Mark Warner (2:58)

I never thought I'd have to ever say this, but I am seriously concerned about the security and integrity of our elections in 2026. And if we have a corrupted election, I'm not sure how our country ever comes back.

Matthew Umha (3:13)

And back to Trump clear as ever,

Donald Trump (3:15)

you got to win the midterms, because if we don't win the midterms, I mean, they'll find a reason to impeach me.

Matthew Umha (3:22)

So with that as our backdrop, today we're going to examine the past, present, and potential future of Trump related election interference and ask whether or not the American election system has the capacity to keep a president that has already attempted to subvert an election from doing it again. David A. Graham is a staff writer with the Atlantic, and he's done a lot of reporting on the state of American elections. He's our guest today. Hi, David.

David A. Graham (3:58)

Hello.

Matthew Umha (3:59)

So Trump won reelection in 2024 without conceding defeat in 2020. And really, since the first day of his second term in office, he, he and his senior staff, as a piece in the Atlantic has described it, quote, launched tandem efforts to rectify the imagined injustice of a rigged vote. How powerful a force would you say that that imagined injustice is?

David A. Graham (4:20)

I think it animates much of sort of way the way Trump has interacted with all politics. And I would say even going back further, you know, he continues to claim that he was cheated out of the 2016 election popular vote.

Kathleen Goldhar (4:33)

Despite winning the election, Trump is reviving unfounded allegations of voter fraud, a sign he's unwilling to drop his penchant for

News Reporter (4:40)

conspiracy theories now that he's the President elect.

David A. Graham (4:43)

So he's been claiming fraud now for a decade. And this idea that something was taken from him in 2020 has been an important justification for really many of the actions he's taken, whether it's sort of going after political opponents or attempting to seize control of the election process.

Donald Trump (4:59)

2020, by the way, that election was totally rigged.

Matthew Umha (5:02)

But these are the.

Donald Trump (5:03)

That's okay. It's a war that should have never started, and it wouldn't have started if the 2020 US presidential election weren't rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what

David A. Graham (5:17)

they did and also for bringing together his coalition. In this shared sense of persecution, Donald

Matthew Umha (5:24)

Trump lost by 7 million votes and 306 electoral votes in 2020. And, I mean, kind of really immediately started to call the legitimacy of that result into question.

Donald Trump (5:34)

If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came.

Matthew Umha (5:47)

After his loss, Trump filed dozens of failed lawsuits and tried to recruit local and state officials to help him reverse outcomes. I think probably most notably, you know, asking Georgia Secretary of State, so, look,

Georgia Secretary of State (Brad Raffensperger) (5:58)

all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have because we won the state.

Matthew Umha (6:12)

His aides actually drafted executive orders to seize voting machines. And Trump himself was later indicted twice for efforts tied to trying to overturn that election. When you look back on that event now, how do you begin to make sense of it?

David A. Graham (6:26)

It's very hard. I mean, it's an amazing thing to have experienced, and it was one thing to watch it in real time and, and sort of see what Trump and his aides were doing. And given what we now know about the efforts they were. They were taking in private, it was really an elaborate, if not very well thought out, legal effort to try to subvert the election. So it's amazing that it happened. It's amazing that we lived through all of that. And then the other thing that is incredible is, after all of that, Trump faced no serious consequences. Uh, he escaped any legal jeopardy, uh, and in fact, he won reelection fairly and squarely after trying to subvert a vote.

Max Rushton (7:05)

So I.

David A. Graham (7:06)

It's a very singular thing, and I think really still boggles my mind.

Matthew Umha (7:09)

I mean, you know, also, you know, we're kind of talking about Trump's allegations of election fraud here, which have been obviously disproven through the courts. But I'm not sure that laypeople necessarily have the best sense of what some of these conspiracies and candidates that he's relied on actually are. Um, can you kind of walk me through some of the conspiracies that you've heard Trump and the. Those in his orbit rely on when talking about 2020?

David A. Graham (7:31)

There are a whole bunch, and one of the hallmarks of their strategy, I think, is to raise a lot of allegations with varying levels of evidence for them or persuasiveness and sort of see what sticks with people. So we have seen claims, for example, that there were election workers in places like Georgia who were adding votes, that there were, you know, boxes of ballots that were delivered later. We heard claims that voting machines had changed the tally. That was particularly tied to one county in Michigan where there was a. Just a. There was a glitch in reporting the results, then was seized on. We heard allegations in Arizona that there were Chinese ballots being mailed in. We had claims that Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, who was at the time dead, had somehow conspired to hack voting machines and change them. I think a lot of this comes down to what Rudy Giuliani, who was working as Trump's lawyer, said in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which is, we have lots of theories but not a lot of evidence. And that remains the case there. There are just all of these different ideas. And it also comes in a. I'd say in an environment where people, particularly on the right, have been claiming for years that there are supporters being bused in from other states to contested elections, or the Democrats are bringing in illegal immigrants to vote. There's a whole range of ideas floating out there.

Matthew Umha (8:57)

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's kind of worth noting that the Heritage foundation, which is a conservative organization in the US ran a study recently which found, I believe, 77 cases of illegal immigrants voting in American elections over the last five years. But kind of given all of these theories that you've just, you know, run us through here, you know, and the fact that so many of these theories have been disproven, you know, I mean, through the courts, through the press, but they still seem to retain a lot of purchase in the public. Why do you think that is?

David A. Graham (9:25)

I think one big thing is the voting system is kind of complicated and difficult to understand. There are a bunch of fail safes built into the way it works, but it is opaque. Most people, you know, they go to the polls and they cast their ballot and they don't think another thing about it, and they don't take the time to understand how the process works. And as a result, I think there has been not a lot of effort, necessarily, by officials to educate people on the process. And that lends itself to that kind of ignorance. Not in a negative sense, just the people not knowing lends itself to conspiracy theories. The other thing is you've got a media establishment that is happy to amplify these on the right. And I think about, you know, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Fox News, which had been very closely aligned with Trump, kind of turned against him and said, you know, these theories are not real. There's no evidence for this. And what we saw is the Audience from Fox started going to alternative channels that were willing to repeat the conspiracy theories. Fox saw their audience dropping and changed course. So you've got a kind of bubble that reinforces the idea, these ideas for people who support Trump and are maybe more willing to believe them.

Matthew Umha (10:47)

I want to dig into this notion that since his first day of his second term in office, Trump has been working to mitigate the possibility of another election loss. You know, in, in the last year, he's replaced all kinds of local officials with loyalists and election conspiracists. This includes people in pretty senior jobs like the Director of Election Security and Integrity and the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity. Trump has also launched a number of investigations into high profile political rivals. And it was also reported that he has discussed the fact election related prosecutions could be coming. I mean, you know, let's just kind of sit in that for a moment. You know, when there are full blown election conspiracists working as senior officials in the American government, you know, when, when the President is talking about election related prosecutions, what do you even begin to do about that?

David A. Graham (11:35)

You know, I think the first thing is to, to take a little bit of heart what one quirk of the American election system is how decentralized it is. So the President can make a lot of noise and he can put people in these positions that sound very influential, you know, Director of Election Integrity. But the actual federal role in elections is fairly small, especially for the President. So what he's looking to do is seize power to exert control he doesn't really have, and see if people will go along with it. But I think that, you know, that's an important thing to remember is that he just doesn't have a lot of role here. But I think it is really important to push back on these ideas and, and to be on guard for attempts to subvert the system, much like the ones we saw in 2020. But this time, it seems like he's much better organized and prepared.

Matthew Umha (12:22)

In an executive order last year, Trump asserted that mail in ballots which arrive after election Day would not legally be counted even if they were postmarked on time. In that same order, Trump also moved to decertify every voting machine in the United States and then recertify only those which met a very specific list of requirements. It should be said that both moves were denied by the courts. But what do you think he was trying to pass both of those orders into law in the first place?

David A. Graham (12:48)

I think Trump is trying to do two things. One of them is Potentially to affect the election itself. One thing we have seen consistently for years in the US Is something called the Blue shift, where initially results tend to look more Republican friendly. And then as more ballots come in, the, they move more towards Democrats, partly just because cities are heavily Democratic and there's a lot of people and they take longer to vote. But there's an idea particularly spread by Trump, that it's mail in ballots that are doing this. And some mail in ballots are allowed to come in in some states after election day if they're postmarked. So he's pushing back on that, and he's been suggesting, you know, the mail in ballots are, are susceptible to fraud, which is another idea that doesn't have a lot of evidence for it. So in some ways he wants to affect the way the election goes. But I also think he's laying the groundwork for claims that the election was fraudulent after the fact. So if he issues these orders and states continue to accept ballots after election day, or they use, you know, these voting machines that they've been using for a long time, then he's tried to decertify. He can say, look, we tried to tell you we tried to do something about this and nobody listened. And now the election has been stolen from us yet again. So I, I think a lot about it is sort of preparing a talking point for later.

Matthew Umha (14:02)

Yeah, I mean, the President has also expressed the desire to nationalize elections.

Georgia Secretary of State (Brad Raffensperger) (14:07)

The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting. The voting in at least many 15 places.

Donald Trump (14:16)

Take a look at Detroit, take a look at Pennsylvania, take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look at Atlanta. Look at some of the places that term horrible corruption on elections. And the federal government should not allow that. The federal government should get involved.

Matthew Umha (14:32)

What does that mean? And does it stand up to constitutional scrutiny?

David A. Graham (14:36)

It's a little hard to know what he means by that. And he will often speak in these kind of vague terms. You know, Congress could pass laws that exerted greater control over the way elections work. They certainly have that power. The President doesn't have the power to do that. But, but Congress has, and we've seen Congress do that in certain circumstances. You know, after the 2000 election, they passed a law that was meant to clarify and, and specify the way some of the, the way the process works. There's an important law passed in the 1990s that said people could register to vote when they applied for a driver's license, for example. But they don't control elections directly. And partly that's because the federal government simply doesn't have any kind of apparatus for that. I mean, there's no department that has the expertise to run all of the tiny elections on a county level that we have across the country. There's also political resistance. For a long time, mostly conservatives have argued that the federal government shouldn't be in the business of running elections, that it's dangerous to have that kind of power centralized. And you've heard people on the left saying that a national election system would be better. In the last couple years, in Trump's time, that has flipped. I now see progressives saying that the decentralized nature of the system is a real strength. And I hear Trump saying that we should have a single national system.

Max Rushton (16:02)

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Kathleen Goldhar (16:29)

You know that feeling when you reach the end of a really good true crime series. You want to know more, more about the people involved, where they the case is now and what it's like behind the scenes. I get that. I'm Kathleen Goldhar and on my podcast Crime Story, I speak with the leading storytellers of true crime to dig deeper into the cases we all just can't stop thinking about. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.

Matthew Umha (16:56)

I guess this now brings us to our present moment here and I think a good place to start is the recent FBI raid on an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia. Can you walk me through exactly what happened there?

David A. Graham (17:08)

Yeah. So Trump has been talking about Fulton County, Georgia since the election and claiming that there was sort of some sort of fraud. He filed lawsuits there to no avail. There's been no evidence to back that up. So we recently saw this raid and it was really surprising for a few reasons. First of all, the search warrant is premised on debunked information, so it's not really a valid claim for why they needed to raid a voting facility and to try to obtain a lot of this material from the 2020 election. Often magistrates will sign off on that sort of thing. They, you know, they tend to take the evidence that's given to them at face value. But in this case, it was not good evidence. It was filed by a US Attorney in another state. So a federal attorney, but a federal prosecutor. But who was assigned to do this, even though he is not local, which raises some eyebrows. The Director of National Intelligence was present there, even though she has no role in. In domestic election security. She called the President, and the President talked with FBI agents who were involved, which is a really surprising involvement of the president in what's supposed to be a law enforcement operation that's not political. And the pushback has come not just from Democratic election officials, but from Republican election officials. You know, local election officials, I think, take their jobs really seriously. They do make mistakes from time to time. Occasionally you have people who are prosecuted for from, you know, whatever misdeeds. But these people are really devoted public servants, and when they see the federal government reaching in and doing this sort of thing, look over their shoulder, it shakes them a little bit.

Election Facility Employee (18:43)

So basically, they just showed up. They said they had a warrant to pick up the 2020 ballot.

News Reporter (18:49)

In the video, employees appear to be confused as the FBI served the warrant at the office near Atlanta.

Election Facility Employee (18:54)

So you want to take up 700 boxes of Alice have at least so they can go play make paper airplanes for all I care. All right, that's pretty much it. So they just popped up. What's happening now is that their warrant is wrong. It had the wrong. It's not in elections possession, it's in clerks.

David A. Graham (19:10)

And we've heard pushback and real concern coming from election officials across the political spectrum about how this might affect the ability to conduct elections.

Matthew Umha (19:20)

I mean, you can. I know you mentioned there the. The presence of Tulsi Gabbard, who was the Director of National Intelligence. And I know that there was a lot of attention paid to her presence at this operation. I mean, ultimately, why do you think that she was there? Like, why. Why would the Director of National Intelligence be present for this kind of operation?

David A. Graham (19:38)

It's hard to find a good reason for. Is the case that Gabbard has been a proponent of claims of voter fraud in 2020. So it's in line with her sort of political interest. It's also coming at a time when Gabbard seems to have been a little bit on the political outs with Trump. You know, she is an opponent of a lot of foreign intervention, and she is in a case where. Where she's sort of at odds with Trump in Venezuela or in Iran. And I think there's an impression, fair or not, that this is a way for her to get back in. Trump's good graces by emphasizing some of her agreement with him. But I can't see any legitimate reason for her to be there. Foreign.

Matthew Umha (20:24)

Let's now talk about the midterms. So conservative operatives have hinted at the potential use of emergency powers like the Insurrection act come Election Day and the fact that something like that would give the president, you know, more broad authority. Trump has also said that he would accept the results of an upcoming election.

Donald Trump (20:40)

I will, if the elections are honest.

Matthew Umha (20:42)

Look, I want, and the quote, we shouldn't even have an election. Earlier this month, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem kind of added to these fears by saying, and I would

Kristi Noem (20:52)

say that many people believe that it may be one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust is reliable and that when it gets to Election Day, that we've been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country through the days that we have no, that people can trust it.

Matthew Umha (21:11)

That's why when you hear stuff like that said in such plain language, what's your reaction?

David A. Graham (21:16)

I think it's very worrying. You can, you know, you can look at Kristy Noam's comments and, and you could interpret them in a charitable way as meaning, you know, the right people voting means people who are legitimate voters. But when you say the right, the right leaders like that, or you, you hear these talk, I, I don't think there's any way to, to interpret it as a aspect, a positive thing. You know, this is a president who has complained about democracy and an administration that has fought back against the election administration for a long time. And they may not have the capacity to do much in this case, or they may not have the will, but they certainly don't have a lot of respect for the process. And I think that's, that's concerning.

Matthew Umha (21:53)

In a lot of the, you know, kind of reporting and writing and commentary about the midterms, there's been a lot of focus on the possibility of a militarized presence at voting stations across the country.

Steve Bannon (22:04)

President Trump has to nationalize the election. You got to put not just, I think ice, you got to call up the 82nd, 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act. You got to get around every poll and make sure only people with IDs, people are actually registered to vote and people that are nine states citizens vote

Matthew Umha (22:22)

in this election full stop or even seized voting machines. You know, and I know that Donald Trump has already said that he regrets not having seized voting machines. In 2020. You know, you've been reporting on election, elections and democratic freedom for, you know, a long time now. Is there any part of you preparing for a kind of, you know, worst case scenario here? And I wonder if so, what that scenario would look like.

David A. Graham (22:44)

Yeah, you know, when I started reporting more on this cycle, on what might happen, I viewed the possibility of military invention intervention as a kind of thing that was a sort of outside chance and not something I really needed to worry about. And then I started calling experts who, who I've talked to in the past who have tended to downplay fears, who have tended to be very sober and careful and not exaggerate. And they would repeatedly say, yeah, that's possible. We should be prepared for that. And so I'd say that that made me a lot more worried about the possibility. You know, it's legally complicated. There are laws that are intended to avoid direct interference. The government can't send armed men, as the law says, to, to polling places unless there's an active insurrection. So there's, you know, and there are state laws around these things that should constrict the way you do it. But people worry that there might be some sort of interference anyway, and that could be, you know, we already have seen the National Guard in the streets of some cities and cities are overwhelmingly Democratic. We've seen Trump talk about the Insurrection Act. We've seen obviously, major pro presence from people like ICE or the, or CBP in states. And those are the sorts of things that can be used to intimidate voters or to inconvenience voters or, or to, you know, cause problems with elections, even if people aren't directly interfering at the voting places. So there's that. And then you also have people like Steve Bannon, you know, close advisor of Trump in the past and still somebody with influence in his, you know, his circuit, saying that Trump should send ICE directly to the polls. They should absolutely do it and they should avoid some sort of theft. So, you know, this is something that local election officials are taking seriously and, you know, sort of election advocates are taking seriously is something they need to be prepared for as a possibility in November.

Matthew Umha (24:29)

When you say people are preparing for a militarized presence at the polls, what does that kind of preparation look like?

David A. Graham (24:34)

A lot of it is understanding what the law says about where, where people can be. It is making sure people know that they have the right to vote. People are, you know, local election officials are getting in touch with their city and county police departments to ensure that things stay calm to Ensure that people have, you know, the right cordons around things. I think a lot of it is they, they want to make sure that people are aware and, and they can try to mitigate that. So if, for example, if the military is blocking access to polls or making it hard to get to the polls, make sure people know about that, make sure that they vote ahead of time. They use things like mail in voting. So it's more about mitigation than anything else. As we've seen in Minnesota, it's very hard for a local law enforcement agency to resist the kind of military might of the federal government. They simply can't, you know, get into a, a shooting match with them.

Matthew Umha (25:35)

So I'd like to maybe take a little bit of a step back here and kind of, you know, take a more historical lens on this conversation a little bit. Voter suppression and disenfranchisement generally are, you know, like a central constellation in the American political story. This is something that both parties are implicated in, although to varying degrees. Voter suppression, for example, has had a really long and violent American history, which includes lynching and, you know, all, all kinds of racist political violence and intimidation. There's also a history of literacy tests and poll taxes and gerrymandering. How central would you say, though, that voter suppression has been to the history of elections in the United States? And what do you think are some of the key lessons to be learned from that history?

David A. Graham (26:17)

I think you can make an argument that voter suppression is more the, the rule than the exception throughout American history. You know, election advocates will say there's no such thing as a perfectly free and fair election, and the goal is to get you as close to that as possible. I think there are ways in which we've been taking steps back as a system in the U.S. the, you know, the Voting Rights act of 1965 is a really important piece of law that helped to push back on various voter suppression efforts, whether that was, you know, voter IDs at the polls or certain kinds of redistricting and gerrymandering. But the Supreme Court has been picking away at that and weakening it to a great degree. And so you see more states being able to do these things. We've also seen a growth of partisan gerrymandering driven by, you know, really specific map making and computer programs that have give a capacity that didn't exist in the past past. So it's an old school technique that is being adopted to the modern moment. And we've seen the Supreme Court say that it has no, no role in Policing partisan gerrymandering. So that's something that is growing a great deal. You know, the, the big things in this moment, I think, are voter ID laws, which you see in many states across the country and which are fairly popular. I think a lot of people believe that makes sense to have voter ID laws. The question is really how they're implemented and then gerrymandering. And that's something we've seen in many states. We're witnessing a partisan tit for tat going on where, you know, Trump pushed a bunch of Republican states to redraw their maps in ways that were more favorable.

Mark Warner (27:54)

The Supreme Court tonight and what appears to be a 6 to 3 ruling along ideological lines now allowing Texas to use a new congressional district map drawn to favor Republicans. New maps could help Republicans gain up to five more seats in the House in the midterms next year.

David A. Graham (28:11)

And we've seen Democratic states then respond

News Reporter (28:13)

by doing that, the Supreme Court is allowing the state to use a new congressional map for this year's midterms. The Trump administration and California Republicans had sued Governor Gavin Newsom, claiming the newly drawn map favored Hispanic voters.

David A. Graham (28:27)

In the case of California, they had to go to voters to overrule a, a body that voters had instituted to prevent this kind of partisan gerrymandering. So it does feel like a little bit of a race to the bottom between both parties right now.

Matthew Umha (28:40)

You've written about a phenomenon called competitive authorit. You know, in, in the context of these upcoming midterms, can you kind of walk me through what competitive authoritarianism is and kind of is in this context and why it's a particularly relevant framework to understand Donald Trump in this moment.

David A. Graham (28:57)

I found it really helpful to thinking about what a lot of the things that Trump does. We have this idea historically of what a dictator or a strong man is, and it's a, you know, really straightforwardly repressive environment. You ban opposition parties, you get rid of elections. You have a single media establishment that's run by the state. And we can think of lots of examples of these around the world in the 20th century. This is an idea that comes from the, the sort of end of the Cold War and originally was designed by political scientists to talk about countries in, in, for example, in the former Soviet Union. Now I think we're seeing it more in places like the US and the idea is you, you don't adopt those really heavy handed tactics, you don't ban opposition parties, you just make it a lot harder for them to win elections. And I think a lot of the things we're talking about Trump trying to do fit under that rubric. You don't get rid of elections altogether because that gets a lot of backlash, both domestically and overseas. You just make the elections harder. You don't ban the media altogether, but you, you sort of pressure the independent media and you try to put friendly operators in, in place who can give you more favorable coverage. So that's an example. We've seen that in, in Viktor Orban's Hungary. And I think you can look at the way Trump is attack, attacking media outlets, threatening them, but also working to install political allies as the owners of those outlets in the US Whether it's CBS or cnn fits into the same thing. And so there you, you're just sort of shifting the playing field and putting a thumb on the scales so that you may not win every election, but you will win many elections, and the opposition party will just really struggle to compete.

Matthew Umha (30:38)

You know, we've spent a lot of time in this conversation talking about Donald Trump and the Republican Party, the particular and unique risk posed by one party in the United States. In which case, I think the, you know, the natural question to ask here is probably whether or not you think the Democratic Party is up for the fight here. You know, I read one person in the Atlantic that, you know, the magazine that you work for who said, quote, republicans are over here being straight up mercenaries. Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work, life, balance. They are not built for when the fascists come. What do you make of that argument?

David A. Graham (31:10)

The Democratic Party has certainly seemed on the back foot for much of the Trump administration. And, you know, what the leaders will say is we're in a difficult position. We just don't have a lot of power because we don't control the Senate or the House or the White House or the Supreme Court. And it is true that that is a, that's not a strong position to be in, but they do seem to have been taken by surprise by some of the things that Trump has done and the Republicans have done. And I think that, you know, that is a, that's the worry that activists have. I think there is a, there's a real effort to be prepared for the midterms. And Democrats also feel that they have the edge in the midterms. And, you know, you mentioned earlier Trump saying there shouldn't be midterms because the president's party always does poorly. He understands that. They understand that. So they're looking forward to this as the chance to put, put some pressure on Trump to win the election and, and to regain some power. So I think they understand the, the existential stakes. But, you know, it's very hard to resist the kinds of things Trump is doing. What he's doing is using government power in ways that have traditionally been either illegal or have been, you know, viewed as inappropriate, and using that power against your opponents to make it hard for the opponents to have power. That's, that's a, that's an effective tool, and they need to come up with new ways to push back on it.

Matthew Umha (32:26)

I think just as a last question here, you know, we've done all kinds of episodes on this program about the way democracy has historically produced authoritarianism and fascism, how it has, through history, helped to facilitate its own destruction in many cases. Do you think that American democracy, you know, the system as it currently exists, has the capacity to withstand and resist the, the kinds of challenges that we've been outlining in this conversation?

David A. Graham (32:51)

I think it's too early to tell. We have seen some real signs of strength from the system. You know, the 2020 election was a test, and in many ways, the system passed it. Well, the, the, you know, Trump lost the election and left office. What came after that was more worrying, the lack of accountability. We have seen now Trump managing to sort of work around Congress, sideline a lot of the safeguards on him, but also losing a lot of cases in court. I think that 2026 midterms are going to be a really important moment to see just how strong the system is. If the system is able to hold this election in a fair way and whether Republicans or Democrats win, those people take power without major strife, without violence, without, you know, widespread issues. That will be a good test for whether the system is working. But even if it works in 2026, 2028 was going to be another important and probably even more important test. So I think what's scary is there's no chance really to take, take the foot off the, the accelerator here. People have to keep paying attention to this and working at it and defending institutions, and it's very hard to sustain that kind of effort over a long period.

Matthew Umha (34:01)

David, thanks so much for coming on the show.

David A. Graham (34:03)

My pleasure.

Matthew Umha (34:12)

That's all for today. I'm Matthew Umha. Thanks so much for listening.

David A. Graham (34:27)

For more cbc podcasts, go to cbc ca podcasts.