No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump encourages his fans to commit voter fraud. Because of course.

Episode Date: September 6, 2020

Trump encourages his supporters to vote twice and commit voter fraud, and gets caught making vile comments about US military members. And Brian speaks with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about whether Americans are buying Trump’s coronavirus dismissals, his insistence on fomenting violence in cities, and how Michiganders’ voting rights are being protected in a state that Trump won in 2016 by only 10,000 votes.Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CAhttps://www.briantylercohen.com/podcast/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about Trump encouraging his supporters to vote twice and commit voter fraud and getting caught saying some pretty vile things about American service members. And I interview Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, where we talk about whether Michigan voters are buying Trump's coronavirus dismissals, his insistence on fomenting violence in American cities, and how Michiganers voting rights are being protected in a state that saw Trump win in 2016 by only 10,000 votes. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Leave it to the guy who has spent all of four years railing against imaginary voter fraud to then encourage voter fraud.

So here's where we're at. Trump was in North Carolina for one of his mid-pandemic rallies that definitely won't have any consequences, and he said this. 600,000 people could vote by absentee in this state. Are you confident in that system? Well, they'll go out and they'll vote, and they're going to have to go and check their vote by going to the poll. voting that way because if it tabulates and they won't be able to do that. So let them send it in and let them go vote. And if their systems as good as they say it is, then obviously they won't be able to vote. If it isn't tabulated, they'll be able to vote. So that's the way it is. And that's what

they should do. I don't like the idea of these unsolicited votes. I never did. It leads to a lot of problems. They've got 11 problems already on very small contests, so I'm not happy about it. At the same time, we're in court on a lot of it. We're going to see if it could be stopped. But send in your ballots, send them in strong, whether it's solicited or unsolicited. The absentees are fine. We have to work to get them. You know, it means something. And you send them in, but you go to vote. And if they haven't counted it, you can vote. So that's the way That you should vote by mail and then you should go to the polls to check on your vote. And if you don't see it, you should vote in person too.

Now, there are a few problems here. The first problem, as you might have guessed, is that this is voter fraud. This is the literal definition of voter fraud. Like, we've been hearing for years out of the Trump camp about these insane conspiracy theories when it comes to voter fraud. that that three to five million undocumented immigrants voted in California. Trump said the only reason he lost New Hampshire was because out of staters drove in and cast ballots. He said the only reason that Republicans lost the midterms was because people would, and this is a direct quote, go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt,

come in and vote again. All of this is like the stuff of an OANN fever dream. They are so desperate to make you. believe that voter fraud is happening, that they're trying to convince us that people are like putting the fake Mr. Potato Head glasses with the nose and mustache on to sway the results of a federal election. Meanwhile, the guy just told his supporters to vote twice. He said vote by mail and then go on over the polls. The only way this could be clearer voter fraud is if you just said, go do voter fraud. And of course, what came after was the usual parade of Republicans

following along behind Trump to say that, in fact, yes, he was right, and this is completely normal, and no, not illegal in the slightest. So first we had Bill Barr. It sounds like he's encouraging people to break the law and try to vote twice. Well, I don't know exactly what he was saying, but it seems to me what he's saying is he's trying to make the point that the ability to monitor this system is not good. And if it was so good, if you tried to vote a second time,

you would be caught if you voted in person. That would be illegal if they did that. If somebody mailed in a ballot and then actually showed up to vote in person, that would be illegal. I don't know what the law in the particular state says. You can't vote twice. Well, I don't know what the law in the particular state says, and when that vote becomes final. Is there any state that says you can vote twice? Well, there's some, you know, maybe that you can change your vote up to a particular time.

I don't know what the law is. I'm not going to offer. He was saying test the system. Well, you know what he's saying? Why are you asking me what he's saying? He doesn't believe in the mail in voting. You're the Attorney General of the United States. Why does it?

Yeah. This is the Attorney General, the top law enforcement official in the United States of America, pretending that he'd have to check on the individual state before he could say with certainty whether voting twice is illegal, as if there is any individual states who are voting twice as legal. And then after Bill Barr, we had Kaylee McAnney. The president is not suggesting anyone do anything unlawful. What he said very clearly there is. make sure your vote is tabulated, and if it is not, then vote.

Basically, when you get a absentee ballot and you send it in, there are poll books, and it is recorded that you have tried to vote, that you have, in fact, voted. And if you show up at a polling site, they look at the poll book and say your vote's been counted. He wants verification. Democrats want a whole new fraudulent system of mail-in voting, never tried before in American history. And what Democrats are saying to you is trust us, but don't verify. And her thing was that polling locations would have a polling book that would confirm whether your vote had been received. But here's the problem.

There are almost a dozen states that don't even begin counting until after the polls close. So how could you tabulate those votes? What about states where ballots are still counted after election day so long as they're postmarked in time? How do you tabulate those votes? You can't. Meaning that you're going to have these Trump-inspired vigilantes putting on their election security capes and taking matters into their own hands. And then they'll cast that in-person ballot because Donald J. Trump told them to on the TV. And then that'll be the last vote they

cast for a really long time because voter fraud is a felony. And even after their prison sentences, depending on the state that they live in, felons are often disenfranchised, meaning that they might not even be able to vote again. Like, the extent to which Trump's gut instinct is to screw over his supporters is mind-boggling. Just think about some of the examples. between pushing hydroxychloroquine even after it was found to have caused cardiac issues to telling people to inject disinfectant which led to a nationwide spike

and calls to poison control centers around the country to holding rallies in the middle of a pandemic which led to his own advisor Herman Kane dying like I can go on and on but the point here is that there is nothing and no one that Donald Trump isn't willing to sacrifice to win some arbitrary point Like any normal person would see that hydroxychloroquine isn't performing well in trials and cut your losses before you inflict any more damage.

Just like any normal person would be able to acknowledge, okay, yeah, maybe don't vote twice. But Trump is only led by his ego. So because he said it once, then that's his position forever. He's pot committed and he will defend that position, even if 100,000 of his own supporters get arrested on voter fraud charges because every single hill is a hill worth dying on for him. So with that said, Trump's malignant narcissism aside, let me use this opportunity to offer this. First, and I don't know who needs to hear this, don't vote twice.

I found that not voting twice has been a really great way to stay out of jail. I would recommend everyone try it. Second, if you're voting by mail, you can track your ballot in 41 out of 50 states. So if you get your ballot and fill it out and stick it back in the mailbox with plenty of time before November 3rd or if you drop it off in a drop box or even if you bring it in person to the Board of Elections Office, you can go online and track your ballot in every single state except for a few, except for Maine, New York, Connecticut, Hawaii, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Every other state you will know when your vote is tabulated. It's easy, it's fast, it's not a felony, so please take advantage. Okay, next I want to talk about reporting from the Atlantic, outlining comments reportedly made by Trump

where he called American soldiers who died in war losers and suckers for getting killed, that he wanted wounded veterans to be kept out of military parades because, quote, nobody wants to see that, that he needed to know who the good guys were in World War I, and that he didn't understand why the U.S. would intervene on the side of the allies, and that he didn't want to lower the flags to half staff to honor John McCain after he died. And the White House came out right away in full force to deny this story. Trump even took to Twitter to deny having ever called John McCain a loser,

which I got to say might have carried just a little more weight if Trump wasn't on camera, literally calling John McCain a loser in 2015. And I said, somebody should run against John McCain, who has been, you know, in my opinion, not so hot. And I supported him. I supported him for president. I raised a million dollars for him. It's a lot of money.

I supported him. He lost. He let us down. But, you know, he lost. So I'd never liked him as much after that because I don't like losers. There is no better way to find out exactly what Trump does than to wait for him to deny something. Because he will divulge every single verifiable detail in his denial. The best validation of the truth is Trump insisting that something is a lie.

And aside from Trump's own denials, things actually got worse for him when other news outlets began correct. robberating the Atlantic's reporting. And that's including Fox News. Fox's Jennifer Griffin confirmed basically all of the reporting, which, of course, led to a Trump Twitter meltdown demanding that she be fired. And even Mark Esper, Trump's defense secretary, who was in France during one element of the Atlantic story, said, quote, President Trump has the highest respect and admiration for our nation's military members, veterans, and families. This is why he has fought for greater pay and more funding for our armed forces. Yes, there are a lot of platitudes, but there's no denial there. At no point does Esper say that any of the

Atlantic's reporting is false. So either he just forgot to deny the claims at the heart of this scandal, or there's nothing to deny. And look, beyond the corroborations and the lack of denials, let's just use common sense here. Of course the reporting is true. I mean, come on. Trump has attacked Goldstar families. He refused to do a single thing when he found out that Putin placed bounties on our soldiers' heads. He used the military as a front to siphon money into his failing Turnberry resort in Scotland. He abandoned the Kurds in northern Syria, which deprived our troops of one of their top allies in their fight against ISIS.

He skipped a World War I ceremony because he didn't want to get his hair wet. The guy concocted a disease to avoid going to war that then miraculously disappeared. Like we could go on forever. Donald Trump's disdain for our military isn't just unsurprising. it's well documented it's common knowledge so the only way trump calling the troops suckers would be more believable is if he followed that up with a rant about low pressure showerheads so with that said the question here isn't so much did he say it it's does it matter like i know a lot of people are listening to this and thinking yeah of course he said those things of course he's depraved

the problem is that no one cares on the right and i would normally tend to agree. Typically, if you're the president and you oversee the deaths of 190,000 Americans and you're able to keep your supporters, those people are probably going to stick with you. Like, going to go out in a limb and say that if locking kids in cages didn't steer them away, they're pretty much a lock, right? But here's the thing. This isn't migrant kids in cages. These are American troops. These are, you know, the red-blooded Americans that Trump panders to. And so while the idea of a migrant from Guatemala getting apprehended at the border and put in a detention center might not move a military mom or dad, hearing Donald Trump referred to their son or daughter as a sucker for risking his or her life might just be a different story.

And the fact that the White House came out so hard and so fast to try and discredit this story is proof of that. Trump made a statement at like midnight the day that this reporting dropped. That's not an accident. You got to figure that if they're panicking, it's for good reason. And that is because Trump getting exposed for having attacked a beloved subset of his own base and then having that corroborated by his own favorite pet network can actually hurt him. And in an election where every vote counts, where we're trying to overcome margins of just a few thousand voters and a few swing states, having to deal with a scandal like this could make a difference.

So I get that the inclination is to shrug off these scandals because what would normally end another politician's career is a Tuesday for Donald Trump, but we're less than two months out from an election. And what this does is serve as proof that not only can't Trump govern, but that his character is enough to push people away. Maybe you voted for him for his personality. Maybe you voted for him because of his agenda. But he has proven that they're both liabilities.

The unemployment rates at 10%, 13 million Americans have lost their jobs. We're coming up on 200,000 coronavirus. deaths, and now he's attacking American military members, the fact is that there is no upside with this guy. And things like this are only giving people permission to finally be able to acknowledge that. Next up is my interview with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She was one of Trump's earliest targets for the cardinal sin of having taken decisive action against coronavirus.

And now, in retrospect, we can clearly see that, in fact, her leadership did save lives. So with the U.S. death toll approaching 200,000 Americans, there is no one better qualified to discuss Trump's ongoing failures with this pandemic. All right, today we've got the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. Thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, glad to be with you. So let me just say, first off, good on you for taking Trump's woman from Michigan attack and publicly laughing at it because Trump only thrives when he knows that he pushes people's buttons, but when you laugh at him, he shuts up pretty quickly. So I hope you can inspire some people out there. You know, this is how you deal with Donald Trump. Well, I learned a long time ago,

you know, that you can't give bullies oxygen. And so when he used that phrase to describe me, I mean, people in Michigan started making t-shirts about it. I wore one, you know, on national television. I mean, it's just we're going to use this as a badge of honor and keep doing what we do. That's it. Okay. So. So let's jump in. I want to touch on the Republican Convention and the fear mongering that we heard from this idea that Biden's going to abolish borders to eliminating the Second Amendment to blocking people in their homes. And I want to contrast that with what I perhaps naively assumed was the more important issue of the pandemic sweeping across the country. So as someone

from the Midwest, from a swing state, from a state that Trump won in 2016, can you give me an idea of what your constituents are more concerned with? Well, I do think that he is using all of these. I don't even know if we call him dog whistles anymore, right? It's using a megaphone to, you know, appeal to people's fears and anxieties. And there's a lot of fear and anxiety right now, right? We're in the midst of a global pandemic. We still, after months in, don't have a national strategy.

Over 180,000 people have lost their battle with it. that number will surely be a lot higher by November. We've got millions who are out of work who are struggling. And so there's a lot of anxiety. But to feed on that anxiety and to turn Americans on one another is, frankly, I just think it's unpatriotic. We do have an enemy. We've got a war. It's a public health war.

And the enemy is a virus called COVID-19. And the virus does not care if you're from Michigan or Ohio and where that. state line is. The virus doesn't care if you're a Democrat or you're Republican and where that partisan line is. We've got to be in this together. And I think from day one, they've never appreciated that. They've never, you know, focused on that. And they've turned this into a political conversation where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris offer a plan to fix that the health crisis, which in turn is what will address the economic crisis we're all feeling. And until we do that, that it's going to continue to be painful and hard.

And that's why I think we've got to give people a plan and show them that there's a reason to feel hopeful, show them there's a reason that we should all band together in this effort and move forward in a way that improves people's lives. But I'm concerned about it because we know that the fewer people that come out to vote, that's the story of 2016 and they're hoping to replicate it. And that's why we've got to get people registered. We've got to turn them out. We've got to show them Biden and Harris have a plan that'll fix these progress.

And you know, the irony of what you said of this being a war is that Trump has been so forthright in saying that he's a wartime president. He's desperate to be a wartime president. And yet when he's actually faced with one, I mean, all we've seen was denialism from the beginning. And then when he had the opportunity to do the work that was necessary to contain this virus, to follow the pandemic playbook that was put in place by the Obama Biden administration, he opted not to do that. And instead throw Hail Marys and push hydroxychloroquine and confused people by talking about injecting disinfectant. And then now we have remdesivir and, you know, whatever other, you know, miracle cure he's cooked up. And I think that's why people are moving so quickly over to Joe Biden's

camp because, because, you know, he's been, he's been forthright and saying that he has a plan to tackle this pandemic. And I think that that's what people need at this time. I also think that, you know, it's a question of hubris over humility, right? Leaders, crises reflect leaders' true character. And in the midst of all of this, we have to recognize, I recognize I am not an epidemiologist. I am not a public health expert. So I seek out the best of the best and try to learn as much as we can. People's lives are on the line here.

This is not a game. This is not just an opportunity to win an electoral game. this is about our standing in the world. This is about the health of our families and people. This is about our economy. And at every turn, hubris has dictated the action as opposed to humility. And I think that's one of the things that resonates from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is that they're real people. They want to get it right because they see how many people have suffered when we're not focused on the right things. I think Joe Biden is particularly well placed for this moment because of anybody running, nobody can appreciate and understand loss better than, better than Joe Biden

can. And so, you know, I think at a time when, like you said, you know, we're coming up on 200,000 dead Americans. And a lot of times this just gets lost as a number, as a rising death toll. But, but, I mean, these are, you know, these are family members and friends and doctors and nurses and neighbors. I mean, you know, the majority of the country knows somebody who was touched by this virus, you know, or knows somebody who actually died from this virus. So, you know, I don't think that you could have a better position candidate to understand the gravity of loss than Joe Biden. And I think, too, you know, the fact of the matter is, in this moment, there was an opportunity to rise to the challenge. And as much as I don't want Donald Trump to be reelected again, he had that

moment and didn't take it. Maybe he couldn't take it. I'm not quite sure why, but he didn't rise with this challenge. He chose rather to focus on pitting Americans against one another and stoking fear and inciting violence. I can tell you my personal experiences when the focus was turned on to me, it changed the politics on the ground. It increased the number of death threats. It increased the number of people showing up on my front lawn with automatic rifles. I mean, the whole tone and tenor changed. And it's just designed to tear us apart for the benefit of a reelection. And that's, I think, criminal. And it's unpatriotic. And we deserve better. Yeah, that's really well said. So what kind of impact has coronavirus specifically had on Michigan's

economy. Well, we have, you know, we had, we're rising very early on New York, Louisiana, Michigan. We're all in that first tranche of states that we're going through at New Jersey as well. We took aggressive steps to save lives and they were largely in a much stronger position than most of the nation right now because of the work that we did. Of course, it's come with a lot of hardship and, and big sacrifice has been made. But our, um, our account. economy is about 87% of where it was in January of this year. And so we've really bounced back. Of course, now is not a time to spike a football. We are nowhere near done with COVID-19 and it's all very tenuous. And, you know, it can change fast if we drop our guard. And so that's why we've got

to continue to fight to make sure people keep their guard up and mask up and do what they need to do to keep themselves and our community safe. Well, I think that's also a testament to your leadership because, you know, you, like you said, you were, you were criticized relentlessly. You had stay-at-home order protests fomented against you specifically for the early action that you took. So, you know, I think we're seeing the fruits of your labor right now. Well, there's no question that, you know, the states that followed the science and listen to their epidemiologists are in stronger positions. And that's not a partisan statement in the slightest, frankly, the state of Ohio. We have had robust, regular conversation. They're the Buckeye State. Michiganers,

you know, we're always rooting against Ohio State in the fall during football season. But we've helped one another. We've learned from one another. And I think that's what you want leaders to do, regardless of what party at their end, to recognize that a public health crisis means it's got to be all hands on deck and we've got to band together and get through it. So more broadly, Trump won the industrial Midwest, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, promising working class voters that he would revive U.S. manufacturing. But all four of those states have actually lost more than 16,000 factory jobs in the last year alone. His trade war has been a disaster, and he's needed to take taxpayer dollars to try and make farmers hole for the damage that he caused. His fake populism worked in 2016. Do you think it'll work again in 2020?

I hope not. I think that the lessons have been hard and they've been real and a lot of people have suffered because of this undisciplined, scattered policies that come out via Twitter. We can't compete with anyone in the world, right? We're Americans. And Michiganders, we have a robust agriculture section. We've got a robust craft brewing in Michigan and, of course, manufacturing. I mean, that's what we're known for. And yet, we know that. a tweet from the White House can dramatically undermine all of the jobs and industry in those spaces. I remember touring a brewery after one of the early tweets that, you know, impacted steel and aluminum. And, you know, the owner was said, you know, see that vat where we, you know,

ferment the beer? I guess, I don't know. You'll have to tell me if we got it right. Steel. See those cans where we put our beer, aluminum. Every tweet undermines our bottom line, threatens our ability to keep all of these people employed. And so whether you're a farmer who exports soybeans to China or Mexico, every time these policies and changes and whims happen, there are real costs to it, to people, to industry, to jobs. And same goes, of course, for manufacturing. One of the things that I think became so stark in COVID-19, especially early on, we couldn't get enough swabs. We didn't have to do the test. We couldn't find N95 masks.

We were competing against one another because the White House didn't have a national strategy. And it became very clear that when the biggest producer of swabs is in Italy and N95 masks are produced in China by and large, and they're both shut down, that that is a homeland security issue on top of a public health crisis. So we got to bring manufacturing home, and that's not happened in these four years of Trump. I think that's a good segue into Joe Biden's Build Back Better program. So how do you expect this program will help Michiganers and more broadly industrial Midwesterners and the American people as a whole? Yeah, well, I do think that, you know, American manufacturing, American jobs, American, you know, security is all.

contingent on us maintaining our strength in these parts of our economy. It's absolutely essential. And Joe Biden gets that. You know, he gets it. That's why, you know, Elizabeth Warren, I'm a big fan of hers. She had a plan for everything. Joe Biden does too. And I think that that's something that informs the work that he does, is thinking about what the normal person in society is confronting every single day. How do they get into a job that pays them well? That ensures that when they show up, they've got the protections in the workplace that they need. And also knowing that their kids are going to have a path to a life, that's even better than the one that the parent has. The build back better plan is focused on green energy jobs, right? So that's a two-for. That's a

climate change tactic. And it's also a way to get people to work, making investments in the area that we know is so crucial right now to our globe and to the health and future of our kids. And is. So I think that there are a number of aspects to the plan that he brings. But buying American, supporting American manufacturing is something that inures to all of our benefit. And I think something interesting, too, that we should remember is, you know, Trump spent so much of his time on the campaign trail pandering to co-workers and basically dying industries when what he could have actually done to help the American people, knowing that coal is going away anyway, is pushing people, especially in more vulnerable areas, especially in areas that are

depressed because they're reliant on industry into a growing sector, into the sector of renewables. And instead, you know, he's just kind of delayed the inevitable. And A, given other states or regions that have, you know, taking quick action to adopt renewables, the advantage, and B, given other countries, the advantage. Right. Absolutely. And I think I think the leaders that really get things done or what's that can show you a path forward not just appeal and tell you more of what you what what they assume you want to hear but who can show a path forward and i think your point is really important that um to go and pander and tell every audience what they want to hear um and then not to really have a plan for a transition for a path forward for um looking toward

the future, you know, is, I mean, his, his slogan is literally make America great again, you know, there's nothing, there's nothing forward thinking about it. Well, there's, there's not. And I mean, I think that when you saw the convention last week and saw that they didn't have a platform and can't answer the question of what does four more years mean, what does it look like? It tells you that this is a campaign driven around hubris and one personality as opposed to in a future for Americans. So I want to transition over to speaking about Kenosha and violence more broadly. And this is, you know, this is at the risk of letting Trump dictate the terms of the conversation

because clearly he would rather talk about violence than than coronavirus, for example. But I do want to touch upon this issue and not pretend that it doesn't exist. So Trump's campaign has made it clear that they want the violence because they think it'll benefit him politically. Kelly Ann Conway said it. Laura Trump said it. What are the implications here of the president? of the United States, using the biggest bully pulpit in the world to foment violence in American cities? Well, it's incredibly dangerous. It's incredibly scary. There's not a leader prior to

Trump, who I think use that pulpit, that bully pulpit and the biggest megaphone in the world to encourage Americans to attack one another. And that's really what it boils down to. I understand that there are people who maybe are don't understand what the demonstrations are really about and we need to educate there's no question and we need to make sure people know that equity and and fairness don't come at someone else's expense it actually strengthens the fabric of our country when when that is the reality um and i they're feeding into that fear that if someone else gets a fair treatment or an equitable opportunity, it's going to nerd to someone else's detriment.

It's so hard to explain. And yet I saw it written somewhere that just because you say we've got to protect the rainforests, doesn't mean you're against all the other forests. It means you recognize that there is a unique threat to this particular type. And that's what Black Lives Matter is all about. And that's why this conversation around policing and, frankly, COVID-19 is so important. The disparate impact of historic policies and practices that have made it, you know, inequitable for an obvious, you know, population in America means we all got to be a part of fixing it. Yeah, and I've said before, you know, with the phrase Black Lives Matter, it doesn't, you know, there's not a

limited amount of mattering to go around, you know? So I think that was a really good point that you brought up. After Trump saw how much he could milk Portland for campaign footage, he actually threatened to send federal troops to Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Detroit in your state. So three major cities in three swing states, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan. Is he even trying to hide the fact that politics are driving his actions here? I don't think so. I mean, it is very clear that that's what is driving a lot of what's coming out of the White House right now. It's about November 3rd and it's about helping himself. And I think that we're all being played for fools when that kind of conversation is what's

occurring. And so I fortunately think the American public is smarter than that, but we can't make any assumptions about turnout, about translating Joe, Biden's policies into what it really means for people at home at that dinner table and we've got to continue to coalition build. I think one of the most optimistic things that I've seen over the course of the last six months because there's been a lot of tough stuff that we've had to confront as a nation is seeing these diverse, enthusiastic, positive groups of people coming together around equity and coming around ensuring that, that, you know, people of color are safe.

and respected and have opportunity and health in this country. And that's a source for great optimism. I joined one of the marches that was put together by a number of ecumenical leaders. Lots of different faiths came together and said, we want to show our support. And I went to, you know, even though I thought it was important, we mask up, you know, we're still in the midst of this pandemic. We went because my kids were saying, we got to go.

We want to be a part of it. You know, so these teenagers and young, people and groups of different, you know, people who have struggled under this administration are coming together. And that is powerful. I think that's a good segue into voting in general. So what steps has Michigan taken to protect voting rights ahead of the election? So a few things. First and foremost, I'm so grateful that in 2018, voters of Michigan elected a number of strong women to take on all of our executive office. So Secretary of State is Jocelyn Benson, our Attorney General is Dana Nessel, and they are really leaving the way.

But one of the other things that we did is make it easier for people to vote from home. We amended our Constitution in 2018. And so this is really the first election that we've had this tool, and I think a lot of people are going to avail themselves of it. And thank goodness we did it because none of us knew we'd be in the midst of a global pandemic when we adopted this. But we made it easier for people to vote. So we're holding the Trump administration accountable. We are one of many states that is suing the Trump administration around the efforts that they have to undermine the postal service, despite the representations made by the Postmaster General. We have reports coming out of our post offices and pictures coming out of them where machines are being dismantled.

And so we're taking them on, but we're also supplementing our clerk's work in terms of ensuring that they've got dropped. boxes. So if people request an absentee ballot, which they'll be going out in a couple of weeks, that when they get it, if they have any reservations about it getting in the mail on time, they can drive up and drop it off. And a lot of our clerk's offices, and we think that's going to be another important tool where there are going to be so many efforts to undermine it. I do know that more than 10,000 ballots were rejected in the primary because they were postmarked by Election Day, but delivered after 8 p.m. This is a state with a margin in 2016 of just over 10,000 votes. You know, that was the difference between a Trump victory and a Hillary

Clinton victory. So what steps are being taken to ensure that voters aren't disenfranchised in that arena? Yeah. So you're asking a really smart question. I wish I had a great answer for you, but I have a Republican legislature, both chambers of my legislature, a Republican-controlled. I would love to get a bill to my desk that says if it is postmarked before election day or on election day, it counts. But under the current law, it wouldn't count unless it's received on election day. And this legislature is not going to make it easier for people to make sure their ballots get counted. And so that's why we are getting these ballots out soon. That's why we're encouraging people as soon as they come out, fill them out, and turn them in. And if you want to drop them off,

we'll have drop boxes available. Unfortunately, with the legislature that I have, it's just probably very unlikely that we'll be able to authorize anything postmarked to count. So we've got to work around that. Yeah. Okay. So I mean, we know that, you know, we hear the date November 3rd, but in actuality, I mean, you know, like you said, as soon as you get your ballots, it should be, it should be no later than mid-October, like you said, drop boxes and even bringing them to the elections offices themselves. Yep. It's important for people to know that. You get your ballot. You can you can take it into the clerk's office and drop it off. We know that it's taking in some cases two weeks for domestic mail within a state to get to its destination. And that's why it's

important that people know that this is an option that is available. Awesome. Well, Governor Whitmer, thank you so much for your time and for your leadership, especially, you know, in the face of so many attacks by the president. Thank you. You're doing great. Best of luck to you. Thanks again to Governor Whitmer. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, interviews captured and edited for YouTube and Facebook by Nicholas Nicotera, and recorded in Los Angeles, California. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Feel free to leave a five-star rating and a review, and check out Brian Tylercoen.com for links to all of my other channels.