The Daily - The Army of Election Officials Ready To Reject The Vote

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

On Tuesday night, as the voting ends and the counting begins, the election system itself will be on trial.Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The Times, explains how some local election officials entrusted with certifying ballots are preparing to reject the results  and create chaos in the weeks ahead.Guest: Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine.Background reading: The army of election officials ready to reject the vote.What to know about the potential election certification crisis.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. On Tuesday night, as the voting ends and the counting begins, the election system itself will be on trial. Today, my colleague Jim Rutenberg, on the army of local election officials entrusted with certifying the vote who are prepared to reject it and create chaos in the weeks ahead. It's Friday, November 1st. Jim, this is our third presidential election in which Donald Trump has been on the ballot

making the claim that if he loses, it will only be because the election was stolen from him. He threatened to make that claim in 2016, but of course he won. He very much made that claim after losing fair and square in 2020. And now he's prepared to make that claim once again on Tuesday night or whenever the election's ultimately called if he loses. You covered every single one of those races. In fact, I was in a studio inevitably with you on election night for each one of those.

Your beat has become essentially election denialism in the United States in all the forms that it takes. So on the cusp of this third election, where does this denialist movement now stand? Well, Michael, thanks for reminding me of our long journey here. But that's exactly what I've been spending the past few months trying to do. And I'm visiting swing states,

going to local commission meetings to see where this movement that really was born forged in the chaos of January 6, 2021 has brought us because that was the beginning of something, was beginning of a new movement to deny elections, to change the way elections are run. And this past summer, I found myself at what really to me is ground zero of this new movement. And it was in Northern Nevada, Washoe County, which encompasses Reno, where things had really blown up on this very basic task in this local election system. Tell us that story. I'm gonna direct you to a specific day.

Please. It's July 9th, 2024. Couple months ago. Recently. Good morning, everyone. I will call the special board accounting commissioner meeting to order. It is 10 o'clock.

And we're at a commission board meeting, which by the way, this commission deals with water issues, sewer issues, streets, you know, the regular stuff. It also certifies elections. The commission of Washoe County is gathered for a very specific and easy normally purpose. They are going to certify some recent local primary elections. Thank you very much.

We'll now move into the roll call, Madam Clerk. This is the very basic process of putting the board stamp on. Here are the number of votes. Here are the winners. We're going to register with this with the state. Tie a ribbon around it. Thank you very much. We'll now move into item number three, public comment.

But rather than it being the normal pro forma process, things pretty quickly start to go sideways. We have quite a few people signed in, so when I call the second name, please queue yourself up to be ready. For a large number of people at this meeting, something's been wrong. Good morning, Drew Rebar, for the record. So we're here about elections.

Not quite sure why they- Something's been wrong with elections since 2020. In the last four years, we've had nothing but turmoil and fraud. Because this group of people does not believe that Donald Trump lost that election. And ever since, they've been convinced that elections in their county just aren't right. Why do we continually have errors every single election? There's an error. Never right.

I guess it would be like a greatest hits album. Everything you thought you heard in 2020. Directly connects to Dominion, which directly connects to Serbia. Dominion machines switching boats. They were trying to hide stuff. They turned off the cameras. Questionable activity in the counting center. The recent counting of ballots in the primary election,

it was unarguably dishonest and corrupt. Votes are being stolen. That was dirty. Dirty voter rolls. Wacko, George Soros, guys come in and just mess things all up. Alleged malfeasance on a grand scale. These people, myself included, are disgusted. These people are out of line.

You can't certify this recount. You're actually going to be an accessory to the crime at a minimum now that you know and that data and evidence is right in front of you The room is packed with people who want the board to reject election certification You're not only citizens you are servants servants of the people The way they're addressing the commissioners sitting up there in the stays it gets pretty heated We're gonna have a big barbecue and we're gonna have every one of your pictures up there in the dais, it gets pretty heated. We're going to have a big barbecue, and we're going to have every one of your pictures up there. And we're going to show those North Valley people

how you voted. You all better think about what you're doing now, because this is not going to stop here. It's going to be realized. Think about it. [♪ music playing, fades out. And back to the music. And a lot of this anger is being directed at the single commissioner sitting up on that dais who's about to actually certify her own election, Clara Andriola.

Okay, what should we know about Clara Andriola? Clara Andriola is a lifelong Republican, but she does not go for this kind of election denialism. In fact, when it comes to elections issues, she's a swing voter on this board. This board is a five-member board with two people who have doubted past election results, are not big believers in certifying elections, and then two Democrats. And Clara Andreola is the swing vote. So now here she is about to certify her own election, and the crowd is begging her and the rest of the board not to, but really because of this whole panoply of fraud and problems and doubt about the election system.

Of which I'm going to venture there's no evidence. Yeah. Let's just say we have not seen any credible, compelling evidence and certainly not any that stood up in any court. Okay. So what does Clara Andreola say in response to these pleas and this anger from the audience? Well... Commissioner Andreola.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Andriola says out loud. I really appreciate, to be honest, the fact that everyone, no matter what side of the aisle, realizes that the elections have a lot of room for improvement, period. I hear you. You have concerns. I've got my own a very important element, period. And I do think that's a very important element, period. I hear you.

You have concerns. I've got my own issues with the election system here, like everything can always be tighter and better. Mm-hmm. But... And where those election laws take place are at the legislature. This is not the forum for those concerns. There's the state legislature.

If you want, for instance, which many in the crowd do, hand counted ballots and you want to get rid of voting machines, let's get a law going at the state legislature. But this is not the forum for that. And when it comes to certification, the law is the law. And I have to do this. Voting machines, all of these can be changed through elections at the legislature. And they can be changed. And I'm encouraging-

Point of order, DA Edwards. And suffice to say, this does nothing to calm this crowd down, zero. So you're sitting here talking about legislation, Andrea Ola, no. Doesn't work, that's not gonna fly. In fact, if anything, at times it seems to incite the crowd more. They are so frustrated by that answer.

They see it as a cop-out. You know, you're pushing elements of our society in a direction that no American wants to go. We just want to be heard. And I want to make a point here, though, that this isn't like a few comments. This goes on literally for hours. Wow. This whole process. But eventually...

There's nobody else signed in. Thank you, Madam Clerk. It's time to vote. Commissioners, are there any questions or comments before... And there's a ritual here where the local lawyer with the DA's office will be invited to speak. It's not formally part of the process, but he'll come and say, hey, Mr. DA, what's our duty here?

What do we have to do? DA Edwards, if you could just, you know, set the stage here and remind the board what we are doing today. Thank you, Madam Chair. You are canvassing the vote today. This is 293.387, a statutory duty of the board. There's been a lot of talk about whether this is ministerial or not ministerial.

Inexplicably. I don't think I really... When the... He's actually an assistant district attorney, starts to speak, the words coming out of his mouth are not what anyone expects to hear. And they certainly don't seem to be exactly what's in the statute. But what I do think you have a duty to do,

A, is canvass the vote, and B, to decide what the true results of the election are based on the evidence that you've been presented. So you don't have a duty to vote yes or no on a particular motion. You vote your conscience. I tell you guys that a lot. And I think that's what you do here. You think it was a different result. You don't have to vote yes. You don't have to vote no You vote your conscience. I tell you guys that a lot. And I think that's what you do here. You think it was a different result.

You don't have to vote yes. You don't have to vote no. Vote your conscience. Hmm. So even though the law, according to everything you've said, everything I've ever heard, says that you really do have a duty to vote to certify, this prosecutor in their midst is telling them something else. And once the words, you don't have to vote yes, come out of his mouth, now we have a problem for Commissioner Clara Andriola of Washoe County.

What does she do with that guidance? Well now, Clara Andriola is in a real fix. She's been telling this crowd that she must certify her election. This crowd has been imploring her for hours not to. Someone with the DA's office is saying she doesn't have to. So what does she do? Given the fact that Mr. Edwards cleared some information in terms of our legal responsibility. There's a lot of information that has been shared that, in my opinion, warrants further investigation which is...

Along with the other two Republicans on the board... I am not going to certify the vote. She votes no. And what no means is that her own election now will not be certified. She's voted against herself. She's voted against herself. And it looks like Commissioner Andriola, Vice Chair Herman, and Commissioner Clark voted not to certify the recount.

So we will now move on to item six. And for the first time that anyone knows, since Nevada became a state in 1864, a county has failed to certify an election. A truly remarkable moment. And if we return to that question where you started, Jim, about where this denialist movement stands, what does this vote by this one commission in Nevada really tell us about where this movement stands? It shows you, and it's punctuated by the elation in the crowd, that this movement has now succeeded

in at least being able to block certification, to do the thing Donald J. Trump could not do in 2020, to stop the process. And Michael, it turns out it wasn't a one-off, that in fact, for the first time in our lives, we can really say this, this has been happening around the country over the last few years. Just explain that, because I don't think of this happening across the country. We've done an episode about one election board in Georgia that's passed some laws. That's it. Yeah.

And I have to say that it was surprising to me in reporting this story how frequently this happened. Washout was extraordinary because they really blocked the certification. But in at least 20 counties across several states since 2020, a lot of board members have done this new thing, vote no on certification. And I just can't stress enough how unusual this is. This had never really happened at this volume in American history. No.

When we think about the, quote unquote, success of the election denialist movement in its own eyes. We think of it raising doubts. We think of it trying but failing to stop a vote count. What you're suggesting is entirely different. A success that literally marks the invalidation of an election. It's a great way to put it because that's what the crowd in that room and the movement that believes in this overall see certification as legitimizing elections. So blocking certification gives them that mark of shame,

but it's much more important than that because if this happens in November, now we've got a real problem because next time it'll be the presidency on the line. And believe it or not, one county can affect certification all the way up to January 6th. Right, this, you're saying, was an election for the world's least important position, the local commissioner. I care about water on sewers.

Next time, literally, it would be important position the local commissioner. I care about water on sewers. Next time, literally, it would be for a vote to confirm the electors for the presidency. Yeah, because every state needs to do this certification process by certain dates in the fall ahead of the electoral college vote, ahead of the January 6 vote. So now we get into this whole other territory. So a problem like this is pretty major. And I have to say, what happened in Washoe County, this isn't by accident. This is actually part of a long-running coordinated campaign that had been taking shape for years. We'll be right back.

So Jim, tell us the story of how we get to this decision in Washoe County not to certify this election. I can give you a specific date. Again. Yeah. January 7th, 2021. Not the sixth. Not the sixth, the seventh.

It's over. It seems that this stop the steal movement has hit an inflection point pretty soon. Impeachment will be getting underway. Social media shuts down content about stolen elections, which have been running rampant and lead up to January 6th. And kicks its leaders, Trump,

his campaign advisor, Steve Bannon, off a lot of these major social media platforms. And thousands of others. But what happens to the anger that drove it? It's still there. To many millions of Americans, this is a completely illegitimate election. It can never happen again. That gets said a lot.

And the truth is that the people behind January 6th, they failed. The elites of even their own party failed. Biden became president, in their view, completely illegally. So a new movement really quickly starts to form, shockingly quickly. And it comes together in two different ways. First you have this anger, this notion that, ah, what can I do to change this? How can I as an individual go out there and stop this? I need to do something.

That's at the grassroots level. At the same time, you have some new Trump-style groups forming money is flooding in, like millions of dollars are flooding in to organize this grassroots... Harness it, right? Harness it. And again, shockingly quickly, all the players, and it's pretty broad, hit upon the same strategy. On January 6th, it was about members of Congress, a handful of people in Washington, maybe some state legislators.

Now it's no. The place to fix this is in my own backyard, on the local level, the start of the certification process, not the end of it. And some key figures emerged to sort of midwife this. Hmm. Such as? We need a real investigation. I don't think we have one yet. Yes, it's true. And yes, it is a crime. There's a woman called Cleta Mitchell. You are a hell of a lawyer and tough. And that's what we need.

Welcome to Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell. Who's Counting with Cleta Mitchell is her podcast. Who's Counting as in Who's Counting the Votes. Exactly. Our goal is to build a platform for building a national infrastructure for election integrity. And that's what... Cleta Mitchell had been a lawyer for the Trump effort in Georgia where he was trying to overturn his 2020 laws. And she starts a group called the Election Integrity Network.

And at this group, she really argues that if you want to change things, if you really want to make a difference, you have to go local. Just because they think that they own the election offices and the leftist groups have infiltrated the election offices, we're going to take it back. Getting in people's faces, making the change so it never happens again, as Cleta Mitchell will put it in a podcast. And we're going to retake our election system

one county at a time all over America. We are going to take back our elections one county at a time. And at the same time... This is all to empower you, ladies and gentlemen, for no money, okay? This is all to empower you ladies and gentlemen for no money. Okay, this is all Steve Bannon, you remember who he is? I do presidential adviser. He has a podcast called war room Warroom lost its YouTube channel, but it was still available on Apple and it still had quite a big audience So Steve Bannon, there's a lot happening this week. People are getting revved up

People are getting fired up people are getting madder as they should. Starts using his podcast to say, hey guys, we're all angry. You know what? I see you locally. You're all want to do stuff. Let's go local. At the school board level, right? At the county supervisor level, at the precinct level, this is, we're taking it, we're going

to take this back village by village, precinct by precinct level. This is, we're taking it, we're gonna take this back village by village, precinct by precinct village by village. So it's going right at the system at the very start of the process. And they come up with this template for this system. There's even a name for it, the precinct strategy. And it's almost as if, if you're a local activist in a community,

you can take this template right off the shelf to start your own election integrity group. So how does this template ultimately translate into action in Washoe County? Well, to me, it's a fascinating story. And interestingly, a lot of it centers around one wealthy individual. His name is Robert Beatles, a crypto millionaire. The thing is action, action, action, get engaged. I want to bring in Robert Beatles now who's working with-

He discusses the strategy out in the open on Bannon's War Room podcast. We need to do like a peaceful purge, you know, bringing in American fursitors. And he's there in Washoe County, and Beatles sees the anger in the community, shares the anger in the community. So now they can organize and strategize and figure out how to take back our country using peaceful means through the precinct strategy and all that stuff is- And he becomes sort of a central organizing node to take the anger and channel it into more constructive or destructive, depending on your view, direction.

Such as? Well, for one, he starts a website. It's called Operation Sunlight. And that's going to be the local media hub for everything. It's going to give people, like-minded people who feel like something's wrong, a place to go to get information and maybe even some direction. So you know, in that article, he had special Beatles bombs. And it's enumerating all these problems he thinks he's seeing there,

claiming that he's busted the county, he's caught them with the fraud, suggesting maybe there's even racketeering going on. It's just loaded up with problem after problem that he and his like-minded citizens in Washout County believe they are seeing. And that, in turn, helps give people a place to go to maybe organize.

And he almost deputizes some of them to go, let's go out there and find the fraud. Let's prove what we're saying once and for all. And prove it. How? For some, it becomes almost like a detective hunt, right? Like it's like a thriller, right? Where the local citizens can take it upon themselves to investigate the fraud to be their own detectives, election integrity detectives. And I ended up meeting two of these election integrity investigators. And their names are Janis Hermsen and Susan Van Ness.

And what should we know about them? Well, I've always got this tendency to be an investigator. They sort of describe themselves as like citizen grandmas. Susan's retired and Janice runs a small bookshop slash publishing house slash sort of printing center where I actually visited with them and spent some time with them a few weeks ago. Because mine didn't start until after 2020. Right.

And as soon as that hit, I said, oh man, we're in trouble. And they didn't know each other at the beginning of all this. Yeah, you're telling me this dude got 81 million votes? Yeah, that didn't happen. It just didn't. But they're both in the same boat. Because I know that they stole it from this county. I know that I know all the people, and I know how many people turned out to vote for Trump

and what they're saying isn't true. They are convinced that there's no way Biden legitimately won Washoe County. Not their Washoe County, no way. And at that time I'm going, okay, I'll do anything because I know that. And they're looking for things to do about this. Then I started going and asking for people that were doing election integrity, and I hadn't met you yet. And I went to the Republican Party and they kept giving me the wrong answers.

Oh, we're not going to look back at that. And I said, the hell, we're not going to look back at that election. How can they channel this feeling into something more constructive? And it took us through 2020 to find somebody who we thought was honest and was going to go looking into that, and that was Robert Beatles. And they both end up meeting each other through Beatles. I hooked up with Beatles because he had a meeting at his house and you were signing up for different things to do and all that.

So that was my initial meeting as far as knowing who he was. And was that different ways to litigate 2020 or going forward for 2022? It was primarily just to investigate 2020 and see what happened. And with Beatles, they start getting some assignments. He gave us this huge stack list. And we started clear up there at Fish Springs and we went all the way through it. They start traveling around the county with these assignments. And what were you doing? Just going through?

These were the people who voted. And you were talking to them and seeing if they... Or if you could find them. Because they were vacant lots. These voter lists, are they dirty? Is something wrong here? There was one that Google showed us was a gold mine up on a hill, and 150 people voted from that gold mine. For instance, they go to a gold mine where they say— Literally.

They say it's a gold mine where they see voter addresses and they're saying, well, there are no voters here. Like the gold mine. There was a dorm, a huge dorm over here at UNR. It burned up. It wasn't even feasible. 1,000 people voted from there in 2020. Okay, then we went to the nursing homes and oh my god.

These people were comatose and they were listed as voting. They're seeing what they view as real problems with the election system, and they're, to me at least, seemingly very sincere about wanting to fix things. And I want to make one note here, because I've spent a lot of time over the years looking into these allegations about voting. And often what you find is that there's a reasonable explanation for things, or things that look a certain way really aren't what they look like once you go and dig into it. And I also want to say that I spoke with the county.

I took some of this to the county, which said that what people don't realize is the system is built to protect voters. It's not made to easily kick somebody off who maybe made a mistake on a form. And there are laws around when you kick people off of roles, or maybe there are homeless people who do live by a goldmine. So election administrators know that there are these problems. They're fixing them all the time because it's a human endeavor. These elections are run by human beings, often overworked, underpaid workers, volunteers.

The system's creaky. It's worked. It's delivered result after result creaky. It's worked. It's delivered result after result after result. It's not perfect. So, there's a constant effort to tighten things up. But there's a tension building here. Well, 2022 was worse almost for us, for me anyway. And Janice and Susan get really animated as they walk me through this.

June of 2022 was when they signed us up to go out and ballot run. We went from place to place. They had these voting sites set up. It was in total disarray. Not only are they hunting ballots, but they're studying tape at counting centers to see how the ballots are being counted. There was cameras. I sat 24 hours a day, almost, slept at my computer.

I caught stuff. In fact, at one point, one of them, Susan Van Ness, says she stations herself outside of the counting center at nighttime. Like the night of the election that we stayed out there so far to watch to see if they were in there. To make sure that all the protocols are being followed. We were just taking pictures from the sidewalk. To the way that ballots are moved in and out of the building.

So during a local election, she stations herself outside of the place where votes are being counted so that she has eyes on the process. To make sure they're doing what they're supposed to do. And wherever they look, they're seeing confirmation of their suspicions, right? They're collecting those mistakes. They're trying to send them to the right authorities at the county, at the state. You guys put a report together on all this? Oh, yeah. Beatles did all this together.

But they're also working with Beatles, who's channeling all of this into potential lawsuits. He started organizing it. And then we started doing affidavits. He's suing the state, he wants to sue the county. He even works up a case that gets all the way to the Supreme Court. Of course, he himself will say that its chances of getting heard are long, but it gets there. If he wouldn't have been able to bring lawsuits, if he wouldn't have been able to go down and get the data, we wouldn't have been able to move forward because Beatles is giving up his fortune. This really does feel like the realization of that post-January 6 vision of deputizing

local people, making them the tip of the spear when it comes to, quote unquote, election integrity. It's precisely that. But I should say a lot of these lawsuits are getting totally blocked by judges. One judge literally writes about one of the cases, it was quote, gossamer threads of whimsy, speculation, and conjecture. And it's not just judges who are getting impatient with this activity, it's the election officials who are on the other side of it.

They've been inundated with requests for public information, often about things that aren't really problems. And it's creating an extra strain. On an already creaky system. On an already creaky system is what the officials will tell you. I think the answer from the other side is, but that's how you fix it. But the elections officials have begun to view it as there's no amount of explaining that we can do that anyone who believes what they believe are going to accept. I wonder if you ever confronted these two women with that critique that nothing would

ever satisfy them, that they will always be suspicious of the system even when credible explanations of some of the anomalies or problems that they find are given to them. Well, I did ask that question in a way. How do you react? Because look, I have to write a lot. There's no evidence for this thing. Like how do you react to us when we say that?

I think I know. But how do we react when you say, yeah, we ignore you. To be honest, that's what I write. Well, everybody's just I do. Right. While everybody's just gotten to the point where they just said. Yeah, we just say mainstream media doesn't have a clue. And she said, we just ignore you. That we don't get it, right?

Because we're in the same. That you don't get. The Times doesn't get it. The Times doesn't get it. The mainstream media doesn't get it. And that we're the same as the election officials who aren't listening. Overly bought into the system. Yeah, part of the system.

So beyond recruiting these citizen sleuths, what else does this precinct strategy look like in this community? Well, Beatles helped conduct this takeover of the local Republican Party, which there have been a lot of moderates in charge in Marshall County. He brings in a more far right sensibility with a lot of help, working with other activists

who are angry. And the real goal is to get onto the local boards that really make decisions in the county, especially when it comes to voting. So you're back at this board of commissioners where a story began. And when Beatles started, interestingly, there was one person who doubted the 2020 results and voted against certification. But just one. Just one, one of the first people in the country to do it in that cycle.

And she was there, but she was outvoted four to one. So the idea here is if we can get more people like us onto the board, we can have control of the board, then they would have a lot of say over how voting goes and ultimate say over certification. So in fact, as they move forward with everything else that's going on, they get behind a candidate who also says he doubts the 2020 results, Mike Clark, and they succeed in the 2022 midterms in getting him onto the commission. So now you have a five-member board with two people who are ready to vote no against certification. Right.

Which, of course, brings us to that fateful July 9th meeting where Andriola will cast the decisive third vote not to certify the election results. Yes. And now, since I've been talking and talking here to you, you can— Endlessly. Endlessly. You now see where what's really going on in that meeting is that everything I just described is coming together at one place, at one very critical time. And in fact, if you go back and listen to the tape from that meeting, you can hear all the traces

of this. [♪Jazzy music playing.♪ This is the document from Operation Sunlight. You can hear references to Operation Sunlight. Operation Sunlight, a wonderful publication created by Robert Beatles. You can hear references to Beatles himself. We should applaud Mr. Beatles for what he's doing. Mr. Beatles has been fighting.

Not only has Robert Beatles provided evidence, and it's not done. Good afternoon, Robert Beatles. Please put all my comments on the permanent record. Thanks. In fact, Beatles is in that crowd. Susan Van Ness, I'm from the North Valleys. I ask the Lord to be here with me with the Holy Spirit.

And Susan Van Ness is in the crowd. And the crowd there, they've similarly been on this ride. I've caucused, I've canvassed, and I've seen so much fraud and illegal things going on. Looking into the fraud, growing in their own concerns. You guys weren't there. We are. And you're saying nothing happened? And then of course there's that moment when this lawyer with the district attorney's office

introduces this confusing notion for Andriola that her vote on certification is in fact, as he put it, a vote of conscience, which of course leads her to vote against her own certification. And what's so interesting is that you hear that same idea from a bunch of people in the room that day, this idea that you do have discretion. You're duty bound to investigate this, all of you, including the DA's office. You cannot legally certify this recount or election. So do your job. Don't certify the fraud.

The board has the discretion, the power, and the duty to block this election that in their view, like so many elections now, cannot be trusted. You guys have the power to stop it. I'm urging you all to use due diligence. If there's any question of fraud, then I think it is your duty to prove to us that there was no fraud. And really what that argument amounts to is a rewriting of the job. Because the job of certification is not a discretionary act. There's not really any law that says you can't do this, and the citizens are asking for it.

It's throughout the country for the better part of two centuries been a mandatory act. So they're basically asking for a change. They don't see it this way, but this is effectively what they're asking for, is a change in the job and a change in the powers that that board actually has, which go beyond what it does have, which is really only the ability to stamp the results and send them along. And what ends up happening after the board makes this vote? Clara Andreola goes back to her office. She tells it to me. She spends the night there. happening after the board makes this vote. Clara Andreola goes back to her office.

She tells it to me she spends the night there. She's there at 11 o'clock researching, determines this was not the right thing to do. Oh, so she pretty quickly second guesses herself. Like almost immediately, but wants to really go deep in the law, sees it's in fact a classy felony potentially to block it. This is a serious thing. You have to block it. This is a serious thing. You have to certify calls for a revote. And within days they do revote.

She certifies, huh? She takes back her vote, takes back her vote. Her election goes through along with a couple of others that were in the mix and all would seem to be fine. However, you may ask, and I'm going to ask for you, why are we even talking about this? Because it all got solved, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Problem solved.

What the heck, Jim? Let's move on. Sorry, sorry, but time out. Because you have to remember that there are 10,000 voting jurisdictions that are going to face this same situation this fall. And it's going to be much higher stakes. And it's going to be much higher stakes. And it's going to be much more of a pressure cooker. You could so easily have another lawyer who's being inundated with questions about what

is this weird duty? Why do we have this certification? What's the point? Give similarly bad advice and another board could not certify. In fact, a lot of voting rights lawyers are girding for this to happen in a number of places at once. So this is in fact a cautionary tale. Okay.

But here's where I think it's important that we push on the guard rails that do exist. I can't think of an example, maybe you can, where the courts have allowed anything like this to stand, right? The courts are the final arbiter when it comes to local election commissions losing sight of their actual legal obligation and deciding, yeah, they do have this discretion when they don't. So isn't that a pretty strong built in layer of protection within our system, despite how concerning everything you're laying out here is? Well, I do have to say it is. And long time election lawyers who are looking at this say, okay, judges will come in, they

will make this happen. So there's a system in place. And in fact, there's even a new law post January 6th, the Congress drafted to make it even easier to get these situations to the court as fast as possible. But the fear is that you're going to have some judge somewhere who doesn't want to move it that fast. Or maybe there are questions about how discretionary is this and what right does the board have? And then you start dragging things out.

What if some board members say, okay, judge, you can tell us that we have to do this, but we refuse. Now what do you have? Are you going to have prosecutions? That's going to look not good, right? Especially after all the years of Trump's trials. Okay. of Trump's trials. Okay, I have a final question along these lines of, but wait, if Donald Trump wins on Tuesday,

how moot is all of this? Because if he wins, presumably these people might be very happy to certify, and we don't really have any of these showdowns that we're contemplating here. I think you're right on the certification part, but I ask that question a lot to people I spoke with in all these states. And again and again, the answer is surprisingly no, that a Trump victory is not going to convince

them that everything's okay. There was, among some people, this idea that it's a rigged system, and if Trump wins, it's because it was too big, our vote was too big to rig, that Trump's support was too big to rig. And I actually asked Susan and Janice's question. He might wait, if Trump wins then this problem goes away, right? No, it doesn't. It actually gets worse. It doesn't.

Because you don't know what they're going to do. There's going to be an uproar like you would never believe. And they came down in a similar place. Yeah. And I think that we have to clean it up. We have to continue to work hard. They said, in fact, the system is bad. We're not going to be shaken from that.

I'm not going to say I don't support Trump. I do, but that's not my motivation. My motivation is we need to have our vote count. My grandkids need to know that when they go to vote, when they're old enough, that it's really gonna mean something. I mean, that's where I'm coming from. I have seven grandkids. I mean, insofar as they believe that,

it's interesting how much they're ultimately parroting what Trump says. And we have spent a lot of time in this conversation describing a deputization of local people to question the system. And that clearly seems very important. But at the end of the day, it is Donald Trump who has created the stop the steal movement and it is Donald Trump who repeats it and amplifies it.

I mean, I can show you a tweet from, we're taping on Wednesday, October 30th, that Donald Trump sent out within the past few hours, describing falsely widespread cheating in Pennsylvania. And when Susan and Janice say what they told you, they're repeating him. He remains the single most important person in this movement? Well, he's actually really an avatar of a movement that predates him. Just explain that. There's long been, and we've covered it, I think I've done daily episodes about it, a conservative movement, much smaller, more lawyerly, that said,

there's great fraud in this country, which does not stand up to true fact-checking, right? But under that argument, they worked to restrict voting laws and— Right, voter ID. Voter ID, they're trying to make these strict laws about it. But what Trump did was he took it all, as the saying goes, to 11. He took it to this other place. And this isn't a continuation of conservative legal arguments about voting rights in this

country. This is about the machinery of democracy. The machinery of democracy that has been functioning pretty well for the better part of two centuries, questioning things that have never really been questioned before, like certification. And I think it's fair to say no matter what happens to Trump next week, that is a huge element of his legacy. I do not see this just going away. It's just, it's too strong. It's too resistant to everything else.

All the other evidence that's come along. And it makes me think that if he were to lose and he wakes up the next morning and he decides he wants to accept it, he wants to concede, I really don't think if he were to go out and tell his people, drop it, accept it. Don't fight it anymore. Don't fight it. I don't think that the desire to block certification, the belief that it's just not right, I don't think that goes away. And therefore, I don't think he could stop this, even if he tried.

Well, Jim, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In another last minute showdown, Kamala Harris assailed Donald Trump for remarks that he made on the campaign trail about women. My people told me about four weeks ago, I would say, no, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women.

Sir, please don't say that. Why? They said we think it's very inappropriate for you to say so. During a rally in Wisconsin on Thursday night, Trump recounted how his advisors had urged him to stop claiming that he would protect women. They said, well, I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them.

Harris, who is eager to turn out as many women voters as possible, quickly seized on his remarks as further evidence of Trump's paternalism and his desire to take rights away from women. Listen, it's just, it actually is, I think, very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies. And this is just the latest on a series of reveals by the former president of how he thinks about women. Remember, you can catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. This week, David Marchese speaks with the philosopher Peter Singer. I have set up Peter Singer AI, and so on my website you can connect to a chatbot who has

been trained on all of my works and actually does remarkably well channeling my views to people with ethical queries. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Asta Chathurvedi, Eric Krupke, and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Willens, with help from Chris Haxel. It was fact-checked by Will Peischel, contains original music by Diane Wong, Marian Lozano, Alisha Baitoop, Sophia Landman, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood and Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the daily.

I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.