Election Meltdown, Part 2

Summary

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Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Election Meltdown, Part 2

Date: February 2, 2020
Host: Dahlia Lithwick
Guests: Rick Hasen (Professor of Law, author of Election Meltdown), Joel Kurth (Managing Editor, Bridge Michigan), Jocelyn Benson (Michigan Secretary of State)

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Episode Overview

This episode, the second in the "Election Meltdown" series, explores the role of incompetence in election administration as a threat to American democracy, especially amid the highly anticipated 2020 election. While much public debate focuses on voter suppression and fraud, this discussion zeroes in on the less sensational but equally damaging risks posed by errors, outdated technology, undertrained staff, and infrastructural neglect, which can undermine trust in election results.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Fragility of Election Administration (00:00–03:13)

• Rick Hasen frames election administration as one of the most complex civic tasks America faces, on par with the census or even war.
• The episode aims to engage listeners in critical thinking about election system vulnerabilities before it's too late.
• Notable Quote:

  "Our system is only going to work if people have enough confidence in it that they can accept the results." — Rick Hasen (01:39)

2. The "Weakest Link" in Election Systems (06:02–06:18)

• Hasen introduces the "weakest link axiom": voters' confidence is only as strong as the most error-prone part of the system.
• Detroit's 2016 election serves as a focal example, where small administrative mistakes ballooned into major controversies.

3. Detroit's 2016 Meltdown: Anatomy of Administrative Error (06:18–13:57)

• Joel Kurth recounts years of systemic problems in Detroit elections: ballot misplacement, power outages, and chronic counting issues.
• In 2016, over half of Detroit’s 600+ precincts had discrepancies between poll book sign-ins and ballots, making them ineligible for recount under Michigan law.
  • Example: Precinct 152—52 physical ballots found, but 307 votes logged. Uncounted ballots located after records closed—fueling conspiracies.
• Notable Quote:

  "More than half ... counts were off by five or more, which means that they couldn't be subject to recount by Michigan law ... doesn’t give a lot of faith in the system." — Joel Kurth (07:47)

4. Media, Conspiracy, and Public Perception (10:12–13:15)

• Media outlets (right, left, and center) sensationalized the Detroit discrepancies, spawning narratives of fraud.
• The reality, verified by Michigan’s State Board of Elections: “mass incompetence,” not deliberate malfeasance.
• Notable Quote:

  "Nothing could be less interesting than talking about tubs of uncounted ballots. And yet who the next president is could turn on it." — Rick Hasen (10:56)

5. Systemic and Racial Subtext (13:57–18:29)

• Disproportionate scrutiny falls on large, urban, majority-minority jurisdictions like Detroit and Broward County, FL.
• Donald Trump’s public attacks on election officials in such areas blend legitimate concerns with racially charged rhetoric.
• Notable Quote:

  "When Democrats have problems with incompetence, they're accused of voter fraud ... and Republicans look the other way when the incompetence is happening in Republican areas." — Rick Hasen (17:46)

• Problems of disinvestment and complexity are often magnified in urban centers but echo issues found in rural precincts, just at larger scale.

6. Persistent Myths and Erosion of Trust (18:29–22:13)

• Incompetence breeds conspiracy across the political spectrum (not just among partisans), but over time these narratives “stick.”
• The delay between election errors and official explanations allows doubts to fester before facts can catch up.
• Protracted vote counting in urban areas (“Big Blue Shift”) further fuels unfounded suspicions, exploited in political rhetoric.
• Notable Quote:

  "It's easier to believe a conspiracy theory than to believe that incompetence is the sole cause." — Dahlia Lithwick (18:29)

7. Room for Optimism: Institutional Responses (23:09–27:19)

• Jocelyn Benson (MI Secretary of State) outlines reforms: greater poll worker training, improved backup plans, investments in resiliency.
• Emphasizes transparent, multi-level preparation for Election Day emergencies, including cyberattacks and power outages.
• Realistic but hopeful: the decentralization of election authority limits her control, but she aims for coordination and transparency.
• Notable Quote:

  "Our preparation ... really relies on us to be close to the ground on election day and prepared for ... all these potential scenarios." — Jocelyn Benson (25:43)

8. Enduring Vulnerabilities & The "Election Administrator's Prayer" (28:57–30:48)

• Joel Kurth is skeptical major breakthroughs will occur: “It always comes down to just sort of like roll the dice in Michigan.”
• Routine investment in election infrastructure is rare because problems remain “invisible”—until they’re not.
• Rick Hasen closes with the “Election Administrator’s Prayer”:

  “Lord, let this election not be close.” (29:55)

• When elections are razor-thin, every error is magnified, and system failures become national crises.

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• "Aside from going to war or maybe the census, holding an election is the most complicated thing we do as a country."
  — Rick Hasen (00:00)

• "Small mistakes in election administration can snowball into big problems. Big mistakes can throw something as huge as who won the presidency into question."
  — Rick Hasen (03:25)

• "You just expect them to work until they don't."
  — Joel Kurth, on election infrastructure (00:07, 28:57)

• "There was no evidence that Brenda Snipes ever tried to steal an election. There was only evidence of incompetence."
  — Rick Hasen (16:31)

• "Election officials ... always say: it's not the crime, it’s the cover-up."
  — Rick Hasen (27:57)

• "It’s not a sexy subject until it all falls apart."
  — Joel Kurth (28:57)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• 00:00–01:39: Framing the complexity and stakes of U.S. elections
• 06:02–10:12: Real-world recount stories from Detroit; breakdown of process failures
• 10:56–13:57: Impact of mechanical, social, and administrative errors on public trust
• 14:10–17:46: Political and racial dynamics in perceptions of election mismanagement
• 18:29–22:13: How incompetence seeds conspiracy theories and undermines democracy
• 23:09–27:19: Michigan’s Secretary of State on reforms and realistic limitations
• 28:57–30:48: Summary reflections; why closer elections multiply risks

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Tone and Takeaways

The conversation is earnest, often darkly humorous, but underpinned by an urgent warning: election errors are not just bureaucratic slip-ups—they’re crucibles in which public trust is lost or preserved. Both guests and host blend skepticism and hope, reflecting on the limits of reform in a highly decentralized, under-resourced system. While technical errors can create the appearance of malfeasance, deliberate fraud remains exceedingly rare—yet perception, fueled by media and partisan rhetoric, can be just as damaging.

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Conclusion

This episode paints a sobering picture: while voter suppression and fraud grab the spotlight, it is day-to-day administrative errors, aging infrastructure, and fractured oversight that most threaten the legitimacy of American elections. The key message: robust democracy requires relentless maintenance, transparency, and investment—before, not after, things fall apart.

Transcript

[Rick Hasen]

Aside from going to war or maybe the census, holding an election is the most complicated thing we do as a country.

[Joel Kurth]

You just expect them to work until they don't.

[Jocelyn Benson]

We need to do more to recruit and train a talented workforce of election workers on election day.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the law, the rule of law, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick and I cover those things for Slate. And this is the second part of our five part series, Election Meltdown. Rick Hassan is the author of the book of the same title. He's also professor of Election Law at UC Irvine, and he's here to help us think about the increasingly desperate, pressing question, can American democracy survive the 2020 election?

[Rick Hasen]

You know, it's a pretty serious question we're asking, but we're trying to ask it in a way that will get people engaged and thinking about these issues before it's too late. I can't wait till October to worry about what's going to happen in November.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

What, I ask, could possibly go wrong with November's election?

[Rick Hasen]

So I've got two scenarios that really worry me. Imagine a Florida 2000 type situation with Trump in the White House.

[Joel Kurth]

Then those precincts can't be counted.

[Jocelyn Benson]

Pretty wide scale voter purge.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

We've been asking civil rights lawyers, public officials, local journalists and disinformation experts for their election doomsday scenarios. Imagine a deepfake the night before an.

[Jocelyn Benson]

Election, a scenario in which people did leave the Internet and take much more physical action.

[Rick Hasen]

Our system is only going to work if people have enough confidence in it that they can accept the results. We're not asking these questions so we all spiral into despair, but instead to think about what we could do now, before November, to protect the most important thing we do as Americans voting.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

Of course, if you want to spiral into despair, that's totally on you. But if you want to be part of this unbelievably important conversation, do join US in Washington, D.C. on February 19th for the Amicus Election Meltdown live show featuring former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, MacArthur genius fellow and vice President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, Danielle Citron, and the Director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, Dale Ho. Go to slate.comlive for tickets. This week, the storm of the Senate impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump has swirled and blustered and buffeted, but we're trying to not get blown off course with this project. An Amicus listener and actually a Slate contributor, Scott Pilautic, said in a post about our election meltdown series on Facebook this week, quote, it's not as juicy a topic as the daily reality show that's been the hallmark of this administration. But I have a strong sense it may be on the final test. And listen, I'm only quoting that because it is especially true of what we're going to talk about this week. Last week, we heard about the pernicious myth of widespread voter fraud and how it bolsters subsequent voter suppression. And this week we're turning to what, Rick? Incompetence.

[Rick Hasen]

Yeah. So, you know, voter suppression is sexy, I think, in the election law world, as these things go, if that's our scale. And talking about competence in election administration sounds like it's about as boring as it can be. But when you hear some of the things that have actually gone on, it's gonna, you know, raise the hair on the back of your neck. Small mistakes in election administration can snowball into big problems. Big mistakes can throw something as huge as who won the presidency into question. And remember, as we talked about last week, my main concern with thinking about both voter suppression and thinking about incompetence is how is this undermining people's trust in the fairness of elections? If you think that people can't confidently count the votes, that's a good reason to be worried about the fairness of elections. So some of the podcast listeners probably are old enough to remember Bush versus Gore and the 2000 election with its famous hanging chads and voting machines that didn't work, and the inability to figure out if people were voting for Bush or Gore or Pat Buchanan. There was a famous Jews for Buchanan vote. You may remember this, the butterfly ballot. All this is probably bringing back some terrible memories for some of your listeners, but some of your listeners were probably too young or not paying attention back at that time. The upshot of the 2000 election was that we had a lot of problems with how we ran our elections. One study found that about a million votes across America were lost in 2002 due to incompetence and how votes were being counted. And you'd think that almost 20 years after Bush versus Gore, we would have gotten better. It hasn't worked out that way, at least not everywhere. You can look at Broward County, Florida, that was a huge mess. But we're gonna focus on another case, one that's gotten a lot less attention than Brenda Snipes in Broward County, Florida, and her problems with counting votes in 2018. And one that could be very important, which is The Case of Detroit, Michigan.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

And Slate + members will actually be getting more insight into what's going on with elections in Detroit and Michigan. You all will have access to an extended interview with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who actually offers a glimmer of hope. So look out for that in your Slate plus feeds. And if you're not a Slate plus member, now's a good time to check it out with a two week free trial that you can [e-mail] amicusplus but.

[Rick Hasen]

Before we speak to Secretary Benson, I spoke to another Michigander. He's been following elections closely there for a long time.

[Joel Kurth]

So my name is Joel Kurth. I am the managing editor of Bridge magazine in Michigan. We're a long form nonprofit public policy journal. And before that, I was the editor of investigations at the Detroit News. I was the lead reporter in the 2016 election meltdown involving Detroit's unrecountable precincts.

[Rick Hasen]

There's this thing I call the weakest link axiom of election administration, the accuracy of an election system. And voters confidence in that system is only as strong as the weakest parts of that system. And the case of Detroit and more broadly, Michigan is an example of this.

[Joel Kurth]

I'd been a reporter in Detroit for about 15 years. And with every election in Detroit, there's allegations of mis voting, lost ballots. Ballots have been found in the trunks of cars. There's often power outages at precincts. During elections, there's difficulty counting ballots.

[Rick Hasen]

So remember, the way that Trump surprisingly won the 2016 election is that he won a narrow Electoral College victory in three Midwestern states, if it's fair to call Pennsylvania Midwestern Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And the margin across the three states was 80,000 votes.

[Joel Kurth]

Donald Trump won by about 10,000 votes in unofficial election results in Michigan. And it was razor thin. Obviously, we're talking about 5 million ballots cast. A few days after the election, I got a phone call from a pretty good source that says they're not going to be able to count the ballots in Detroit. And I think the person was trying to tip me off because there's a law in Michigan that says unreconciled votes cannot be recounted.

[Rick Hasen]

So Jill Stein, you remember her, she was the Green Party candidate that many Democrats think cost Clinton the election. In some of these places, Jill Stein demands a recount. The Clinton campaign, they don't think that they're going to win in a recount, but they decide to act as observers. And Michigan has these very strict regulations, as Joel said about when can you.

[Joel Kurth]

Do A recount for recounts. What happens is people cast ballots in boxes and then there's a sign in sheet as well. And so the numbers on the sign in sheets have to match the number of ballots in the box, unless there's a reconciled difference, a paper jam, a lost ballot, and they have to be caught on election night. And if they're not caught on election night with an explanation, then those precincts can't be counted. And so I got the. It took a day or so, but I got the. They're called reconciliation sheets of 600 plus precincts in Detroit. And I found that more than half of them, the counts were off by five or more, which means that they couldn't be subject to recount by Michigan law, which is a pretty strenuous law, but also, given the context of Detroit's problems, doesn't give a lot of faith in the system.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

Just to be clear, now we're talking about boxes and checklists and stuff that's left in cars, right? This is how we decide elections in America. Like it's 1804.

[Rick Hasen]

So it's not true everywhere. In some places, election administrators do a whole lot with very little in terms of resources. But there are places where there are problems and there have been great improvements in many states. But what happened in Detroit is evidence that there hasn't been improvement everywhere. And if you have a really close election, where's the attention going to go? It's going to go to the place that is the weakest Link.

[Joel Kurth]

So Precinct 152 is pretty infamous because 52 ballots were discovered in a ballot container. But 307 votes had been logged into a poll book. And at the end of the day, they found out that there was a tub of ballots underneath the tabulators and that they hadn't been sealed so they couldn't be counted. I think it speaks to the general sloppiness in Detroit. It wasn't just the 2016 election, the most recent election, 2018, there was another recount involving the city clerk because of misplaced ballots, unsealed ballots, open ballot boxes, and it's a pretty frequent occurrence in Detroit that's really undermined people's feeling of integrity in the process.

[Rick Hasen]

The infamous Precinct 152, those ballots that had never been counted. I mean, it led to conspiracy theories. World Net Daily had a headline, quote, stealing the vote recount uncovers serious fraud in Detroit. Fox News Insider declared, quote, oops, Stein's recount turns up more votes than voters in Detroit. And even the Detroit Free Press had an Inflammatory headline quote, Detroit's election was 782 more votes than voters. That's got to undermine people's confidence in the process. Nothing could be less interesting than talking about tubs of uncounted ballots. And yet who the next president is could turn on it.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

This is just the section where we just talk about how weird it is that in the 21st century, I can pick up my phone and order exactly the right number of milligrams of rice in my Chinese food. We can do everything perfectly. It's delivered to our door, and yet still we lose boxes of ballots and machines don't work and hanging chads determine. I mean, there's a way in which so much of what you're calling incompetence is just we run elections as though it's still rocking 1840.

[Rick Hasen]

Well, so first of all, last night before we recorded this podcast, my Chinese food delivery was wrong twice. First they brought the wrong food, then they forgot the rice. And it's like, America's democracy is not going to crumble if I didn't get my dinner right. Similarly, people say, well, why don't we just vote with ATM machines? Well, you know, there's a billion dollars in fraud every year with ATM machines. And the Republic still stands because banks are willing to absorb that as a cost of doing business. If we had that level of error with elections, we'd be in big trouble. I mean, think about it. This is aside from going to war or maybe the census. Holding an election is the most complicated thing we do as a country. And we have this history of decentralized elections. So we don't hold one election on election Day. We're actually holding thousands of elections or even holding over a thousand elections just in the state of Michigan. And most election officials do a very good job in how they run their elections. But there are these places where there are still problems.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

So remind us, Rick, what in the end, happens with this recount?

[Rick Hasen]

The court stopped the recount. Not only does Michigan have some problems with how poll workers are administering their elections, they also have some problems with the rules for running recounts. And this recount was stopped. Clinton didn't kick up more of a fuss because she didn't think she could win. You'd think that with these ballots, uncounted Detroit ballots are going to heavily favor Clinton. But they calculated it wasn't enough to make a difference. Maybe they didn't want to shine more of a light on the problems in Detroit, because Detroit, as many American cities are, is a city run by Democrats. The State Board of Elections did an investigation, and their conclusion is it was mass incompetence.

[Joel Kurth]

They found no evidence of any effort to try to stuff ballots. In fact, in Detroit, at the end of the day, I think the difference was about 500 ballots that they couldn't reconcile. And the former state Elections Director, Chris Thomas, conducted an audit, and they found that it was poor worker training. It was the ballot, that machines themselves were 10 years old. They led to frequent jams. There were ballots misplaced, but that there was no effort to throw the election. This is the result of an old city's aging infrastructure, poorly trained workers who work one day every four years or a couple elections, and just really poor practices rather than fraud.

[Rick Hasen]

No malfeasance, but incompetence.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's race, actually, that plays a pretty big role in attacks on election administration in Democratic areas like Broward county, in Florida and in Detroit.

[Rick Hasen]

The fact is there's incompetence across the board. But when you're talking about where the large numbers of votes are and where Democratic voters are, they're in the large cities. And it's because of this that people like Trump focus on the incompetence of election administrators in places that have large minority populations, often run by people of color who are the election administrators. And race just becomes a part of this conversation, often in ways from Trump that seem tinged with racism. Broward county in 2018, it was a very close race for the United States Senate between the incumbent Democrat, Bill Nelson, and the outgoing governor and Republican candidate, Rick Scott. Brenda Snipes was the election administrator in Broward county, and she had a history of problems in how she administered her elections. She wasn't transparent at all. She didn't tell Rick Scott, when they were tucked here, we got how many ballots were left to count. Trump goes on the attack against Brenda Snipes, an African American woman. It was one of a number of attacks of African American women that Trump had announced at the time. Here's President Trump shouting over the blades of Marine One back in November 2018.

[Donald Trump]

If you look at Broward county, they have had a horrible history. And if you look at the person in this case, a woman involved, she has had a horrible history. And all of a sudden, they're finding votes out of nowhere. And Rick Scott, who won by, you know, it was close, but he won by a comfortable margin. Every couple of hours, it goes down a little bit, and then you see the people and they were involved with that fraud of the Fake dossier, the phony dossier. And I guess I hear they were somehow involved or work with the GPS Fusion people who have committed. I mean, you look at what they've done, you look at the dishonesty. Look, look, there's bad things have gone on in Broward county. Really bad things. She's been to court, she's had a lot of problems. She's lost. I say this, he easily won, but every hour it seems to be going down. I think that people have to look at it very, very cautiously.

[Rick Hasen]

Well, that was a pretty bizarre episode of Chopper Talk right there. There was no evidence that Brenda Snipes ever tried to steal an election. There was only evidence of incompetence. Not sure how GPS Fusion worked its way in there. It's kind of a web of conspiracy theories. Lead as far as the Ukraine call on impeachment, but no evidence of rigging the vote, just your good old fashioned incompetence. But Democrats are in a tough spot in terms of how they respond to such attacks because they don't want to call out their own people for messing things up. Listen to Joel Kurth from Michigan's Bridge Magazine again. And you can hear how that dynamic that we saw in Broward county also play out in Michigan.

[Joel Kurth]

Obviously this is their base. It's largely minority. You don't want to accuse them of being incompetent and you want to respect their autonomy. It opens the Democrats up to accusations of incompetence that you see Republicans accusing Democratics of rigging elections when a lot of times these are sort of really simple mistakes, but they can't have good explanations for why they occurred. It wasn't just Detroit. A lot of the heavily urban counties had similar problems as Detroit. There was Genesee county, which is Flint, I believe Saginaw county had similar problems.

[Rick Hasen]

There's a very pernicious asymmetry here. When Democrats have problems with incompetence, they're accused of voter fraud, they're accused of stealing the election. And Republicans look the other way when the incompetence is happening in Republican areas. And so I think, you know, the double standard gets applied once again.

[Joel Kurth]

I think it's a real balancing act. I think in urban areas, obviously they're dealing with many problems and decades and decades of disinvestment that lead to some voting irregularities. On wider scales, I will say though too, that. But it's not any different than what's happening on smaller scales in rural places. It's just a matter of volume.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

But let's be clear and this goes back to the fundamental point of your book, that whether we're talking about incompetence in election administration in Democratic areas, in Republican controlled areas, and to be sure, Georgia has had some very serious problems, which we'll talk about in a later show in this series, but the effect overwhelmingly is the same, which is it undermines confidence in the electoral process. And it's easier to believe a conspiracy theory than to believe that incompetence is the sole cause.

[Rick Hasen]

The fact of the matter is that when elections are administered badly, when there are problems, it can have a profound effect on people's trust.

[Joel Kurth]

The Green Party is convinced that elections are stolen systematically in Detroit. And I think on the other side, the conservatives do as well. And I think that the vast middle, the 85% in the middle, have a sort of a shoulder shrug of that's just how things happen sometimes in Detroit. It's not a great way to run a democracy. I mean, you want ultimate, like utmost faith that your vote's gonna count. And unfortunately, especially in Detroit and sometimes in Michigan, that's just. You can't always be sure that's the case.

[Rick Hasen]

So here's the problem. When things go wrong in places like Broward County, Detroit and Georgia, the news media and interested parties rarely differentiate between incompetence and deliberate abuse. Or that differentiation comes later on down the line when the damage is already done. It took months for Michigan election officials to investigate. In the meantime, what did people who watch Fox News learn? That there were more votes than voters in the city of Detroit.

[Joel Kurth]

I don't think that there's been any evidence of trying to throw elections that have been, you know, that are credible. But I think that it's hard not to let your imagination wander. If you're frequently having power outages in precincts during elections and you're losing ballots, why wouldn't you have a conspiracy theory?

[Dahlia Lithwick]

Maybe this is a good corollary to your initial point, which is we only think about broken election systems in the week before elections. We only think about them again in the week after. And so if six months later a finding comes out, no harm, no foul, or no foul, but harm, it's too late for anybody to care. And conspiracy theories not only get fixed in our imagination, but they have a pretty big megaphone in this current White House. The way in which election returns come in from urban areas absolutely amplifies some of the worst conspiracy mongering. Right?

[Rick Hasen]

Sure. So the larger the jurisdiction, the longer it takes to count the votes, the more people there that are Voting with provisional ballots or, you know, might be, maybe they're new voters. The longer it takes to count the votes. These tend to be in urban areas. These tend to be in areas that have more Democratic voters. And that's why we see what Professor Ned Foley has called the big blue shift, where votes start out being more Republican, and as more votes are counted, you end up with a Democratic surge. We saw this, you may remember, in the 2018 election as California was counting millions of absentee ballots, we saw election after election in Orange County, California, swing from Republicans in the lead to Democrats. That wasn't because there was any conspiracy. That's just because that's how election administration goes. And Trump was saying, let's just take the results as they are on election Day. He wants to freeze it in time when he's in the lead. But in fact, we do see this shift and there's not a nefarious reason for it. But if you're inclined to believe those conspiracy theories, you may indeed find that there is something problematic about it.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

Okay, so Rick, having focused, laser focused on Michigan's problems, and specifically maybe Detroit's problems, is there some glimmer of hope here to be gleaned?

[Rick Hasen]

Well, you're not gonna find it from me, but you might find it from Jocelyn Benson, a former election law professor and law school dean. Now she's the Secretary of State of Michigan. And I should pause for a second, say, we've been talking about Secretaries of state. What are they? They're the chief election officers of the state, but they don't actually get to run the elections in each state because those elections are run on a county or even sub county level. But they do have some control over how elections are run. So Benson literally wrote the book on Secretaries of State called Secretaries of Guardians of the Democratic Process, which I think is more aspirational than descript. But she's now in charge. And I asked her about some of the concerns raised by Joel Kurth, and here's what she had to say.

[Jocelyn Benson]

In 2016, the heart of the errors were poll worker based human error, Poll workers making errors in the way they left records of ballots after they were cast, and the human errors were identified in the recount process. The integrity of the election itself was not in question. In fact, it just underscored again, in my view, the examples, the types of examples of mistakes that human beings can make when they're running the election process. So they're useful points of reference for us also as we train our election workers for future elections and Part of the reason, frankly, why I've made recruiting and training poll workers across the state one of my priorities for preparing for 2020. And across the country, particularly in urban areas, we need to do more to recruit and train a talented workforce of election workers on election day to ensure they are prepared to follow the law and, you know, and protect the process of the vote.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

Are places like Michigan and Florida and Georgia, have they learned what they need to know and are they geared up and ready to do November 2020? Right.

[Rick Hasen]

Well, I have more hope than I do optimism. If you asked election administrators in 2012 what the biggest problem they might face in 2016 would be, they might not have said Russian operatives trying to hack into our voter registration databases, which is something that we know happened sometimes. You're fighting the last war. So now there's a lot of concern about cybersecurity. But we've got a lot of places that are rolling out brand new voting machines being used for the first time. It's like premiering your new play Straight to Broadway, you know, high risk there. And so, you know, I'm not sure what the future is going to hold. I know that there are a lot of good people with good intentions who are trying to make elections better, but not everyone and some people are trying to make things worse. So in the book Election Meltdown, I conjured up a kind of worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario is, rather than those isolated power outages that Joel Kurth talks about in Detroit, how about if there's a cyber attack from a foreign entity that brings down the power grid in the city of Detroit on a lower election day and the potential for us not being able to run the election over. Right. We only have one election day for president. What happens then? I raised the scenario with both Joel Kurth and Jocelyn Benson, asked them what they thought would happen if there were such an attack.

[Joel Kurth]

It would be, it would be absolutely chaos and I think it would hurt the, you know, people would not want to vote anymore.

[Jocelyn Benson]

On that specific example, in terms of a power outage on election day, we have generators in place and backup plans and of course, paper ballots to enable us to actually keep proceeding. If we are all in close communication with the 1500 jurisdictions, in this case the one jurisdiction in Detroit or others that may be affected, our preparation for things like that, whether they be natural disasters or, you know, the acts of nefarious people trying to attack our system, really relies on us to be close to the ground on election day and prepared for, for all these potential scenarios. Just as we are for a power outage, and then also partnering with the Department of Homeland Security and with other national entities like the Information Sharing and Analysis center isac, so that we are in real time getting support and feedback if these things are happening in other places as well. And so I feel that we're more prepared than ever. And I say this not just for Michigan, but I think other states as well, to deal with the types of attacks you're referencing. Because there's been so much more attention and proactive preparation and planning in place than I think ever before. And with 1500 jurisdictions, it certainly leaves it open for challenges and wrinkles. But I'm bolstered and emboldened by the fact that we've got so many people with eyes on this problem, identifying potential solutions. And our goal is to make sure all those people are in place on election day for a rapid response plan to be executed if anything does, as you suggest, like that, happen.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

So what I take from Jocelyn Benson is actually a nice tidy summary of the thesis of your book, which is that somebody who has the role of Secretary of State has to say the aspirational thing, has to say it's fixed, the system works, get out there and vote and there's nothing to worry about. Whereas the journalist Jo Kerse is pretty much saying you have reason to fear the doomsday scenario cuz it could really happen. And there's a weird way in which we're having two conversations, one about what is and one about what we can't say might be simply because we want people to get out there and vote.

[Rick Hasen]

What I took away from Secretary Benson is that she has limited control over her 1500 jurisdictions. She's doing the best she can with what she has to work with, and she's going to try and be as transparent as possible. I think not only promoting confidence is important, but being honest with what's going on. And I think that really, when I look at incompetent election administrators, you know, they always say it's not the crime, it's the COVID up. Lots of times when election officials are not telling you what's going on, it's because they're covering up their malfeasance or their misfeasance. And with someone like Secretary Benson, if she could control the entire election system of Michigan, I would probably have more confidence than the fact that she is this general coordinator of an election being run in 1500 jurisdictions. So I asked Joel Kurth if things are potentially going to get better for 2020. And here's what he said.

[Joel Kurth]

Ultimately, it always comes down to just sort of like roll the dice in Michigan. It's really sad to say that, but sure as rain, there's going to be a problem in Detroit. This is a crisis for six months after there's a crisis, and then everybody forgets about it. It's not a sexy thing to invest in. And it's something like sewers, you know, that you just expect them to work until they don't. And you're not going to win elections standing up and talking about how you just hired 10 times more volunteers or bought new optical scanners. It's not a sexy subject until it all falls apart.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

I guess we are now simply hoping that it doesn't rain in Detroit in November of 2020, and also that the boxes and the bins and the papers are all in good order.

[Rick Hasen]

Well, Talia, I don't know how religious you are, but there is something called the Election Administrator's Prayer, which is, lord, let this election not be close. And really I wrote about that in my 2012 book, the Voting wars. And here things have not changed. The best solution to a, the best way to avoid an election debacle is for an election not to be close. Because when it's close, you're peering into the bins, you're cleaning the gunk out of the machines. We didn't even talk about Palm beach county attempt to run a recount in 2018, where the vote counting machines that were recounting the ballots ended up failing because an election worker thought the machines were going too fast and shoved a paperclip into the mechanism and caused the machine to explode.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what it's gonna come down to.

[Rick Hasen]

So, you know, like a sewer, it stinks.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

We've talked now about vote suppression and the myth of vote fraud. In our first episode, in our second here, we've just finished talking about just incompetence and technology and the great brokenness of electoral systems. What's coming up next.

[Rick Hasen]

So we're going to turn to dirty tricks. We're going to look at that contested election in North Carolina in 2018, this congressional election with its absentee ballot problems, Russian interference in 2016, as well as the 2017 Senate race between Doug Jones and Roy Moore in Alabama. You remember, that was the race that came up when Jeff Sessions became Attorney general and some dirty tricks done in that race that might surprise you.

[Dahlia Lithwick]

And that is a wrap for this Part two of our election Meltdown series here on amicus from me and from Rick Hassan. Thank you so much for listening in. If you want to get in touch, our email is amicuslate.com or you can always find us on Facebook, facebook.com amicus Today's show was produced by Sarah Burningham. Gabriel Ross is editorial Director of Slate Podcasts, and June Thomas is senior Managing producer of Slate Podcasts. Slate plus members, you have a bonus episode coming your way. Everyone else, back with you in a week for part three of Election Meltdown.