Lessons Learned, Lessons Denied

against media for shit's sake. It's similarly why I have made a career in politics and policy and now in media, because I wanted to be able to change the hearts and minds of as many people as possible. Right to advance equality, and how do you do that right? You can do it through policy, if in fact you have

a functioning government and Congress. You can do it through media by telling stories that really bridge the gap between people's understanding of others lives, right to move outside of fear of the unknown, and understand that there are people who benefit right from spewing lies, from making sure that we all want to stay in our own cocoons and bubbles, never to really connect with one another. People profit off

of that. And I have seen my work as yes, the quest to get as many people as woke as fucking possible, right, because what doesn't mean to be woke, It means to be conscious, It means to be aware. It means to be connected and to understand that there are systems that have been put in place to benefit

a few at the events of the many. And as I am watching this Trump drama play out, which you know, we were notified to the fact that we are not going to see another appearance until December, which I think is you know, crazy. But again, I don't have a law degree. I just watch a law and order all

the time. But I would think that it is at the behest of the judge and the ag to expedite this case because I think that the longer that Donald Trump is able to grift out in the open, the longer that pictures of the judge's daughter and Alvin Bragg's wife and family members are able to be used as you know, some type of taunts to their fringe violent base that we're just counting down to tragedy, And frankly, I'd like to get this wrapped up as soon as

possible because I think that it's in the best interests of our country and our sanity. That being said, you know, just as we know, does not move like that, which is why these criminal shows are always so popular, because they get to be wrapped up at the end of an hour, and that's not really how things go. But

it's the disappointment for me. It's the fact that there are people who sit at these desks with microphones who have built careers out of supposedly providing information and analysis to people that I have seen become a shell of themselves. And who am I talking about Van Jones? Van Jones is a CNN commentator, but I knew Van Jones well over a decade ago when he was the head of

an environmental justice education in California called Greenfall. Van Jones was one of the first people that I reached out to when I was working on Capitol Hill and I had written a piece of legislation around connecting kids with nature, particularly black and brown kids, trying to express that the environment is not a place that you go, it is

where you are. And Van Jones, out of the work that he had done on environmental justice and you spoken out and he had created so many amazing and important organizations that lifted up the voices and the needs of the most marginalized communities. And over the course of several years, you know, I had seen Van and you know, watched his rise and you coming into the Obama administration and then promptly leaving the Obama administration because of the way

that the right wing lambasted him. And now when I see this man, this black man, sitting on CNN and saying things about Donald Trump when he was in office, because he put together a coherent sentence at the State of the Union, he has said things like, oh, that's today's the day that Donald Trump became president, as if Donald Trump is you know, a baby that just learned to walk, and you're like, oh, this is the day that, you know, the infant became the baby then became the toddler.

While we were watching the circus around Donald Trump's arrayment, Van Jones found himself on CNN saying that he doesn't revel in today in Donald Trump's arrayment, that this just looks like a sad grandpa. And this is you know, the criminal justice system is hard on everyone. Van Jones, Sir, with all due respect, shut the entire fuck up the way in which you have turned into a shell of an advocate to a shell of an activist to a talking head and stooge for the right wing is beyond me.

I have no idea what has happened. I really don't know, but you are definitely not the man that I met over a decade ago, whose work an environmental justice and social justice was one that I wanted to model my own career of advocacy around because I thought it was so profound. So to watch you contort yourself into some type of motherfucking step and fetch it for the right. Donald Up is no one's sad grandpa. I'm sure he

doesn't even know the fucking names of his grandchildren. He is more like a sad grand wizard right of the KKK. He wasn't a sad grandpa when he was inciting violence and yelling to his security detail to remove the magatrons at the stop the Steel rally, even though he was told that the people that came out to that rally

were heavily armed. He wasn't a sad grandpa then when he was pointing in the direction of the Capitol Building and telling people to go and take their country back, and that Mike Pennce betrayed him, putting a target on his back for those people to go ahead and build a gallows on the steps of the Capitol building. He wasn't a sad grandpa when he signed legislation that would put children in cages and separate them from their parents. He wasn't a sad grandpa when he decided to gut

the EPA. He wasn't a sad grandpa when he called nations that people that look like me come from shitthhole countries. He wasn't a sad grandpa when he decided to uphold white supremacy by saying, after the Charlottesville riots incidents white supremacy march of they will not replace us, that there

are good people on both sides. He wasn't a sad grandpa when he stood on national television and told the Proud Boys and the oath Keepers, those two very same groups who would orchestrate the insurrection, to stand back and stand by, sir. What the fuck are you looking at? This is what I mean when I say how fucking

irresponsible mainstream media has become. When you see the revolving door of people who bolstered their career through attaching themselves like a barnacle to the Titanic of Donald Trump, only to them be rewarded for their lives and their criminal behavior by getting plumb jobs on the view on CNN, on MSNBC, Right, Van Jones is no one's Oh I'm

trying to understand. He is a white supremist apologist, and it is disgusting, and I'm calling him out specifically because that type of language and rhetoric and faux ass empathy is how the fuck we get to the place that we are in right now, where Oh, you just want to recognize how aggrieved white racists are. They're losing their country.

Oh you mean they're actually being asked to share this abundant land that was toiled for free by enslaved captive people, land that was dolan from indigenous Native Americans, Like, give

me a fucking break. Van Jones is emblematic of everything that is wrong with the mainstream media and just another reminder that if you do not hold your center, if you do not remain grounded in the current tempest of fascism and authoritarianism that we find ourselves swirling in, you will lose sight of who you are and what is actually at stake. Just so that you can put more money in your pocket, and that is just a disgraceful

place to be. Coming up next on woke F, dear friends, an important conversation and one that doesn't involve truly centering around Donald Trump, is my conversation with Sam Alika Friedland, who is from the Institute for Responsive Government. That talks about Sam and I will get into a conversation about voting infrastructure and how it has been attacked over so many years, how essentially voting in this country has been defunded.

So we will have that conversation with Sam. Coming up next, folks, I am very happy to welcome to okay EFFI Daily for the first time, Sam Alika Friedland, who is the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government and before this position previously worked as a voting rights litigator at the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division under both two very different presidents friends, the Obama administration and the Trump administrations.

So Sam, welcome, Thank you, thank you for having to woka F. Thank you so much for joining US. Voting rights,

access to voting, voter suppression, jerrymandering. These are all topics that I cover on a fairly regular basis on WOKF And since the Supreme Court was able to systematically gut the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty four and our Congress's failure to be able to re enact those pieces under the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we have seen an assault on voting rights that I think is pretty unprecedented in our modern times, right, And so I just wanted to give you an opportunity to tell us what

you see from your vantage point about the landscape of voting and one how you see this landscape, but to how it has shifted over the last seven years, where we have lost a lot of integrity in our voting system because of the Trump administration, the Big Lie and others. That's a great question. And I love actually your use of the word integrity either because I think it's so important to talk about the integrity of the system as a whole. And I hear a lot of folks using

election integrity to mean preventing voter fraud. And it is important to make sure that only eligible voters are casting a ballot, and our systems are very well set up to do that, and it's important to talk about election integrity in that frame, but it's also election integrity to make sure that every eligible voter is registered and has

that opportunity to cast the ballot. So together, I think people think of voting access and voting security as like two sides of a scale, where you increase one and it decreases the other. And I think what's become abundantly clear over the last few years, that's actually not true. Those are to mix my metaphos, those are two votes that can be lifted at the same time, you know, on the same tide, And talking about sort of election integrity as a whole is such a great way to

talk about it at this particular moment. So you asked about the Supreme Court and seven years ago, and I started at the Department of Justice basically right after the Supreme Court got to the Voting Rights Act. So I'm I'm one of few civil rights time to starting. Welcome. Welcome. So the Chief Justice welcomed me to the Civil Rights Division by taking away at the main statue we had

to enforce. That was very nice of him. But it was really interesting because it was a time when lawyers needed to figure out how to pivot from some sort of long held patterns of how to enforce these civil rights laws, and people think about, you know, I think when people think about the Voting Rights Act and the preclearance provisions that got struck down, you think about these big, you know, big ticket, high visibility sort of voting rights

policy pieces like voter ID laws in in Texas for example, that got struck down under the preclearance system and then they were reinstituted, and redistricting plans for Congress and jerrymandering, and these are all incredibly important. But another incredibly important part of the voting rights ecosystem of our ability to cast the ballot is the bureaucracies at the local level

that really do run our elections. So people forget that elections are run in the US at the county and municipal level in almost every state, and that means that we have about eight thousand local election officials in the country who are primarily in charge of deciding should we have, you know, how many early votes sites should we have, How should we hire poll workers, How should we communicate to the public about how to vote and how voting has changed in the pandemic. Should we process vote by

mail applications? In a timely manner and send people their ballots. How many polling places should we have an election date? All of these are decisions that get done at this local level. And one of the most powerful things that preclans did has surfaced all of these teeny little local decisions that had such an impact on people's voting behavior to the Department of Justice, who was able to sort of either block or allow it to go into effect.

And what keeps me up at night about this Voting Rights Act is like, how do we get that information from the local level to bubble up to the top. But that locality, that localism, is also an opportunity. So I like to try and be a little bit like Pollyanna, not Pollyannish, but I like to be a little bit more optimistic than others when we talk about voting rights, because I think there are more good things happening right

now and more opportunities than many of us think. So those eight thousand officials, Republicans, Democrats, rural, urban, the vast, vast vast majority of them are non partisan bureaucrats who just want to do their job and provide people the voting opportunities. The law says they should have. There are some exceptions. The exceptions are relatively rare. And when you talked about Congress failing to act on the John Luis

Voting Rights Act, that was an important failure. And another important failure of Congress last year was failure to advance proposals that would have adequately funded those local election officials. So the President asked for ten billion dollars in his budget over ten years, for much of which would go directly to local election officials. Congress answered the call with only seventy five million dollars. Yeah. Wow, that was exactly my face and exactly my wow when I saw the

final number. It was a stunning failure to put the sort of money where their mouth was on democracy and actually create those opportunities of the local level for those nonpartisan bureaucrats to like give us all what we need. And so, you know, it's important to think about like the big picture laws, the big picture policies in tandem with this incredibly localized tapestry of election administration that's happening across the country. And I like to sort of think

about both of those at the same time. You paint a picture, because obviously what most people understand about voting is walking into whether it's a elementary school, gymnasium or whatever, community center and booth and you know, thanking the people for sitting there and doing the job and walking out

right filling out their ballot and walking out. And I think that what we have seen since twenty twenty is that more Americans have become skeptical right of the voting systems because of the lies that were spread by Donald Trump, the Republican Party, which is you know, I can't help but think now about that ten billion dollars versus seventy five this coming from people who claim that they were so much wrong with their voting right and so much

wrong with our system, then then wouldn't you want to fund to make sure that the integrity of said system remains? So I digress, but you know, when I think about what people learned from the election of twenty twenty, and it was a historic election, right in the midst of a pandemic, there was a lot of pivoting and nimbleness that needed to happen in order to keep people safe but also for them to be able to exercise their

constitutional right to cast a ballot. And I want you to talk about one, the historical nature of twenty twenty, what were some of the lessons that were learned, but then also the lessons that were denied, as we just had at the end of last year the midterm elections, which were again historic turnout, the lessons that were learned in twenty twenty that were not applicable in twenty twenty two. And what you were thinking with regard to how we're

going to run a successful, unencumbered election that isn't tampered with. Great, great question, and I think, like when we think about things we can celebrate, I think it's worth starting by pausing on twenty twenty and exactly like you said, it was a world changing pandemic. It was an office changing pandemic for local election officials across the country who weren't able to do anything remotely the way they were able to do before. And local election officials are great a process.

They are great at sort of like managing a process over time and in the face of threats. But this is something new. This was This required a level of nimbleness by those local officials that we haven't asked for before and that we did not adequately resource them to do, and they pulled it off anyway, and that was an incredible success and something we should all celebrate. In twenty twenty, as high ranking you know, Republican officials called it, it

was the most secure election in American history. You had people who had the choice whether they could vote by mail from home if that's what felt safe to them. They could also go into their polling place and be greeted by that sort of friendly neighbor who has always greeted them at the local community center of the local church. Providing those options for voters was something new in twenty

twenty in a number of jurisdictions. There were some places in the West who had done mostly vote by mail before twenty twenty, and there were places other places that had done almost exclusively in person voting. That mixing of the two modes, that providing the voters the choice was something really powerful. I think that came out of the

pandemic and something that you've seen stick around. The problem is that needs money, and that needs staff, and that needs new warehouse spaces that they never needed before, and they need security. So this is the last lesson from twenty twenty, or the last takeaway that's still with us is that local election officials are getting threatened. And this is remember local election officials of both parties. Of those eight thousand counties and municipalities that run election, the vast

majority are majority Republicans. So this is like, these are mostly Republican officials who are getting threatened by their friends and neighbors because they're listening to that disinformation. And that's not only morally important to me, but it also actually threatens the integrity of the election system, because if we can't give these hardworking people the resources they need, and if we can't give them the security that they need at relatively low paid jobs, we are not going to

have people to run our democracy. And that's more than anything that keeps me up at night about the future. Is the after effects of twenty twenty on election official recruitment and election official retention, not to mention, of course, the exact same problems in recruiting those poll workers who work at your local community center for that one day year. They really are, you know, sort of the definition of

thankless job. And I think our job, as folks who want to promote democracy is to thank them more often, both with our words, and with our policies. When you talk about being really concerned about being able to recruit people because of political threats of violence, right, do you think that this is something that is not then Sam

getting the kind of attention that it should. Should we be taught because you know, for the last couple of years, I mean, we have seen an escalation in political violence, you know, from what happened to a former speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, for what has happened in threats

with members of Congress. We think about it at that level, but then we saw, right the attacks on Shay Moss and Missus Ruby Freeman from Georgia, who were made a target literally yes, by the president, former President Donald Trump, by Rudy Giuliani and others. And so when you talk about we need to be able to have security and protections, what is that in a best case scenario? What does that actually look like? Because we're not giving these people

Secret Service bodyguards right while they're doing their jobs. So what does security and protection look like for these people? Yeah, so to answer your first question, what it doesn't look like? It's seventy five million dollars for the entire country. Yeah right, well that is that Yep. To put that number in context, in California, which ran a recall ellection for the governor last year, Riley County, one county in California spent fifty

three million dollars on the recall election. Excuse me, So the seventy five million does not stretch across jurisdictions. And I bring that up again. You're gonna hear me probably mentioned that at least one more time on with you today. And the reason that I mentioned that is that, like, that's the security money. So we're not probably hiring secret service, but there are security services that costs money that election officials can hire to bring them through a unique threat environment.

And I think some of that, some of that spending on security is necessary not only to keep people safe, which is the number one goal here, but also to really like increase the confidence of those officials and the poll workers in the process. And I think if you're a potential poll worker and you saw what happened in Georgia with the president last year, that's going to make you a little reticent to serve as a poll worker. Yeah, yeah,

you know, it would make me a little reticent. To serve, and so I want to see election departments actually spend some money on security. And I know Fulham County, Georgia has spent millions more in security in the last few years than they have spent in previous years, in part, again to keep those folks safe, that's their number one goal, to keep safe, and in part because their election system will not run if they're not spending that money on security. Um.

But but they need that money. But of course, the second piece of this is the disinformation environment that we're that we're drowning in right now, and we're going to keep seeing these threats if we keep allowing this disinformation to spread unchecked. Now, good news that some of the solutions that work for one of these pieces also work for the other piece. What's the best way to fight disinformation?

It's with trusted information from a trusted government official. So I can go out there as a leader of a nonprofit and say whatever I want to voters and they're not going to know who I am, and they're not going to necessarily trust me, no matter how well designed my informative brochure is or my my AD or my UM you know, my digital program. What really works is giving election officials the ability to say, hey, you know, you're hearing a lot about vote by mail, but let

me tell you how the system works. First, we match every vote by mail request to a voter registration record to make sure that the person requesting is who they say they are. Then the ballots that go out have X, Y and Z security features, and when they come back in, this is again exactly how our security protocol works to

make sure that each person can cast a ballot. But people are only casting one ballot, and I'm not a communications professional, so that might not be exactly the way to do that, but this is what we need to give election officials the resources to do to fight that disinformation. They need their own communications professionals, right, they need to be working in those offices, and that cost money that

they don't have. So we're looping back to the same problem here in many ways, but it's a potentially very powerful solution. If we can get this right, what do you think the future of our elections look like? Yeah? Right, you know we have long said, you know, every election is the most important election, and obviously the less couple were consequential to whether or not we actually continue to be a functioning democracy or not. Some would argue that

we're not actually a functioning democracy right now. But as we look ahead to twenty twenty four, again another consequential presidential election, what are your thoughts about America as a whole as we're watching other countries fall to authoritarianism and fascism that have pretend elections. I mean they have elections, Yeah, yeah, they just don't mean anything. And so where are your thoughts about how America looks in the next few years?

What a great question. So, ay, we start with the election. So what we have to do, Like you said, I think five minutes ago, when you walk into that polling place, you have to have a good experience, because what keeps people going back to democracy is the like individual sort of customer service level experiences they have with that system.

I think that one of the reasons, more broadly, that our democracy is under threat is that our government does not do a good enough job of providing customer service to people. When someone needs Medicaid in order to take their kids to the doctor, we make that process so hard for them to sign up with. There's so many pieces of paper that say the same thing over and over again, so many different offices to go to when

we owe someone a tax refund. We make the process of the government giving us the money that they owe us so hard that all of this is actually about one sort of coherent theory of government service delivery. And at the Ensuite for Responsive Government, there's a reason we didn't call it Responsive Election Administration. We called it the Institute for Responsive Government, because we think every single one of these government customer service interactions is about strengthening democracy.

When you go to the DMV and you have to go home four times because their website was clear about which kinds of idea you had to bring, I just moved to Illinois. I'm not saying this happened to me recently. I'm not saying it didn't happen to me, because apparently very well, and I am so privileged compared to like most people who who are living My ability to go home and get those papers without calling sick for my

second job and losing income was unique to meet. And so the government not only needs to be providing a good democracy experience mechanically, and that means that when you know, you need to have good poll workers that respect you when you go in and can explain that process to you, and that you cast your ballot and walk out feeling like you had a great experience with your neighbors. It means when I go to the DMV. First of all, when I go to the DMV, they should be automatically

registering me to vote. If I'm proving that I'm an eligible citizen through all those papers that I brought, they should just be adding me to the voter rolls. I shouldn't have to fill out another piece of paper that tells the government the exact same thing I just told them. But moreover, if that DMV experience is good, then I will out of their thinking like, wow, I had a good experience at this government office. And this whole project we are working on together where we like it's a

democracy is a weird idea. We get together with our neighbors and we say, let's like pull our resources and work together and build a system that makes us all better off. And the way to strengthen our democracy is by actually making us all better off, you know, delivering material wins for people through the government is a way to strengthen democracy. And going back to the beginning of

our conversation. It also lifts security and access. At the same time, the more we automate tax filings, the harder it is to cheat on your taxes. All of these are the same where the more we use data we already have to deliver things people deserve, the better people are off, the better democracy is, and the more secure the system is. At a whole, it really improves the

integrity of democracy, not just the election system. Brilliant Sam, This has been such and enlightening conversation that I know that people are going to walk away and be really thankful for it. Please tell the woke app audience how they can learn more about your organization if they want to get involved. Please awesome. So, first of all, please visit our website. It's Responsive governing dot org or if you just google the Institute for Responsive Government you can

find it that way. The reason I say come visit us on our website is we work on a number of different topic areas, like I said, primarily voting an election, administration, but also these other areas of government service delivery where there's so much good technical sounding work that it first sounds boring and then you look into it a little bit more and then you realize how transformative it can be to people's experience not only with the government, but

their ability to feed their families, take care of their families, etc. So come visit us a responsive governing We tweet a responsive underscore GOVT. And if there's anything I want people

to take away, it's what we just said. It's that like we can use data well to make government more accessible, to make voting more accessible, to automatically register people to vote, to provide them the best choices possible about how to cast their ballot securely and efficiently and increase election security at the same time. So come out of the frames that we're thinking about these issues on. You know, if we're not seeing impact from a policy, then that policy

isn't doing what it's supposed to do. We do a lot of legislative work where we pass bills that try and sort of encompass these principles. Passing a bill is not a win. If there's a bill pass that implement that passes an automatic voter registration system, that's not a win until we actually see people being added to the voter rolls. And that takes everyone in government working together

to actually make implementation happen. And if you're not thinking about that process through the entire scope of policymaking, you're not doing policymaking right and you're not going to do your policy making in a way that actually improves people's lives. So I would invite listeners to come learn about how to make policy with impact and implementation in mind, how to keep those practical lenses on while you do this, and how to sort of think about democracy the entire time.

It's something broader than just something we do every two or four years. It's every interaction we have with our neighbors, and it's every interaction we have with our government, and together we can actually make that something that makes all of our lives better. Sam Olika Friedland, thank you so much for making the time to join woke F and for all of the work that you are doing to try and keep our elections safe and fair and free. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me.

This was an absolutely delightful conversation about a difficult topic, and I'm so glad you're covering it. That is it for me today, Dear friends on woke F. As always, power to the people and to all the people power, get woke, and stay woke as fuck.