Danielle Citron (5:01)

Thing.

Dahlia Lithwick (5:04)

Rick let's start with you i'm sure everyone's listened to every second of the last few weeks but can you remind us sort of why we're all sitting here what it is that we were doing and why we undertook to do it in february before the election what are we looking at here well.

Rick Hasen (5:21)

I think this is an i think this is an easier conversation to have thanks to the iowa democratic party which illustrates how many things could go wrong in an election and in the book election meltdown i talk about why trust in american elections is declining people are worried that their votes are not going to be fairly and accurately counted a recent npr study found that over forty percent of the public is worried that their votes are not safe and secure and so the purpose of the book and the purpose of our podcast series is to ask why is this happening and more importantly what can we do to make it better and so the book went through and the first four episodes of the series went through four reasons why trust in american elections is declining first voter suppression efforts that have been passed in mostly republican states that have convinced republicans that voter fraud is a major problem even though it's not and convinced democrats that republicans are trying to suppress the vote which they are but they don't always succeed at doing the second problem that we talked about in the second episode was incompetence pockets of incompetent election administrators and these can be democrats or republicans we tend to focus our most attention in large democratic cities because that's where there are more votes and in those cities sometimes the voters are hit with a double whammy first they have very poor election administration and then they're accused of participating in fraud third problem dirty tricks and we talked about those that was not just the russians doing their thing in twenty sixteen but also old fashioned tampering with ballots we saw that in bladen county north carolina where a congressional race first time in recent memory that's a redo a congressional race because there was actual fraud in that election not the kind of fraud that justifies the kind of laws that we talked about in the first episode and then the last issue that we talked about was this increasingly incendiary rhetoric about stolen or rigged elections and there we talked about trump a lot about trump and how he's claimed that elections are stolen or rigged he's called on voters to watch other communities and to look for fraud but we also talked about how democrats talk about stolen elections too and we talked about the very difficult question of what do you do in a place like georgia where you had the sitting secretary of state brian kemp who was not only running the election he was running for election he was running for governor running the election did a whole bunch of suppressive things we talked about those in the fourth episode is it okay to call him the legitimate governor of georgia and so we had a very intense conversation with carol anderson a professor at emory about that so that was the first four episodes the last chapter of the book the one we haven't talked about yet is well what can we do about it it's nine months before the election what are we going to do to try to minimize the chance that in november when forty seven forty eight percent of the population going to be very unhappy anyway no matter what happens that they're going to say okay we lost the election but we think it was a fair election the way it was run we're going to fight another day to be back in office.

Dahlia Lithwick (8:42)

And i want to really just as a precatory note put out there something that's been sort of a sub theme of the whole series and is a sub theme even today i'm looking at dale's face and he's really i think articulated back in the green room that part of the problem is having these conversations that you know homer simpson famously said like beer it's the cause of and solution to every problem in this case i think the cause of and solution to this problem is that these very very intractable issues that we are kind of exploring in depth in this series make people feel hopeless and make people feel disempowered and we've had a lot of listener mail from people saying holy hell this is really terrible maybe my vote doesn't and we have been trying to sort of thread the needle throughout this series of being honest about the problems but also honest about the fact that you have no choice but to vote anyway and one of the things we want to talk about here tonight as we talk about solutions is the ways in which there is not an existential problem here these are systems problems largely that we can solve but it requires confidence that systems work so i just want to put that out there and we can sort of debate that proposition but i do think that it's incredibly incredibly difficult to have a series about a thing that is going to make people say maybe i don't want to vote i want to turn to you first andrew because you know rick opened with the iowa caucus and this sort of cataclysmic meltdown that we saw and you wrote a piece in the post saying pretty explicitly this is getting a lot of attention and it's a lot of white people and it doesn't get attention when it's people who have black and brown skin but for whom every single election looks a lot like this and i wondered if you could sort of amplify your concern about how we have just come to live in a universe in which it is simply understood that you are twice as likely to have a malfunctioning machine or some other system problem if you're a person of color and that iowa was.

Andrew Gillum (10:53)

Not the first yeah no it wasn't i don't know if i'm supposed to ignore the audience or not but hello everybody this is i'm honored to be here and i actually do think that it is important that we talk about these issues and illuminate them in a way that i think don't leave people sort of depressed and thinking that they shouldn't participate in the process because it's not fair but hopeful about what we can do about it and also very present with the things that need to change in cities counties where most elections frankly are administered and in states all across the country i did talk about i was doing some cnn coverage of the results from iowa and watched the slow meltdown of nearly every panelist that night as we kept saying well where are the results i mean this is right now around seven o' clock and folks were getting impatient and i just had a thought that at so many precincts people are waiting for hours just to get in there to cast a ballot to maybe even later find that their vote wasn't even counted or maybe get inside and be told that they were at the wrong precinct and not have the agency to then say well i want a challenge ballot maybe it is that you were in line but because you had to go to work and you don't want to lose your job you had to get out of line and so i think about the polling precinct where i go and vote where if and i live in a pretty nice neighborhood in tallahassee florida if those folks who i vote with are not in and out of there in like fifteen minutes they're like what is going on the system must be broken but if you go to many neighborhoods of color where so many of these precincts have been collapsed into one where there isn't enough support staff for folks to be able to move through it expeditiously there's just an expectation that you're going to be there forty five minutes an expectation you'll be there for an hour now whether that's right or wrong it just struck me that on this particular night and i will concede that the problems that we saw in iowa should not have happened but we were blowing all the way up not over the fact that there were issues around whether these votes were legitimate or not but just whether we were getting the results in the timely enough manner that we wanted them and what a luxury it was for us to have that issue and not a question of can i vote will my vote be counted is my name on the roll three hundred thousand people in florida have been purged in twenty nineteen from the voter rolls so if i showed up i wouldn't even show up on the roster so just putting into context a little bit i know it's not complete apple and apples but just causing our awareness to go up to say man these are issues that we should be fighting every single day and it isn't a crisis only when it's in iowa it's a crisis when it's in any city county around the country and it's a problem that's far too pervasive in too many poor communities and communities of color.

Dahlia Lithwick (13:56)

So dale you're here as our gladiator right like you're out on the hustings fighting about these you know you're bringing these cases you're not chucking your hands up and saying you know the systems are broken i guess we should all move to norway you are you are doing the litigating and i think that's a little bit why you have the most furrowed eyebrows when we talk about you know how some of this feels hopeless sometimes because you're trying i think to make it less hopeless and i wonder if you could just give us a quick survey of you know the cases that are out there that you're involved in what you're watching the ways in which actually the guardrails the legal guardrails are fixing some of the things we've talked about or may fix some of the things we've talked about well.

Dale Ho (14:46)

You know i don't want to be pollyanna either i am nervous about communicating a message that could be disempowering to folks telling folks that you know the system's unfair people are being excluded i don't want people to go from that to thinking that the system itself is illegitimate and that their participation no longer matters but at the same time i also don't want to give people an idealized view i wouldn't be doing the kind of work that i'm doing bringing lawsuits around the country to remove barriers to eligibility and voting if i believed we were in an okay situation at this point but just to give folks an overview of some of the work that the aclu is doing and the work that i lead we're bringing lawsuits around the country to expand who's eligible to vote to make voter registration easier to remove obstacles from voting during early voting periods and on election day and we just just to give you an example of the first category eligibility we just got a ruling in a case that we have today in florida people might have heard about florida is one of or was until two thousand through twenty eighteen one of only four states at this point with laws on the books that disenfranchised you from voting for life if you had any single felony conviction so one felony conviction you're excommunicated from civic society for your entire life right because florida's so big that meant that there were a lot of people and a large proportion of the people disenfranchised nationwide just in that one state six million people barred from voting nationally because of a criminal conviction one point six million in florida so almost a quarter of the disenfranchised nationally in a single state and a single very important state the numbers in florida are kind of shocking people don't believe me when i give people these numbers but it's one out of ten adult citizens in the state it's more than twenty percent of the adult black population of the state of florida so when you when you think about those numbers which i think are really a testament to how we've overcriminalized society and to what mass incarceration has done to our society but when you think about those numbers i think it's really hard to and here i'm going to do the thing i said i wasn't going to do but you hear those numbers it's hard to think of florida as a real functioning democracy right when that many people easy.

Dahlia Lithwick (17:14)

Easy.

Dale Ho (17:18)

But when that many when that many of your citizens are excluded from participation in civic life it really i think does at least raise that question well florida came back after the voters of florida in twenty eighteen passed a constitutional amendment that would automatically restore voting rights to people upon completion of their sentence the florida legislature came back in twenty nineteen passed a law that said completion of your sentence includes repayment of all fines fees court costs you know in florida they assess you a court cost to assess whether or not you are sufficiently indigent as to be entitled to a public defender seriously right so you know you walk out of court for a criminal prosecution with between five hundred and one thousand dollars just in costs and fees assessed to you for going through the system our initial estimate was that of the one point four million people who've completed their sentences for the people that we could get data on about eighty percent of them still have some legal financial obligations associated with their sentences and that the percentages are higher amongst people of color than they are amongst white former offenders in florida so we know what kind of effect this is going to be have we got a great ruling from the district court in this case last year and just today this morning a panel of the eleventh circuit court of appeals affirmed that ruling holding that if people can't afford to repay those financial obligations that can't be a reason for excluding them from the franchise it is a limited ruling it only applies to the seventeen plaintiffs in this case but if all things hold they will be permitted to vote in the march presidential primary and we go to trial in april and hopefully that will resolve the status of the hundreds of thousands of other voters in florida in the same situation.

Dahlia Lithwick (19:25)

So danielle one of the reasons we wanted you on the podcast when we were sort of conceiving of what we were going to do is you know you work there at the intersection of technology and privacy and free speech and law and you know you kind of came on and scared our face off because you were talking about misinformation and disinformation and you know the specter of deep fakes and all the ways in which you know we think we're having a process problem about voting but actually there's a meta problem which is we're all pushing around fake information and none of us can tell what's real anymore and that i think is a sort of grinding problem underneath whatever electoral fixes we could talk about and i wondered if you could sort of give us your sort of good and bad what what has improved since twenty sixteen what is scarier what do you think about when you think about this entire kind of cacophonous world of fake news and bad news disinformation information foreign and domestic that people cannot tell anymore what's true and how that inflects on how you think about the twenty twenty election okay so.

Danielle Citron (20:36)

Maybe we should start with the good.

Dahlia Lithwick (20:39)

Yeah right we're doing good everybody's hoping.

Danielle Citron (20:42)

So i'll start just with a definition of what a deep fake is and i think what is good is we're starting to understand the phenomenon so deepfake is either manufactured from whole cloth or manipulated audio and video that shows people doing and saying something that they never did or said and we've seen in the last six to eight months a real rapid escalation of the technology that once you would look at a video and say you know you can see some of the imperfections but it is developing so quickly that now it seems as if we're at that point where audio is impossible at least for audio deepfakes impossible to tell just as a technical matter the smartest of people the greatest experts can't tell the fake from the real so when this phenomenon hits and like everything a la internet it begins with porn forgive me but welcome to my world you know it's ugly you know deep fakes come on the scene there's a subreddit named deep fakes and it is basically porn videos with women's faces celebrity female face faces inserted into porn and the name is then taken from the subreddit deepfakes and it sort of the notion of what a deepfake is and it's still predominantly so of the fifteen thousand deepfake videos online ninety six percent of them are deepfake sex videos and in ninety nine percent of the time it's women's faces being inserted into porn and it's often true with network technologies that the first victims of mischief and abuse are women in marginalized communities and then they get mainstreamed so i'm trying to figure out maybe what my good news was i was gonna say sorry sorry we're having a.

Dahlia Lithwick (22:37)

Rip snorting good time okay we're coming.

Danielle Citron (22:41)

To understand the problem for the fullness of it that rather than i think a hype that scared people and still people were saying what are you talking about what is a deep fake we at least have a phenomenon we have our arms around it we've seen examples we've seen it used in satire president obama you know jordan peele did a satire of president obama a deepfake so we're coming to see and understand the.

Rick Hasen (23:08)

Problem i just want to say that one of the things that i realized from reading danielle's work was i thought the greatest danger of a deep fake was you'd see something and you'd think oh my god you know i can't believe what this candidate is doing where i think the bigger danger is that we just come to disbelieve everything right and we disbelieve truthful information and we have a hard time knowing what's true and i think you and bobby in your article coined the term the liar's dividend so here you could have donald trump saying that wasn't me on the access hollywood tape that's fake news and that becomes more credible the more this fake actual real fake stuff out there.

Dahlia Lithwick (23:48)

Right right so part of the sort of play here is that if you can't know what's true and what's false you give up on the possibility that you could ever know anything and that's the playbook let's do one can i.

Andrew Gillum (24:02)

Relate that to the aclu case in florida one huge kudos to you all there needs to be defender johnny the.

Rick Hasen (24:11)

Cake.

Andrew Gillum (24:14)

In the same election that i lost by thirty thousand votes which was the closest gubernatorial election in the twenty eighteen cycle and the closest a democrat had gotten to winning the race for governor in florida for twenty four years thirty thousand votes the voters of the state of florida sixty five percent of them decided that we were going to be a forgiving state a state that allowed people second chances that you were not going to be judged forever by your worst day and obviously the legislature came into power just nakedly recognizing that it is possible that they could get the short end of this stick even though the majority of people being re enfranchised are white yet in the first three months in duval county something like fifty four percent of the people registering were black men sending quite a signal to people around where the energy was around this so to the idea of fake news if everything is you know questionable what is real the lasting legacy i fear on the continued litigation and i'm glad we are continuing it but the but the but the conflict that the legislature and the governor has created is that it has thrown great doubt and suspicion and fear into the minds of these individuals who we very much so want to register to vote and get involved in the process but in florida if you register to vote and you have not satisfied these fines fees court costs restitution knowingly or unknowingly you sign that you are now registering yourself to vote if it is later found that you still have fines fees court costs or restitution to be paid you can be criminally prosecuted so why would anyone volunteer to put themselves into a situation that you just got out of all you want to do is protect participate in the democracy make a way for yourself for your family but you do that now at the risk of prosecution again and so i'm hopeful that over the length of this this will all be worked out i fear that in the short term for twenty twenty that there's so much fear in the environment that it really does complicate our ability to do the work we have to do which is to register and re engage these folks i just want.

Dale Ho (26:31)

To say that i agree one hundred percent that you know voter confusion is i think not only something that we're worried about but very much a goal of folks on the other side right the message after amendment four was passed in twenty eighteen was folks can vote the message after the legislation was passed in twenty nineteen was no you can't and now there's this court ruling it applies to seventeen people maybe it'll apply to more people and i think a lot of folks are rightfully confused and would worry about signing a piece of paper under penalty of perjury that they're eligible to vote one other point on that is that florida's records on fines and fees only go back to the early nineteen nineties so if you have a conviction from the eighties or earlier than that like actually some of our clients do you actually can't find the records associated with your conviction to determine whether or not you've paid off all of your fines and fees and you still upon registering to vote have to swear under penalty of perjury right now that you've fully discharged all of those so it's really confusing it's something you know in all of our cases frankly and it speaks i think to the limits of the effectiveness of the work that i do you know we can change the laws but if the public doesn't understand what those laws are if it doesn't get communicated out sufficiently in advance of an election the work that we do is only going to be so so useful go ahead just want.

Andrew Gillum (27:57)

To say finally on this and then we can get off florida at least for the bad news really i guess.

Rick Hasen (28:03)

The podcast is over i know oh.

Andrew Gillum (28:05)

Lord are we that bad yes we are some days some days to understand the significance of the impact in a state like florida you're talking about a governor's raise that was decided by zero point four percent of the vote donald trump won the white house by a point in florida barack obama won the white house twice by a point in florida al gore depending upon where you sit on this question five hundred thirty eight votes or as we like to say a five four supreme court decision decided the presidency of the united states and so if we think this is just you know a little happenstance thing one point four one point six million people we're talking about a state that is routinely in presidential and gubernatorial elections in this case the last five gubernatorial elections decided by a point in my case zero point four percent that these are the kind of marginal differences that can completely overturn or impact the outcome.

Dahlia Lithwick (29:06)

Of an election you know it's interesting after the census case was decided i wrote a very depressed piece saying it doesn't matter people are now going to be afraid to fill out the census regardless of the outcome because they sort of feel as though the government's coming for them and a dear friend of mine sort of took me out to the woodshed under the sort of dale ho theory of don't keep putting the idea in people's heads that even when you win you lose because there's now confusion and a sense that the system is rigged and so it was a sort of good moment for me to realize that you kind of take your wins and the problem of confusion and despondency is a separate problem let's do this quick quick lightning round with the caveat that dale does not want to participate but just a sort of fifteen twenty thirty seconds of what your when you project forward rick to twenty twenty election night what is your nightmare and then once we get it out there we're gonna fix it all but just tell us your worst case scenario and.

Rick Hasen (30:13)

I should say we already talked about one on the podcast which was a cyber attack on a democratic city in a swing state that cuts the power to detroit or milwaukee but that's not mine tonight oh good you've got a different one yeah so here's one pennsylvania's changed the rules this is a good thing it used to be that if you wanted to vote absentee you couldn't show up at the polls on election day you had to have a good excuse now they have no fault absentee balloting which is good except it takes a long time to process absentee ballots and we know that in pennsylvania we also know that in michigan where they made the similar change it may be days before we get the results of the presidential election in november so here's the nightmare scenario it's election night it all comes down to pennsylvania's electoral votes as it did the last time and donald trump is ahead on election night and he declares victory and the networks say it's too close to call too early to call because there's all these ballots to count but yet trump says as he said in twenty eighteen in the mayor's race and in the senate race he says no you know the only the ballots that come in the first night those are the real ones everything else is quote massively infected so trump claims victory even though four days later the democrat is declared the winner so trump then goes to the republican state legislature and says you know why don't you send in a slate of electoral college votes for me because the constitution gives you the power to choose the electors and so two slates of electors go to the to the united states congress where according to a bunch of arcane rules the house chooses the president but under a rule where each state house delegation gets one vote one state one vote and there are more republican state house delegations than democratic state so trump could actually lose the election according to the count in pennsylvania from election officials but be declared the president again so that's just one.

Dahlia Lithwick (32:06)

You'Ve given that some real thought that did not trip off your tongue okay i'm going to skip dale for a minute danielle tell us your nightmare scenario you talked about a little bit but tell us what your when you think about what could really go wrong in your lane at least what do you worry about.

Danielle Citron (32:22)

The night before an election there's a deep fake showing one of the major party candidates doing and saying something just imagine so despicable about kind of a core bloc of voters who that person needs to go out and vote so offensive and it spreads like wildfire right it's not only on twitter and facebook it's being you know shared in whatsapp and and it tips the election and of course you can't undo an election and so significantly too it sort of shakes how we think of elections the legitimacy of elections on the theory that this is so far fetched it's really not so in the philippines about six months ago there was a deep fake of someone who was up for a very important official in the government up for a position and a deep fake went around showing him having sex with another man which is illegal in the philippines and he was removed from the job it turns out it was a faked video and the same is true for so yesterday in india there was a deep fake actually released by a candidate for office it was a message he gave but then showing him in the many different languages so he perpetuated a fraud suggesting that he was speaking languages he did not different dialects he did not speak right and so we sort of see brazen deepfakes not a hostile state actor it's not a hostile party suitor your opponent it's our own officials creating deep fakes to perpetuate fraud and it's happening in the here and now so i always feel like i'm a little hysterical and that's okay but it's not far fetched in that way.

Dahlia Lithwick (34:06)

Right i'll leave it there andrew do you have a nightmare scenario and i.

Andrew Gillum (34:11)

Do we're living it donald trump is president that is my nightmare scenario i can't participate in that kind of game theory but i don't think it's going to be certainly in a state like mine and maybe that was close to mine an actual episode necessarily i think it is the cumulative effect of all of these what we might think of as little things that are contributing to what will ultimately i believe will be a one percent difference outcome in my state so the voter purging that has happened three hundred and almost three hundred ninety thousand over twenty nineteen and my you know thanks to court litigation we got the signature mismatch sort of figured out but we don't necessarily have the college campus and the voting precinct thing make you know all the way figured out although we're working through some compromise on that but but i think it's going to be all of these small things long lines florida has already already been the country's nightmare a la two thousand election so we can actually deliver this thing again to y' all right florida is the gift that keeps giving when it comes to these things but i think it's going to be the cumulative effect of everything that they are doing right now that will absolutely weigh on florida's twenty nine electoral votes because we are i think of all the states that are swing states the only swing state that could by itself determine the outcome of the election with its.

Dahlia Lithwick (35:40)

Twenty nine electoral votes dale i'm looking at you with scared eyes but do you have a sort of nightmare scenario or are you very much of the view that everyone will ride in on a white pony and vote and the election will be awesome and even if you don't think that you're not going to say anything else i like ponies.

Dale Ho (36:01)

Ponies well actually i had similar thoughts to those expressed both by andrew and actually by rick too about the effect that more states having no excuse absentee voting is going to have it's a good reform right states that have it tend to have turnout that's about two percentage points higher than states that don't michigan and pennsylvania two very very pivotal states in the twenty sixteen election have adopted it for the first time in an election but it might mean that the counting's going to keep going well past election night and that could create a problem i'll step out of i think about like the legal regimes right and the effects that those might have but i'll step out of my lane a little bit and just talk about voting trends and demographic patterns and you've probably all heard this that the dissonance between the electoral college or the potential for dissonance between the electoral college and the popular vote seems to have increased right where we saw a popular vote margin of two point seven million in twenty sixteen and trump win the electoral college it's very conceivable that the popular vote margin could be double that and trump could still win the electoral college right you can imagine an energized democratic base in california and new york you know turning out in higher numbers you could imagine the changing demographics of states like texas and arizona and georgia pushing those states much closer than they have been in the past texas was closer in the twenty sixteen presidential election than ohio was right and people generally don't tend to think of texas as a swing state but they think of ohio as one so you could imagine the margin for the republican candidate falling in some of these sunbelt states but not so much that those states actually tip over and you could see the same alignment of states overall and now we will have been in a situation where in half of the last six presidential elections assuming twenty twenty goes the way that i'm suggesting it might there's a divergence between the popular vote and the electoral college fifty percent of the time which we had only had what you know two or three times before the twenty first century that i think is alarming and when you look at population trends and see that oh about you know seventy percent of the population by twenty forty is expected to live in fifteen states right the sort of structural imbalance caused by the electoral college starts to become even more alarming.

Dahlia Lithwick (38:47)

Okay so look we promised a happy happy show full of easy peasy fixes i should stipulate rick says in his book that he can't think of like really great short term fixes between now and november but i wonder if you know we're all presumably smart people who've thought of these what are some and feel free if you want to respond to one another's nightmare scenarios or or give us some thoughts about things whether it's legal fixes which i think i've learned throughout this podcast there's not a lot of these problems that can be fixed through you know sort of any regulatory regime that pops to mind but i wonder if we can at least muddle through some of what we're worried about and talk about if not fixes that we can put into place but before twenty twenty medium term going forward fixes rick.

Rick Hasen (39:46)

You want to start sure so i finally got a hold of this i had heard it happen but i didn't see it myself but someone sent me.

Andrew Gillum (39:55)

A clip today check the video yes.

Rick Hasen (39:57)

Maybe it's a deep fake it was wolf blitzer on cnn standing in front of a negative countdown clock how many hours since the iowa caucuses ended before we had a result so some of this is the responsibility of the news media and the news media needs to be educated that they need to explain that slow count like fine wine you know a good election count takes time and just have a glass of wine and wait for the election results and maybe you'll have to wait a day or two and i think we have to change expectations because you know cable news more than anything else is trying to create a sense of drama even when there is no drama like when you're waiting on exit poll results you know you're waiting to call a state and that drama can contribute to people's angst right or the new york times meter do you remember that you know clinton or trump so i think the media needs to tone it down and you know i'm actually i've formed an ad hoc group and we're going to come up with recommendations by early may over what people at facebook can do what the media could do what local election officials can do i think we have to think about it in small bore problems there's no one magic fix we're not going to solve the voter purge problem by twenty twenty but there are things that we can do and the news media's got some responsibility here.

Dahlia Lithwick (41:16)

And would you i would maybe add to that and you've i think made this point also just when you make a mistake you say it and that the culture of nothing to see here nothing's wrong we didn't do anything wrong and then and simply it's part and parcel of this sort of performance aspect like this is not a circus this is democracy and when there are errors and there will be errors the single worst thing you can do when everybody is paranoid is to lie well i.

Rick Hasen (41:47)

Remember on when the iowa results were coming out everything it was slow but it was when the democratic party put out a statement saying that there were quotes quality control issues that i knew that something was up like fess up to it the absolute and then they denounced partial counts and then they had to take them back because they did them wrong i mean they're still fighting now over those counts so yeah you have to fess up to your errors and explain what happened transparency is the number one thing on the list for.

Dahlia Lithwick (42:17)

Election officials okay dale what do you.

Dale Ho (42:19)

Got well i mean to rick's point though about about you know expectations on when we're going to get results it's it's it's really i think as a cultural phenomenon very difficult in the social media age when there's such a premium placed on speed right everyone's got to have the fastest take the quickest result if the tweet doesn't start with capital breaking you know people don't want to read it sometimes and so i don't know what the solution is other than that i think it goes even beyond kind of media practices and just kind of cultural expectations in our twenty four hour on demand social media world but one easy fix on something that we talked about earlier the absentee ballot counting issue right in michigan i mentioned is one of those states closest state in the twenty sixteen presidential election now has no excuse at absentee voting they have a requirement in michigan that the ballots cannot be counted until election day that's not a very good legal requirement when you expect the number of absentee ballots to skyrocket this year compared to previous years the secretary of state of michigan is pushing for a simple fix for this let us start counting the ballots she's saying as soon as they come in right it's a no brainer right so there are some technocratic should be non ideological fixes to some of the problems that we're talking about that will at least hopefully reduce the likelihood of the kind of nightmare scenario where we don't know who won michigan or pennsylvania.

Dahlia Lithwick (43:54)

On election night and is there some engine that is pushing for some of those fixes i mean is somebody out there angsting about this in public in a way that could allow for some of these technical fixes i mean it's.

Dale Ho (44:10)

So hard when you have fifty one different systems governing our election systems whenever you talk to someone from another country and try to explain how our elections work they're sort of they're just kind of baffled they look at us like how can this possibly be but it's it's really hard because it's decentralized and the rules differ when you cross state.

Rick Hasen (44:29)

Lines but in michigan jocelyn benson has gotten together with city clerks county county clerks and they're lobbying the legislature now she's a democrat the legislature's republican the governor's a democrat so it's kind of hard to get bipartisan agreement on election things because everybody's looking at what might benefit their party but at least she's putting it on the agenda danielle do.

Dahlia Lithwick (44:51)

You have some thoughts on fixes and i want you to talk a little bit about because you've given a lot of thought to what if we regulated facebook what if we regulated twitter what if the candidates all agreed that they just wouldn't wouldn't push out something that was fake is this something in your world that is fixable if we put our shoulder to it and just one.

Danielle Citron (45:13)

On the positive point i think our electoral federalism has a real upside which is there what isn't one point of failure so as frustrating as it is there isn't one bottleneck that can completely fail so in a way like as we're trying to take stuff off the rug of democracy despair you know maybe we can put our electoral federalism in the you know in the positive box okay but so what what do we do that now that we have you know facebook's and twitter's in their algorithms are and in the interest of their shareholders because there isn't regulation is to mine our and exploit sort of the worst sides of us right the stuff that we're going to like click and share on is the most salacious right and that's what earns them advertising income and so what i think we need to do is we can't trust on faith anymore that these companies are just going to self regulate because every time they promise and we're going to be more responsible mz says to congress that just doesn't happen right so i think it's twofold right we need strong privacy rules around the use of micro targeting as ads that are not i'm going to go back to rick's point about transparency ads that are not transparent so eight thousand nine hundred ads at any given moment trump is you know or any candidate is tailoring to someone like neo nazis hum come vote for trump we never see those ads and facebook is enclosing them in a way that they were supposed to be transparent right now facebook says political ads we're not going to let you see any of it right so both privacy rules and transparency rules there's like the honest ads act we can do better right but ways in which we're going to introduce transparency and accountability into these sort of algorithms of exploitation and manipulation which is for their bottom line it's bad for democracy and the other is sort of my famous bugaboo which is section two hundred thirty of the communications decency act which provides a legal shield for online service providers for content user generated content and the whole idea of it was to incentivize self monitoring and the statute is called good samaritan blocking and filtering of offensive content and unfortunately the way the statute's written is it doesn't require you to be a good samaritan so sites that are in the business of you know deep fake videos they get to earn advertising income they get to encourage people to to post destruction and they get to say sue me too bad so sad i got a section two hundred and thirty defense and so we need to think about changing section two hundred thirty to reintroduce the incentive to actually be a good samaritan so that these algorithms can't earn you money you can't facilitate abuse and then walk.

Dahlia Lithwick (47:58)

Away from it how about you andrew would you pick up something from the rugged the rug of despair and tell us what if you could if we.

Andrew Gillum (48:09)

Fixed florida this rug would be floating in the room but towards your question around twenty twenty things that we may be able to do given the short window we have for twenty twenty so my first suggestion and this is a little self serving in the sense that this is work that i picked up on in florida which is voter registration if you are not actively working to increase my bias not yours but democratic big d democrat registration in your area i would encourage you to figure out how you can involve yourself with an organization or an entity who is doing voter registration work we've got over four million eligible unregistered in my state alone and we fixed our attention on trying to register and re engage a million of them in advance of the twenty twenty presidential election to have impact in that process the other thing since this is speaking to the decentralized nature of how elections are run largely these are volunteer structures that are being run not from state to state but from county to county differences rules can be different between those places florida's at sixty seven counties others have you know whatever number that they have i would love to see the election protection brigade those of us who are out there trying to ensure that we are tamp downing tamping down on deliberate intimidation at the polling places passing out leaflets material that help people know their rights when they're in some of these places if you're told that you don't have a valid id this is you know that you have a manual or someone that you can go to to help you navigate that process i think we take for granted how difficult it is for the average person who is not doing this work every day to show up and have agency when it comes to a conflict with an elected official elections official who's telling you that this is the rule when they may themselves be misinformed someone coming in and saying i need a ballot that is in my language you don't have the right to say no you cannot you have to provide that person a ballot in in which they can understand what is there so the election protection piece in my opinion is something we as citizens can do since our elections are run by citizens and by and large i think to the extent that it will be lost it will be lost by various elements of human era or human intake and perception that we basically are going to be the ones that screw this up we at the individual level or get it right not notwithstanding some of the larger sort of themes that have been put out here already so i would just challenge people the things that you can do you can register voters you can engage voters you can help turn voters out you can join an election protection brigade because as you know the president has already called for his people practically to take arms go watch them go to these precincts observe what it is that they're doing i'm not suggesting you know a violent response to that i'm simply saying we're going to need a affirming and positive response to that for the voters who we know may be more easily targeted here so i would.

Rick Hasen (51:18)

Just add that when you're talking about election protection one way of trying to protect the election is everyone should be looking at what their local election administrators are doing there's opportunities to observe the vote if your jurisdiction is not demanding that there be post election audits to make sure that the voting machines are counting the votes accurately and that there's something a piece of paper that people can look at to verify so it's not just a computer code it's a name that can be counted these are the kinds of things that because it's so decentralized you need local pressure from local people this is not something that's going to be solved you know dale.

Dahlia Lithwick (51:56)

Can'T be everywhere no but i think you're making a really important point that i think gets us out of this trough that we kind of fall into which is there is this huge leviathan unknowable superstructure that i cannot effectuate any change and what you're both saying is no like the beauty of i guess danielle you made this point first the beauty of what we think of as this like rickety decentralized system that is only as good as the like ninety year old lady who does this you know once every couple of years and like you know is that those are positives because you can have real influence over those decentralized local rickety systems right every one of you is saying some.

Andrew Gillum (52:43)

Version of that and partially because i think at the local level as maniacal as i believe the president is and his larger apparatus is and how intense and orchestrated they are in trying to bend the rules to their will to provide them an electoral advantage many of these local elected folks you go to you see them at t ball games you engage with them i don't think that they set out to intentionally steal elections now there may be some examples and you all probably know them better than i do but by and large they do want they don't want it the embarrassment they want these things to work and so in addition to you know going in and auditing at some level you can also go and see the ballot before the ballot is put in the newspaper or sent out as an early ballot in our state we had instructions for the united states senate race at one part of the page and then it's clipped from the next page where it actually has the race on it so the instructions were not connected to the race that people were voting for was someone well the party should have caught it but anyway somebody should have been able to catch that but in sixty seven counties where every ballot looks different miami dade's ballot is a hell of a lot longer than my ballot in tallahassee florida and so who's paying attention to that if you engage with that early enough can you give advice feedback that allows for those changes to be made before we end up with something that results in something cataclysmic but it isn't cataclysmic activity that makes it that it is a very small nuanced detail that changed the outcome of an election and we're just far too used to that where i you know where i live and i think we can do something about it so.

Dahlia Lithwick (54:24)

Dale let's say you're talking to somebody who wants to be educated engaged and activated and they just don't know i mean what they're hearing what andrew gillum is saying and they're like what now like i could have done this i could what would you tell them to do between now and november that would really be an impactful some action that is not you know heroic that any person could undertake between now and november that would make them feel more confident in the entire process well you know.

Dale Ho (55:01)

As a lawyer i'll just say something about that first lawyers can do right and andrew mentioned the you know election protection efforts that are happening there's a consortium of civil rights and good government groups that participate in an election protection program that's run by the lawyers committee for civil rights based here in washington dc they're nonpartisan and they set up boiler rooms you know these response call centers in about two dozen states that are on the ground even before election day during early voting but on election day itself and with call centers in dc to help people just navigate the process right sometimes you get very simple calls from people who are having a hard time verifying that they're registered having a hard time trying to figure out where their polling location is helping people navigate those kinds of situations and then when there is a real problem of malfeasance like voter intimidation happening or an election administration problem like machines breaking down and lines being too long then the lawyers in that room can spring into action try to get something done that day to help make sure that no one's disenfranchised now sorry i'm a lawyer so everything looks like a nail to me i always think about things in terms of legal problems but things that non lawyers can do people can participate in voter registration drive people can participate with their party and get out the vote efforts during early voting on election day it's not actually that difficult to find any number of opportunities to get involved if what you're interested in is helping people exercise the most fundamental right that we have opportunities are out there you just have to step up and take the time for it and danielle.

Dahlia Lithwick (56:46)

I want to ask you a version of the same question except yours is kind of existential which is what do you tell people who are at this sort of you know the place that rick hassan describes of you know i guess all news is fake and whatever i see on election night is going to be fake and i guess you know as my son would say he's here somewhere i should just move to mars and date mars women because the planet earth is functionally over what he's gonna that's bleak that's what he says the mars girls he's never gonna forgive me for this we'll have to edit it out danielle what do you tell people who say we are now in this like quagmire of misinformation and disinformation i don't know how to tell my parents what's true and not true how.

Danielle Citron (57:36)

Do we navigate this so let's not forget right that we have sources of public trust right pbs npr bbc you know we often sort of you know sort of forget that we do have media where we say that they they enjoy the public trust and for darn good reason sleep right i you know our go to thank you right i have my slate coffee cup at home because i was one of the first plus subscribers just saying love slate all subscribe so but those are really incredibly important don't rely on facebook and twitter right unless it's someone who's part of that public trust and they're linking to articles in slate right you know we have to be better consumers and of course at the same time we have to remind ourselves that the distrust that we feel that liars are leveraging that bobby chesney i call the liar's dividend is going to lead people to say just believe what you want to believe truth be damned and then folks are going to be self serving to escape accountability just we have to remind ourselves of that i don't think we should stop efforts to educate ourselves about deepfakes and the problem of disinformation and propaganda and our disorientation i think we have to look it in the eye and then look to those sources of public trust for news right i don't want your son going to mars no me.

Dahlia Lithwick (59:06)

Neither andrew i want to ask you a version of the same question which is you know after what you went through you could have been completely justified in saying i don't think this is fixable you know this is a monstrous system that purges the voter rolls that does voter caging that suppresses the vote particularly the vote of black and brown people who have really shouldered the burden of this for a long time as carol anderson told us last week and yet you have redoubled your effort to get people to believe in voting and i wonder like i want what you're having tell me how you kind of get up every morning and compose yourself and say this this is a system.

Andrew Gillum (59:54)

That can still work well i still believe in it i worked my you know what off for two years trying to become governor of florida and gave everything that i had to it and an election that was supposed to produce six point one million voters which would have been the increase of its share over the four years since the last governor's race produced eight and a half million voters right we come close to nine million voters in a presidential election so we had crazy turnout which meant people were responsible black voters for the first time in the history of the state of florida voted at their share of the population they didn't do that in zero eight they didn't do it in twelve they did it in eighteen so i can't take for granted that these folks came out participated in in the process the election result was certainly not what i wanted and what many of them wanted for me and for themselves and for the state but it to me would have felt like a total slight to everything that i said i believed in everything that i campaigned on if i was like the rest of the nominees who have come before me and lost and packed up their toys and went home and i completely understand why people do it but florida is a state that is a winnable state it's the state i'm raising my family it's a state that i love and i am as idealistic about the process today as i have ever been before and so i don't know if that's pollyannish but in order to keep up every day sort of recommitting to this work there's got to be some sense of belief that it is that it's going to work out doctor king gave a famous speech not the i have a dream speech but here in washington and i think it was later titled give us the ballot and he said all i want from america is for her to do what she said on paper and when i think about the sacrifices of people like doctor king and rosa parks and all of those heroes and sheroes whose names i cannot call and faces i cannot recognize who gave life livelihood and everything in between for a cause that they themselves were not sure that they would ever be able to benefit from there's no way i can back out from this thing right when people are and i've tried to say it to young people as well on college campuses if people are working this hard to keep your vote from counting don't you think they know something about your vote don't you think they know something about the power that you can command if they are able to keep you from this process you don't lay down and give that up you stand up you stiffen your shoulders and spine and you fight back and i think if we do that i'm convinced that they're more of us than there are of them but what they have had the success of doing is repeatedly beating us down to the point and this is where it is the gift that keeps giving to where we don't believe and if we don't believe and we can subtract ourselves from the process that's the gift that's the disinformation disenfranchisement that is the that's the legacy of it so no you got me by thirty thousand you won't get me again by thirty right.

Dahlia Lithwick (63:06)

Dale do you want to do you want to dale's sort of tearing up here i was.

Dale Ho (63:10)

Responding i just loved what andrew had.

Rick Hasen (63:12)

To say he was thinking about the.

Dahlia Lithwick (63:14)

Mars romance i want to give rick a chance you know we've been on this journey together for weeks now and you and i have been sort of of pinging back and forth between utter despair and the belief that you know we don't have a better system and i always think of justice scalia like you just have to beat the other you know the other guy who's running away from the bear and like this is what we got we just this is what we got and i wonder if you have any reflections having sort of gone through this and i know when we talked to carol anderson at emory last week it was really you said i'm just creeping up to the point where i'm willing to hear the word stolen that an election was stolen i'm not quite there yet and i wonder if kind of going through this process talking to the folks that we've talked to has sort of located you somewhere different from where you started well.

Rick Hasen (64:11)

I'M different five times a day.

Dale Ho (64:16)

But.

Rick Hasen (64:16)

Yet i hear something like the mayor said and you know what i hear is resiliency and i hear determination and that makes me say you know now is the moment for activism now is not the moment for complacency and because we're talking about an election being such a complex system you've got to attack it in a lot of different ways to be successful and so it's the job is on all of us and so i do feel more determined going forward you know people said why write a book called election meltdown it's alarmist i'm sounding the alarm we've got nine months let's get to work okay we.

Dahlia Lithwick (64:52)

Have just time to do one more quickie lightning round but rick and i have promised throughout that we are going to end this thing on a high note and we're also going to give people an action something they can do tomorrow morning when they get home and something they can do in two months and something they can tell ten people to do so i'm just going to sort of go down the line and ask you to give the folks in this room who came out here despite the fact that the first four episodes may have depressed or alarmed them they came out here because they want an idea of something they can do to fix the system and i wonder if we can start with you andrew one action that every person in this room can take tonight and every day between.

Andrew Gillum (65:37)

Now and november register as many voters as you can we're doing it in florida at ford florida action but i could guarantee you that there are outfits probably everywhere you live even if you live here in dc there are ways for you to engage remotely we all have platforms i know stacy does through fair fight and fair fight action where even remotely you can hustle i don't mean like hustle people but but it's an app where you can help us through texting get people registered and engaged.

Danielle Citron (66:08)

Register register register danielle educate educate educate right talk to folks about being smart consumers of what they read dale join.

Dale Ho (66:19)

The aclu people power volunteer network we're going to be plugging people into election protection efforts the one i mentioned in november and for folks in particular states like ohio and arizona who are willing to do work in states like that we're going to be working on ballot initiative campaigns to bring automatic voter registration and election day registration to those two states we did it successfully in michigan with a ballot campaign in twenty eighteen we're going to replicate that in two states in twenty twenty okay and rick.

Dahlia Lithwick (66:50)

Hassan one thing that everyone in this room can do to help american democracy survive not just the twenty twenty election but beyond what is a thing an action step everyone in this room can.

Rick Hasen (67:02)

Take tomorrow morning don't be complacent look at what the media is doing what your local election officials are doing what your elected officials are saying and speak out when you see something that's wrong and don't spread misinformation be a i don't want to say good samaritan but be a responsible person and talk to your neighbors especially if you disagree politically with them because we're in a very polarized moment right now and we're in a moment of technological change so at a very precarious position and the more that there can be actual dialogue between people i think the better off we're going to be.

Dahlia Lithwick (67:38)

So i want to i really want to thank everyone who came out here tonight dale ho mayor gillum danielle citron and and a special special thank you to rick kasson for bringing us the idea of doing this podcast putting so much hard work into it i want to thank all of you who came out here to join in this conversation and i want to thank you in advance because i know you're going to be putting the integrity of the twenty twenty election front and center in the coming months and help spread the word that this is neither pointless nor futile this is something that really is on each and every one of us to buy in and make change thank you all very very much thank you to my extraordinary guests let's keep fighting and let's be here in a year to celebrate the fact that.

Danielle Citron (68:25)

Democracy survives thank you dalia dalia and.

Dahlia Lithwick (68:30)

That is a wrap for this final part of the election meltdown series slate plus members keep an eye on your feed next week for a special bonus wrap up episode rick hasson and i will have a debrief on the entire series thank you all so much for listening thank you for your support through this series your letters facebook messages suggestions and those of you who came out to see us in washington dc on wednesday made all the difference if you'd like to get in touch our email as ever is amicuslate dot com we love your letters and you could always find us at facebook today's show was produced by sarah burningham extra special thanks to slate live's executive producer faith smith and to rosemary bellson for her steady hand on the controls in washington dc gabriel roth is editorial director of slate podcasts june thomas is senior managing producer of slate podcasts and we will be back with a fresh new amethyst new next week.