 Hi, welcome. It is 101 Eastern Time. That's 10 01 PM in Tashkent, which means it's time for vision, a weekly show about the trends ideas and disruptions affecting the future of our democracy. I do need to start today's show with a quick programming note. You can see from the image that should be coming up on your screen in comparison to last week. I am in phase one reopening, but you can, you can be rest assured that this, this haircut and the shave have been conducted strictly in accordance with public health guidelines. So nothing to worry about on that front. But let's get back to the show. Last week, we began exploring the question of how to manage an election in a coven 19 world, and we heard that the challenges are profound. That it could take two to $4 billion to ready our election system for potentially far higher vote by mail rates and for needed improvements to polling places in the event of an active coronavirus epidemic or pandemic. We also learned that we need to start planning now, even if we hope and pray that coven 19 will be a memory in the fall. And that the tools that we might use to assure this vital democratic process during a potential covert recurrence also further risk those most disconnected and most marginalized in the voting process. So we face some big questions, can we pull off a generational reform of our election system. Can we do so in a way that gives everyone a vote and a voice. And can we accomplish all of this without exacerbating declining trust in our democratic process. So we have a lot of questions that we're going to continue exploring this week on vision. Today we're going to be talking to Spencer overton who's the president of the joint center for political and economic studies and our tour of artists the chief executive officer of the National Association of Latino elected and appointed officials, also known as Nileo. We have a lot to discuss we're really lucky to have both guests so we might go a little bit long today and I'd love to just jump right into the discussion so without further ado, please welcome Spencer Vargas. Thank you for joining. Thank you for joining. Well, I am really eager to dive into this. And I think the place I'd love to start the place that I'd really love to start is kind of giving our audience a bit of context, you know when we're not entering this election in a vacuum. We have we have had challenges generationally in this country around ensuring everyone has the right to vote. The nature of those challenges is has of course changed over over the years. In many ways for the good. So I'd love to start by just hearing from you all about kind of what's the state of civil rights around voting, you know what are the big challenges issues concerns. When we think about making sure that elections are open to all maybe Spencer will start with you and then go to Arturo. Sounds good. Well, you know same this has been going on for a long time in terms of really since the beginning of our republic in terms of excluding particular citizens or designing systems that result in particular factions of the population having influence and power really you know since the founding of the nation. Obviously, you know, we saw it in the 60s in the 70s and we talk about, you know, the Voting Rights Act and the South and the Southwest and enfranchising a number of people. And then we saw kind of the current generation Sam after Bush v Gore in terms of 2000. And, you know, in the last couple of decades, some of the big issues have been, you know, voter suppression through restrictive procedures right whether that involve purges of voter registration roles or making registration more difficult or excessive identification requirements that are up and over above the existing identification requirements that have been working opposition to voting by returning citizens so these are some of the barriers that we've seen in the last 20 years, and then in just the last election cycle Sam, you know, we saw voter suppression through social media you remember that the Russian Internet research agency created social media accounts that posed as African Americans, they built up trust with African Americans and then right before Election Day, they urged black voters to boycott the election. Well, African Americans just make up 13% of the population black audiences accounted for over 38% of the US focused ads that were purchased by the Russians, and almost half of the user clicks. So, you know, this, this voter suppression in terms of social media is is also an issue. I mean, you're out talking to communities. What, what are you seeing what what are what are the what are the measures active or passive, you know, in some ways that are actually affecting people sense that they they can or are able to vote. Thanks Sam and thanks for inviting me and Spencer good to see you. Let me just follow up on some of the things that Spencer mentioned first you know in my view, the right to vote in this country is fragile. And we are seeing more efforts to try to introduce more cracks into the voting process in a way that suppresses the vote of certain population groups in particular Latino and young people. Texas I think is example a in efforts to create systemic barriers that result in making it more difficult for Latinos to vote everything from the type of ID that is required to vote in the state of Texas, for example, a gun license, you're good to vote. A university of Texas is a state agency issued ID is not a valid ID for voting. Okay, who's more likely to have a student ID, a young person who's most likely to have a gun. Well, I think that's self explanatory. Now these are the kinds of barriers that have been introduced in the past 10 years. And why the past 10 years, because in our view as we look at the emergence of Latinos as now the second largest potential segment of the electorate. Now, just about on par in terms of the size of the African American citizen voting age population that for Latinos are that we're seeing efforts now to turn the clock back on Latino voting power and we see it in the streets when we encounter Latinos to your question. Many Latinos don't vote simply because they think the system doesn't work for them. And then when you see these kinds of barriers being erected, it just reinforces the notion that voting is not something that Latinos particular feel is welcoming or something that they're being invited to. And that's where we need to intervene as nonprofit organizations civic engagement organizations to stand up our democracy and to actually engage like Latinos and others who are encountering these barriers to figure out how do you register to vote and how do you vote. And so what is COVID changing anything about that is COVID changing either the nature of the impediments or the feeling you know the feelings that you described that are sound like the that are as important right that the people in a way can be their own barrier you know reinforced by what they they perceive what what changes are you COVID has made the situation situation exponentially more difficult in terms of the gauging like you know since civic participation. Now we're just looking at the census, the census has been completely disrupted by COVID. The censor had to stop its field operations, as all of us have been sheltering at home for the past 10 weeks. Now we would think that having a captive audience would allow us to then engage those people to fill out their senses. You had nothing else to do at home but watch Netflix right one with me, but COVID has so disproportionately affected the Latino population both in terms of infection rates, death, and the health, I mean the economic and social impacts that it is now even more difficult to break through that COVID noise to engage Latino households about the importance of this active civic participation. And I think this is setting us up with lessons learned of how we need to engage our community to get those are eligible to vote to do so come November. Spencer, what you know when in thinking about the impact of COVID I'd like to maybe we can pick up on something you raised which is kind of this emerging barrier which is the way that the social media environment can be influenced to discourage someone from participating to discourage someone from voting is that how you know that we've talked a lot in the show about the sort of infodemic really with COVID the amount of misinformation that some of it has to do with health information but a lot of it has to do with information about you know, when you can go out when you can't go out what's safe to do what's not safe to do are you seeing, are you seeing or worried about any ways that this the challenge or social media as a suppression tool. The task to size is during COVID. Yeah, Sam. Yes, and I definitely want to respond to that. I want to take a couple steps back though, right because something that I think we all recognize as conventional wisdom is important to get on the table that the death rates among African Americans and Latinos are much higher than the population as a whole that when we talk about who's an essential worker, who's on the front lines when we talk about grocery stores delivering food, healthcare workers. We're talking about African Americans and Latinos here who are actually on the front lines and expose so you know kind of before we even get to the democracy piece, we've got to recognize the very real threat that this poses to the health of African American and Latino communities in terms of being vulnerable and susceptible. We also have to recognize that you look at those employment unemployment numbers off the roof in terms of Latinos generally African Americans have the highest unemployment rates. In April, we found out that Latinos have leapfrogged over African Americans in terms of unemployment rates with African Americans, it jumped from about 6.7 to 16.7% unemployment in just a month. In fact, it jumped even higher than that. So we see economic impact there. There was a recent study that showed that black and Latino business owners were more likely to close and less likely to access PPP stimulus funds here. The community in terms of health and economics is already been hit. But when we talk about democracy, when we talk about being in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where, you know, and you got to make basically a choice between your health or the right to vote where they only have about nine polling locations. And normally they have, you know, over 100 polling locations, you know, you shouldn't have to make a choice when we talk about registration drives and these drives being incredibly difficult in person already. But now with COVID you can't do really registration drives is difficult for people to go to a government office and register to vote. Those are some real issues and then when we talk about social media and voter suppression, certainly there is one, the challenge of disinformation that is out there generally about what we did in terms of our communities, certainly with regard the threat in terms of democracy like we talked about last time. And now you've got a scenario where and we'll talk about a little later. You know, President Trump talking about fraud, and we'll talk about that soon in terms of the fact that it is completely overstated and overblown as a threat, especially compared to some of the barriers. And when I'm making a false claim about a voter fraud. Twitter responding, not by taking down his tweet, but by pointing readers to information and factual information about vote by mail. And then the response being as we saw today the possible executive order. Twitter should not be immune from lawsuits for its activity and should not enjoy the same protections as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides to other platforms and calling for an investigation into tech companies. We want tech companies to ensure that good information is on their platforms that's not misleading. The executive order is definitely the wrong way to go. So we've got a lot of variables that are here in front of a Sam. In some ways the executive order is just the logical extension of a Twitter war into the into the regulatory sphere. But what I mean let's go back to the sort of the fundamental point that you laid out Spencer, you know, Arturo, how do you respond to that can, can this really critical democratic procedure survive, you know, a level of economic and social disruption that is this profound. This disproportionate in its impact. I mean what are in the face of those facts about who is being affected about the communities that are most affected about the vulnerabilities that we're seeing are what are some of the things you know you and your colleagues think we need to do in order to assure, you know that in a really critical election, people don't have to make a life or death choice to exercise their rights. Right well my response is our democracy has to survive we have no choice, but to do everything we can to ensure that democracy triumphs in the middle of this challenge. I also believe that it is a strong democratic society that is able to take on the challenges of a pandemic like COVID-19, and we have to engage all of the segments of our population equally in that, and we're not doing that. And so we need to refocus government response to COVID-19 to direct the resources to those who are being most affected by the pandemic, which is not what is happening right now. For example, yesterday, Nalel did a briefing for Latino state legislators with data, polling data that was conducted by Latino decisions for an organization called Somos. And in that data, we found that 40% of Latinos said that they did not receive a stimulus check, because they were for some reason ineligible, and they were also the most likely to be making less than $25,000 a year. Now $1,200 for those families would make a much more significant difference for them in this crisis, but they're not getting that relief. And that's the kind of readjustment that we need to do to how the government is responding to COVID-19. We have to make sure that the most vulnerable segments of our communities are being supported at this time. And when it comes to civic engagement, we need to make sure that the resources are there to allow everybody the equal opportunity to register to vote and to vote in November. Now, there's this great conversation happening about increasing vote by mail. We support that, but we also know that Latinos are much less likely to use a vote by mail ballot than non-Latinos. So if states are going to move towards vote by mail, and not all of them want to do that, by the way, because many people are not interested in putting a ballot in every single eligible voter's hand, and that's a different conversation we can have as well. But for those who do receive a vote by mail ballot, we're going to need a very comprehensive, robust public education campaign about how to vote by mail. Now, look, I have a master's degree. I vote by mail, and I have to go through that ballot a couple of times to make sure I get it right in terms of how I'm marking my ballot, which envelope I'm signing, which envelope I need to put on the outside and the inside. It's not an intuitive process. And if we're going to move our election systems to vote by mail, we have to make sure that states have the resources to carry out those elections, and that we have the public education campaigns so that people can actually exercise the right to vote. Even with all the vote by mail opportunities out there, we're still going to need in-person voting in a way that is safe and secure and that people feel comfortable doing. Well, I want to go to Spencer in a minute, but tell us a little bit about what you think we'll need to do around in-person voting in order to make sure that people who, as you point out, already feel disconnected from this process actually feel that this is a safe choice for them. What are some of the things you guys are looking at? Well, in-person voting has been a great tool to make sure that people get the assistance and the resources and the support they need to vote in terms of having questions answered and having language assistance provided where federal civil rights laws require it. Now, I see that one of the questions on the chat asks about recruiting younger people to be poll workers. Absolutely. We need to do that because your traditional poll worker is an elderly citizen retired person who's doing his or her civic duty, but many of them are now in this very vulnerable population group of being affected by COVID. So many polls in the primaries that we saw did not have sufficient staffing because their go-to poll worker pool just wasn't available. So we need to do new recruitment strategies for new poll workers. We need to make sure their experience is safe and secure. That the polling locations are large enough to have such a distancing that you have the sanitation element in place so that people feel comfortable when they approach a machine, that it is clean and ready for them to use. All that takes people power to make sure that it happens and that takes resources. Well, Spencer, could I first hear from you just on vote by mail? Because that really is occupying a lot of the oxygen right now. I think partly because of the perceived logistical challenge and actually making sure it happens. How do you think about vote by mail, both as a response to the possibility of a COVID influenced election, but also how to do it responsibly given the concerns? Right. Sam and Arturo, okay, there's this first issue, which is that states and localities have lost a lot of tax revenue in terms of income taxes and sales taxes. And as a result, they need resources. We don't want them to cut away from democracy in order to balance budgets. So when we talk about stimulus money, we need resources that are targeted to preserving democracy. Right. So that's number one. And it can't just be any old thing as Arturo suggested and just mentioned and stated. Latinos, but then also African Americans, there are studies actually the data is kind of is mixed at least with regard to black folks. Some studies say that black folks may be more likely to vote by mail. There are other studies like in Florida where they looked about black folks and Latinos that said black folks were less likely to vote by mail. Right. The traditional universal vote by mail states are only five of them Colorado, Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington here. And they're not that many black folks, you know, they're not completely overrepresented. You know, there may be a few Latino folks in Colorado, but some of those other places, you know, are very sparse in terms of folks of color so we don't have great data right so we need to make sure that when we have a black vote by mail one it's not universal so that there is an in person option, but then the vote by mail we take precautions so it's accessible. What do I mean by that. I mean, allowing a signature match for your ID so not a notary requirement where you got to go out and get a notary here and expose yourself to the virus, not a photo ID requirement because a lot of people who don't have top years at home have other things, a signature match, a timely signature curing so that if the government says oh this doesn't match up with the registration card. People can actually come in, clean it up and say hey I am who I said I was your computers are off here. We'll drop boxes so that people can drop off their ballots, allowing third party groups to pick up and submit sealed ballots, allowing vote by mail ballots through that are postmarked through Election Day. Additional protections for tribal communities, many of them do not have street addresses so some additional protections for them that are important. Now, now with this and we're dealing with two groups right, we're dealing with one group that would say let's just do universal vote by mail that's the simple solutions and no, we got to have these protections right. There's another group that says, oh we can't even do vote by mail because a fraud right and that's President Trump's perspective. If we look at fraud it's incredibly rare. There have been about 250 million ballots cast by mail in the last 20 years. About 204 of those have been a problematic fraudulent so that's one case of fraud out of every 1.2 million votes your, your five times more likely to be struck by lightning, then to find a fraudulent ballot. Don't give me something else to be afraid of. So, so, so anyway, that's kind of the vote by mail piece. I think a thorough covered we got to have safe in person voting, you know, and take procedures for that. So let me, I mean, as I listened to both of you, you know, so much if we get this right, you know, so much of the administrative energy and cost will go into the procedure, you know, it'll go into in the best case scenario, making sure that we've really set up the polling place as well making sure that we've done vote by mail, as you point out Spencer in a really reflective way, thinking about the need of the individual voter. So, none of there won't be any energy to actually communicate to people who bring in a whole lot of assumptions about whether this system is actually trying to help them vote or not. And you both alluded to this and we're getting a lot of questions about that how what's what's going to need to be done between now and November to communicate to people that indeed this is safe and indeed there are ways that you know here's how you fill out your mail in ballot. Here's how you can be sure that you're protected here are questions to ask as you go to your polling place if you've got concerns and want to make sure that it's safe what are who's going to do that and what's the best way to do that maybe Spencer we can start with you and then go to our Turo. Yeah, well, you know we really do need to have a federal allocation of resources and there needs to be some strings attached in terms of public education as Turo mentioned, as well as real outreach so that people are able to participate we shouldn't just assume that this is going to happen. It's different and it's going to take some significant effort here. You know, when we talk about ensuring that polling places are not crowded and ensuring curbside voting, all of this takes time and it's a logistical and you also need election officials to be on board with it and as we noted, generally elections are administered at the state and county level. So the only way you can really do this federally is by funding it and basically saying if you accept the funds here are the restrictions and so we need the funds now about $4 billion now so that states have time to set up systems to effectively include people there be some elected officials who might say hey, we're not interested in including folk but you know I think many Americans believe that it is important to include all eligible voters in terms of giving them access to freely participate without jeopardizing their health. Turo, how do you think about communicating this and getting people comfortable? Well, before we communicate to people that they should be comfortable in this new voting systems, we first have to make sure ourselves that the new voting systems are in fact safe and secure, and that's where the resources come in. That's where the federal government needs to provide relief to the states and localities who have lost significant amount of tax revenues right now, that they do not have the resources in order to create safe and secure voting systems. Once we have that in place then we need the resources for this public education campaign so that voters understand one, how to vote by mail, that's the way they choose, but if they want to go through the in-person experience to know that it is in fact safe and secure and if we're smart about this as a country, we can use this experience to come out of this to make our democracy even more inclusive and more participatory. If the kinds of systems we can put in place now to deal with COVID-19 can actually lead to a different way of conducting elections in the future post COVID-19 that in fact makes it more accessible to everybody. So we should look at this not just as a short-term investment about November 2020, but how do we invest for the long term to make sure that our democracy continues to do it. So let's, yeah, go ahead Spencer. Sam, I just wanted to point this out because, you know, I wanted folks to know we're not, we got some data here, we're not just, we're not just making this stuff up. In 2012, on average, African Americans waited in line 23 minutes, Latinos waited in line to vote 19 minutes, and whites waited in line 12 minutes to vote. So if we've got a scenario where people are waiting in crowded lines and polling places, we're talking about a scenario where African Americans are twice as likely, and Latinos are almost twice as likely to be exposed to crowds and lines if what happened in 2012 happens in 2020. So this is real data in terms of the past, and we have to design systems so that everyone can vote safely. Well, this is so this is actually the kind of the issue I want to leave on and ask you both about, which is, you know, I having, you know, we talked to Nate personally from Stanford last week, you know, the three of us, you know, as a point of disclosure of work together on voting issues in the back in the dark ages, and five or six years ago. And, you know, I, I have to confess one of my fears is that even before COVID, every really good public servants, really committed civil society organizations are fighting to keep our election system at like a B minus, right, like at a, at a level where if you really want to work hard, you can vote. And if you're really willing to work hard. You know, you might have a chance to, to, to wait in a long line and vote and that's kind of the best we can achieve and you've both alluded to the fact that we really should be seeking higher here. You know, no, no one should have to, no one should have to show up at the polling place and ask, because of how I look, am I going to have to wait longer than someone else, you know, no one should have to show up at a polling place and ask, is this going to be healthy for me, no one should wonder today, whether the election is going to be available to them. And while that ideal itself in an imperfect society may be hard to reach. You know, I guess I'd ask you each, you know, like what's what are the one or two things that you would do to to to reach above that just barely passing grade to build to build a better election system for the future what are the one or two things you do if we're really are trying to to seek higher as a democracy to see the opportunity to weigh in is the kind of the great defining advantage of our system rather than the thing we must endure. Every every four years so maybe our turn and start with you what are what are one or two big reaches that you think we should be considering and then we'll go to Spencer. Well, I would say that the kinds of things we have been wanting to see put in place before COVID-19 not become a reality. And that's that counties and states invest in modernize equipment and whole books that are updated registration systems that are kept up to date so that people can assure that they themselves are registered allowing people same day voter registration with adequate protections. Registration of 17 year olds so that once they turn 18, they're already registered to vote, making the voter registration process more universal so that all eligible citizens are able to vote is is are the kinds of things I would be investing in. Spencer, how about you. Yeah. I think the first thing to just be honest about is that too often elections and election rules, it's like gerrymandering. You got a scenario where politicians are selecting voters rather than the voters selecting politicians, and we want to move away from that concept. And also right now, your vote, your right to vote depends on where you live. Right. And so we really want everyone to be able to participate and when I say everyone. You know, I'm certainly talking about underrepresented communities, but I'm also talking about military voters through you Ocaba, right, I mean, everyone being able to meaningfully participate like that is democracy. You know, some of the things that are talked about certainly online registration and same day registrations important registration serves as an important barrier in terms of purging and in terms of other things to me something we haven't talked about is that there's no turning folks who are eligible, you know, who would otherwise be eligible to vote should be able to vote here there's notion of putting a scarlet letter on somebody for life or once they've, you know, served their time. So the premise of we want to hear from everyone, and I'm not we believe in like liberty in this country so I don't know that we will have compulsory voting anytime soon like we have compulsory jury service. But one advantage of that is the elections based on ideas as opposed to suppressing particular parts of the population and what we want as a norm is for everyone to participate. I think these are great thoughts and I, you know, I think one of the questions we're trying to explore in this show I think you guys have have framed up really well is, you know, what is the ideal of democracy, and how do we, how do we, if covid's not an opportunity to improve it how do we make sure we don't lose sight of that ideal, despite a really a really unprecedented disruption so I for folks who want to continue to dive into this you can follow Spencer on Twitter at at Spencer and definitely check out the joint center at joint center.org and you can follow Arturo on Twitter at at Arturo Nileo and you can also go to Nileo.org is as always will send this out to everyone on to everyone who joined the show but Spencer Arturo I couldn't imagine a more important conversation with two more important leaders in this space so really appreciate you joining us today. Thanks Sam and I'm honored to also be with Arturo here right. Excellent thank you both. Before we go folks I, I want to tell you a little bit about what's coming up on vision we've got a couple more shows on elections. Next week June 4 will be talking to two former commissioners from the Federal Election Commission, Trevor Potter and Ann Ravel and on June 11 will be talking to Seth Flaxman who's a digital innovator who is really trying to change the way that we can interact with elections and vote. As a reminder, this episode will be up tomorrow you can see this episode in any episode on demand at kf.org slash vision. Visit us at vision at kf.org or visit us on Instagram at vision.kf please stay for a few seconds to take the survey we appreciate your views and as always we're going to end the show to the sounds of Miami songwriter Nick County you can check out his music on Spotify thanks so much for joining us everyone until next week.