Free and fair? Fast? Sifting hopes and realities for Election 2024.

Episode transcript

Gail Chaddock:  Welcome to Part 2 of our podcast on how hurricanes and last-minute changes to voting rules are affecting campaign 2024. We’re talking with Cameron Joseph, who joined the Monitor in the middle of campaign season as a senior Washington political writer.

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Chaddock:  This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. Welcome, Cameron.

Cameron Joseph: Thanks for having me.

Chaddock:  In Part 1 of this podcast, you talked with us about how election officials and poll workers are scrambling to ensure access to voters in counties hard hit by hurricanes. It’s also a story about rumor, mistrust, and the expectation that elections could be chaotic. In North Carolina, new voting rules voted unanimously by the State General Assembly nonetheless stirred up claims of partisan conspiracy. Georgia, another battleground state, has a rich history of controversy over voting rules. Can you help us understand how another searing dispute over election rules surfaced at this late date, and why, in decisions that surfaced after publication of your story, the courts blocked them? Let’s start with the rules.

Joseph: So, there is a state election board in Georgia that doesn’t make the law on how elections are run, but it interprets them and provides specific rules for what county officials should be doing when they actually execute the election. For years, it had been a relatively bipartisan operation. And this May, a relatively establishment Republican stepped down and the seat was taken by a very, very hardline conservative who’s questioned the 2020 election. And for lack of a better term, the election deniers got a majority on this state election board. And they started pushing through rule changes for the election that were so deeply controversial that they were opposed by the Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, as well as the Republican attorney general of the state. There were implications in some of these rules that county election board officials would be able to toss out specific precincts if they had doubts that something had happened there, or refuse to certify.

So when I was down reporting a couple weeks ago, local, non-partisan officials who were running this election were very alarmed about what this would take to actually get the vote count done. Just weeks before early voting was to begin, and after a lot of counties had already trained their poll workers about what the rules were and what they would need to do on election day, they made this rule that you’re going to have to hand count every single ballot to make sure it counted the same number of ballots cast, as the machine count in every single polling place in the state. That’s a huge lift for anybody, especially the majority senior citizens who are poll workers, after a 14-hour day, to be able to accurately count hundreds and in some places, thousands of votes. And so they’re really worried about that.

So what’s happened since, and this was pretty clearly where we were headed, because the conservative attorney general of the state basically said “this isn’t legal,” they were sued. And in a couple of separate cases, judges have said that all of these rules cannot be in place for election day. Now, some of them, they’re saying, are completely Illegal. In the case of the hand counting of ballots, they’re saying that it’s impracticable for this election.

As of today, all of these things have been blocked, essentially. But the Georgia Republican Party and some others are already saying that they’re going to appeal these decisions. That level of uncertainty is problematic both for the folks who actually have to execute the election as well as normal voters who are just hoping to have an accurate count they can trust in Georgia. It’s building towards a postelection situation, especially if this is a close election, that could be really fraught.

Chaddock:  When you reported this story, how did you come up with the people that you were going to talk to in Georgia?

Joseph: Well, in Georgia, I reached out to the head of a nonpartisan association of these county election officials. He represents a very small, very conservative county, exurban Atlanta, northwest of the city. And he sat down with me and then he also connected me with a woman who was running elections in a majority Black Democratic leaning suburban county outside of Atlanta, another small county. And so, basically, all county election officials in the state were encouraging the board not to take these actions. And they were basically ignored by the state board.

Chaddock:  When you look below the national level, where things look pretty polarized, there’s a lot of cross-party discussion about these rules, and what a fair election looks like. I was especially interested in your interview with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Will you remind people why we know that name from Election 2020?

Joseph: Yeah, he was the guy that President Trump asked to find 11,700 votes, just enough votes to tip the election to Trump when he had lost that election. One of Raffensperger’s staff recorded that call, and it went public and was some of the strongest evidence that President Trump was trying to flip the election without any actual proof that he had won. He tried that in many states, and pressured a lot of Republican officials. And Raffensperger was one of the people who really stood up and said: “No, I’m Republican. I wish you’d won, but I’m not rigging this election for you.” And he was one of the few Republicans who really took that stand who [then] also managed to win a primary in 2022. What happened in a lot of these swing states were election denying candidates, who were backed by President Trump, won their Republican primaries, and then they were defeated by Democrats. But Georgia is one of the few swing states that still has Republicans, both in the governor’s office and secretaries of state’s office. And I think that’s largely because these Republicans refuse to accept the premise that the election was stolen and stuck to the facts.

Chaddock: You know, I loved the interview that you did with the secretary of State. It’s a separate story in the Monitor. It’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever seen of a public official at a very controversial time. Let me take you to some of your questions. You said: “Do you think that these election board members are operating in bad faith?” And then you say in this article, “Mr. Raffensperger pauses for nine seconds.”

I love that nine seconds. Because in highly polarized times, no one pauses for nine seconds. Immediately there’s an answer, and you know what it’s going to be. And he said, “I think they’re living in the past. They’re fighting the wrong battle. Because we’ve already responded to many of these concerns that everyone had.” I mean, Georgia was under such siege for having corrupt elections and blocking votes forever, black votes especially. And to just see the detail in this piece, it’s just wonderful.

Joseph: Yeah. Frankly, some of what they’re doing is pretty controversial. It is Republicans in charge who have done some things that Democrats really don’t like in terms of voter ID, in terms of number drop boxes allowed, things like that. There’s a 2021 law that banned people being able to give out food, drink, including water, to people at the voting sites. Brad Raffensperger supported this law. And so these are not, you know, squishy anti-Trump Republicans. Brad Raffensperger pushed through a study of whether undocumented immigrants were voting in the state, and basically documented conflicts between people who had registered in the state and a federal database that showed people who had green cards, but weren’t naturalized citizens yet. Uh, those are dated, some of them, and, you know, he found about 1,600 people, statewide, that would fall under that. I think probably the vast majority of those people are citizens who registered, but are new citizens. And so, they got flagged for this and got sent a letter. That enrages Democrats and liberals.

You know, Governor Kemp was the boogeyman for the left on voting rights for years. And so the idea that Brian Kemp is all of a sudden this harbinger of voting rights, and has become this enemy of the hard right is funny to me, honestly, and deeply ironic. But they draw a line at embracing full out conspiracy theories.

Chaddock:  That is enormously helpful.

There was one other thing that Raffensperger said to you in the interview that I thought was interesting, he said: “We’re serious when we say free, fair, and fast.” Now, free I get, fair I get, but why fast?

Joseph: In his mind, and I think that there’s some truth to this, the slower a state counts, the more people are skeptical of the results. Not that something is actually going wrong, but it allows people to push wild claims that things are being rigged, that people are taking the time to rig them. Look, urban areas count slower because they have more votes. A county that has 10,000 votes can count those votes a lot quicker than a county that has 100,000 votes. We often see this, you know, Detroit counting last, Philadelphia counting last. But it injects this idea of: Oh, they’re waiting to see how many votes they have to make up for Democrats. And look, some of these places, including Philadelphia, have history, you know, ancient history, of vote tampering. I’m from Chicago, um, there’s probably some voter fraud in 1960 that may have put Kennedy over Richard Nixon in Illinois.

But these places don’t have that now, they have much more transparent processes. But, you know, we saw in 2020 this idea that slow counts were a problem really bled in. And, you know, some places are counting slower than they used to because there has been a widespread adoption of mail voting. And frankly, that’s just much harder to count. And so we see some states like Arizona, like California, that send everybody a mail ballot. And some places you can return ballots, as long as it’s postmarked by election day, it still counts for the election even if the mail takes two weeks to get it back. You have to process them in a different way. You have to, depending on the state, verify based on the last four [digits] of their Social Security number or the driver’s license number. Some places have signature match requirements. So you have to physically open the envelopes, you can’t just take them all and feed them through a scanning machine.

And so I’ve been covering races in these mail-voting states since 2010, and they’ve always taken forever, sometimes over a month. And we’ve seen congressional and even Senate races take that long to count. And the difference is people are now paying attention to it. And I don’t think we’re going to see things as slow as we saw in 2020 because people were voting by mail in unprecedented numbers. We saw in 2022 those numbers dropped significantly. So I’m hopeful that things move quicker this time around, but, you know, Arizona’s gonna take a while.

Chaddock:  Stepping back from your current reporting for the Monitor, how different is this election from previous elections you’ve covered?

Joseph: In some ways, very different. We’ve never seen a candidate swap at the top of the ticket as late as we saw. We’ve never seen a candidate come in who wasn’t a sitting president, who was the party’s nominee without winning a primary. The way that Biden was pushed out by party elders, and Kamala Harris, all the party rallied behind her without any real competition.

In terms of the way that the country is divided, you know, we’ve seen college educated voters, especially college educated women, white women, in particular, go even further towards Democrats than we’ve seen in recent years. We’re seeing non college educated folks continue to move right. And Black and Hispanic men in particular, and younger men in particular, not in huge numbers, but a higher percentage of them are planning to vote for Donald Trump in the polls. And that could be the election difference in some of these states.

2016 was probably the most chaotic race I’ve ever covered. Just the wild swings and the crazy wow news, I think, is unrivaled. If 2016 was a series of tornadoes, 2020 felt more like an avalanche. It was a slow moving thing that just kept picking up pace and you could see the disaster coming. And, you know, as early as April, May, I was writing about how Donald Trump was pushing not-accurate claims about how the election was going to be working and, you know, some legitimately controversial changes being made by states to make it easier to vote during the pandemic, uh, to claim that there was going to be an election rigged against him, and then looking at the weaknesses of national law in terms of certification of election results and how that could be used to foment chaos and a possible constitutional crisis.

Honestly, 2024 in some ways feels like a replay of the last two elections. We’re seeing the national coalitions look pretty similar. Now, it doesn’t mean this isn’t a monumentally important election. I think we’re seeing, you know, two remarkably different visions of the country. And if Donald Trump gets reelected, I think he’s going to be much more organized, effective, as opposed to the last time when he wasn’t really expecting to win.

Chaddock:  Listeners may have heard some real concerns about what a Trump presidency looks like in terms of democracy. Are there any concerns out there about what a Kamala Harris victory might look like in terms of how the country functions?

Joseph: I think the most likely scenario, if Harris does win, is that there is a Republican Senate acting as a pretty strong check on any legislative priorities. And we’ve seen the conservative Supreme Court striking down a lot of liberal priorities. So I think she’s going to be relatively constrained.

We’re still seeing exactly what she believes [being] fleshed out, the Kamala Harris of today does not sound like the Kamala Harris of 2019 when she’s running for president and adopting a lot of really hard left positions. She basically has taken a watered down version of Trump’s border security views, and is trying to push through some more moderate ideas into the electorate for electability reasons. So, I think that if she wins, her presidency is unlikely to look significantly different from what we would have seen in the second Biden term.

Now, if you think that’s a fundamental threat to American democracy, then you’re going to see that as alarming. But I don’t think it falls in line with Donald Trump, who I think is pushing the country in a direction, whether you like it or not, that’s fundamentally different from what we saw in past Republican presidencies. And I think, you know, in some ways there’s things that people can really like about that. And I think that Democrats have gotten a little over their skis in terms of pushing the idea that Donald Trump is going to adopt everything from Project 2025, this very, very hardline conservative blueprint that’s being pushed by some of his former aides and the Heritage Society and a bunch of conservative groups. But you know, he has already talked about potentially prosecuting his political enemies, because he thinks that’s what they did to him, and talking about breaking down the wall between the Justice Department and the White House that has existed since Watergate.

Chaddock: How does a political reporter work in such a divisive environment? You know, when you write your stories, who are you thinking about? The undecided voters, those fixed on both sides who couldn’t conceive of a positive thing that’s going on on the other side, or ...

Joseph: I really try and offer something that will help people both understand an issue in the world a little bit better, but also possibly understand where the other side is coming from. I think it’s important to treat everyday people, Americans and others, with respect and empathy, and let them tell their story. So that there’s voices from all sides. At the same time, you know, if one perspective is not based in reality, making sure to make that clear as well.

I think that elected and appointed officials need to be held to a higher standard, and part of my job, you know, the old adage about, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted in journalism, I think there’s some truth to.

People increasingly don’t want to hear facts that disagree with their own preconceived notions. And I think that is an issue that is spread widely across the political spectrum. I’m not going to do it perfectly every time, but we are not playing to write stories that are sensational and aggressively one sided. We are really making an effort to tell the full story.

Chaddock:  I love that. Cameron, I want to thank you for joining us for this podcast, but especially for joining the Monitor. When, by the way, was your first story?

Joseph: My first story was covering the disastrous debate performance from Joe Biden. And so it’s been a busy couple of months. I’ve been a big fan of the Monitor for years. I started reading it in high school when I was doing speech and debate. It’s an honor to be working here.

Chaddock:  Very glad to hear that. Thanks to our listeners. We value your comments on these podcasts and, of course, your support. You can find more, including our show notes with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Jingnan Peng, with additional editing by Clay Collins. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone, Alyssa Britton and Jeff Turton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2024.