The New Yorker Radio Hour - An Election in Peril

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

This Presidential race is a battle for the soul and the future of the country—on this much, both parties agree—and yet the pitfalls in the election process itself are vast. David Remnick runs through some of the risks to your vote with a group of staff writers: Sue Halpern on the possibility of hacking by malign actors; Steve Coll on the contention around mail-in voting and the false suspicions being raised by the President; Jeffrey Toobin on the prospect of an avalanche of legal challenges that could delay the outcome and create a cascade of uncertainty; and Jelani Cobb on the danger of violence in the election’s aftermath. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The two presidential candidates agree on this much. Pretty much everyone seems to agree. This election is a battle for the soul and the future of our nation. Joe Biden sees Donald Trump laying waste to our democratic institutions and our public health. Donald Trump sees the radical left looming behind Biden just waiting to destroy America, as we know, it's suburbs and all. It seems that everything is at stake. And at the very same time,

there's so much that can go wrong on Election Day itself. They think they're going to send hundreds of millions of ballots all over the United States and it's going to come out. You won't know the election result for weeks, months, maybe years after. Maybe you'll never know the election result, and that's what I'm concerned with.

It'll be fixed, it'll be rigged. People ought to get smart. To get some insight into the very serious, risk to our election, I called up some colleagues. Hey, Sue. Hi, David. Can you hear me? I can. You can. Okay. First up, Sue Halpern. She's a staff writer who covers election security and a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. Now, Sue, we've got a highly decentralized voting system in the United States, but I want to talk about the integrity of the vote. Are voting machines safe from interference in any way? That's a funny question.

No. I mean, most of them, yes, but a lot of them, no. So, I mean, it's a hard question. Obviously, there are, you know, 9,000 election districts in the United States, and they all use different kinds of machinery and have different protocols. Most machines, you know, that we've seen, you know, have a lot of integrity. But we have states like Wisconsin, Florida, I think Michigan, that have modems in their scanners that connect to tabbynors. and those are connected to the internet. And those are states that are swing states. So that's problematic. We've got machines and states that are new, and they look kind of fancy, but they are called ballot marking devices. And some of them encode your vote in a QR code or a barcode, and you have no idea whether or not the choices that you've made are actually the choices that are going into

the tabulator, because you can't. read it. So these are just, these are just some of the issues that are arising, even now, as we are very conscious of the fact that machines that we use to vote on can be compromised. So voting machines in crucial battleground states are vulnerable. And if I'm a clever fellow sitting in, I don't know, a city like, I don't know, St. Petersburg or Moscow, you're suggesting that things could be tampered with in a very serious way. Sure. Things can be tamper with. You know, the thing about hacking is that that we've seen, you know, it's possible to hack machines. We've seen this over and over and over again. But it's still a hard, it's a hard

call to make to say that our whole electoral system is under attack in that particular way. But yeah, in swing states, they are vulnerable. And we've seen, you know, there have been questions all along about the integrity of votes in certain places because, States have used computerized machines that don't have paper trails. And if you don't have a paper trail, you can't audit. And if you can't audit, you have no idea what's gone on. Now, have states stepped up their cybersecurity efforts, have as the federal government done that?

Because as we know, in 2016, according to all our intelligence reports, Russian intelligence probed state election systems. Right. So states have tried to increase the security of the state. their systems. But again, remember, states don't really run the systems. They're still run by these local jurisdictions. So that, you know, that means that those jurisdictions have to have the money in order to really increase the security. So that's somewhat problematic. But, you know, DHS has gone and offered lots of cybersecurity training and that sort of thing. States have

put what are called Albert sensors on their databases for voter registration. So that's helped to some extent. But we've had four years where the Congress has failed to enact any security legislation whatsoever. I guess it's a very general question, but one of the deepest concern of the many millions of Americans who will go to vote on November 3rd or mail in a ballot. To what degree can they be confident that their ballot will be counted properly? That's a really, really difficult question. So what most people would say is that all of it's pretty safe. We do know that if you vote by mail, there is a chance that your vote won't be counted because you've made a mistake. You know, you fail to put it in the right envelope or you didn't sign it correctly. And those are just things that happen. And they happen a lot. And they happen in red states and they happen in blue states. And it's not fraud, it's just, you know, human fallibility. And then when you go to your in-person and vote, chances are, that's going to count. I think one thing that would be problematic and mistake is to

over-emphasize all of the problems that we're going to have and that we have had, which will be a disincentive for people to go to vote. I think the thing that we can really do is say, look, There are going to be problems. We know there are going to be problems. There are inherent problems with the machines with the way we count votes with all of these things. The best thing we can do is actually go vote. The more people who vote in a way, the better the integrity of the system will be. This is going to be the greatest election disaster in history. And by the way, you guys like to talk about Russia and China and other places. They'll be able to forge ballots. They'll forge ballots. They'll forge. them, they'll do whatever they have to do. Steve Coll is a staff writer and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and he's been

following the saga of the U.S. Post Office. Now, Steve, not long ago, I got a letter with information on mail-in voting, and I think millions of people got this, but I understand that there have been some problems with that very letter. The post office tried to write a letter,

I think, notionally in an effort to be helpful. That was one-size-fits-all explanation of how to go about voting by mail. And the way they described the procedures was, for example, completely at odds with what you should do if you live in Colorado. And in fact, so at odds

that the Secretary of State of Colorado concluded that it was going to actively suppress the vote by confusing people and causing people to make mistakes. So they sued to block distribution and a federal judge ruled in favor of Colorado. I don't know how. how you pull things out of the mail that have already been mailed, but they did get an injunction. Record numbers of voters plan to vote by mail this year. How large of an increase are we expected to

see compared to 2016? At least 50%, I think most of the expert forecasts say, and it's remarkable as I was covering this, I didn't appreciate, that between, say, 2004 and 2016, the number of voters who voted by mail or early in some other way, more than doubled to 40% of all of the votes in the United States, even in 2016, were cast before Election Day. And this year, people are expecting that number to be close to 70%. One reason why we have so much mail voting today and why it grew even before the pandemic is that states like Florida, with heavy, older populations that leaned Republican, really pioneered the idea that, that male voting was good for Republicans.

And yet Donald Trump is constantly going on that mail in voting is ripe for fraud and abuse. Does that have any grounding, in fact? No, certainly not at any scale. Yes, there are fraud cases that you can find. There was one in North Carolina, fairly recently in a congressional race that had to be rerun because somebody on the Republican side

had basically illegally, organize some mail ballots and stuff the ballot box, as it were. And there is occasion in cities like Philadelphia where old school corruption isn't completely gone, where somebody will bribe somebody to stuff a ballot box. But I mean, these are incidental, tiny percentages of the total votes cast by mail or by all means. And so why is he doing it? I read it as a broader effort to discredit the election, to create narratives of dispute, especially if the vote is close in the Electoral College and there is litigation that follows Election Day,

that he wants to put out a strong and consistent line that male voting shouldn't be trusted. And, you know, honestly, we're in a world, like you can see in parts of Central Europe and other places where the judiciary is starting to be politicized and polarized. So who's that message for? For Trump-friendly judges here and there

who might just understand that this is a narrative that has an antecedent in the president's speech and that can be advanced also in adjudicating the kinds of cases that are likely to come up if the coin lands on its side in a state like Wisconsin or, you know, Ohio.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. You'll have somebody like the governor of Nevada, come out with this massive plan out of nowhere to take millions of ballots and send them all over the place. You'll never know who won that state. Universal mail-in ballots is going to be a great embarrassment to our country. I'm here with Jeffrey Tubman who covers legal affairs for the New Yorker. Now, Jeff, by one accounting, there are more than 200 pending lawsuits about the rules for the November election. What are most of these suits about? Well, a lot of the suits have to do with the rules for absentee voting.

And, for example, one of the big issues is, do the absentee ballots have to arrive at the Board of Elections by Election Day? Or do they have to be postmarked by Election Day? You know, that sounds almost trivial, but when you consider the difficulties the Postal Service is having, you know, you could be talking about thousands of votes per state on. that issue. That's one of the biggest issues. Other issues are, you know, will the, will the envelopes be postage paid? How fastidious will election supervisors be about matching the signatures on the absentee ballots with the signatures in the registration forms? You know, one of the interesting things is that because of, you know, the digital economy, people just don't sign their names as often as they used to. So people's signatures change a lot over the years. And, you know,

every ballot could be fought over on those grounds alone. So those are the kinds of issues that are before the courts, and there are some states like Pennsylvania where there are multiple lawsuits all heading up through the appellate process. Isn't it possible that Donald Trump will, on election night, if he can, declare victory, and after that, some kind of havoc, real confusion will come out of it? I mean, it will remain the case that these states will count the ballots.

I mean, you know, they're, and if Biden pulls ahead by a substantial number in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, then those states are going to award him the election. I think, you know, the nightmare scenario that many Democrats have is that, you know, Trump declares victory and then somehow files lawsuits or involves the Justice Department in trying to shut down the counts in these highly contested states. Shut down the counts on what basis? Well, that the process is so riddled with fraud that you can't trust the results. And that's one of the particularly crazy-making aspects of this whole controversy,

which has been manufactured by Trump and his endless complaints about voter fraud and mail-in voting, is that it is a non-existent problem. You recently observed one of the recounts for the Democratic Party here in the state of New York, which of course was slowed down by the pandemic. What was that all like? And did it give you any sense of how things might play out on a national level after election day? Yeah, it was, I mean, for a essentially boring bureaucratic process, it was actually scary because I saw what was involved in election. officials like ripping open envelopes, trying to read absentee ballots, comparing signatures, and you just saw how slow and difficult and tedious it was. And here we were talking about one Democratic primary in one congressional district in one state. And to think about election

officials doing that kind of effort under the scrutiny, not of a fairly obscure congressional primary, but with Biden people and Trump people sitting there in front of them, on a grand scale, it was chilling to think about how ugly and long that process could be. Between the pandemic, the attacks on the legitimacy of mail-in voting, the change is made to the post office. What is the best case constitutional scenario for resolving a contested election in 2020? Having a landslide so you don't have to do any of this crap. I mean, that's really, I mean, that's really the way to avoid this problem. Let's say there are threats. They say that they're going to threaten riots if they lose on election night, assuming we get a winner on election night.

What are you going to do? We'll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want. Look, it's called insurrection. We just send in and we do it very easy. I mean, it's very easy. I'd rather not do that because there's no reason for it.

But if we had to, we'd do that and put it down within minutes, within minutes. Jolani Cobb is a staff writer and a professor at Columbia University who covers issues of racial justice. He recently wrote about the threat of political violence in 2020. Jelani, we have seen extraordinarily close presidential elections in this country before and even disputed elections, 1876. In 1960, it's quite possible that Illinois could have gone quite a different way in Kennedy v. Nixon. And we had Bush v. Gore in 2000. And yet this time, this time is the first time I've really ever heard about the possibility of a true, not only a constitutional crisis, but the possibility of civil unrest following November 3rd. What are your concerns where that's concerned?

Yeah, this is one of those things that I thought about for a long time and didn't say out loud because I was wondering if I was paranoid or if there were maybe factors that would de-escalate the tensions that I wasn't taking into account. But what are things that seems to be arguing to the contrary of that, is the Transition Integrity Project Report. And this is a group of people, bipartisan group of people who are former government officials,

academics, journalists, policy people who have just gamed out scenarios for the coming election. And a disturbing number of those scenarios contained some element of violence. And it's not all that shocking, given what we've seen over the summer. We've seen violence in Kenosha. We've seen widespread violence from the left and the right in the wake of George Floyd's death. We've seen in May militias marching on the state capital of Michigan with arms and then issuing so many threats to the life of Governor Gretchen Mitmer that the legislature actually had to shut down. And if we look at just what our recent history has been with Charlottesville, with El Paso, with the Tree of Life massacre that happened in Pittsburgh, it is not inconceivable that with tensions as high as they are and this kind of crescendo moment of a national election between two figures, both of whom see the opponent as an existential threat to America. democracy of the American way of life,

it's not hard to imagine that that will spill over into violence. Jelani Cobb. And we heard from Jeffrey Tubin, Steve Kahl, and Sue Halpern, all staff writers for The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yarns, with additional music by a... Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Mengfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.