Here's Why Voter Fraud Is Virtually Nonexistent, and What Experts Actually Fear

Transcript

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

0:00:34 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1310. I'm Thomas. That over there is Jenessa, and it is time. It's the, it's the election, Jenessa. It's the thing. It's the, it's tomorrow. It's super, if people are listening to this right away, it's tomorrow. I, I feel so great. I feel great. No, no nerves. Fine. I'm totally fine, 100, oh sorry, that was just my fourth heart attack.

0:00:44 Jenessa: It's the day yeah no it's all good

0:01:02 Thomas: How you doing?

0:01:02 Jenessa: I am doing pretty good. I think we're doing good. This should air Monday the 2nd and the election day is Tuesday the 3rd, and based on the data I'm seeing, many of you will have already voted anyway, which is great. So, we're doing okay.

0:01:18 Thomas: I'd is, yep, say this is episode 1310 or, if things didn't go well, the last episode.

0:01:26 Jenessa: Oh no.

0:01:27 Thomas: Final OA.

0:01:29 Jenessa: Oh god. Hey, you know, I am always behind the idea of vote like every election could be your last. We're in a bit of a pinch, in terms of needing this support at the federal level and state and local, everywhere. So, make sure you get out there, everybody.

0:01:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yep.

0:01:46 Thomas: We are going to ease everyone's minds by talking about election. No, this is the, of course, last day before the day, and there's a lot of good information that you wanted to get out to people. What to worry about, what not to worry about. We're not doing horse race stuff.

0:01:51 Jenessa: Heh heh heh heh No.

0:02:04 Thomas: There's other shows for that. This is about the law, and specifically, Jenessa has a background, as I think people would know by now, in law and elections, and is going to be able to tell us what we should actually worry about, what we shouldn't worry about. You know, I wouldn't mind if you just repeated to people now, because I forget everything, how long you've been doing this, and where your experience comes from.

0:02:05 Jenessa: Sure.

0:02:27 Jenessa: I actually started at this position while I was in law school. My initial role did not require a law degree. It was just extremely helpful. And that's where I got a ton of experience learning about New York election law in particular, but also some federal, and I helped represent people in HAVA complaints, which is something people should know about in all 50 States, you can complain about accessibility and privacy and the whole voting process. If it doesn't go well, you can complain to either your state board of elections or your secretary of state, whoever runs the elections.

0:03:03 Thomas: If I go well, you don't mean the outcome. You mean like...

0:03:06 Jenessa: Right, right. The process of the voting.

0:03:09 Thomas: Gotcha. Damn.

0:03:10 Jenessa: The somebody Didn't know how to use the machine and couldn't help me, or the voting space was inaccessible in a variety of ways. Yeah, I did that for a while, and then I, uh, graduated, passed the bar, and stayed in that role, but slowly moved up to doing more, um, law degree requiring things.

0:03:10 Thomas: Okay. Just making sure.

0:03:30 Jenessa: Uh, I'm being a little vague because I Try not to, uh, Name my employer on here since I do non-partisan, non-profit work, and this is obviously very partisan work that you and I do. Been a great experience, and I am continuing to expand my practice into all kinds of disability, not just voting access, but employment and housing and things like that. So yeah, yeah, it's been about four years now.

0:03:29 Thomas: Hmm, right, sure.

0:03:52 Thomas: So how many election days have you seen?

0:03:55 Jenessa: Between primaries, specials and generals, I'm somewhere in the like 10 to 12 elections where I have to call and yell at people so that's fun.

0:04:03 Thomas: How many were stolen by the deep state left?

0:04:06 Jenessa: Precisely none.

0:04:07 Thomas: Oh, okay. That is what you would say.

0:04:08 Jenessa: Not a thing. You know, I've done quite a bit debunking some of the worst lawsuits around.

0:04:13 Thomas: Yeah, well, it's that experience we're gonna lean on today for sure. If you want to get oh, you should get people a little bit better of a preview than I did What are we going to be talking about?

0:04:20 Jenessa: Yeah, so what I kind of want to do is run you through, like, a day in the life of a person trying to commit voter fraud and why that is so extremely difficult. You know, I'm sure our audience already knows the odds of individual voter fraud, it's just, it's so rare. But like, why though? How is that? If you go to talk to somebody who's kind of on the fence hearing this through the grapevine, are you able to explain to them why we know that as opposed to just like, well, we have few reported cases. No, we know, we know this is rare. We know this is difficult, I want to walk through that. And like, really when people say voter fraud, they're either talking about that, like an individual who's not eligible or tries to vote twice or something, or they mean like hacking elections, like we're going to steal votes. And I want to talk about why that is not accurate either. That one I see a little more both sides of the aisle worry

0:04:45 Thomas: Right. Mm. Yeah, definitely. I see the like, oh, the machines are flipping votes. I see that a

0:05:14 Jenessa: Yeah, and we should definitely talk about why that's not exactly accurate to describe what's going. And then a bit about what are the real threats? Obviously the voter suppression stuff that we've talked about, there are real cybersecurity elections experts who are raising alarm bells, not about the vote tally, but about other issues in elections, taking our attention away from things that are not going to happen and putting our attention on these very real issues we could be addressing.

0:05:18 Thomas: Oh, yeah.

0:05:41 Thomas: I think we need to spread the word more about the voter ID being stupid. That is a very popular position, the voter ID, like I think it's something like 80% of people think you should have to show voter ID or show ID to vote. We kind of were talking about this on Dub2Dub just obviously in a casual manner, not from a position of expertise, but it's just like, who is the person who's gonna go try to vote as someone they're not? And then like, what happens in that process? So they, well, you're going to tell us, I'm sure, but like they give the address and then they went like, it's all that for one vote. Like who's going to do that? I just think it's something we ought to talk about

0:05:46 Jenessa: Yeah. It is.

0:06:11 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. And

0:06:19 Thomas: More.

0:06:20 Jenessa: Also, that requires that somebody would do all of the ridiculous steps we're going to talk about, but faking an ID is just a step too far for this person. The thing that, like, everybody did in college so they could drink that, no, no, no, I'll never make a fake ID, but I will try to commit a felony voter fraud in every other way. Like, really? So, yeah, we'll walk through how it works in New York where we don't require you to show ID.

0:06:28 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

0:06:45 Thomas: Well, how it works is they just don't have elections, fake elections, it's all completely fake. They just flip a coin and just like, we, it's this person because we don't know, we couldn't administer elections without ID, it's impossible.

0:06:57 Jenessa: There was an election, I believe it was on Long Island, where it was tied after like four recounts and they, I can't remember if they flipped a coin or pulled names out a hat or something, there but has been a coin flip election in New York.

0:07:04 Thomas: Yeah. There was something, yeah. We talked about that, I feel like. Yeah, it was like that was the last thing. They were just like, all right, let's do this. All right. Well, we'd better take our first break and get to it. Patreon.com/law, if you'd like to support the show and good expertise and conversations like these that we really need right now and skip the ads. We'll get to it after this break.

0:07:15 Jenessa: Got to pick somehow.

0:07:32 Thomas: All right, so a day in the life of a, of a, of an election thief.

0:07:36 Jenessa: A criminal.

0:07:37 Thomas: Yeah, of, I'll play the part of the criminal.

0:07:39 Jenessa: Perfect, okay.

0:07:40 Thomas: I've woken up. I've decided I would really like to steal one person's vote today, just,

0:07:46 Jenessa: Yeah, so how would you do it in New York? You don't have to show an ID, but you are going to get identified. So let's think through how you could possibly try to do this, already imagining you're the kind of person who would do this, which is a very small number of people. People underestimate that a lot, that, like, most of crime prevention is just, like, a culture that says don't do this,

0:08:07 Thomas: And it's not like a crime where it's like, well, I need this vote to eat, you know, it's like one thing if we have a lot of crime because of poverty and stuff like that, this is just, nobody's incentivized to do this.

0:08:18 Jenessa: Right, not at all. Let's imagine you're the rare individual who would even think about doing this. What are you gonna do? Well, first of all, you gotta get registered. To register in New York, it's not like you just write your name down. You do have to identify yourself. So the way we do it is either your DMV number or your Social Security number.

0:08:35 Thomas: We're not stealing someone who's already registered. We're going to like steal a person's vote who hasn't registered.

0:08:39 Jenessa: Well, let's think about that. Let's say we were going to start with somebody who's not registered and try that. I'm going to register them. Right off the bat, you cannot register a fake person. You need a DMV or a social security. So you're gonna have to find a real person who's not already registered.

0:08:49 Thomas: Sure, yeah. That's not, like, the easiest thing to find out.

0:08:58 Jenessa: Not really, no. You would have to go look at the voter registration list, and then where are you getting a list of everybody who lives in my state to compare against? I'm not quite sure. Already right off the bat, you're going to have to find that, which is not straightforward. Dead people are removed at least quarterly. The requirement is like coroners or whoever has the death certificates at least quarterly.

0:09:22 Thomas: So I have to commit the perfect murder first that I time to be in not the same fiscal quarter to be just before.

0:09:26 Jenessa: Right. Yeah. We have some extra level of crime happening at that point. The idea that, like, your relative dies and you vote for them, you're going to have to time that real well for that to even possibly be an option. Vast majority of cases when we get somebody who's actually on the voter rolls and wasn't supposed to be there, it's administrative screw ups.

0:09:48 Thomas: Yeah.

0:09:49 Jenessa: I check the box that says no I'm not 18 or no I'm not a citizen, and like it just accidentally pushes you forward to registration anyway. The vast majority of people that happens to don't vote. They know they're not supposed to. And it also creates a lot of confusion where, like, rather than something malicious, it's usually like, well, I don't know, I answered these questions, I was allowed to register, I started getting postcards about where my poll site is. It's a little more understandable how somebody could get confused and go vote. It's almost never this malicious, intentional thing. It's some sort of administrative screw up. The other thing that's important is jurisdictions share information. So, like, if you try to register in one county, they're going to send a postcard to your new address that says, "This person is registered here."

0:10:35 Jenessa: If that's not accurate, call us immediately. And they'll also send one to your old address that says you are no longer registered at this address. If that's wrong, call us immediately. Here's the phone number. If we're registering a brand new person, we're going to have to hope they don't pay attention to that when they get a notice that they're registered now. If we're trying to take the registration of an existing person, you're not gonna be able to change it without them getting notified.

0:11:03 Jenessa: They're going to get notice sent to them no matter what. So we're gonna run into a problem there. You'd have to know their personal information to register them, which like obviously it's not too hard to pick an individual and know their name and address, but you'd also need their DMV or social security number, which, how did you get a hold of that? If they can't verify your identity based on the information you gave, they will ask for ID at the polling place the first time you vote.

0:11:02 Thomas: Um Well, I thought it was illegal to do that and you'd be

0:11:29 Jenessa: Yeah, uh, per the latest Where There's Woke, not true that in New York it's illegal to show your ID.

0:11:35 Thomas: It was California mainly for that one, but yeah.

0:11:37 Jenessa: Yeah, he mentioned New York too, though.

0:11:39 Thomas: Yeah, he did. Yeah, both.

0:11:40 Jenessa: Yeah, not true, not a thing. You will be asked to show it if they can't, in the registration process, figure out who you are. Okay, let's imagine you've either registered somebody and somehow you knew all this information about them and they never figured out that you did it, or you pick out a known registered person, you somehow know who this is, they're already on the rolls, that's a little easier to find. You're gonna have to find, and if you want to go in person to vote, the right polling place for that person, relatively easily. If you know the address, you'll find it. You go in, you give your name and address, and the poll worker looking at the thing, what also pops up is your birthday. So you're going to have to pick a person who looks like they're about your age and the gendered name is going to have to match too.

0:12:29 Thomas: But assume I'm a master of disguise. You know. Cuz that's these people, these criminals who do this definitely are also an international man of mystery. I

0:12:32 Jenessa: Sure. Picked out a Thomas Smith who was not born in 1950 but was born around the same time you picked out a Thomas and not a Tomalina and you don't raise any suspicions. The poll worker doesn't think that doesn't sound right. You're also going to have to sign. The signature needs to match. If you've never seen another person's signature before, it's actually quite hard to replicate.

0:12:46 Thomas: Like me? No. I'm just kidding.

0:13:05 Thomas: Yeah. I can't even match my own signature.

0:13:08 Jenessa: Yeah, exactly. And like there's very specific loopy, I like was in Catholic school to learn cursive and I signed my first letter and my first name in a very specific way, it would be a dead giveaway if you tried to actually spell my name out, it's not going to work. Um, also, nobody knows how to spell my name, anyway. Let's say, then, the signature match is close enough that somebody doesn't feel like harassing you. You're also gonna hope nobody there recognizes you or the other person. So, recall how small polling places are. They're assigned to a couple of blocks, a single area.

Like, everybody there knows you. If I walked into my old polling place and gave my mother's name, everybody'd be like, "No, you're not, I know her. She's lived in this town her entire life and I know her personally and absolutely not. The, like, older women who are nosy and also poll workers are the ones sitting right there and they're gonna be like, I know for a fact you're not that person. And then, if that person has already voted, you are, like, caught immediately. They're gonna be like, that's funny because they checked in and voted.

If they haven't voted yet, They're going to show up to vote and be told you already voted and they can actually prove who they are. You're going to get caught again. You think there's not cameras all over these places? Like they know they're going to find you. So all of these obstacles are going to get in the way. I'm willing to try all that. I'm not going to fake an idea like, come on. So pretty tough

0:13:49 Thomas: Hahaha Yeah.

0:14:32 Jenessa: To make all of that line up and not only make it line up so that you get to vote, but also not get caught trying to do it. It's just, it's nearly impossible.

0:14:42 Thomas: It's one thing to think about this in theory, it's another to be like, "When, who, what crazy asshole would have the confidence to do any of that thinking they weren't going to get caught at every one of those steps, like it's like every single time you'd have to know for sure that you know the person didn't vote yet. Or the, but you know, everything you just said, that you're not gonna do that. There's just no way.

0:14:47 Jenessa: Ha ha ha. Right, right. Right. Right. If this was for a million dollars, I'd worry that somebody might try it. But, like, there's no prize money at the end of this. It's a single vote. Concerns that can come up for the average person who's not trying to commit a crime. Have some things we can do in person voting to try to prevent bribery and coercion. So, in New York, no ballot selfies. You can't take a picture of a marked ballot, because that would let you prove how you voted, and we don't want you to be able to do that.

0:15:13 Thomas: Yeah Yeah, that's an interesting one. I think we've talked about that before.

0:15:33 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah, not every state has that rule, but it's one that we use that... Well, think about the culture of old-timey New York, and you can imagine why we are pretty strict about concerns about bribery and coercion.

0:15:40 Thomas: Yeah. And it's just kind of counterintuitive to think of the way to attack that is like, we don't want people to be able to even say how they voted or prove how they voted. It's kind of interesting to attack that. You wouldn't necessarily think That's the way you would do

0:15:47 Jenessa: Right? Right. It's a felony if you got caught, you'd be in huge trouble for doing it. But the easiest prevention is, Oh, good. Great. You can't prove how you voted. Why would somebody coerce you or pay you to vote a certain way if they'll never know if you did it anyway?

0:16:11 Thomas: Yeah, they can't find out.

0:16:12 Jenessa: Right. No ballot selfies, no markings on ballots that could possibly identify it. Don't write your name on a ballot. The latest misinformation I'm seeing going around this post just went viral of like, I went to poll worker training and I have to tell you something. If you see anyone write anything on your ballot, like an R or a D or your name or a star, that invalidates your whole ballot, get a new one. Now here's the thing, it would invalidate your whole ballot. Nobody's doing that.

0:16:38 Thomas: Yeah, no, definitely nobody's doing that. Who would do

0:16:41 Jenessa: I've never heard a single example of a poll worker putting a mark on a person's ballot, never, not once. And if they did, what would happen is you'd go to scan your ballot and the scanner would reject it for having marks outside of the bubbles. I suppose if somebody did try to do that, you would find out immediately and they would give you a new palette and you would fix it. Yeah, I don't know what that's about. Don't put your name on your ballot, and if you accidentally make marks that are really identifiable, go get a new ballot and you'll be fine. Another thing we do is, you have to go into the voting booth alone.

0:16:47 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm.

0:17:15 Jenessa: The only people who can come with you are a child under the age of 16, or if you need physical assistance getting into the booth because like a disability, then somebody can come with you. But otherwise, you have to go in there alone, which again prevents this idea that somebody could look over your shoulder and see who you voted for. For the individual who is in the terrible situation of someone trying to coerce you to vote, you have my permission to lie, go into that voting booth, vote how you want, and then tell people whatever you want to tell them about how you actually voted. That is a helpful preventative. Instead of in-person, if we're talking mail-in, it is slightly higher risk in a couple of ways. The abuse coercion thing, if you fill it out at home, is much more of a concern.

0:17:22 Thomas: Right. Thank you.

0:17:59 Thomas: Mm, sure.

0:18:00 Jenessa: There's no privacy protection in your own house. I don't know that we want to get rid of absentee ballots because of that, but it is a real concern that we have for some people. Same thing if you were trying to impersonate somebody, you're going to have to get the ballot mailed to you and have them not notice they're registered at their address, but an absentee is being mailed?

0:18:21 Thomas: The times I've seen this happen is like the MAGA woman who voted for her dead husband or something like that. The the husband died after the ballot was sent but before the voting kind of thing.

0:18:32 Jenessa: Yeah, that's happened before. So like that's obviously, oh yeah, like that happens sometimes. And that's like, technically it's, I think not a valid vote, that wasn't, like, intentional or malicious. The person died after.

0:18:34 Thomas: Yeah. And even they got caught, or at least that Oh, the one I'm thinking of was, was they specifically tried to do it.

0:18:51 Jenessa: Oh, okay. Yeah. Cause we also get other examples. It happens with older women a lot that like, you know how a lot of old ladies are like Mrs. John Smith, They will actually use their husband's name. We've had one or two where an older person gets the ballot for Mrs. whatever Smith and Mr. John Smith, and they just fill out the husband's instead of their own. It's the same name to them, what's the difference? So like they didn't vote twice, they just sent in the wrong envelope. Silly things like that can happen on rare occasions. And you still get caught if it's somebody who lives in your house. That is slightly more risk, we would think of that as like elder abuse or abuse of a person with a disability that you're taking advantage. They live in your house and trying to vote for them. That could on rare occasion happen. The most common thing that's like actually fraudulent is people voting at an old address or their vacation home or something. This is a person who's totally eligible to vote.

0:18:58 Thomas: Oh, yeah.

0:19:47 Jenessa: They're not getting any extra, they're only voting once. They're just voting in a jurisdiction they shouldn't vote in. Yeah, when you move, you have to update your address. I don't care if you moved one block, you have to update it. That you could be in a different city council district or something like that. You do have to update it. For the vast majority of us, there is one and only one right address to be registered at. It's the place where you put your head down at night. Think probably the most common thing we see is like gray area, messy stuff of like somebody voted at their vacation home.

0:19:52 Thomas: Mm. Right.

0:20:17 Thomas: You live halfway, yeah, exactly, like you split time between two places or something.

0:20:20 Jenessa: Yeah. Right, and like look, if you're like 60-40, I don't think anybody's coming after you for like you should have done the math on where you spend more time, but like some people know. They have a summer home, it's closed up all winter, you know you're not supposed to be voting there. So that one I would say is like probably of all real risks, that's like a real thing that can happen, it's

0:20:35 Thomas: Yeah. And that's nothing. Like, think about how much all of these are immune from any dark force like China or whatever it would be. Like them, according to Trump, like them doing it. There's no way you could coordinate anything like this.

0:20:48 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:20:59 Jenessa: Not really, we're already starting from a very small pool of people who would even think about it, the people who are doing things on accident, it's a lot more understandable, but for trying to do this intentionally, it's extremely difficult to even do it, let alone not get caught, and that's why you really don't need to worry about this. So hopefully that equips you. If somebody were to ask you, well, how do we know they're not? That's how we know all of these different checks along the way that mean showing my driver's license as part of this would not provide some massive extra layer of security. What about after?

So I'm worried somebody is going to mess with my ballot as opposed to like, I'm going to commit fraud, somebody else is going to try to do something. In person, you fill out that ballot and you scan your vote is counted. There's no scenario where like, oh, then we got to run it again. No, it's ran through. If it came down to a hand recount, you will have poll watchers from campaigns watching while they go through the ballots getting scrutinized. And every once in a while you'll get one tossed where like they're gonna argue you didn't fill the bubble in just right and it is far enough outside the requirements that they will toss it. New York has pretty strict laws about like if you can discern the intent of the voter, we'll

0:21:40 Thomas: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

0:22:20 Jenessa: Keep it. If it's genuinely unclear what the voter's intent was or if there's an identifiable marking like putting your name on it, that is actually gonna get thrown out. If somehow your ballot that is not filled out properly doesn't get caught by the scanner, which the scanner almost always catches, it catches problems that aren't there and rejects ballots cause it's crinkled a little on the corner, Like it's gonna catch it. But if somehow it didn't catch it, the only way the ballot you scanned in the polling place is not getting counted is in a hand recount. Once you put it in that scanner, it is good. Nobody can touch that. Federal law also requires a paper record. In New York, we still hand mark a paper ballot and then we put it in a scanner. Some places you're voting on a digital machine.

It will still have to, no matter what, show you a paper record that you get to review. Hey, I printed what you voted for on this piece of paper. Do you agree? Some of them do that by fully printing it out. Some print it and like put it in a little window behind glass and you get to look at that

0:22:43 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Wow.

0:23:26 Jenessa: But either way, inspect your ballot, if it's correct, that ballot is accepted and put in, and then the paper record is kept so if god forbid, we'll get into how we could catch something went wrong, the paper record is always There and you should have reviewed it very carefully to make sure the record paper is correct. By mail instead, mean, hypothetically, your mail carrier could throw it out. They don't know how you voted, they'd have to open the envelope, which would void the ballot.

0:23:40 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they might know, they might. They're looking at the flags in front of your house.

0:23:57 Jenessa: They might know if they know you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, hypothetically, your individual carrier, I guess, could commit a felony,

0:24:05 Thomas: Yeah, it's the mail carriers, damn That's who's going to do

0:24:08 Jenessa: Yeah, at like a major distribution center, like in the mailing back process, They don't know where these came from, it's just a random envelope. They don't know how you voted. If they open the envelope to figure out how you voted, they voided the ballot. They can't, like, check and only throw out the Democrats ones. So, I mean, that's pretty unlikely. Especially when you consider ballot tracking is available in all states and D.C., except for Missouri doesn't do Illinois does it not at the state level, but at the county level, and it's not clear to me if every county does it. And then Wyoming, same thing, you can, your county can choose to offer ballot tracking. It's not clear to me if any of them do. In Illinois or Wyoming, you should check with your county. In Missouri, I'm sorry, this is not an option. Everywhere else, you can track your ballot.

If you mail it out and it's not received, you can either try to get a new one, try to figure out what happened. And in most states, you can go vote in person at that point. Some states will say it's a provisional ballot. If we get your absentee, we're counting that and tossing the provisional. In some states, they'll just let you regular old vote and make a note that if your absentee shows up, that's the ballot that's going to get voided and tossed.

0:24:32 Thomas: Hmm.

0:25:19 Jenessa: It's never really tossed. They're going to hold onto these records for a certain period of time. What about, like, once it gets there and people are supposed to open it? Each state does this a little differently. In New York, we use a bipartisan system. Those ballots are opened by a Republican and a Democrat sitting next to each other. And step one, they're going to look at the names on the envelopes and check off who voted, and they'll separate those two envelopes. Now that we have a list of who voted, we're gonna take out of the ballot and separate them. So we'll keep the envelopes as a record of I did receive your ballot, but now the ballot is separate and unidentifiable, it's anonymous now. Then as they go to the scanner, again, a bipartisan team takes this box of ballots up to the scanner, scans them each, they're watching what each other is doing.

0:26:09 Jenessa: They are also stored before and after scanning in a room that has two locks, and one key is held by the Democrats and the other is held by the Republicans.

0:26:19 Jenessa: Isn't it? It's like these are like nukes. You're not getting in the room alone with it ever. We take this extremely seriously to make sure that there are always at least two people watching everything that happens. People of different political parties,

0:26:37 Thomas: I'm just thinking back to when you were in high school and like each teacher, when they, like, the bathroom key or whatever, it would have like some, sometimes they'd have some weird crap, like, just for fun, it'd be like the, the art one would have some art thing on it, I was thinking that there should be like the woke key, and then, like, the, the Republican key to the, uh, to the thing there's... there's like a pride flag on it and, you know, all that yeah have fun why not

0:26:43 Jenessa: Ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha Oh, God. I would not be surprised if there were some unique keychains involved in this. So at this point, really, the biggest risk is the mail. And not even because anybody's doing anything intentional. It's just because it's slow and that sucks. So track your ballot.

0:27:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:27:20 Jenessa: Okay, what about the scanner then? Fine, my ballot's here. My ballot was not, like, a human didn't do anything to it. But either in the polling place or with my mail-in ballot, they're gonna scan it. And now all of a sudden it is technology, which to most people might as well be magic. It's just magic and scary now. It's not, let's talk about why it's okay. The scanners are stored in that same locked method as the ballots. So they're in a room, Democrat has a key, Republican has a key, nobody goes in there alone. Meaning they are functionally incapable of connecting to the internet. There is no Wi-Fi capability, there is no ethernet port. You can't connect them to the internet if you wanted to. If they need to get data off of it, like who voted, or update software, you have to use a USB, extensive security checks involved before anybody plugs anything into anything. And again, you will only ever be there with at least two people, a Republican and a Democrat, while you do it.

There are functional tests before and after the election. So they'll run a bunch of mock ballots through the machine and double check that what we put on the paper, you know, this many people voted for PB&J and this many people voted for grilled cheese, it tallies it correctly.

0:27:39 Thomas: Mm God, that's so much better than the candidates we Kill for PB&J,

0:28:40 Jenessa: Oh, now I'm hungry. And then after the election, there are audits in New York. It's a 3% minimum of ballots and scanners are going to be checked for malfunctions, for discrepancies. Any problem will trigger a full recount for the affected precincts. We still have the paper records. So if we saw a discrepancy, it's not like, well, shit. The scanner did something wrong, what do we do? The paper record is there. And this whole time, if for some reason you don't trust any of these poll workers, there's also poll watchers.

0:29:12 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:29:13 Jenessa: Partisan people from campaigns usually, they can get permission to be in the polling place, to be there during the counting, they're observing everything, they're checking that everything adds up. Extra layer of support there that both candidates are watching what's happening. And then we have a list of who voted at every precinct. So everybody who checked in voted, right? That count total should match.

0:29:35 Thomas: And sorry, remind me, are you talking New about York or everywhere?

0:29:38 Jenessa: Is, the way these machines work, it's like this everywhere that you have a tally on the side of the machine of just how many ballots went through it. The actual election results, you're gonna have to get off of there digitally, but like there's the pure count X number of people.

0:29:47 Thomas: Right. I just meant for this whole thing, because like there are states that have better and worse systems, right? Aren't there ones where there have been like vulnerabilities before? Like I'm sure people in their mind will have heard of some kind of time where it's like, wait, these machines were vulnerable in some way. And I don't know how much of that was anything or fake or overblown or what.

0:29:56 Jenessa: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, so the concept that, for example, the machines are air-gapped, that is the law. That is everywhere. You're not going to go to another state and find Wi-Fi access to these machines. Like four or five major corporations that make the scanners and ballot marking devices, they're all going to be following the same federal laws to make sure that it is private, that it is independent.

0:30:18 Thomas: Mm. Mm-hmm.

0:30:37 Thomas: And you could almost name all of them from the lawsuits they had to file against Fox and Smartmatic,

0:30:42 Jenessa: Yeah, pretty much. Dominion actually renamed recently, they're probably trying to Escape some bad branding, but yeah, there's really like four or five manufacturers that cover almost everything. The requirement for paper records, that is federal law. The fact that poll watchers can come in, I don't know of any state that doesn't allow that. The things that are more New York specific are like, we specifically audit three percent of ballots and scanners. I'm sure other states have a different cutoff. But audits are a really important part of this process. If you somehow manage to get physical access to the machine, you're not gonna hack it from the internet, you're gonna have to get there in person with a USB and do

0:30:46 Thomas: Dominion, yeah, smart.

0:31:24 Thomas: Well, unless you have a Jewish space laser, that's the only, yeah.

0:31:27 Jenessa: Right. Right, naturally. That, um, if you somehow, like, social engineering, get yourself in there and somehow plug it in, even though someone else is watching, even then we're going to notice that the count is not right. There are tallies everywhere and there are paper backups. If we find a discrepancy, we can go to the paper backups. People are marking their ballot and then scanning it. So they're not going to be able to get in there and change. It's not a printer, what exactly are you going to do to it that somehow lets it count the ballot but not count the ballot? Like, it really make sense anywhere in here. The biggest check being the social aspect of how are you going to even get in there and do this in the first place. But it's also not clear what you would do.

0:32:15 Jenessa: And as soon as anybody catches a problem, we have paper records, paper backups. So that would solve that problem.

0:32:21 Thomas: Yeah, the only question I had about the different states is like, is there anywhere, and this is not like really anything that doesn't have an easy solution, but I'm curious if there's anything like, you keep saying Republican and Democrat, someplace like Alaska or something, or hypothetically, if we got a jurisdiction where it's third party or what do they do? They have some threshold or what?

0:32:36 Jenessa: Sure. Yeah, yeah. Different states do this differently. New York is one of the states that uses the bipartisan method, which is, we're not even going to pretend anybody's unbiased. We have to be a registered Democrat and a registered Republican. Some states choose a non-partisan method, which is like, you can't be affiliated with any campaign. You can't do this, this and this. They'll still always have like, at least two people are involved in everything. Nobody's alone with a scanner, nobody's alone with a ballot, but they might choose to do it differently. New York has taken the zero trust method of bipartisan, the nonpartisan method. There's plenty of states that do it that way too, the requirements by state of how exactly to identify yourself that way and to operate in that way, but then they have checks on top of that, essentially.

0:32:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:33:28 Thomas: Right, but are there any that have, like, other parties, you know, third parties or anything.

0:33:32 Jenessa: Not that I'm aware of, I'm not aware of any state that has a big enough third party to either be the second person or to become a required third person. Technically, the New York law doesn't say Democrat and Republican, it says bipartisan. So hypothetically, if we ended up with two major parties that were not, like, one of them is not a Democrat or a Republican, yeah, that person would probably be entitled to be there, but there's going to be like a cutoff for how many people have to be voting that way in each election before you rise to that level.

0:33:35 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm. Mm-hmm, sure, mm-hmm.

0:34:07 Jenessa: Yeah, side note for New Yorkers, in case you get confused, the way we do it is there's a lot of parties that are like technically third parties in New York, that almost always just cross-endorse. Working families endorses the Democrat, the conservative party endorses the Republican. So if you see somebody on the ballot twice, you can vote for them on any line, any party line, and they still get the vote, it won't matter.

0:34:30 Thomas: Okay.

0:34:30 Jenessa: What it does is it communicates, like if you vote on the working families line instead of Democrat, it helps working families stay on the ballot and keep a ballot access line and it, like, signifies the importance of the party, you know, I voted for you under this line because they're the more progressive party, whatever. It helps that party a little and is otherwise largely symbolic. It won't matter. If you see the governor under Democrat or working families, either one, doesn't matter. So New York does it a little weird like that. Let's say, fine, I trust the scanner, I trust the ballot, but what about the results, the tally? How does that get done? Each machine has a tally of how many ballots went through it, and then the actual tally of the results from each contest. And the precinct is going to put together for each machine, here's what the votes were, and send that up to your county.

And then your county is going to pull together the results by each polling place and report that. And then your county will send it to the state and they will report the total plus what happened in each county. So you have multiple redundancies where there are individuals who know this was the count at my precinct, this was the count in my county, this is the total for the state, they have to all add up.

0:34:59 Thomas: Hmm.

0:35:55 Jenessa: There are people checking that they add up, both internally and poll watchers and campaigns, checking that it all adds up. And critically, this is being reported in multiple locations, privately and publicly accessible. So if you go to your county board website, you will see, here's the results for who's the mayor of this city and who's the mayor of that town. But you will also see that broken down by precinct to see that each of those add up to the total. You will also see at the state level publicly reported, here's the totals, here's who won, and here's what happened at each county. All of these different sources and locations have to add up.

0:36:43 Jenessa: And if they ever didn't, we have a paper record that we can go back to, to figure out what happened. You would have to somehow mess with this on the precinct level, otherwise the error would just be caught and fixed. If you tried to influence it by the reporting by the state or the county, the real true number is still hanging out in the precinct. Hypothetically, if you could somehow get the precinct to like the poll worker there to report the wrong number. If it was still like a plausible number, maybe nobody would try to audit it. And congratulations, you have messed with one poll site.

0:36:57 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:37:20 Thomas: Yeah, I don't even know how you would do that,

0:37:22 Jenessa: I, right, right, like what are you, you know, hold them up with a gun and make them type the wrong number, they're gonna go tell somebody immediately that you did that, like that's not how this works. So you'd have to get access to the physical space because of the paper backups and the digital system, and not just hack the website so it shows the wrong number, the people behind the scenes know the right number. So you'd have to somehow make it so that they can't even know the right number. I can't even begin to think how you're gonna do this, let alone do it and not get caught. It's just not happening.

0:37:51 Thomas: The idea that anyone is going to be able to do that, concerned or at all concerned with this when we just have Elon Musk buying elections like we just, we know he's spending half a billion dollars to buy an election, but that like somehow we're like, well, that's gonna happen.

0:38:00 Jenessa: Precisely. That's normal.

0:38:08 Thomas: Yeah, why would we care about anything else? Like, this is not happening, no one's stealing an election in this way.

0:38:15 Jenessa: No, this is just really not a real concern. If you see results come up that seem like that can't possibly be right, it's probably because you don't hang out with the conservatives in your area and you're like, everyone I know voted this way, and it's Yeah, cause you don't, you don't hang out with those people.

0:38:26 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not that I credit the arguments or whatever, but I at least will credit as a genuine feeling Trumpers had in 2020 that, like, how could people have voted for Biden in these record numbers? Like, he was so unexciting, et cetera, et cetera. I actually don't really blame them for, like, feeling that way in the same way that I feel the same way when, like, Trump wins. I'm like, how could people have done this? Like, there's no effing way.

0:38:42 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:38:58 Jenessa: How is this possible? Right.

0:39:00 Thomas: But the, to your point, they're not hanging out with those people. And it was during COVID when everybody was voting on the people weren't trying to go out, uh, like people weren't rallying for Biden because a lot of the people who voted for Biden were the kinds of people who want to be more careful about COVID, like all these things, you know?

0:39:04 Jenessa: Right.

0:39:20 Jenessa: Right. You know what, if we see nationwide, like the next president wins with 90% of the vote, I will endorse that that is fake. That can't be real. That's not what's happening. So compare this to a place like, you know, Russia, where we see like Putin got 80% of the vote and like, we know that's fake, right? Well, what is the layers of protection that's missing over there? Part of it is compared to a lot of other countries, is we have this state by state breakdown where it's run by the states and by Your local government. And it's a lot harder to universally mess with something. There's not like one voter registration database or something like that, that really helps.

And honestly, a huge part of what's happening in those countries where we don't trust the result, it's just corruption. The Hugest protection here is that the poll worker is your neighbor and they are not loyal to any higher official. They're not worried about getting shot for reporting accurate election results. That, that's what's really going on in those other countries. It is so much easier to tamper with things because there's one system and the people running it are corrupt. And even then, we all know it's fake. Nobody's like, I really think Putin's so popular. Like, you know, we still have the understanding. It's not like you're sneaking it in under the wire.

0:39:27 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm. Yeah.

0:40:41 Thomas: Now what about now? I know, though, we were kind of worried in the wake of of 2020 and all that, the most MAGA-ist of people trying to get some of these important positions, running of the elections. How worried should we be about that kind of thing? Yeah.

0:41:00 Jenessa: Voting rights lab has their election risk heat map and you can see counties where they are concerned. The number one thing that influences that score is the presence of election deniers in power. That is the biggest concern. I'm not so worried they're going to like actually change a vote tally or something, but they're gonna gum up the works so bad by challenging voters who are eligible, by making us recount and recount and recount because they just can't believe the result, by potentially somebody who's gonna try to refuse to certify. They're not gonna be successful in the long run if they are just blatantly not certifying a true election result, but it's not a purely ministerial power to be like, we have to do audits first and we have to do this and that. It is a way for them to gum up the works, and so distrust, and, like, the damage from distrust cannot be undone. Absolutely, I think that is the number one risk, people in power who are, you know, mostly wild cards, like, it's not, they're all Trump plants.

0:41:06 Thomas: Wow. Yeah.

0:42:06 Jenessa: Honestly, a protection is that most of them are true believers, as opposed to, like, I've just been paid to throw this off,

0:42:13 Thomas: That a protection? I feel like I'm, the thing I'm worried about is Trumpers who believe the 2020 election was stolen,

0:42:21 Jenessa: So, like, if you were a paid, like, Trump just paid you to do this and you don't believe for a second any of it, you would just do everything in your power to ruin everything, everything legally possible. I think these like true believers, a lot of them really think if they just make sure the process is secure enough, then obviously Republicans will win everything.

0:42:26 Thomas: No.

0:42:43 Thomas: Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, maybe I that's interesting.

0:42:47 Jenessa: I don't think they're ever gonna change their mind, but I think they're gonna be Like less nefarious about doing something Like they're not gonna challenge a person they know is eligible. They're gonna challenge somebody that they've convinced themselves is ineligible

0:43:01 Thomas: I think the truth is that there aren't that many of that kind of person. Like, I think for the most part, they just want to steal an election, or they think, if it didn't go their way, it must be stolen, and they're not gonna really, like, actually be looking at, yeah, yeah.

0:43:07 Jenessa: There really It's like a psychological thing, yeah, but as compared to, like, an evil universe me who knows all these laws and was, like, paid to ruin it, I could probably do a lot more damage than just some rando who's like, the Lord Jesus has appointed me to fix this election. Still, it's a huge threat, it's not good to have people who don't believe in elections in charge of elections. I think that is the number one problem. Other threats we are concerned about, obviously we've talked extensively about voter suppression. That's a serious issue. Anything that stops people from being able to vote for no good reason. And moving polls out of certain neighborhoods, moving ballot drop boxes out of certain neighborhoods, overly onerous restrictions that let you easily toss a mail-in ballot.

0:44:04 Jenessa: This is real. This is something we should be fighting about all the time. People getting kicked off the registration just because they haven't voted in a while and they didn't answer a postcard. The fact that we require registration at all, that is voter suppression. The government knows who you are. They could make a list of eligible voters and be done with it. And they don't do that. They make you affirmatively state that you plan to vote and you got to do that before a certain day or else. Like, what? It's not necessary.

0:44:32 Thomas: Yeah, there's no a priori reason for any of this stuff. If it's just because they want to make voting harder, like we covered last week.

0:44:39 Jenessa: Yeah, pretty much. Those are real threats. And we've talked about many groups you can join that are fighting this, the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, the Voting Rights Lab, the Brennan Center. These are all places that are working on these issues.

0:44:57 Jenessa: Cybersecurity, what are real concerns? There's a really great, if anybody feels like sitting through a seven hour conference, but I found all of the information very useful. The Brennan Center for Justice did a whole summit on election cybersecurity. So you'd think, "How can I be telling you nobody can hack the election when there's a seven hour presentation on how people could hack an election?" Universally, every expert sitting up there said they are not concerned that the tally will not reflect how people voted.

0:45:28 Thomas: Okay.

0:45:29 Jenessa: The number one cyber thing is misinformation and disinformation.

0:45:32 Thomas: Oh yeah, so not the voting machines themselves even, it's just like, yeah,

0:45:35 Jenessa: Right, not at all. Yeah, no, they are very confident that the way we store those machines and the security checks are extremely good. Nobody expressed a concern that a ballot scanner was gonna start malfunctioning and, like, voting for candidates. It's not a thing.

0:45:51 Thomas: Yeah, the air gap thing is really key. I mean, that like is pretty much unassailable.

0:45:54 Jenessa: It is. It's...

0:45:57 Thomas: I mean, I remember they used to spread, there used to be stories spreading virally about like, this guy got in the room with a voting machine. And he hacked it in three seconds. And you're like, yeah, but they don't let you do that. You aren't allowed to do that.

0:45:57 Jenessa: Yes. Exactly. Those are almost always coming from those like hackathons where like they challenge some grad student to hack a thing, but they gave you access to it in order to do so. There's never a hackathon that is try to James Bond break into the building. Like that's not part of it at all. And it's the number one protection is every time I see those and they're like, look, you could do this. I'm like, yeah, how though? When are you going to sneak past people and do this? Like, it's not a thing. The misinformation and disinformation on the other hand is massive. Think about all the checks we talked about, all of the crimes that would be involved in trying to change votes, all of the expense involved and like somehow trying to do that in more than one precinct at a time.

0:46:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:46:59 Thomas: Yeah, and that you wouldn't just Use that money to buy the election like you already can, legally. Ha ha ha

0:47:06 Jenessa: Exactly, exactly. It's completely legal to put out campaign ads, because we have such strong free speech protections, it's pretty much legally protected to say misleading things about a candidate. You have to lie on a level that's pretty extreme.

0:47:07 Thomas: Ha ha ha ha. Yeah. This is great. What a great country.

0:47:24 Jenessa: Yeah, isn't that so fun how we did that? Your campaign ads would have to be pretty blatant for you to get in trouble for it, and a lot of what people can do is put stuff on social media where it's hard to trace back to who really put this information out and then get away with doing things that are blatant. Disinformation, the intentional distribution of misinformation, we already know that's happening. That happened in 2016. Russia put bots everywhere to tell conservatives that Hillary Clinton was a communist, to then go into left-wing spaces and tell everybody Hillary Clinton's so conservative she might as well be a Republican. That was cost-effective, and depending on how you do it, not always a crime. Why would you try to commit all these felonies when you can just put out bullshit ads?

0:48:12 Jenessa: One that is a concern that I think gets under... looked, that's not the right word, but you know what I mean.

0:48:17 Thomas: Okay. Overlooked is the word that I think

0:48:21 Jenessa: Right, yes, that's what I meant. I think I was going for underreported and, a lot of issues with misinformation about candidates, like, oh, this person voted for blah. A huge problem is misinformation about voting itself. Incorrectly, intentionally incorrectly telling people, you're polling places over here. There was one robocall that went out that said, the election's canceled, or the election's on Wednesday this year, not Tuesday.

0:48:26 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, I know Hmm Yeah. Oh, remember the what's-his-name, the worst person in the universe? Wool. Jacob Wohl,

0:48:56 Jenessa: It's like wool but it's not spelled like wool on a sheep

0:48:58 Thomas: Yeah, it's spelled weird. Ah, it's W-O-H-L, that's why. That's that idiot who, gosh, he looks like a long-lost Trump son in this photo I'm seeing now. Maybe he's just aspiring to, yeah, I missed this. In 2025, rapper Boozy Badazz, whoever that is, paid Wohl and Jack Berkman $600,000 to arrange for a pardon by President Trump.

0:49:07 Jenessa: Oh no, they're all starting to look more and more the

0:49:23 Thomas: Is he in prison? He better be in prison. He should be in prison.

0:49:26 Jenessa: My God. How are these people not?

0:49:28 Thomas: I don't know if he is. Damn. But it is really great. Yes. And this is his first line in Wikipedia.

0:49:29 Jenessa: That Oh no.

0:49:33 Thomas: Born, you know, 1997. [bleep] guy is an American far-right conspiracy theorist, fraudster, convicted felon and lobbyist.

0:49:41 Jenessa: Solid.

0:49:42 Thomas: Yeah, so in 2020, Wohl and Berkman, you know, partner in crime, made tens of thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states in a campaign that alleged intentionally targeted non-white communities and spread disinformation in an attempt to suppress voting in the 2020 presidential election. Yeah, so those are, I kind of remember that, like they These like they might have even had like a fake like black voice like saying where to yeah, it's just awful, the worst kind.

0:50:09 Jenessa: Like, this is a real threat. We have demonstrable examples of it. We have people who are convicted felons because of it. This is real. You actually have to worry about this, that somebody is going to tell you your polling place is over here and it's not, that the voting, hours close at nine and actually closes at eight in your state. That's a huge problem and we need to be more on top of that. When it comes to cybersecurity, like what people are thinking of like hacks, what are the real issues? It's almost never that somebody is actually trying to influence an election, it's just the usual bullshit. There was an example, a New York County government got hit with a ransomware attack.

0:50:51 Jenessa: The whole county was down. Like, I don't know how anybody paid their water bill for, like, months. They had set up so that the county board of elections was on a different server and was completely, like, firewalled, air gapped, I don't know what you call it. Whatever the thing is, essentially

0:50:50 Thomas: Yeah, man, those are big Hmm Why don't they just build the whole plane out of the black box is what I would say to that but yeah

0:51:15 Jenessa: Segregating it so that if something bad happened to the rest of the county government, the Board of Elections was still there and it was running and it was perfectly fine. And you gotta remember how few people work there compared to the entire rest of the county. So phishing attacks, you just have fewer targets. And these are the people who are gonna get the most cybersecurity training because we cannot let somebody get in there. You cannot be given away your password. Don't click links in an email. It reduces the odds of these kinds of attacks happening by segregating it off.

0:51:49 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:51:49 Jenessa: And having very few people have access in the first place. Similarly, there was one where some activist group hacked an elections website on election night. They were not trying to change votes, they were not trying to cancel registrations, they literally just put like their political message up on the website that they knew everybody would be clicking on today.

0:52:12 Thomas: Mmm.

0:52:12 Jenessa: They had a security measure where

0:52:13 Thomas: Yeah, it was like a Calshee ad.

0:52:17 Jenessa: Probably, basically like every hour, the website was like a brand new instance. It had a new, I don't know what to call it, like it's not an IP address, I don't know the technology here, but a total reset of the website, rather than just updating results, the entire thing gets redone. So every hour that message would come down, the Board of Elections website would be working again, and that hacker group would have to start all over again, trying to break into the system. So they did multiple times, but most of the day, instead of seeing this hacker group's message, you could just get on the website and it was working fine most of the day. Why is this such a big concern? I'm telling you about great examples where it didn't hurt. The Trump administration has defunded the programs that fund all of those preventative measures. Having separate servers, having website resets, that was all federally funded.

0:52:25 Thomas: Mm. Sure.

0:53:14 Thomas: Wow. That doesn't seem good.

0:53:16 Jenessa: Yeah, that was what people were the most pissed off about is they were like, we are the experts, we know how to prevent election cybersecurity threats. It's this. This is what you have to do and you are defunding it. What the hell?

0:53:27 Thomas: Yeah. It's almost like.

0:53:31 Jenessa: It's almost like they don't care. It would be a huge problem if your board of elections website is down on election night, and we could have prevented this, and we stopped funding the thing that prevents it. That's a real cybersecurity threat, not they're gonna get on the board of elections website and change the vote tally, and that would somehow actually change the real result that somebody reported on the back end.

0:53:53 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:53:53 Jenessa: Like the website is just a display for you and me. There are real things we have to be worried about here and we should be putting our energy into fighting misinformation, fighting against voter suppression, which is coming at us from every angle, and making sure this cybersecurity program is refunded because it's so vital and has helped so many times and we're defunding it. Those are the real things to be on the lookout for. You don't have to be worried that there's a bunch of fraud happening or that the tally is not real.

0:54:26 Thomas: Geez, I feel a lot better. It's even better than I thought. I thought there were more vulnerabilities than there even were,

0:54:28 Jenessa: Yeah. No, this is like culturally so important to everybody. The level of security is wild with how much you can't get anywhere near these ballots, these machines. They are very, very careful about that.

0:54:43 Thomas: All right, well, with that said, hopefully we talked at least one listener down from their heart attack they were currently having.

0:54:50 Jenessa: I hope so.

0:54:51 Thomas: And if you still haven't voted, you need to do that. You gotta do that. Make sure you voted make sure everybody in your life voted unless they're Trumper and Thanks, Jenessa as always and we'll be crossing our fingers

0:54:52 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:55:03 Jenessa: I will see you on the next one to hopefully celebrate.

0:55:10 Clip: This has been Opening Arguments, produced by Thomas and Lydia Smith, with editing help from Peter Baird. The intro is by Thomas Smith. This outro is by Matt Cameron. Support the show at patreon.com/law. Contact us through Patreon or openarguments@gmail.com. Make sure to follow our blue sky, at OpenArgs. But most of all, please share the show. Thanks for listening.

0:55:42 Thomas: Arguments. I'm Thomas. That's, uh, no, I'm, now I'm messed up. I did it right the first time.

0:55:48 Jenessa: Oh, this person voted for blah.

0:55:52 Thomas: Why don't they just build the whole plane out of the black box