 Hi, good afternoon. Welcome. It's 101 Eastern and welcome to Vision, a show about the trends, ideas, and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. The past two weeks have seen a nation rise up in ways that we haven't seen for a long time in this country. And one of the key questions that we've been tackling on this show is, can our democratic systems meet the moment and channel this anger, this energy, these new demands into change? And as we saw this week in the state of Georgia, this is a profoundly practical question in the COVID era. Exactly two weeks after the killing of George Floyd touched off an awakening in cities across the country, those eager to have their say in the state of Georgia had to wait in frustratingly long lines as new voting machines malfunctioned. So with that event as the backdrop, we're going to continue our discussion on how to manage an election in a time of COVID and clearly in a time of immense change in the country, with two incredible guests with Trevor Potter, who's the founder and president of the Campaign Legal Center, and Anne Ravel, who's the director of the project on digital disinformation at Maplight. And both are former members of the Federal Election Commission, which oversees campaign finance laws. We've got a lot to discuss given what's going on in the country right now, and we may go a little long today. So without further ado, please welcome Trevor Potter and Anne Ravel. Hi, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thanks. Oh, and I think you're muted. Just a quick. All right. Excellent. Well, so we could really only begin with one question, which is what happened this week in Georgia? Anne, can you do you want to start and then we'll go to you, Trevor? Well, you know, obviously, we know that there were really long lines that people were voting after midnight. It took them seven seven hours, some of them, and to be in line, which is outrageous. I think that the issue of whether or not the machine's malfunctioned is interesting. Because from what I understand, it is that the machines actually just were overly complicated and nobody knew how to make them function. And they were the poll workers weren't trained. The people who were there to vote couldn't utilize them. Sometimes the poll workers I read somewhere, they put in the cards upside down and inappropriately. So it was a systemic problem. And of course, there were more voters at the polls because a lot of their mail in ballots didn't arrive or they arrived late and didn't have the right language on them. I mean, all kinds of problems that created longer lines. And it's pretty pretty scandalous for people to have to wait in line that long. But they did it, which is a testament to the interest that people have in wanting to have their voices heard. Right. But we don't want, we don't want voting to be a decathlon. Why are you being able to even if you're lazy and into it, we want you to be able to vote. Trevor, what did you see go wrong in Georgia? Well, there is a basic rule in election administration, which was violated here and everybody knew it was violated. And that is, you don't introduce new machinery and new systems in the middle of an election here because you want poll workers who are by and large older and used to whatever they've been doing to be able to do it without a lot of complexity and thought. And so when Georgia went to these new systems, which were highly controversial, they made the right decision to have a paper trail, which I think was vital so that if the machines broke and people had voted, you'd at least know on paper how they voted. But they introduced these with very little training, partly undoubtedly because of the virus and the fact that it wasn't easy to train people for the last three months. But they put these new machines in and as Anne says, some of them may have malfunctioned. Sometimes the poll workers may not have known what to do with them. But the end result is you had 10 machines in some places with only one working. And that led to the next problem, which is they had not expected this, understandably, so they didn't have backup ballots. There wasn't a way when the machines were down to simply hand people paper ballots. Furthermore, there were a number of people who had requested absentee ballots had not received them and therefore came to the polling place. So they were listed as having had an absentee ballot and they were told they couldn't vote. And they said, yes, but I'm here because I didn't get my ballot. So it was a snowballing of problems. What I think is worth noting is that these problems tended to be in the heavily populated urban areas. And I don't believe that's a conspiracy, but that's the reality of life. You have more voters there and there tend to be therefore more voters per polling place in a city than there are way out in the countryside. So the reports are that maybe people waited 20 minutes in the countryside and eventually they went in and voted. In the city, we have reports of waiting seven hours. And so that has led to charges that this is simply a system designed to make it harder for urban residents and therefore minorities and blacks in particular to vote because they comprise a much larger percentage of the people waiting to vote in these cities. And that undermines faith in our election system at a terrible time when people are focused on systemic racism anyway. So let's go deeper on that issue because I think there, even two weeks ago on their show, we had Spencer Overton from the Joint Center and Arturo Vargas from Nalayo. And they pointed to that that there's a huge inequity layer of the onion with regard to COVID in particular because all of the challenges of having to manage an election by mail, all of the challenges of having to make sure that polling places can be resilient and medically safe are compounded in under-resourced areas. And then of course, we've got this other layer of the unden which is to what extent are these, is this a function of sort of longstanding resource disparities to so many neighborhoods and communities where black Americans live, where brown Americans live. So I mean, and how much of this is, how much of the kind of inequity access question has to do with the unique challenges of COVID and how much of it has to do with what's built into our system? Well, and I think that's a really central question here because one of the other things that we didn't mention yet is that a lot of the mail-in ballots in Georgia were not stamped. And of course, if it's going to be in a minority low-income community, in order to have more access, you would expect, and most of the election experts say that it's important for them to be stamped, and they were not. And even Stacy Abrams, who wanted to vote by mail, couldn't because it was closed and you couldn't open it. And so, I mean, there were a lot of things that were wrong. But with regard to your question, I think it's very interesting to think about what voter suppression really is. While we have a long history of voter suppression in this country that is clearly purposeful, the other part of it is that election officials can make decisions about who can vote easily and who can't. That's their role. And typically, you would think that they would do it equally across both, especially those communities that are more populous, such as the cities, where there are more Latinos and more African-Americans. But that isn't what happened here. And so, really, the issue of voter suppression is how they affect voters' desire and ability to be able to vote. And so, I think in some ways this is purposeful because, yes, there were unexpected things that happened regarding COVID, but also, you always know where the majority or can try to predict where the majority of ballots are going to come in. And in particular, in a situation like this, where they were also not clear about how to vote through vote by mail. And we know statistically, and people have generally said that African-American and Latino voters often don't feel comfortable voting by mail and would much prefer to be in a voting location. So, preparing for that is the job of the election officials. And admittedly, there are things that happened that, perhaps, they weren't prepared for and wasn't purposeful. But I think there's certainly an element of that here. So, Trevor, if you do advise election officials, if you're advising election officials who at least want to be purposeful in enabling as many people to vote as possible, what are some of the administrative issues that you would really be focused on right now, either upstream in terms of how we help people to vote by mail or downstream, like on polling, on election day, what do we need to be doing really intentionally if the goal is to enable as many people as possible who want to vote to vote? And to vote safely, which has been an issue in these primaries this spring. And if it's right, there's going to be a second wave, may well be, an issue for a lot of people in November. The first thing is to have available to voters a range of ways to vote. Now, there are four states, as you probably know, in the U.S., that basically vote by mail. Every voter, registered voter, gets a ballot. They fill it out. They can either put it back in the mail or they can put it in a lock box at specific locations. Those states have been doing that now for a while. They had a transition of four or five years to get to the place where people understood it and it worked smoothly. And that seems to have gone well. But it is difficult to take that system and suddenly impose it on a state where people aren't used to using it. The post office isn't used to it. The election officials aren't used to it. They haven't got the printer contracts. They don't have the machines that are new and speedy to count those ballots. And yet that is what is going to happen in a lot of states because people are concerned about voting in a crowd. And we saw that in these primary states like Wisconsin, which traditionally it had 10%, people vote by mail suddenly had 50% and 60% voting by mail. So states need to be prepared for two different things at once. One is a wave of requests for absentee ballots and getting them out in time and educating the voting public now that they need to ask for them in advance and allow enough time to get them. If you ask for them and get it on the Saturday before the election, it may not get back in time. There are many states that require that the ballot must be received by election day or on election day. So voter education needs to be done now. Some states are doing this really well. They're sending postcards out to people saying it's easy to vote absentee. Here is how you do it. Other states are proposing to send every registered voter an application for an absentee ballot, but that's only one piece of it because as Ann I think absolutely correctly said, there are a number of communities that for one reason or another are not going to find absentee voting by mail. They're preferred choice. People may not have a good mailbox. They may have a history of getting their mail stolen. They may live in a place where there's a common mailbox and they're worried about that. They may have site issues and need help voting. So for all of those, you're going to have to have enough in-person voting places. And so states need now to be focusing on who is it who's going to staff those places. One of the things that happened in Georgia and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is that a large number of their traditional poll workers who are tend to be elderly because that's a great responsible job for retired people who have the time and can spend the whole day, those people did not turn up in significant numbers for help reasons out of concern. So they closed polling places or were under staff because they didn't have the poll workers. So starting now if it's likely that college students are going to be at home, train college students, look for people who can take the day off and work the poll so that you have a backup group for November. And then the final piece coming out of Georgia is be prepared for problems and have enough backup paper ballots. Not every state is going to have a brand new voter system on their biggest primary day, but states have problems. There are electrical issues and so forth. And you need to have enough paper backup ballots handy. And what would you add to or quibble with anything on that list? I would. I mean, I think not only backup ballots, which obviously they have to have, but all kinds of equipment. I mean, for example, they should have the voter registration rules in paper so that there's clearly going to be access to all of those things. As well as, I mean, in my view, part of what happened in Georgia was the failure to train. And yes, of course, COVID may have had some influence on that, but it's very important to train the poll workers. And obviously they could do a zoom just like this. So with young people because they're not going to have the older poll workers. So I mean, those are things that I think are really important. But the other factor that we didn't talk about that I think is really important to do, given the situation now with more mail and balloting and COVID would be to have the polls and in all locations, all kinds of locations, both the drop offs as well as the polling spots as well, you know, as well as earlier voting, it should all be done earlier. They should be open more than just one day. They should be open for a week in order to not only have them more accessible to people, but to allow people later to actually count that vote in a way that is more expeditious than what's going to happen in this election. So I want to ask a few questions about some of the perceptual issues that come along with elections. I mean, one of the reasons we were really excited, you both were able a couple reasons we're really excited to join the show. I think one is you guys have you've helped to oversee election policy in different administrations and times. And I think it's easy to think about where we are in a vac. It's natural to think about where we are in a vacuum versus as part of a continuum of debate about the right way to hold elections. But also because you know, you as particularly at the Federal Election Commission, you both have had to be at that bridge point where arcane matters of policy come together with really fundamental value questions about who has a voice and how that voice gets expressed. And so one of the questions I wanted to ask about everything you all just described is, you know, what are the partisan dimensions of this debate? And how are they helping or hurting? It seems to me the reality is we don't seem to have, we may have bipartisan consensus that everyone ought to have the right to vote. I think there's some debate about that. Some people don't think we have bipartisan consensus about that, but we clearly don't seem to have bipartisan consensus about the validity of mail-in voting. It doesn't seem we have bipartisan consensus about the level of investment that will be required, at least at the national level. On the other hand, you know, we hear over and over, and it comes up on this show, when you're, for so many local election officials, they're just thinking about, hey, I'm a public servant, no matter what party I'm from, I'm a public servant trying to help people vote, and I'm doing everything I can to make that happen. There just seems to be this really deep juxtaposition between our national politics and the way so many folks in the front lines are thinking about this. So how do you come at this? Like, we now have a political and policy question that we're facing. Are we going to be able to get ready for this election? Are we going to be able to make it as equitable as possible? Where do you see the partisan shoals in the debate? Maybe Trevor will start with you and then Anne. Sure. This should not be a partisan issue, and yet I have not seen election issues this polarized in my lifetime. Part of it is President Trump's loud and unrelenting attack on voting by mail, even though he votes by mail and his Vice President does and his press secretary does. And he's really into the postal service, as we all know from the Amazon debate. Well, and that's another corollary issue here, because the postal service is essential to voting by mail, and he is threatening to shut it down and saying he will block the loan Congress has passed to it. And they've said they they may have to shut down before the election, which is crazy in an election where it's it may not be safe to vote in person. I think you have to unpack this a little. The Republican Party historically has had a very strong vote by mail program in the number of states. California's one, Arizona's one, Florida's one, where they identified Republican leaning, registered Republican voters and focused on older voters and went to them and said you don't have to vote on election day. You can fill out an absentee ballot and you can vote at home and we'll get the ballot to you. We'll get the application to you and you can do it and they would follow up make sure people did vote it's public record when ballots are returned. And as a result, they didn't have to worry about voter turnout for that group and they would what they would call bank those votes in advance. What's happened is the Democrats have figured out how to do that to and in the last election, particularly in California, they had a huge absentee voter program and Republicans were unpleasantly surprised by that. I think President Trump has made a calculation here that his voters are first of all more rural and less urban. And therefore they're going to have an easier time voting anyway they're going to be at the moment less worried about the pandemic. And they're probably in his view, going to vote no matter what. So he sees the threat that everyone else is going to be encouraged to vote and that they're going to have votes in his scenario delivered to their door stops, ballots delivered to their door stops, as the possibility of really increasing voter turnout beyond his base to democratic base and independence. And that's what he's objecting to. On the other hand, you have Secretaries of State of both parties saying, look, as you've said, I'm a public servant, my job is to make sure that people can vote and vote safely. And so I want to provide a range of ways for them to do it. They don't see it as stimulating the turnout of one party or another. I would add that every survey I've seen says that there is no partisan advantage to absentee voting, that it does not change the election numbers when people shift from in person to absentee. The reason is that pretty much the same people still vote. It doesn't radically change the voting pool and bring in lots of people who hadn't voted before. It might be good for democracy if we had higher levels of participation, but merely shifting from voting in person to voting at home doesn't change that. Anne, your thoughts on the partisan. Well, first off, I agree with Trevor for sure that it does not actually have an impact on the vote, whether you are when you're voting by mail. And Stanford recently did a study on that issue and said that there was no evidence whatsoever of that. But I do think that over the years, and I don't think this is the only year with Trump, that voting and access to voting has been a partisan issue to some degree, because I know, for example, in vote by mail in those states that do have the absentee ballots and votes, I mean, in some states, there are great impediments for people to be able to show that they can vote by absentee. And also in many states, we know where there are in particular conservative or Republican secretaries of state, some of the decisions that are made about looking at the signatures on absentee ballots has been politically motivated and they have, by large percentages, disqualified ballots from more low income African American and minority, other minority communities. So I disagree with Trevor a little bit in that there have been circumstances, and this is not all across the country, but there have been circumstances where those ballots have been disqualified in really large numbers that essentially give people no ability to vote whatsoever. And so I'm kind of concerned about that problem because we know that some states, for example, Oregon has both Democrats and Republicans on a committee that will make decisions about whether those ballots are valid, that are right in the mail ballots, but other states are particularly partisan. Yeah, Trevor, it looks like you're not getting that. Because Ann's absolutely right. I mean, a big part of CLC's work is fighting partisan efforts across the country to privilege the party in power in the legislature or holding the Secretary of State's office and make it harder for the other party to vote. We have seen that across the country. We've been fighting voter ID issues where the Texas legislature wrote laws that made it easy for Republican gun owners to vote and made it impossible for students in state universities to use their ID to vote or Georgia last time where there was purging of the voter rolls or North Dakota where they required a residence address of tribal members on reservation properties which don't have residential address. They knew that. So this is an ongoing battle around the country and it is offensive, I think, that the party in power, whichever party it is, would try to rig the rules to make it more difficult for the other side to vote and particularly difficult here where in a number of these southern states when Republicans try to make it hard for Democrats to vote, which is what they will admit in the redistricting context, where we are stacking the deck to elect more Republicans, what they say is we don't want to elect Democrats, but this is in a state where Democrats have a racial identity and most blacks are Democrats. So there is a double whammy. They are not only going against the other party but they are making it hard for minority communities to vote and we see that time and again, they rig the rules to say we're no longer going to have voting on the Sunday before the election because that was a day that traditionally black churches would go to church and then souls would go to polls. So this is an ongoing problem and is absolutely right about that. The distinction I was drawing is that we've never before had a president who tried to threaten the validity of the election and a key way to vote. So let's talk about that because one of the things that we've seen this in polling, some research that we've done around people who don't vote, we did a big study of the 100 million Americans who chronically don't vote for president, is there's like these compounding losses. So the person who loses the opportunity to vote on election day, you never get that right back for that iteration of that election as we know. There's a party that may be a candidate who ought to have won but even if it doesn't swing the system then there's this net effect which is that people are smart and they know and so they internalize this as into some sort of referendum on the reliability of our elections. We saw a huge portion of people who don't vote are worried their vote doesn't count but more than that, even if that's not the reason they don't vote, they just don't believe in the system. They don't actually think that the election is providing an accurate result and then they take that a step further and raise real questions of the efficacy of their own voice in the democracy. And so we're getting questions already from our audience about should we expect the result on election day and I'm just can you help us think about that task, the legitimacy task which is we're going to do a huge mode shift. It's probably going to mean that we don't get the result the day of the election. We've got a media establishment that will be reporting on the election that psychologically can't handle like the inability to call an election and will go crazy. You've got a president who's already raising questions, incumbent president is already raising questions about the validity of the mode shift. What do we need to do to continue the real genius of this system which is that we accept the results of these elections? That's the real genius of this system. Maybe Ann will start with you and then go to Trevor. How do we shore up the legitimacy? Can I deviate a slight bit from that question because there's a real connection here with the rhetoric that is coming from the president about voting and about COVID and its relationship to the deep state or to various other things like COVID was really done by the Democrats to respond so that they could undo the election and those are things that get transmitted on the internet, on platforms and many of them a lot of the disinformation about COVID as well as the connection to voting is palpable. It's clear that it's done for the purpose of political propaganda. In fact, there's recently been some absolute false information about COVID and various other things on a African American Facebook site that is devoted to voting issues. This is a concerted effort done by mostly right wingers probably who are picking up on the language that's coming from the president and is using it to manipulate the vote. And also foreign actors, by the way, right? They don't care which candidate it's this exact issue. They want you to doubt the validity of the election. Absolutely. And the whole purpose of all of this is to doubt the validity of the vote to have lack of trust in our democratic institutions and governmental institutions and also to assure that in some cases people don't vote. I mean it's almost it's in 2016 that was quite clear. They actually told people not to vote mostly in black communities. So these are all things that I think are a broader problem and the press, the mainstream press obviously has a really important role here to debunk this information that's coming so that people feel more confidence because I think you're right. I mean there's no question that historically if people feel that they do not have trust in government, period, if they don't feel their voice counts, but also if they don't have trust in the way that the voting mechanisms are going to work, they're not going to vote. And that's truthfully back to voter suppression. That's purposeful. So Trevor, what can we do to build confidence? You know, we're in June. It's not that long. But what do we do to build expectations and confidence before election day? Well, two things that I think are really important. The first is that the states need funding for what needs to be done. And Congress gave them $400 million, which is about 10% of the estimate of what they need. The House has proposed several billion. That's sitting in the Senate as far as I can see not moving at the moment. The quicker they get it, the better. They need it to print ballots. They need it to go out in states that haven't had a lot of absentee ballots. They need to go pay printers and they need to put stamps on those envelopes to get them back. They need new machines to count those. They need money to train more workers. All the things we've been talking about at a time when they're in a budget crisis and unlike the federal government, they can't just print money in lower interest rates. They actually have to have tax dollars, which they're using to fight the pandemic and which they're not getting because of the pandemic. They need that money to go do all these things. So one is federal funding. The second is we all, the press, individuals, voting officials, need to have a clear understanding that this is an election process. It is not turning a switch. We are in an ironically sort of back to where we started as a country where it took several days for people to vote because they had to ride in and do it in town centers. And then it took days to know who had won. And it took a while for that election result to reach the Capitol. And that's back where we are because we are stringing out the voting period and people are going to vote by mail. Then the ballots are going to arrive and they're going to be literally tens of millions of ballots that have to be opened and counted. In many cases by law, that process can't even start until the polls are closed. In some states, they're saying you can start counting the morning of the election. But they don't want people to know in advance who's ahead. So they're saying you can't normally count until the polls are closed. The result of that is going to be, it is going to be a couple of days before the ballots are counted. And then of course, you have the question of are there close races and are there recounts and so forth. So last time in 2000, as you recall, it took to the middle of December to get to the point where we knew who was going to be declared the winner in Florida. I hope it isn't that long this time, but it's going to be a couple days. And so the idea that we're going to go to bed on election night, having seen total nationwide returns is just a fiction. It is not going to happen that way. It hasn't happened that way for the last two times, but the press has focused on where the count was and the assumption has been there were not enough absentee ballots to change it. This year, I think there's definitely going to be enough absentee ballots and a number of key states that we're going to have to wait and hear what the count on those ballots is. So that brings me really to the last question I want to leave on, which is the future. And I think the way you said it, the way you sort of described what it used to be like, I think particularly for a lot of young Americans, you know, is sort of what they object to. Like while we were having this conversation for all you know, I ordered five meals on Grubhub, you know, like it's just it's just that easy to do a to transact online for a lot of of what we do, including a lot of high stakes things we do, by the way, banking, etc. really high stakes, high security tasks. And I and I fear, you know, a lot of young people, you know, when don't want to be don't want to they're not reassured to know that there was a time that we, you know, someone on a horseback had to show up. They sort of think that's that's the problem. And I thinking that as we talk about using these really analog processes to be able to safely pull off an election. So let's just last question is really one about the future, like how far away are we and we're getting this from the audience to like how far away are we from, you know, voting online or voting in ways that feel contemporary with some of the other transactions we have, we'll start with you Trevor, then we'll give you the last word. I have one word answer to that, which is anonymity. That's the difference. Of course, I can go bank online and I can order five things from Grubhub precisely because everybody knows I'm me, I've used my credit card data, I've given them the identification, I go to the bank, I've given them my mother's birth date. They know it's Trevor Potter doing this with voting. The whole point is it's a secret ballot. They're not supposed to know it's me. And so it is very difficult to figure out how to design a system where I can vote digitally, electronically online and somehow separate that from my identity while guaranteeing that it's really a registered voter. And so that's the difficulty. The threat, of course, is hacking. And you know, if your bank account gets hacked, your bank makes you whole. Someone uses your credit card, you say that's not my charge. If your vote gets hacked, it's gone. It's done. And with the foreign fears we have of foreign interference or domestic, turning over the voting system to somebody who can hire a good hacker and go in and change results or prevent me from voting or give somebody else extra votes is really a worry, which is why the old fashioned pen and paper is still the safest way offensive is that is the people who are used to operating totally digitally. And last word to you. Well, I agree with Trevor on this one. I'm of course here in Silicon Valley and people here say that there is still a lot of concern about voting online for that same reason because of hacking. And in fact, I mean, even the voting machines that were used in Georgia, people were concerned about hacking in the for those machines. And so and we know, I mean, aside from what happened previously in 2016 with regard to some of the hacking, not not that we know about the voting machines because there wasn't any auditing. So we have no way of knowing. But we know there's already been hacking of the Biden campaigns and the Trump campaigns in this election by China and Iran, I think. And so hacking is a real concern that they would be able to either change the votes or change the voter registration in a way that would be problematic. So I think we're not there yet, but we should be. I think it's something that that is really important to do. Of course, then everybody needs broadband access all over the country as well. Yeah, at least in a mobile fashion. Well, for those of you who are really closely following these issues is the stakes get higher and higher. And Trevor are both really good guides to what's going on and what's important. You can follow Trevor on Twitter at the Trevor Potter and you can follow and on Twitter at Ann M. Ravel. And as always, we'll send that information out to you after the show. And Trevor, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much, Sam. This has been a great conversation. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks, Trevor. Next week, we will be will be joined by Steven Heinz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and Antonio Hernandez, who's the president of the California Community Foundation and the former CEO of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, Maldef. They are serving on a major commission on the future of citizenship. And they'll be on the show to talk to us about the new demands and new opportunities for citizens in an era of intense change. Their commission is releasing findings today. And so we'll have an exclusive opportunity to hear from them. At a time, there were this question of what are our responsibilities as residents of citizens couldn't be more important. As a reminder, this website, this episode will be on the website tomorrow. And you can see this episode and any episode on demand at kf.org slash vision. I'd especially encourage you to check out a special non-live episode we did earlier this week with Benita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, talking about the protests that are happening across the country and what we can do to advance the cause of civil rights in this country. You can email us at vision at kf.org and visit us on instagram at vision.kf. Please take the survey that's up on your screen now. As always, we'll end the show with music from Nick County, Miami based singer-songwriter. It's available on Spotify. Until next week, thanks for joining us.