 Good afternoon. I'm Rowan Chemerinsky, the Dean of the Law School here. The highest honor that a university can bestow upon a professor is receiving an endowed chair. We decided here at UCI as part of this, as part of developing our intellectual community, when a professor receives an endowed chair to have that faculty member deliver a lecture to the law school and the community. We couldn't have a more deserving recipient today than Professor Rick Hassan. Rick today receives a chancellor's chair and in just a moment we will literally give him a chair. But before we do that, let me just tell you a little bit about Rick in his background. He got his undergraduate degree at Berkeley. Received a law degree as well as a master's and a Ph.D. at UCLA. After law school he clerked for Judge David Thompson on the Ninth Circuit. He worked at the appellate law firm of Porvitz and Levy. He then began a tremendously distinguished teaching career starting at Chicago Kent Law School, then Loyola Law School. We were incredibly fortunate to lure him here this year and he joined our faculty on July 1st of 2011. When I became the founding dean of the law school I said that the goal was to hire truly wow faculty. Faculty are outstanding, his teachers, his scholars, his institutional community citizens. We couldn't have done better than hiring Rick under our faculty. As our students, many in this room can tell you, he is an outstanding classroom teacher. This year in the fall he taught remedies and election law. This semester he is teaching torts. He is the top scholar in the country in the field of election law that's reflected in his nationally renowned blog, his many scholarly articles in the top journals, his books including a new book to be published soon by Yale University Press, titled The Voting Wars, and his talk today will be based on it. And all of us on the faculty can attest to the wonderful institutional citizen he is truly pitching in on every committee and every place that he's needed. So as I say, we could not have a more deserving recipient. I was just thrilled when the provost agreed and the chancellor agreed and they've named Rick to be a chancellor's professor of law. And so since it is a chair of professor Rick, if I can borrow you a second. You can join me in lifting the cover. And there is a plaque that says, Richard Lhassen, chancellor's professor of law and political science, and this was effective December 1st 2011 when the provost approved this. So congratulations. No one achieves any significant measure of success in life alone and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or self-delusional. I have no such delusions. In particular, I attribute my professional success to the unwavering support of my family and to the institutions which have supported my scholarship. I begin by thanking my parents who encouraged me to pursue my passion and dreams from an early age supported me and ensured that I would have every opportunity to study and learn even as they sacrificed to make sure that I would do so. I'm so pleased that my mother Eileen could be here today and I'm sure that my dad would have been very proud to have been with us today. As an adult, it is my spouse, partner and best friend Lori who has enabled me to reach my potential, who has been a sounding board, confidant, cheerleader, proofreader and helpful critic, full of love and sage advice. Thank you. To our children, Deborah, Shana who's out of the country studying and Jared, you are the lights of my life and I am dedicating the forthcoming book to you. You and your generation deserve much better than the election system you're about to inherit. I am pleased that many more of my family could be here today, my brother Darrell, father-in-law Sam, mother-in-law Eva, brother-in-law Eddie and Lori's aunt and uncle Pat and Milt. I've also been ridiculously lucky in the professional support I have received. First at Chicago Kent and then at Loyola and now at UC Irvine I've been given complete freedom to pursue the academic areas which interested me and to share the fruits of my research in whatever ways I found appropriate and gratifying. And now I get to share my knowledge and learn from new generations of students. What could be better? I learn from my students every day. I thank Dean Chemerinsky, Chancellor Drake, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Gottfriedson for investing me with this chair. It's a sign of their confidence in me and I will make every effort to live up to the ideals that is embodied in this title. That's the hard part. So, this is based upon a forthcoming book This is based upon a forthcoming book called The Voting Words which we published this summer. And I want to start the way I start the book with a hypothetical situation. I want you to imagine that it is election day in the near future. A very hard fought presidential election comes down to the battleground state of Ohio and it's 10 electoral votes. Returns come in all night. Some of them are putting the Republican up. Some of them are putting the Democrat up. At the end of the night, in the middle of the night, the Democrat is ahead by 200 votes out of millions of ballots cast. The presidency rides on this determination. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund leads a parade of conservative bloggers talking about something bizarre going on in the voting in liberal Dane County or the University of Wisconsinous. He references a controversial Milwaukee police report from a few years ago suggesting rampant voter fraud in Democratic areas. There's much to build on. For years Republicans had been crying voter fraud clamoring for tougher voter identification requirements, tougher voter registration rules and other laws that could depress the turnout of poor minority voters. The next morning, the local election official in Waukesha County, Kathy Nicholas, says that she has been keeping all of the election returns on her personal laptop and she forgot to include all of the returns from a particular town, a very Republican town and Nicholas had worked for the Republican legislature in the past. When you add in all of those votes instead of the Democrat being ahead by 200 votes, the Republican is ahead by 7,000 votes. Republicans are suddenly quiet about their cries of voter fraud. No one cares about Dane County. But Democrats are now concerned about whether the election is being stolen for the Republicans. The liberal blog Think Progress says critics are saying there are only two possible explanations for this bizarre development, foul play or incompetence. The URL is a little more direct. Kathy Nicholas, crook or idiot. Standing behind Kathy Nicholas at her press conference is a woman named Ramona Kitzinger. She's the Democrat on the local board and she vouches and says everything Kathy did is right. The next day she issues a statement. I'm 80 years old and I don't understand anything about computers. I don't know where the numbers Kathy was showing me ultimately came from but they seem to add up. I'm still very, very confused. The story you have just heard is true. The only thing that's changed is that this was an election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court rather than for president. If it were election for the president we'd still be hearing about it This election took place in a heated atmosphere in Wisconsin as you may know Wisconsin's been having a very heavy battle over public sector labor unions. The law that limited the rights of public sector labor unions was appealed to the state supreme court and whoever won this state supreme court election would likely vote in favor of the position of their party. The Republican David Prosser would vote to uphold the law and the Democrat would vote to strike it down. David Prosser ran in an election and here's an ad that ran against him by a local union. It was a bitter campaign. In the end, after an investigation by the Wisconsin government accountability board Prosser was declared the winner and by the way he cast the deciding vote to uphold the new law limiting public labor union rights. So my question is 12 years after Bush vs. Gore could Florida 2000 happen again? If it happened would the next election meltdown be worse? And a little bird told me that the election meltdown next time is going to be much worse. That is the rise of social media has made what happened in 2000 actually be a precursor for something much worse. Why does it matter? Before I go on to briefly explain some of the core arguments in my book why does it matter? Here's a page from Wikipedia where I get all of my information. These are the Egyptian presidential election results from 2005. Hosni Mubarak got 88% of the vote compared to someone named Aiman Noor who got 7.3% of the vote. In the next election the rule of law depends upon fair contested elections. When we don't have fair contested elections eventually we have a social fabric that disintegrates. This is the summer in Egypt this is December in Moscow and this is this November. We are not as far away from a major social fight over our elections than you might think. So the book begins with what happened in Florida and I won't spend a lot of time on it now. We all remember Catherine Harris or some of us are old enough to remember Catherine Harris. When I teach my students now after a member it's almost 12 years since Bush vs. Gore, most of my students by the way cannot identify that picture just so you have a sense of how old you are. We remember Catherine Harris the butterfly ballot. So what are the lessons from Florida? First partisanship. Catherine Harris was not only the secretary of state, the chief election officer of the state she was also the co-chair of Bush's election committee in Florida. The Democratic Attorney General who had no purview over election issues was the co-chair of Gore's committee and he issued all kinds of edicts about what the election laws meant. On the local level the Democratic counting boards that were recounting the votes counted many more votes for Gore than the Republicans. It went all the way down fell in disenfranchisement lists Democratic counties were much less likely to accept numbers on that list than Republicans. Localism Catherine Harris didn't have as much control over the election system as she would have liked. We have 14,000 election administration divisions in this country. Technology problems the butterfly ballot was just the beginning. We learned about millions of lost votes across the country and not just in Florida. And of course we had an out of control Supreme Court that went crazy. Democrats and Republicans agree on this they just disagree as to which Supreme Court it was the Florida Supreme Court or the US Supreme Court. Courts have been involved in election issues and they too have divided along partisan lines. So why haven't things gotten any better? Well we know first that things haven't gotten any better. Every election season we have armies of lawyers and the number of cases decided by the courts about elections has gone from about 96 before 2000 to over 200 after 2000. More than a doubling of the amount of litigation. And voter confidence suffers. So here's a chart of people's confidence in the election process. Before 2000 about 10% of the people thought the election was very or somewhat unfair. Big spike in 2004 when Bush runs for election against Kerry 21.5% of Democrats think the election is run is very unfair compared to 3% of Republicans. But in Washington State where they had a contested gubernatorial election where the Republican was declared the winner then on a recount the Republican was declared the winner. Then on a court challenge the Democrat was declared the winner. 68% of Republicans compared to 27% of Democrats thought the election was unfair. The lesson is clear. If my guy won the election was fair and square. If the other guy won there was fraud or incompetence. And there's a racial element to this in 2004 Pew found that 63% of whites were very confident their votes would be accurately counted compared to 30% of African Americans. Huge disparity. So after Florida what have we seen? Massive allegations of massive voter fraud on the Republican side, allegations of massive voter suppression on the Democratic side partisanship and localism and election administration technology problems and the rise of social media. Together it's a dangerous situation. And so I want to focus for a few minutes on the fight over voter ID which is one of the most salient issues in the election. In 2007 Texas State Senator Mario Galagos was recovering from a liver transplant. The Texas Senate was prepared to vote to pass a voter ID law on party lines. Just about every state that passes voter ID law. All the Republicans vote for it. All the Democrats vote against it. Galagos was recovering from a liver transplant in Houston. He had to be kept in a hospital bed in the state rotunda and wheeled in to filibuster the voter ID law. This is how partisan our election fights have become. Galagos said that voter ID was a Carl Rove trick. The Republican Party sees that Latino community is voting in record numbers so they're grasping at straws. For three years the Democrats were able to use procedural tricks to stop the voter ID law from passing. Finally this year the Democrats luck ran out and Rick Perry passed a voter ID law calling it a necessary major step forward to preserve voter integrity. Texas passed one of the very toughest voter ID laws including a provision that will not allow student IDs to be valid for voting. Many college students go to Texas establish Texas residency but do not drive. They're going to have a hard time getting that ID. Meanwhile, because Texas has a history of discrimination. They're going to have laws on hold until it's approved by the Justice Department. Eric Holder gave a major speech and said voter ID is rare, voter fraud is rare, voter ID laws are not necessary. They've blocked the South Carolina law. They're about to block the Texas law. The matter is stuck in court. Tremendous fighting over voter ID. So where did this come from? What's the truth? So it begins in the early 2000s when in the aftermath of Bush versus Gore the parties realized that every vote's going to count and that fighting over the election rules could make a big difference. And so who was going to claim a lot of voter fraud? There were no organizations on the right, on the Republican side to make the claim that there's a lot of voter fraud. One day before Congressman Bob Ney who was chairing a House committee looking into election administration changes. One day before the hearing that he was going to hold a brand new group arose, the American Center for Voting Rights. It's a group that appeared and then three years later disappeared without a trace. In fact, the person who founded the group, Thor Hearn a major lawyer once in Missouri and now in Washington has wiped his resume clear of this group. His Wikipedia page has been wiped by people at his law firm of his reference to this group. But this group played a crucial role in making it seem plausible that ACT, ACORN and the NAACP are engaged in a coordinated effort. A significant component of this effort appears to be registering individuals who would cast a ballot for the candidate supported by these organizations. The voter registration effort was not limited to registration of legal voters, but criminal investigations and news reports suggest that this voter registration effort also involved the registration of thousands of fictional voters, such as the now infamous Jive F. Turkey senior, Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins. These individuals registering these fictional voters were reportedly paid not just in money, but at least in one instance in crack cocaine. Note the racial undertones of the remarks. And so it began an attempt to produce a belief knocked back by evidence that impersonation voter fraud is a big problem. So here's Michelle Malkin a conservative commentator just before the 2010 elections. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It's the Democrats' coping mechanism for midterm voter election fraud. Faced with multiple reports of early voting irregularities and election shenanigans across the country, left-wing groups were playing death, them and blind. Voter fraud? What voter fraud? And Dick Armey, speaking just a few miles from here to the Lincoln Club, Armey claimed that 3% of ballots cast were fraudulent Democratic ballots. No evidence produced. I'm tired of people being Republican all their lives and then changing parties when they died, he said, to big laughs with no evidence. And then this Hans von Spikowsky. Hans von Spikowsky is at the Heritage Foundation. He wrote a report for the Heritage Foundation at a similar op-ed at the Fox News website where he said voter registration fraud and voter fraud happens all the time. One doesn't have to look far to find instances of fraudulent ballots cast in actual elections by voters who were figments of the actual imagination. In 1984, a district attorney in Brooklyn released the findings of a grand jury that reported extensive registration and impersonation fraud between 1968 and 1982. Put aside the fact that recent is not exactly 1968. Putting that aside, I wanted to see the report. So I wrote to von Spikowsky and I said, please, send me a copy of your report. No response. I wrote to the head of the Heritage Foundation and I said, I'd like to see a copy of the report. It's normal scholarly interaction that you share your data. No response. And von Spikowsky had been writing to me for years, sending me stuff that he wants me to post on the blog. Even though I had outed him for writing an anonymous law review article praising the Department of Justice's voter ID efforts while he was at the Department of Justice. But he was silent. The fight over the document got picked up by Talking Points Memo. I was scheduled to be on the Rachel Madab show to talk about this and then I can blame my shoemaker. The librarian at UC Irvine, who was after other colleagues of mine for years trying to track down this report, she was able to get this report. And I posted it online and everyone has this report. And what did the report show? Impersonation voter fraud. Someone writes, my name is Jaya Turkey. Shows up and votes and you get enough people to come and vote and change the outcome of the election. No, it showed that Democratic Party operatives, part of a local machine, hid in the ceiling posts of the bathroom at the Brooklyn Board of Elections went down in the middle of the night when everyone left and changed people's voter cards to create a record of voter fraud. No evidence of impersonation voter fraud. The only impersonation voter fraud that occurred here occurred with the help of election officials. Something that no voter ID law would prevent. The Bush Administration made pursuing voter ID law as a top priority. After five years of DOJ pushing, what did they find? 120 prosecutions for voter fraud. 86 convictions, not one for impersonation voter fraud. Lots for election officials engaging in fraud. We see real fraud, but not this kind of fraud. Why not? If I want to steal an election, what am I going to do? I'm going to get absentee ballots because then I can collect them, I can fill them out and I can turn them in. Impersonation fraud is too dangerous. It's also you pay people, you don't know that they're going to go up, you don't know how they vote. It just makes no sense. In Dallas, Texas, two-year investigation, no impersonation voter fraud. The very premise for voter ID laws. So what's it all about? You may have heard that a number of U.S. attorneys were fired in the Bush Administration. Some of them were not pursuing voter ID voter fraud allegations aggressively enough. Here's an email that was sent from a Republican activist to the U.S. Mexico, David Iglesias. David Iglesias who has a stellar career as a Republican. He's now in the Jagdcorp, prosecuting people in Guantanamo. This is a straight shooting Republican attorney. And what he says in this email is it's really going to help Heather Wilson who's running for Congress again if we could get an indictment before election day. It's a great wedge issue. So what is this about? It's about ginning up the Republican base telling them that there's a lot of fraud and maybe in as we'll see affecting the outcome of elections a little bit. A wedge issue. What about the voter fraud? So here's a Mickey Mouse voter registration application. You've heard about them. Here's a picture of one. Why do we see so many of these forms? Well, the simple reason is because Acorn had a flawed business model. They paid people to produce forms. And they hired low income people without any job experience and said if you don't turn in enough forms you might lose your job. So of course Mickey Mouse registered to vote. He just didn't show up to vote on election day. You got your $1.50 for turning in the form and that was it. Voter registration fraud though is picked up by the Michelle Malkins and the Dick armies and made into a concern about actual fraud. Well, what about voter suppression? How much suppression? How much does this actually suppress the votes? So the very first of the modern tough voter ID laws came out of Indiana. Here's how tough the law was in Indiana. If you were too poor to afford an ID to afford the documents you needed to get the ID of birth certificate you could go vote on election day at your polling place. And then within 10 days you had to go to the county seat and fill out an affidavit of indigency. You couldn't turn it into a polling place. You had to go at your own expense to the county seat and you had to do it every election if you wanted to vote. Sounds pretty tough. How many actual voters did the ACLU and the Democrats find who would actually be subject to this? None. They said it was a facial challenge. They said they needed to develop the evidence but they couldn't find any. So right after this case was decided there was a story about a group of 80 and 90 year old nuns who couldn't vote because they were old and didn't have birth certificates. They couldn't get the ID. They were turned away. The problem is if you're over 65 in Indiana you can vote by absentee without an ID. So is there exaggeration? The only good study we have of Indiana tells us that of the 2.8 million votes cast in Indiana in the 2008 election 1,000 people showed up without IDs. Some of those are people who just forgot their ID that day. 137 of them ultimately got their votes counted. We don't know how many. We don't know how many people were deterred, didn't even bother showing up because they didn't have an ID. But the best estimates are less than 1%. Because lots of people who don't have IDs are not going to show up to vote. So we don't know how much but we don't think it's massive. But this helps the left too. So here's the Brennan Center liberal think tank and advocacy group issued a recent report. New study. New voting restrictions may affect more than 5 million. How so? Well, for example, in Florida and Ohio, there's one less day of early voting. A million people voted on that day last time. Maybe they won't vote this time. They made it very easy to get to 5 million. What happened in the liberal blogosphere to May effect? This is the Huffington Post. Brennan Center. Millions of voters impacted by new ID law. Delhi Coast. 5 million votes have been targeted by the GOP school of election engineering. Rolling Stone. GOP war on voting. New laws could block 5 million from the polls. What's it about on the Democratic side? Here's a fundraising letter from Donna Brazil, noted Democratic fundraiser and commentator. Bringing up Florida. When my sister tried to vote in Florida in the 2000 election she was a victim of voter suppression. In Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas, extremist governors and legislators are willing to violate people's civil rights to elections. Send me your money. And we know that voter suppression efforts sometimes backfire. So when Harry Reid was locked in a tight race with Sharon Engel, a group called Latinos for reform, which was a Republican party front group, with very few Latinos in it, ran ads that said no vote days. Don't vote. Don't vote. Tell the Democratic Party they haven't made enough progress on immigration reform. What happened? The Democrats used this. Said it was voter suppression. It probably actually boosted Latino turnout for the Democrats. In 2002, in New Hampshire, a Republican party operative said, you know, it would be great if we could disrupt the Democrats' communications on election day. They hired a call center from the Midwest to call all of these numbers where people could call in if they needed a ride to the polls and block this from happening. Within an hour of the calls being blocked, the head of the Republican party in New Hampshire called it off. Years of criminal investigations, the Republican party ultimately settled for $350,000. How many votes were blocked? Probably none. Probably none. But it was great publicity for the Democrats who could legitimately claim a voter suppression effort. And then there are flyers like this. This was a flyer distributed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Vote at the polling place of your choice. And of course, if you vote at the wrong polling place, your vote will not count. Vote on Wednesday. But they don't actually tend to depress a lot of votes. At least there's no good evidence that they do. So it's a partisan war and it's a partisan war that's used much for trying to get the base fired up. But in a very close election and razor thin election like we saw in Wisconsin in the summer, or like we saw in Bush versus Gore, less than 1% of the vote could make a difference. So that's the motivation for all of this. And we have the problems of partisanship and localism in election administration. You may remember Ken Blackwell. He was the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio. Among his many infamous decisions was to reject voter registration cards that were not on 80 pound paper. As though they would disintegrate before they could be input into the system. So you've heard of him, but you may not have heard of Jennifer Brunner. Jennifer Brunner came into office after Ken Blackwell and said, no one will know my name. I'm going to just be a straight shooter. I'm going to administer things fairly until she rejects, wants to reject absentee ballot applications that the McCain campaign had set out that said, check this box to affirm that you're qualified to vote, which was not required by Ohio Law. She said, if you didn't check it, I don't know if you're qualified to vote. The Ohio Supreme Court had to reverse her. Not know her name. The Ohio Republican Party ran an ad saying John Gibson, who told his Fox News viewers, someone is trying to steal your vote. Jennifer Brunner. Partisanship. We have 33 states where the chief elections officer is a partisan election official. No other country does, that's no other modern democracy does this. And then there's localism. I've already told you the story of Kathy Nicholas keeping her votes on her laptop. Let me tell you another story that just happened this last week. There's an election contest for a juvenile judge in Hamilton County, Ohio. 15 months after the election, it still hasn't been decided. Because the Ohio elections board decided to count some ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct, but not others. And the ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct were cast in the wrong precinct, which could be in the same physical location, just a different desk, because of poll worker error. What kind of poll worker error? This is from the court opinion that came out when asked whether the house number 798 was even or odd, the poll worker responded odd. And why do you think that's odd? I'm sorry, why do you think her address is an odd address? Because it begins with an odd number. It starts with an odd number? Yes, 9 is an odd number, 8 even. So on election day if someone came to you with the address 798, you had two ranges to choose from, you choose odd for them? Yes. Okay, is that how you did for all the ballots on election day? To determine if they were even? Yes. To determine if they were even or odd, you looked at the first digit of the address? No. I looked at the whole address. And if there were more odds than even, it would count as an odd address? Yes. That's who's running our elections. So one of the things that was done in the aftermath of the debacle in Florida was that we created a new commission, U.S. Election Assistance Commission. It was given virtually no power. The National Association of Secretary of State, which is the organization of all of these chief elections officers, from the very beginning I said that this group should be disbanded. Do you know that right now we're in the 2012 election? This is a screenshot from the webpage. Those two arrows are pointing to the words Resigned 2011. Of the four commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, we currently have zero. An advisory group that's supposed to be running practices for running our elections, no one is running the ship. A Republican congressman recently called it a zombie agency. They've had to disband their advisory groups because they don't have the power to do it. And then there's Bush vs. Gore. Some people said that Bush vs. Gore would be a great case to make lemonade from lemons. Bush vs. Gore may have been a terrible decision, Democrats said, but at least it could be used by voting rights proponents and court to have courts force fixing election systems. That would be the lemonade. No Supreme Court opinion has cited Bush vs. Gore since it was decided, not in its dissent, not in a concurrence. Very unusual. It took me a month to find another case decided in that time period that had not been cited for something. Supreme Court will not say the words Bush vs. Gore. The only time they said it was in the Citizens United case, they were quoting from my book which has Bush vs. Gore in the title. This is the time those words have been put together. Does the case have any presidential value? What about it punch card ballots, those terrible machines? Does using those machines in one part of a state and not in another violate Bush vs. Gore? The courts have slit but most courts have said no. But it's come up in every major election dispute since 2000 and it's going to come up again if there's an election dispute that comes down to absentee ballots or provisional votes. Alright. Technology. Florida said we got to get rid of these terrible punch card voting machines. They threw them all the way. They were the first to buy a bunch of electronic voting machines. They've now thrown away all of their electronic voting machines because of what happened in 2006 in a congressional race in Sarasota County, the 13th district. This was Catherine Harris's seat. She ran for Congress and won. Then she ran for Senate. Ended up losing that race. But in this race Sarasota County, this was the first screen. It was like an ATM machine, an electronic voting machine. This is the second screen. If you can see up here, this is the race for the congressional district. Here's the first page. Here's the second page. 18,000 people didn't realize they were supposed to vote on top and missed voting in the election. And we know because if you look at the absentee ballots and you look at people who vote in the same election but in a different, using different machinery, different county, because the congressional lines went over the county, they didn't make the mistake. But in Charlotte County, where there was an attorney general race on the bottom, the same number, same percentage of people missed that race. So voting technology, we still have problems with the technology of voting. And then we have people on the left who screen voter technology fraud, the same way that those on the right screen voter fraud. There's a group called the Election Defense Alliance saying that these machines that scan, the optically scan ballots, you know, we fill them out with a number of pens to fill them in. They've got a red color on them that gives Republicans an advantage. What's the proof? We cannot say with certainty that 97% of the votes counted on optical scanners were subject to manipulation, but we can fairly ask, whatever evidence exists, they were not. Spoken like a true paranoia. Even low tech problems, the Lisa Murkowski vote in Alaska, Murkowski is spelled wrong. Joe Miller went to court to argue that if anybody spelled Murkowski with a Y, their vote shouldn't count. Even with paper and pencil we have technology problems. What about internet voting? Could this solve all of our problems? Internet voting. Well one problem is we have a terrible problem trying to get ballots back from military and overseas voters. It takes a long time until we know who's going to vote, especially now, you know, we didn't know if New Kingdom would be on the ballot in Virginia or not. How are we going to get the ballots out? As part of a recent law said you have to give 45 days for military voters to be able to get their ballots out. So the Washington Board of Elections decided to run an experiment. And in that experiment they said we're going to have an internet election for the people who are in these overseas. I said before we do that, we're going to run a little experiment. There we go. Oh my That's the Michigan fight song. In the middle of their experiment, the Michigan fight song started playing. And the reason the Michigan fight song started playing is because four days earlier the University of Michigan had hacked in. Hacked the invitation. The Washington Board said try it. See if you can hack our system, it's unhappable. They broke in. Here's what they did. They collected all the data. They changed everybody's ballots of people who had already voted. They changed it so that they could capture every vote. They then left a calling card, which is that if they went to check on the machine, it would play music. Wait for the Acorn recounts and the absentee voter fraud in Wisconsin recall. Remember Wisconsin, not only must we get more voters to vote, we have to win beyond the margin of liberal voter fraud. And then it got worse. And then it got to violence. I'll let you read this one. The next election not found would be much worse. Because now all of these opinions are amplified by social media. And social media makes people more partisan. So here's Brad Friedman liberal provocateur does very good work exposing the work of the Republican voter fraud people, but has his own conspiracy theories. So when this happened he said, lame dems, you don't charge election tampering and evidence of fraud would you ain't got none? Want some? Try to kind of the actual balance in Wisconsin rather than rely on the off bail easy and inflated computers to do so. You might be amazed at what you'd find. Again, the paranoia of the votes are not being accounted. New studies of social media tell us that yes, people exchange messages, but they're less tolerant when they exchange messages on social media. Social media makes people more partisan shorter views and closer divides. So what can we do to fix this? We could say as soon as someone graduates high school or drops out of high school we're going to automatically register to vote. And we're going to follow you around wherever you go and change your voter registration for you. That's how many countries do it. Automatic voter registration. We don't have to have it on the national level so we can have it on the C level. We could have national voter ID. This is a proposal I've made that has united Democrats and Republicans against my proposal. The government should pay all the costs and give everyone an ID and they should take your thumbprint if you want to give it and you're not going to lose your thumb. If you show them at the polling place and you just use your thumb. Democrats don't like it, Republicans don't like it, but it would solve a lot of the problems. We can have federal election administration, non-partisan election administration in a way that we could do that. We can have uniform technology. In Australia no matter where you go on election day, the machines, the ballots are exactly the same format. There are lots of things we could do. But it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen for a while. And everybody's not going to for a while is that we are in one of the most partisan errors that we've had for many generations. This is a chart that shows the difference between the approval rating of the president by people who identify with Democrats and Republicans and the trajectory with a small dip after 9-11, the trajectory is up up and up. And it's not on this chart, but it could be an 80% difference between the approval rating of say Obama or Bush by Democrats and Republicans. In a partisan era, election administration changes are made by the party in power to benefit the party in power. Except for Rhode Island, every voter ID law that's passed has passed almost exclusively with Republican votes that have been opposed to almost exclusively with Democrats. In a partisan era, we're not going to get the change. So what's the saving grace? The saving grace is the odds of an election meltdown for President are pretty low because it would have to happen in a state crucial to the electoral context. And it would have to happen not 2%, it would have to be within a few thousand votes so the best thing we have going for us is not that we fix any of the problems the best thing we have going for us is that just the odds, I guess but if it happens again the answer is religion. This is the election administration's prayer Lord, let this election not be close that's what we have that's how we're going to check out yes Professor, first of all, thank you so much that was quite an informative lecture thank you Professor, I just wanted to have your opinion on section 5 of the voting rights do you think it is constitutional in this day and age to single out some states for pre-clearance and let others do whatever they want it's a great question and just to for those who are not familiar with this there are different parts of the voting rights act there's one part of the voting rights act passed in 1965 which says that states which have a history of discrimination racial discrimination in voting before they can make any changes in their voting rules whether it's as major as a redistricting change or as minor is moving a polling place across the street they have to get permission from the federal government they either have to go to the Department of Justice or they can go to a three judge court in Washington DC and the question is whether this law that was passed in 1965 is constitutional the constitutional question is whether Congress has the power to require states to get approval for their laws there's no other area where you have to get this kind of pre-approval the Supreme Court in the 1960s said this was constitutional because these states would engage in a cat and mouse game that could change in their laws and we needed to put the burden on those those kinds of racially discriminatory conduct the question is now whether 45 years later we still need the law since it's been in place there's no good evidence to know what would happen if it disappeared in 2009 the Supreme Court in a case called Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District versus Holder said the Voting Rights Act this provision may well be unconstitutional but they duck the issue and they kind of left it to Congress Congress has done nothing since then and now the cases are coming back up when Rick Perry was still running for president during one of the debates he was asked in South Carolina where the Department of Justice had just blocked South Carolina's voter ID law on grounds that members of protective minority groups were more likely than whites to lack the proper documentation to get an ID he said South Carolina is at war with the federal government which I thought was kind of ironic given the Civil War but he said that it was an intrusion on state sovereignty one of those cases that he gets to the Supreme Court my prediction is that the Supreme Court is going to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act it's not a question of if or when it's not the result I would like I disagree with the entire line that requires coming forth with evidence by Congress though Congress is a litigant before the Supreme Court having to prove whether or not this evidence Congress is giving power in the 14th and 15th amendments to enforce those amendments but if you're asking what I think is going to happen I think the next time, within a few years when a state like Texas passes voter ID law will not be subject to pre-clearance because pre-clearance will disappear probably on a 5 to 4 vote as many things as the Supreme Court have done Do you think it would be desirable to abolish the electoral college to have a national popular vote for president? Well, from the point of view of election administration not about what's fair in terms of representation on the one hand if you move to a popular vote where you have hundreds of millions more than maybe 150 million votes something like that the chances you're going to have a very close election go down so here you just have to have a close election in a particular state whose electoral college votes are in play if you move to the national election system the margin is likely to be better but if there is a very close election in actual numbers of popular ballots then you have the problem that you could have recounts and fights everywhere in the country fighting over ballots so I think it's kind of a watch I wouldn't advocate abolishing the electoral college or not because of concerns about election administration there are far greater priorities on the list like moving to non-partisan election administration making it more state-based or even nationally based on the question of what's a better system and that's something that can be debated in part we have this long history and it's hard to know what elections would look like if candidates were appealing to get the highest number of popular votes as opposed to particular states certainly the ballot ground states wouldn't be as happy with this because they wouldn't be getting the same kind of attention yes has the attorney general blocked the voter suppression laws of all the states or just a few well we're talking about the voter ID laws in particular there are two voter ID laws that have been put in for pre-clearance one in the South Carolina that was blocked the other was Texas and DOJ has been stalling whether or not it's going to pre-clear it's keep asking for more information it's trying to put the issue up but Texas just a week or two ago went to the court to reach out to court and DC is trying to go around the Justice Department now so that case is now going to be heard probably before the Department of Justice makes the decision I think one of those cases could end up going to the Supreme Court and back to the earlier question one of the things that Texas is saying is if the Voting Rights Act actually blocks Texas from being able to assure voter integrity through a voter ID law then the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional so get a double win get the voter ID law held up and section 5 structure so on that happy note there's a reception outside invite you to join us at the reception please join me in thanking and congratulating our Chancellor Professor Wachman