've been doing? Me? Us? You know, I have to say that, so we're Southerners, so we have casseroles. And there is a casserole dish called chicken tetrazzini that my mother made that Nancy has tweaked that is spectacular. And so what Nancy does is she does, she creates a, she'll spend Saturday and she'll cook all day

on Saturday. And she just has pan or dish after dish, after dish, after dish of tetrazzinis and baked ziti's and lasagnas. And then she goes and she distributes it to her parents, to my parents, to her aunt. And so she's sort of like become a one woman logistician. And I have to say, I'm not tired of this at all because this is like comfort food from my childhood. I mean, I'm just getting warm feelings with every, every spoonful of, or every dish of chicken cetrazzini. So yeah. So what about you, Sarah? I mean, we've done really exclusively cooking over here. So, and, and we are not particularly into cooking. We eat out a lot, but it's been pretty fun. My family has a recipe for yeast rolls that is very famous. And when I've tried to apprentice under my cousin, who is, he's, you know, the age of

an uncle, but he's actually a cousin. I apprenticed several years ago. And then when I tried to do it on my own, completely fell flat. But now I've had the time to figure out what was happening. And I was able to triangulate it because his son, who is also very good at making these rolls, lives in Mexico City now, and his weren't working either. And so what I ended up figuring out was that I put a pot of boiling water into an oven set to 120 degrees for the rise because the issue was in Houston, we've got humidity and it was aiding the rise of the

yeast rolls in a way that was not happening in Mexico City or in DC. So that has been my biggest scientific and cooking accomplishment for the quarantine. That's a high degree of sophistication there, Sarah. My goodness. No kidding. I'm sending my five-year-old to apprentice with you for the chemistry lesson. I love doing A-B testing for my cooking. This is a big thing that my husband has put up with. Well, Rachel's time is in demand, as is obvious from the amount of knowledge she had on the subject. So I want to thank you for giving us an hour of your time. Thank you for the depth of research that you've done on this. It's always good to hear from people who have studied in depth on a contentious issue and really appreciate you taking the time, appreciate your dedication to really understanding this from every perspective. And I also appreciate you being the first guest on our podcast that I knew and Sarah didn't know. Huge, huge event. Great. It was a great pleasure, David. It was wonderful to see you and Sarah. And thanks so much. Bye.