The US Midterms Will Decide If the 2024 Election Can Be Stolen

And in five key states where Trump tried and failed to overturn the results, the Republican nominees for governor and other important jobs overseeing elections are pushing changes to how elections are run and how votes are counted, and if they succeed, it could be easier to change the outcome if Trump or another candidate tried to do it again. In Well, there's no question that they rigged the election.

There's no question that they said about changing the rules of game of the game three months out and they gave us mail in balloting and we have no voter. I d that was Adam Laxall, the Republican Senate nominee

in Nevada. It was candidates like him that led a team of Bloomberg reporters to have fan out across the country to try to figure out how vulnerable the states are to having their election results overturned, including how state lawmakers have changed laws around voting and elections since, and whether election officials and candidates for important offices say they'll respect the outcome. In candidates like Tutor Dixon, who's running for governor in Michigan, they wouldn't have voted to have

other people influenced this election. I think there were too many opportunities for fraud and that Democrats took advantage of the fact that we were in the middle of a pandemic. From all this reporting, Bloomberg created an election risk index, which assesses what the candidates might do if they win office. People like Kerry Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. It's really really game over for those spinalist politicians who stood by and they didn't do a damn thing for us.

They sat there, they did nothing as our elections were stolen from us. And Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, most of the bad things sadly happened

in Philadelphia. We see bags and bags of ballots showing up with without any good chain of custody, and all this smells very rotten and something's gone wrong To short off this out, I'm here with Ryan t back with one of the reporters on the Election Risk project, and later in the show, we're gonna speak with Mario Parker, Bloomberg's politics editor, Ryan You, and reporter Bill Elsen, who was your partner on this project, along with a whole

lot of other journalists in Bloomberg bureaus around the country. You set out to answer this deceptively difficult ship, How sound is America's election system? How do you even go about trying to measure something as elusive as that. What we came up with was a set of criteria for each state that we looked at where we could kind of break it down to yes, simple yes, no questions, do they have this or not? And we looked at voting access first of all, um regisuring and voting, and

then second of all, we looked at ballot security. What is ballot security? You know, how do they count the votes? How is secure or the voting machines? That a lot of the things that people have been calling election integrity. We're trying to kind of shy away from that because it's become such a politicized term, But you know, is

is it being counted like accurately and quickly? I think those two things have always been kind of like when any changes to election law were made, they usually included some voter access and some ballot security measures combined, and we wanted to make sure that we were capturing both of those um And then for the third was like what are the people who are running to oversee election, Like, what are the governors and secretaries of state and attorney generals?

What are they saying? What did they say about the election? And then we looked at all of the laws that were being proposed in all fifty states, and there were a lot of them. Yeah, I mean there's thousands. Uh, there was more laws proposed in this two year period since the election by an order of magnitude than in any previous two year two years after an election for

like the last twenty years. So definitely like a ton of interest in this and both Democrats and Republicans, and in some ways, like voting is actually easier in a lot of parts of the country than before for two reasons. One is that during the pandemic, a lot of states experimented with things like early voting um or letting people register online and things like that because of the pandemic, and when they try those they were popular, and so

they continued with them. In other cases, I think that former President Donald Trump's attacks on voting and attacks on vote by mail and attacks on the election inspired democ rats the sort of rally around those, And so you saw a lot of states, particularly in the Northeast, like New York, put a lot more energy into trying to make it easier to vote, make it easier to register. So really like overall, like it's easier to vote in

most parts of the country. And yet, Yeah, there's a big and yet in your story, which is that even though it is unexpectedly, according to your reporting, easier to vote in a lot of places, and that this year's elections are likely to be okay. Um that maybe some candidates will claim they won when they lost. By and large,

the two midterm elections are gonna be okay. But depending on who wins this time around, especially in important keys states, could determine whether or not the election is going to

be free and fair. When we looked at what officials have had to say, what people who are running for key offices have to say, we found two hundred and fifty eight people who are either currently holding office or running and have been nominated for an office governor, secretary of state, attorney general, or US House and US Senate who are election deniers. So that's two hundred and fifty

eight people. We published a story noting how many people were on that list, and we had to update it literally like within a day because there was another two people who'd been nominated r And one thing you found was that in five key swing states, and these are

the states that tend to decide presidential elections. And tell me if I'm going to name them all right, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada and also sort of toss up state of Pennsylvania, the candidates for governor, Republican candidate for governor and or secretary of States. Some of them have kind of multiple candidates deny that Joe Baden won the election, and have in one way or another said that they would take steps to correct what they see as election fraud in

election if you should rise right. So the concerning thing there is that what we didn't see in the election, Trump and his allies pushed back in a lot of ways, but when push came to shove, local and state officials didn't go along with their sort of schemes. It was

Republican officials. You know, a lot of case Republicans and a lot of cases these were die hard Trump loyalists who said, I just can't go along with this, right, And I don't know that that's going to be the case if Trump or someone else tries a similar effort next time. At least among these governors, uh, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania's probably the one who did the most, both behind the scenes and as a state lawmaker to try to further Trump's attempts to overturn the election in that state.

And in his subernatorial campaign he has said things like he wants to de certify all of the voting machines. We saw Governor Wolf de certified every single machine in the state twenty nineteen. We can do the same. And you have a Secretary of State candidate Mark Fincham. State Representative Mark Fincham is calling for statewide door to door voter verification in Arizona. He is running for secretary of State right now and as a strong supporter of former

President Donald Trump's unproven claims of widespread voter fraud. If they're elected, paint is a picture of what Arizona looks like in the next two years and what the state's laws would look like. On the eve of the election, Arizona state lawmakers are not anxious to completely upend their very popular vote by mail system based on you know, conspiracy theories and complaints um from a fraction of voters.

But you could see a lot of The secretary of state, for example, in most states certifies which voting machines can be used. So if you are the secretary of state in your an election denier, you could simply pick, you know, the machines that are used by counties that you don't like that tend to go for you know, the other party, and you could just simply de certify all as machines. So suddenly those counties have to spend a bunch of money on their own because they're generally bought by the

local officials to buy new machines. In fact, Maricopa County had to buy new machines because that cyber Ninjas audit of Maricopa County in Arizona was so poorly run that they didn't have chain of custody of the machines, and they couldn't keep using the machines because they couldn't say that they hadn't been tampered with. You could do things like, you know, try to kick more people off of the voter rules as Secretary of State through really aggressive purge.

So just even creating sort of an air of chaos around you know, when and how elections are conducted could be enough to really make it harder for people to vote. So given all of that, Ryan, how concerned should people be about the integrity of the next presidential election? The thing is is there are so many election deniers running for so many offices that some of them, statistically speaking, some of them are going to win. I think that some of the people who have staked out the most

extreme positions on this are going to lose. And that's largely because they've also staked out extreme positions on other issues that are more salient to voters, and I think may end up hurting them more. You know, But some of these people are going to get in there. I mean, when you look at the Senate, you know, a lot of the Republicans who did not go along with Trump's

efforts are retiring. So like Rob Portman of Ohio, the Republican nominee in the state is J. D. Evance, who has endorsed election denial, and Senate nominees in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and New Hampshire who have all denied the election was free and fair. And that's a lot of people, and some of them are going

to win. And so you know what happens if some of these governor nominees win, and some of these secretary of state nominees win, and some of these Senate nominees win, you know the next time that you see a similar effort to what Trump tried and so far, I would say if you were a major party nominee. And you know, there's really been very little downside for Trump himself to have tried to contest the election. So I don't think that this is the last time that an election is

going to be contested. And given the number of people who are running for office, the odds that it may come down to one of these people are are good, and that's concerning. The laws don't concern me as much as the people do. You just don't know what they may do the next time they're faced with that question. Ryan, you've given us a lot to think about, So thanks for that. We're gonna keep you in the chair just

a little bit longer. When we come back from the break, we are going to ask you what we should be looking for in this year's midterm elections. Ryan, you've given us a pretty sobering overview of how all these potential changes to laws and candidates could affect the U S elections. But what about this year's mid term elections that are

coming up in November? What are the places right now that people who are watching this election should keep an eye on for uh, looking at election interference, other election problems and what that might mean. So, there's three laws that have been passed since the election which I think you can already see an effect from which could be

decisive enough to decide a close race. Um. The first is in Texas, they passed a law that said you need to put some kind of voter i D number on a vote by mail ballot, and that number had to either be your driver's license number or you're such security number. And they were warned when they passed this law that the state database only has one of those numbers.

It doesn't have both, because you only needed one to sign up to vote, And in some cases, you might have signed up to vote a long time ago and your driver's license number has changed because you've moved. And why did they do this, Well, this is one of those things where in the abstract and the hypothetical, it's actually a better law than the alternative, which is signature verification. Um Signature verification has been shown to be extremely problematic.

A lot of young black and Hispanic voters have their signatures rejected at a higher rate, and so I'm not really a fan of signature verification than numerical i D works in a lot of states where it's used, and it's not really a problem. But the reasoning behind all of this is presumably to prevent fraud, right, I mean, the reason to pass this is that there's a theory that you know, people are sending in fraudulent mail and ballots, and again there's not really evidence that there's a lot

of that happening. But I think it's fine for a state to require some kind of I D verification and loss of states to do that. But what happened in Texas was that if you put the wrong number to verify, then it was thrown out, even if it was legitimate ballot, because they had no way to verify that number. They only had the other number. And so this is just incredibly poor execution of an otherwise fine law um they had. In the primary, they had twelve percent of mail ballots rejected.

That's three thousand ballots statewide that were thrown out. The national average for an election is about one percent of mail ballots are rejected, which is actually still probably includes a lot of people whose ballots were legit, they just were thrown out. That's a really, really bad rejection rate

to be twelve times the national average. And if an election came down to a few thousand votes and you were throwing out, you know, and that's a primary, so so you can imagine it's gonna be higher than twenty three in November, that could be bad. Does that mean that the twelve percent are people who put down a wrong number? And therefore you could argue that it was a front know, they that's the that's the correct number.

They put down their driver's license number, but the system only had their so security number, and so it was flagged as we can't verify this, and it was thrown out. I mean, that's that's not a fraudulent ballot. That's not a ballot that you know, should be rejected under the state's own laws. It's just that they enacted this law without you know, updating the database and putting the effort

into actually making sure that this would work. And these ballots are disproportionately democratic because Democrats are much more likely to vote by mail right now in Texas. Uh So in the primary, there's a lot more Democratic ballots and Republican ballots that were thrown out. So that was really problematic. So, I mean raises the question. I don't know if you have the answer. The Republicans know that this would mostly affect Democrats, and is there reasonably that that's behind it

or is that just an effect of it? You know, vote by mail historically has not been partisan. It's not been something that either party had a consistent advantage in any state. There were some states where Republicans were more likely to take advantage of it. Republicans being older and less likely to move around, it's tended to be a little bit more friendly to Republican voters. And some states, like in Florida, they have a really good system for sort of getting out the vote through vote by mail.

Since Trump's attacks on vote by mail, Republicans are much less likely to indicate that they want to vote that way, and Democrats are much more likely to indicate that they do want to vote that way. So I think a lot of these laws that are seeking to limit vote by mail are sort of predicated on the idea that it's more popular Democrats. That's not necessarily true, but it was true in the primary in Texas this time around. A Texas makes that's really hard to vote by mail.

So this is just a fraction of votes. You have to have an excuse or be over the age of sixty five in Texas to vote by mail. So it's not a ton of ballots, but if you're throwing out twelve percent of them, you know, in a very close race, that could make a difference. So there's Texas. You said,

there are two other states. Yes, the other one that's the most concerning is going on right now in Georgia, where a law passed since the election makes it dramatically easier for people to come in and basically say I think that this person is not a registered voter, or like who is a registered voter is not valid and should be kicked off the voter rules. And so a group affiliated with some allies of Donald Trump has gone

into various counties. They went into Gwynette County, which is formally Republican part of the state this now trending democratic, and they challenged the voter registrations of thirty seven thousand people. What was the basis for saying they identified those particular people. Yeah, so under the voter at law, it's actually kind of hard to remove someone from the voter rules. It has

to be done under certain circumstances. So there's a lot of times where someone has moved to a new state, they'll remain on the old states voter rules and tell either the state, you know, get some kind of notification that you know they've moved, or they don't vote and they show up as inactive and then they get sent up postcard and if they don't respond to the postcard, then they're finally be canceled, but it can take years for that process to play out, so there's always some

dead weight on the voter rules. So the risk is that along with people who maybe shouldn't be on the voter rules in Georgia anymore, are a lot of people who do live in Georgia should be able to vote

in Georgia but are now being disqualified. Right. There's a reason why they typically wait to clean the voter rules until the January following a major federal election, and that's because it's bad to take someone off who should be allowed to vote, because someone who's legally valid and just hasn't voted in a while because they just weren't inspired by the candidates, or they got busy, or they forgot, and then they decide, now this is the time I'm

going to vote. And they show up to vote and they can't and Georgia doesn't have same day voter registration, so they're out of luck. And the last state is Florida. Never a shortage of drama there, I will say Florida. After the two thousand election where everything kind of came down to Florida and all eyes were on Florida really cleaned up its laws and and overall its voting laws are pretty good and they really didn't want to tinker

with them too much. Then, ain change that they made that was problematic since the election was that the Governor, Rhonda Santis, asked for a special election crimes police task force kind of agency that reports directly to him. And what is it that this uh police force is going to do. Well, what they're supposed to do is look for people who voted fraudulently, people who voted twice, you know, voter registrations that people who have broken some kind of

voting law. And yeah, the particular reason why it was flag is problematic was just that they report directly to the governor. And so, sure enough, a couple of days before the primary, Florida Governor Rhonda Santis held a press conference in which he said, well, you know, I'm announcing that we're charging a bunch of people around the state with crime of voting, even though they are felons and

aren't allowed to vote. And normally I've been to a lot of these kinds of press conferences in the past. Usually they're done by an attorney general, and usually if it was something as sensitive as like voter fraud, they wouldn't do it three days before I Mary, and this was very much not did not follow that rule. He did not name who the people were, He didn't say where they were from. He just sort of insinuated that they were from more democratic areas of the county. He

went to a democratic county to make the announcement. People in the state, voting right advocates in the state said that, you know, doing this just before an election is kind of an effort to intimidate people who you know, may be unsure if they can vote. And it's particularly fraught in Florida because voters actually passed a referendum to restore voting rights cuffelons, which the state legislature and to Santist then undermined by sort of complicating the process for doing that.

So there may be a lot of people who are really uncertain of whether they can vote, and by holding this announcement, by doing this, you know, he sort of made some of those people more fearful of voting. The other reason why I was problematic is that, you know, as it came out, like who these people were, like a lot of their cases were you know, they were told by elections officials that they could out. You know, in one case they were sort of directly handed a

forum and said here, sign up to register. It's fine. And so those cases really weren't as strong as he made them sound. So then, of course RU understanders widely thought to have his own eye on the White House, right, And I think that that's the other reason why he did this, was just that it allows him to show himself as being tough on election and security, and right now, that's something that a lot of Republican office holders and nominees want to do. Thanks so much to Ryan tu

Backw for joining me. After the break, I speak to Mario Parker, Bloomberg's US politics editor. He'll tell us about the latest in key races around the country. With just one week to go before election day, I'm here with Blomberg's politics edator, Mario Parker. Mario, we've been talking all about the mid terms, how election deniers could possibly disrupt a whole lot of things in this election and the next.

But election day this year is fast approaching. Can you just kind of give us a lay of the land of what to expect, because it just seems completely upside down out there. Well, that's absolutely it is upside down is an app description. I think what's troubling from the election integrity perspective is the fact that a lot of

these races are so close. Right, if they were looking to be blowouts, well, that temper is maybe the expectations that someone may be able to deny the results of the election, right, but the close races kind of signaled it. At least they'll have a pathway to making those type of arguments, whether they're salient or not. So here are the races that are going to be crucial to determining

control of Congress. In Pennsylvania, we've got Democrat John Fetterman against Republican of med Oz who was backed by former President Donald Trump. Ump In Georgia, we have herschel Walker, backed by former President Donald Trump as well, facing golf against incumbent Democrats Senator Raphael Warnock. Similar races are taking place in Wisconsin with incumbent Senator Ron Johnson against Democrat

Mandela Barnes. Arizona has another Trump backed Republican and Blake Masters, who was facing golf against incumbent Democrat U S Senator

Mark Kelly. So those are some of the close races to watch in addition to Nevada, where you have incumbent Democrats US Senator Katherine Quartets Mastow facing off against another correct me if you heard this before, another Trump endorsed candidate, and Adam lex I just wanted everybody know because you can't see this, but Maria just did all that at the top of his head without looking at an your note, So kudos to you. And one of the things that we've seen a lot of these races, as you say,

there closed, but it wasn't that close. And a lot of the races not so long ago, even just a few weeks ago, some of these races of Titan. What happened that made a Republicans kind of pull up to Democrats who not so long ago looked like they were gonna win. Talking to Democrats six weeks ago, Oh, they were exuberant. He talked to him earlier this year. They

were pretty glow. And why were they exuber They were exuberant if you were called that was off the heels of a couple of things happened during the summer that turned the tide for Democrats. You had the rollback of

Roe versus Way that really ignited the base. Then you had former President Donald Trump back in the news with the search of his property in mar Lago, whether or not he was keeping state secrets there as well, And so that's just a gift for Democrats, right, So they felt like they were gonna get a little bit of momentum.

Maybe they wouldn't keep the House because in the mid term elections, the party of the president often loses, but maybe it wouldn't be a total blowout, right, because it wouldn't be a total blowout, it wouldn't be the red wave that they thought there was coming for them. About a year ago after the Virginia gubernatorial election in which Republican and former Carlisles Co CEO Glenn Young Can upset Terry mccauloff, who was a big deal in Democratic circles.

So what changed from there because that kind of winding their sales where they're all feeling pretty good about a bad situation now kind of feels more like they're feeling bad about what looks like it's going to be a bad situation. Yeah, just a couple of things happened. Donald Trump isn't in the news as much now, that's relative, right, So as much as he was in August. In September,

uh Democrats went all in on the rollback of abortion rights. Really, if you look at some of the ads the Democrats are running, he likened it to squeezing all the juice out of that limit per se, right. And then Republicans really harped on crime, the post pandemic, rising crime. And you're saying that they that was an effective cudgel. In Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes had been pulling quite well against Ron Johnson. It eroded his lead. Same thing in Pennsylvania, same thing

in Georgia. And so when you look towards election night, and that's gonna be a hectic night for you, how do you see things shaping up? Now? One of the things we have to get comfortable with. And we saw some of this in that we didn't really expect. It's just a prolonged amount of uncertainty. We may just not know who controls the Senate for sure, as you mentioned, was the House is a little bit more clear, but

more challenging for them in the Senate races. And when it's all said and done, um, who do you think controls the Senate? And who do you think controls the hopps. Oh, I wish I had that crystal ball. All right, Uh, but I won't didge your question. And on this one. A few weeks ago, as I mentioned, Democrats maybe could have held onto their majority, picked up one seat Republicans.

Right now, I think that dynamic has flipped right where Republicans feel like it could be worst case scenario for them. It could be a draw. We stayed deadlocked with the Senate, and maybe they pick up a seat. It's funny. We had a reporter out with Joe Manson, senator from West Virginia, who has really stemmied parts of Biden's agenda, and he essentially said something like he's praying to God that it's not fifty fifty because then we just have a deadlock

for the next two years heading into the presidential election. Well, if the Republicans are able to somehow November eight fulfill right their goal of having some sort of rare wave where they take the House and are able to at least take a slight majority in the Senate, maybe they pick up one seat. If it's a great night for them, maybe they pick two stints. Right, maybe they pick up Pennsylvania,

Georgia and Arizona. Right, that's the type of wave of moments and that they're hoping to catapult them to the White House in Mario. Parker, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks a lot, West, great to be with you. You can check out Bloomberg's complete election night coverage and I mean complete maps and results, reporting, analysis, everything you want and need to know. That's all on Bloomberg dot com. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take,

the daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app podcast or wherever you listen. Read today's story and subscribe to our daily newsletter at Bloomberg dot com slash Big Take, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervisor producer of The Big Take is Vicky Bergalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our

producers are Moe Barrow and Michael Falero. Hilda Garcia is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take