A Low-Turnout Election is Solvable (Even During COVID-19)

suddenly shifted. You know, you don't want a governor being able to say, oh, I'm going to postpone an election. I mean, we've had elections in this country under all kinds of dire circumstances, wars and in fact pandemics in the past. But having the paper ballot, having that backup so that you can do an audit, so that you can see if there was fraud, so that you can do a recount, that turns out to be the best

system of all. Is there an argument other than the purely partisan one that more voting may advantage one party versus the other, You're more likely to be struck by lightning than commit in person voter impersonation in the United States. But there are other real hurdles to this year's election.

With millions of Americans vulnerable to a deadly pandemic, social distancing measure is now a familiar part of life, and the country facing what is perhaps the largest economic crisis in its history, the challenge of securing a safe election with high rates of participation is huge. We can have an election that is participatory with robust turnout in twenty twenty. This is a solvable problem. Michael Waldman is the author of the book The Fight to Vote. He's the president

of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU. It's a nonpartisan law and policy institute that focuses on improving systems of democracy. Waldman is an expert in the practicalities of the democratic process. He's identified some straightforward solutions to this year's election challenges. My solvable is having an election that is safe and secure and fully participatory in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and Mike, we can't really predict

what it's going to be like in November. What are the main things we as a country and as states need to do. Well, You're right that we don't know what it's going to be like in November. The bottom line is we need to upgrade how we run elections in the United States for twenty twenty, so that people have the option of voting by mail, so that there are safe in person options and ample early voting, so that people can register to vote safely, and so that

we count the ballots in a careful way. Recognizing that everything's changed, vote by mail seems like a pretty simple and obvious solution. I mean, I understand their legal obstacles in some states and their funding obstacles, but in your ideal world, wouldn't we just send a prepaid ballot to everybody who's registered and encourage them to vote that way. Well, a lot of states already run their elections by vote by mail, Western states, especially like California and Oregon and

Washington and Colorado and Utah. That's pretty much how people vote right now. It will be impossible to imagine the whole country moving to vote by mail in November. What we can do in the meantime is make it so that people are notified of their opportunity to get a ballot, and that they don't need an excuse, they don't need the doctor's note, and we have every reason to think that most people right now will want to vote that way. Yeah.

I mean, you wrote a whole book about the history of voting in the expansion of voting rights in this country. The thing I don't understand about it older people who tend to be more conservative, tend to vote with the Republicans, are the most in need of remote voting options and the most in jeopardy from having to go out to vote in person. Yet it seems to be conservatives who are fighting the vote by mail things. So can you

explain that to me? Well, you know, there's lots of things when it comes to voting that are controversial where there have been partisan fights. If you think about something like the debate over what kind of voter ID makes sense, that's pretty intense and has been in a kind of Democrat, Republican left right way. Vote by mail has not been one of the controversial things. The further away you get from the Fox News set or I guess the White

House podium, the less partisan this is. Trump first said out loud what you're really not supposed to say, which is oh, we'll get levels of voting that are so high that we'll never win. And then after a few days he realized he'd gone off script, and what he said is, oh, I'm very worried about the specter of voter fraud. But he really made clear the goal was to restrict the electorate, but started drama. But that's my question.

Is it possible that he's wrong? That is, in general terms, more people voting might advantage Democrats, but in specific terms, a lot of the things Democrats are advocating right now might just advantage Republicans. More political scientists say that it hasn't affected one party or another, that vote by mail hasn't benefited one party or another. Republican campaigns and Democratic

campaigns are organizing voters to vote by mail. It hasn't stopped the Republican Party of Florida from pouring a lot of energy into organizing people by vote by mail. That's what's weird about this is vote by mail was probably one of the least partisan and least divisive issues in the whole voting area. And that is one one thing

that I think is pretty hopeful. I mean, you say this, but we saw this play out in a seemingly just crazy and somewhat vicious way in Wisconsin, where democratic governor said, we're having a pandemic, let's extend, let's delay the election briefly, and let's have vote by mail. And I guess it's a Republican legislature and a conservative dominated state courts forced the election to happen, and there were these scenes of you know, people feeling very imperiled going out to vote

in masks and so on. I mean, what happened there. People were so angry about their right to vote being taken away or about their health being put at risk, that they voted in greater numbers than anybody expected. One thing that happened is people in the state it wisconstant is one of those states that elects their state Supreme

Court justices as much of the country does. The more progressive candidate won that race in a blowout in a way that nobody expected, and people being angry about what was happening with the voting seemed to be one of the reasons. Well, that's really interesting point, Michael. I mean, there is as part of an American history, you know, your vote acquires meaning in proportion to the effort by other people to deny you the right to vote. You know, you don't want a governor being able to say, oh,

I'm going to postpone an election. I mean, we've had elections in this country under all kinds of die or circumstances, wars and in fact pandemics in the past, very tough circumstances, and we've always done it. We had an election in eighteen sixty four during the Civil War. Lincoln felt it was extraordinarily important to keep going and have the election, and it was actually the case that his victory speech was about why the significance of not letting the rebellion

stop our elections. We had an election in nineteen eighteen. Turnout dropped and they had a lot of the same issues now and people wearing masks. But in the middle of the Spanish flu in nineteen forty two, when millions of people were caught up in World War Two, we ran elections. We've always had the steps taken that had to happen to make it so people could vote under the craziest of circumstances. We've never had a president basically saying out loud that he sees an opportunity to shrink

turnout because of the crisis for political reasons. That has never happened before, and that would be really destructive if we let that guide. What we do as a part of assuring a fair election is making sure that you have technology that works that doesn't enable fraud or you know, just miscount votes, as of course we've dealt with in several recent elections. When we were kids, you know, we

there was different technology from voting. I some of my favorite early memories are going with my parents in Chicago to vote on those giant machines, you know, with the curtain and they pulled the enormous lever and you know, my my parents would let me flick the little metallic levers to choose your candidate. And actually they still have machines when I go to vote in New York, but there are little machines and they they have this opti scan card. But you know, what's how does technology play

into all of this? There was there was in you know, a lot of the country's history, a lot of fraud in voting. And one of the solutions has been technology. And you know, one of my earliest powerful memories around democracy about things that got me really interested in this whole thing is going with my parents to do this very sacramental thing where you not only could flick the switch, but you got to pull a lever to open the curtain,

which meant the vote had been cast. The machine itself was considered a technological solution back in the late eighteen hundreds. It appears, you know, when you would go on election day and stand down at the river, you would see boxes floating on the river because the Democrats had gone to the Republican precincts and taken the boxes and throwing them in the river. And the Republicans had gone to the Democratic precincts and thrown them in the river. So

they had basically they needed a technological fix. They said, we need a new voting system, a new voting machine. And the key specification was it had to be too heavy to pick up and throw in the river. And for all the problems with those machines, they were always too heavy to throw in the river, and it is the case that they were often prone to error or miscounting. The best way to have votes counted is with a

paper ballot and counted by these machines. But having the paper ballot, having that backup so that you can do an audit so that you can see if there was fraud, so that you can do a recount. That turns out to be the best system of all, and we've evolved toward that even in this pandemic. That's what we've got. So let's talk about the solutions for twenty twenty. You know, the COVID election, as I'm sure it will go down in the history books. What are the key things that

we need to do to make this election work? Most important thing is to have everybody have access to vote by mail, and the polls show that most people now expect to and want to be able to vote by mail this year. In addition to that, there are a lot of people who want to or need to vote in person, a lot of communities where the mail doesn't work so well. So what that means is you need safe in person voting, especially lots of early voting opportunities.

We also need to make sure that these in person polling places are sanitary, for example, having masks and PPP for poll workers. It means having sanitation, and means having enough polling sites so open, early enough and early voting so that people can spread out their times when they go and stand online if they need to, in a way that's safe. You're saying the poll workers won't be able to share donuts in the usual way. You know, a lot of poll workers do it for the donuts.

Let's be that's not really quite right. But the poll workers are very you know a lot of the poll workers are very dedicated. They've been doing it for years. They're often senior citizens. But this year we may need to make sure that there are the right number of people who can show up safely to run places. We

have to change also how we register voters. Expand online voter registration, which a lot of states have, because you know, this year, people aren't going to be getting registered to vote with people standing in shopping centers with clipboards, and we did see voter registration rates of new voters collapse in March and April of this year. Whatever the results are an election night aren't going to be the final results because the states that vote by mail just take

longer to count the ballots. States need to change their counting systems so that deadlines are going to shift because it takes longer to count paper ballots, and we have to have a real public education campaign to teach people how they can do it now it's different from what they're used to. All of these things can be done. They've all been done somewhere. That's why it's a solvable This is a solvable problem. We can have an election

that is participatory with robust turnout in twenty twenty. But we've got to act. And what help do the states need? I mean, there's been discussion of congressional funding for vote by mail efforts and for some of these procedures that are needed to make in person voting safer. Do they really need a lot of money? And are we going to have an issue with supplies the way we did early in the crisis around PPP and masks. You know, is there enough watermarked paper for all these mail ballots

or you know the technology around vote by mail? Do we have the supplies and equipment? The main thing they need is money. They need help from the federal government. Only the federal government can spend right now, states many of them have balanced budget requirements, and so that's why these stimulus bills and the ability of the federal government

to spend and provide resources is so important. The Brennan Center has calculated that what will need to happen will cost up to four billion dollars in twenty twenty, and Congress past in appropriation for the first four hundred million dollars. Congress has to act, and if Congress doesn't act, it is going to be very hard for states to do what they want to and need to do. Time is really really of the essence. There are deadlines, there are

supply chain issues. Election officials can't just walk into a Staples in October and buy a bunch of scanners to look at the voting machines. They have to order them now. And there are really tight deadlines. So one of the terrible things would be if we woke up in a few months and realized that we needed to do this but that the window to do it had closed. How

worried should we be about the post Office? The post Office is going to run out of funding if something isn't done and September and the President again is sort of seems to see the post Office as part of, you know, this thing that's going to enable people to vote more than he wants them to, you know. And I was also amazed to learn reading about this that mail in ballots don't come post paid. That is, you

need a stamp. And you know, I don't know your children are a little older than mine, but you know, people who are voting for the first time are often not familiar with the technology of mail and stamps as things you need to have to mail letters. Yeah, I mean, the post office is running out of money. We think it's important that postage be prepaid. Also, a lot of people are kind of nervous about sticking a ballot in a mailbox you know, is going to really go where

I want it to go. So a lot of places that do vote by mail, people get the ballots at home, but they can drop them off at their convenience, in a secure and guarded box, you know, at a government office. And that is actually how a lot of people vote. It's really voted home rather than vote by mail alone. By how will we know whether we've solved this problem? One measure will simply be whether people feel safe and secure and that they've been able to vote and their

votes have been counted. You know, Should we be judging it by turnout? I mean, we've had this big oscillation and turnout in American elections is there a turnout level that will say to us, we've succeeded in twenty twenty. In twenty fourteen, we had the lowest voter turnout in seventy two years. It was for a mid term, but that's how you do the comparison. That was like a real sign of a withdrawal of public trust, of disaffection. But in twenty eighteen, we had the highest voter turnout

in a century. People were reacting to Trump, people were voting supporting Trump. They were certainly kindled in their activism and a real surge and youth voting and other things to repudiate and protest Trump. So this was gonna be We were all preparing for the highest turnout record high turnout in twenty twenty. If there's a collapse in turnout, that is not going to be because people just don't

care whether Trump gets reelected. We'll also know if people are having to stand in line in very unsafe situations. You know, this election is already so much distrust and so much anger and so much misinformation. We can't allow anything to happen that's going to just make people distrusted even more. Think now about the scenes from the Michigan State House militia members carrying AR fifteens have invaded the state House and actually stop the state legislature from doing

its work. It's the most shocking thing you can imagine. It's shocking, and we're going to have a risk of seeing too much of that kind of thing if people don't trust how the elections are being run and if they unfold in chaos in November. I'm very worried about this kind of thing, Mike. To wrap up, I wanted to ask you a little bit about what listeners can do, and in particular, if you are really concerned about the safety and security of the election in twenty twenty, should

you focusing your efforts locally or nationally. First of all, speak out, let your members of Congress know that they should put aside the partisanship and support the resources for states to be able to do this, and let people in state capitals know the same thing this year too. There's individual steps that people can take. Find out and make sure you are registered. Most states have the ability

to do that through a website online. You want to make sure that you're not purged from the voter rolls or that something hasn't happened so that it's all going to be very different now, and you want to make sure you're registered. Find out also what the deadlines are forgetting an absentee ballot or a mail ballot, if that's what you want to do. It's not going to just show up most of the time in your mailbox and you fill it out. You've got to ask for it.

We can help our parents do that if they need the technological help, but we all have a big responsibility. Yeah, but is there a legitimate other side to this issue? I mean, when I hear you talking, this stuff seems so obvious. We should make it possible for people to vote. We should make it easier for people to vote, should be safe for people to vote. More people should vote.

Is there an argument other than the purely partisan one that more voting may advantage one party versus the other, against the kinds of things that Brennan Center advocates in terms of expanding voting rights. You know, the notion that everybody who's eligible should be able to vote is in many ways at the heart of our civic religion. It's

it's it's a core patriotic, widely shared view. You hear arguments that voting is a privilege, not a right, but the right to vote is actually in the Constitution, mentioned five times in the amendments. It's something we all really

believe in. It As America, you also hear people say that they're worried about election integrity and voter fraud, and it's really important that we have elections that are reliable and that we have election integrity, and that means, among other things, focusing on the real threats such as cybersecurity.

And we know that Russia in twenty sixteen try to get into the election systems in all fifty states, and this time there's every reason to worry that Russia or other countries or other malevolent actors will be doing the same thing. So it's not that there aren't risks of misconduct in fraud. It is not the case that millions of illegal voters are magically and mysteriously voting. And when you look at all the research, voter fraud is vanishingly rare.

You're more likely to be struck by lightning than commit in person voter impersonation. In the United States, that worry is addressable and is overwhelmed by the need to make sure that everybody who's eligible to vote can vote. To me, that's the only legitimate way to run an election. Mike, is great to see you via zoom, and I want to thank you for joining us Unsolvable. Thank you. That was Michael Waldman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice.

Remember to check out our show notes for links to the suggestions our guests make for ways that you can get involved. Next week, we'll continue our election series with a conversation with Kristen Clark, President and Executive director of the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law. She believes that the problem of voter suppression is solvable. Please join us. Solvable is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

Our show is produced by Camille Baptista, Senior producer Jocelyn Frank. Catherine Girardou is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Special thanks to Heather Faine, Eric Sandler, Carle Magliore and Kidija Holland. I'm Jacob Weisberg.