Context Podcast Digital Collection

Dr. Caroline Heldman: Can you let me share screen just for three slides? Three slides down.

Dr. Lara Brown: Yes. Caroline, we know you love your slides. You're so good at that.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: Wow. How can you talk about the history of voting systems without, like, a little list? Just a little list.

Dr. Lara Brown: It's okay. It's good.

Dr. David Gray Adler: You like numbers? Numbers are good.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: There's no numbers here, David.

Dr. David Gray Adler: It's no.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: Numberless.

Dr. David Gray Adler: Just. Just words? Just words. All right. I like that.

Dr. Lara Brown: It's good. I have numbers on my notes but not not on slides.

Dr. David Gray Adler: Well yes I've allowed sharing. So you, you are set to go for that. So we'll just, you know, wait a few more minutes before we get started here. People are joining us.

Speaker 4: 80s.

David Pettyjohn: Okay. I think we'll go ahead and get started. Good evening everyone. My name is David Pettyjohn, and I am the executive director of the Idaho Humanities Council. I want to thank you for joining us tonight for our final townhall on the Why it Matters Initiative. Tonight, we're talking about voting in the 21st century.

And joining us tonight, we have some familiar faces who have have been with us and have provided excellent commentary throughout this. And, we are absolutely delighted to have them here. Just a little bit of information about tonight's program. As I mentioned, this is part of the Why it Matters Initiative, which was facilitated by the Federation of State Humanities Councils and funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.

We are incredibly grateful for their support. And also, if you are not familiar with the work of the Idaho Humanities Council, I encourage you to visit our website, which is www.idahohumanities.org. Joining us tonight, we have Doctor Dr. Lara Brown, Doctor David Adler, and Doctor Caroline Heldman. To talk about a really interesting topic, as we kind of look ahead, with technology and how that might affect our voting system.

So with that, I will turn it over to our distinguished panelists. And don't forget, if you have a question, you are able to use the, the Q&A feature located at the bottom of your screen. Great. Well it's good. Good to be with you all again, David. Thanks once more for organizing this. And Lara, Caroline, it's terrific to spend yet another evening chatting about such important topics as voting in the 21st century.

Dr. David Gray Adler: It's always a privilege to share the podium, with two brilliant political scientists, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. And here I am in Middle America. Well, here in Idaho. So, Caroline, do you have do you have some slides for us tonight to start our program? Because they're wonderful.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: You know, I do, David, but really very, very few slides. But I think it's important to, you know, set a baseline in terms of, the very brief history of U.S. voting systems in the U.S. and I know we're focusing on the current century, but it's important to know, I think, where we came from. Of course, voting voting is the cornerstone of American democracy.

So I want to just quickly run through one slide and then show you a breakdown of how, folks are updating, their voting systems in different states. And I will preface this by saying we actually don't have good data on what percentage of, voting districts have different types of voting systems. There is no national clearinghouse for this.

The Brennan Center keeps decent track of this at the state level, but most states have a variety of different voting systems because they're determined at a sub-state level. But we'll get into those details in a moment. So the first 50 years of voting in American elections actually wasn't done in private, right? It wasn't done on a paper ballot.

Sometimes this would happen in bars. And it was often a pretty raucous, carnival time, which might explain why we had 85% voter turnout, in the early days of our republic. And then in the first half of the 19th century. So moving on to number two here. The first paper ballots appeared in the US, but they weren't standardized and they weren't printed by government officials.

Oftentimes they were no more than just a scrap of paper upon which voters would scrawl a candidate's name. And then newspapers started to print out, voting ballots, if you will, with the titles of each office. And then you could fill that in and submit them. And then the political parties got into the game. Right.

So by the mid-19th century, you actually saw state, Republican and Democratic officials distributing preprinted fliers. And what they were trying to do was get you to vote the party line. Right? So get you to vote for their entire slate. And then in the second half of, the 19th century, we adopted the Australian paper ballot, which is the first time that we see the government, actually addressing, you know, all of the voter fraud and the calls for election reform, based upon the party ballots, based upon printed ballots for media and, from newspaper outlets and ballots that, you know, scroll pieces of paper.

So, the partisan, the way in which the government responded, was to issue the first standardized, printed paper ballot. And this happened in 1858, this so-called Australian ballot had the names of all of the candidates, and it was handed to voters at the polling place. It was first adopted in New York, in Massachusetts in 1888.

And it's important to note that we take that, this for granted today. But that's, you know, 100 years after our democratic republic was founded. So we have basically catch as catch can for the first century. And then, the, the late 19th century, Jacob Meyers invented the lever operated automatic booth, voting machine. It was an engineering marvel. It was massive.

It was prone to fraud because all you had to do is just, you know, in the front, all you all you did was press a lever for your candidate. But in the back, you could very easily kind of cross the wires. You could change an entire ballot, a voting simply by wedging something, into the back of the machine.

And what voters didn't know is that the entire system was reset when they would open, the curtains after voting. And so, there were all sorts of ways in which this could go wrong. Lever machines were mechanical and, you know, missing, gear often put them out of commission. Right. So these are pretty complex machines. Then we have the first punch card.

Voting machines. So moving on to number five. They came out in the 1960s when companies like IBM were making punch cards. So the, you know, supercomputers, that era of the supercomputers, also saw the era of, widespread adoption of punch card machines in voting. These systems definitely had their drawbacks for folks who were old enough.

The Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election with the hanging chads, that's when Americans were were introduced to this idea of pregnant chads and hanging chads and dimpled chads. So it's a small part, little piece of paper that's popped out of a punch card when a voter makes their selection. And oftentimes these machines don't work.

So the way that they're supposed to. And so, all sorts of issues counting ballots and you might recall one ballot being held up and two election officials with their magnifying glass trying to figure out what the heck the voter meant. And during the draw, the very drawn out for a recount, election officials, really reconsidered whether or not that was the way to go.

We then, around the same time saw the advent of Scantrons, but I want to jump, actually to touch screens because this was the big innovation after the 2000 election. We put about $30 million in the, in federal money to the states to modernize our election system. The Help America Vote Act actually introduced most states to touch screen voting.

So basically, this is like voting by iPad. This was the big innovation after the 2000 election. And as but these systems are also, pretty penetrable. You'll recall that 21 states had their voting systems hacked in the 2016 election, and the systems that were hacked were the electronic, touchscreen systems. And so the Scantron system of voting that came about that hit the market in the 1960s, around the same time as the punch card system has actually come back into vogue.

So, this is, optical scanning machines. They basically, you fill in the bubble, right? And so they have higher rates of accuracy, or are less penetrable. In terms of being hacked or having issues that come up. And so more states are adopting them. And I just want to end on, this chart from the Brennan Center, for the 2020 election, there was, about $20 million put into at the state level, put into new technologies.

And you can see the technology that folks are choosing the most, which is the optical scan machines over, you know, the direct or, digital machines. So we've had a really interesting history, with voting in the U.S and it seemed like we were out here in terms of electronic voting. But now it's kind of swinging back to, some older technology that was invented in the 1960s.

I'll end it there.

Dr. David Gray Adler: You know, that's fascinating history. And and to think that Americans have been more or less concerned about fraud from the beginning. Except I do recall that in the early days of the republic, elections were, we're not so highly regulated. And so for example, as Robert E. Brown, the historian, demonstrated by a half century or so ago that even though the commonly imposed requirement on male voters, of course, in the early days of Republic was that you had to own 25 acres or you couldn't vote.

But often as as he showed, in a couple of books, voters went to the polls. They were asked, do you own 25 acres? The answer was no, but I expect to soon and they would be allowed to vote. So, so the so the is so what's interesting to me about all this is, that within the confines of the limited franchise leaving out, Blacks, women, etc., that there was encouragement of the franchise, not discouragement, which seems to be so widespread in America today in response to non-existent allegations of fraud.

I know the two of you have never thought about non-existent allegations of fraud in the last six months. Lara, have you that ever occurred to you?

But it's also true, that the office block ballot came into use. And so it's really important to realize that for a good part of our history, you if you went to the poll and you were essentially somebody who declared yourself a Republican or a Democrat, because remember, there was also not register, there was no registration. Okay.

You were essentially given the choice of a party for all of the offices or, the other party for all of the offices. And this gets to then kind of what Caroline was talking about was that the parties then figured out, well, we can even after the office ballot is invented, we can create a way that you can just pull one lever and it'll mark the whole thing.

So it would be like having a party ballot. It's also true that the reason why we're moving back to these optical scan devices, as opposed to the touch screen, is that what has been learned over the last couple decades is that it's really important to have a paper record, because if you do not have a paper record of the the vote, then you cannot sort of accurately do a recount.

Right? And we can all think about how much and how often our computers have failed us. Right? I mean, we know what it's like if you were in the process of writing something and all of a sudden your computer doesn't work and you try to reboot, you may lose what was there, or you may find what was there.

It might not, but it might. But the great news about it is, is that you've actually got a physical ballot so you can run it through the machine again. You can run it through a different machine. You can hand count it. I think what we know is when we look at something like the state of Georgia in this last election, it was counted three separate times, twice through the machines, and then once, in a hand count.

So all of those ballots, need to be able to be seen physically as well as having a digital, aggregate of what the outcome is.

Dr. David Gray Adler: And, you know, I think about, the good point that Caroline made that in Article one, Section four states are given broad authority to determine the time, place and manner of the elections. But of course, it's important to remember that Congress can override those decisions with the authority essentially to set a national election date. That didn't occur until 1845, when President John Tyler signed that bill into law.

But of course, we're no longer a nation comprised principally of agrarians. And it makes me wonder, is there a better time of the year to hold elections? And that raises a host of questions. Should should we have a national holiday for a presidential election, for example? What's the future of elections look like in the United States?

Will it be, always a reliance on paper ballots? And what about the Georgia measures, which, hit minorities and the African-American community very, very hard? These are questions of great moment for American democracy in the 21st century.

Dr. Lara Brown: Yeah. I mean, if I could just say the one reform I have always been a little cynical about is actually making Election Day a holiday. Now we change it from a Tuesday to a different date. Maybe. But the problem that I have is I tend to believe Americans will take the opportunity to have a four day weekend, so they will take off Monday.

They will know that they have a holiday on Tuesday, and they will be gone for the weekend and may decide that voting is not that important. So unless, the absentee ballot provisions still allow no excuse absentee. I think, we could see people essentially skipping the last weekend of the election for their own enjoyment.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: That sounds great. A four day weekend. But you're right. Yeah, the need to actually vote to earn that. And and there are proposals, right, to have compulsory voting, which I think will never have here in the US. Some countries do have it. I think we'll never have that because it runs counter to our radical individualism. Although I think it would be, it would certainly give us a stronger democracy, because one of the big issues that we do have is, a declining turnout rate starting in the 1960s as a result of, you know, the social trends and the ways in which we spend our time.

And, Putnam has looked at this and it's and it has a lot to do with the fact, you know, that we're not connected to our communities in the same way because of technology. And also we have this consumer orientation, right? Where, we we are much more kind of self-focused than we used to be. And there's lots of data indicating this.

And so, we don't think of ourselves as a community, as a democracy in the same way, although the contentiousness of the last two elections has caused voting voter turnout to go up, I'm just imagining that it would maybe be in the 80s or 90s, as high as it was in the first 50 years of our republic.

If indeed we actually had some other provisions in place.

Dr. Lara Brown: Well, and Caroline, this gets to, you know, H.R.1., right? So the bill that the Democrats have put forward in the House of Representatives, there are a lot of things in that bill. I would not argue that everything is a wonderful idea. We can get into that in a minute. But I do think that probably the most interesting thing in the bill is the idea of automatic voter registration.

So it's known as AVR. And what it does is it basically says if you as a, as a citizen are going to the the DMV, if you're getting a Social Security check, if you're engaged in any level of kind of government, activity or service that the government entities, the state in particular, is actually required for to register you to vote.

Okay, like to basically assume that you are going to vote. They obviously would ask if you have a party registration or not, but it is up to the state to keep your voter registration current. And if you do not want to be registered, you have to then opt out. So we have AVR, you know, here in the District of Columbia where I am.

And it is true, when I went to go get my driver's license, you know, they said, you know, you're registering to vote, you know, fill out this form because it's part of the process. And if I didn't want to be registered, I could say, no, thank you. Please opt me out of the system. But what this would really do is change, you know, up to the estimates are perhaps 50 million more Americans could end up being registered to vote.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean turnout goes up. I mean, I think one of the things we have to remember is that as we have also expanded the denominator, the number of people eligible to vote, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to expand the numerator, the number of people who turn out and vote. So there is some, question about whether or not that would increase turnout, but certainly it would allow for greater participation because then everyone who is eligible, would essentially already be in the system.

Dr. David Gray Adler: I like that we're bringing math into this discussion. We got numerators denominators. I feel like I'm engaged in some long division here. I don't want to be left behind. Don't you, don't you think that in a democracy that we ought to do our business in a way that makes it as easy as possible for American citizens to vote and automatic voter registration, as you say.

And H.R.1., I think, is a golden idea. Why would we want to throw, hurdles into the path, on the day when American citizens can mostly immediately and directly exercise their popular sovereignty?

And so, you know, I am not particularly interested in party politics, but I am fascinated by why it is that one party is trying to keep the voter numbers down. So who exactly do they think they're going to be discouraging from voting? And how does this benefit their party? And, thankfully, in court cases, especially in, you know, states of Arizona and Texas, the Republican Party has actually been very forthright.

And they say, look, if everybody shows up to the polls, that's not, we're going to lose elections. And I you know, I think I maybe said this last month, it if your party, can't win elections fair and square that you have to, you know, change the rules and keep people home on Election Day. You really need to reconsider where your party is headed.

You need to reconsider the umbrella of your party and who's included and who isn't. And, you know, I think that that Donald Trump has been particularly bad for the for the Republican Party in terms of getting their folks out, because his rhetoric has been so divisive that he has turned off some Republican voters, he's turned off some independent voters, he's turned off voters of color.

He's turned off perhaps some women voters. We saw this with suburban voters. The dip in 2020 over 2016, suburban white women in particular. And and so he's it's, he's certainly his rhetoric is certainly appealing to this portion of the Republican Party. And in fact, in a way that's way more passionate than you usually see in politics.

But at what cost? The cost is the Republican Party has lost its appeal to, enough, a sizable number, that they're now attempting to change the rules. And so obviously, the Republican Party's got to figure out how to get it back on track and appeal to a broader swath of folks. Go back to, you know, economic conservatism, go back to, traditionalism, go back to some of the principles of the party that make it so successful.

But at the end of the day, there may well be kind of a, hodgepodge gutting of our electoral system, across the United States. And we may have to spend decades just trying to repair our democracy from these new laws.

Dr. Lara Brown: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think, I think one of the things that's important to remember, you know, David, you asked this is, sort of why would anyone attempt to shrink the people who are eligible to vote? Well, I mean, we should remember that voter registration itself was a progressive party reform. And that came about because the Progressive Party back in the late 1800s, early 1900s was, about trying to create purity within the electorate.

They were, in fact, very concerned about, sort of drunk Irish, who had come over on boats and were voting Democratic in the big cities of New York and Chicago, and they were hoping to essentially keep out, certain undesirables from the electorate. And I think this is where the same arguments are happening. It is just, sort of a swapping of the parties.

So rather than the progressives, arguing for a more pure electorate, a more educated electorate, an electorate that really just meant, essentially educated white men, there is now essentially a, a different argument from the Republican Party, which is now we just want only white men. Right. So in some ways it's the same. In some ways it's a little bit different.

Dr. David Gray Adler: I agree with what both of you said. And, and the success formula, at least as it stands for Republicans, would be shrink the electorate sufficiently, so that the party can triumph. But isn't that placing, Machiavellianism ahead of American democracy? The ends justify the means, to the disadvantage of democracy. And, and shouldn't there be a sense?

Boy, I'm going to sound really naive when I ask this, but shouldn't there be, at some level, a sense of fair play? Because we say in a democracy there has to be an agreement to play by the rules. Otherwise a country cannot achieve a one of those vital conditions necessary to, living in a democracy.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: I would argue that it is more important now than ever for partisanship to be set aside, because our electoral systems are under attack from other countries, right. Whether it's through Facebook propaganda, whether it's the 21 states that the Russians were able to hack in the 2016 election, which we haven't fully investigated, we don't actually know the implications or outcome of that.

Whether it was the constant attempts to hack the 2020 election, the provision of polling from the Russians to one political party in the 2016 election, which just came out today, I mean, we're finally sanctioning the Russians for the SolarWinds hack, which is the largest hack, you know, global hack in any history. And so our electoral systems are under, severe attack from outside forces.

So right now it would be weakening the system and to be limiting our voting, really seems to be quite myopic because right now we need to be unified. And, you know, Lara, you had brought up, you had brought up H.R.1., and I just, you know, brought up the the key provisions in it. And I think we would agree some of these are kind of bells and whistles, but this bill would provide same day voter registration, automatic voter, voter registration through the DMV or public universities, national holiday vote by mail.

It would also establish an election assistance commission. So it would nationalize what is happening instead of having, you know, 50 different states with, really hundreds of different voting systems within, I mean, 14 states have counties, for example, that have no paper trail, but not all the counties in those 14 states. It's kind of catch as catch can with, local, voting commissions.

So it's a really timely bill that would preserve our democracy, but more importantly, perhaps protect it from outside threats at a time when, you know, this is the future of of our, voting systems, the fact that we will constantly be under attack from other countries who want to sway the outcome of our elections.

Dr. Lara Brown: The only thing I want to say there, though, is that there is a tendency to to sort of believe that if everything moves to Washington or to the federal level and everything becomes standardized, that that will actually be better. One of our greatest protections in this country is in fact, that everything is is happening at the federal level.

It makes it almost impossible to hack, to, influence. There is what we consider to be a tradeoff between essentially malfeasance and incompetence. So the more nationalized our elections become, there actually then becomes one point of of essentially vulnerability. Right? Imagine if under, you know, the Secretary of State, in the administration, that they had access to essentially all of the voting rolls across the entire United States, that might have been very scary in 2020.

I am not so certain, that the vote would have been protected if it hadn't been for local people like Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to his own president and his own party. So, you know, but as I said, right on the one side, the more nationalized you make it, the more vulnerable it is to malfeasance on another side.

Right now, our system, because it is federal, is very vulnerable to what we consider to be incompetence, meaning that there are many ballots that are spoiled because there are mistakes made or there are decisions that were undertaken that no one had really thought through. And so, as Caroline got to this catch and catch can and so I think we, we do have to understand this tension and what really exists, between these two poles.

The one last thing I want to bring up about voter turnout, because I think it's so important, Jim DiNardo, who was one of my professors at UCLA. He actually wrote a book on this called, you know, the Joke's on the Democrats talking about the fact that high turnout, purportedly always helps Democrats. The truth of the matter is, high turnout just means that there is greater uncertainty in the outcome.

It is not something that you know is going to necessarily ahead of time, be favorable to one party or another. In fact, I would argue that when you look at the 2020 election, one of the reasons why the Democrats did not do as well down ballot was because, in fact, Republicans turned out in much higher numbers than Democrats had projected or predicted.

And in fact, that meant that the win numbers they calculated. And yes, David, we're going to get back into math for a moment. The win numbers that the House members calculated were too low. It's why they lost many of the close seats. And the Republicans ended up winning. So let me tell you how a win number is typically calculated.

A campaign manager takes a look at the race in their state. They tend to look, historically in the elections, they say, okay, let's just say, I'm running for, you know, a house seat. I'm going to give you the example of what happened to Eric Cantor back in 2014, because I happen to know this, this from one of my former students.

What basically happened was Eric Cantor as he was approaching his primary election. He was obviously running for reelection in Virginia. He was a House member, hadn't had any problem. He he and his campaign staff looked back and they said, you know what? Every single primary campaign, Republican or Democrat, if it's a contested campaign in Virginia for the House, it typically has a total turnout of 60,000 voters.

So what they did was they said, okay, our win number, you want to have 50% plus one right to win. So you they they decided that their win number would be 38,000, because if you hit 38,000 voters, you would most certainly win if the total turnout was 60. Well, guess what happened. Total turnout, in that primary election ended up being 90,000 voters.

All of these House members thought that the 2020 turnout was going to be somewhat similar to 2018. They believed that there would be an asymmetric turnout. The Democrats would turn out more than Republicans. They ignored the fact that in 2018, Trump was not on the ballot, but in 2020 he was. That meant a lot of his people turnout.

And what that meant was a lot of these Democrats miscalculated their win number, and they ended up losing their elections because even though they turned out their voters, they were not anticipating that the Republicans would in fact, turn out more.

Dr. David Gray Adler: Those are fascinating points. I have two quick points. So the first, I'm not worried about the nationalization of election laws, rules, regulations and practices. I am concerned about maintaining strength and integrity of the election at the state level. And we do have protection, as you say, from foreign hacking, in that sense. But I think that's all the more reason why H.R.1. needs to be passed to overcome, voter suppression laws in the 25 states or so that have them on the books and have already passed them.

Right. That's the beauty of of allowing Congress ultimately to conduct the elections. Because and this is an argument for nationalization, because if Congress did not have this authority, then the nation could be split, at least two ways between those states that wanted to enhance and those that wanted to suppress the vote. That's point one. Point two is I, I like your analysis about what happened to Democrats down ballot, but isn't there some accounting for the issues that some Democrats complained about in terms that split the, let's say, the progressive wing from the moderate wing?

Or maybe that was just seeking, some rationalization. But at any rate, the, the points that Caroline made, I think are, are very powerful. And, Caroline, I'm wondering, what what do you think about that nationalization versus, for lack of a better word, federalization of the elections here in this country?

Dr. Caroline Heldman: Well, I would very much agree with Doctor Brown that we wouldn't want to federalize elections right there. It would be great to have some federal oversight in terms of best practices and funding. But the Constitution really is pretty specific, right, that we would actually have to alter the Constitution if we wanted to federalize elections. But, David, you're pointing out that Congress has some sway in that, but ultimately it is the states that determine this.

The problem, of course, is the incompetence, right? That that Doctor Brown comments on, which is that there are a lot of different ways in which elections are being conducted and, a lot of ballots being spoiled because of the ways in which they are being conducted. And but I think, you know, Lara, you bring up this great point and Doctor Adler, you brought it up as well, right?

This tension between the states and the federal government, which is, by the way, the tension we have for every major policy in our country. And it's good to have that tension. It's an unusual system. It's unlike any other system in the world. And in fact, it's highly confusing if you come from another country or live in another country and try to understand, the power sharing between the federal and state government.

But, Lara, you really hit the nail on the head, right? It really is an issue of oftentimes set the policy aside. It is all pretty much always an issue of incompetence, versus malfeasance. And what happens when you centralize thing, you know, when you centralize things, something like voting at the federal level. I think what happened in Georgia this last time around and what happened, you know, in Michigan, what happened in Pennsylvania, where you have state election officials who are standing up to someone, mostly their own party, in order to say, no, our elections have integrity, and we're not actually going to be altering our results.

Dr. Lara Brown: And I just think that and okay, Dave, I mean, the one thing I would say is think about the lawsuit that the attorney general from the state of Texas, who was under indictment, yeah. You know, that he put forward basically saying all of these other states held illegitimate elections, and the Supreme Court thankfully rejected that out of hand, because it is not right at another level for another state to weigh in on, on some other state's procedures.

And, you know, I mean, you saw, Republicans across the board joining with that, that lawsuit in amicus briefs. So it's stunning to me and to.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: Can I jump in and provide some context there because you bring up such that there it is. Right? It's the Paxton lawsuit. It's the the idea that because other states were making accommodations for a pandemic, right. We're in a pandemic, other states are making accommodations through mail-in ballots that Texas was challenging the integrity of those elections. And as you point out, thank goodness the Supreme Court, you know, just swatted it down.

But I remember doing media commentary in California and saying, Texas doesn't get to tell us how to run our elections over here. And I so I think that sort of state and you would all of a sudden see Democrats engaging in some pretty, pretty forceful states rights arguments if we tried to federalize it.

Dr. David Gray Adler: You know,

Dr. Lara Brown: And I think this is true, really, when we talk about the electoral College and we talk about the, you know, national Popular Vote Compact, Democrats always assume that there's going to be a Democrat who would win. I cannot imagine there being a situation where, say, a Republican actually did win. The national popular vote and then a state like California would be like, oh, well, our state went for the Democrat.

But you know what? We're in this national popular vote compact, and we have to now give all of our electors to the Republican candidate that that would go over so well. So I do think that both parties are hypocritical in their love of states rights, right? They they love it when the issue suits them. And I think we can see this right now with, you know, legalization of marijuana.

We can see it with gun rights, we can see it with abortion laws. But it is also the case, with voting. And there are some provisions within H.R.1. that are very disconcerting to me. I mean, you know, we haven't talked about campaign finance. But one of the big provisions in H.R.1. is a campaign finance provision that would create matching funds for candidates.

Well, I'll be honest with you, Marjorie Taylor Greene just, raised $3.2 million in her first, you know, quarter, fundraising in a non election year. And I'll, I mean, I'll be quite frank. I have no interest in one dime of my public money going to her campaign. And so I also think we have to understand that some of what we have and some of what we dislike is just that everyone in our system also has the freedom to advocate and support their interests, which aren't always necessarily what we, would agree to as a public interest.

Dr. David Gray Adler: One more point, and I see some questions. David, where would we be in this nation if Congress did not have the authority to pass national laws to protect voter rights? If you think about, even though the Supreme Court gutted the voting, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, nevertheless, if without that, without that statutory authority, states like Georgia could prevent voters from voting.

So the. I would stick to the point that there's a powerful case to be made, for the fact that the framers of the Constitution placed this ultimate authority in Congress, not the states. David, what questions do. Oh, Caroline. Yeah.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: Well, I would just say that some of the questions, fit in with this, too, but, yeah, I mean, the courts. So what, we're, just to do the 30,000ft view. You have a president running for office who knows? He's not going to do well. And so he starts to tell the big lie, and then he raises over $100 million once, he loses that office fair and square and, all of that or much of that money is going into propaganda about the big lie.

Dr. David Gray Adler: Right. So, we have several questions. First of all, great commentary. I think that, it's it is a challenge as we kind of move forward. And some of the questions here kind of address this, specifically the security, you know, we talk about, okay, so because of the ability to hack touch screens, and those systems and then the scantron, aspect, but you all are well aware, you know, kind of the, the big, I don't want to say controversy, but the Dominion voting system, somebody had asked I think it's, you know, the Dominion voting system that that was challenged.

It was used, that it was hacked and it changed votes. So the question that we have is, what do you think of the importance for the future integrity of our elections of the Dominion election equipment companies, legal challenges to the claims by organizations that said they were faulty?

Well, I'm going to defer, I'm going to defer.

Dr. Lara Brown: I mean, I'll just jump in and say that this is what the courts are for, right? I mean, Dominion is asking that media companies have essentially, wrongfully, you know, asserted that they're machines did something untoward. And the truth of the matter is, there is nothing wrong with Dominion voting machines. I think it's really important for Americans to realize that we have a number of, of companies who do actually provide voting technology and that voting technology is both tested, by, so so the states can request that, that voting technology be tested by either the federal government or there are standards that the state governments have used across, different states.

And our voting technologies. One of the biggest reasons why they are safe are things that Americans don't really think about. But it is true. You do not ever connect the counting machine with the internet. So one of the things that's really important is, is that when you look at these technologies and you look at how it's done, okay, they are closed networks.

And it is true that local election officials, what they do is they then essentially take the key cards, put it into a different machine to count it, and then once they have the count, then they will transmit that via the internet to the Secretary of State. So one of the things that I just think is important to realize is that from a voting system standpoint, and this is why our federal elections actually do protect us, is you have to be in all of these places to actually hack these votes.

Now, it is true that, foreign actors have attempted to hack Secretary of States, right. And it is true that, that we have had people trying to essentially bombard us with misinformation and disinformation. But in terms of being able to, to change the actual count, that has yet to be shown anywhere or to be proven because it is one thing to hack the Secretary of State's website and to try to get the Secretary of State's website to report something different than what the underlying votes show, but it's a whole other ball of wax to actually change the votes.

So the paper records are wrong, too. And this is where, we do have actually a lot of security in the variety of systems that we have.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: And Fox News, and other outlets used Dominion as a way of promoting the Big Lie. Right. And so they tanked the, this company. And that's why Dominion is suing for an extraordinary amount of money. So but it's it's interesting kind of corporate, a corporation that was essentially destroyed by the big lie now pushing back against it.

And as Doctor Brown is pointing out, it's really actually hard to rig elections. It's just hard. I mean, the amount of work that goes into it, this whole idea that we have a, you know, a voter ID problem or a voter fraud problem, like my favorite stat is that you are 37 times more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to engage in voter fraud.

In the US, we actually don't have a voter fraud problem. So any law or bill attempting to address and non-existent problem, has to be met with skepticism.

Dr. David Gray Adler: So one of the questions I have and somebody else had brought up is we kind of look forward, there are different ways about it, you know, there's, instant runoff, you know, a, you know, approval or ranked. Do you think that, and some individual counties and states have them? Do you think that there's the potential of that being nationalized in the future?

Dr. Lara Brown: Well, so the problem, at least as far as I can tell on a lot of these things, is that it's not about, the rule that we use to vote. That part of the problem that we have in this country is actually that we are sorted and highly polarized. So this even gets to the issue of gerrymandering, you know, when we look at drawing districts, in our states, part of the problem is you have to draw really crazy districts to try to get a competitive one, because we are now at a moment in time where most of the people who lean left are living in the cities, and most of the people

So I think this just all gets to these other voting mechanisms. Right? Whether you're talking about plurality rules or whether you're talking about ranked choice voting or whether you're talking about, sort of an open, system or a top two. There are good and bad aspects to all of it, but our biggest problem is just that we as a country right now are so far apart that we can't bridge these partisan differences and we don't even, you know, cross over voting.

I mean, split ticket voting is way down. We're living sort of in a parliamentary world, and we are trying to impose, kind of democratic presidential, rules on top of that.

And I don't say that lightly. Watch The Social Dilemma to see what that mechanism looks like and where it's coming from.

Dr. David Gray Adler: So, I think this is, you know, we'll just have time. This will be our last question. And it kind of touches, Doctor Brown, what you were talking about, you know, really how divided and polarized we are, just even the mechanics of voting, are even within the party system, primaries. So there's a question about closed primaries.

Dr. Lara Brown: So this is where we get into this tradeoffs problem, right? It is true that if we are in kind of a, a system whereby, the general election is meaningless because, there really isn't a two party competition at the general election level because the district has been essentially gerrymandered or just, because of sorting. There are so many people of one party that it's impossible for the other side to gain any traction.

Then what that means is that all competition is happening really at the primary level. And if you have primaries that then are closed. Well, on the one hand, that's a good thing, right? I mean, on the one hand, shouldn't regular party members be the ones to choose who their nominees are? I mean, people who day in, day out are sort of loyal to their party.

Shouldn't they be the ones to decide their nominees? Yes. But then again, if there's no competition at the general election level, then maybe you should open up that primary to allow other people, to weigh in on that decision. But if you allow other people to weigh in on that decision, then it also dilutes, kind of the party membership from being able to make their choice and it weakens the overall party.

So this is a fascinating conversation. And then I will tell you, I wrote a chapter in a textbook, for Michael Nelson, that really talks about the fact that the framers never addressed, at least at the presidential level. They never addressed this question of who does the nominating. And so as a result of that, this is something that we are continually, revising, exploring, rethinking.

And so you can think about just our, our sort of primary process for the presidency. Right. And you can think about all the different states and New Hampshire and Iowa going first and whether that's right or wrong. And is a caucus good, is a primary good? Should there be a closed rule or not? All of those things have, I would honestly argue some good, some bad, and really tradeoffs.

And I don't think that we have a good answer, but I think what I believe is that every political culture makes the decision about their rules, that their culture actually believes in. So let me just say, in closing, because I know I've talked a lot, but, you know, Americans, we are, a culture that sort of believes in winners and losers.

We like I mean, if you watch the Food Network, which I do, all the time, I mean, every show is now a contest, right? If you watch, you know, March Madness, you can't lose any game. You lose. You're out. We like this idea of winning and losing and having that be very prominently demarcated. It's part of the reason why most of our elections exist in a plurality rules kind of way.

A first past the post kind of system where it doesn't matter if you want win by six votes, doesn't matter if you win by 6000, you win. You win. A W is a W. And that's partly our culture. So some of what these other states are doing is starting to tinker with this. And I think this is, something that we will have to see whether or not Maine's ranked choice voting actually does help them get to sort of outcomes that more of the majority is, preferring than the way they were in the past.

But I certainly would implore every, sort of American to work at their state and local level to think about what will work for them and and to do this because this is the freedom of localities and states being able to implement different kinds of systems, to experiment with them.

Dr. Caroline Heldman: I would just point out very briefly that in all of the questions in the Q&A, it's, you know, the pros and cons, the trade offs of different voting systems. What I also hear implied in that question is a trade off between the multi-party system versus a two party system, which has been codified into law in all 50 states.

I think it brings up the pros and cons. There also, the Electoral College. There's no easy fix there. You know, there are pros and cons for abolishing the Electoral College, especially given its history in terms of reinforcing, you know, the slave, slavery in the South. But at the end of the day, I mean, none of this is an easy, quick fix.

It's a constant ongoing discussion. And, you know, as Doctor Brown pointed out, right. It's there's this constant tension, that really needs to be mostly worked out at the local level. But as Doctor Adler pointed out earlier, when you have issues of discrimination involved in our voting system, then it makes perfect sense for the Supreme Court and the federal government to be involved, to make sure that that local prejudices are not working their way into our democracy.

Dr. David Gray Adler: Well, I certainly agree with what both Doctor Heldman and Doctor Brown have said very quickly. I would say that the, freedom of association allows parties to decide to close their primary if they wish. What's the political impact on the electorate? In theory, the more a party leans toward closing the primary, that should force some members of that party to say it's become too narrow minded.

I'm going to defect and join the other party and maybe reshape it. That's that would be the behavior of an electorate that would be a little more savvy and, exercising the opportunity to better influence electoral outcomes. But it doesn't happen very often. And so that reflects, I think, the short sightedness of voters, which is frankly, a problem because we could we could illustrate that in many ways.

And you'll all remember the great book book written by Tom Frank in 05, I think, what's the matter with Kansas? How people voted against their interests, how to explain that that's that's point one. Point two is, as you both said, in many ways, our our system is shaped by the presence of the Electoral College to we want winners.

We don't want to be losers. And so voters become very pragmatic as opposed to doing what Caroline alluded to. And that is having multiple, multiple parties which could provide more options. But that, of course, invites a parliamentary system that doesn't work well in our system. And so it's a conundrum we have and should both say several tradeoffs to to make.

But ultimately, aren't we back at the point where if American voters exercise their own sovereignty, they should learn to choose wisely for themselves, for their own futures, and for the future of the country? How do you impose greater knowledge, on the voters. That's why we're all in the business of education. If we knew how to do that, with a snap of our fingers, we would surely do it.

Dr. Lara Brown: Dave, I don't mean to be, once again bringing up something, but I think it's so important for people to realize most of the problems that people have with the Electoral College is not necessarily with the Electoral College itself. It's with the fact that all of the states, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska, have chosen to allocate all of their electors to the plurality winner in their state.

Dr. David Gray Adler: Yeah.

Dr. Lara Brown: So one of the easiest ways to actually change things, to make every state matter in the country, is to have every state legislature decide to allocate their electors proportionally. So if you were a candidate and you won 55% of the vote in a state, you would get 55% of the electors instead of 100%. Now, what this does is precisely what Doctor Hellman said, which is invite third parties, to become spoilers.

And then if they become spoilers, we have to understand that the constitutional question, if nobody earns a majority of electoral votes, it then goes to the House of Representatives to decide. Which I think more Americans would freak out than anything else in the world, is that if the House of Representatives decided who the president was. But this gets to another point.

There is no constitutional right to vote for president. So while it is true that there is a constitutional right to vote for the House of Representatives, and because of the 19th amendment, the which amendment, 17th amendment, Senate, that is not the case with regard to president, because article two explains that it is up to the state legislatures to decide the manner of the electors getting selected.

Dr. David Gray Adler: Right. Which brings me back to the point that I would make. And that is the Electoral College inflicts more harm on this democracy than a popular vote would. And I like that. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Lara Brown: Oh no, You and I could have a whole conversation about that.

David Pettyjohn: This sounds like an opportunity for a whole other conversation. But unfortunately, our time has ended tonight, Doctor Brown, Doctor Heldman, Doctor Adler, thank you so much for joining us. I do want to say those who, are still that are with us, that we will have a public session coming out, within the next month, with all of these contributors.

So look for that. It's been a pleasure, you all. Thank you for all that you do. And and, Doctor Adler, just want to point out, yes, we are all in the business of education, and it's an honor to be in that business and an honor to have the pleasure of working with each of you. So enjoy your evening, everyone.