Hello and welcome my name is jamila michner and i'm an associate professor in the department of government at cornell and i'm welcoming you to our second installment of a series that we call democracy 2020 and it's organized by the american democracy collaborative now more than ever the intellectual work of the american democracy collaborative is pivotal right um this is a group of political scientists some of us who study the united states others of us who don't study the united states who study the many other import parts of the world that are also really important and valuable to study uh but we've come together with an eye towards threats to democracy and its preservation and an eye towards learning from one another to understand those topics better so today we're gonna under we're gonna examine a question that's a key part of that which is can the united states hold free and fair elections this fall i think that's a really hard question and i'm glad that we have some really brilliant people here today to think about it with us you can read more about the american democracy collaborative act and this is going to be really insightful american democracy collaborative.org i love it when websites are intuitive uh and we'll be posting on the website more information about upcoming events we'll have our next event will be titled already authoritarian policing the use of force and democracy and we'll have uh vesl weaver the one and only as well as sabrina karim from here at cornell and a third surprise panelist so check the website so that you can figure out the surprise it's like my kids what's in the cereal box um okay we'll also announce the date and time of that webinar soon so again check the website uh so we're really appreciative to cornell uh for making this possible particularly the ian audi center uh and now i get to turn things over to my colleague david bateman who's going to do the actual hard work by being our moderator today uh david is also an associate professor in the department of government uh he's a pretty incredible colleague to have one of my favorite people he studies american political development democracy democratization disenfranchisement and a bunch of other really important things that i can't do justice to in 10 seconds so find his work and read it and before i turn it over to david the last thing i'll say is if you are struck by anything you hair hair don't forget to tweet we'll be tweeting at hashtag democracy2020 all right thank you so much camila and thank you to our panelists for joining us to discuss whether the united states can hold free and fair elections this fall we have four over 400 registrations so we know that a lot of us are intensely concerned with this question there were already reasons to be concerned with the state of american elections before the pandemic the president for example has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to positively affirm that he will accept the results of the election refusing yet again just last week to do so some of the problems will predate the president we have a very fragmented electoral system in this country vulnerable in a variety of ways to both malfeasance as well as simple mistakes we have growing levels of distrust in the legitimacy of the system and in the commitment of public officials to making sure that all citizens can cast a vote and have haven't counted and the ongoing pandemic is only going to complicate matters further behind these specific concerns about elections however is a more general worry about democratic backsliding while these words are propelled in large part by the president's behavior on a variety of fronts they are not entirely new and they are certainly not uniquely american thinking of how these patterns relate to others seen around the world is more important today than ever and i can't think of three people i would rather hear from on these issues than the panelists we have with us today amel ahmed is an associate professor of political science at the university of massachusetts amherst her work focuses on comparative democratization and especially in the origins of electoral institutions and their unintended consequences for electoral form themes she's developed in her fabulous book democracy and the politics of electoral assistant choice there's no one who's better situated to draw from historical and comparative experiences to help us understand american elections today jacob grumbach is an assistant professor of political science at the university of washington and a faculty associate with the harry bridges center for labor studies his research focuses broadly on the political economy of the united states with an emphasis on public policy racial and economic inequality and american federalism he's been doing a lot of work on the topic of mailing voting which is going to play an even greater role in the fall elections than has in previous years we're very excited to hear about that and last but certainly not least richard hassan is chancellor's professor of law and political science at the university of california irvine austin is a nationally recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation he's the author of numerous books all of which have been eye-opening and highly compelling from which i've personally learned learned an enormous amount his newest book election meltdown dirty tricks distrust and the threat to american democracy is out just recently with yale university press and will no doubt be of great interest to our audience so we're going to start off with the conversation and i hope that this will be a conversation with a few questions to our panelists and just to get the ball rolling and just to get everybody in the right mindset we want to start off with asking the question what causes you the most anxiety about the prospect of holding free fair and secure elections this fall and like to start off with amal and then we'll go to jake and then to richard thank you david um the question of what causes me the most anxiety took uh quite a while to to settle on a single answer and i don't think there is a single answer but i think certainly holding elections in the context of a pandemic is what is alarming most people both technically and politically i think there's no reason to think that we will handle elections under a pandemic better than we've handled the actual pandemic which is to say i think we should expect that there are going to be lots of complications and i think there will be both first order complications of how do we implement the strategies that we that we recommend how do we implement those and then the consequences of implementing those new strategies so the first order challenge is how do we hold these elections safely and there have been great proposals for uh increasing mail-in voting and early voting advance voting and i think there are there's evidence that states are moving in this direction but that really introduces the second order problem which is that we're moving very quickly and most states that have adopted mail in voting for example take several years to do that uh when you're moving as quickly as we are trying to identify venues new venues with larger capacities for example every single one of these moves even though they're welcome every single one of these moves introduces complications and opportunities for error and i think that is the real question uh one thing i wanted to address though in the framing of the question is what is what are the impediments to free and fair elections and i wanted to distinguish between what will really we can all expect will be a very messy electoral process and i'd say election administration on its best day is messy and complicated and introduces all sorts of irregularities some of which we hear about some of which we do not but i think it's going to be very important distinguishing between irregularities and events that systematically bias outcomes and in understanding free and fair elections i think irregularities we can absorb errors we can absorb even consequential errors if you you know think back to the 2000 election those were some very consequential errors those we can absorb what we really need to pay attention to are the things that would produce a systematic bias in one direction or another and might lead one party or another to reject the outcomes yeah i'll follow amel's great great answer there so i think amel described pretty well the so we saw in the wisconsin primary this year turnout of about 15 percentage points or something like that the shutdown of many in-person voting polling places during the pandemic the refusal to expand absentee and mail voting um and that i think is a first order concern is extreme danger of kovid and states not moving to vote by mail or not fully trying to implement vote by mail we know not just the sort of uh de jure policy matters but the full state administration and county election administrators all the way down need to really want to implement it in an effective way that's a first order problem but really for me i'd say it's that my biggest concern is the interaction of two sort of forces one is the long-term mostly republican party but especially donald trump-based delegitimization of essentially voting as a mechanism for affecting democratic outcomes in general and then interacting that with the rise of sort of really paramilitary and somewhat authoritarian uh policing and military uh interventions against protests and uh civil assembly and things like that i think that interaction is is uh quite frightening um the prospect this is not like if you remember the sort of fox news conspiracy during the obama administration of the new black panthers going to polling places that was extremely far-fetched and and state and local police forces would certainly not allow for that um but a sort of what we've seen in the michigan legislature in oregon with uh paramilitary groups occupying state legislatures and shutting down legislative sessions something like that combined with the long-term uh delegitimization of elections yeah so yeah so i would um i think agree with both uh jake and ml generally let me just paint a picture of a particular nightmare scenario that i'm worried about and it kind of brings together the um concerns that i had before the election and before the before the election season started uh when my my book came out the day of the uh iowa caucuses which uh really helped to solidify the idea that we might be facing election meltdown and then with the rise of covet um and so so here here's my nightmare scenario uh donald trump has made uh so many comments uh against mail in balloting uh that we are starting to see republicans shift to uh more voting in person i think this is actually going to depress republican turnout because some people are not going to feel comfortable voting in person or they're going to be long lines but we're starting to see where we had not seen a real partisan difference in the use of mail-in balloting across parties we now do see that so it's quite possible that if it's a close election that in a swing state like pennsylvania or michigan donald trump is ahead on election night thanks to the counting of ballots that are in person trump declares victory uh it's because of poor election administration in places like detroit and in philadelphia and because of the flood of absentee ballots that we're not prepared for and that there has not been adequate funding for it's going to take a week or more before those ballots can be fully counted donald trump claims victory and continues to make claims as he made as recently as this morning that voting by mail is rigged he's making these claims without any evidence to support them and in fact um trump and his uh closest advisors regularly vote by mail and they're trying to draw distinctions between vote by mail and absentee ballots that make no uh distinction between these two but it's quite possible uh that we could see trump claiming victory and then a week or two weeks later biden declared the winner uh this is not acceptance legitimate and we have a kind of breakdown of um our normal election processes it might even include competing slates of electors being sent to congress for counting remember that these states have republican legislatures and the republican legislature might purport whether it has the authority or not to come up with a different slate of electors it also might happen that the courts in pennsylvania or michigan decide they need to extend polling times or something because of either the virus or some kind of cyber attack or just uh problems with how the election is run and this is claimed to be illegitimate uh leading to the creation of this alternate slate of electors where it goes to congress or to the supreme court or both where there is a partisan divide over these questions and with as jake mentioned um the potential for uh federal troops in different cities it just creates a very volatile mix and it makes me very concerned about how things might look if it is a close election and i'll just end with that point i keep saying if it is close election i do think that the margin really matters here and that if uh we don't have a close election and uh say you have a biden or trump winning a clear majority in the electoral college without taking a look at um these pivotal states that have their problems then i think we will focus on their problems as academics but it won't be the subject of social unrest and and and uh pop uh you know populist uh uprisings potentially so those are that's a quite a nightmarish scenario but i think one that is not uh far-fetched at all i'd like to follow up on a few of the points that each of you has raised and i'd like to hear your responses to each other and perhaps a good way of doing so would be to um connect it with the points that amel was making and that jake was making you know mail-in voting so i guess my first follow-up question would be to shake and that would just be well what should we do about mail-in voting now to prepare for the types of dangers that i'm all recognized and that rick has recognized and put on the table yeah so uh first off in a pandemic you know voting by mail is absolutely crucial um there's also historically essentially infinitesimally small evidence of male voting fraud despite what uh you hear increasingly from sort of uh certain political elites um and then i just want to uh emphasize rick's point about the the delay in the counting of ballots with mail-in voting so we're so used to traditionally staying up on the tuesday in november election night on the west coast uh you get you know you may be able to do it before the kids go to bed on the east coast people stay up a little late and have a you know little election night party with mail-in voting we may have to be prepared for a longer stretch of days counting this and that shouldn't uh mean a less legitimate election result so that's uh certainly a concern but overall uh the increasing partisanship at the elite level of uh mail-in voting is really concerning given so poll poll after poll over the years have shown that uh you know both parties super majorities of both parties bases in the electorate enjoy vote by mail and i typically want to expand access to mail-in ballots via no-fault absentee or full all-male voting elections um my research and a couple of other papers that have come out quickly have shown that both vote by mail tends to increase turnout uh when it's in in particular in colorado and to some extent washington state where uh the election administrations have have really put automatic voter registration plus uh uh automatic uh mailing of ballots to all individuals with drop boxes around cities and towns and post offices and college campuses you've seen a greater increase in turnout and this increase in turnout has been among really all demographic groups and partisan groups in society um and it's really uh uh uh it doesn't seem to swing election outcomes in a partisan direction but it does uh have appeal for both people that are traditionally disenfranchised low-income uh black and latino people young people students as well as older people who have been using absentee ballots for longer periods of time so miller rick would you like to jump in on this rick you're on you need to unmute sorry sorry it wouldn't be a zoom seminar without someone forgetting to unmute so i'm glad i got that out of the way um uh you know when you look at mail and balloting across the united states it's just um really a wide variety of levels of competence let's just just take a a number that i found astounding in 2016 in the georgia primary presidential primary election 36 000 people voted uh by mail and in uh the 2020 uh election it was 1.2 million voters who requested absentee ballots that kind of scale it's not something that's easy to ramp up and you know we're now i think four weeks since the new york primary and they're still counting ballots new york is particularly byzantine and unfair and how it runs its elections i like to say that if new york were a republican state they would be protesting voter suppression in the streets but they pay a lot less attention to it because this democratic state there's a wide variety of competencies and uh we're running an election in 10 500 different jurisdictions there are going to be problems uh there are going to be problems uh and you know for as much as trump's talking about fraud and i'm happy to um uh you know talk about the fraud issue which i know is on a lot of people's minds my bigger concern about absentee ballots is how many people are going to be disenfranchised we're seeing rates of uh you know not like the one percent that we often see but five 10 even 20 in some places of ballots being tossed because of people making errors in how they are um filling out their ballots um forgetting to sign them or it's not even an error their signature is found to mis be mismatched and how is you know who's going to be trained to be checking the signatures in places where they don't normally do this where the rate of absolute balance is going to go from 3 to 40 so there's a lot of a potential for disenfranchisement if it really is a very close election it's going to be you know trench warfare fighting over every ballot and it's going to be very ugly and part of that is a problem of partisanship part of that is a problem of competence uh and uh resources congress has only allocated 400 million dollars for the additional expenses that are going to come up nationwide not only for absentee balloting but for in-person voting in a safe way and you know the estimates are 2 billion or more are going to be needed it's not clear if this final supposedly final coronavirus bill that's supposed to come out of congress at the end of this month is going to include additional funding but whether that funding comes or not the absentee ballot requests are coming the absentee ballots are coming they're going to be mistakes and there's going to be disenfranchisement because of the lack of preparation so david i wanted to just jump in on this point because we've been very focused on male invaliding and i think it makes sense it's gotten a lot of attention recently but there's also early voting which we haven't talked about very much and there is more capacity i think to expand early voting in a lot of these states and early voting has some several advantages a lot of the issues that have been brought up with male invaliding um this votes not being counted or coming in too late uh can be resolved with early voting and especially considering that um mail-in balloting is not really a reliable method for those who have you know low-income individuals who have unstable residences for younger voters who move around a lot so i think expanding early voting is another strategy that we really in in 2016 i believe early voting accounted for half of all of advanced voting so i think there is room to expand there and and avoid potentially some of these areas um but i wanted to go back again to the question of democratic legitimacy because it is very easy to get lost in the weeds of this and i think um it's important for everyone to manage the rhetoric around what what constitutes an actual challenge for democratic legitimacy versus uh evidence of state failure or failure of capacity and i think you know one way to look at elections is that this is a scientific means of ascertaining the popular will this is a scientific means of figuring out exactly who the people want another way to look at it is that it's a means of forming government and i think it's both of course but i think one points you towards the process and one points you towards the outcome and understanding or what determining whether or not this is a defensible legitimate democratic outcome is what i really keep going back to because at the end of the day um it's not so much the the technical results of the election but our democracy resides within our willingness to accept those results um and so my my uh thinking always goes towards the outcome um perhaps even more so than the process i like that conceptualization i mean we we do need to think so this panel is mostly about the sort of electoral democracy dimension determining how healthy american democracy is but thinking about you know liberalism egalitarianism and these other forms of and deliberation and participation as other key forms that you know are somewhat associated with elections um and i just want to come back to the long term under investment in election infrastructure in the u.s um part of this is the role of the institutions of american federalism where states constitutionally administer election have very different incentives for how to determine the size of the electorate uh uh states of the former confederacy have a long and storied history of uh of determining of a sort of racial caste system in elections that uh you know our moderator has written about uh really powerfully um but this this is a is a massive deal so the cares act passed by congress unsigned provided uh sort of rick mentioned uh provided emergency funding to administer elections to move to mail voting to expand early voting to uh train additional like get ppe for election administrators and poll workers these sorts of things as of early june seven states still hadn't requested that funding and it reminded me of state's refusal to expand medicaid under the affordable care act free money from the federal government to expand medicaid you know local hospital lobbies wanted it patients wanted it both democratic and republican voters seem to have wanted it um and states still have some republican states have still refused that this is a really i think a radically new moment in american federalism where states administer elections for all levels for all races of uh government and can really affect now with a coordinated republican party nationally you get some coordination from the trump administration has actually had tried to push state election administrators to do uh new mechanisms of voter suppression and this uh that sort of federal institutions that divide authority between the state and the national government in which states administer elections is actually really coming to a head now i think i i would just add to that um i agree with those points but the other pressure here is uh litigation uh we are seeing uh the uh already in 2018 in statistics that i've compiled in election meltdown uh 2018 was the uh most litigious uh uh election season at least since 1996 and probably ever and uh there's no question in my mind that 2020 is going to outpace that my colleague justin levitt over at the election law blog has been keeping track of covert related election lawsuits and i think as of yesterday he had 164 lawsuits these are just coveted related election lawsuits 164 lawsuits in 41 states in the district of columbia uh so there's a lot of pressure on states and localities to change rules some of it's coming through these court cases and the courts are dividing and it's certainly the plaintiff's not always successful but this litigation is causing change so i think as of yesterday yesterday there were seven states that were not allowing anyone who wants to to vote by mail in november i think now we're down to six because um uh alabama has now said that they will count this as a disability but so this has become you know a state by state fight and one of the things uh that we see is that you know the fights are over you know very specific rules so alabama yesterday said okay you can vote without an excuse uh uh if you're afraid of getting cover 19 but you need a notary or two witness signatures in order to vote and you need to provide a photocopy of your voter identification card i mean these are things that are going to deter people from voting in the midst of a pandemic and they don't serve any real anti-fraud purpose so jake's absolutely right that you know we've got kind of this um uh decentralized fragmented voter unfriendly system across lots of the united states but some of that is coming under pressure now because of the virus to try to force some change through litigation uh and it's i'd say uh partially successful and re you can tell rick's the law professor but i just wanna like i do think there's this thing with the decentralization of election administration that teaches us so the question is not aren't you glad to have a decentralized federalist system now that you have a very dangerous executive branch at the national level that's a common question i get but if you think about the the ability of states to suppress votes uh to uh administer elections poorly to under invest um among net to gerrymander um when a party takes control of a state it actually plays a role in creating the sort of politics of today of trumpism of sort of plutocratic populism and all this so we should think longer term about the incentives that federalism provides that lead to i think really poor election administration in the u.s in addition like they they uh are a lens through which all the forces of long-term institutional racism and plutocracy and things get filtered in a powerful way thank you all very much this is extremely illuminating i see at least sort of two issues uh that came out of the last discussion and one is sort of uh relates to uric was talking about the level of competence the level of compton's varying hugely and it ties in with what ml highlighted as about sort of the second order types of problems of the systemic biases and so one sort of question is simply um the types of errors the types of sort of efforts that signature match matching that are likely to be highly problematic level of confidence overall to what extent do these sort of map on to existing systematic biases in terms of who's in franchise and who's not and the other issue goes to goes back to rick's nightmare scenario on the point of democratic legitimacy are there any institutions that are trustworthy enough by all sides to be a neutral arbiter to adjudicate the disputes especially the national level of disputes that arise from these scenarios and uh one sort of uh one institution that was referenced was the supreme court one of the problems with going through the court scenes is that it's not just a huge time drain of time and resources but it's very impenetrable to popular audiences um the reasoning is very impenetrable or can be very impenetrable so the basic question for all of you is are there any institutions that can do this work and what uh can we do to sort of lay the groundwork right now for trying to do the work of making the outcome seem legitimate if it is actually true well so one thing i would say is uh if you go back to 2000 uh and the disputed election in florida between bush and gore the supreme court was successfully able to end that election democrats were very unhappy they grumbled but power was transferred we had a new president he was accepted as legitimate i think after 9 11 and you know kind of changed the the tone uh in of his presidency but when that happened uh even though the court divided five to four it's important to remember that two of the four justices who were in the dissent or republican appointed justices david suter and john paul stevens today the supreme court is similarly divided five to four along ideological lines but it's also divided along party lines with five of the conservative judges justices appointed by uh republican presidents and the four liberal justices appointed by democratic presidents and so far there have been four election-related uh emergency petitions that have made it to the united states supreme court this election season and uh in three of the four the court divided along those lines um and uh the the wisconsin case that jake made reference to earlier uh but also case from alabama from texas and from florida florida not a pandemic related case but one about felon disenfranchisement um i don't think that the supreme court would be seen as the same kind of neutral arbiter uh that it was by much of the public certainly not all there was a lot of democratic discontent but by much of the public uh and i i'd say the very opacity of the supreme court is it's virtue in term you know it speaks like an oracle and people you know well they've studied this and this is what the law requires uh i think that that kind of gloss on the court has diminished and overall levels of legitimacy of the supreme court if you look at polling it's much more partisan divided among the public and so it's hard for me to see the supreme court serving as this uh neutral arbiter one of the things we suggested i i put together after we had our conference in late february can american democracy survive the 2020 elections i put together a committee of uh bipartisan experts in law politics media and tech and we issued a report called fair elections during a crisis which you can google and find and one of the things we recommended in there was the convening of bipartisan elder states people who could come together and try and speak about these issues you know i don't know how much that would sway the most ardent partisans but we are seeing people like tom ridge and jennifer granholm come together on the importance of vote by mail and so i think you know trying to get um former uh presidents uh former secretaries of state uh i think it's the best we can do although i'm not at all confident that it would um for 20 30 percent of the population would be a good enough way to try to you know establish a neutral body that could uh speak on issues of election legitimacy i agree with a lot of these points and i think of the institutions that we see around us the supreme court is probably going to have the most credibility on these issues but i also agree not just the opacity but i think legal logic is not always intuitive um and so we saw that in the wisconsin case where the courts overturned the governor's decision i think you know the governor's decision was on shaky grounds legally but it did not feel fair it did not appear fair because it presented a different kind of logic than what people were expecting to see um all that said i still think the courts are probably where this is going to end up and where it's going to be decided and i think at the end of the day it's not institutions that i'm going to have the greatest faith in it's going to come down to leadership and i think it's going to require leadership that is willing to you know fight hard to get the outcomes they want but at the end of the day accept a legitimate democratic outcome that has been determined i guess i'll be the relatively more pessimistic one in this question where i think politics has really become it's fascinating but in the current sort of partisan and media landscape politics at the mass level is so deeply uh intertwined with cultural and racial resentment um to the point where it's not really it's not policy based it's about uh it's a connection between sort of socio-cultural forms of resentment and who's in power um and there's a deep uh uh sort of affective polarization a negative polarization against the other side i do not see so if you remember in 2016 like there were george w bush uh declined the trump endorsement there was a number of sort of uh uh you know previous elder statesmen of the republican party that didn't seem to have a very large effect on perceptions of of sort of i don't know legitimacy of the other side and things like that so not exactly sure i hope but i agree this might be the best we have but i think the alternate models we'll get to later which are uh bolstering sort of the uh democratic intervention of other organizational and mass level forces um to to uh as a sort of countervailing power in the election you so much so one of the things that's come up a few times has been uh about uh basically sort of situating current crises and the current questions within a longer history and so we know that american democracy has always been uneven put it gently um some of the vulnerabilities exposed in the last few years seem new such as foreign interventions on social media or the increased role of anonymous actors in campaign finance others such as voter suppression seem to be sort of occurring problems so i guess there's two ways that i want to take this question one is simply to ask how contemporary challenges compare uh contemporary challenges compared to those of early years what is specific to the current moment and what is endemic given our institutions and how this should shape our efforts uh to respond and then the other is to take it outside the american context and so we'll come back to this next but first like your thoughts on how it responds uh compares to later years but i'd also like to know how these challenges compare to the problems faced by other countries whether these are stable democracies and or regimes where democracy is backsliding or has outright disintegrated so let's start with the uh american focus and then move it to a comparative perspective uh start off with jake i'll jump in uh so i think that's a great question some of the best i think some of the best scholarship and sort of public intellectual thinking on what's going on now has drawn on the american case historically so in light of the uh black lives matter movements about reforming or abolishing police uh in light of voter suppression in so many ways when we think about american democracy people are drawing connections to american history it's been extremely powerful um i don't think we're back to the level of of sort of uh uh semi-democracy hair invoke democracy authoritarianism that we had in the pre-65 period in uh the u.s south and really throughout you know uh less directly throughout the entire country um but the trends are very similar so now like if you look at a state like north carolina it's really been fascinating where you see emerging in the states because states administer elections and do policing and so they're on the front lines of determining how healthy american democracy is looking at a state like north carolina is fascinating where in the 90s and also first in the 60s and 70s it was one of the hardest racially authoritarian enclaves to break through to it was the most one of the most jim crow-ish states a true non-democracy within a broader semi-democracy the u.s it uh broke through long-term civil rights movements legal cases enforcement by the national government all of this by the 90s and 2000s north carolina was expanding early voting same-day registration absentee ballots it had increased its voter turnout by like 10 percentage points on average it was like a hopeful case implementing the motor voter act all of this it was it was uh and it was increasingly electorally competitive between the parties when you got to the 2010 election and the gop takeover in 2011 you saw a uh in the 2010 wave you saw a radical new gerrymandering of the districts you saw uh voter id law immediately after the uh uh section five of the voting rights act gets uh dismantled by the supreme court it's really a case of democratic backsliding in the states um and that is actually quite uh you know draws it very clear connection to the state's own history earlier on i would just add um i think to to a part of david's question about now versus then what's different now we've had periods of intense polarization in the united states before what's different now is that social media and the internet has um has changed the nature of american democracy where we no longer have reliable intermedia intermediaries there's no longer a walter cronkite no no everyone's not gather around the tv at seven o'clock to find out what happened on the news of the world uh instead uh it is um uh the rise of uh what's been called sheep speech has uh caused a collapse of the model for local journalism it has uh allowed people who have um non-fact-based conspiracy theories to find each other and to reinforce each other's beliefs uh it creates these uh echo chambers information silos and all of this i think contributes to an atmosphere where when the president makes a comment for example about um fraud in elections uh it gets amplified he can speak directly to tens of millions of people and his message can be amplified and and followed in a way that it wouldn't have happened if you know the question was whether or not the political editor at the cbs evening news was going to put this on tv uh so you know we've had donald trump is not the first american demagogue by far but he is able to uh send his messages out in a different way and so i think that changes the nature of political struggle right now in the united states so i would add to that um in thinking what in my mind stands out as being very different now uh is the steady weakening of parties in terms of their ability to manage the nomination process uh and forge broad coalitions that can carry them through elections and so i think in my mind that is actually linked to voter suppression and i think um you know we think of voting rights often in very negative terms which is not which is to say it's a negative freedom you want freedom from discrimination and freedom from obstruction and and intimidation and all those things are vitally important of course but we also know that in modern mass participatory democracies mobilization i'm sorry participation is a function of mobilization and so many of the institutions that historically have played a role mobilizing voters across the board are atrophying i'm talking labor unions even religious establishments no longer played the same role in in in civil society that they used to which means that increasingly parties are doing this parties entirely are the the vehicle for mobilization and more so campaigns are the vehicle for mobilization this means narrower and narrower coalitions as campaigns focus increasingly on their base and it really in my mind is a different kind of voter suppression that's practiced by both parties by ignoring the the hard to get voters that would require greater persuasion it's weakening the parties even while it's bolstering them electorally i just want to continue on amel's absolutely wonderful answer there that i think bridges the sort of rick brought a sort of mass level rise of social media and other forms of media and amel sort of bringing the elite institutions in in connecting this the decline of the of uh labor unions as an intermediary organization and so forth um i i do think at the elite level sort of the national coordination of the parties within this federal institutional structure really matters so now if you're a republican no matter what office you're running for or what state you're in if you have that you know mostly white district you're probably gonna win your republican office and the way to mobilize them is not to talk about you don't have a different electorate than whoever's running for senate or the us president on the republican ticket you have the same line of voters um in this polarized era and therefore you have the same incentives to shape the electorate as the other politicians do at the different levels of office you have an incentive to dismantle labor unions who mobilize for the other team whether you're running for city council or you're writing for state legislature or u.s senate or president and whatnot um this creates a new set of incentives for coordinating and really investment by well-resourced political organizations plus elite strategy since the southern strategy for example have played a role in this but they're a real coordinating institutions in american politics now fox news uh on the media side the rise of you know sort of large benefactors like the koch brothers network um and uh all of these are sort of glue that hold the parties together in this very decentralized structure and and help incentivize along with amel's point of the decline of the labor movement help to incentivize the sort of cultural identity politics we see now where you know the republican mass level republican uh voting is based on cultural and white identity politics at the elite level it's about policy for uh uh major businesses and plutocratic interests this is sort of the plutocratic populism in the new hacker and pearson book um and then as well the decline of the labor movement my work shows has really helped uh create fertile ground for white resentment politics when you don't have a countervailing political orientation around for example your workplace um and an interracial uh sort of form of collective action at work thank you all very much so i'm hearing uh i think that these were wonderful points and a number of them sort of connect to each other through the weakening and bolstering of parties rise of social media and the decline of trust intermediaries nationalization and hobbyism and elections the polarization of parties all of these seem to point to a sort of declining sense of trust in the process and is the trust in the process that underpins acceptance of the outcomes and so that raises this goes back to uh what i wanted to bring us to uh which was how america's contemporary challenges compared to the problems faced by other countries whether stable democracies or regimes where the outcome has been outright disintegration of democracy or a much more complex rise of uh undemocratic but competitive in forms of authoritarian rule so how does america's contemporary challenges compare to these other places i'd like to start off with them now so thank you for the question i think you know the comparative perspective cuts in two ways what we can potentially generalize from the comparative perspective is what we know is one of the essential features of our study of democracy which is that uh one of the strongest predictors of whether a democracy will endure is how long it has endured and so i think democracy produces its own self-enforcing mechanism so on the one hand we can say you know democracy in america is is in somewhat secure footing in that respect uh you can only take that so far so this is not to say that democracy in america cannot fail but i think if it does it will look very different than what where it looks elsewhere and i think that's really the limitations in my mind of the comparative perspective which is that we don't have any example of a centuries-old democracy failing we don't know what that looks like and i think there's been a lot of really important work on uh democratic backsliding in the united states and you know i've taken that all in what uh worries me is that much of the focus of those works is on the executive and there is a temptation for example to compare to an erdogan or orban or bolsonaro when in reality we're in a very different situation here thankfully in a very different situation in part as a result of the the age of the democracy and the institutional structure so the first thing i would say is you know those other leaders were able to steamroll over legislatures and really make short order of of what they wanted to accomplish in a way that i could not imagine happening in the united states given um institutions that you know appear to us to be weak but relatively speaking are really quite strong and able to resist autocratic tendencies effectively um the other part and jake's already brought this up is that much of american democracy resides in the states so there's a lot of tendency to really focus on on the state level but i think we would i'm sorry on the national level i think we would be well served to focus much more on the state level and focus much more on voting rights this is something that jake's talked about rick also has talked about and i'm fully with them on that if we are really interested in the question of democratic backsliding then we need to pay attention to what's happening to voting rights in the states thank you very much jake would you like to respond to this question uh it looks like rick's ready um oh well i know i was just unmuting to say that i'm going to have to defer to the comparativists uh you know uh i can say you know reading uh uh levitzky and zablot uh and and seeing the kind of the list of what makes you move towards authoritarianism uh you know we're checking off more things every day and i would just say in the last few weeks the well even the last week the sending of a federal police to portland is a very disturbing sign and lines up with some of the things we've seen uh in you know other countries where there's been this kind of democratic backsliding uh but i really have to defer to the comparative yeah so as do i but i'll as you know i'll stick my neck out regardless but uh the levitsky and ziblat i'm a huge fan of how democracies die that the book um which points to things like elite polarization um and uh but i one i think wrinkle in the polarization i've more recently come to think about okay so what is it really about polarization at the elite level that is threatening democracy and in my sort of ongoing work right now i'm noticing that in recent years democratic backsliding in the states is not well predicted by partisan competition levels of partisan competition not even really by elite polarization in state legislatures based on you know measures of their roll call votes and things like that rather it's there is something unique about the historical configuration right now of the republican coalition and its policy demands so it's really important that it does have both at the mass level and the elite level incentives to push back on democracy and they're historically derived based on its white electoral base um which uh wants to resist uh voting by the young and uh non-white people and things like that um and a legacy of sort of uh of of essentially you know ethnonationalism has been associated with limited democracy around the world um in addition at the elite level you have clear economic incentives uh to push back you've seen uh the republican party's national all the way down policy agenda has really been despite the sort of discussion of the white working class at the mass level in the trump base and things like that it's really been to cut taxes on high income and high wealth individuals that is like the raison d'etre of this party at the elite level it's very clear both of those have clear if you want those policies to go through red meat in sort of white identity politics or you want tax cuts on the wealthy both of those point you two incentives to push back on democracy so it's not necessarily polarization writ large right that just elites are really disagreeing with each other and have different ideologies it's the particular ideologies that are happening now due to the geographic configuration and i'll note that around the world it's actually somewhat rare that you get that sort of tax cut on the wealthy party to be in a coalition with the sort of populist uh majority ethno nationalist group right often you get that a classic fascism has a sort of uh more uh more redistrib economic redistribution along with sort of racial authoritarianism but in the us you have this unique configuration of of anti-redistribution with sort of uh ethno-nationalist mass politics which seems pretty pretty damn scary david i wanted to just add uh one thing quickly uh which is that i i didn't mean to suggest that i have no concerns about what's happening to the executive by any means uh we have a leader who seems to kind of instinctively reach for autocratic measures instinctively and consistently so that's certainly something to to be worried about um i think i would just warn against there's a temptation to draw analogies to leaders in other places that may not be um the most appropriate but there's also the bigger danger of missing the real erosion to american democracy that has been happening and that in many ways allowed for 2016. so i think on both ends um i'm interested in making sure that if this immediate uh challenge is removed that we don't just um that we're not just satisfied with that outcome and say well we've rescued democracy and and we're done here i think a comparative perspective it's extremely valuable and one of the things that i'm touched on that i thought was very uh useful um was how whatever the danger looks like in the united states it's going to be filtered through the specifics of america's uh institutions and its particular history and so on and so one of the great example of this is its electoral fragmentation it's terrible if you're in it and it creates an extraordinary mess as rick has identified in a variety of ways it does at the very least potentially make one particular danger of trump canceling the elections outright less likely he would sing although that would be a question for you for you all uh and then so many of our many of our audience might not be familiar with a book that jake referenced it was uh both jake and rick referenced the legitimate ziploc book uh how democracies die and one of the arguments in this book that i should bring to the attention of the audience is that one of the things that they find especially important is the role of conservative elites and conservative parties in restraining uh demagogues from accessing the system and then doing something if they have access to the system in some way doing something to make sure that they aren't able to gain power so this brings us to a question that rick has raised as well as a question that was submitted in the audience and so i think we're going to start turning now to the questions from the audience i should just say at the outset that a lot of you have submitted questions upon registration so we have a lot more questions than we could possibly deal with others have great questions that come up during the last half hour we're not going to get to all but we try to identify some of the most common questions and some of the most important ones that fit with the conversation so the specific question goes back to something that rick had discussed earlier and that was what kinds of discourse if any might help short the legitimation of election outcomes during the error-filled phase-long period of vote counting after tuesday in particular what might be the role of conservative elites who have those conservative leads who have broken with trump or potentially haven't broken with trump but or might be breaking with trump curious what rule might they have uh in those potentially panic-filled days right i'd like to start with you yeah so i mean i think there's a role for everyone in terms of assuring election legitimacy and in our report fair elections during crisis we we say you know the media has a very big role to play uh for example in educating the public that uh because of the shift to absentee ballots uh election results are going to be delayed and delayed results do not mean that there is a um something nefarious going on with the vote counting uh and election administrators need to be transparent they need to explain here's what how many ballots are left here's when we're counting them here's how you can observe them here's when we expect results uh but uh absolutely i agree that some of this depends on conservative elites and and in part this uh goes back to the the very basic point i made uh at the beginning which is that much of the question about how successful the 2020 election is going to be is going to depend upon the margin of victory if it's very close then i do not expect that you're going to see conservative elites uh lining up against trump uh you know if you know if you ask you know why why isn't uh mitch mcconnell or you know other uh conservatives who are in power why aren't they speaking up it's because as the republican party base has changed uh trump is much more popular than they are and they know that if they go against the president they will face a trumpist uh challenge from the right in the primary a partisan primary and they would be out of power so um uh if it's not close uh then i think and it may not be you know if the polls continue the way they are and we have no way of knowing that they will but if they see where they are and we're getting past past labor day and trump looks like he's going down then i expect you're going to see a lot more republicans stepping out and you know we have an example of this you know think about sticking comparatively in states we had a kentucky governor uh matt blevins who was um running for reelection and uh on election night it looked like he was losing to andy beshear who was the democratic candidate and um you had uh blevins make the claim that he was um subject to uh fraud in the election and he suggested that the kentucky legislature which is also republican uh use a powered hat to basically take the vote away from the people and declare him the winner and uh you know there was a couple of days of trial balloons of looking at that uh that governor was not very popular he could not come up with any evidence to support his claims of fraud he later claimed he was concerned about the quote urban vote which i think was just a you know a nice way of saying that uh african-americans did not support his candidacy in the larger cities and eventually the republican leaders in that legislature told him come up with some good evidence or step aside and that's what he did and we had a peaceful transition of power in kentucky which you know you wouldn't even think we'd have to talk about but we're talking about it now so i think if it's not particularly close we'll see a lot of brave republicans if it is uh very close then you know you'll have the never trumpers you'll have the principles out of power you know now paul ryan's talking about donald trump in ways that he wouldn't when he was in power we've talked about the republicans in power they're only going to speak up and you know say the truth about the elections legitimacy if it's not close i i think that's right at the same time i just it's i think it's important to highlight how limited that's been even for so even retiring republicans in the house and senate for example have stuck with sort of trumpism and the trump coalition because now there is this large sort of backup industry for uh conservative advocacy um sort of uh grifting on you know conspiratorial uh sort of fear of the other side these sorts of things so uh it's limited and it's been quite i've been a little surprised given the importance of conservative mainstream elites in determining you know whether the system so to expand on david's point about levitzi and ziblat so it's conservative interests within electoral democracies typically don't want to redistribute more of their wealth and power to the masses as the electorate expands and the franchise expands and more people have a voice in as democracy expands um so they have an incentive to sort of constrain democracy in some ways and they may pull the emergency switch and pop and partner and join a coalition with uh demagogues if they feel that they're uh two backed against the wall or for whatever reason so i just think we are much closer to that where you see i i think it's much more typical to see the susan collins style i'm very concerned rather than the uh a slight uh slightly morally more morally courageous uh sort of uh putting one's own uh popularity with the trump coalition at risk but let's hope let's hope this you know in the days before the election two you may see some more elite republican push back to uh delegitimizing statements from the trump coalition so i would act um you know i do think if there's anything other than a landslide we're going to see both parties really going to the mat um and i don't you know i don't anticipate a complete blowout i know we're in july and it's looking good for biden but you know 15 point lead in july is kind of like sinking a three-point shot in pre-game warm-up you know so it feels really good but i i'm not going to count on it by any means i think back to the question of what do we do with the rhetoric and how do we take down the temperature my mind really goes to the way both sides have framed this is really an existential threat this election has become uh or the other side has poses an existential threat and that's where you see the the real danger i think and i think both parties have a responsibility in that respect so yes conservative parties play a certain role but in my um understanding of historical democracies and the failure of democracy more broadly and throughout europe both sides play a role both democracies detractors and democracies defenders i mean often because they fear this existential threat and they fear that if they don't make a stand now that it's going to be all over and so they overreact so i think both sides have a responsibility to really bring down the temperature around this election and to focus on the acceptability of outcomes given the the integrity of the process thank you very much so the next audience question is going to be about foreign intervention which is something that we haven't really touched on all that much in the conversation so far so uh there's a variety of ways that we can approach this one is just how well equipped we are to fend off any sort of flipping of vote counts what specific intrusions by uh foreign actors might be planned for the elections at present do we know what is sort of is coming um and then all to me how important is it either and sort of changing vote outcomes or in changing how americans understand the process itself so i'd like to start off with rick right so uh what we saw in 2016 in terms of foreign interference uh if we look at what the russian government did according to the intelligence reports um they engaged in three different kinds of activities uh one thing they did was they hacked into uh emails of uh democratic officials and released those emails that was probably the one that had the most impact on the election you know the podesta emails and others uh demobilize the sanders supporters etc um the second thing that was done uh was probing of voter registration databases this happened in all states this did not cause a change in uh any information there's a report maybe one or two states there was an attempt to change a little bit of information but it was enough to i think cast a cloud over things and and then the third thing that was done was and this got the most attention but maybe had the least impact the russians spent about a hundred thousand dollars on facebook ads and other things to try to rile people up and you know famously organizing a rally of uh a pro and anti-immigration rally on two corners in a florida city um we're already hearing reports of you know similar kinds of things happening uh in terms of um potentially releasing uh information about uh the ukraine and barisma and hunter biden uh with stuff coming from the russians it was just a letter that was sent yesterday by democratic leaders uh saying basically that ron johnson the senator from wisconsin's committee was being used to launder this kind of information and so we might uh see that again uh one i i do think that where in in terms of our election machinery we're much better prepared than we were before everyone is on the lookout for interference uh despite trump and his unwillingness to recognize the russian interference the department of security has been working with state and local governments on hardening voter registration databases and other things like that most states and most counties have machines that produce a piece of paper which can be counted uh in the event that there's a attempted hack of election software so there's a paper record that's not true everywhere but it's true in more places now and i hope that's the direction we're going to go but you know we don't know exactly what foreign interference is going to look like i'll mention two of my big concerns number one false information that is um uh that that relies on kovid as a means of trying to deter voting for example uh spreading information that polling places are closed or that you can vote by email uh you know or things like that related to covid uh the other and i described this scenario in some detail in my book election meltdown is a cyber attack on the electrical grid in a democratic city like detroit in a swing state like michigan where i think that would really gum things up and uh you know people wouldn't be able to vote and there'd be a whole fight over what to do about it and we don't have good rules about what to do about it it's where our legal infrastructure is not up for the task of dealing with election catastrophes uh and you know i've called for states to try and deal with that for a long time and they really haven't so there's plenty of room for foreign interference uh in the election everyone's looking at fighting the last war i'm worried about the next one and um you know if we had a president who was really strong against foreign interference and would say you know messing with our elections would be treated like an act of war i think that would be very helpful but instead we have a president who is inviting foreign interference in our elections and i think that's very detrimental now so i think of the all the nightmare scenarios this is the one that gives me the most pause because i think aside from the technical defenses which are really technical and other political there isn't a lot we can do and i think this is an area where um you can see a systematic bias in favor of one side or another so this this for me is one of the red flag items um and i think you know rick rightly points that there are two different layers to this the interference with the actual balloting and then the manipulation of the electorate and i think the latter is somewhere where we can uh be more vigilant a lot of the questions that have come in have been about what can we as citizens do and this is an area where we can absolutely all be more vigilant and and and be more savvy about what comes through our social media outlets and our information bubbles um and i think that's going to be one of our best defenses going into november okay sure um yeah my co-panelists are much more uh high-level experts on this topic than me but i'd say on the on the sort of uh the last point the uh the sort of meme and public discourse intervention by russia and things like that if you remember there was a prominent story's written about they targeted black midwestern voters if you remember uh who uh to try to get them less enthusiastic about the democratic party and clinton as a candidate highlighting the legacy of tough on crime laws from the democratic party and the clinton coalition and things like that uh the memes had you know poorly spelled things and looked really bogus um at the same time so it's tough to know because uh the us abroad does so much uh electioneering from the ideological level down to like actual uh interventions physically um that i don't know i tend to downplay like repeating like true facts about uh tough on crime laws and things like that or making voters less enthusiastic about the democratic party i'm not sure there's a real uh national level response that can or should be done in the era of the internet about that um and i do believe i think rick said that was probably the least influential of the foreign intervention strategies um and i think that'll probably continue to be the case but i just think we shouldn't necessarily i don't know i i sometimes think we're a bit overly concerned about them the memes thank you so much another question this has come in is what's um this goes back to the earlier discussion about what institutions might be uh effective for responding to an election day crisis or to election post-election crisis and we talked then about the supreme court and one member of the audience is asking about um whether or not the results might be close enough and what would happen what would be the perception of legitimacy if the if the election were to be decided by the house of representatives and we're thinking here about at least two aspects one what could the house of representatives do um what would that look like uh if it were to be the ones to decide on the outcome of the election and how legitimate or illegitimate would that be perceived as anybody wants to take a shot at that i'm i'm not a i'm not an expert on the electoral count act but there's a federal statute that was passed after a disputed election in 1876 that provides for rules about how to resolve counts the constitution also provides certain rules under one scenario uh the house of representatives would decide with each state getting a vote as opposed to each member of the house which would have a republican bias today given the the way that the house is constructed this debate occurred back in 2000 between bush and gore where some said that the supreme court shouldn't have resolved those disputes it should have gone to the um to the congress to decide um uh you know i get i say the one of the most common questions i get is you know what if trump won't leave office well you know is is the congress going to do something about that and i would just point out that by operation of law and the constitution if if no president has been chosen by january 20th because there's still a dispute then we go to the order of succession and there's a question about whether that order of succession is constitutional but the president is no longer the president then so delaying the election or canceling the election does not seem to be a way forward much if you're talking about nightmare scenarios that are much more within the realm of what's constitutionally allowed it would be state legislatures reclaiming their right to choose presidential electors directly and sending those slates to congress and cancelling the vote you know taking the vote away from the people i think that would provoke a rioting in the streets and and should provoke rioting in the streets because that would be a profoundly anti-democratic move even though it's actually allowed by the us constitution i thought we're going to end on a happy note but i'll leave that to the others [Music] i was going to just comment that if you don't want to sleep between now and november you should talk to election lawyers because they know more than anyone how many ways this can go sideways and rick we're so um indebted to you and and the work that you all do to keep track of of of these different considerations yeah so while i don't think there's some sort of institution that's uh you know so still so bipartisan and respected that it could single-handedly you know in many of these uh in many cases of democratic backsliding the military has the ultimate sort of decision and the military is still generally bipartisan respect or at least respected by bipartisan majorities um at the same time there are is the mobilization of federal sort of you know military s policing troops in ways that are pretty correspond pretty well to other international instances of declines into fascism where you have certain uh sort of partisan wings of of uh the military and things like that um at the same time there are so many hopeful examples of democratic resurgence in the u.s from the black lives matter uh uprisings to a resurgent sort of uh wave of uh labor actions both of essential workers and uh and more um this is uh all actually been crucial and i think does have a hopeful story to end on that when we think about uh politics uh actually getting out and about despite kovid getting out and about into the streets actually seems to have had some effect and may have an effect if uh a real election meltdown to quote the rick's book um i do want to end on a somewhat hopeful note um so i guess the question i was going to ask at the very end was just quickly what concrete steps uh you each of you would like to identify that we can take to revitalize american democracy both preserving uh the current elections the upcoming elections but also going forward what would you think is the most important thing we could do i'll start off with the amount so i fear that my answer will not be concrete enough there isn't you know i think for me the most important thing is expanding beyond our understanding of electoral democracy and so i will you know echo what jake's just said we are very focused on the regime challenge in the united states from the right but there's a different kind of regime challenge happening on the left and i think a great kind of regime challenge that is really questioning how we understand democracy and inclusion and participation in that democracy um and really my money is on that as a vehicle for progress and improvement i i would add that people are very energized right now um i think that uh the 2016 election was a wake-up call for a lot of people about the fragility of american institutions um people are you know stuff is not stuff is not sliding by without protest and the fact that um the inequalities that have been uh building in our system over the last 20 to 30 years uh are are going noticed is a hopeful sign because it does mean that um you know if there is a slide towards authoritarianism at least people are not going down without a fight and so you know i that does give me some hope not necessarily in the very short run but in the medium run that um demographically there is a strong uh sense of uh at least among a majority of americans of a need for a more inclusive and participatory democracy going forward there's a tremendous amount that's very like 1932 in ways multiple financial crises we have a young more diverse more immigrant-based generation coming of political age there are people taking action in the streets i would call on civil society organizations like uh universities non-republican-aligned firms for example in the tech industry and elsewhere um the democratic party itself labor unions uh incumbent politicians at state and local levels to take uh to think about policy feedbacks uh things that would encourage greater civil society participation as a backstop to democratic backsliding um and uh and support that even when it puts you as an incumbent at the state or local level or as a university potentially at some short-term risk of some of uh being primaried or some sort of chaos on campus with student activists or something like that be brave be brave marching orders for all of us uh so i just want to thank all of you this has been a very informative conversation in closing we would like to thank cornell university and particularly the announce center for their generous support democracy 2020 series next section session in the series will be in late august on the theme of already authoritarian policing the use of force and democracies must be brave uh the session will include freshly weaver and sabrina korea and it's sure to be informative so before we go i want to thank you all again so much for joining us and thanks also to our audience for some wonderful questions it's been extremely enlightening thank you thank you thank you david thank you all thanks all you.