 All right, welcome. It's 101 Eastern Time. That's 101 AM in Ulaanbaatar, and that means it's time for Vision, a weekly show about the trends, ideas, and disruptions affecting the future of our democracy. As always, we start at 101, so you have time for mandatory Zoom updates. And by the way, Zoom is debuting yet another slogan this week. It's Zoom, where 80% sure this product isn't harmful after extended use. So over the past few weeks, our focus on the show has been the way that the COVID-19 pandemic has been opening up huge questions for how our democracy functions. We started with the infodemic. This is the official term the World Health Organization has used to describe the overabundance of information about COVID-19, especially on digital and social media, and the challenge that this overabundance creates for people to find trustworthy information. What we learned is that the pandemic has unmasked a vulnerability in our digital world, the same systems that can help us find friends, find family, meet with others who share our interests are the systems that can be mobilized to spread misinformation, to so doubt, and to undermine authoritative information, especially when we need it most. What the infodemic has revealed is how powerful, exciting, and useful new technology can also inject novel vulnerabilities into our democracy. But what's so stunning about the scope of the pandemic is that it's also exposing vulnerabilities in the oldest architecture of our democracy. The basics of our election system appear in just 741 words into the Constitution. Article I, Section 4, delegates the management of elections for our legislative branches to the states. And since then, states sometimes with help from the federal government and sometimes in opposition to the federal government have largely managed our electoral system through its various ups and downs. But now we face a new challenge, the potential that COVID-19 will affect how we administer what many expect to be among the most contested and certainly contentious elections of our lifetime. A Pew poll recently found that two thirds of Americans expect the election to be disrupted in some fashion. And we already got a glimpse of what this could be like in Wisconsin's recent presidential primary vote. So over the next few weeks, we're going to explore the state of this vital democratic process in a time of COVID. A process important both as a key gear in our democratic machinery and as a ritual that's full of meaning for the health of our democratic republic. We're going to start the conversation with Nate Persley. He's a Stanford law professor and elections expert and was the research director on the bipartisan 2013 presidential commission on election administration. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nate Persley. Nate, good to see you. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. So look, America is reopening. What's the worry? Well, the worry for the election is that we need to make sure that people can vote safely. And so people's concerns about social distance and and interacting in a safe way extend beyond their sort of pre-election activities to what they're going to be doing on election day in the month before. So what needs to be done? I mean, right now, you know, you can sometimes vote early. You sometimes have to wait in line on the election day. Certain people can vote absentee. What are the things that need to be, what don't we have in place to be able to do this? Why are we concerned that we might not be able to pull this off? Well, so the basic changes that we need to make involve moving as many voters to vote by mail as possible, and then to reconfigure the polling places that do exist to make sure that they ensure social distancing and healthy voting. And that's that's easier said than done because while for some states like my own California, which has had well over two-thirds of voters voting in voting by mail, let alone the other states that have permanent vote by mail. They have long traditions. It's not going to be a face, you know, too much of difficulty. But for many of the battleground states in particular that have, you know, rates of mail voting in 5% around those ranges, it is really difficult to try to move millions of people to vote in a way that they've never done before. Why and why is our jurisdiction so inconsistent in this? Why? I mean, if you, if someone arrived from outer space and you asked them, how do you think a national election works in the U.S.? They'd probably assume that it's the same everywhere. And that the the same systems we can use to file our taxes or to renew drivers licenses, all these other these other areas in our lives where there's, you know, a digital option, a mail option. Why is it so why is voting by mail so inconsistent? Well, we delegate, as you pointed out, constitutionally down to the states and even within the states of the state legislatures, the power to run our elections and to determine the manner of electing the president and Congress. And so constitutionally and structurally it's built into the American system. But even sort of traditionally the way this has evolved is that the, you know, the states are very, very different from each other. And, you know, what they elect, you know, what what positions appear on the ballot, what technology they use, what opportunities that they they provide, whether they allow for referenda and like that. So the ballot in California looks very different than the ballot in New York. It's very different than the ballot in Louisiana. And so let's so just staying on vote by mail for a minute and then we'll talk about polling places since at least we've got a few months on that one. What what will it take? I mean, can we let's say there was a big resurgence in COVID, you know, we're obviously praying that's not going to be the case. But let's say in September, there's a big resurgence in COVID cases with the onset of fall, it is manifestly unsafe to go to a polling place in a number, let's let's say in any battleground state in this country. What has to happen between now and then to be able to pull this off? Are there policy changes that have to happen? Or is this really about getting this differentiated machinery to work for for an election? So let me begin by emphasizing one thing, which is that the changes that need to be made cannot be made once we know what the status of the virus is on the election day, right? So the changes have to be made now, right? So we have to assume that it's going to be difficult for people to vote in person in the fall. That doesn't mean we're going to eliminate in person polling places. In fact, I think that the critical part of the solution, but states need to make decisions now to make sure that they can move to vote by mail. That requires massive shifts in procurement of the kind of material that you need in order to run a vote by mail election. Even something as simple as the ballot envelopes that are required are, you know, we're facing the same kinds of shortages that we find with PPE and the like in the sort of election machine marketplace. But you also have to make sure that your databases are accurate so that you can get the right ballot to the right voter at the right address. And given the fact that we, you know, we expect a lot of social dislocation due to the recession that's accompanying the pandemic, we should find, think that there's going to be a lot of difficulty in getting voters the right ballots. And that's one thing that I think people don't quite appreciate when thinking, well, why don't we just, you know, everybody vote by mail? Every voter, depending on their address is getting a different ballot. And so you need to make sure that you get the right ballot to the right voter. In a polling place, that's not such a big deal because you can sort of have a negotiation between the poll worker and the voter to make sure they end up voting the right ballot. But in some of these states that don't have a tradition of voting by mail, they don't really have as accurate voting lists as one would want. So we're going to need to build new material supply chains. We're going to need to improve IT. These are functions. Any big bureaucracy is phenomenal at doing well. No, these are huge problems for big bureaucracy. So can this be done? You know, can we get ready? Well, we need to have a sort of all hands on deck approach. So we need to do what we can to shift as many voters to vote by mail as possible. Even though, as you pointed out, the, what happened in Wisconsin was an object lesson and whatnot to do. They actually ended up turning out well over a million, million and a half voters by mail in a very short period of time under the worst of circumstances. So we at least have more of a lead time from the fall election than they did. And so I think what you're going to see is there are going to be problematic jurisdictions as there is in every election. And that's going to be quite spotty around the country as to who's doing this well and who's doing it poorly. We do have enough time if we make the decisions in the next six weeks. And so that's what I'm encouraging these jurisdictions to do. And you've thought about, you've also thought about critically about the costs for this, you know, do you what, do you have an estimate of what it would take to make this investment? So the Brennan Center estimates around $2 billion. That is, I think for the bare bones of what you need to deal with the COVID related challenges that we face in this election. But at the same time that that, that we're dealing with COVID issues, you're seeing that state legislatures are tightening budgets across the board. I would probably double the Brennan Center's estimate. But, but I've now arrived at sort of this view that the most important thing that Congress can do, apart from the $400 million that they've already appropriated, is to pay for all the mail charges, all the postage that is going to be relevant to elections at this time, to fully fund the National Guard to help out with staffing in polling places and in mail balloting, also to offer up federal facilities as a way of adding to the number to the polling place inventory, and then also providing PPE to the election jurisdictions to make sure that they have all the sanitizer and face masks and other protective equipment that they need. So let's come back to polling places. But you know, so maybe thinking about some of the kind of common arguments that start to get raised when you think about mass vote by mail, you know, one is a prominent one is a fraud concern, right, that the inability to control the ballot that someone gets, as you point out, that it's not unreasonable to raise questions about someone getting the right ballot, and then the inability to control who's filling it out, who's sending it back. Well, how real are fraud concerns if we have to do a major portion of the electorate is voting by mail? I don't think fraud concerns are a major concern. I mean, that's what the data shows. So we've had vote by mail elections in Oregon and Washington for some time, Colorado has now had total vote by mail, Hawaii and Utah have total vote by mail, two thirds of the voters in California, Arizona have voted by mail, and we don't see any sort of higher levels of fraud in those jurisdictions and other places. So I think that that sort of needs to be discounted. Of course, the politics of this are such that since the president has raised the issue that it's now attracting a kind of familiar polarized structure as a lot of other attitudes. But I want to be clear that there are voices on the left and the right that have concerns about vote by mail. So not only is there the fraud trope that you talked about there, but also concerns about the biases that we see in the vote by mail system, that wider voters, educated voters, older voters tend to vote by mail. And particularly people with disabilities are going to have difficulty voting by mail. And so that's why you have to have a sort of multi prime approach to this, which includes mail, but also has some polling places for people to vote online. I mean, are there, I was going to ask, so I was going to ask about this argument too, right? Which is who's privileged in a world of fixed address, who's privileged in a world where there's a lot more onus on the individual voter to make sure that they've got the ballot, they fill it out, they get it in, they have the time to do it. I mean, there's all kinds of factors, including just the exigencies of someone's life that are inequitably distributed. Are there ways to address equity and inclusion concerns of vote by mail? And I actually, I want to ask this in a specific way too, which is, certainly we've got to be afraid and concerned if people who want to exercise their right to vote regularly do so aren't able to. But as you know, we did some research at Knight Foundation on the 100 million people who never vote, people for whom there are a lot of good reasons not to engage at all. And I wonder, and many of them are some of the more marginalized and vulnerable members of society who question whether any of this is even working for them. How do we make sure vote by mail doesn't continue to just narrow the range of people who get to have a say in our democracy? Is there anything that could be done around the way vote by mail is administered? Yeah, and I think that that is a very big question for this election. One thing, I want to sort of reiterate what I said before, as bad as it might be under other circumstances, if you were to move massively to vote by mail, if you do so during a pandemic with an accompanying recession that leads to social dislocation and people moving addresses, that makes it even more difficult and likely to have a disparate impact. And so with greater resources, you can do a lot to address these concerns. You can have greater outreach. You can have help that's provided to voters. You can make sure that there's multiple mailings that people are educated about vote by mail. There's also legal changes that need to happen. You need to make sure that if voters, for example, if their ballot is presumptively disqualified because there's signature on the outside of the envelope doesn't match the signature that's on file, that they have an opportunity to cure that. Many of these first time voters are not going to realize that you have to sign the outside of the ballot. So you will see, I bet you, a million people who forget to put their signature on the ballot, right? And as a result, we have to make sure that there's curing possibilities there as well. So there's a lot that the local jurisdictions can do to kind of facilitate vote by mail and make it easier. But it is still in the transition period going to favor those types of people who can navigate bureaucracies and navigate government forms, because that's essentially what a vote by mail application and vote by mail is. So I really want to come back to this issue of what sort of curative remedial action you take on the back end of this. But let's talk about polling places, since that is going to be a part of a solution that's equitable, that gives people the opportunity to engage. We can list off all of the kinds of safety controls we have physically right now and think about how those translate to an in-person polling place. We can social distancing, PPE masks, hand washing, I'm sure physical things you can do in the design of the space. I think every, certainly every employer right now is grappling with the reality that there's a lot we don't really know about what enables people to be safe in physical space. We've got intuitions that are common sense. We've got limited research, but a lot of that is based on offices that have opened in China, public places that have opened in China where the data is unreliable and where the lag times to really find out, did you prevent recurrence of the infection? We're just not there yet. So are there steps that we have confidence in right now about how to make sure polling places can be safe on election day? Yes. Well, just to give you an example of how this could be done, South Korea did run an election a few weeks ago, which was primarily done in polling places. And they did it with, they had temperatures being taken to voters as they would go into the polls. They had physical distancing. They had masks. They had gloves. And even people who were COVID positive were allowed to vote in the kind of segregated polling place next to the other polling places. So it can be done. Other countries have shown that it could be. But this requires some kind of ingenuity here and adaptation of our current system. One of the things that worries me the most is the number of polling places that are going to be taken out of commission. What we're seeing now is that some jurisdictions are having half or more of their polling places being taken out of commission because the schools say they will not open under these conditions. The senior living facilities, which are ubiquitous polling places are not willing to open up in firehouses. So something like a third of the polling places in the U.S. are in schools. And so if we lose them, we've got a real challenge. But there are things that we can do. There are things at least we know which would be problematic, right? We cannot run elections under these conditions in small and close places where people are going to wait in long lines. And when I was research director of the presidential commission that you mentioned before, we actually had the head of Disney theme parks that was also on the commission in order to talk about long lines and how to deal with it. And one thing that we came up with after we actually did a field visit to the Dumbo ride in the Magic Kingdom was the idea of taking a number and voting. There's no reason anybody should have to actually wait in line. You should be able to just like at the butcher take a number. So then you come back at a prescribed time in order to vote. There are other ideas like curbside voting that are being put out there as well as sort of the normal issues of social distancing that poll workers can enforce. And we outsource it to Disney and they're hurting. I mean, I if they could take over. We could think about what we actually had a hearing on this with the presidential commission. The head of Disney theme parks had one question for the election officials who testified. He said my one concern is why don't you have merchandise at the end of the voting process that would make things a lot different. I didn't really I was thinking you could bundle the you know the right to vote with Disney plus as long as there wasn't an incremental additional fee for the for the I mean you're the lawyer. But that's my interpretation of the Constitution. So you know what about so we've talked about what we could do to get ready physically that there that there may be a path forward certainly with what we know now if we're serious about it that combines vote by mail combines a person that of course doesn't address the psychology you know of the voter and you know a big uncertainty here is what's going to make people feel safe now we're seeing you know this week you know some people are hesitant to change their life and some people are like give me a haircut or give me death you know so I it's there's a lot of inconsistency I think in the readiness of Americans to go back to to to public life as usual and we'll have some time again you know kind of we're hoping that that that we see at least a decrease in in cases what is anyone thinking are you thinking about what it will take to give people confidence that yeah exercising this really critical constitutional right is is something you should feel comfortable doing what other work do we have to do that we normally wouldn't have to do in an election to to achieve that so first one of my concerns is that we are going to drop our guard over the summer when people think that things are going well and then as the fall approaches uh renewed concerns about the virus are then going to afflict the election and we're going to say oh you know we were caught by surprise and so I think we need to work now to sort of ensure that people feel safe in in voting um at that again is one of the reasons you have to shift as many people to mail as possible um to do it as early as possible so you can educate them about how to do that successfully um and then it's just like any other public education effort when it comes to uh voting in polling places right you have to explain you know what's what are you going to see on election day and and what um what can you expect that's going to keep you safe and the hope is right that people will be accustomed to these types of measures in their other aspects of their lives whether it's supermarkets or post offices and the like that then what they see in the polling place is pretty familiar to them right uh but but that's going to you know take a lot of adaptation uh over the summer and then just to draw a link between this and everything else you know that I work on and then uh that you've been doing in these webinars right one of the other concerns is not just about legitimate fears that people may have about what happens in the polling place but concerns about misinformation about both the process of voting and then the fears in the polling places right so if there's misinformation about a coronavirus and an outbreak in a particular area or if there's uh allegations about uh what's you know poll workers being sick or polling places being shut down all of these kinds of problems that we were worried about before the pandemic hit about misinformation come up with a vengeance and are exacerbated because of the pandemic we're getting a lot of questions about that right because you've already got people raising doubts you know around the primaries about about vote by mail and whether it's reliable about your polling place what what can we do I mean it doesn't you know you know your colleague Renee Deresta was on last week and one of her points she's been making lately is you know authoritative sources of information need to learn how to play this game a little bit better and to talk to people in ways that feel authentic and in the tempo and mode of the internet you know election administrators who are incredible we were talking about this before the show are just incredibly dedicated public servants not their game exactly you know to communicate in these ways so as are we are we seeing anything promising in terms of how to beat back some of this misinformation uh in the in the primary season that's already upon us well I think what we're seeing is not good and I think that where we should be genuinely worried about the capacity of you know strapped election officials to also launch sort of corrective information campaigns and remember some of the disinformation is coming from public officials so so it's they're really outmatched right so the Twitter feed of the sort of local election official in you know small county in Pennsylvania is no match against either either you know a media personality or a politician and so you know it's just like any of these other problems when it comes to dealing with disinformation is you have to get as many established voices that people trust as possible to put out as much good information about the process in order to encourage people to vote and to vote safely so um so I want to talk about kind of what the results and how to think about the result but I have one other question the process that's also coming up in the in from our audience which is you know you put a pretty hard time cap on when we've got to solve this if we had you back on the show in six weeks will we be looking back saying we came close to the brink but we got it done like are you seeing signs that will make the decisions or are you are you you know king lear and uh and we you know we really appreciate it but but uh but it doesn't look good well here's here's what I will say which is that there are going to be many places with significant problems in November um whether we focus on them as sort of indicative of a potential catastrophe in some ways depends on how close the election is right I mean election officials will tell you right in close elections everything seems like a problem I mean that's why we what we call the election administrators prayer oh god whatever happens please don't let it be close right and and so the um I am very concerned I think that the election officials do have lead time to make some of these decisions I'm concerned about both the actuality of the fairness and and and success of the process but also the appearance and whether people are going to trust that the system is working for them uh and so yes I think if you did have me on in six weeks we will have a good idea as to whether uh most jurisdictions particularly the battleground states are prepared for this so let's talk before we before we go I talk a little bit about the result because I think it's easy but I think a mistake to think about the disruption as confined to whether we can pull off the election right I think part of the disruptive potential here the democratic discontinuities that are in the offing are that the way even a successful vote by mail uh much more controlled in-person experience will be whether it gives people space to question the validity of the result legitimately the either a losing a losing candidate or individual voters right who are seeing some of the issues you just raised about what ballots are being disqualified versus not disqualified about whether they really think they got to get their ballot back you know they feel confident that their ballot was counted about whether they feel they they left a polling place because they thought the PPE wasn't there I mean all of these things are going to give space for someone to say this wasn't a legitimate election how how seriously should we take those concerns um and what can we do to manage them the media will go crazy right if they can't call the winner at least of one of the races the night of the election uh which isn't going to help um how do you how do you think about that dimension of this well let me focus on that last point you made because I think it's a critical one which is that while we know in this era social media and the like that we can't stop irresponsible outlets from calling the election even tomorrow uh that um it is absolutely critical that the media cover this election in a very different way because a vote by mail election or one where 70 million votes are cast by mail is a very different election than the one that we're used to and so we need to build in patience which is incredibly short supply these days in order to allow for the possibility that several days after the election we're going to have to wait to call the winner so that that I think is quite uh important there um I think but but I also want to manage everyone's expectations which is that we should assume that even under the best of circumstances there will be 40 to 50 or maybe more million people who will think that the winner was illegitimate right that was possibly true uh I mean we saw that even last election um you know whether it was because of russian disinformation or the electoral college split in life um uh and so while it's true that these questions about absentee ballots and about fraud and about um other logistical problems are just one more reason that people could have to question the legitimacy the outcome because of the polarized status of the american electorate um we should understand that there are going to be tens of millions of people who are not going to accept the result the question is will there be real evidence that something went wrong that that would fuel fuel that fire and so we need to do as much as we can to limit the possibility that there's any good reason for people to feel that the election was not valid but let's talk about that because I like you know you're obviously immersed in the in the details of what this takes but I you're also you are someone who's thinking about the sweep of democracy you know and in the show we're trying to think about the sweep of democracy that's another trap we shouldn't fall into right to assume that what our current electoral system as as one of the critical institutions that either does or doesn't promote trust in the efficacy of this democratic system of this democratic republic this isn't some pristine vase that we're just trying to avoid a crack there's all kinds of cracks right that already exist can we do you think that we can tolerate an election that as you point out under the best of circumstances is going to test the the trust the patience the the belief of a lot of people are we gonna or if we did the show we just said what would happen if we did this show in six weeks if we did the show in a year would we say what does the next election need to look like to go back to a democracy you know what what can we manage can we handle this do you think are you optimistic well I think both sides right now see this election as sort of existentially threatening right and that's not a good prescription for a healthy democracy right I mean you have to sort of trust that that there will be opportunities for replacement and that you know the choices are not as threatening I mean even something like bush versus gore which really tests the republic right we were able to move on in ways that I don't think are going to be possible this time because of how how threatened people feel I mean remember that even four years ago the winner of the presidential election alleged fraud right of millions of voters that that he said were illegal so you know that that happened even under under circumstances that were favorable there but right now given the stakes in the way people perceive it I think that you know I am very concerned right that there's going to be large losses of the electorate we're not going to accept the result so let's maybe that should be the kind of the last question which is what are what are we know what we need to do we know at a high level now in talking to you what we need to do is a country from an administrative perspective but the stakes are really high and they're really high because this is not happening in a vacuum you know it's not it's not 1984 it's not 1996 um felt like a simpler time um you know back when our partisan rancor was you know only about someone's private life um but uh what what should we be thinking about you know what can others do maybe who aren't involved in this specific administrative challenge to to build confidence in among the electorate that look democracy is working no matter the result that we can that we can have faith in our systems to be able to live and deliver an accurate result and that that faith should actually be compounding that you know if we can't get through this right if we can do more vote by mail if we can help polling places to adjust that's a reason to be optimistic you know about the resilience of our democracy despite this you know nearly unprecedented threat are there are there other institutions roles actions that folks should be thinking about well I would reiterate something you said earlier which is that we need to amplify the voices of the local election officials who are really just focused on management questions and the more I deal with them the more that these are just folks who want their names out of the headlines right they don't want to be on someone's twitter feed the next day they don't want to be the next you know Teresa Lapour managed the Palm Beach elections in in 2000 uh and so the more that we can sort of give them space give them credit uh and try to to amplify what is generally a non-partisan approach that these local election officials are taking that can balance out the voices that we see at the state level and the national level which are really kind of harmful in terms of the polarizing messages that they're sending to the electorate well look we will on vision we'll be calling the election in the next couple weeks and any result that's not what we call is we're going to assume is fraud but but other but everyone else should be following your good advice so this this was a really great conversation um I want you know everyone should be following you you can follow Nate on twitter at at personally uh p-e-r-s-i-l-y uh you can also follow him on his website uh www.personally.com uh there's a great lawfare uh podcast uh in which uh Nate asks some of these bigger questions about whether democracy can survive the internet which we've of course been talking about that's on Spotify and we'll be sending around to you a really important op-ed uh that Nate put out in late march I think really outlining uh the challenge uh the challenge that is uh is ahead of us so uh Nate I really want to thank you for joining us thanks for having me and everyone else before we go just want to remind you about what's coming up on vision as we continue to look at the challenge of an election during a time of COVID next week we'll be talking to two really important civil rights leaders Spencer Overton uh from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Arturo Vargas from uh from the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on June 4th we'll have two former federal election commissioners uh Trevor Potter and Ann Ravel and on June 11th we'll hear from sex Seth Flaxman a lot of you were asking questions about the role of technology and an election and Seth will be able to answer some of those also if you're interested in what it takes to build engaging communities you should check out another show uh that we host at night called Coast to Coast it's Tuesdays 1pm um and you can find it at the same place that you can find vision uh and finally as a reminder this episode will be up on the website tomorrow noon you can see this episode in any episode on demand at kf.org slash vision we want to hear from you vision at kf.org or it's our vision dot kf on instagram please stay and check the survey uh take the survey and as always we're going to end the show with the wonderful wonderful sounds of miami songwriter nick county you can check them out on spotify until next week everyone stay safe thank you