Tangle - INTERVIEW: Michael McDonald on midterms, "The Big Lie", and mail-in voting

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

On today's episode, we sit down with election expert Michael McDonald. Michael is the author of the new book From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election. He also runs the website ElectProject.org and is a widely cited expert frequently seen on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and others. Today, we talk to him about his new book, where things stand on the 2022 midterms, mail-in voting, and "The Big Lie." You can follow Michael on Twitter @ElectProjectYou can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tango Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, I'm thrilled to be sitting down with Michael McDonald. Michael is a professor at the University of Florida and an elections expert.

He runs the website electproject.org and is the author of the book From Pandemic to Insurrection, Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election. For a lot of people in the media and election space, including myself, Michael has been an essential following on Twitter and his website is hugely helpful in scouring some of the election data

from across the country, election laws, basically anything and everything that has to do with US elections, which we're going to jump into today. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh, great to be with you, Isaac. So we were sort of talking before we punched record here, and there's, I mean, it's midterm season, so there's so much going on to talk about. Normally, you've got a book out that I want to chat about because I think we have some similar interests in the kind of, you know, the election fraud, big lie, quote unquote space. But before

we jump in, you know, I love kind of hearing guest stories. I mean, I'm curious how you got into the political data, election law world. I mean, what's your story? How did you end up doing this kind of work? Well, I'm long into, you know, so I've been around for a while. And it's really hard to, you know, pick a point to begin with. But basically, after I graduated from the California Institute of Technology, I went to work for the consulting firm that runs the elections and reapportionment database for the state of California. So we were out there collecting up voter file data,

precinct boundaries, created a GIS application, and this was all back in the late 1980s, early 1990s. So we were really bleeding edge a long time ago, working with all these data. And during that period of time, I was doing some really interesting work. I was working with some professors, you know, I was still an undergraduate, just graduated these professors on some voting rights cases with the Department of Justice. And I was doing all the data work, all the statistical analyses, and they were presenting my work in courtroom. And I said, well, actually, that's my work. I want to be that guy. So I decided I'm very lucky. I've got to live my dream. I've been able to carve out a career doing legal work and being able to analyze election data and work in many different formats, teach students about this. And, you know, it's really rewarding to see those students out there working on both sides of the aisle, by the way, but working

at major important places. And so, you know, it's been a good life for me. And I've had lots of things that I've done along the way. And I'm sure we're going to talk about some of those. So I'll just highlight some of the things that I do that are, you know, more current, besides the book, which, you know, everybody should buy, Pandemic Instruction, Voting in the U.S. Presidential Election. So it covers a lot of things that what I do as well. So some of that, what I do is I've been working decision desks at various media outlets and at the National Exit Poll Organization since 2002. And it was really some of that experience that I had working with the principals who run the exit polls that led me to be interested in things like voter turnout and the early voting analyses that I do.

And those were projects that were way back in the late 1980s, excuse me, late 1990s and early 2000s. I was helping them improve the exit polls and come up with analyses that led me to realize that we were measuring turnout wrong in the United States. And that's really where my career as an academic was launched from was that sort of leading over practical work with academic work and seeing the value of how those two things interacted. And still, like even today, a lot of what I do, like for example, we produced the precinct boundary and election results data that were used in virtually every analysis that you saw of redistricting this cycle. You were using Kay's redistricting app.

We were using our own district builder. You were using our data and places like PlanScore and others that were evaluating redistricting plans. None of that would have been possible if we hadn't put out that data. So there's this sort of interest in democracy and the infrastructure of democracy, keeping it going. And it's not possible. I think we're doing that in the trenches grunt work of doing some of the data analyses that I do. I love it. So, you know, I guess related to that, and we'll just jump right

in here. I mean, one of the big questions heading into this midterm cycle, I think, is the impact of the fall of Roe v. Wade on both Democratic enthusiasm and registration among women and especially, you know, Democratic women across the country. But obviously in swing states is what a lot of people are going to be watching because, you know, how those states play in 2022 might be indicative of what to expect in 2024. I'd love to just hear you kind of set the table a little bit about what we've been seeing, you know, maybe in a few states that you think are important to follow or reflective of the national mood or just nationally, you know, in terms of the, I guess, the repercussions of the fall of Roe v. Wade. I think there's, it seems to me,

from my perspective, there's a good deal of debate about how big or small this impact has been and, you know, whether it's going to really change the course of the midterms, which generally, I mean, we have a president with fairly low approval ratings and normally we see the party that's not in the White House gain a lot of seats in the House and Senate in an environment like this. So what are you seeing on the ground from the data perspective? Yeah. So just to set the stage on this, I'm looking at all of the data so far. We had a very exceptional 2018 midterm election. They had the highest turnout rate for those eligible to vote since 1914. All right. Really unprecedented in modern American history to see that much

engagement in elections. And of course, the 2020 presidential election, again, was really unusual. You had to go all the way back to 1900 to see a turnout rate as high as what we saw in the 2020 presidential election. So, you know, 2018, 2020, clearly something has changed in American politics. People are engaged in ways in which they haven't been in previous decades. So obviously it's a lot to do with Donald Trump. obviously, it's a lot to do with Donald Trump. But we're also seeing other things like abortion is really important, because it speaks to the polarization that our country is a period of polarization, our country is entered into. And there are major issues facing this country that impassioned people, it could be Donald Trump, but it could also be abortion. The economy,

which was not looking very well over the summer. And it could be that. I mean, there are lots of different issues that are important to people. And again, you have to go back all the way to the late 1980s, 1800s, really, to see these major issues and see the polarization at the levels that we're seeing it today and the levels of turnout. So on all fronts, I think we're highly engaged. And so to more directly answer your question, when we looked at the summer, I think a lot of the analysts and pundits were thinking, well, this will be a typical midterm election. The president's party is going to do poorly in a midterm election. The economy was on the skids. Inflation was high.

Still, these things have not been completely resolved. But it looked like it was going to be a typical midterm election. It looked like there were going to be, it was going to be a referendum on Biden. And the polls that we were seeing from midsummer, spring fit the narrative, that historical narrative that there's a penalty for the president's party in a midterm election. narrative that there's a penalty for the president's party in a midterm election. Well, really, Dobbs changed that. And so that Dobbs decision, suddenly, we see Democrats becoming more energized. We start seeing inflation waning, you know, at least as you can directly measure it at the gas pump. It's certainly down considerably from where the highs were just a few months ago.

And so when people are starting to evaluate the candidates and the positions, everything else, there's clearly something has shifted. And we can look at a number of indicators to see the generic ballot. If you look at 538, at this point in time, Democrats have about a two percentage point edge on the generic ballot. That is really unusual in a midterm election to see something like that, where the president's party has a lead in the generic ballot going into November. We can see it in enthusiasm. Again, I can pick out any number of polls on this, but just most recently, NBC poll says, you know, the enthusiasm is basically the same for the

Democrats and Republicans, and it's at unprecedented levels. So it looks as though we have a very highly engaged electorate, much like we saw in 2018 and 2020. We're looking at another highly engaged electorate. Lots of signals in that direction to suggest that that's what's going to happen. And what does that mean? So we're probably looking at another turnout rate of around 50% of those eligible to vote. at another turnout rate of around 50% of those eligible to vote. Again, you have to go back to the early 1900s to see something, this level of engagement. And this is where I think some of the polling has fallen short and the pundits have fallen short. They're thinking about, well, this is a typical modern election. This is what I've experienced in my life. go modern election. This is what I've experienced in my life. You know, the president is going to get punished at the polls in November. That would be true if like one party was showing up to vote, the other was all dejected and not voting. That was what we were looking back at the summer. Conditions have changed. It's very clear that we're going to have a high turnout election, and we're going to have Democrats and Republicans voting. I don't mean to say this is a blue wave.

All I mean to say is at this point, that red wave that people were convinced of that was going to happen in the summer, that wave has crashed. And now we're looking at a really hard fought campaign in some of these battleground states, where you don't have the crazy Republican candidates on the ballot, you know, where did they're really going to be a choice between the voters. And so again, if I would take a step back, and we can discuss more, but I'm with a lot of other people at this point, I think most likely the Democrats retain control of the Senate. I think the House is going to be closer with a lot of other people at this point. I think most likely the Democrats retain control of the Senate. I think the House is going to be closer than a lot of people thought. I'd still give the Republicans a bit of an edge.

But now even the big issue for the Democrats is going to be these senators and Senate candidates, their characters and they make news. So it's kind of easy for the national media to talk about them. It's easy for voters to become informed about your Dr. Oz's of the world and the nature of those sorts of people. So for that, that's easy. Those House candidates, it's more difficult to get that information. But we're starting to see the stories about that as well. difficult to get that information, but we're starting to see the stories about that as well. And so in so much that the Democrats can break through on some of these key House races and people can understand what the stakes are within those House races, not just the Senate races and the human rights races, that's what's really going to be the key for the control of the House at this point. Because otherwise, you tend to give the Republicans a bit of an edge.

If it was just going to be straight party, there's probably still a residual referendum on Biden that would be out there that's going to work in their favor. But it's not a big, strong way. It's going to be something that's a minor ebb. And it's just going to be, can the Democrats overcome that? Interesting. So let me ask you this. I mean, I guess, look at the landscape a little bit and the generic ballot polling. And I have to say, I'm kind of skeptical. I mean,

obviously, I think in 2016 and in 2020, there's been a lot of punditry and commentary about whether the polls were right or wrong. And if we're, you know, underweighing some of the quote unquote kind of Trump right, or more conservative Republicans. I know David Shore has talked a lot about this, you know, the idea that liberals right now and Democrats are more likely to answer a phone call from a pollster and sit down on the phone for 20 minutes and talk about their political views when someone from NBC News calls them up, which makes a lot of sense to me. And that, you know, I think there's sort of a school of thought out there that pollsters are kind of underweighing some of the more conservative parts

of America. I'd love to hear your perspective on that, how you think about that problem or issue or whether it's a problem or issue when you're looking at this sort of whole collection of polls that we get in like a 538 average or something. Yeah, you know, Nate Silver's solution for this is to just include some crazy Republican polls in there so that the average comes out to be something where he thinks is going to be more reasonable. And so that doesn't really seem to be a good solution to the problem of polling. You'd want just accurate polls in general, and you wouldn't have to throw in some junk polls that you just to counterbalance some sort of bias that you think is happening overall on the numbers.

So there's that. Is it possible that we're going to see some bias? Yeah, towards the Democrats, yeah. But if you look at like Gillette Morris's analyses on this, and he's got a book out as well about polling, what's wrong with polling. He compares, he makes adjustments on bias for the 2020 presidential and the 2020, 2016 presidential elections, but he doesn't look at the midterm elections. And I mean, again, the, it's different. These things are really different.

And if you look back at 2018, there wasn't really much of a bias nationally. And 2014, there was actually a Republican bias. And so when you start looking at the midterm elections, you get a different picture. And so it's the people looking under the proverbial rock. They're looking like, oh, yeah, presidential election. So I'll look there. And instead of doing the more difficult work of looking at the midterm elections and trying to figure out what was going on there. Do I think it's possible that there's a bias? Absolutely, I think it's possible. There's lots of different biases that

could be baked into polls for various reasons. I'm always suspicious of likely voter models, because I think some particular pollsters really put their thumb on the scale quite a bit when it comes to likely voter models. And what they do do is once they get close to the election, miraculously, their numbers look a little better because that's what they know how 538 is going to evaluate them is how well did their final poll do on predicting the election, not on the one that was a month and a half out. So I just, you know, I like to see more information. I like to see a range of turnout models. Some pollsters do that, which is good, but most don't. But, you know, helping, you know, giving us more information helps us be better consumers. And that's partially

why I do the early voting analyses that I do. I try to be very clear with people. It's a methodology. It is what it is. It actually tends to do as well as the polls do. It has its misses and it has its pluses. But when you look, if you take all the information, that's what you really want to do. You want to take the information from the early vote. You want to take the information from the early vote. You want to take the information from the polls. You want to take the information from donations, small donations. All these indicators, take them all together and then come up with a reasoned adjustment.

The problem with that approach, though, is that you can't model it. You can't put it into a regression and come up with an estimate where you think is going to be the number. And so there's much of an art of interpretation here. And whenever there's something that's an art of interpretation, then people can say, ah, you're just wrong. And those are reasonable debates to have. But sometimes those, Those are reasonable debates to have. But sometimes those you're completely wrong. This method is completely broken. There's no way it can work. That's not a useful discussion. So, again, I try to look at the result of everything.

And just to go back, just to say, like right now, at this point in time, we don't have a lot of information early going yet. So I'm flying blind as much as anybody else. All I can see so far is that out of one state with a few ballots in, we can see that Republicans and Democrats, registered Republicans and Democrats in North Carolina are returning their ballots at the same rate. And that seems to fit with the narrative or the polling information that shows that both sides are equally engaged at the moment. You would expect if one side was despondent and didn't want to participate, they wouldn't be returning the ballot so far. We'll get more data in the coming weeks and we'll be able to judge and assess this as it goes on. It could be weird timing that has to do with how people voted in the 2020 election. And that's stuff that's covered in my book. We know that

Democrats started turning their ballots in sooner in 2020, and everybody actually did. But Democrats were voting by mail quite more frequently. So there could be other things that are going on that are really difficult to model. And so you just have to make this informed judgment about the value of the information you're looking at. It's fine to be skeptical. I think that's good. Healthy skepticism is always good. But don't just discount one data source entirely just because it doesn't agree with your worldview. Yeah. So, I mean, let me ask you, I guess, looking at the field of swing states that we have, obviously, I'm talking to you. You're in Florida. I'm in Philadelphia. I'm in Pennsylvania. Two states I think a lot of people are going to be keeping their eyes on. Is there a state or two from your perspective in this midterms

that you are really interested in seeing the results of maybe more so than anywhere else, a state that you feel like could be a really good barometer of kind of what's to come down the pike and what the national mood of the country is? Well, for the early voting analysis, so this is pre-election day, I think I'm very much interested in the seven states that have vote by mail elections. They're going to give us a very good clue as to what the overall turnout is going to be. And we're going to be able to see in places like Colorado and that's had a long history of having vote by mail. And it's proven to be a very good indicator when we have these all mail ballot states. The relative balance of Democrats and Republicans tells you something about the direction of the election. And it's proven to be a very good indicator when we have these all-mail ballot states.

The relative balance of Democrats and Republicans tells you something about the direction of the election and how it's going to play out. So I expect that weekend before the election, we're going to start getting some clarity about, you know, were these polls right or wrong? We should see some confirming or disconfirming, whatever you want to call it, non-confirming signals that are coming from the early vote in the all-mail ballot states. So I think, first of all, I think that's, you know, in the short run leading up to the election, that's where I'm looking at are those seven all-mail ballot states. For the long term, yeah, I mean, there's some interesting things going on. And one of the things that I think that has been over-analyzed or misanalyzed is the Hispanic changes in Hispanic support. I think looking at some statistical analyses, not polling analyses, so basically looking at the precincts where there are heavy Hispanic, Latino populations and looking at the voting patterns within those precincts,

you can see that I think 2016 was an anomaly towards Clinton among Hispanics. I'm using Hispanics because that's the Census Bureau term, Latino. I apologize if you have another term. But so we saw a very strong, I think, unusual outlier election for Hispanics towards Clinton. And then in 2020, we see an unusually high outlier election towards Trump in 2020. And so all these pundits are saying, oh, my God, the Democrats have lost the Hispanics. And look at this. You know, this spells doom for the Democrats. I think that you just you're just looking at two outlier elections. And if you look at all the other elections that are happening during this time, at least within Florida, where we've done these statistical analyses,

you look it looks like those were two extreme points on all the other elections that are happening. So I expect what we're going to see is that there's going to be a reversion back to the Democrats among Hispanics, that the Trump vote among Hispanics was unusual and that that will not be sustained. It will be interesting if it is.

And so there's where we are interested in places like Florida and Texas and Arizona and Nevada, because if Hispanics really are moving towards the Republican Party, that has long-term implications for the coalitions and the winning the map, the electoral map, as we see it in the future. The other thing to look at are really the suburban whites. And so, again, you can see and there's lots of evidence on this is that whites have moved back towards the Democratic Party over the last four years. And so it's very small percentages overall. So we're not talking like huge movements. But since they're the majority of the electorate, whites are really important.

And and so that shift that we're seeing there, will it be sustained? Are there going to be some House districts that are in these suburban areas that are going to be retained or fall to the Democrats. So I'll be looking at those. And then the implications are like that. That shift has something to do with the sort of extremism that you're getting within the Republican Party. And this is where when we start looking at the extreme candidates like in Michigan and Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Even in Alaska, if we get another debacle where Palin ends up costing the Republicans a House seat out of Alaska, of all places. Those are the sorts of things I'll be looking at as well, because it tells us again about

what's going to be the future direction of the coalitions or the parties. You know, that's a good segue into, you know, I want to talk about both the 2020 election, your book, and a little bit about the impact that election I think is having on the 2022 midterms and sort of how it's all tied together. Obviously, there are quite a few candidates who are running, you know, Doug Mastriano for governor here in my state in Pennsylvania, who's somebody who very explicitly has said, you know, he believes the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. I think he is much more conservative than your typical average Republican in Pennsylvania, or at least your

typical right down the middle voter, your moderate, your Pennsylvania moderate. And by conservative, I guess I mean he's much more pro-Trump, Trump aligned than some other candidates, the sort of establishment Republicans may have wanted to run against Shapiro here in a race that I think is going to be pretty tight. What kind of impact are you seeing that those candidates are having on the dynamics of the race? I think the general narrative that I'm seeing is Trump endorsed candidates who are sort of backing him on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen are hurting chances for them to take the Senate and take control of the House and win some governorships in races that based on the generic ballot results we see in polling, you know,

registered Republicans versus Democrats, whether they'd support Republicans or Democrats, they're kind of hurting their chances and very winnable races. I'm curious if that's kind of your read on the state of things and, you know and what races you're sort of keeping an eye on in that regard. Yeah, so there's so much there. So why don't I first start off with Mastro Stano. I'm butchering his name. Mastro Stano. So look, he was all in on Trump during the 2020 election. This 2022 position for him is nothing new. He was out there talking about vote fraud in the 2020 election, and he was all in on Trump with that sort of stuff. And really, you know, people like like him and others. This has been a long term movement for the Republican Party. And this is the sort of thing that I do cover in the book, which is that this did not just appear from nowhere. This this democracy denial that's happening around the country, among the Republican Party.

that's happening around the country, among the Republican Party. The Republicans for decades have been making false claims, exaggerating vote fraud. And they do it sometimes using very deceptive analyses. It used to be almost two decades ago now that the common way to show vote fraud was to look at a voter file and match everybody who had the same name and birth date and come to the conclusion, oh, those are double voters. Look at all these double voters. And I wrote a paper on this to say, no, that's just like statistical anomalies. If you got 500 Robert Smiths in New Jersey, which is what the paper that we did on, actually, it turns out there's a fairly high probability you're going to have two Robert Smiths with exactly the same name and birthday.

I know myself, there are people out there because I have a fairly common name, but there are people who have my exact name and birthday out there. And it causes problems. You know, if you try to get a bank loan and it turns out like one of those people is a felon, you know, you have to do extra paperwork to make that happen. As what actually happened with my wife, who doesn't have as much of a common name as I do. So these anomalies are exploited to give a false sense that there's much more prevailing vote fraud than there actually is. You know, more recently on this sort of line, you look at Governor Abbott in Texas, made the claim about over 100,000 non-citizens voting. And it turned out, well, that was just bad data. It was just matching with the driver's license database, which was outdated, had not been

updated for citizenship. So it had like citizenship that was five or six years out of date. Those people had naturalized and they were eligible to vote. And again, it comes out as a big brouhaha of a story. Look at all these ineligible non-citizens who are voting. President Trump at the time, you know, is going to tweet it out and talk about it as evidence of fraud. And then in the aftermath, we learned that, well, the allegations are not true. And but that's just the very standard way in which this works is you make sensational allegations. It gets out there in the media. And, you know, Trump has never said, hey, my bad. We were wrong about the non-citizens voting in Texas.

He's never going to say something like that, right? So the perception is left out there that the system's broken. And there are bad actors out there who are doing this intentionally, putting out this misinformation, and they want to highlight these cases as soon as they can so that they can bring attention to themselves. The other important purpose behind those allegations of vote fraud is that they then give Republicans rationale to adopt suppressive voting laws. And the Supreme Court in a case, Crawford, voting laws. And the Supreme Court in a case proffered a decision that came out of Indiana and its voter ID law, the Supreme Court blessed the idea that even if there is no vote fraud, simply trying to assuage people if there's no vote fraud, that's okay. That's acceptable

rationale. And in that particular case in Indiana, the state of Indiana had been challenged to produce a single instance of impersonation fraud that the photo ID law was supposed to address. And in evidence, they said, we can't find any, there are zero examples of it. So even when there's none, just the fact that you can have a narrative to say that there is vote fraud is the sort of thing that the Supreme Court and the federal courts will say is acceptable then to enact these laws. So it's all part of an ecosystem. It's part of something that is a very cynical designed attempt to manipulate people into thinking that there's a big problem and something has to be solved done to solve that problem and then eric walks in donald trump

and he looks at that and it's like well of course i could take advantage of that um and and he just amps it up even further and then you get these other people who, of course, desire to have his him, his blessing and the blessing of his followers. And so they're also going to be all in on this because by now the snake oil has been sold. It's been drunk. They want more of it. It tastes so good for them. So there's just no end to the craving for this narrative that everything is, our slights and wrongs have been done by, perpetrated by these foul Democrats, even when Republicans are the ones running the elections. It's still, it must be that they are somehow in cahoots with the Democrats. You know, there's just no end to the labyrinths that people will go down and they're thinking,

even when people were serving on Trump's election committees as statewide election officials, the secretaries of state. That's not good enough. He didn't win your state. good enough. He didn't win your state. So therefore, it must be that you were in cahoots with Biden, even though you supported Trump during the election. It doesn't make sense, but it's where we're at now. And this is a real danger that we've, a dangerous time that we've entered in when moving forward and thinking about these laws, that it's possible that, you know, we could see a real election denier elected in like Arizona or someplace like that. The Secretary of State's election there has got a Republican and he says they won't certify the election. So if a Democrat wins, so, you know, I hope that whole discussion about polling is wrong

because otherwise we've got some real problems for democracy. And if we actually have someone who is elected to a position of power who doesn't think that democracy works, it only works when Republicans win office. I'm curious. I mean, you know, listening to you talk, following your Twitter account, things like that. I have a pretty good idea, I think, of where you stand sort of in the on the political tribe side. Like, I think your politics are more aligned with Democrats. And you can definitely correct me if I'm wrong. I'm wondering, you know, what kind of challenges

that brings up for you when that sort of meets the statistics, meets the polling, meets your work, meets working on your book. How do you manage that? How do you balance those two things? The sort of political opinions and then being Michael McDonald, the elect project guy who's a lot of your work is very rooted in data and stuff like that. Yeah, it's very simple for me. I put country over party. I really care about democracy more than I care about the democratic party. Yeah. I'll say that I'm a Democrat, but I've worked with Republicans because there are times when the Democrats

are the bad guys. It's true. I mean, it's much lopsided. It's true. I mean, it's much lopsided. It's usually Republicans. But I worked with Republicans in Maryland who had been gerrymandered. And that was a case that was the companion case to the Rucho decision out of North Carolina that the Supreme Court ruled on. I was working for the Republican plaintiffs in Maryland because it was very clear that they had been gerrymandered. And in fact, at least the state Supreme Court in this round of redistricting agreed with me and overturned that congressional district on the panhandle side of Maryland as a Democrat gerrymander and instituted representation. I mean, democracy works when we deliberate at the elite level. We have to have all the voices there to deliberate.

And it doesn't work if one side is trying to put their thumb on the scale and suppress the voice of the other side. That's not democracy. And so, again, it's just very simple for me that... Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown.

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And I'm not going to take, I'm not making any apologies about this. I mean, the big lie is a lie. It's a lie and it's damaging this country. And it can really hurt in the long run if we don't combat it. And so I'm unabashed about it. I call out people, I don't think highly of Trump at all for the very cynical thing that he does to make money and build a political movement out of lies. And I would hope that, you know, rational people who can look at the salt of everything that happened and can see through the lies and realize that, yeah, I know my side lost. It sucks. We go out and work harder next time. We get our messaging right.

We don't try to beat the other side into submission. That's not what this country is about. And so I just, again, there are some people that are out there that are never going to, you know, they're too wedded and have drunk too much Kool-Aid at this point to ever change their positions on things. But hopefully there are enough out there. And there clearly are some who are sensible Republicans. And it would be really great if they could come back. great if they could come back. And I've worked with those people before in litigation, you know, in other states beyond Maryland. I would consider some of them to be my friends. Those are the sorts of people and voices that in order for democracy to work,

that we need to have. And we have to acknowledge that sometimes the other side has some good ideas. And only having one side always win, you lose the opportunity to get a good perspective from all angles on how to solve problems in this country. And so hopefully, you know, that's what we can elevate, a message that we can elevate over that there's some insidious plot to keep Republicans and Donald Trump from winning. So let's talk about your book. It's titled From Pandemic to Insurrection Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election. I'm curious, maybe if you could give us kind of the top level overview of, you explored and what some of the major takeaways were from your work and your research in writing this. Yeah. Well, let's just first start from the very sobering perspective that a lot of people got sick and died during the pandemic. And unfortunately, some of them were election officials.

They couldn't really protect themselves well. They had to interface with voters. They had to go into offices and do the work that they needed to do. And so I really, I mean, the dedication of the book is to the election heroes, if you will, the people who made it possible for democracy to continue. And, you know, unfortunately, not always were our politicians on their side. And we can see that, and I document this in the book, all the legal battles that happened during the primaries and then the general election, that, you know, of course, the Democratic states were, and the Biden campaign and their allies were really trying to make voting as easy and safe as possible for people who

wanted to otherwise be home. And primarily that was through mail balloting. But Republicans really resisted that in most places. I mean, there are a few outliers. So, of course, Kentucky would be an example of this, where there was bipartisan agreement on how to manage the pandemic in a safer way. But there were many other places where it was all about partisan advantage, or at least perceived partisan advantage, that if all those Democrats are voting by mail, and we could see lopsided numbers in the data of Democrats voting by mail, somehow it would be politically advantageous to Trump and to Republicans to suppress mail balloting somehow. And it's just, again, I document all of that in the book, just the legal battles, the rhetoric that was coming

from Trump and other corners that was disparaging mail balloting as being fraudulent. Again, the deep irony is that prior to 2020, Republicans were the ones voting by mail. And again, documented in the book, Republicans thought they were going to have an advantage with this. And they wanted, they thought Trump was actually conceding a natural advantage that Republicans had by disparaging mail balloting. And it's possible that he did shoot himself in his foot. No one's going to arrest him on Seventh Avenue if he does that, I guess. But, you know, it's possible that he did that, that he actually managed to suppress his own vote, because I'm certain that there were some Republicans who wanted to vote, but didn't feel comfortable doing it in person and may have gotten a message from

Trump that, oh, that mail ballot is fraudulent. I shouldn't vote. So that's all documented in the book. And I was doing this all in real time as I was doing all the other election analyses that I do typically in an election period. And it just started seem natural for me to start aggregating these stories and I started clipping them and then started like saying, oh, this is like really a book. And I started writing the bare bones of the book and that's where it sort of evolved. What I didn't anticipate though was what was going to happen after the election. And so a book that you would have normally hoped to be about the election would have been done, ah it'll be done like March, yeah it'll be done. But instead we have an insurrection and inquiries

and everything else. So there are additional chapters in there about the aftermath of what happened. And then finally, like any good book, if you're going to try to figure out what happened and how we can improve things, I do conclude the book with some ideas about what might work. Although I have to say, the bottom line on that really is that

Trump needs to do just like every other president, losing president has done in the history of the country, which is to say, yeah, I lost. And it was fair and square. I lost. And so without him doing that, other things we might do around the edges might help some, but really the driving force is the big lie. And somehow directly confronting that is what needs to be done. And we both know and all your listeners know Trump ain't going to ever say that he lost the election. So, you know, unfortunately, I think that particular avenue is not one that we can take. Let's talk about mail-in voting a little bit. I mean, I think in my experience as a political reporter, and, you know, I write a newsletter, goes out to 50,000 people, and we have

readers from all across the political spectrum and listeners of this podcast from all across the political spectrum, lots of Trump supporters, lots of hard left progressives. And usually when I write, I've done a good deal of work on some of the election fraud claims in the newsletter and writing for other publications. I recently wrote about 2000 Mules, the documentary, and sort of went kind of clip by clip and story by story dissecting some of the things about it that I just think very obviously don't add up and have since not come to fruition despite promises from the filmmakers that they were going to produce some of the evidence they didn't show in the movie. I mean, I guess I

leave some of that with the perception that the mail-in voting specifically is something a lot of my readers and listeners are suspicious of. vote going through many different hands before it gets to a ballot box, whether it's postal workers or the ballot applications being sent out en masse to people. I get it. I think it's easy to find suspicious activity in there or things that appear suspicious. I think oftentimes it can be easily explained by people who understand how elections work. I mean, I've seen a lot of videos online of ballot remaking or ballot sorting that are being reframed as really dangerous moments of proof of election fraud or some grand scheme. But I guess specific to mail-in ballots,

I'm wondering, how do we know? What kind of process do these ballots go through that someone like you can be sure that the process was safe in 2020 and that it was legit, despite the fact we had this huge surge of unprecedented mail-in voting and a lot of states doing more mail-in voting than they ever had before? I actually devote an entire chapter to the procedure of mail ballot. So I wanted to address this

right off, and I framed it in terms of Trump's claim that some foreign country would somehow send in ballots, and election officials wouldn't realize this was going on.

It's stupid. I mean, it's just a completely stupid sort of claim because once you realize that how the process actually works, you realize like you'd have to be able to fabricate the ballots and the envelopes. fabricate the ballots and the envelopes. We have so many different ways that the ballots look in the country because we have all these overlapping districts. So you have, if you're this foreign country, you somehow have to have all the different ballot styles. That's what we call the different elections offices that are on the ballots. You have to have that perfect. And it's got to look perfect too. It's going to have to go through some machines. So it ballots. You have to have that perfect. And it's got to look perfect too.

That's going to have to go through some machines. So it's going to have to have the same paper, same paper size, same font, everything, right? So the printing has got to be perfect for it to work. And then you also have to have the situation where, oh yeah, like someone hasn't already requested that ballot and returned the ballot. So somehow you're going to have to know that. requested that ballot and returned the ballot. So somehow you're going to have to know that. You have to know all the people that didn't return the ballots. And in many places, there's signature verification through various means. So you have to know the signature verification. You have to somehow forge the signature in a way that wouldn't.

Look, people are right. If you look at where fraud happens, it happens more frequently in mail ballots, but it's a minuscule amount. And when it does happen, it's usually happening in local elections. And when it does happen, election officials get wise to it pretty quickly. They can see like an unusual number of mail ballots coming from someplace. These are our election officials are not idiots either. Come on. If you think like you're the smartest person and you can figure out all the ways in which the fraud can be done.

Guess what? The election officials have been doing this as their career and they've seen it all and they talk to each other and they know how these, you know, how people try to defraud the system. And, you know, when we look across the country, we look at people who were trying to vote twice by voting in Florida and Pennsylvania, for example. Guess what? The Republicans, they're Trump supporters because Trump had lied to people and said, well, this is so easy to do. People thought they'd go out and test the system. So here in Florida, for example, we have three retirees from the villages, our major retirement community in central Florida, who have been found guilty of double voting in another state. And so election officials are checking these things over to what's the, you know, don't do it. Don't try and test the system. Could you get away with it? Yeah, I mean, there's a probability, you know, I can't say like, you know, you couldn't get away with it.

And I'm some sure someone's out there chortling someplace. I voted twice. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Yeah, it's possible. But in terms of a large scale effort to subvert the election, where there was some orchestrated campaign on this, it would get out. Election officials would detect it. People are human beings. They would put it out on social media or something. I mean, you can't keep things secret anymore in the sort of way that you could have done in the past. And so people are dumb about how they post their lives onto social media.

I'm probably a good example of that myself, if you follow my Twitter account. So, you know, it's this idea that there was some orchestrated campaign to somehow subvert the election through mail balloting. It just doesn't add up. It's not possible that some sort of systematic organized effort existed to sway the election one way or the other. So, you know, in states like Georgia, where signature verification happens, you know, that's one of the, I guess, a central plot line in the 2000 mules film is that this idea that people were basically ballot harvesting, that there were, you know, quote unquote, paid mules who were going around collecting ballots from

people, filling them out for Joe Biden, then returning them in mass, you know, at their local mail-in drop boxes. Can you talk a little bit about why you don't buy that theory and, you know, what some of the process looks like there? Well, you know, you've already watched 2,000 Mules. Thanks for giving some money to those scammers. And, you know, the state of Georgia subpoenaed them and said, give us your evidence. Not the things that you made up in the video, in the movie. Give us the hard evidence that you have that this thing happened. And they couldn't provide it. They refused to provide it. They refused to

provide it. So that should be your big clue. I mean, beyond the fact that if you had evidence that the election was fraudulently run, and that the election should have been turned over, you wouldn't make a movie about it. You wouldn't charge money for it. You give that evidence over to law enforcement and election officials so they could take action. And I was involved in the litigation in Georgia, defending actually the Secretary of State, which I've been involved with numerous times in the plaintiff suing them. But they came to me and they asked me, could you testify on our behalf uh uh against the claims that are coming from trump i never had to testify because the trump organization dropped their lawsuits the

day before i was uh um the lawsuit and i was i had all my bags packed 4 p.m i'm like do i need to drive up to atlanta let me know and uh and uh lo and behold they dropped the suit uh but um i i looked at all the evidence um and you know was it oh look at all these people who are voting by mail from these uh um mail uh um uh boxes like a mailbox store and and then it turned out well actually that's just an apartment building that has like a mailbox, boxes, etc. And the ground floor and everybody uses that as their mail. That's like how the apartment complex runs is that's where their mail goes is via mailboxes, etc. And it was that sort of stuff. And it was the bad matching that was going on.

of stuff. And it was the bad matching that was going on. And again, if you just, just a cursory knowledge of how the data work, you wouldn't realize, you'd realize that a canceled ballot is not a voted ballot. And yet they were claiming that, oh my God, look at all these people voting twice. It's like, no one look at the field. It says, see, cancel. That was never, never counted. That was, we only look at the A's, the accepted ballots. Those are the ones that, and people destroyed ballots for all reasons. Again, I can look into the data. There was one time a voter requested a new ballot because their cat peed on their ballot. And that's actually a notation in the system. But it got a C next to it. It was canceled.

You destroy that ballot. We send you a new one. And it's barcode. It's got other identifiers on it. So we know that you can't return both the ballots and they'll be counted twice. So, again, if you look at the litigation that happened in Georgia and lots of other places, the evidence was wanting. And even Trump appointed judges said, we don't believe it.

You're not putting forward any evidence. You're just making rhetoric. This is nonsense. And so now here we are much later. You know, these claims keep getting regurgitated in different ways. One day they're going to find the thing that sticks. And, you know, that's the hope here. But if we keep throwing out the smoke and we say, yeah, there's fire here someplace. Here's the smoke.

There must be fire here someplace. That's not proof of anything. And they have not proved to this day that there was any fraudulent activity that could have changed the results of the election. Are there a few people out there who committed fraud? Yes, we know that. But it's a handful. I mean, you can count them on your fingers. I mean, that's the sort of thing that did not change the outcome of the election. I mean, that's the sort of thing that did not change the outcome of the election. Leading up to the 2020 election, we did see a lot of election laws change. Obviously, I think mail-in voting is probably the most notable.

It was expanded in many places. Some states moved up early voting dates, things like that, you know, all to address the reality of the pandemic, which was basically that a lot of voters didn't want to go stand in a voting line indoors and vote because they were scared of getting sick. Now we're heading into the 2022 midterms. I'm curious. I mean, this is one of the things I know you track is how election laws have changed. There on the quote-unquote big lie and all the election fraud stuff, there was a pretty significant legislative backlash where the election laws sort of changed again post-pandemic in response to this. So I'm curious, where are we now in some of these states? Are we closer to how the laws were in 2019? Are we closer to how they

were post-pandemic? What kind of role do we expect mail-in balloting to play going into the midterms in 2024? What are you kind of seeing in that space? Yeah, that's actually an interesting question. So we did see a rapid expansion on an emergency basis of mail balloting throughout the entire country, except for a few of the Republican States, like sort of your usual suspects of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, those sorts of places, Indiana. But the question that you're raising is kind of interesting one. Was there a reversion back to the election laws in 2019. And in some

places, the answer to that is yes, there were, because these were emergency provisions. And once the emergency passed, then whatever emergency orders that were issued by the state government lapsed, and now the state is back to this election laws, unless there's been any other legislative activity, are back to the laws as they existed before the pandemic. There are a few states, though, that have decided to change the way in which they vote. So places like Nevada and Vermont are now running all-mail ballot elections, where they were not doing that before. are now running all-mail ballot elections where they were not doing that before. California was on this track, but they had given counties an option to move towards all-mail elections before 2020, and some had started moving in that direction. And so everything just got accelerated

in California, so now they're all-mail. When I I say all mail too, I have to be clear that you can still vote in person in those states. They have same day registration in California, for example, and in Colorado, which is a vote by mail, all mail ballot state. But they do have these, what we call vote centers, these super polling locations where anyone in the county can go vote and do same day registration at the same time. About 10% of the people do that in Colorado. That went down in 2020 a little bit, down to like 7%. It's probably going to go back up again with 2022 as a percentage of

those who vote. So there are going gonna be some changing behaviors of people too. One interesting place though that had a reversion that's gonna go even back further in time than 2019 is gonna be Florida. Although that's not gonna be for this election cycle. So I wanna be very clear on this one. In Florida, after the 2012 election, there was a lot of concern about long lines.

And Republicans in the state said, well, we will make it easier for people to vote by mail. A mail ballot request will be good through two general elections in Florida. And initially, that worked well for the Republicans because more Republicans were voting by mail than Democrats. But then Democrats started catching up. They started investing effort into encouraging their supporters to vote by mail. And then everything got topsy-turvy in 2020. Again, well-documented in the book, but in state after state after state. And it wasn't just like the blue states, this was going on in the red states too. Um, places where Republicans, more Republicans typically voted by, um, uh, mail, suddenly more Democrats were voting by mail and by lopsided margins. It wasn't just a small amount and in-person early voting, which is where Democrats usually voted. Suddenly that's where the Republicans were voting were in person early.

So that the whole thing got switched around. The legacy of that in Florida is going into the 2022 election. Currently, the Democrats have a 500,000 mail ballot request advantage going into this election. Wow. Yeah. But this will be the last election after this. Republicans passed a law that said after this election, you have to request a mail ballot for every election. You can't do this renewal or this sort of semi-permanent that we currently have in Florida. So it'll change after 2022. But right now, Democrats actually have a mail ballot advantage that I don't know how it will, you know, to what effect it will have. But reasonably, you know, Democrats might get an extra 20, net 20,000 votes or so just

because of the way in which their voters are going to get, to use Trump's words, unsolicited mail ballots. Actually, they solicited them. They requested them in 2020. Interesting. So we're coming up on time here. We're a little over an hour. Before I let you go, I do want to kind of talk about this, I guess, the final chapters in your book where you explore some of the solutions. I mean, I know you mentioned in your eyes, the big one is just Trump conceding that he lost the election and, you know, anybody who loses an election just owning that reality. But putting that aside for

a minute, I'm curious, I mean, how do you think we can make our elections more secure or more trustworthy? I mean, what kind of reforms might you be interested in implementing if, you know, you had a magic wand and could do something like that? Well, I mean, if I had a magic wand, we would have national standards, at least minimum standards on mail balloting and in-person early voting and same-day registration. And actually, again, I wrote an op-ed on USA Today about this. I agree with Donald Trump. We need a national identity card and just have that count as voter registration. Let's do away with that.

These aren't things that are in the book though. More directly to like what the experiences of the pandemic were is that, and as you know yourself, transparency was used as a weapon, was weaponized against the election officials. So election officials put cameras into uh the vote counting locations they they wanted to be transparent they thought that transparency would be this panacea and uh people being able to see how elections would run were run that would solve the problem of people being distrustful.

And instead, what happened was, oh, that poor guy in Georgia who had a sample ballot in with the regular ballot sent back to the election office, and he's separating them out of the envelope, and he sees the sample ballot, and he crumples it up and throws it away. envelope and he sees the sample ballot and he crumples it up and throws it away. Suddenly he's tampering with the election and death threats are leveled against the guy. And he has to go into hiding because he was doing something very innocuous, which was simply taking two pieces of paper. Oh, this is a sample ballot. This is not, here's the real ballot, but the real ballot over here, here's a sample ballot. Let's throw that away. And that sort of thing happened a lot. And so while I'm very sympathetic to transparency,

trust me, I am, I really am. I think in some ways, maybe we need to be a little bit less transparent. And one of the ways I think that we can be less transparent is to delay reporting of election results. Wisconsin showed us during the primary under court order that you could delay the election results reporting by a week and we will still survive as a country. Alaska just showed us, not in the book, but Alaska just showed us, telling those ranked choice voting, that might take a few weeks. We're okay with it. We don't have to have on election night. We don't have to know the election results on election night. We can wait till noon at the next day. I think that's perfectly reasonable. And instead of there being like a ballot dump of Milwaukee, all reporting their mail-in ballots because the Republicans in Wisconsin refused to allow election officials additional time to process mail ballots. So they all had to do it, you know, on election day, and it comes in, they have to, they report all of those in

one batch out of Milwaukee. It looks like an anomaly. It is an anomaly because it's a blue county and a blue city. And they're just reporting their election results by a method of voting that we knew Democrats were going to choose to vote in. And so Trump, again, and his surrogates and everybody else have claimed that these ballot dumps are somehow evidence that there was nefarious things going on in the election when it was just election reporting. And if we had waited till all of the votes were available to be counted within like the County of Milwaukee, then guess what? We wouldn't have seen the ballot dump. We would just see normal reporting. If all the counties

did at the same time, we would see normal reporting and it wouldn't, there wouldn't be this nefarious thing about how the timing of the elections are being reported, how that somehow means that there's attempt to manipulate the election results. And then it would also solve the problem of Antrim County, Michigan. So that's the place where the local election officials had misprogrammed a tabulation device. There was a late race that had been left off the ballot and it was in one precinct and they had to reprogram their tabulator and whoever did it made a mistake.

And they made a change that went countywide and said it was supposed to be for that one precinct. And suddenly all of the columns, if you will, of the data are off. And so in that one county, even on election night, I'm sitting around the exit poll organization on election night, we see Antrim County pop up and we're like, oh, that's a reporting error. All right. Yeah. Ignore that one. Let's look elsewhere in Michigan. Let's ignore Antrim until they figure that out. And of course, AP, Associated Press,

is on the ground. They're reporting, yeah, it's an error. All right, so we know it's an error. Ignore it. They'll figure it out. And they did, because they had paper ballots. They were able to recount. They were able to figure it out. But of course, that launched billion-dollar lawsuits about Dominion voting systems somehow manipulating the election. That's not what happened here. It was just a simple human error. And fortunately, we could fix it because we had paper ballots. And again, if you really care about these sorts of things, you want paper ballots everywhere. And you'd want some way to detect these errors before they get reported so that we don't have this hemorrhage as a country to think like there is somehow fraud when the most simple explanation was simply incompetence.

Yeah, I mean, I guess from all the reading and writing I've done on this, my takeaway has been that I really like paper ballots because it's a really nice way to be able to track all this stuff when things go wrong. And I know everybody wants to techify everything, but it strikes me as kind of one of those scenarios where the old method of somebody filling in a bubble is actually the most reliable when stuff hits the fan and you need to go back and count them one by one? Yeah, I'm a big fan of the ballot marking devices, especially for certain communities like disabled communities and empowering them to participate. And so those are expensive, though, and how they've implemented it in Georgia is a travesty because you don't actually get to, it's a QR code instead of indecipherable for the voter. But there's certainly better ways to have ballot marking devices to help certain at-risk and disadvantaged communities to participate in elections and have a paper ballot. Well, let me ask you, I mean, I got to say as a reporter, I think I'm a little bit allergic to your idea of waiting on the results because

I want them so badly. And I love the transparency. My solution to the same problem has always been, and you actually sort of alluded to this a little bit about Milwaukee, is like, you know, what I tell people all the time is we didn't, or I tell my conservative readers all the time when I talk about some of the things that happened in the 2020 election is we didn't have these problems of midnight drops in Florida or Ohio or other Republican-led states because those Republican legislatures let the counties process the mail-in ballots before election day. And so we got those results much quicker. So my solution would just be,

why don't we just make it standard procedure that these places get two weeks to process the ballot? So when Election Day gets here, we get the mail-in ballot results basically right away rather than at three in the morning. Well, you know, one day that's going to happen the other way. But again, there's no need for us to have the election results other than the, you know, curing an interest that's happening in those election results and staying up late on election night so that we can try and figure out like who's going to win. And I think that unfortunately also creates another bad narrative, which is that we look at the horse race on election night itself. And we come up with narratives about how people did and based on reporting of results and the timing of results. And, you know, someone's come from behind. That's not how it works.

These are all the results that are getting reported. Everyone voted at the same time. It's just a reporting delay. It's not someone coming from behind to overtake another candidate. coming from behind to overtake another candidate. But that's how it gets filtered in the press. When you see the numbers ticking away and you're like, what's going to happen here? And are they going to come up from behind? And so a lot of that horse race narrative that, you know, it's broken our system generally going into the election that we

unfortunately have way too much horse race coverage. It just gets amplified on election night. And it's not a story about what the voters cared about and what the voters and how they voted. It's more about, you know, is so-and-so going to come from behind? And, you know, it's a whole other horse race coming down to the wire that I think we could do without as a country. And yeah, I mean, look, I consult the exit poll organization. So I'm biting the hand that feeds me here. And so I'm arguing against something that I have a deep investment in myself. But I think it's really important that we change the way in which we think about how election night happens and the meaning of those results. And this may be a way to mitigate some

of the problems that we have with our overall coverage on election night. I love it. Michael McDonald, his book is From Pandemic to Insurrection Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election. His website's electproject.org and his Twitter handle is electproject, which I definitely suggest punching a follow on. Michael, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it. And maybe we can link up post midterms and talk about some of the results that came in. I'd love to do it. Thanks for having me on. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Sean Brady, and Bailey Saul.

Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who designed our logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our website at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.