Reply All - #163 Candidate One

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

The story of an election in America where everything went wrong -- bribery, hacking, ballot-stuffing. And the 17 year old kid who tried to save the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply-All. I'm PJ Vote. I feel like you could say this most years since America started, but 2020 is not a great year for people who want to believe that our democracy is still operating at 100% functionality. Whether it's Kentucky closing down 95% of their polling places right before the primaries, or Wisconsin refusing to let people mail in ballots during a pandemic, or, I don't know, Russian interference in the last election, it just feels like, elections themselves have become way more broken. And this week, we have a story about an American election where everything went wrong. Outside interference, outright bribery, a runaway populist who nobody seemed able to control. This was an election where the real question was whether, when it was over, people would even still believe in the idea of free elections at all. The election I'm talking about, of course, is the 2019 student-body election at Berkeley High School.

Berkeley High, as you probably guess, is this intensely lefty public school in downtown Berkeley. They have more walkouts than my high school had snow days. Hundreds of students walked out of class at Berkeley High School today. These kids are super charged up. They're ready to change the world. They think we're worrying about Twitter and Instagram, but right now we're doing what they don't have the balls to do. Let us march on the Capitol and demand action here in California now. Most of all them, register alone.

And while most of them are not actually old enough to vote, they take all that political fervor and they apply it to their own democratic system, their election for student body precedent. And while the 2019 election was very undercovered by the National Press Corps, it actually does. Seriously, it feels like if you look at it, you can see all the bugs and all the features of American democracy. Our political reporter, Damiano Marquetti, has the story.

The Berkeley High School election starts with an event that, if you've ever seen a movie about high school elections, will be completely familiar to you. The election convention. Thank you, candidates, for showing up to the 10th annual election convention. This is a tradition unlike. You describe the election convention? So it's in our little dark, janky little theater where the seats squeak when you sit in them.

And basically everyone goes up one by one and does like a one minute speech and then they answer a few questions from the audience. That was Rachel Alper, one of the candidates. She told me that that year, 2019, an unprecedented number of students were running for Berkeley High School office, something like 70 candidates. So today you'll be hearing from representatives for class positions as well as for school-wide positions.

This is the teacher who oversees student government. His name's Mr. V. And he calls to the stage the student who was in charge of the election. So I'm going to pass the mic over to the commissioner of elections, Robert Stern. Thank you, Mr. V. Robert Ezra Stern,

the elections commissioner. He's 17 years old. He's got this long curly hair and a baseball hat. First thing is you will notice your schedules on the cover of the booklet. A lot of five-minute recess. Mr. V&I, like your mean principal in middle school, have canceled recess. There will be no recess. You may take a break during other class presidents.

This young man who's joyfully canceling recess for his classmates, nothing about him would suggest that he would actually be a key figure in all of the scandals to come. Hello, hello. Hello. Hi, how are you doing? Good. The first time I talked to Robert Ezra, it was almost a year ago. So I guess like the first thing I'm just curious about is like what Berkeley High is like?

Was it like a typical high school where there were like different groups and camps and stuff like that? By all indications, it's a reasonably normal high school with a lot more political activism slash tension going on. But you're talking to the number one worst person to ask about that. Why is that? I am a bit of a recluse. I'm not entirely tuned into, you know, the social scene. I can point you to some people who are. In this school of would-be revolutionaries, Robert Ezra was something else entirely.

When he'd run to become elections commissioner, he essentially ran as like a technocrat. Just wanted to make things more efficient. even this varied convention that we're in. Before Robert Ezzer's tenure, it had essentially been this day-long party. There's pizza, there's costumes, all this stuff that in Robert Ezra's eyes was unnecessary pageantry. My platform was, let's not have that party anymore, or at least let's not make it so intense, because I am anti-public gathering that detracts from school instructional time. It annoys me. Yeah, without further further.

So at the do, let's have the candidates up here for sophomore class president. So at the convention that day, Robert Ezrow, of course, is running a very tight ship. He's on the stage, he's got all the presidential candidates lined up behind him, and one by one, he's calling them to the podium.

My name is Rachel Albert, and I'm running to be your ASB president because I believe that students have the power to make meaningful change for Berkeley High. Rachel's sort of a Tim Kane figure, like, very well-liked, low and favorables, but not a candidate who's defining the race. I'm a proven advocate for Berkeley High students.

For example, this year I worked with principal swing to bring free menstrual products to Berkeley High bathrooms. The candidates have 45 seconds to speak, and not a second more. I'm a committed student who has participated in a wide range of activities at Berkeley High. If they go over, Robert Ezra's tactic is to just start abruptly shouting, thank you. Thank you. And I guarantee you Berkeley High two rally days. The next two candidates in this convention walk up to the podium together. They're in black sports coats looking like interns on a citizen.

editorial campaign. Anyway, my name is Lexi Pebb, and I'm Dacia Connerly. And we're running to be your ASB president and vice president. Lexi and Dacia. They stayed up into 1 a.m. practicing their synchronized introduction. Their main campaign promise is a supply center for homeless students, but they have a laundry list of other items. I would also like to work on the bathrooms at our school, like making sure the gender

neutral bathrooms are unlocked and clean, that there are dividers in the M building boys bathroom, making sure that teachers can't take away our extra crows. credit in exchange for passive in keeping the menstrual products fully stopped, while also ensuring our restroom smell fresh instead of fishing. Deja, the girl on the left, this whole thing was really new for her. She's the only black student on stage, and she's surrounded by people who are more or less strangers to her. That's because Berkeley High, it's this huge school that split up into all these smaller mini-schools. And from talking to the students, it seems pretty segregated.

The kids we've heard from so far, they're mostly white, and they're in the honors and AP focus program. Deja says she's from the school that's geared more towards medicine and public health and is a lot more diverse. Almost no one ever runs from Deja's program. But when she saw the election announcement, she got excited. I was like, I've never done anything like this, but I started to become more interested in politics. So I was like, I think I should run. But it's not only like I'm doing it for me. I was kind of doing it because I hadn't seen a lot of African-American people in general, like, apply for these positions.

and I was thinking, maybe if I do it, then I can start something and other people want to do it. As a candidate, Deja's the progressive insurgent who's trying to break in from the outside. But she needed a running mate, someone with way more experience of the BHS political machine. So she asked Lexi, who has been in student politics since she was in diapers, basically.

Sixth grade, I was a house of representatives in middle school. Then seventh grade, I was an ambassador. I was on the city of Berkeley's youth commission. Eighth grade, I was an ambassador, eighth grade class president, freshman class leadership, sophomore class president. It's involved in youth in government with the YMCA, and then it was my second year on the National Student Leadership Board. I am on the board of directors for a generation citizen.

And I believe that is it. Lexi comes from the crew of elite student government kids, but she has a very different background for most of them. You know, Berkeley High isn't only made up of the, like, rich kids from the hills. During middle school, I was homeless because I got evicted from my apartment in fifth grade right at the beginning of summer with my mom. So my friends and I worked on spreading awareness about homelessness at our school and worked with showing that there are low-income students and that, you know,

we are even low-income students and we were trying to, you know, make sure that we're not, like, swept under the rug. That was the platform. Lexi would earn for president, Deja for vice president. And in a world where elections are completely fair and the best candidate wins, Deja and Lexi are she wins. Like, they're principled, passionate, they have the best ideas. And after that first speech, it seemed like it could even happen.

Deja and I are anything but quiet. So if you want two strong-determined leaders to be the voice of the student body, vote for us. And I didn't even expect people to cheer. And people just started like, ah, yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah. Like, it gave me a confidence boost. It was just a really good feeling,

knowing that other people kind of believed in me. But if Dacia and Lexi were going to win, they would have to be an extremely strong candidate. A kid I'm going to call Zach. Zach was a completely different type of politician. He was a showboat, a populist. His whole campaign was going to be about entertainment and distraction. His strategy was clear, even on that first day at the convention.

Rachel, one of the other presidential candidates, was there on stage with him. I remember Zach had his, it was, like, somebody said it was water, and I assume it was. He was, like, sitting on the stage with this, like, vodka bottle, like, next to him, and, like, just, like, drinking out of it, like, sitting on the stage. It was actually, I was mostly annoyed because I feel like everyone the audience was paying attention to that and, like, not my speech, which, like, it is more interesting, I guess, so, like, I don't blame them, but... The glass bottle is the subject of a lot of debate at BHS. Was it a vodka bottle with water in it?

Was it a bottle that just looked like a vodka bottle? In any case, it stole the show. And when it's Zach's turn to give his speech, he doesn't go to the podium. He doesn't bother using a mic, which is why we don't have the audio. He's in a black button-up shirt. He's got this quaffed hair. And he's commanding the stage like, this is TEDx talk. He tells the kids that Rally Day, this huge party that Berkeley High School throws every year.

In his administration, they're going to do that every single month. Deja cannot believe it. My facial expressions were just like, like, what? In that moment, I wasn't thinking of myself as a candidate. I was thinking of myself as a student. And I was thinking, if I were down there, would I want to vote for that? The thing was that Zach's class clown strategy honestly had kind of an appeal to it. Like, you could read it as authentic.

Almost like his shenanigans were saying, we all know that there is nothing more phony than a high school election. And I'm treating like a grown-up by being honest. about that. After three hours of speeches, the candidates are done, and Robert Ezra calls the convention to a close. Okay. Thank you. That's about all we have time for. A round of our applause for our ASQA. Which is where Robert Ezra should have disappeared from the story. Because election commissioners are like baseball empires. When everything goes right, nobody notices them. Nobody asks them their origin story. Tell me about why you start getting involved in election stuff.

Oh, I just like elections. Someone on on this campus has got to run an election, why can't it be me who reads about them on Wikipedia in their spare time? The origin story of Robert Ezra's career starts when he was merely a sophomore. It was 2016, and he'd just watched the Clinton v. Trump Showdown. An election, he found very disturbing.

After the 2016 election, I just sort of, I don't think grew disillusioned is the right word, but I just withdrew. I went through my Twitter, anyone who started retweeting political stuff, I just muted them so I don't have to see their tweets. Twitter is about sports and jokes. I don't need to subject myself to the day-to-day news cycle. I think it deteriorates your mental health really quickly.

His candidate had lost, and lost in an election that was itself a total compromised mess. In aftermath, he avoided politics, but he threw himself even deeper into his obsession with elections themselves. They're minutiae, how they're run in different countries. And a few short years later, as elections commissioner, he would get a chance to build the perfect one. And you'd build it at Berkeley High School. What were the things you wanted to do differently or better? It's quite a lot of things, actually. I wanted to switch the elections to rank choice voting.

Are you familiar with rank choice voting? No. Ranked choice voting is exactly what it sounds like, where instead of voting for one candidate, you vote for n-minus-one candidates if the race has n candidates. You rank your preferences, and there's an algorithm that determines who's the winner based on everyone's preferences.

Rank choice voting is not the only modern election innovation that Robert Ezra can't help the rhapsodize about. There are many more, and BHS was going to get all of them, which is how in 2019, the Berkeley High School election went entirely online. No more voting in the classroom on scantrons that the teachers passed out. Students would be able to vote via Google Forum they could access from their student emails. I would much rather students be able to vote on their phones, students be able to vote in class with computers.

True accessibility. He couldn't fix American elections, but he could fix his high schools. That was the plan anyway. Now, with the convention over two weeks until voting, the high school politicians begin their campaign in earnest. Every election that's ever been held has been a sort of battle between two imaginations. On one side, there's the person who designs the election,

who has to think of every way politicians have ever tried to break the rules, anticipate all the new cheats they'll cook up. And then there's the politicians, imagining ways to game the system, looking for whatever advantage they can find, and they often win, at least a little bit. It's almost like politics itself has a way of shaking loose whatever rules you try to put around it. But despite his academic, loiter nature,

Robertizer had certainly tried his best at imagining all the ways his system could be compromised. The rules he'd written were comprehensive, he sent them to me. They look like something you'd get at the DMV. Lots of fine print on everything from campaign finance to negative campaigning, to the distribution of everything. edible materials, but which I'm pretty sure he just means candy, and a whole section on posters. Posters displayed on school properties shall not exceed three feet in height or eight feet in length. Posters shall be placed on Baltimore boards only or in classrooms or class doors with the explicit

verbal approval of the teacher. Writing on a whiteboard constitutes a poster. Posters must not be intentionally placed next to that of candidates for the same office without the explicit verbal approval of the candidates of correction. Posters must be placed during school hours. If that sounds like a lot of rules around hanging posters. It is. But the reason he's done that is because in a high school election, posters are like TV ads, radio ads, and Facebook ads all rolled into one. They are the place where the candidates can get their message out.

And with so many candidates in the race, the poster wars got intense. It got completely out of control. Like, I just like, people taking it way too seriously. Like, thousands of, like, posters of like, vote Lexi, vote back, like, all over. over the hallways, like every single hallway. That's a kiddo called Gabriel. He runs an Instagram meme account that's basically like the school's gossip column. I remember Lexi's team made posters in like, like, in like five different languages.

But like they did it through Google Translate. So they had when it was in Chinese, and I speak Chinese since I've taken like manner for seven years. And like it was like completely incorrect. Like like, like I was just like wow. Like I don't even think you're helping yourself at this point. The thing was that while we're. Gabriel may not have been impressed by insufficiently vetted Mandarin, Gabriel was completely unimportant.

He was a junior. And the junior votes were basically locked up on day one because everyone more or less voted for their friends. That group is as predictable as California or Mississippi. If Nate Silver were explaining the parameters of the Berkeley High School election, he would almost certainly observe that there was only one real group of undecideds. The Pennsylvania of Berkeley High School, the swing voters. Those are the freshmen.

They're the prize target. Each candidate lives or dies based off whether that they can win the hearts of these kids who are too naive to have picked their click yet. I heard rumors of a candidate that had stooped so low as to offer bribes to win freshman votes. I brought this up with Evie, another one of the candidates. Do you remember people giving out candy? That was me. I...

What? I was the candidate who accidentally gave out candy. What do you mean accidentally? You can't accidentally give out candy. Okay, okay. Well, yeah. I just had some starburst, and it was like this fair, and it was kind of like a meet-the-cad. candidates thing during lunch, I think.

And I think I gave out some starbursts. And I remember explicitly saying, like, okay, so I gave out some starbursts. And I remember though explicitly saying, like, this is not a campaign bribe. I'm just giving this to you to the people that I would give them to, which obviously is a campaign bribe. But also, I didn't, I only think I gave it out to like five people max. Uh-huh. A little sugar-based bribery, not that big of a deal.

But separately, people were. also starting to ask questions about possible campaign finance violations. Can you imagine spending $50 on like stress balls with your name on it to hand out to kids to get them to vote? I don't know how much of it was like, wow, this is like super competitive. I wonder who's going to win as much as like, this is just stupid. And was that unusual though? It was unusually stupid. Robert Ezzer's rules on this were clear. Your campaign shall not spend more than $200. A log of all donations and expenditures to and from all relevant parties. shall be kept and made available to the commissioner of elections.

But in the middle of Robert Desert's election was Dejan Lexi's campaign, the sick orgy of political party favors. They had monogram pencils, they had pamphlets, there was a bubble machine, silly putty. How were they doing that? Everybody assumed that we spent so much money on our things, and I think in total I probably spent about, like, $20 on our entire campaign. The posters that we made, everything that we made, we probably, you probably, you probably We got from the dollar tree, from my job.

Where do you work? I work at the YMCA Teen Center. It's like right across the street from Berkeley High. Meanwhile, Zach, the populace candidate, is doing exactly what you would expect him to do. He's throwing house parties and inviting the underclassmen. He would post like after the party on his like Instagram, like pictures of people at the party, like holding up his campaign posters essentially. And it'd be like a little like video montage. And, I mean, it was brilliant.

I mean, everyone was talking about him. I asked Asia, the outsider candidate. It seems like some of the other students were running more traditionally high school campaigns. Like, we're going to, you know, have more fun and party. Party. Did you hit at some point in the campaign where you're like, God, like, maybe we should just be doing that? No. You have to hold yourself to a different standard if you're running for, like, ASV president and vice president.

To Dadaja and a lot of students are Berkeley High School, it seemed like Zach didn't care about much other than winning. You won't hear from Zach in the story, but I talked to people who said, actually, that's not true at all. One of them was his friend, Canaan. So Zach and I talked for months about what he was going to run for. Now, he realized that he could probably just run for ASB president, because at that point, he was so well known and so well liked, and he had all the experience. And just generally, having known him, I know that the ASB presidency is very much a popularity contest. And his popularity was very much earned through being dedicated to certain causes. I mean, we were activists together outside of school for different climate groups.

And he had dedicated a lot of his time toward furthering academic opportunities for his fellow students, that he decided that his platform would be bringing about free SAT and ACT tutoring prep. And because he had this delusion that people didn't like him, he decided to throw monthly parties on top of that, which did not go over so well. But I do think that of all the campaigns, Zax was not terribly dirty at all. By the last week of campaigning, things were getting kind of ugly. Dacia told me that she got this text message from her friend. It was a picture of her and Lexi's poster in a urinal. It had been peed on.

It took an emotional toll on us. Like, there was a time when I was crying because I was like, people hate me. I should have never run for this position. Like, they're peeing on my posters and I never wanted this. Did you have a theory about who was doing it? At first, I was thinking about other candidates. And I was trying to tell Lexi, I was like,

Lexi, trust me, the candidates are probably doing this to us for like revenge or something. I don't know why they would need revenge, but they're probably just like mad about something. She's like, no, none of the candidates would do something that rude. Like, we shouldn't just assume. And I was like, Lexi, like we are running against them. And we are doing a decent job.

The elections commissioner of Robert Ezra, he actually, for the most part, stayed out of all of this. Which at first surprised me, like, this was his election after all. But Robert Ezra told me that it was important to stay out of all of this. he had to remain objective. The more I got to know him, the more I came to understand this kind of logic as particularly Robert Ezra. It was a logic that dictated also that he keep an extreme level of distance from the candidates,

who I'll remind you where his class meets. What were the different personalities that were running? So at the time, there were a lot of races going on, and I didn't want to get in the weeds of any single one. So I don't know. I'm probably not the best storyteller for this, and I can point you to someone. someone who was, but... Totally. Just tell me, like,

who do you remember as being, like, the big candidates or the big frontrunners? So the... I don't really know how to answer that question. There were definitely big front runners that I'm not really in tune with the school social scene or with the control on who people would vote for.

I do have the returns in front of me. I can definitely tell you who won. But I guess I'm just curious, like, putting aside everything and getting right? I'm just like, who do you remember running? Like, which candidate stuck in your brain, if any of them? Um, or did not? Not really. I was really, I tried to detach myself from the race. My job was not to assess the race qualitatively. On Monday, the two weeks of campaigning closed, and Robert

Ezra declared voting open. The students would have a whole week to cast their vote. Now, finally, his innovation, the online voting system, the thing he actually cared about, would have its moment to shine. The Google forum was open, and you could go into your email and vote. You could have a Chromebook supplied to you in class and vote. You could vote on your phone. You could vote at home, whatever. And everything was mostly fine for like four days. Until Thursday night, Robert was in his bedroom, and he can see the votes coming in. And he gets a tip from the teacher who's been helping him oversee the election, Mr. V, who says, something weird is going on with the ballot numbers for this candidate that Robert Ezra calls candidate one.

candidate one who has for all this time been running in a solid second place to a very popular frontrunner all of a sudden is in first place now and then very quickly we saw a whole bunch of red flags oh all the votes for candidate one are coming in a row all the votes for candidate one are coming in alphabetical order all the votes for candidate one are also voting for their running mate and They're not choosing any, like, second or third choices in the ranked choice election. So right there, that's us noticing fraud. Robert Ezra's election had been compromised. Welcome back to the show.

Robert Ezra, the Elections Commissioner of Berkeley High School, has just realized that somebody has hacked into his voting system. The student he calls candidate one has shot into the lead. But the election is not over yet. There's one day left of voting. And Robert Ezra needs to figure out what to do. we first, basically, we try to make a list of people of interest. And number one person of interest, of course, is going to be the candidate.

Right, of course. There is also some very complicated relationship dynamics between them and some other people. So those other people were on the list. Oh, you're suspecting the people that they are maybe in an argument with or something like that. In their social circle, yeah. The next morning, he goes to the school's IT expert, also known as his computer science teacher, and asked him to look at the back end of the Google voting form. Can you find anything like an IP address?

And we don't get a smoking gun from that. All we learn is that the votes are being cast from an Apple computer. It's not a smartphone, it's not a tablet, it's not a Windows computer, not that people have those. It is an Apple computer. Great. That narrows it down to like every other kid at Berkeley High School. So now Robert Ezra has a decision to make. there's six hours left in voting. The reasonable thing to do

would be to just pull the plug, redo the entire election. Or he could set in elaborate trap, find the hacker, and personally observe them fraudulently entering votes into their computer. In which case, the voting must be allowed to continue as normal. If you tell, say, a mob leader

that you're in the process of investigating their speakeasy, when you have a speakeasy is not going to be there. So we actually did stand by and let fraud happen. We relied on that. It was very important for us that fraud keep happening. Here is Robert Ezra's strategy. He can see the fraudulent votes coming in in real time. And so he's going to take his list of suspects and he's going to watch each of them.

Try to catch the student in the act of committing the election fraud. The school gives Robert Ezra its blessing on his investigation, which he's working on with a teacher. They even lend him a conference for. but he turns into his war room. We had obtained schedules for basically everyone we thought would have had some minute reason to do this. And what I actually did is I just walked down the hallways. He's looking for his suspects, visiting their classrooms,

casually strolling by the door. Trying to just look through the window because it was very important to me that people not catch on that something's going on with me. Some cases I walked by their door like four, five times. If he sees a suspect, he takes notes on their activities. Do they have access to devices?

Are they working on something that looks like election rigging? Nothing's suspicious. He crosses them off the list. If they're not in class, figure out where they are. Are they on campus? If they're on campus, try to observe them. And we didn't have any duck blind, so that was a little bit harder than it should have been.

What do you mean duck blind? Oh, like you. Yes, sorry. My joke sometimes creep up on people like that. Like you're saying you didn't have like a place where you could just like see the entire campus? Yeah, without changing the effect. At this point, it's after lunch. Robert Ezra has three hours left in a school day.

And he's looking for the main person on his list, candidate one, who turns out to be at the college and career center, which is like a study hall. He walks in and there's candidate one in the back of the room with two friends. friends, who Robert Ezra calls suspect two and suspect three. I sit down on a computer. I pretend to work on schoolwork. What I'm actually doing is looking at candidate one and writing emails to Mr. V describing exactly what he's doing and what the people around him are doing. This email was sent at 116 p.m. I come in...

Robert Ezra manages to rope in the school assistant who runs the center, the name's Mary. So now they're both observing the suspects. And it's like Robert Ezra is finally at the scene of the crime. Proof feels so close, he can almost taste it. He starts to hear snatches of suspicious conversation. Suspicious because it sounds like people trying to use student emails to get into a Google form. Namely, the form that Robert Ezra has created. Candidate 1 talking to suspect 3,

Wait, did you get an email? Quote, are you sure because I just failed to type in? I got in, but like, unintelligible, that's in brackets from... Mary makes me a note. that she heard candidate one say, I'm going to die trying. What? Fifth period bell rings.

Everyone starts packing up their bags, getting ready to leave for class. But candidate one stays seated, and they're the only one still on their computer. And as Robert has her watches, two more fraudulent votes come in. Yet another fraudulent vote. We've got candidate one.

Candidate one, as you may have suspected, is Zach. Mr. V, the teacher who's working with Robert Ezra, shows up and picks up Zach along with someone they suspected of helping him. And he takes them all to the principal's office. We get parked in the principal's office before she's in there. And we have to sit in that room with just me, Mr. V and a candidate one for a while. What was the conversation that was happening in that room? There's a lot of silence. When the principal finally comes in, Zach denies everything.

But Robert Ezra has all his evidence in hand. It was a game over. The election scandal would end up being a big enough deal that district-level administrators got involved. And so teachers and parents couldn't talk to me on the record for this story. There was a lot of anxiety because these are kids after all, and adults understandably wanted to protect their privacy. I do know that the administration made sure that there were consequences for Zach

and the two friends who'd helped him. But the details were kept strictly confidential, which disappointed Robert Ezra, who felt like if nobody knew what the punishment was for election tampering, how could you deter anyone from doing it again? I wanted to know Zach's side of the story. And while he wouldn't talk to me, I did ask his friend, Canaan. When he sat you down to tell you everything that happened,

what was the story he told you? That he invested a lot of time in campaigning among the freshmen. And the year before, we had voted on paper ballots in class, so everyone had gotten a chance to vote. Last year, the ballots were online. Voting was not done in class. So a lot of people didn't vote. They didn't know they got to vote.

They didn't think to vote, especially the freshmen who had no experience voting whatsoever, which is where Zach had spent most of this time campaigning. Can you help me understand this freshman thing a little bit better? So it sounds like you're saying that there was something structurally built into this that wasn't fair. but I don't completely understand. I wouldn't call it suppression the way, you know, Republican administrations use these voter ID laws to suppress votes.

The freshman class was simply not aware of how to vote. This was their first BHS election. And in previous years, it had been done on paper ballots in classes. So when I first voted, my second period teacher passed out ballots in class and we spent 20 minutes filling out those ballots. But for doing it online, it was not mandated that it be done in class.

So a lot of the freshman class could not have their voices heard because they had no idea how to vote. This was very new to them. So when the results started to come in as they come in over the course of a week and he had access to them and he saw that he wasn't winning, a friend of his had offered previously to hack the election for him. And when he saw that the freshmen weren't voting, which is where he'd spent most of his time, he said, okay, do it. So essentially, Zach had felt that the only reason he was losing was because the election was from his perspective rigged against him.

And so by cheating, he was actually making it more fair. And on top of that, there was a huge obvious vulnerability that made cheating very easy. The way that the hack worked, it was almost disappointingly simple. the students voted using their school emails. And the way that the students' emails were set up, the default password was Berkeley and then their student ID numbers. And a lot of students just never changed their passwords. A friend of his had access to the school's, the student schedules,

because she was in charge of a lot of student activities. And I have my schedule right next to me, actually. The school, I think foolishly, places the students. student IDs right on a student schedule. That's how they did it. And unfortunately, he got caught. And that was that. People did work extremely hard to win, like Lexi and Deja. I know how much this meant to them. What do you think about? I mean, the idea of him stealing the election from them in this way. That does feel pretty unsavory. I don't know Lexi and Deja very well, but it's hard to say they would have won had the freshman voted.

When did you finally learn that you won? This is honestly the most cheesy story, but later on in the week, they sent out emails, and I didn't want to open it around anyone. Like, I'm one of those people. I would not open a college admissions decision around

anyone or anything like that. So, I took the bathroom pass, and I went to the bathroom. But I was like, I don't want to open this in a closed setting. So I, like, walked outside for a bit and I read the results and I saw Lexi's name at the top and I was like oh my gosh Lexi won and I scrolled down and I saw my name at the top I was like oh my gosh I won and then I texted Lexi I was like oh my gosh did you see the results and before she could even

respond I was like I couldn't I couldn't stay in place so I was like I was like running and I saw the campus green and I was just about to run onto the campus green but as I got out there I saw Lexi. Like she was standing outside on the campus green, and we had never even planned to meet up. And we just ran and hugged each other, and we started crying. And it was just such an emotional moment.

After the election results were announced, Robert Ezra had one last job to do. Write his report, a comprehensive review of the investigation. The document he comes up with is seven pages, single-spaced, a full accounting of his methods with footnotes, figures, and graphs. It's titled, report on fraudulent voting in the 2019-2020 BHS ASB elections. The day he was done, he delivered it to the jacket, the school newspaper.

Here's how Evie remembers it. I was on the jacket at the time, and we were, obviously, like, this is our biggest story of the year. And so he comes in, I think it's on like a Tuesday or something. He comes in with this big packet. He just walks in. It's dead silent. Everyone already knows him and knows what it's about to be. he walks up to our editor-in-chief, just drops it on the table, and says,

here's the Mueller report, turns around, and just leaves. And it was, like, so amazing. That was easily the best moment of my high school experience. It was just dead silent. And then everyone just ran to go and see. I hope this report provides a satisfactory answer to student concerns about the election, and that it is now clear that, despite this fraud, the election is being conducted with a high degree of fairness.

It is important that Berkeley High students know that the ASB election was conducted in a fair and equitable manner, that people considering rigging any election in the future know that they will be caught. It has been and continues to be an honor to serve as your commissioner of elections. Ari Stern, ASB commissioner of elections. Once the story of the election got out, local news was all over it. That rigged election happened to one of the most notable high schools in the Bay Area. Some say the intense pressure to get into college may have been the reason that student cheated the vote. John Viavicencio teamed up with Robert Ezra Stern, a student serving as the commissioner of elections.

Was it nice to see yourself? Oh, no, no, I resented that. I did not like being a public figure. I would have preferred that the only people who knew that I did this were colleges in perspective, employers. Did you feel proud afterwards, though? Yeah, I mean, I sort of feel proud now, but there was a lot of conflict around me grappling with what exactly my role is now at the high school. My ideal scenario is that I would just, you know, walk him on the crowd and no one would pay attention to me, call me out, say, you know, hey, good job. I don't need to be

congratulated for my work. I just do my work. That's very stoic of you. It's very Robert Mueller, yes, I know. 2019 was the beginning of the Dacia and Lexi administration. Their homeless student supply center was successfully funded. Campaign promise kept. Last month was graduation. It was online because of COVID-19.

The class of 2020 is resilient, powerful and inspiring. The good news is that all the kids are going to colleges they're excited about. Rachel's McGill, and Dacia's going to UC Davis, Lexi's going to Sacramento State. There is no doubt in my mind that our class will make significant change in this world. High school is already starting to feel small to them. This little league version of the adult world that for four years they took completely seriously. There's nothing more embarrassing than the stuff you used to take seriously. But to be honest, I don't think they should be embarrassed.

I think they should feel proud. In the grown-up world, people are so tired of complaining about the rules being broken that often they just give up on caring. I've definitely been guilty of that. That didn't happen at BHS. For once, there was a fight where the most popular, loudest or most powerful person didn't just automatically get their way. In the end, the rulebook actually won, which feels surprising right now. As for the person who cared the most about the rule book, Robert Ezra, he's been at the University of Chicago for a year now. you'll never guess what he's been up to.

I'm on the University of Chicago Elections and Rules Committee, a five-person committee that basically does the same thing that I did at Berkeley High, except more efficiently. How does the board compare to the high school version of it? They have better codified precedents, and they're not flying blind. So they have pages and pages and pages of procedure precedent, what-to-do rules. whereas I had maybe three pages and my intuition. We just got finished at the university with running an election cycle,

and there are some people on the Elections and Rules Committee who have just been there forever, and there's this institutional memory of like, oh yeah, four years ago, there were these candidates who like wiretapped the Elections Committee and tried to catch them in the act of being biased, which they were not, Basically, I have this log, this oral history of the past six, seven, eight years of the University of Chicago elections, something crazy happens every single time. I mean, there are thousands, if not millions of high schools in the country. How often do things like this happen? Scandalous slash crazy slash, you know, ridiculous things.

happen when people are vying for made-up power. Yeah. Is any part of you looking forward to the, to other things that come up? Oh, absolutely. Why? Same reason I wanted to be commissioner of elections. It's not that you long to see other people's lives destroyed in a spectacular, like, burst of infamy.

It's, it's the process of elections and running them and proceed. and rules and the boring stuff that you love. Yeah. Damiano Marquetti is a producer for our show. Reply All is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced this week by Shruthy Pinmanani, Damiano Marquette, Anna Foley, Jessica Young, Emmanuel Jochi, and Lisa Wang. Our executive producer is Tim Howard.

Our senior producer is Fia Benin. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Backchecking by Michelle Harris. Additional music production by Mari Romano. Special thanks this week to Doug Levine. Our theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmone. Scylinder. Matt Lieber is the first time you don't botch a new recipe. You can listen to our show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.