SIO475: Greg Palast Claims the Election Was Stolen. Let's Check His Work.

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 475. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I'm very excited about this episode. Well, it's actually two episodes. A two -parter coming your way. Dr. Jenessa Seymour is coming on the show to break down a claim that I have seen a lot of places on the internet. It's this article thing or website post or something by someone named Greg Palast, I don't know how you'd pronounce that, that says Trump lost vote suppression one. It's essentially saying that Trump stole the vote, maybe not directly Trump, but Republicans, or the vote was at least stolen by voter suppression. And I've seen even some of you folks share it. And I really wanted to know, is there anything to this? I'll admit my bias is that I don't find any of this stuff really convincing at all. Just my prior, because I just see that this country sucks. So I don'T really, it's almost weird to think like, no, actually the vote it was still, it's like, I don't know. I look around. It doesn't surprise me that Trump won, I guess. But here's the thing. Here's why this is so interesting and why it's two parts. Jenessa, in addition to just being, I think, justifiably very riled up over how frustrating this claim is and the lack of sources and shoddy work going into it, it also badly misrepresents election law, something that Jenessa cares a lot about, obviously, and so do I, and so should you. But it gets it wrong in ways that are actually spreading misinformation. So even if it's not just the misinformation about Trump actually lost and Kamala actually won, even if It's not Just That, it's also misinformation about how voting even works. And this is harmful stuff. It's bad. And Jenessa is here to both walk us through why these claims are nonsense and also how some very important election law actually works. This is a great, really fascinating educational deep dive. Why don't we just get to it? We'll take our break. Hey, avoid the break at Patreon .com slash SeriousPod and support the show. Support stuff like this. It means a lot. It makes the show happen. All right. After this break, let's get on over to it.

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0:02:24 Thomas: And I'm joined by Dr. Jenessa Seymour. How you doing?

0:02:27 Jenessa: Hanging in there.

0:02:30 Thomas: Fair. Appropriate. So excited to talk to you again. It's another voting thing, weirdly. Check out the bonus we did, by the way, previously, if you want to hear interesting things about voting and what swung elections and whatnot. But we're going to talk about a different one. This made the rounds. People have linked it to me, and I think some amount of our audience is going to have seen this and believed it. It's called Trump Lost, Vote Suppression Won. And right off the bat, I was pretty skeptical, but you never know. And I just wanted to take an actual scientific approach to it and see what it says, what claims it makes.

0:03:01 Jenessa: Yeah, so I think it'll also be helpful because we're gonna talk a ton about election laws in here. I think people probably know me as like the psych and neuroscience person, we've done a lot of stats stuff, but I've kind of offhandedly mentioned that I quit that life a while ago, and I've been working at a law office in voting rights. It's a disability rights law office, but I'm in the voting division. I'm officially sworn in now, so that's all taken care of.

0:03:30 Jenessa: So you too can quit academia. I know things are really popping off right now. If you'd like to get out, feel free to talk to me. So that's where that relevant experience comes from. I've been doing that for about two and a half years, presenting on voting rights. There's a book, Disability Practice and Law, and the new edition when it comes out, I will have written the election law chapter. It's New York election law.

0:03:56 Thomas: Ooh, you wrote the book chapter on election law. Great. I love it.

0:04:01 Jenessa: Yeah, technically. I've also represented people in HAVA hearings, Help America Vote Act. They are hearings that are like administrative, quasi-legal. You don't technically have to be an attorney to represent people in these. So I've been doing this for a while. And man, you would think that by this point in my career, I would stop doing this to myself where I would be like, this man is telling us that he's so sure he's right and everybody else is wrong. Am I the woman crazy? No, the man is wrong and confident.

0:04:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Boy, you just summed up all the problems with our entire country. The man is wrong and confident. Your new book about everything that's wrong with the country.

0:04:43 Jenessa: It really feels like it. God, it really feels like it and I just, just so it becomes clear that I am not just picking on this person. I need you to hear how he ends this thing.

0:05:03 Thomas: You want to do that before we talk about the claims or? Okay, sure. All right. Okay.

0:05:05 Jenessa: I do because it's really just his credentials. I rarely make a big deal about my own credentials, but since the election, the web has been flooded by amateur, arithmetic -defying speculation about computer hacking and other unsupported twaddle.

0:05:24 Thomas: So far, I kind of agree with that.

0:05:25 Jenessa: Yes, I'm 100% on board.

0:05:28 Thomas: Yeah, so far I'm on board. Okay.

0:05:30 Jenessa: Best to stick to hard, verifiable data, and that's what I do. For two decades, I was a forensic economist for government agencies, including the U.S. Justice Department, which I don't think is a thing. It's the DOJ.

0:05:43 Thomas: Yeah whatever.

0:05:45 Jenessa: Taught statistics at Indiana University, provided expert calculations of vote suppression for the ACLU, blah, blah. Numbers you get here are exactly what I'd present to federal court. In other words, kids, don't do this at home. Calculating the uncount requires expertise.

0:06:02 Thomas: The uncount. Okay, I'm sure you'll tell us what that is later. Yeah. Oh, boy.

0:06:05 Jenessa: This is at the end of having read this thing that's so incorrect and just wildly speculative and wrong, just flat wrong in some places. And I was like, am I nuts? And no, I am not.

0:06:21 Thomas: No. Yeah. I will say it is really interesting because there was this thing when Trump and MAGA went all in on these idiotic conspiracies that were completely debunked 100 ,000 million times. They always try to both sides and say, well, you did Bush v. Gore. It's like yeah much different and there were legitimate claims about that and in the end who got to be president did we still say no Gore is president and he's still like no it's not what happened he conceded it's just fundamentally different and then I was almost worried in the wake of this election I mean there's too much to worry about so not it's Not really but I was Almost worried that we've gotten to a point where it's gotten so desperate that even the left will go for this stuff like I was a little bit because there was one very early on that instantly just smacked of complete bullshit to me because it was about like voting machines and the guy was like my duty to warn letter, attentions.

0:07:08 Thomas: It's just like, that's stupid. That's obviously trappings to make something seem more official or whatever is silly. And really to our credit, the left, I mean, we don't really go for that because we go for evidence and that's important. It is just important to be evidence-based. The point is, I'm interested in this. I'm interested in getting the truth on it. I don't know how many people have bought into this, but it's definitely people I've seen in the audience somewhat.

0:07:33 Thomas: So I want to approach it at least in good faith to start and address And that's why I'm so glad that we have you, the expert.

0:07:39 Jenessa: So the basic claim you're going to get here is a claim that we can show mathematically if voter suppression hadn't happened, Harris would have won and very specifically would have won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, which of course tips the Electoral College. Unfortunately, we all know the popular vote doesn't matter.

0:07:58 Thomas: And So right away, you could say like, well, there's a broader sense in which if the Voting Rights Act hadn't been gutted, there is a bunch of ifs that I'll go for. Like, it's plausible that like, if going back several years, Republicans hadn't fundamentally undermined the right to vote yet, like maybe. But this strikes me as something that's making a much more concrete claim than just that.

0:08:13 Jenessa: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah, so I would say absolutely a general claim, but for voter suppression, Harris would have won. I would absolutely label that like at a minimum plausible. If you read through this article and you see XYZ instance of voter suppression happened, for the most part, those are accurate. It's the quantifying that is varying from slightly a little misleading to dead wrong. It's the attempt to put down to the singular vote numbers on some of this. And I think in a lot of ways, this loses the plot because in an attempt to say that we are going to quantify this to the level of certainty about knowing the election would have gone the other way, you kind of get stuck trying to stick to things that are quantifiable on that level and you skip the most important causes of voter suppression. So things like voter ID laws and felons being denied the right to vote and restricting early voting hours, restricting the number of polling places. It is extremely difficult to quantify just how many people were denied their right to vot because of that, especially because it's hard to know how many of them would have voted and how they would have voted. Those are probably the biggest causes of voter suppression by far. So in some ways, if you take the ways he's going to wildly inflate his numbers and you squash these way down, but then you build it back up with what are actually the biggest causes of vote suppression, yeah.

0:09:38 Thomas: Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. I still have a lot of questions about how, you know, what proportion of the vote would have been, you know, all that stuff, but maybe. Possible.

0:09:59 Jenessa: Plausible. Totally plausible. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. So for international listeners, I hear from a lot of people outside the US kind of not really following why voter ID is such a big deal. The US does not have free, automatically issued government photo ID. We don't do that. You have to go pay for it. You get it as like your driver's license. Usually tons of people don't drive for various reasons, especially if you live in a big city and guess who lives in big cities? This is disproportionate. If you live in a country where people just get a photo ID from their government for free and everybody has one, I can see why you would think voter ID, why is that such a big deal?

0:10:49 Thomas: And I see a lot of people, and I think I myself when I was younger, I think a lot of otherwise like reasonable people say, wait a minute, having ID to vote, that makes sense. But like when you look at it in context, it is absolutely just to try to reduce black people's vote because there isn't actually a problem.

0:11:06 Thomas: There's no problem that's being solved. So it's entirely entirely artificial. And if it requires some amount of like resources and stability, by the way, and other things to get this thing, you are automatically by a certain percentage point, increasing the proportion of well-off white people who can vote versus underprivileged people of color. It's just a free way to do that. And for these Republicans, it's so good because it has such plausible deniability. Oh, we just, you know, voter ID sounds so reasonable.

0:11:33 Jenessa: Absolutely, and if you say, oh, we're trying to prevent fraud, well, of course, doesn't that matter to you? And it changes all the time, and it's different by state, And I mean, because it changes all the time, it can be hard to track these down. There was, at a time, multiple states that were accepting as ID the state-issued hunting license, and they were not accepting tribal IDs of Native Americans, which is a federally issued ID. That's gross.

0:11:55 Thomas: Oh God. Out. I wonder why that would be. Yeah. What demographic of people hunt more?

0:12:05 Jenessa: Yeah, it's obviously unacceptable, obviously discriminatory in so many ways. To be clear, as we go through this, and, you know, I'm going to pick at some things that are like, okay, is that number really that big? You know, I don't care how big it is. Every single instance of voter suppression is unacceptable. You have a right to vote. I don't care if it never swung a single election. I don t care it didn't stop even one person from voting. The fact that someone tried to make it harder for you to vote unnecessarily is not okay.

0:12:37 Jenessa: We should be making it as easy as possible. Obviously, there's going to have to be some verification. There's going To have to have some rules about who can and can't vote. But there are ways to have those rules set up that are fair and reasonable. There are ways To verify people that do not involve keeping people out of the polling place unnecessarily. There was one year where I had moved. New York's rule, you have to live at the place you want to vote for 30 days before the election. I had done so. I have ADD. I had not changed my address on my driver's license yet. It was in the mail. And so I was like, crap, it's not in the system yet. New York does not require ID. But if you're not in a system, you could use ID to prove where you live. My driver's licence will not say the right address either. I was able to show up with my electric bill, which it would be very strange if I was paying someone else's electric bill. And a letter that was mailed to me and like the stamp has the little ink thing from the post office. So clearly it was to me at that address. I just presented those two things and they're like, well, you live here. So, clearly that is a way to prove I am who I say I am. I live here, I'm not trying to vote fraudulently. I'm very sorry I didn't get my DMV record updated on time. It's completely unnecessary to do that for the purpose of preventing fraud. So with that in mind, do we have the ability to quantify this to know for certain Harris would have won? And we also need to talk election law as we go through here, because there's some inaccuracies that I think could actually accidentally suppress the vote if we're not careful. Okay, so the bank claims up top, I'm going to warn you ahead of time.

0:14:32 Thomas: Beforehand. That's what you were doing. I got it. Okay. Guy. That's good times.

0:14:33 Jenessa: Yes, the two of them. One time I was teaching and I accidentally said six of one, three dozen of the other. And then I was like, what is the... You know what? Nevermind. They're the same. They'RE the same thing. I don't know. Sometimes my brain goes faster than my mouth. So, okay. Warning you beforehand, as we go through, he's going to throw a bunch of numbers at you. First of all, none of them have a citation. I had to go look it up when he just says, this many votes were thrown out.

0:15:10 Jenessa: And I'm like, where did you get that from?

0:15:10 Thomas: Not a good sign. Yeah.

0:15:12 Jenessa: No, no, it really isn't. Trust me, bro, isn't a source. Sometimes it was like, according to the election assistance commission, but there's no link. There's no footnote. There is no nothing. This has been reposted multiple places, but like I read it on his sub stack. I read it on another website. Like I couldn't find any of the links. I saw other people complaining about this. So I am Googling like election assistance, commission and the number, and it's not popping up. Everything that pops up is reposts of this article. So. Son of a bitch. He calculated this this number, and then is saying the Election Assistance Commission found it. So I have to, it doesn't say in what year, because they put out a report every two years. Maddening. He's going to throw out a bunch of numbers, and they're going to feel like they don't make sense. And they're not going to make sense by the end. And it's not going be like a formula. So let's go on this journey together. Okay. According to the US Election Assistance commission, if you want to to look it up, EAC Elections Assistance Commission. According to EAC data before the 2024 election, 4 ,776 ,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return a postcard. They were wrongly purged, is the claim. We've got a claim that we have vigilante challenges challenges of varying numbers, largely because you've got the groups claiming that they did it. One group by August of 2024 claims they challenged 317 ,886 votes and estimated by the time of the election, it would be 2 million, I think they said. NAACP of Georgia estimated 200 ,000 challenges in Georgia alone. 2,121,000 mail-in ballots disqualified for minor clerical errors. For example, postage due. 585,000 in-precinct ballots. It depends on your state.

0:17:15 Thomas: Do you have to pay postage for those? I thought you didn't. Oh, really? Wow. It is like a poll tax. Oh cool.

0:17:19 Jenessa: Yes. So somebody sued over this trying to say that being required to pay postage to return a ballot isn't that a poll whole tax. And a judge said, no. Yeah. Super fun.

0:17:31 Thomas: Why? Who knows? No source given. Citation needed. You could vote for free if you didn't do mail. Yeah, okay, sure.

0:17:34 Jenessa: The source was basically that voting is a right. Yes, precisely. Voting by mail is a privilege and a convenience and you're paying for the privilege. That's essentially what they said. I have heard, uh, not legal advice. I would recommend putting a stamp on everything. I Have heard from us postal workers that they are under advisement to if they get a ballot and it doesn't have a postal stamp to just deliver it anyway because it's like official U .S. election mail.

0:18:08 Thomas: Yeah. You wouldn't want to have any accusations of like messing with that. I'm sure that that would be bad.

0:18:12 Jenessa: Yeah, right? Like on the one hand, if I was a postal worker, I would just be like, do I really have an obligation to return this because it doesn't have a stamp on that? Like I'm taking it where it belongs. But if I am the voter, I would not assume that's going to happen. If you live in a state that requires postage do, put a dang stamp on it. The next claim we have, 585 ,000 ballots cast in precinct were disqualified. A claim that 1,216,000 provisional ballots were rejected.

0:18:13 Thomas: Liability there. Sure. Hmm.

0:18:46 Jenessa: And finally, that 3 .24 million new registrations were rejected or not entered on the rolls in time. Supposedly that that will all add up to enough. And I mean, clearly, 3 .24 million alone is a lot. 2 million disqualified mail -in ballots is a whole lot, right? But we have to actually parse this out because first of all, those are unsourced. But even if they were true, it's more complicated than that.

0:19:14 Thomas: And even if these were going to favor Democrats, I'd find it hard to believe it was 100 % to zero, right?

0:19:20 Jenessa: Exactly. Absolutely. On the other hand, depending on which type of problem we're talking about, it is disproportionately happening to black voters. It is disproportionately happening to women a lot because when women get married and change their name, the rest of your life, legal documents, it'll be like, oh, we have you down as blah, blah, or like, oh, if you hyphenated your name and then like one name shows up and a computer like deletes the hyphen and chaos, you know, some people change their middle name to their old last name and like, just women will forever run into that problem on legal paperwork. For Black voters, here's something I want to make super clear as we go through. It's not 100% clear why this disparity is happening and is probably caused by a combination of many factors. What it probably isn't is completely explained by explicit racism of somebody twirling their mustache and throwing your ballot in the garbage. So please don't decide you can't mail in vote because there is an evil white man who's going to put your ballot in the trash on purpose. I'm sure that's happened. I don't want to deny that that's a real thing. But it seems that there is a wide array of causes of the disproportionate rejection of black ballots, especially when you consider, in many cases, the poll worker would have had no way of knowing the person's race. Obviously, in instances where it's like, oh, we took away ballot drop boxes in predominantly black

0:19:42 Thomas: Right. What a pain. Yeah. Sure.

0:21:00 Jenessa: Neighborhoods, like, yeah, we all know what that's about, right? But when it is things like ballots getting lost in the mail, there's a systemic racism component of why is the postal service not as good in certain neighborhoods? That's not great. The pickup rates and all of that. But it's probably not your local mail carrier threw all your ballots in the garbage. We can track a lot of these things and see that.

0:21:27 Jenessa: Primarily, I just bring this up because I don't want people to be scared out of voting. And I think sometimes this article presents that really scary, explicit racism as opposed to implicit and systemic racism that's happening here. If you ever want really good voting data, the Brennan Center for Justice does amazing analysis of voting data. And they will say, hey, we observe this disproportionate thing. We don't quite know why. And they'll say things like, for example, one of the number one reasons an absentee ballot gets rejected for anybody is it arrived late. And that is disproportionately happening to Black voters. It could be a mail problem. We definitely want to do messaging on get that thing in the mail. ASAP. That could be the way to correct this. This is not putting blame on people. This isn't suggesting that the Black community doesn't know what they're doing. It's whatever the heck the cause of this is that's a way to potentially fix it who knows

0:22:14 Thomas: Mm-hmm, sure. And it's just another one of those things where systemically the people who might be late for stuff might have more socioeconomic stress, more going on in their lives, more blah, blah, on down the line.

0:22:30 Jenessa: Yes, yeah, a hundred reasons that could be

0:22:39 Thomas: Whereas the old racist fucks who are going to vote for Trump have nothing else to do but racism. They're like gosh I can't wait to do my racism vote I've done early early and often as they say oh

0:22:39 Jenessa: Happening yes yeah yeah he will throw in numbers here like there's a lot of I don't know if it's cherry picking or if it's just the first thing that came to mind for him like washington state 400 percent more likely to reject a black ballot than a white ballot. I didn't find a source for this, and I just moved on with my life. The U .S. Civil Rights Commission study in Florida, 14 .3 % of Black votes rejected. That was a study of in -person ballots in the 2000 election in Florida and the hanging chads thing. Yeah, huge, huge problem. There was absolutely a racism component there. Most likely older voting machines were were disproportionately in Black neighborhoods is one explanation. I'm sure explicit racism came in a lot in that election. And there was a wildly disproportionate rejection of Black votes. That is in the year 2000 in Florida before the Help America Vote Act, which was largely in response to the Florida 2000 election. One of the big things there was everyone cut it out with these lever machines. Never again, the hanging chads. We're phasing that out. It gave states funding to get new voting machines, but it also created some protections for voters, a lot of accessibility for voters. That's why it's really important for my job. And it also create the voter registration database rules for states to digitize it. So every state has a statewide uniform digital system that they can like keep who lives where. It's very helpful for keeping track of that and easily transferring your voter registration. So I think that's why it got through relatively easily was on the one hand, it's security. On the other hand, you move and the counties communicate with each other and just kind of automatically make things work for you if the paperwork goes right. So it's It's a study from the 2000s. This just seems to vary wildly. And so I went to the Brennan Center and they found, yeah, if you see something like 400 % more likely in Washington state, we'll go to the Bremen Center and they'll tell you in absolute risk, we had 0 .9 % of white ballots were getting rejected. I think this was mail -in ballots, but 1 .6 % of black ballots were getting rejected, that's a significant difference. That is meaningful. It's not a, right, right. The 400 % more likely that's a relative risk. Here we're talking about the two absolute risks. So you got to remember, we're still talking about a difference of, you know, depending on whether we're taking local or state or federal election, it could be a million votes or a couple thousand votes or couple hundred votes, and especially the disproportionate nature, in absolute risk terms, it's not nearly as big a gap as like the Florida 14 .3%. It's usually in the single digits percent are getting rejected. And the gap between black and white is going to be in the simple digits. It's not okay, we need to do something thing about it, it's not going to get you to like millions of votes.

0:23:16 Thomas: Yeah yeah that was a problem right yeah yeah it's not 400 but yeah it's a different one I guess yeah right

0:26:10 Jenessa: Different. Somebody needs to do shit about this. Totally accurate claim. Bomb threats closed polling stations in Atlanta on election day. They did get a court order to stay open for as long as the poll had been closed. So great. I'm sure that deterred some people. That's really not cool. Probably impossible to quantify how many people that detered. There's a slight possibility, something that happens a lot with voter suppression is a retaliatory kind of increase in voting.

0:26:40 Thomas: Yes yeah cuz I've seen the studies that are like actually kind of ends up evening out I've Seen those studies before but I don't know how often that's the

0:26:48 Jenessa: Yeah, sometimes you do have to go into like race crosstabs to notice that it could still be suppressing certain groups of people. And it's not uniform, and it depends on the thing and how much publicity it gets. But in particular, the really in your face voter suppression that gets a lot of media attention, it can backfire. And people get motivated and they get out there and they're like, I don't care if I have to stand here in the pouring rain for three hours, I'm going to vote because you don't want me to vote.

0:27:19 Jenessa: So it can backfire, which good on you, people who make it happen.

0:27:19 Thomas: Case

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0:27:31 Jenessa: Okay, so this is where it starts getting interesting. Citation to the Brennan Center, hooray. Since at least 2020, at least 30 states enacted 78 restrictive laws to blockade voting. He says almost every red state pretty much Trump's victory map. Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, not on the list.

0:27:44 Thomas: Blockade hmm yeah I was gonna say the ones he was gonna win anyway it was the voter blockading rule that's a weird choice of words blockade

0:27:54 Jenessa: Yeah, and that's the thing. To just give you a sense of just how liberal, the lowercase l liberal, The Brennan Center was with putting states on the lists, New York was on that list because we adapted a rule that the board of elections had to receive your request for a mail-in ballot 10 days before the election, not seven. That's largely because we introduced early voting that starts 10 days before the election and you can register 10 days Before the election. It kind of just even things out and took it from like seven days to seven business days. Basically you can still like in in person, this is the deadline to get it to them by mail or by email. If you go in person you can walk in the day before and say I need a ballot.

0:28:44 Thomas: Voting right right right so point is it's on the list but that's definitely not like a trumpy rule in trump country designed to help

0:28:51 Jenessa: Right. In the same window of time we passed the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, the state version of it, and we got no excuse mail -in voting which New York is one of very few states that didn't have that for like the longest time you had to have an excuse for your mail -in ballot. So we drastically expanded our voting rights and we're still on the list. I do not want to be dismissive of how many voter restrictions are on there. This is my point. There's a huge difference between our little technically we belong on the lists and Georgia

0:28:52 Thomas: Trump

0:29:24 Jenessa: Shortened early voting by like half. That's a huge problem. I Do think he's really focused on Georgia. I get the suspicion that he lives there or works there or something. Yeah, yeah, it's become closer and closer recently, in particular on the state level. We all know Stacey Abrams campaigning for governor, and it's got enough electoral votes that in theory, if you got Pennsylvania and Michigan, but not Wisconsin, you could make up for it with Georgia or Wisconsin, but non -Michigan. You can never make up for Pennsylvania, basically.

0:29:34 Thomas: Well yeah it's also one of the closest ones yeah but yeah Yeah, I just meant in this recent election is one of the closest ones. And in 2020, it was super duper duper close. I mean, famously. Yeah, yeah.

0:30:03 Jenessa: It's one of the closest there. Yeah, and I would say honestly the biggest thing is Georgia is in terms of close states it's one of the worst for voter suppression they are just on it campaigning and getting stuff out to try to suppress the vote whereas other states I think it's just less blatant in some ways yeah

0:30:25 Thomas: Well, it might also have to do with the properties of the state. I mean if it's a state where Republicans control a bunch of it, but it still somehow is maybe going for Democrats statewide, then that makes sense. They're going to try to do something about it.

0:30:35 Jenessa: Right. So Georgia is really the exemplar of voter suppression taking away flipping elections. Certainly on the local level, I mean, there are tons of elections that are won by like a single vote. So yeah, voter suppression affects the outcome of elections all the time. On the federal level, on the statewide level, it's a harder claim. But on little townships, yeah, all the time. So things like shuttering drop boxes in the city, that happened. There's just so many Georgia laws that got passed. But compare that to other states on the list. And yet, critically, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan are not on this list of states enacting even more restrictive laws. So those are the ones that we're the most focused on, right? Okay, thing that we really do have a problem with and you should be paying attention to. People who are out there like making it their job to challenge voters, he kind of portrays this a little inaccurately in suggesting that this is like some brand new thing. Pretty much every state pretty much forever has had on the books, people can challenge your vote. And the little history I've seen is essentially before we had computers and like census list of all the people and sharing of data. Basically, the way they figured out that somebody shouldn't be voting here is somebody stood outside and goes, I don't know that guy. This town has 10 people in it. Who who the hell is that? Well, yeah, and most likely that, right, is a lot of racist and, you know, I'm sure as women got the right to vote, sexist challenges. But basically, states have had this on the books forever. You'd be shocked how broad it is. Somebody's right to just kind of walk up to the Board of Elections and like, on information and belief, I think this person doesn't live at that address, that does not mean you are going to be taken off the voter rolls. That does not mean when you show up at the polls, you are not going to able to vote. That's the part I want to make super clear here is like to not have this cause a panic. Yes, there are groups out there that are coordinating. They're using like weird AI software to try to identify people they think are like, this is fraud. And they're running into just like, yeah, there's so many people named Thomas Smith and they just decide you're all the same person and they all moved.

0:32:10 Thomas: It's not the family guy skin tone thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I think this should be like in sports where if you challenge and you're unsuccessful, you lose your vote. You know, like if you're just out there challenging and you're wrong, I'll give you, I'll give you like one free challenge. After that you lose your vote?

0:33:19 Jenessa: Some of these people are sending in an individual.

0:33:22 Thomas: Who is the Karen that is doing this? Like I can't who has the time again, old people have nothing but time for their racism.

0:33:29 Jenessa: Yeah, literally, like they're talking to reporters. They're not ashamed of this. Oh man, there's a really funny one in one of these articles where they talk to the guy and he's like, I sent them thousands of obituaries. And then they talk to the clerk and she's like well, most of them were already off the list. She's like yeah, yeah, we know they're dead. It is a real problem. It seems clear there is an attempt to overwhelm boards of elections with just a huge pile of these challenges right before the election. Something to know, the National Voter Registration Act, federal law, it applies to every state. There is a ban on mass purges within 90 days of an election. So an individual challenge where you have clear reason to believe this individual, that individual is not eligible, yeah, you can take them off. But as a board of elections decide we're taking all these people off on suspicion, you can't do that. And so it seems really clear if somebody just hands you a list of a thousand people, there's no reason because someone else generated it that the board is suddenly allowed to do this within 90 days of the election. That should provide strong protections for people so far, what we are not seeing is someone hands in a list of thousands of people and a board of elections without doing any investigation just accepts it, purges. Yeah. Yeah, the laws seem to be working. That doesn't make this okay. It doesn't makes it not a problem. It's happening. I don't think it should make people panic.

0:33:33 Thomas: Yeah? Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember that. That yeah right yeah sounds good yeah yeah right and then not be able to do anything about it yeah yeah should give you a heads up that some asshole is after you though hey just a tip this person, yeah,

0:35:08 Jenessa: There's also a lot of claims in here that people could somehow get challenged, not know it, and just have their ballot rejected, and that's that. Or get challenged and show up at the polls and be shocked to find out that their vote was challenged. Right. That's not true. Every single state. Now, the procedure is different. Elections are run by the states, and this will make it complicated. Every state has to notify you. They have different ways of telling you. Some of them just automatically notify you that someone challenged you, which I think is, given this problem, probably a bad idea. A lot of states, what they do is they investigate. And if it is obviously bullshit, it just goes in the garbage. They don't call you up and be like, uh, are you... They're like, yeah, this is nothing. And then they throw it out.

0:36:04 Jenessa: I kind of... Yeah, I would want to know, But I also wouldn't want people to, yes, the second they get it, that they just, hey, just so you know, we're investigating, you should probably panic for a little while. That seems not great. But states have different ways of handling it. An impression you're going to get, I wouldn't even call it an impression, an explicit statement you're gonna get in this article is that you could theoretically be challenged, have the Board of Elections do no investigation, purge you off the rolls, not tell you, you show up at the polls, and you're are shocked to learn you're not registered and there's nothing you can do. That's just not true. Some of them will tell you immediately. Some of then will investigate first and possibly just throw it out without anything happening.

0:36:08 Thomas: Yeah. Be able to overwhelm, yeah gotcha. You're a non -entity. They can't see you, yeah I throw it out you mean the challenge not the vote or not the yeah, sure.

0:36:52 Jenessa: Yes, correct. Throw the challenge out. If the challenge is successful, you will have a right to appeal. Obviously, you can't just be thrown off the voter rolls and have no due process on this. You have a right to, in some states, it's a hearing. In some Some states just send in a new voter registration and it doesn't matter, whatever. Every state is different. Look up the rules. You're not going to show up and find out you got challenged. That's not how it works. There's a mixing in here of he kind of mixes up people who got removed for normal reasons, removed for accidents and removed for purges when actually the state would treat all of them differently. So that's a problem.

0:37:32 Thomas: So, So far we've just listed big numbers of things.

0:37:37 Jenessa: Yes. And they're big numbers that are OK. Okay, so this is where we start to get into a really big problem. In 2008, even before the majority of Democrats began voting by mail, when absentee balloting was much rarer, the federal government reported 488,136 mail-in ballots were rejected, almost all on picayune grounds, i.e., middle initial on signature missing, etc. I just can't find a source for that. The federal government reports. Who?

0:38:07 Thomas: Wow, yeah the federal government,

0:38:07 Jenessa: Who? I don't even know. I tried Googling that number. I am sure people are getting rejected for silly bullshit. The idea that almost all of those, the number getting rejected is for silly reasons. And that's 2008 and I don't know what to do with this. Okay. Here is an MIT study in 2008 and he cites it this way. An MIT study put the number of rejected mail -in ballots at 2.9%. That's the low end of MIT's estimate of mail-in ballots tossed out. Charles Stewart's Distinguished Professor of Political Science, author of the report, notes mail -IN ballots requested and never received, nor returned, could raise the total mail -ин ballot loss rate to 21%. Not even close. There's so many problems with this first of all exact same author exact same lab the paper he's citing is called losing votes by mail and a new paper by that guy in 2020 like you know way more relevant called reconsidering losing votes buy mail has redone this with 2020 data so we do not need to be citing the 2008 paper, okay? But let's say in the 2008 paper, it is true, 2 .9%, according to the Election Assistance Commission, they do a report every two years or so, and they found the returned ballots versus counted, which is going to therefore give you the rejection rate, was 2. 9%. So if we assume every single one that wasn't counted was a ballot that should have been counted, okay, then I guess 2 .9 % are like stolen votes. But some of them weren't counted because they shouldn't have been counting because you weren't eligible to vote. You weren't registered.

0:40:04 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Or could they be filled out totally incorrectly, like voted for both candidates or voted, you know, stuff like that.

0:40:09 Jenessa: Now, yes. Yes, absolutely. There's so many different rules.

0:40:15 Thomas: There's actually legitimate reasons that, hey, people are not good at paperwork.

0:40:19 Jenessa: Yeah, here's one. New York, really strict rules. If your name gets written anywhere on the ballot, if any identifying mark is on the ballot, garbage. We have super strict rules to try to prevent bribery. So anything that could be, hey, you can look at this and know how I voted, throw it out.

0:40:40 Thomas: Interesting.

0:40:40 Jenessa: We're not doing that. So your signature goes on the oath envelope and your ballot goes in the oath envelope. And then they verify you looking at the oath envelope and they make sure it's right. And then they take the ballot out of the oath envelope and then they separate them. And then we'll count your ballot. And these are separate things once you're verified. We could also then look at the ballot and see problems with the ballot. That's another reason to reject it. But first we check that you're okay. Then we check your ballot." So the point being that you couldn't take somebody's money and then prove to them you voted the way they wanted you to vote because you can't mark up your ballot in that way. We have really strict rules around this. This is why you can't take a ballot selfie, a filled out ballot, not allowed. Nobody can go into the polling booth with you unless it's a child under the age of 16, or if you need assistance getting into the booth. All kinds of things to try to prevent bribery and coercion around your ballot. So any identifying mark, garbage. If you voted for two candidates in one race, we'll count the rest of your ballot, it, but not your vote for that race.

0:41:49 Thomas: That varies by state, obviously. You're just talking about New York, right? Yeah. Sure.

0:41:52 Jenessa: This is just New York rules. I use New York as my example often because I know it. Every state will handle this slightly differently. But the point being, yeah, there's totally valid reasons to toss a ballot that is not somebody intentionally tried to take your vote or that there's a systemic problem here. It's just sometimes it's legal, but I don't like that and we should change it because I think it is voter suppression. Sometimes it's the law for a reason. But let's say, because he's going to say, 100% of the returned and not counted should be considered a lost vote. Okay, that's 2.9% of mailed-in in ballots, not 2.9% of all votes. Where is this 21% coming from? They took a survey of people and said, hey, you didn't vote. Why not? Not. And one of the options was for you to self -report. Well, I asked for an absentee ballot and they didn't send it to me.

0:42:51 Jenessa: I'm sure you can hear the problem already. The author explicitly says this, this estimate where we go, anybody who requested one and didn't get it, anybody who sent it and the board didn't got it, the board got it and didn't count it, or they tried to count it and there was a problem with the ballot, any of those things. If we put them all together, this is quote probably too high so we're grabbing the probably too high estimate the author talks all about how there is a social pressure that you should vote and people who don't vote kind of you know this doesn't even have to be conscious bias find the reasons why they didn't that are not an internal personal choice but some sort of external force and every reason to suspect that is an overestimate but now, if we were to look at the 2020 paper by the same author re -evaluating this using 2016 data, one of the things he talks about is, hey, I don't have to rely anymore on like estimates of how many ballots might have gotten lost because we now have really good data on how often letters and packages get lost. So I can estimate roughly how many of those people could be telling the truth and start start subtracting that out and recalculating. It's all estimates, of course. And estimated, first of all, about 50 % of unreturned mail ballots are not lost votes because those people later voted in person.

0:44:22 Thomas: Right good point

0:44:24 Jenessa: So you can't just say, first of all, they did get it in the mail and then they never sent it back. Oh, lost vote. No, that person just for whatever reason went to the polls. He's estimating it looks like about 50 % of those are already off the table here and starts calculating a bunch of different things. Also, just the mail has gotten better. The policies around accepting absentee ballots has gotten better. He ends up saying in states that require an excuse for an absentee ballot, which tends to be states that are not as great about running their absentee ballot system, about 4.9% are somewhere in this chain of custody getting lost or getting rejected, 4 .9%. And in states where they have either a permanent list or vote-by-mail states where it's automatic, 3.5%. So he calculates in 2016, that would have been 1 .4 million votes. That's a lot. It's nationwide, but it's a law. That is an order of magnitude lower than what our author here is going to say. He says based on the 21 % number that this guy gave back in a paper about the 2008 election, it would have been 14 .1 million ballots that

0:45:21 Thomas: Yeah nationwide yeah okay

0:45:42 Jenessa: Vanished from the count. Not even close. There's a lot of these. When he's talking about the signature matching thing, okay, here's the thing. Sometimes you're going to reject your ballot because of a signature match, and sometimes that's a load of horseshit. Why do we have this at all?

0:45:41 Thomas: Sure Racism it's just another barrier right I mean

0:46:01 Jenessa: Okay, here's the thing, though. For an absentee ballot, how do we know who actually filled it out and really who signed the thing? Well, in Alabama, where they require voter ID and they are not backing down on that for absentees, you need to go sign it in front of a notary. Now that, that is some voter suppression right there. So if you would like to not do that, if you'd like to not do what Texas started doing, where you had to put your social or your driver's license ID on your absentee ballot form, basically what states do when they don't do voter ID and they're doing absentees is they do a signature match. And you would be surprised how hard it is to fake somebody else's signature. It's a problem. Yes. Right.

0:46:22 Thomas: Yeah well especially because this isn't a diamond heist it's like casting a meaningless vote that nobody would try to do like the number of people who are going to be trying to do voter fraud is so small and mostly Republicans.

0:46:52 Jenessa: Right. Honestly, it's kind of telling to me when people are worried about voter fraud because I'm like, I would never. If the opportunity was offered to me, I wouldn't, like morally, I would never, yeah,

0:47:04 Thomas: Who would risk? Yeah. Who would risk like jail time for one vote in our meaningless system of nothing that's electoral college anyway? It's not even worth it. Yeah. Yeah.

0:47:16 Jenessa: Because to be clear, doing that intentionally is a felony. Do not do it if you were thinking about it for some reason. It's a way of, you know, when we don't make you you put an ID number, when we don't make you sign it in front of a notary, when you're not coming in person. Signature matching is really the only thing left. And there's this other problem. So most states, most by a little bit, 33 states and the District of Columbia, if your signature doesn't match or any other problem with your absentee ballot, you have notice and cure. Hey, just wanted to let you know there's a problem. Better get down here and fix it real quick.

0:47:34 Thomas: All right. Fair enough. Right. Every time I hear that curing your ballot, I think of like cured ham. And I'm like, yeah, you got to come, whatever that process is, to your ballot, make it a little more tasty.

0:48:07 Jenessa: Yeah. Well, and this is where like you're still getting campaign donation emails after election day. That's what this is. We have the list of people whose ballots got rejected.

0:48:14 Thomas: Not tasty enough. Wow.

0:48:18 Jenessa: Obviously, you don't know how they voted, but you might know they're a registered Democrat and be like, God damn it, we better get to their house and knock on their door and be be like, did you know? So every state is different in how they give the notice and how they offer the cure. And some are easier than others. There are 16 states that don't let you cure it. And they don't even necessarily tell you. Those states are almost exclusively who you'd think they'd be.

0:48:48 Jenessa: Wisconsin's on that list, which is not great. But otherwise, it's like Idaho. And it's It's like, once again, not acceptable if somebody loses their right to vote in the presidential race with the Electoral College. Sorry, Idaho. I'm just not worried about you.

0:49:05 Thomas: That's not changing outcomes. Sure. Wow. What?

0:49:06 Jenessa: It's not. On the local election level, this is messed up. This is not how this should be. Pennsylvania, goddamn Pennsylvania, county by county, it varies whether and how you will be notified and be able to cure it. What the fuck, Pennsylvania? Get it together. Like uh and there was litigation about it too of like county officials saying that the state saying counties could do notice and cure is illegal because who even knows it lost it lost because the judge was like what are you talking about so yeah the state could continue to allow counties to not let you cure your ballot jesus christ it's a problem the thing I will say here he portrays it as like that you're being accused of forgery if your signature doesn't match which is a federal crime that's not what this you aren't never not

0:49:59 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:50:08 Thomas: Why is that even important to the point? Just another dramatic thing. Yeah.

0:50:12 Jenessa: I have no idea he's just being dramatic through this whole thing he calls it like oh the fed said 157 477 ballots in 2020 were rejected for supposedly mismatched signatures quite a crime wave like no if they're not accusing you of forgery. It's a separate civil thing that's going on. You're not going to jail. This is not a crime. It is not an accusation. Like stop. Once again, that could intimidate people. You are not actually being accused of a crime, like please, please go ahead and mail in a ballot. It s okay. If you are nervous, like go vote in person.

0:50:47 Jenessa: I am not going tell you not to do that. There is a whole bunch of stuff about provisional ballots. My God, there is so much misinformation about about this. Here's how he describes a provisional ballot, which you might also know as an affidavit ballot. If you've been challenged or you find you've been purged off the registration rolls, you'll be offered one of these provisional ballots, paper ballots you place in a special envelope. Typically, you're being charged with a proviso You'll be promised your registration will be checked, and then your ballot will be counted. Bullshit. If you're challenged, unless you personally contact or go into your county clerk's office with id and proof of address your ballot goes into the electoral dumpster.

0:51:28 Jenessa: A better name for a provisional ballot would be a placebo ballot you think you voted but chances are you did not that is your ballot wasn't counted yes

0:51:37 Thomas: I thought that was when you might have gone into the wrong, like, polling station.

0:51:40 Jenessa: This is so incorrect okay first of all let's not conflate challenged taken off the voter roll total accident like he's just saying yeah if you've been challenged, you, yeah, talk, figure it out, talk to your board of elections, do whatever you got to do. If you just walk in there and they're like, huh, you're not on the voter rolls. And you're like, I live here. And then you show them your driver's license and they'll be like, oh shit, you're almost certainly fine. Go ahead and call them if you want. The Help America Vote Act federal law requires that there is some form of either hotline or website thing where you can and check whether your provisional ballot was passed, and if not, why, so that you can fix it. Like, no, it doesn't just go in the dumpster.

0:52:26 Jenessa: Fill out a provisional ballot if it's offered to you.

0:52:28 Thomas: The electoral dumpster, to be fair.

0:52:30 Jenessa: Yeah, so here's the big thing about provisional ballots. He says, according to the EAC in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast, a breathtaking 42.3% were never counted. According to that document, yes, there's a hundred reasons. Okay, it could be. You mailed in an absentee, and if they get your absentees, they'll count it and not count your provisional. It could be you are in the wrong polling place. Now, if you know that for a fact, I would strongly recommend you get to the right polling place I work with a lot of people with disabilities who might find it is physically impossible to go make it to the next polling place. This provisional ballot is the reason they can vote today. If they were told, sorry, too bad, you have to go to this other place, they're not voting.

0:52:47 Thomas: Doesn't that mean they were counted in the correct place? Wasn't also like, maybe I've mailed in my ballot, right? Or something. Right. Mm -hmm.

0:53:24 Jenessa: This is such an important tool that was created for this purpose, critically. Actual data from the EAC in 2016, when 2.5 million provisional ballots were cast, 71 % were fully or partially counted. What does partially counted mean? It means when you're in the wrong polling place, if you voted for like a town council member who you are not eligible to vote for, they won't count that, but they will count the stuff you're eligible to vot for.

0:53:51 Jenessa: And you know who you're always eligible to vote for is the motherfucking president! It in. You can't say 42.3% weren't counted. 71 fully or partially counted. Of those, 87.7 were counted in fall. Here's a real kicker. 75 % of all provisional ballots came from California, New York, Arizona, and Ohio. 50 % came from Carolina alone. California's got to get their shit together. Yeah, that makes sense.

0:54:13 Thomas: Ah, right. Yeah, well, we have universal mail-in, so it's like, maybe a lot of people don't know if they mailed, or they, they, maybe it's, like, oh, will my mail-in be on Times? I'm also going to go. I don't know. I'm not sure. We also, by the way, have a shitload of districts. So that's going to make sense that we have the most people

0:54:23 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah it said um nine percent of California's ballots were provisional. Right.

0:54:36 Thomas: That like don't know if they're in the right district.

0:54:40 Jenessa: And some people are gonna get handed a provisional ballot because they are not eligible to vote and they're like I still want to try and you're like all right. And obviously um if you know for a fact you are ineligible you're signing an affidavit saying you believe you are that would be not okay. If you think you are, uh, yeah, vote. And if they later determine you're not and they're correct, it was correct to not count this ballot. Like sometimes it's correct by law and I still don't love it, but one way or the other, like plenty of these are not counted and they should not have been. Disproportionately, people casting a provisional ballot is going to include people whose ballot should be rejected by law.

0:55:23 Jenessa: Of course, they're not all getting counted. That same page of the report has a little graph of in 2016, greater than 2.4 million provisional were cast. There's a stat that says from 2006 to 2016, 2.4 million total were rejected over a 10 year range. And of those 44 % got rejected because you're not registered in the state. So maybe that's where he's getting this like 42 .3 or whatever, like approximately 44. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, but please, if you know you're in the wrong polling place and you know the right one, go to it. But if you're told for some reason you're not on the thing, oh my God, and you don't know what to do, but you believe you are eligible to vote, yes, fill out a provisional ballot and do not assume it's going in the electoral dumpster. Like Jesus Christ.

0:56:14 Thomas: EVEN THINK THEY HAVE AN ELECTORAL DUMPSTER. I'LL COME OUT AND SAY IT.

0:56:17 Jenessa: They They don't actually, they would have to be, it's a record, it would have to be safe. Like you can't like light it on fire. Jesus.

0:56:20 Thomas: Yeah. I think Trump ran on make the electoral dumpster great again, though. So we'll see. And these are all you haven't given us like necessarily specifics of his calculations, but these are all just like numbers. He's thrown into the mix of like these should have been votes that could have been Kamala kind of thing yeah this money yeah yeah seven

0:56:36 Jenessa: He's just going to keep doing that. Oh, this many in 2016 and this many in 2008. And I'm like, how is this comparable at any point?

0:56:44 Thomas: Million ghosts were denied their ballots as well all right

0:56:47 Jenessa: Yeah. Just over and over again. Okay. I just have to briefly go off on this real quick. The majority of removals were based on questionable, indeed, shockingly faulty information that a voter had moved their residence I'm not talking about the 4 .9 million voters purged because they're dead, or 8 million others whose residential move could be verified, nor those serving time in prison, nor those ruled too crazy to vote.

0:57:14 Thomas: Too crazy to vote I don't think we have that

0:57:17 Jenessa: Oh, we do, and it's a massive voter suppression problem that I am like, oh, let me go off on this for a hot minute, okay? Do you remember Britney Spears under a conservatorship for decades for, like, no reason? In multiple states, she would have not been allowed to vote So many states have rules about guardianship and conservatorship. Guardianships and conservaterships that are arguably way too easy to get. Sometimes parents are like their kid is about to turn 18. Their kid has like a mild intellectual disability or not even an intellectual disability. They could be autistic and have certain support needs where they need a little help with this, that or the other thing. And they are just told you should get a guardianship by like, you know, schools and whatever. And some judge decides it's in the best interest and gives the guardianship. And like decades later, the parents don't want it. The kid doesn't want on it. The kid's 40 years old, living independently their whole life, and they still have to call mom and dad every time they go to the doctor for permission for shit. They are treated like a child the rest of their life. And they're trying to get out from under it, and it's a huge legal problem. And in some states, that takes away your right to vote. And the parents and the kid had no idea that they were signing up to sign away their voting rights. This is so

0:57:20 Thomas: Oh we do we have a too crazy to vote oh wow sure wow wow

0:58:32 Jenessa: Bad. It's terrible. And And he just dismisses this as people ruled too crazy to vote in his story about how voter suppression is so bad. I was fuming when I read this. I could go on and on and On about this. There is a Wisconsin lawsuit where somebody who believes there's so much voter fraud is trying to get guardianship records, like records where somebody was brought to court and held held to be mentally incompetent, and a judge appointed them a guardian. And the judge then, as part of that, ruled they weren't competent to vote, which may or may not have been appropriate. And this guy wants that to be public record so he can check whether the Board of Elections actually took that person off the voter rolls. Exactly.

0:59:21 Thomas: Or just like pretended to I don'T UNDERSTAND all

0:59:25 Jenessa: It's a total conspiracy theory nonsense nonsense to begin with that like, oh, supposedly the judge decided you weren't competent to vote, but the board didn't take you off the list. And then what? I don't even know. But like in the meanwhile, this was a really private moment where like medical information was disclosed and he wants the records. And this is a lawsuit that's ongoing in Wisconsin right now. Had to get that off my chest. Also, we're not talking about felony voting, Jesus Christ.

0:59:51 Thomas: Right and that's where we left it for our first recording. We actually recorded this in two parts as well, and that was where that first part ended. And we're going to pick it up with even more terrible claims, but also even more education about voting and voting rights and how it works in different places. I want to thank Jenessa again so much, and I'm excited for part two. It's really good. Find it on Patreon right now, patreon .com slash series pod. For everyone else, it'll be out in a few days. All right, thanks for listening, and I'll see you then.

1:00:34 Jenessa: Am I the woman crazy? Trust me, bro, isn't a source. Throw it out.