| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Prototype, test, field, like all of the things that we've been talking about over the past hour in a very rapid way so that we can get comfort with these systems. | |
| We understand how they work. | ||
| We work through the autonomy policy directive. | ||
| We figure out how the human needs to team. | ||
| Where is their appropriate human judgment? | ||
| All of that. | ||
| I think figuring that out is probably the longest poll in the tent, if I were to choose. | ||
| Well, thank you to all of you for being here, and please join me in thanking this great panel. | ||
| Tonight, Missouri Republican Congressman Mark Alford holds a town hall with constituents as part of a 15-county tour through his home state. | ||
| We'll be live from Bolivar, Missouri, beginning at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| You can also watch on C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Joining us this morning is Michael Morley. | ||
| He's a college of law professor at Florida State University, and he's also a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises. | ||
| Michael Morley, let's begin with the president's Truth Social post where he wrote, I am going to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots and also, while we're at it, highly inaccurate, very expensive, and seriously controversial voting machines, which cost 10 times more than accurate and sophisticated watermark paper, which is faster and leaves no doubt at the end of the evening as to who won and who lost the election. | ||
| Michael Morley, let's talk about mail-in ballots first. | ||
| He calls them highly inaccurate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, mail-in ballots are a part of the electoral system. | |
| States vary in how they use them. | ||
| About two-thirds of states allow any eligible voter to cast a ballot by mail if they wish to do so. | ||
| About a dozen or so states have what's known as for-cause absentee voting, where particular groups of people, such as senior citizens, people who are confined to their homes for medical reasons, in some cases, people who will be outside of their counties on election day, are permitted to vote by mail. | ||
| And then anyone who doesn't fall into one of those categories has to vote in person, either during early voting in states that offer it or in their polling place on Election Day. | ||
| And over the course of the 2024 election, we saw roughly 30% of votes nationwide cast by mail, whether vote by mail or absentee. | ||
| And states really vary in terms of, you know, based on their laws and based on their political culture and what the voters there are used to and their own preferences in terms of how much of the electorate in a particular state chooses to use them. | ||
| You'll see states that in an ordinary election, right, COVID obviously was different, but in the ordinary course of events, you'll see states that have as few as 5 to 10% of voters choose to cast their votes by mail. | ||
| Whereas in other jurisdictions, you'll have over a third of voters choose to do so. | ||
| And there's a handful of states, of course, that conduct their elections almost exclusively by mail. | ||
| Let's take a look at those numbers that you just referenced. | ||
| 30% of those who voted in 2024 election did so by mail. | ||
| 37.4 voted in person on election day, while 35% voted in person before election day. | ||
| Michael Morley, if you vote by mail, have states done so in a timely fashion so that voters know the American people know who won the election quickly? | ||
|
unidentified
|
So states, as with many aspects of the electoral system, state laws differ dramatically. | |
| Florida, where I teach, has a series of laws that allow for election results to be determined very quickly, even though we have one of the most robust vote by mail systems in the entire country. | ||
| That's because, number one, state law allows election officials to begin pre-processing of vote-by-mail ballots several weeks before election day. | ||
| So, this means when election officials receive a ballot, they don't do final tallies, but they'll do all of the steps leading up to the final tally. | ||
| So, they'll open the envelope. | ||
| They'll make sure, yes, this is a person who requested an absentee ballot. | ||
| This is a legitimate ballot that we election officials sent out, right? | ||
| It's not some sort of fraudulent document, homemade document. | ||
| They'll do signature match. | ||
| They'll compare the information on the ballot envelope to the voters' information to confirm that, yes, it appears that the person who was entitled to cast this vote cast it. | ||
| They'll run it through the scanning machine and they'll do everything except for determining the final tally of how many votes each candidate received. | ||
| So, the longer before election day you start doing that, if all of that work is already done, that makes it very easy to then be able to determine the results on election night. | ||
| Some of the other factors that vary dramatically by state: what is the deadline for returning absentee ballots, right? | ||
| In many states, including Florida, domestic voters are required to ensure that election officials have actually received their absentee ballot by the close of polls on election day, whereas other jurisdictions may take longer to be able to get results because they allow absentee ballots that are either postmarked by election day or in some cases that lack a legible postmark to be received for days or in some cases, even a week or two afterwards. | ||
| I believe the longest period in the country is 21 days after election day. | ||
| Again, the ballot still has to be completed by the voter and mailed out by election day, but by the close of polls, right, election officials don't even know how many legally valid votes have been cast in that election. | ||
| One of the other major factors is what's called the cure period for provisional ballots, right? | ||
| So, if you show up to a polling place and let's say you don't have your ID, or in some cases, let's say election officials don't think your signature matches, rather than say, or you're not, or let's say you don't appear in the registration books, even though you know or you believe that you've registered to vote in that polling location, rather than turning you away and saying you're not allowed to vote, federal law and state law requires election officials to give you a provisional ballot. | ||
| So, you fill out the ballot, you choose the candidate you want, that ballot is put in a sealed envelope, and then it's set aside. | ||
| And so, then states vary in terms of how many days after election day the voter has to cure that defect. | ||
| So, to go back to election officials to the election office and show their ID or show their voter registration card, provide a different signature, provide whatever information was missing that they didn't have with them at the polling location. | ||
| And so, the longer the post-election cure period, again, election officials don't know how many legally valid votes have been cast in that election because you don't know how many of those provisional ballots are going to get cured. | ||
| And in some cases, you might have hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots, particularly in a high turnout election, such as a presidential election. | ||
| And so, it's sort of these under-the-radar technical nuts and bolts aspects of state law that determine if you have, even if you have robust vote by mail, are election officials going to be able to generate results quickly? | ||
| And again, this is the initial results, the unofficial results. | ||
| Every state in the country has a more formal canvassing process that occurs over the days and weeks following the election. | ||
| But those initial unofficial results that get announced and that allow networks to call particular races, again, all unofficially. | ||
| It's all these technical nuts and bolts aspects of state law. | ||
| When does pre-processing begin? | ||
| What is the actual deadline for the return of ballots? | ||
| How long is the cure period? | ||
| These are, and of course, resources, right? | ||
| How are election officials adequately staffed? | ||
| Do they have the funds? | ||
| Do they have the resources necessary to be able to process the amount of absentee ballots they're receiving? | ||
| These are the factors that determine how quickly you're going to get results. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We'll ask our viewers to join us in this conversation. | ||
| We'll take their questions and comments this morning. | ||
| Michael Morley, Republicans dial in at 202-748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Michael Morley, going on to voting machines. | ||
| I misspoke. | ||
| The president called the voting machines highly inaccurate, very expensive, and seriously controversial. | ||
| Can you respond to that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So again, the term voting machine can refer to many different types of technologies. | ||
| Jurisdictions across the country use different types of technologies in order to allow people to vote. | ||
| Of course, right here in Florida during the 2000 election, many counties use the punch card ballots, which of course the nation came to become familiar with and ultimately led to the post-election dispute in Bush V. Gor. | ||
| And so since that crisis, states have been looking to move away from those sort of less reliable, particularly manual type devices, and looked for machines that would be able to assist. | ||
| And so on the one hand, when you say voting machine, you might be referring to what's called a DRE device, where a voter presses a button on a screen and that's it. | ||
| You have to count on the machine to record the vote. | ||
| You have to count on the machine to tally the vote and the voter doesn't see anything else about their vote. | ||
| Those have become extremely rare based on, according to the most recent report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, somewhere about only 1% of the jurisdictions in our country still use those sort of black box DRE machines. | ||
| And I would expect over the upcoming election cycles, we're going to see their usage further reduced and even eliminated. | ||
| On the other hand, many states and many, many counties in Florida have what's called ballot marking devices, where voters, rather than having to manually fill out the ballot themselves, instead they go to a touch screen, they press the buttons next to the names of the candidates they want, and the machine actually prints them a ballot that is already prepared for them. | ||
| And so their voters then can then look at that ballot. | ||
| They can confirm, yes, these are the people who I want them to vote for. | ||
| These are the candidates that I chose. | ||
| If there's a mistake, if the machine didn't record their touch correctly, or perhaps they accidentally touched the wrong button, they can return that ballot to election officials and have the machine generate a new correct one for them. | ||
| And then once you have that printed ballot, you avoid the issues that arise when the voters themselves, particularly elderly people, people who face physical challenges, perhaps if they were required to manually complete the ballot, they don't write dark enough where they might make stray marks, right? | ||
| Anybody who's taken the SAT or standardized tests know how sensitive some of these scanning machines can be. | ||
| And so having the ballot marking device prepare the ballot eliminates that opportunity for manual human error while still letting the voters confirm, yes, these are the candidates I chose. | ||
| And then many jurisdictions have tabulation devices where those ballots are then scanned in. | ||
| So you have a PDF image or you have some other digital image of the ballot. | ||
| The tabulator records the votes, but you still have that paper trail. | ||
| You still have those ballots in the machine. | ||
| So you have the opportunity for a hand recount if necessary. | ||
| You have the opportunity for a post-election audit in order to confirm the accuracy of the results. | ||
| And before any of these tabulators are used, states require what's called logic and accuracy testing before the election. | ||
| So all of these tabulators are tested in public. | ||
| Candidates are allowed to show up. | ||
| Political party representatives are allowed to show up. | ||
| Members of the press, the public can show up, and election officials will run a known stack of ballots where they know exactly how many votes were cast for each candidate. | ||
| They'll run a known stack of ballots through each of these machines to confirm and to demonstrate, yes, they're properly calibrated. | ||
| Yes, they're properly programmed. | ||
| They're working correctly. | ||
| If some of the machines are returning inaccurate results, they'll be taken out of service or they'll be reprogrammed, recalculated, right? | ||
| They won't be used unless and until election officials can demonstrate, yes, they're programmed accurately. | ||
| Yes, they're working properly. | ||
| And again, you have that paper trail if you have a close election or if doubts do arise as to the validity of proper results. | ||
| So talking about voting machines as a category, I think, like I said, that there are lots of different types of devices. | ||
| It could be that term could be referring to. | ||
| Some where it's just the touchscreen and nothing else and no paper trail. | ||
| Those have been. | ||
| They've been challenged in court. | ||
| Most election officials have chosen to move away from them. | ||
| But other sorts of things like ballot marking devices, like the modern tabulation machines, I think help to promote election integrity. | ||
| I think they help to, again, we talked before about getting results as quick as you can, getting accurate results as quick as you can after election day. | ||
| Having those tabulating machines do that initial determination of results is certainly much quicker and based on empirical research, much more reliable than having to go through and wait for hand counts of every single vote and every single ballot cast in every single race. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Charlene, Marilyn, Democratic caller, you're up first. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, good morning, Greta. | |
| I have a question. | ||
| Could you do a fact check on Donald Trump? | ||
| Because if I'm not mistaken, he mailed in his vote when he was running. | ||
| And my thing is, and I'm not trying to get off the subject, my thing is every time something bothers him, it seems like it's a big deal. | ||
| So he's going to make it as a bigger deal, just like... | ||
| All right, Charlene, well, let's take your point. | ||
| Michael Morley, do Republicans use mail-in voting? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yes. | |
| I mean, again, Florida, I hold up as the gold standard in this regard. | ||
| Florida is at least currently a Republican state, and mail-in voting is an integral aspect of Florida's election system, right? | ||
| Putting aside the states that are all mail, right? | ||
| Florida has one of the highest percentages of voters who choose to cast their ballots by mail. | ||
| We'll go to Brian next in Houston, Republican. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, good morning, guys. | |
| Real quick, I wanted to know from the guests, and I've always found this topic fascinating and just the different type of voting systems that we have. | ||
| But I think what frustrates me and probably a lot of callers is on a, you know, I watch other elections around the world. | ||
| I'm fascinated with Canadian elections and British elections and all that. | ||
| And we know within a few hours of the polls open, you know, of them coming on air who the winner is overwhelmingly, whether it's the conservatives or the liberals or whoever. | ||
| And we don't seem to have that here because you have these, you know, California, two weeks later, we're getting that. | ||
| And I'd be curious to know from the guests, just regardless of what type of voting system is used, if there would be some type of national state, if he thinks there should be some type of national standards set in terms of all votes have to be reported by X a day. | ||
| The states can then decide at what point they open up voting, whether it's by mail, whatever. | ||
| Obviously, allowing for overseas and military ballots and provisionals and keeping within the terms of law, but there's no reason in a country like ours why we can't know 100% every or within 99.8%, | ||
| 99.9% what all the results are barring recounts within election night, where it's not, well, we have to wait on the House and we have to wait two weeks for California to get their act together because their system drags out so long. | ||
| And same with Neveta and all that. | ||
| Hey, you can canvass all those early mail ballots by exitate and those can be reported as soon as all polls close. | ||
| All right, Brian. | ||
| Professor Morley. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So there's a lot to unpack there. | ||
| Most basically, right, as we talked about before, there are lots of nuts and bolts technical aspects of state laws governing various aspects of the electoral process that determine how quickly states will be able to be able to calculate their results after election day. | ||
| The sooner they're able to begin pre-processing absentee ballots or vote by mail ballots, the earlier you're likely to get results, right? | ||
| If your deadline for returning absentee ballots is election day itself, for domestic voters, then you're likely to get earlier results. | ||
| In terms of having those unofficial results determined, in many cases, it's really only the close elections where the media is going to withhold judgment and is going to wait hours, potentially days. | ||
| If an election actually is coming down to a few hundred votes for, let's say, a statewide Senate election where a few dozen votes for more local elections, certainly when it comes to a presidential election, California doesn't need to actually finish counting all of its votes for the presidential election before the state gets called. | ||
| So part of the issue, too, in terms of will an election get called close to election day comes down to, in large part, how close it is. | ||
| Another thing, as I mentioned, states vary in terms of how many of their voters choose to cast their ballots by mail, even among states that don't use excuse-based voting that allow any voter who wants to vote by mail. | ||
| Again, political culture, voter preferences, what voters are used to, you see different usage rates of vote by mail. | ||
| The more voters you have choosing to vote by mail, all else being equal, that's going to impact how long it takes to get your results, especially because you typically see a significant uptick in ballots being returned in the days immediately before election day and on election day itself. | ||
| Election officials, by definition, can't have pre-processed them because they're just receiving them on election day. | ||
| And so if election officials are being deluged by large amounts of absentee or vote by mail ballots on election day on the day or two before election day, that's going to likely delay getting those initial results. | ||
| Whereas if most people in a jurisdiction are voting in person or whether during early voting at their polling places, well, all election officials need to do is take the dating card, take the data cards from those voting machines at the close of the polls, plug them into the county system or upload them to the county system, and they have their initial unofficial results. | ||
| So for voters who are able to do so, who are physically able to do so, right who don't face unreasonable burdens in doing so, it is certainly to their own advantage to vote in person because they don't have to worry, will my absentee ballot get returned on time? | ||
| Did I fill it out correctly? | ||
| Did I leave something off? | ||
| Did I manually fill in the bubbles wrong or something like that? | ||
| If they're voting in person at a polling place, they don't need to worry about that. | ||
| If there's a problem with their ballot, election officials in most jurisdictions will let them know, or in some cases, the ballot marking device or the tabulation machine will let them know and they'll have the opportunity to fix it. | ||
| And from a systemic perspective, if they've cast their vote in person at a polling place, that helps expedite, as we talked about, getting those results after the election. | ||
| The last thing that the caller had mentioned was the possibility of a national standard. | ||
| And that gets into concerns about federalism. | ||
| Congress, of course, has jurisdiction over congressional and presidential elections. | ||
| It has less power to regulate state and local elections. | ||
| When it comes to state and local elections, Congress's power is really limited toward protecting the constitutional right to vote and preventing racial discrimination and violations of other voting rights amendments like discrimination against women or against people who are at least 18 years old. | ||
| But beyond that, when it comes to state and local elections, Congress does not have constitutional authority to legislate just because it thinks it's a good policy idea. | ||
| It can use its spending power. | ||
| It can say, you know, we'll appropriate a few million dollars for elections, but states have to follow these particular rules in order to take advantage of this election funding. | ||
| Michael Morrison. | ||
| But does the president have power? | ||
| He wrote on True Social. | ||
| He wrote on True Social this. | ||
| Remember, the states are merely an agent, he said, for the federal government in counting and tabulating the votes. | ||
| They must do what the federal government, as represented by the president of the United States, tells them for the good of the country, he wrote, to do. | ||
| So he thinks he has the power here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The Constitution states that Congress has the power to regulate the time, place, and manner of congressional elections. | ||
| The Supreme Court has said Congress has similar authority over presidential elections, but in the absence of a federal statute delegating authority to the president or delegating authority to the executive branch to adopt certain regulations to make certain decisions. | ||
| No, the president doesn't have unilateral power to prevent states from using vote by mail in any elections or to prevent states from using particular voting machines. | ||
| Any sort of federal action on this end would require a new federal statute. | ||
| And one of the arguments that congressional Republicans have made is that elections are primarily state-based systems, right? | ||
| Each state has its own election code. | ||
| Elections, including federal elections, are primarily run by states, right? | ||
| States, of course, conduct their elections consistent with the U.S. Constitution, within the bounds set forth by federal law, the Voting Rights Act, the Help America Vote Act, UOCAVA for military voting, statutes like that. | ||
| But within those fairly broad boundaries, states have broad authority with regard to how to conduct their elections. | ||
| And that's especially true with regard to state and local elections. | ||
| All right, we'll go to Michael and Del Ray Beach, Florida, Democratic Caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your turn, Michael. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Greta. | ||
| Greetings. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So I was in Florida in 2002. | ||
| I mean, the Gore Bush. | ||
| And I'd like you to delve into that just a bit more. | ||
| Now, I'm not sure if you were around then, but they delayed the results for, was it, two and a half months? | ||
| trying to figure out what happened in Florida. | ||
| Well, Michael, there's a lot that happened then. | ||
| So what specifically do you want Mr. Morley to delve into? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My vote didn't count. | |
| My vote didn't count because the Supreme Court decided they stopped counting the ballots because there was so much fraud and abuse. | ||
| And what's to stop that from happening this time? | ||
| I mean, my vote won't count because, Mr. Morley, I'll have you take that. | ||
| We've got other calls waiting. | ||
| So take it, but don't spend too much time on it because I want to get some other voices in this morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The main concern that the Supreme Court had identified in Bush v. Gore was an equal protection violation. | ||
| The court said that the state of Florida didn't have specific enough standards to govern the manual recount to make sure that election officials in different counties or in some cases, election officials at different tables in the same room were all applying the same standards. | ||
| And so the court said because the recount was being conducted in an arbitrary manner where different people were, some people would count a particular ballot, other people would reject that an identical ballot, the court said it's unconstitutional. | ||
| And there wasn't enough time before the safe harbor deadline set by federal law at the time to do a new recount. | ||
| Since then, Florida has dramatically changed its laws. | ||
| It doesn't use punch card ballots anymore. | ||
| And the Secretary of State has promulgated very detailed regulations that actually show or attempt to show every conceivable way a voter could try to mess up their absentee ballot and goes through and says, yes, count this, no, don't count this, in order to try to provide those uniform standards that the Supreme Court demanded. | ||
| Steve is in Massachusetts, Republican. | ||
| Welcome to the conversation, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, how are you guys doing? |