#384 — Stress Testing Our Democracy
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Summary
Barton Gilman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. He currently serves as a senior advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. Previously, he was a staff writer at the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He s the author of Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, as well as Angler, The Cheney Vice Presidency, for which he won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In this conversation, Bart and I talk mostly about election integrity and the safeguarding of American democracy. We discuss the war games he s run to test our response to an authoritarian president, the prospect of such a president using federal troops against American citizens, the difference between laws and norms, state powers to resist the federal government, voter identification and election integrity, political control over election certifications, the Electoral Count Reform Act, the possibility of public unrest after the November election, the significance of January 6th, what will happen to Trump and Trumpism if Hillary Clinton wins in November, the presidential debate between Harris and Trump, the authoritarian potential of a second Trump term, Project 2025, and other topics. In this episode, we recorded this conversation before the second attempt on Trump s life, so if there seems to be any place where we should have discussed that and didn t, that s why we didn t. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, it s made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, we ll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber! You ll get access to the full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast by subscribing to the podcast on our podcast, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can t afford it? This is made possible by the podcast is making possible entirely by the program, and so you ll be making sense of what we re doing here, too become a member of the MESING Sense Podcast? -- SAM Harris, by Sam Harris, making sense here. -- THE MADE MADE SENSE PODCAST -- SUBSCRIBE TO THE MONDAY, by SAM HARDEN: -- and the MADE MEANING SONGS? (PRODUCER: ) (FOUNDED IN THE MAKING SENSE EPISODE: THE MALAYTER AND THE MATERIALS OF THE PASTOR?
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be
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hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making
00:00:19.840
Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our
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scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one.
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We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
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of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
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Today I'm speaking with Barton Gelman. Bart is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author.
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He currently serves as a senior advisor at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School
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of Law. Previously he was a staff writer at the Atlantic and the Washington Post. He's the author
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of Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, as well as Angler, the Cheney
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Vice Presidency, for which he won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Anyway, Bart and I talk mostly
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about election integrity and the safeguarding of American democracy. We discuss the war games he's
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run to test our response to an authoritarian president, the prospect of such a president using
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federal troops against American citizens, the difference between laws and norms, state powers to resist
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the federal government, voter identification and election integrity, political control over election
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certifications, the Bush-Gore election, the Electoral Count Reform Act, the prospect of public unrest
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unrest after the November election, the significance of January 6th, George Soros, the good people on both
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sides, calumny against Trump, what will happen to Trump and Trumpism if Harris wins in November,
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the presidential debate between Harris and Trump, the authoritarian potential of a second Trump term,
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project 2025, and other topics. Just one note, we recorded this conversation before the second
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attempt on Trump's life, so if there's any place where it seems like we should have discussed that
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and didn't, that's why. And now I bring you Barton Gilman.
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I am here with Barton Gilman. Bart, thanks for joining me again.
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So, you've been busy since we last spoke. When I last spoke to you, you were a mere Pulitzer Prize
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winning journalist for The Atlantic, but now you have moved on to become a man of action,
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purpose toward protecting our democracy. What are you up to? You've left The Atlantic and what are
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you now doing? I am in the office of the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, which is based in
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New York and has a big presence in Washington. It's a think tank, a public policy advocate. It does
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litigation and so forth. And the main purpose is to protect democracy and civil rights. I was at The
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Atlantic for about four years and I spent most of my time writing about how there were existential
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dangers to democracy. You know, I'd done a piece two months before the 2020 election predicting that
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it could be a disaster if Donald Trump lost the election and refused to concede defeat. And I outlined
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many ways that might happen and I would have wished that to be wrong, but it didn't prove so. I finally
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got tired of writing about how we're at this kind of generational challenge to democracy and decided
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to stop saying, you know, look over there, it looks really bad over there and to kind of step in and step
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off the sidelines and try to do something about it. So, to get to your question, my first big project
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at the Brennan Center was to run something we called the Democracy Futures Project, which was
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a series of five tabletop exercises, or you could call them war games, in which we had about 175 in
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all former officials and leaders of civil society. You know, we had a couple of governors, we had a
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couple of cabinet members, all retired, a senator, a couple of members of Congress, judge, generals,
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and so forth, coming in to war game, what would happen if an authoritarian president were elected
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and pro-democracy advocates, kind of across a broad range of government and society, tried to restrain
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that president. And instead of just saying, well, he may try to do this and then we would just do
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that, we gamed out how it would actually work with an iteration through multiple rounds of the game
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so that the red president who had run on Trump's agenda could respond to pro-democracy moves to try
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to stop him and they could respond to his responses. And how are these games conducted? I mean,
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so the person who plays the role of the president in this case, is it up to him or her just to be as
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bad as they want to be? I mean, are they just, is it just an exercise in extemporaneous gameplay and
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fiction making? Or is there some, are there parameters in advance that are ironed out, you know,
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precisely, and they're basically just following some kind of template in response to the various
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moves that are being made against them? Well, first of all, bad as they want to be, could be a good
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band name. We had two of the five games were basically that. We called them everything, everywhere,
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all at once games. And the person playing the president was supposed to be modeling his or her
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behavior on Trump's declared agenda and the agenda of his closest allies. For example, Project 2025 is
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kind of written by over a hundred former Trump administration officials. Yeah. It's amazing.
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Trump knows nothing about it. Yeah. He's never met these people. He's got no association with him
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whatsoever. Yeah. I think 22 of its chapters were authored by his former senior people. So we,
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we considered that fair game for guidance of what the president would do in office. So in those,
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the president did a lot of things all at once and tended to overwhelm the blue or the pro-democracy
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team by doing that with all the resources of the federal government. Three of the games we did
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with a narrower, a narrower policy focus. And I should just mention here that none of the games modeled
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any kind of behavior that falls within the ordinary range of policy and political disputes. So we
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weren't testing what happens if he cuts taxes or pulls out of a climate accord again, or even an
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issue like abortion. We were testing only things that Trump has said he wants to do that would be
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threats to democracy and the institutions that uphold the rule of law.
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Like what specifically? Like, for example, use, uh, arms of the federal government to go after your
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enemies. So prosecute them, the department of justice or bring any trust actions against Amazon,
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because you don't like what Jeff Bezos is doing with the Washington post, which he's also the owner
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of, or sending the IRS to challenge the tax exemptions of nonprofits like the Brennan Center for that
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matter, because they're advocating things that he doesn't like among many examples.
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But what about using federal troops or the military to quell protests or round up undocumented
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Well, those actually were the other two games. One of them was about the domestic use of military
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power and military force to break up anti-Trump demonstrations on the grounds that they consisted
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of insurrections and riots and were threats to the rule of law that local and state authorities
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could not handle, even though actually the mayors and governors involved in those scenarios said they
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needed no federal help. That was one. The other was mass expulsion of migrants, sending federal law
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enforcement forces into cities all around the country to make mass arrests, to send migrants to
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detention facilities and to expel them back to their countries of origin or just expel them back to
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Mexico, whether or not they came from Mexico. And what we were testing was, what could anybody do about
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that? And the answer wasn't always a happy one. I mean, for example, we had a former governor, I should
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say we did these exercises under the Chatham House rule, so we don't name participants unless they gave
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their consent. But in this case, Christy Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey,
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did give her consent. So I could say that she was one of the players and she was looking for a way
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to prevent the president from using his authority to federalize the National Guard in her state.
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And one of the interesting things that emerged from this was that governors don't actually know
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where their power ends and the president's power begins because we haven't, as far as I know,
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ever had a case in which the president federalized the Guard against the will of the governor of that
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state. Ordinarily, it's the governor who requests that the president do so.
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I thought there was nothing like that that happened during desegregation in the South. I mean,
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my history is a little wonky here, but just when the forcible integration of whatever that college
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was in Alabama or Mississippi, forgive the vagaries here, but didn't JFK have to bring in
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the National Guard to, I'm just assuming it was over the protest of the governor, but maybe that's not
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the case. Well, I am also not an expert historian on that subject. It's true that the president did send
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the Guard. I'm not even sure it was JFK, but you may be right. Yeah, no, it was. JFK definitely
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was the president for, I mean, perhaps there are other episodes that I'm not thinking of, but for one
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of these, yeah, it was JFK was calling the shots. What I understood is that the governor did not try to
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prevent the federalization of the Guard in that instance.
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It might've been a lot. I think there was definitely, somebody did. It was probably the mayor who was
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against it, and then the governor was probably acquiescing to the president. So, yeah. So it
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probably wasn't opposition between a governor and a president in that case.
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Well, it's just, it's not every day that you have a state adjutant general who is the senior
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commanding officer of the state guard who gets conflicting orders from the president of the United States.
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and from the governor of that state. And it turns out that governors don't happen to have in their
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back pocket a clear understanding of where the boundaries are. And that's, I mean, it's one of
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the takeaways from our exercise is that governors and state attorneys general and state legislatures
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and potentially mayors are independent sources of authority who can offer some protection against
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and authoritarian abusing the powers of the, of the federal government, but they need to actually
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study up on what the authorities are and what the boundaries of their authorities are.
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Right. But that's assuming that these governors and state officials are not part of the personality
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cult that is rooting for the aspiring authoritarian to wield as much power as he wants.
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Yes. So when you play these games, are there people on the side of the autocrat or aspiring autocrat
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too, or was it everyone resisting, trying to resist the president?
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No, we gave the president a full cabinet and executive agencies. And there were also supportive
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governors. There were supportive judges. The military was considered neutral. And in some cases
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did resist orders that it considered to be unlawful, or at least tried to slow things down to get clarity
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on what a lawful mission might be. But one of the interesting things about this exercise,
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we had Republicans and Democrats, we had conservatives and liberals. We really did have a pretty broad
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ideological spectrum, people who disagreed on a lot of things, but we didn't have any, you know,
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sort of strong current Trump supporters. We had former officials who served under Trump, but everyone
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in the room in real life was a pro-Democrat with a small d. But it was remarkable how much fun they had
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playing an autocrat. They really delved into the part. And there was something about the transgressiveness
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of ordering the prosecution of your political enemies. They were coming up with ideas, some of which
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we're not even going to publish because they were ideas we don't think Trump has had yet.
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They're so diabolical. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can, I can imagine it's just, it's a, as a creative exercise,
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it's got to be a ton of fun playing the bad guy.
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I think it's why they say, they say actors in Hollywood enjoy those villainous parts more than the kind of,
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I don't know. There's something very ordinary about playing someone with good intentions.
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In any case, these, these folks, you know, including people who are well-known critics of
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Trump or, you know, quit his administration in outrage, certainly played the role with relish.
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So I think we like to imagine that we have a system that is so good that it doesn't require
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good people to run it, right? That it should be impervious to the intrusion of a malicious,
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narcissistic jerk who just wants to enrich himself and hold on to power. But I think one lesson I drew
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from the Trump years was that where we thought we had laws to cover all of these contingencies, we,
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in many, many cases, all too many cases, we only had norms, right? And, and norms on some level were,
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you know, more flexible then and more important than laws. But because they're not laws, when somebody
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blows right past them, you're left with not much you can do. Did I, is it too cynical and paranoid a
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lesson to have drawn from Trump's presidency? Or is it, or do you agree with that assessment?
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You know, I, I think we got mixed results from the Trump administration in terms of the value of
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having sort of right thinking people, people who believed in fulfilling their duty to follow the
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law and to follow longstanding ethical rules and to follow the governing norms that were consensus
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norms between the parties. There were times when people like that were absolutely critical to
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stopping bad things from happening. So that's why you, you had all these leaks from the people around
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Trump during his presidency. And that way you found out, for example, that, you know, his treasury
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secretary had removed a document from his desk before Trump could see it and sign it because it
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was so crazy and hadn't gone through the usual governing processes. And in the effort to overthrow
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the 2020 election, there were people at kind of even, even not terribly senior levels who drew a line
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and said, I won't do that even though I'm a Republican and prevented the overthrow. I mean, there's a guy
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whose name I can't recall, but I wish I could because he deserves a celebration. It was Vander something,
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a guy on the Michigan state board of elections. And the way the board works is it had, I think it was
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three and three, it had an equal number of Republicans and Democrats on it. And if all of the Republicans
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had refused to certify the election as Trump was asking them to do, then Michigan's electoral votes
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would be in controversy. It might, you know, it might be arguable in courts or in Congress that
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the electoral votes had not been cast. Although that probably wouldn't have worked, but this one
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Republican on the board, not a very senior guy, some guy in his thirties who did this as a, literally a
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part-time gig said, I'm not going to refuse to certify the election. The votes have all been counted and
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double-checked. And everything is in order and I'm going to vote to certify. And for that reason,
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Michigan was taken out of the unknown category and, and the man who won it, Joe Biden, got those
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votes. You had the same thing with the elected secretary of state in Georgia, who's better
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known, Brad Raffensperger, and more junior people in the state secretariat who refused Trump's request
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to quote unquote, find 11,780 votes that could be flipped so that he would win the state of Georgia.
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So you did have these people who I think were real heroes and upheld the law, but you also found out,
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as you say, that a lot of the stuff that we don't want presidents to, to do because it would be a huge
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abuse of power, there's actually no law against it. And Trump has a kind of genius for finding stuff
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where nobody ever wrote down, you can't do that. I mean, you know, for example, I mean, if he had
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wanted to put a giant banner over the white house to advertise, you know, Trump goods for sale,
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there's nothing written down anywhere that says you can't do that. It's,
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this might be one of those ideas you don't want to leak out lest he get into his head,
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leave it to him to sell Trump steaks and other crap from the facade of the white house.
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So what did you find after these games were run? What was the punchline with respect to
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what the, the system could do to contain the overreach of a, of a rogue president?
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Well, the unhappy conclusion was that the blue team seldom found a way to stop the autocrat in
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his tracks. They seldom found, you know, you know, the one weird trick that lets you, uh,
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cage him up and prevent him from abusing his power. But we did find things that could delay or deflect
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or, or, uh, diminish the damage of authoritarian acts. So one thing I've mentioned already,
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which is that if you have a, a governor or a state attorney general who believes in the rule of law
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and is willing to resist an overreach of federal executive power, those people have a lot of power
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and need to be doing their homework now. So they're not in the middle of an episode and unaware of what
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they can and can't do. And there are a bunch of questions that may not actually be settled law
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that they need to be ready to take position on. Like, are there any limits you can impose on,
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you know, someone from the Bureau of Prisons or from DHS or from a militia that the authoritarian
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president has deputized to enforce federal law and comes into your city or your state and starts
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rounding people up? Can you impose any limits on how they exercise police powers in your state?
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Does state law or the state or do the state courts have the power to limit those things? What would
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happen if you refused a federal demand for state data that might help them find migrants who they're
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looking to expel and so on? I mean, they just need to do a kind of broad reaching sweep of their
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legal and operational authorities. I have to think that there's an army of, of democratic
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and never Trump lawyers who are, who are at work on this and have been at work on this for some time
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to try to prepare our, our democracy for a coming stress test in, in, in reality, should Trump
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get four more years to take a crack at it? Is that too hopeful a notion? Is that, I mean,
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what are they, what are all the lawyers doing who are, who are equally worried about this?
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Well, you know, it's sort of a yes and no. I'll tell you a story from the beginning of 2024. I,
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I was thinking about making this career change and I caught, I called up Michael Waldman,
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who's the president of the Brennan Center and said, you know, do you have a place for me there?
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And he said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I'd like to protect the November election
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and I'd like to do planning for what happens if Trump wins and tries to carry out his authoritarian
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agenda. And he told me we're doing a lot of the one already and we're not doing a lot of the other.
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Uh, and that's why I started where I started. Now, since then, there are a lot of organizations
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and people in the kind of democracy and rule of law space who are thinking and planning ahead
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for how you would restrain an authoritarian president, but they're trying to do a lot of
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things at once. Uh, they're trying to protect, for example, the integrity of the November election.
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They're doing planning for what happens if a Democrat wins, or even if there's a democratic
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trifecta. I mean, the Brennan Center, for example, would put huge priority on passing the Freedom
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to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Improvement Act. And so there are people doing
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that kind of planning. And for a while, there was a time when people just didn't really want to think
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too much about things going wrong after the inauguration of the new president in 25. I think
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that's changed quite a bit in recent months, but there's, there's plenty more work to be done.
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Hmm. Okay. Well, let's take it from the top here. I'd like to talk about the November election and,
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um, the various outcomes that we might expect. But before we do, is there any sympathetic
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construal we might give to the right wing slash populist slash Trumpist concerns about the integrity of
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our elections? I mean, so you've got a lot of people out there that have come to the, the Trump circus
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from, you know, Trump himself and Elon Musk on down, who are making noises about that seem to signal the
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legitimacy of concerns about election integrity. We should have paper ballots, you know, the computers
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can be hacked. There are people who are, you know, who are voting, who shouldn't vote, you know,
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and the Democrats want to bring in lots of non-citizens to vote effectively. And, um,
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therefore voter ID laws or just make abundant sense. I mean, just, I mean, just take a voter ID.
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What, what is wrong with passing a voter ID law? I mean, we, we need ID for so many things that are
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far more trivial than, than voting. Why does anyone resist the need to have proper identification when you
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go to vote? Well, the question is what's proper identification, um, how are the standards set and
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for what purpose? And I'm going to give a, a very broad answer to your, your meta question here. It is
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almost universally the case that when people talk about the need to protect election integrity
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as a political issue, they are trying to prevent people from voting who are not on their side.
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Election integrity, the, the idea that they have to stop an election for being stolen,
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premised on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, which is nonsense, are almost universally
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proposed by people who are in fact trying to steal the next election. So let's come back to,
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to, to voter ID. The big idea on the table right now from the speaker of the house who is trying to
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attach it to funding the federal government and threatening to shut down the government if it's
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not attached is called the save act. And it is ostensibly to stop non-citizens from voting. So
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here's what's really going on. First of all, non-citizens are not voting. They claim
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the proponents of this bill claim that there are millions of non-citizens being shipped in to vote
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for Democrats. They can't name millions or thousands or hundreds or even dozens of occasions on which
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a non-citizen has ever voted in a U.S. election. They have completely garbage.
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The truth is we have the opposite problem. We have citizens who can't be bothered to vote,
00:27:07.260
right? I mean, it's the, the idea that voting is such an attractive thing to do
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that even non-citizens by the millions would want to do it is just patently ridiculous.
00:27:16.700
Well, right. So we have citizens who can't be bothered to vote. That's true. And it would be
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better if we had a democratic culture, small D democratic culture in this country in which
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more people wanted to vote, wanted to participate and believed that there was something in it for
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them, that they could have some impact on the way our government is run and though, and the way
00:27:37.740
society functions and some way to improve their own lives by participating. That's one thing,
00:27:43.920
but it's also true that citizens who do have the right to vote are prevented from voting by some of the
00:27:52.120
things they want. So the proposal in the save act in order to solve a non-existent problem of non-citizens
00:27:59.320
voting is that you should have to have, be able to present a birth certificate or a passport in order
00:28:06.220
to vote. So there's good data that shows that poor people and racial minorities are disproportionately
00:28:16.260
unable to present documents like that. I mean, they've never traveled abroad. They don't have
00:28:22.080
a passport. How many people can actually put hands on their own birth certificates. And so you're
00:28:29.660
going to prevent some rich Republicans from voting if they can't find their birth certificate. But the
00:28:35.800
point of it is to remove from the voting rolls, a lot of people who the Republicans think are going to
00:28:43.680
vote for Democrats. And so by trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist, they're creating a new one
00:28:49.360
of disenfranchisement, of preventing people from voting. And, you know, in litigation and in hundreds
00:28:55.620
of statutory changes around the country, laws passed by state Republican legislatures, laws proposed by
00:29:05.060
others, they are in every case, every is a big word. I'll say virtually every case, they are designed
00:29:11.080
to reduce the number of people voting, to take people off of voter rolls. And it's, it's grotesque
00:29:17.800
and it's fundamentally sort of undemocratic, anti-democratic behavior.
00:29:23.520
Yeah. I guess my intuition here is a little, I guess it cuts across this problem, you know,
00:29:31.040
what I imagine is certainly a nonpartisan way, but it, I just feel like given that this keeps coming up
00:29:36.460
and there is, there is so much that we do require identification for in our society.
00:29:41.420
I mean, to get on an airplane, you need identification now, right? So this is, you know,
00:29:46.180
that's got to pose a problem for all the people who can't figure out how to get ID who want to fly,
00:29:51.660
right? So the question is, is there a way to solve this problem? I mean, we're not going to solve it in
00:29:55.560
advance of November's election, but for future elections, it just seems that we should figure out
00:30:00.700
how to get people the identification they need to vote and remove this as a, as one of, as this
00:30:10.120
perennial object of partisan gamesmanship so that people can vote with, with the ID that we have
00:30:17.300
agreed on is sufficient for the situation. No, so I mean, in every state, in every county,
00:30:23.500
in every jurisdiction, you do have to present local election officials with sufficient evidence
00:30:30.880
that identifies you as a person who lives in the district and is entitled to vote. Sometimes it's
00:30:36.780
a utility bill, sometimes it's some other form of photo ID. And for example, in Texas, not so many
00:30:44.440
years ago, the Republican state legislature imposed an ID requirement in which a university,
00:30:53.500
ID with photo would not count to allow you to vote because college students might not be citizens.
00:31:02.800
Well, college students are, are less likely to vote Republican. Uh, and they, but they did allow
00:31:09.420
a gun license, which doesn't even have a photograph on it to, uh, count.
00:31:14.400
That's genuinely funny. Yeah. That is something that would have got, would have produced a laugh in
00:31:19.280
one of your war games had it been, uh, produced for that purpose. Uh, yeah. Yeah. So, well,
00:31:25.900
there were a lot of things that, you know, you either laugh or cry when you see it, but I mean,
00:31:29.700
you know, the latest thing that's happening now in the integrity, the election integrity front,
00:31:33.720
quote unquote, is you have a move in multiple States, including several swing States around the
00:31:40.380
country, most kind of paradigmatically in Georgia to impose political control over certification of
00:31:47.880
election results. So that's, that's a new legislative and, and litigation related front in
00:31:56.840
this, in this war, you have, uh, you know, a member of, of, I'm trying to, I want to get this
00:32:02.920
right. There was a, there was a member of the elections board for one of the counties in Georgia,
00:32:07.600
a woman named Adams who refused to certify the results of a primary election in 2022 and demanded
00:32:16.520
to be given the power to investigate. And this is someone who was a long time election denier,
00:32:23.980
someone who was propounding the lie that the 2020 election had, had been stolen from Trump.
00:32:30.220
Uh, and she wanted the power to, uh, sort of to command the production of all this data from
00:32:36.500
election officials, uh, sensitive data that's kept private for a reason and refused to certify.
00:32:42.800
Then the governor appointed three Republicans to the five person state election board who passed a new
00:32:53.800
rule for elections in Georgia that enabled the Republican administrators of elections in the
00:33:01.400
counties to refuse to certify and to investigate instead. Now certification has always been a kind of a,
00:33:08.740
a ministerial function. There's lots of good law from around the country and from that's more than a
00:33:15.800
hundred years old that election officials don't have the power to investigate elections. If there's a,
00:33:22.880
if there's a, a controversy over whether the, uh, whether there was foul play in an election,
00:33:27.880
it goes to the courts where they have standards and rules of evidence. And in 2020 ruled 60,
00:33:36.080
sometimes that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen, but they want to,
00:33:42.760
they want that function now to be exercised by partisan officials on election boards. And that
00:33:49.300
offers a lot of opportunities for a mischief and chaos, and at least delaying the outcome of an
00:33:56.640
election and, and, uh, potentially to overturn the vote of the people and say that the loser actually won.
00:34:05.220
Yeah. So that's another level at which the integrity of an election can be attacked. And
00:34:12.300
again, I have to think that there are democratic lawyers who've been all over this for quite some
00:34:19.420
time. I mean, just from, from now, from the top down, we've got Kamala Harris and her husband,
00:34:25.040
both of whom are attorneys, right? I mean, is it conceivable that the Democrats are not sufficiently
00:34:32.040
alert to Republican Trumpist machinations in trying to put their true believers into positions of
00:34:41.440
authority when it comes time to count votes? Oh, uh, the pro-democracy forces are very much alive
00:34:48.160
to this problem and very much engaged in it. And the Brennan Center, where I work, is a tax-exempt,
00:34:56.220
non-profit, non-partisan organization, but it believes in the right to vote. And anywhere that
00:35:03.000
someone is trying to throw people off voter rolls for insufficient reason, or is trying to insert a
00:35:09.060
new political level of voter certification, uh, the Brennan Center and lots of its allies are all over
00:35:16.140
that. They, they get involved in lobbying for or against state legislation. They filed amicus briefs
00:35:25.160
in several cases, challenging these new laws. And they're very much, these laws are very much
00:35:33.240
under partisan debate around the country. So in Wisconsin, where the state legislature is heavily
00:35:40.600
Republican and gerrymandered to remain so, the Democratic governor has vetoed a number of
00:35:46.500
these changes. So there, there are laws that would have been in place by now in Wisconsin to politicize
00:35:54.620
the vote count, but for the fact that Tony Evers vetoed those. But there are other states, even with
00:36:02.240
Democratic governors, where the Republicans have a veto-proof majority and are passing these statutes. And
00:36:09.880
they're under litigation now, even as we speak.
00:36:13.660
So what do you expect in, in November? So, I mean, there's obviously, there are two outcomes that
00:36:19.480
Kamala Harris could win or Donald Trump could win. I guess there are, uh, you know, really four
00:36:25.580
outcomes. I mean, I either could win quite narrowly, which is what, what I think we expect, but I guess
00:36:32.300
things change if either wins in a landslide. I mean, let's just linger on that possibility for a second.
00:36:38.580
Wouldn't a landslide victory obviate some of the concerns we're going to raise here? I mean,
00:36:45.240
just if Kamala Harris wins, you know, 400 electoral votes, do the, the lingering disputes over whether
00:36:52.260
the election was, was run properly, the, the endless, you know, the protests and, and riots we
00:36:58.960
might be worried about, does the risk of all that get radically diminished? I guess in either direction,
00:37:03.800
if there's a landslide for one of the candidates? Oh, I think absolutely. You're right about that.
00:37:08.480
In fact, it is, there's an inside joke among election administrators that, that there's, uh,
00:37:15.500
something that they, uh, facetiously call the election administrator's prayer is Lord,
00:37:22.320
let there be a landslide. Right. Because then all the little controversies about whether this ballot
00:37:29.440
drop box was compromised by the fact that the streetlight went out for half an hour, that stuff
00:37:36.360
just stops mattering. And, and the outcome is clear, but I'm no political pundit. You know, I, I covered
00:37:46.460
politics for a lot of years as a journalist and I'm involved in controversies about politics now at
00:37:53.400
the Brennan center, but I think the consensus view is this election will be decided by a very small
00:38:01.120
number of voters in a very small number of states. So, I mean, you know, the tipping point state is
00:38:06.320
going to be Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, maybe Michigan, maybe North Carolina. And if you look at the
00:38:13.120
polls in those states, they're either dead even or very close to the margin of error in terms of
00:38:19.720
who's ahead. So you could very easily expect that the winning margin is going to be in the tens of
00:38:26.380
thousands of votes. It could even be smaller than that as it was in Florida in 2000.
00:38:31.480
Right. Okay. So let's talk about those possibilities. So what would you expect in the case of a narrow
00:38:39.020
Harris victory versus a narrow Trump victory? I mean, it's just in terms of, is there any kind
00:38:46.900
of symmetry here? I mean, I guess it's possible to expect that in, in a close victory, either way,
00:38:53.040
you have half the country possibly poised to not accept the results of the election, right? I think
00:39:00.240
this is obviously a worse problem over in Trumpistan, given that this conspiracy thinking about all this
00:39:06.280
has been consciously engineered for, for now, uh, the better part of a decade. But do you think
00:39:11.860
there's a, is there anything like an equivalent level of paranoia, skepticism, conspiracy thinking
00:39:17.340
that could allow for just a breakdown in a fundamental trust in the electoral process,
00:39:26.280
I do actually think that there is some symmetry in the sense that there will be some Democrats,
00:39:34.500
some influential Democrats, and a substantial number of Democratic voters who challenge the
00:39:42.400
outcome. If Harris loses, who will attempt to block certification in some state, who will,
00:39:50.680
who will take other steps to say that there was cheating or that the result isn't legitimate,
00:39:59.880
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