The Daily - How Democracy Itself Ended Up on the Ballot in Wisconsin

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

Over the last decade, Wisconsin has become an extreme experiment in single-party rule. Republican officials have redrawn the state’s election districts and rewritten laws to ensure their domination of the state’s legislature.In Tuesday’s elections, those officials are asking voters for the final lever of power: control over the entire system of voting. Guest: Reid J. Epstein, a reporter covering elections and campaigns for The New York Times.Background reading: In Wisconsin, a 50-50 battleground state, Republicans are close to capturing supermajorities in the State Legislature that would render the Democratic governor irrelevant even if he wins re-election.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the past decade, Wisconsin has become an extreme experiment in single-party rule. Despite being an evenly split swing state, Republican officials there have redrawn the state's election districts and rewritten its laws to ensure that they disproportionately dominate the state's legislature. Now, those same Republicans are asking voters for the final lever of power, control over the state's entire system of voting. Today, my colleagues Reed Epstein, Rob Zipko, and Rachel Quester

go to Wisconsin to understand how democracy itself ended up on the ballot. It's Tuesday, November 8th, Election Day. Reid, my sense is that you have basically moved to Wisconsin over the past few weeks. You're almost a resident. Michael, this is my fourth trip to Wisconsin in the last month. Well, explain why. Because it seems to me your beat during these midterms has been, for lack of a better phrase,

the state of democracy in the U.S. How exactly does Wisconsin fit into that question? It has seemed for a while that democracy is kind of sitting on a nice edge in Wisconsin. It's a 50-50 state in statewide elections. Four of the last six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point but republicans here control the state legislature with such a tight grip that there's almost no hope of democrats doing much of anything

other than electing a governor who can veto conservative legislation. And Governor Tony Evers, who won in the blue wave of 2018 by a whopping 1.1%, is up for re-election against a Republican named Tim Michaels, who has expressed skepticism about the results of the 2020 election. He has said if he wins the election, that Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin. And what does he mean by that? Well, it wasn't clear what he meant at the time. His campaign aides have since said that what he meant was he would implement policies so popular that it would elect Republicans forever. But what Democrats heard him say was that he and Republicans in

the legislature would rewrite the state's election laws so that Republicans would never lose again. Meaning the new governor and this firmly Republican legislature, they would literally re-engineer how it is that people in Wisconsin vote to perpetuate their own re-election and power. vote to perpetuate their own re-election and power. If not necessarily re-engineer how they vote, re-engineer who is in control of the voting and accounting. So now it makes sense how the future of democracy fits into Wisconsin. That's really what's at stake in the election here today. So how exactly does Wisconsin find itself in this position?

Well, to really understand that, you have to go back and take a closer look at how the 2020 election played out here in Wisconsin. Hi, Nikki. How are you? Hi, nice to meet you. I'm Rob. Hi, I'm Rachel. So for the past few weeks, I, along with Daily producers Rob Zipko and Rachel Quester, have been doing just that. You guys want to come in out of the cold?

Sure. Yeah, out of the wind. And one person we talked to who really brought this all into focus for us is a woman named Nikki, who lives in Racine County, about a half hour south of Milwaukee. All right. Shall we start? Let's do it. And tell me about Nikki. What do I need to know? Well, I was born and raised in Racine. So, yeah, I pretty much only have known Racine as far as where I've lived. So Nikki's a small business owner with four kids.

She's lived in Wisconsin her whole life. You know, for somebody who's never been here, if you kind of had to take them by the shoulders and be like, this is what Wisconsin is, this is what Wisconsin is about, what would you say to them? Beer. I mean, if I'm being honest, it is about beer and cheese. I'm sure everybody's heard that. She says she didn't grow up in a particularly political household, but by the time she started her own family... I think that's when I really started paying attention to what was going on in our country. She finds herself paying a little more attention to politics. 9-11 happened. 9-11 happens.

Terrifying. The country goes through a period of time where politics sort of becomes on the front burner for people in a way that it hadn't been before. It opened my eyes to, OK, well, I have a say in what happens, too. Everybody does. And the more she votes and the more she looks at candidates running for office, the stronger she feels about it. for office, the stronger she feels about it. I talked to my family about the importance of voting. And one of the biggest things that a lot of my family would say to me at that time was, it's one vote. My vote doesn't matter. What's one vote going to do? And I never really tried to sway them one way or the other. I just said, this is important. Like, you should have a say in what's going on because you can't.

She kind of becomes an evangelist for voting. And by the time 2016 happens. So 2016, I voted for Trump. Nikki finds herself very interested in Donald Trump. I liked what he stood for. I did like that he was kind of an outsider to politics. She admired the different approach that he brought to speaking about politics. So Trump's elected.

And when 2020 rolled around. COVID happened. And then all these different policies happened around voting. Wisconsin has to figure out how to put on an election when there's a pandemic happening. Right. If you remember back in the presidential primary in April of 2020, Wisconsin was the first place to try to run an in-person election during the pandemic. Right. And April 2020 is literally like just a few weeks into the pandemic.

Right. And it was a disaster. The Democratic governor, Tony Evers, tried to postpone the election like they did in a few other states to try to sort of get their act together. The Republicans in the state legislature and the conservatives who control the state Supreme Court blocked him from doing so. And so they held an election that wound up with almost all of the normal polling places were closed. In Milwaukee, there were lines around the block in the rain, in a pandemic. Right. And it really delivered an image of incompetence in dealing with the pandemic that kind of signified what a mess things were both in Wisconsin and the whole country. And so because the primary was such a mess, officials in Wisconsin took a number of steps to avoid a repeat during the general election.

Mm-hmm. And what did those steps look like? Well, Michael, the thing to understand about Wisconsin elections is that they're run by 1,850 municipal clerks in every city, village, and town in the state. Mm-hmm. clerks in every city, village, and town in the state. And those clerks get their guidance and rules on how to run elections from a state body called the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which everybody here just calls the WEC. It has six members. There's three Republicans and three Democrats. And the idea is that they're supposed to give guidance and make rules in a bipartisan fashion. So the commission had the job of trying to figure out how people were going to vote during the pandemic. Got it. So what did the WEC do in

2020? So the commission took some creative license with the state's voting laws. Take the state's nursing homes that were in lockdown, like they were all over the country. Before the pandemic, people who were confined there who needed help filling out their ballots would call two special voting deputies from their local clerk's office to come in and help them with their ballots. But during the pandemic, deputies, like everybody else, weren't allowed inside the nursing homes. And so the commission allowed nursing home staff to help people fill out their absentee ballots instead. Got it. They changed the rules also around absentee ballots. So before the pandemic, a Wisconsin voter would have to specifically ask

for an absentee ballot application. But during the pandemic, they allowed a mass mailing of absentee ballot applications to all the voters. The third thing that they did was change the guidance on dropboxes, which really hadn't been used very much in Wisconsin before the pandemic. Now the commission was allowing clerks to distribute dropboxes around their community so people could return their ballots without having to go inside or putting them in the mail. So the commission's approach was, how can we make it easier to vote, and specifically make it easier to vote remotely

in the middle of a pandemic? Yeah, it was all about trying to make it easier and safer for people to vote during this period of time. And in a way, it worked. More people in Wisconsin voted absentee in 2020 than had in any election up to that point. But for Nikki, this all seemed kind of funny. That's the first time I think I've really ever

heard or paid attention to the whole absentee ballots. She'd never thought that much about absentee ballots before. Like, is this normal? Does this always happen? And I just never paid attention to it. And of course, at this time, Donald Trump is talking a lot about the ills and perils of absentee voting. Right. And so were his supporters. And even though the state elections commission was bipartisan and Republicans on the commission supported these new changes, a lot of the Republican lawmakers in the state felt the WEC had taken things too far.

Hi, Senator Bernier. Hi. It's really good to meet you. I don't know that we've met, but it's good to meet you. And one of those who was concerned was one of the people in the state who knows the system best. Give me a quick tour of your office. Do you have any memorabilia or anything? A state senator named Kathy Bernier.

And then the Dairy Business Association. Can you describe what that award looks like? Looks like a cow. Yeah, so. Made of glass, right? Yeah. Well, plastic, technically. Tell us about Senator Bernier. So Kathy Bernier has spent her entire political life working on elections.

She got her start in 1998 when she was elected the county clerk of Chippewa County in western Wisconsin. when she was elected the county clerk of Chippewa County in western Wisconsin. And there she oversaw voting for a decade, helping the municipal clerks in her county run their elections. Eventually, she runs and wins a seat in the state assembly. I was on the election committee right away. And once she gets in the state legislature, she works on elections issues. She gets herself on the state's elections committee. She writes the voting laws. She knows this inside and out. And so when the pandemic hits.

So COVID put an entire new twist on the elections. She gets worried about what the elections commission is doing. I had a conversation with Dean Knutson, who sat on the Wisconsin Election Commission. You know, I told him I didn't disagree with being able to use drop boxes, but I argued with him that the law doesn't allow for it. She knows that their decisions to expand the use of drop boxes and allow people in nursing homes to vote without special voting deputies don't fit within the state law. We have no law that allows for it.

And these things that didn't seem quite right to Nikki also weren't right to Senator Bernier because she, perhaps as much as anyone else in the state, understands what the state law says and what it doesn't say. So headed into election day, understands what the state law says and what it doesn't say. So headed into Election Day, this is the atmosphere. Real Republican worry at lots of different levels

about this new pandemic-era system of Wisconsin voting. That's right. And so in Racine County on Election Day, Nikki heads out to vote. I was going to go to a place and vote. I wasn't sending anything in. I wasn't doing an absentee ballot.

I wanted to go and put my vote on paper and put it in the machine. There was no chance that she was going to use an absentee ballot or a dropbox. She wanted to know that her ballot was fed into the voting machine herself. And did it feel secure to you once you did? I think I looked at things a little bit differently. I looked at like, I remember looking at like the pen that I used even. Just looking over the ballot and felt a little bit different putting it into the machine. Like, I hope this counts.

So that night at Nikki's house, her family watches the election results come in. It is 10 o'clock here in New York City. Polls have just closed in another four states. Let's start. We were all just sitting around watching it. Like we will have like family dinner and stuff like that where they come over. So it was just kind of like any other night that we would have done that. But we were watching this. I'm going to interrupt you. We're going to make a big call right here. The Fox News decision desk can now project that President Donald Trump will win the state of Florida. Twenty nine electoral votes. The way numbers were coming in, it looked like he was, you know, winning the big

numbers that he needed to. Fox News, the decision desk, can now call the state of Ohio for President Trump. You can't get to the White House. The Republican couldn't without Ohio. He now wins Ohio. We all kind of, like, we're in the mindset of, he's going to win. Donald Trump wins if he wins Pennsylvania, if he wins Wisconsin, and it's possible that

he could win Wisconsin. Like, this is good. This was a good night. And that night, if you remember, Trump was winning in Wisconsin. Right. The Election Day vote was a big Republican vote for him. And when I went to sleep, I can't remember the exact time, but it was later,

I went to sleep because I'm like, that's good. Like, he won. But when she wakes up the next morning, woke up and was like, what happened? Joe Biden is ahead in Wisconsin by a few thousand votes. Democratic? Joe Biden is ahead of Wisconsin by a few thousand votes.

Democratic nominee Joe Biden appears to have a narrow lead over President Trump in the fight for those 270 electoral college votes. Now, this could all change. I was surprised, very shocked and surprised when I woke up. Joe Biden holding a lead 238 to President Trump's 213. I was watching the TV and I was just like in kind of disbelief. It's coming down to a few key swing states, including Michigan, where Joe Biden has a slight lead and Wisconsin, where Joe Biden is also with a slight lead. And then I just remember, you know, then more details coming out about how, you know, a bunch of votes came in in the middle of the night. And like that was weird.

What happened was, and I remember because I stayed up for this at about three in the morning, a big tranche of absentee ballots were reported. And those ballots were primarily Democratic. And they put Joe Biden into the lead in Wisconsin. Right. And so when Nikki and the rest of the state woke up in the morning, they found that what they, when they went to bed, was a Trump advantage was now a Joe Biden lead. So for Nikki, it didn't add up. And it was suspicious and it seemed fishy. But for others, particularly people who knew how elections worked inside and out,

like Senator Bernier, it made a lot of sense. So the fact that it takes a long time for large cities to count their ballots, especially when there are so many absentee ballots, is not surprising to me. A Republican has to be thousands of votes ahead before Milwaukee finishes counting because you are going to lose your lead without question. Because even before 2020, the big Democratic cities in Wisconsin tended to take longer to count their votes than smaller Republican districts. And the Republican votes would get tallied first. They'd create a portrait of the results

that didn't quite fit with the final reality. I knew there was going to be questions or problems, you know, with how things were carried out. But I was still, I was confident in the results and they were as accurate as they possibly can be. And so this is where Senator Bernier's experience of 2020 starts to diverge from Nikki's. Once in a while, there's a mistake. Once in a while, somebody screws up. But for the most part, we have all of the checks and balances in place so that the results are the results. Are there people that we have caught cheating? Yeah, there are some. Are there some that we might not have caught? Yep, I am sure there are some, but not 21,000. Ultimately, Senator Bernier had faith

in the final results that came from Wisconsin, that Joe Biden won the state by just over 20,000 votes. And she knew that the questions that she had about absentee voting were an order of magnitude too small to change the final result. And she trusted that the local clerks in the state had done their job right. that the local clerks in the state had done their job right. And she was savvy enough to know that people who weren't in government, who didn't have her level of access and didn't know the system well, might not believe in that result. My concern was and is that, you know, perception is important too, that you want to make sure that all of the voters have confidence in the electoral system. And if they find that... Right. So she doesn't necessarily know Nikki, but she understands why someone like Nikki

is seeing this all as so suspicious. She knows a lot of people like Nikki who had doubts about the election and what had happened before and on election day. And those doubts got amplified when fighting for truth, justice and the American way. The conservative talk radio hosts in Wisconsin who are very powerful begin spreading allegations about what had happened. I personally think and again, we have to get the investigation see there that we have seen voter fraud on a mass scale across this country unlike anything we've ever seen before. And that quickly reached Nikki. You know, the things I was hearing was that there was a lot of things going on in Madison that, and I'm going to forget what they were called, but they were like set up in the park

and collecting votes from people. The same exact thing happened in Georgia where they had RVs going through mostly minority cities and towns. Oh, we've seen that in RV. Oh, they did? We've called it the Scooby-Doo voting machine. That they're just sort of rolling around with five teenagers and a dog. I mean, and you have.

I heard about the on Dan O'Donnell. He called it like the Scooby Mobile, but that was like going around collecting votes. I've done significant research and significant reporting into the issue of nursing home vote fraud in Wisconsin. And then in the nursing homes, they were collecting a ton of votes from people in the nursing homes. You actually had nursing home staff members filling out ballots. To my knowledge, this is what happened. They either filled out ballots or someone who is clearly not mentally able to vote.

They're saying, oh, do you want to vote for Joe Biden? They wouldn't respond. They say, OK, we're voting for Joe Biden. And there were some, you know, certain stories I heard on different podcasts or on the radio just about, you know, people's parents, you know, voted and they never voted before. People's parents, you know, voted and they never voted before. Or, you know, like, they can't even know, they don't even know what day it is. But they voted for the president. And with everything she heard, Nikki was feeling more and more frustrated about the election. I kept following those stories as things progressed.

And my biggest thing is, why aren't we doing anything about this? Why isn't this getting, you know, more attention? I definitely talked a lot about it to my husband. And he just, you know, what are you going to do, Nikki? And I'm like, well, I don't know, but something needs to happen. Like, more people need to question things instead of just being complacent with the answer they're given. And then Donald Trump himself comes out and says, Well, actually, I won Wisconsin. Wisconsin was stolen from me. But I actually won. And this was not what Senator Bernier wanted to hear.

And this was not what Senator Bernier wanted to hear. So when Trump came out in December and said, actually, I won Wisconsin, what went through your mind? And what did you think his supporters in Wisconsin would think about that? Grr, is what I thought. Because she knows this will give ammunition to Donald Trump supporters in the state who had any doubts about the results. But Trump doesn't stop there. He starts calling out the Republican leaders in Wisconsin,

saying they were deliberately covering up election fraud. And eventually the pressure becomes so intense that some of these lawmakers give in. The Republican Speaker of the State Assembly authorizes an investigation to look into election fraud, not led by an independent investigator, but by a highly partisan former state Supreme Court justice who already had claimed the election was stolen from Trump. Wow. And that caught Senator Bernier off guard. I thought, that's not the plan.

I had a discussion about the plan. Because in her mind, the way to handle election doubts was to calmly explain to people what had happened. The plan was to educate the electorate on the election system here in the state of Wisconsin, to start turning the ship, and to get everyone to cool their jets a little bit and wait for... She met with constituents. She told them the election wasn't stolen. She explained why the election results started in Trump's favor and switched to Biden. And to her, this partisan investigation became sort of a theater of the absurd. It drags on for months.

It costs more than a million dollars. The investigator tried to subpoena local officials. He threatened to put them in jail for not talking to them. He takes meetings with well-known conspiracy theorists. And eventually, Senator Bernier decided she'd had enough. It's a pleasure to be here. In December of 2021, she goes to a press conference and she says, This is a charade, what's going on with this constant drumbeat of all the massive voter fraud.

This investigation is a sham. There's a simple explanation for almost every single thing that people accuse election officials of doing. There's an explanation for almost all of it. And so I think the Gableman investigation should come to a close sooner rather than later. She felt like the partisan investigator had been totally out of control with his investigation. Because the longer we keep this up, the more harm we're going to do for Republicans.

And she says, I'm a Republican and this is bad for Wisconsin and it's bad for Republicans, and it has to end. When Benjamin Franklin came out of the convention and our Constitution was created, he was asked, what kind of government do we have? And he said, a republic if we can keep it. We're in jeopardy of losing it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Senator Bernier. Why did you decide to do that? Because our election officials were getting beat up

as if they did something fraudulent in the electoral process to give Joe Biden an edge. And I just knew that not to be true. But despite Kathy's plea, the investigation continues. The investigator eventually published a report in which he suggests that the state legislature should seek to decertify Joe Biden's election in Wisconsin. Which, of course, is something that's not possible. There's no mechanism to do that. But once the report's out there, it's like pouring gasoline on the fire of Wisconsin Republicans who think that there's a way to undo the 2020 election. Republicans who think that there's a way to undo the 2020 election.

So among Republicans in Wisconsin, voices like Senator Berniers are just being overwhelmed by people who want something done about this election fraud they believe took place, something big and decisive. And that's what happens. We'll be right back. Sir Reid, you said that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, voices from within the Republican base are demanding tangible changes to the Wisconsin election system. So what do Republican leaders end up actually doing in response to those demands? Well, Michael, they start what becomes an all-out assault on the state's election system. It begins with a right-wing activist group that brings a lawsuit

seeking to end the use of drop boxes in Wisconsin. The case eventually goes to the state Supreme Court, which has a four to three conservative majority, and they rule that just about all drop boxes are illegal. It's a big ruling. It's a big ruling. But where things really kick into high gear is in the state legislature, But where things really kick into high gear is in the state legislature, where Republicans in both chambers begin trying to rewrite the state's election laws. My colleagues want to draft all kinds of bills to deal with election fraud and election issues. And once again, Senator Kathy Bernier is at the middle of this. We had people on our side of the aisle,

our constituents out there screaming and wailing and whatever, and they wanted to appease them. As it happens, she is the chairwoman of the Senate committee that deals with elections. She's really the gatekeeper for any election laws in the state of Wisconsin. So they're drafting bills like crazy. And she's just being inundated. Numerous bills. With proposals from her conservative colleagues. My staff will tell you I'm very fussy when I draft legislation or accept it in my committee.

It has to be drafted precisely right or I won't accept it. And she says that those colleagues were in such a rush to pass new election bills that some of these proposals were a mess. Many of the drafts were sloppy and I wasn't going to accept just any piece of legislation. And of course, when I wouldn't do it, I had a colleague send out a press release chastising me. And so that is where a lot of Trump supporters felt that I was hindering things. I wasn't hindering anything. I just wanted to make sure that our reaction was appropriate for the situation. So she tries to pump the brakes, sort out what's

reasonable and what's not, and stop some of the more what she saw as ridiculous proposals from getting through. But she is a Republican. She is a conservative Republican. And so she signs off on a number of bills, About a dozen of them pass the legislature. And what do those dozen bills do? Well, if you remember in 2020, the Wisconsin Elections Commission mass-mailed absentee ballot applications. One of the bills would require voters to make a formal request for an absentee ballot and show a valid ID every election to get their ballot. Another bill would forbid clerks from doing something that they've always done, which is fill in missing information like a zip code or a line on the address on the envelope

that the absentee ballot is returned in. That would be illegal. And if the information isn't all properly filled in, the ballot would be invalid. Interesting. So these changes are going to make absentee voting just a little bit harder, or make it hard to finish absentee voting. Right. And we know that Democrats are more likely to use absentee ballots than Republicans. And so there is a real sort of partisan advantage that Republicans are seeking through these new laws. process. But what's different in Wisconsin and why we're talking about Wisconsin and not anywhere else is that Republicans here are also trying to change who is in charge of elections in the state. Explain that. What do you mean? Well, if you remember, we talked about the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The legislature is trying to cut the legs out from the commission,

which they allege set these policies around the pandemic that opened the system to fraud that cost Donald Trump a victory in the state. And how were they trying to cut the legs out from under the commission? Well, one of the things that they passed would give the legislature control over guidance that the commission hands down to the clerks. So you can imagine like a chain of command of state senators telling the commission what to do and the commission then handing that to the local clerks about what election rules to follow. So basically the Republican-controlled legislature would supplant the judgments of this commission. It would take it over.

Right. They wouldn't be able to, you know, send a press release or any sort of guidance without the legislature say so. But there's a bigger idea out there that a lot of Republicans have embraced in the last year, which is to eliminate the commission altogether. Wow. And if that happened, it's not entirely clear what would take its place, but we know that the Republicans in the legislature are not about to hand control over the elections to any office that's run by a Democrat. And so if Republicans win the elections for attorney general or secretary of state, there's been talk that election authority could be handed to one of those offices.

They could create a new office and put a Republican in charge. Or the legislature could keep authority for running the elections for themselves, which is something that Senator Bernier is pretty uncomfortable with. Well, first of all, the legislature is a lawmaking body. We really cannot be the executive branch and the legislative branch. So I don't see that working at all. Because to her, it would mean the legislature is the judge, jury and executioner for how elections are run in the state, even though the legislators are on the ballot themselves in a lot of these races. And what's going to happen when we're in the heat of an election and there is a controversy involving a Wisconsin legislator, either in the Senate or the Assembly. And here we've got to oversee our own decisions involving something in our own election. It's incompatible.

We need a body to facilitate running an election one way or the other. And Reid, what is the likelihood that the scenario that you are describing here will actually happen? Well, that's part of the reason why today's elections in Wisconsin are so consequential. that the scenario that you are describing here will actually happen? Well, that's part of the reason why today's elections in Wisconsin are so consequential. In the race for governor, the Democratic incumbent, Tony Evers, has been the thing holding back these Republican bills from becoming law. He's vetoed every bill the Republican legislature has sent him to change the way Wisconsin votes.

He's actually prevented all those things we talked about from becoming law. Right. And he said he would continue to veto Republicans' efforts to change voting laws said he supports changing or eliminating the Elections Commission to effectively put it under Republican control. Hmm. And as of this past weekend, the polls were showing the race in Wisconsin is tied. So if Michaels wins, there's really nothing to stop Wisconsin's Republican legislators from running elections exactly how they want. Right, and I'm thinking back to that quote, Reid, you mentioned earlier from this Republican candidate saying that if he wins the governorship, Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin. It sounds like what he means is things like abolishing this election commission ensures that he and the Republicans in the legislature have the power to make that statement true. Yeah, I mean, he's not wrong that he could change things to ensure that Republicans don't lose an election again if he's elected governor.

But even if Tim Michaels loses, Republicans have drawn themselves such an efficient and aggressive gerrymander that they need to flip just a handful of legislative seats in today's elections to give themselves veto-proof supermajorities in the state legislature. And then they can do all of these things we're talking about regardless of who the governor is. Right. And regardless of the fact that Wisconsin remains a purple state. So you're saying Republicans have two ways to make sure that they take over the state's electoral process. Right. I don't think we have the proper imagination to consider what they would do with full control of the election system.

They will be able to do whatever they want when it comes to elections, and frankly, anything else in the state. So given all of that, I wonder how Senator Bernier is thinking about this moment. Because the forces that she, in that news conference, called out as excessive, and that she's been trying to rein in, they are clearly prevailing. Well, Senator Bernier decided not to run for re-election. So her role as a gatekeeper is going to end. I think I've impressed upon my colleagues the importance of well-thought-out election law, and I'm hoping

that they don't get too carried away and to be too restrictive. There might be one or two of my colleagues that want to be incredibly restrictive. But I think once we get through this fall election, they'll maybe realize that the majority of this system works pretty well. But she really believes that over time, a lot of this stuff is going to self-correct. This too shall pass. Hauling into question the electoral process is not new. You know, in 2000, Gore, Bush, that whole legitimacy of that president was called into question. So I don't think it's the end of this. I think it will rear its ugly head, especially in close elections. But it definitely made us examine our processes and make sure that we're, you know, everybody's following the same rules. And we'll get through this.

And is there a solution to all of this that you see? Yeah, just time. And we have many of those naysayers and criticizers of the electoral system now working the polls. So they're at the polls, they're working, they're seeing the process. They're also witnessing that it's pretty hard to hack into the system or be fraudulent in any way. They also really have to deep down, if they're smart, realize that all of the things that they say may have happened, could have happened, should have happened, whatever, was never proven. You think as more folks are brought into the system, they'll understand and appreciate that it works? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And I've had major Trump supporters and believe that the election was stolen that went and worked the polls and verified.

Yeah, we have a pretty good system. And she's actually kind of heartened that some of the more skeptical Republican voters in the state have this year become involved in the midterm elections, either to monitor the polls or to work at the polls. And Senator Bernier thinks the more people become involved in the system, the more they'll believe in the system, and the less they'll doubt the system. Eventually, I did sign up to become a poll worker for the spring primaries. And Nikki is one of the people who tried to do just that.

I wanted to see for myself what happens. Because, you know, I don't like to just take somebody's word for it. She signed up to be a poll worker in Racine County for this year's primaries. And as part of that, she went to a training. So it was City Hall. And she remembers hearing the county clerk laying out the ground rules for how the training would work. She was the one kind of running everything. So she stood up and kind of laid out everything for everybody. I think she had mentioned at least once that, you know, you need to be objective. We're not talking about our political opinions with anybody. We're just here to assist people in their voting. So then we got in line. Eventually, they all get into a line.

They hold their own mock election so that they can learn what a poll worker does at each step of the process. I went there by myself, so I didn't know anybody there. And so I wasn't having communication with anybody, but I was just listening to what was going on. And it was loud enough that I could hear people expressing their opinions about how they felt about the election one way or the other. I mean, it was, I heard both opinions of like, the election was fine, everything was fine. And people are making a big deal out of nothing. You know, that would never happen in Wisconsin. And then there was the other, you know, opinion of lack of confidence in the process and how, you know, they want to be a part to make sure that everything happens justly for everybody. for everybody. Now, mind you, I was there for my own reason, but I still don't think it was appropriate for me to express that in that environment. I mean, these are the people that are going to be working the polls. It's not professional. You should be professional, I think. So if people were doing it at the training, do people do it while people go and vote?

It just, I don't know. My feeling after I left was just not a good feeling. Hmm. So the more Nikki saw, the less faith she had in the process, which is the exact opposite of what Senator Bernier had hoped would happen with skeptical Republicans participating in the process. Yeah, the system as Senator Bernier had hoped it would operate didn't work and in fact did the opposite. In your mind, was it more about how elections are run or the people who are involved in them? Well, I think we can have a process,

and it could be done several different ways by whoever is leading that process. So I guess I would say the people and my confidence in the people running the process is not there. Do you feel like you're going to be able to trust the 2022 results? How are you thinking about that? I don't know. We'll have to see. That's how I feel about it. And I assume you're going to physically go and vote this time again?

Oh, yes. Mm-hmm. Yep. You know, when we look at the election today and we talk about democracy being on the ballot, we're not really talking about whether Tim Michaels wins or Tony Evers wins in Wisconsin or the next thing that happens about this bill or that bill. We're really hitting on what Nikki is talking about, which is a much more fundamental issue that's being confronted in Wisconsin and across the country about voters'

faith in the elections themselves. And so that's what it means when people say that democracy is on the ballot, because the future of the faith in our elections is what's on the ballot in today's midterms. thank you very much thank you Michael We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know about today's election. Across the country on Tuesday, voters will cast ballots in 435 House races, 35 Senate races, and 36 Governor's races. To win control of the House, Republicans must pick up five seats from Democrats, a prospect seen as increasingly likely given historical patterns and polls showing growing Republican

strength. To win control of the Senate, Republicans must pick up a single seat currently held by a Democrat, which may prove harder than winning back the House. Among the most closely watched Senate races are those in Pennsylvania, where recent polls show Democrat John Fetterman is deadlocked with Republican Mehmet Oz. Nevada, where Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto is neck-and-neck with Republican Adam Laxalt. Georgia, where Democrat Raphael Warnock is nearly tied with Republican Herschel Walker, and Ohio, where Democrat Tim Ryan is polling slightly behind Republican J.D. Vance.

Finally, governor's races will test the power of election denialism beyond Wisconsin. In Arizona, polls show that Republican Carrie Lake, who denies that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, is favored to prevail over Democrat Katie Hobbs, but that in Pennsylvania, another election denier, Republican Doug Mastriano, is widely expected to lose to Democrat Josh Shapiro. Results from the election will begin rolling in around 8 p.m. Eastern later tonight. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko and Rachel Quester, with help from Muj Zaydi.

It was edited by Michael Benoit, fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Rowan Emisto, Dan Powell, and Alicia Baetube, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Maddie Macielo and David McCraw. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bolboro. See you tomorrow.