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David Becker is back at our desk.
He's the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
David Becker, remind viewers what kind of research and innovation you're doing at the center.
So we've been around for about eight years.
We work with election officials of both parties to support elections that voters should and do trust.
I work with Republican secretaries, Democratic secretaries, local election officials.
We put out research.
Research, for instance, shows that it's easier to register to vote than ever before.
More states have availability of online voter registration, automatic voter registration, same-day registration.
And it's easier to vote than ever before.
97% of all voters can vote early in the United States.
And in fact, as we sit here today, 45 states in D.C. are offering early voting.
So people should get out there and vote.
And 36 states in D.C. offer no excuse mail voting, which is better than ever before.
Those are the kinds of research pieces we generally put out.
And then we also run the Election Official Legal Defense Network because unfortunately, over the last several years, election officials have been targeted for threats and harassment, sometimes even by the former president of the United States, sometimes by name.
And they often need a lawyer for advice and assistance.
And we have recruited a network of lawyers all across the country who are willing to be paired with them regardless of party and work for them for free to assist and advise them.
Staying on the center for a second more, how's it funded?
And does it have a partisan leaning one way or the other?
No partisan leaning whatsoever.
As I said, I work equally with Republicans and Democrats.
We get funded primarily by major foundations out there as well as individuals who choose to donate to us.
We're a 501c3, so all of our funding and everything else is publicly available.
On voting and early voting, so more than 42 million Americans at this point have early voted, either via absentee ballot or in-person early voting.
What do you make of that number and how it compares to previous years?
Yeah, I just checked it before I came on.
I think it's about 48 million, getting very close.
It's going to hit 50 million today.
It's, first of all, very good news.
The more people who vote early, not only does it mean voters are taking advantage of the convenience of early voting, it's actually an important security measure.
And I think this is often missed when we're discussing early voting and mail voting, how important it is to spread voting out over a series of days in a series of modes in person or by mail.
That way, if there is any kind of event, whether it be intentional, like some kind of cyber attack or ransomware or something like that, or unintentional, like we had the CloudFair Flare situation this summer that caused some delays in Arizona during their primary day, or just traffic or weather, which we've seen, it spreads that out and makes it easier to mitigate any possible challenges that you have, especially in this era of disinformation.
If voters choose to vote early, they make themselves a moving target for any disinformation that could try to affect their vote or confuse them about how to vote.
And once they've voted, they've completely inoculated themselves against that disinformation.
So it's really good news.
I caution people not to take any partisan message from the early vote.
We just don't know what this early vote is.
It's coming from all over.
It seems to be skewing slightly more women, but also be skewing slightly older.
So that could mean a variety of different things.
Does early voting mean that vote counting is going to happen faster on election night?
When are we going to know the results?
It could.
It depends on the kind of early voting.
So first of all, we should mention that it has always taken us days, if not weeks, to count all the ballots.
There's a misconception that because the margins used to be much wider and the media could call a race on election night, that states were counting ballots fast.
But that's not true.
What was happening was they were just counting enough ballots that the media could call the race.
So take, for instance, California, which will likely be called as soon as the polls close in California.
California will have counted a very, very tiny percentage of its votes, but it's pretty obvious which way California is very likely to go in the presidential race.
Whereas Georgia is going to count ballots very fast, but the margin could be very, very narrow.
So we're going to need a lot more votes before we can understand who won Georgia.
It's always taken that long.
That's why the U.S. Constitution says electors don't meet until six weeks after the election.
That's so the states can actually figure out who is going to win and get their electoral votes.
So understanding that, it all depends on the margin.
The margin is the biggest variable.
If it's very, very close, and by all accounts it will be close, I think everyone rationally should be able to process the idea that their candidate won or lost, given how close it is.
We'll likely need a couple of days in some states, particularly Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and possibly Arizona, Nevada.
And that's largely because of two things.
One, in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, they can't begin processing mail and in Pennsylvania early votes until Election Day, meaning they can't look at the envelope, confirm all the information, open the envelope, take the ballot out, and put it in a scanner.
In Arizona and Nevada, they can pre-process, but they get a lot of mail votes on Election Day.
And you can't pre-process a ballot you don't have.
So they're going to have to take some time to do that, depending on the margins.
That could mean we're going into later in the week, Thursday, or perhaps even Friday.
I think, you know, if I were to guess, I'd say we're going to probably know earlier than we did in 2020, just because we're not in COVID.
And that means we have more people working.
A lot of the technology has been improved.
Philadelphia has greatly improved its processing ability of getting those mail ballots counted.
So I think we're probably looking at Thursday or Friday, but don't hold me to that.
Let me give the phone numbers for viewers to call in.
As usual, split by political party.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
As folks are calling in, I'll show this headline that we showed viewers in the first hour of our program.
It's from the Wall Street Journal today.
Voting battles begin to hit the Supreme Court.
I want you to just kind of walk through what's going on.
I want to start with the one in Pennsylvania.
Here's the graph that describes it from the Wall Street Journal.
The Republican National Committee and election officials from Pennsylvania's heavily Republican Butler County asked Supreme Court justices to block authorities from counting provisional ballots cast by voters who previously sent mail-in ballots that were invalidated because of errors such as assembling the return envelope incorrectly.
Can you just put that into regular state?
Yeah, this is a really kind of complicated issue.
It's probably not going to affect that many votes.
But when the ballots come in, either mail or early ballots under Pennsylvania law, they have to be inside an inner secrecy sleeve.
So it's a second envelope that gets sealed to preserve the secrecy.
It doesn't actually need to be there, but that's what Pennsylvania law says.
What election officials can do in some counties and do is they weigh the ballots and they can tell by the weight of the ballots whether or not certain ballots have the secrecy sleeve or not because the scales are that precise.
And if they don't have the secrecy sleeve in some counties, they reach out to those voters and say, hey, if you want to come down, you can cast a provisional ballot.
And if your ballot doesn't have the secrecy sleeve, that provisional ballot will count.
What this Pennsylvania Supreme Court has held is that's fine.
That's under state law.
That's a fine thing to do.
And now the Republicans have taken this to the United States Supreme Court.
But this is a very state law issue.
I think it's highly unlikely that the United States Supreme Court is even going to take this case.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has refused to stay their order pending that appeal.
And the appeal relies a lot on this idea that state legislatures have complete power to do whatever they want without regard to the state constitutions or the state judiciary.
This has largely been rejected in a case from about a year ago called Moore versus Harper that came out of North Carolina by the Supreme Court.
So I think the Supreme Court is going to stay out of this.
I think the Supreme Court in general doesn't want to get involved in these very, very state law election disputes.
I think we're going to see that repeatedly through this process where the United States Supreme Court allows the states to continue to run elections as they see fit consistent with the United States Constitution.
The other case, not as much of a swing state, but in the state of Virginia, Virginia's Republican Attorney General has asked the Supreme Court justices to revive a state voter purge that removed some 1,600 alleged non-citizens from the rolls after lower courts found that canceling voter registration so close to the election violates federal law.
So there's two big problems with what Virginia was trying to do this time around.
First, there is a very well-known federal law called the National Voter Registration Act passed in 1993, which says that all states that are covered under the NVRA, which includes Virginia, there's six states that are exempt, cannot conduct large-scale systematic voter list maintenance removals of voters within 90 days of the election.
That's in there because sometimes states get it wrong.
It's very understandable, particularly people with common names, other things like that.
They're doing their best they can.
But if they do that in 2023, there's still plenty of time for that person to get re-registered or fix the problem.
If they do that 90 days before the election, they might not even know there's a problem before they go try to vote.
So that's why that law is in place.
And Virginia knows about that law.
It's been around for 30 years, and they did this program anyway.
The second big problem was they made a lot of mistakes.
I mean, there were a lot of identified citizens on this non-citizen list when they went to court and proof was shown to the court.
So they kind of showed through their actions how important this 90-day quiet period, as it's called, in the National Voter Registration Act was.
Again, I expect the United States Supreme Court not to weigh in on this.
I think this is pretty clearly the Fourth Circuit just affirmed the district court's opinion in this case.
I think it's likely the Supreme Court's going to stay out of these very state-specific, although this one does involve federal law issues.
How concerned are you about non-U.S. citizens voting a week from today?
I'm not very concerned, and that's because of the documentation and work that, frankly, Republican election officials have done to show how extremely rare the problem of non-citizen voting is.
We've known that's true.
There are reasons it's extremely rare.
One, it's illegal.
It has been for 30 years under a very specific statute that says it's a crime with jail time and a fine if a non-citizen votes.
Also importantly, they're going to get deported if they vote as a non-citizen.
So they're risking their presence here in the United States.
Second, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize this, since 2002, there's a law in the United States that requires every single voter who registers to provide ID when they register, almost always a driver's license number, which is checked against the Motor Vehicles Agency data.
And remember, when you go into motor vehicles agencies now, you have to show proof of legal presence.
So if you've shown a green card, that'll be flagged.
But if you show a U.S. birth certificate or a U.S. passport, it won't be flagged.
So that's really important.
Every single voter has to provide ID when they register to vote.
We have nationwide voter ID for registration.
And then lastly, as I mentioned, these Republican states have documented how rare it is.
Just last week, Ohio had alleged that there were about 499 non-citizens registered to vote.
When the Attorney General, a Republican, looked at this, he found only six people who he could charge with non-citizen voting over the course of a decade, dating back to 2014.
I looked this up.
It's actually more likely, you're more likely as an Ohioan to get hit by lightning and to find a non-citizen vote.
Georgia did an audit of their rules.
They just announced it last week as well.
I believe they found nine people dating back to 2008, so over 15 years, who were non-citizens who voted.
It does happen extremely rarely, almost always because of some sense of confusion about what they're supposed to do, because no one would rationally put their legal presence at risk in the United States, put themselves at risk of being deported to cast one ballot in an election in which 160 million ballots are going to be cast.
As usual, plenty of calls for you.
Let me start in Delaware, Georgetown, Delaware.
Kathleen, Line for Democrats.
Good morning.
You're on with David Becker.
Good morning, John.
Good morning, Mr. Becker.
I would like to know, now, in 2020 and again this year, they were assuring everybody that these voter boxes where you can drop off your ballot in these boxes.
Now, if I'm not wrong, I saw on the news the other day where about three, maybe more of those boxes had been set on fire and all the envelopes in it were burned.
Now, I don't know what Donald Trump's going to make of that, but what do you think of that, or am I wrong?
No, you raise a really good point.
There's been three instances over the last several weeks.
One was a postal box in Arizona, and then I believe over the last two days, there were ballot drop boxes, one in Portland and one in Vancouver, Washington.
And in each case, in the Arizona and Portland situation, only a very small number of ballots were destroyed.
The rest were salvageable.
In the Washington case, Vancouver, Washington, it looks like there might have been hundreds of ballots destroyed.
Now, really importantly, here, they're reaching out to voters.
Voters know whether they dropped ballots into these boxes.
They also have good ballot tracking in those states so they can tell whether or not they've got those ballots in.
There are protections against to make sure that no one votes twice, but if their ballot has been destroyed or they're not sure what happened to it, they can go get a replacement ballot.
If their ballot comes in, only the first ballot will count.
The second ballot won't count because they know who sent it because the envelopes say that.
That's really, really important.
But I think Kathleen raises another point, which is really important, which is we're seven days out from the election at this point, and there are tens of millions of mail ballots that still haven't been voted that are likely coming in.
And if you're still holding on to your mail ballot, I would at this point definitely not put it in the mail.
I would put it in a drop box.
Most drop boxes are monitored, verified, cleaned out every day.
So it's very likely that's going to be safe.
But if you have any doubts at all, you can take it right to an election office, hand it to an election worker.
It'll be logged in at that point and stored securely and safely for the entire time.
And another option is if you have a mail ballot and you're just not quite sure about it, you can bring your mail ballot into an early voting site or even on election day in most places, surrender it, and they'll give you in most places a regular ballot.
Even if you don't have it, they'll give you a provisional ballot, and that provisional ballot will only count if they don't receive your mail ballot.
And so again, protections to make sure that each voter only votes once.
On the drop box fires, I was talking to a longtime firefighter yesterday, and he was talking about the training that he was going through that they have this year that they just got on how to deal with drop box fires of not to use water on it that might destroy the ballot, but to use chemical chemicals to put out the fire and then secure the site so election officials can come and be on site.
He's said in all his years of firefighting training, he doesn't remember getting that kind of training before an election before.
What do you make of that story?
I mean, it's incredible that we live in a country like that right now, right?
Where there are people who are intentionally, by the way, there's film of this individual.
It might have been the same individual who firebombed both the Oregon and Washington drop boxes.
That person is going to get caught and is going to be prosecuted and spend several years in jail.
So people should know that.
But how sad a commentary on our country that there are people out there trying to destroy ballots.
Maybe they're doing it for partisan reasons.
Maybe they're doing it to sow chaos.
I guarantee you what they're doing is serving the goals, either wittingly or unwittingly, of our foreign adversaries like Russia that want to sow chaos, that are clearly trying to interfere in our election.
I mean, similarly, what does it say about our country that a nonprofit like mine needs to run the Election Official Legal Defense Network and recruit attorneys to work pro bono for our public servants, for our election officials who've been facing abuse, threats, and harassment for well over four years now and are still facing it and anticipating even more in the aftermath of the election.
I'm very proud to provide that service, but I can't wait till we've restored sanity and I can sunset that and we don't have to offer it anymore.