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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
FEMALE_1: Welcome to civil discourse. This podcast will use government documents, to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your host, Nia Rogers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hi, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I would be fine if I thought this election was ever going to be over, but considering that I'm spending about half my time in a swing state these days, and the commercials, make me feel it's been going on for approximately 87 years. I just don't know if it's ever going to be. Is it ever going to be over?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, unfortunately, Nia, even after we vote, it will take a few weeks before it will be officially over.
N. Rodgers: No, no, I can't wait that long. Wait, sorry. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I've been better. Listeners of the day we are recording, is approximately a week after the funeral for my beloved grandmother.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry.
J. Aughenbaugh: I appreciate that.
N. Rodgers: Half the team that made you Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: My 99-year-old grandmother who lived, she's a child, or was a child of the Great Depression and just a remarkable woman. But it's funny, Nia, you mentioned that you spent half of your time in a battleground or swing state and you're tired of the commercials, I was up to Pennsylvania.
N. Rodgers: That's right. Your mom and grandmother were in Pennsylvania.
J. Aughenbaugh: In Pennsylvania. I even noticed the change as I was driving home, and I got into Pennsylvania and I had the radio station on.
N. Rodgers: Then it started. As you crossed the line.
J. Aughenbaugh: After every song that got played, there were back to back commercials, either Trump, Trump Harris.
N. Rodgers: It is exhausting.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or Harris Trump. Then my mom she does not stream television shows, listeners.
N. Rodgers: She kicks at old school.
J. Aughenbaugh: She kicks at old school. She's got a cable package. Every channel you flip to.
N. Rodgers: Every commercial. Oh, my goodness. The straight up things that they say that aren't true. Like, I find myself yelling at the TV. That's not true. That's not true. Not just on one, but, on multiple.
J. Aughenbaugh: Multiple.
N. Rodgers: Of these commercials.
J. Aughenbaugh: In Pennsylvania, in addition to obviously the presidential race, one of the senators, incumbent Bob Casey.
N. Rodgers: Oh, Bob Casey.
J. Aughenbaugh: Is in a very close fight with the challenger. I believe his name is McCormick. Those commercials were running. I spent a lot of I spent a lot of fun.
N. Rodgers: It makes you feel like the election was never going to be over.
J. Aughenbaugh: To my family's credit, they were, we got our resident political science professor with us. Can you explain X?
N. Rodgers: You're like, no, I can't explain any.
J. Aughenbaugh: Any of this, right? Because none of this.
N. Rodgers: This is the thing that political scientists have nightmares.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because none of this makes sense. But an ad would run, and then immediately, I would get like, posed 20 questions. I was just like.
N. Rodgers: What about this? What about that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Guys, can I just sit here and, not talk about? They're like, but we never see you. You're here in person. We don't even have to, call you up. You're like, right here, and I was just like, can you guys just pretend that I'm just, some 3D image on the wall.
N. Rodgers: Oh, my goodness. That's a thing for all of us to think about. How about we don't talk about politics at people's funeral?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, that was the other thing.
N. Rodgers: Let's have a little dignity and not talk about political stuff, especially divisive political stuff. We can talk about political stuff that's not divisive. Don't we all love the Eagle? Don't we all love the Constitution. We can say things like that, but let's not bring up. Anything that causes us to be even remotely indivisible at a funeral.
J. Aughenbaugh: But to Nia's point, listeners, if you're tired of the election before the election, we got some bad news.
N. Rodgers: Just wait, because it's never going to be over.
J. Aughenbaugh: We got some bad news for you. After people vote. Then there's going to be the period of time where we have to count votes. Eventually, what we're going to talk about today for roughly the next 45 minutes to an hour is what goes into certifying an election?
N. Rodgers: What's the process? I said to Aughie, what's the process in this, because what will happen on election night is that Steve Kornacki will get out his big white board, and he will loosen his tie and he will must his hair, and he will draw on the board incessantly for hours. He'll put in returns, and he will add all these things. Returns are a very specific thing. They are.
J. Aughenbaugh: Unofficial vote counts.
N. Rodgers: Unofficial counts from a given area. If it's districts or if it's precincts or if it's whatever, and they'll say, 45% of precincts reporting in whatever. It waves across the country, of course, because the polls close usually around seven, in most states? It goes on the East Coast, seven o'clock in the East Coast happens, of course, three hours before it happens on the West Coast and five hours before it happens in Hawaii. It takes a long time just for the actual, because of the size of our country. Even the beginning returns to start to come in and they will start counting them, and then they will predict a winner.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: After they get to a certain point where they think they've got enough of a view of what's happened, they will say, we are predicting so and so has won the election. Which Fox News got in trouble with Donald Trump the last time for predicting that Joe Biden had won the election.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because Donald Trump did not want to hear that. He perceives Fox News as his mouthpiece, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: But yes. Just like the Democrats.
N. Rodgers: Those are predictions, those are not actual number or numbers. Election day you go and you vote or you pre voted before the election if you went and did a mail in ballot or an early ballot, so you go and you vote election day and there are numbers, but they're not real numbers, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: That is correct.
J. Aughenbaugh: Put this in context, and I'm actually looking this up online. Maybe, Nia, you could find this. How many votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election?
N. Rodgers: I can dig around, 81,283,501 for Biden, 74,223,975. Roughly 81 million and 75 million for big candidates.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, 156 million.
N. Rodgers: Then, like Phil Collins, not the singer, but the prohibition independent candidate got 4,000. Count another million onto that. I have a total, 158,429,631 votes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's just go with 158 million.
N. Rodgers: Roughly half of us.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you think next Tuesday, 158 million votes will have to be counted.
N. Rodgers: It's going to take a while.
J. Aughenbaugh: As Nia points out, when throughout the evening on election day, you will see the press say, we are predicting this state, Harris or this state went Trump. That's unofficial, because after the polls closed, these are not the final certified results because other steps have to take place. Rather quickly, Nia, I'm going to explain the steps. Basically, you can go ahead and there are, if you will, five steps for counting votes. First step, people have to vote.
N. Rodgers: In 2020, Kanye West got 70,000 votes. Seventy thousand souls in the United States thought Kanye West would make a great president.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's for a different podcast episode where we go ahead and talk about the intelligence versus ignorance of voters, but nevertheless.
N. Rodgers: But anyway, so everybody goes and vote, and you're talking about 158 million people casting a vote.
J. Aughenbaugh: As Nia pointed out just a few moments ago, increasingly, states give voters choices on how they vote. For most of our country's history, you had to physically go to a voting location. They're called the polls. Some places call them precincts, but you had to go to a physical location and vote.
N. Rodgers: Back in the day when the founders were around, it was bars. You voted in bars and taverns and churches and all cool places.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's places. But states increasingly understood that perhaps turnout would improve if they gave more choices. In many states, not only can you vote in person, but you can vote in person before election day. This is called early voting. Most states allow early voting now. Here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, I know plenty of people who've already voted. Then there is non in person voting, which you're talking about mailed votes. That was significantly increased in 2020 because of the pandemic. We didn't want a whole bunch of people showing up in person and possibly creating a super-spreader event at a polling level.
N. Rodgers: At a polling place, all it takes is one person sneezing all over you and that's pretty much the end of it. Is it Oregon where it's all mail? It's not done in person? Is it working one of the other states.
J. Aughenbaugh: You can still vote in person. They just encourage you to vote by mail because Oregon actually allows for the counting to start before election day.
N. Rodgers: They can pre game it by getting more of the work done ahead of time.
J. Aughenbaugh: They can spread their work, which is a more efficient work process.
N. Rodgers: Because if you have to wait till election night to start counting the mail that you got.
J. Aughenbaugh: In some states, like my home state of Pennsylvania, they don't count mailed ballots until election day.
N. Rodgers: They act as if you came in and voted in person. They open up all the envelopes and run them through the machines.
J. Aughenbaugh: There are thousands of votes that have already been received in Pennsylvania. They're not doing anything right now in terms of counting.
N. Rodgers: They're just sitting around in boxes.
J. Aughenbaugh: As Nia points out, election night, media sources will start reporting unofficial results, but guys, I don't say you should ignore them, but you should not believe that they are the truth because that's only Step 2.
N. Rodgers: You shouldn't take them with a grain of salt. You should take them with a rock of salt.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the third step is the most important step in counting the ballots. It's called the Canvas. This is where election officials confirm the accuracy of election data because this is where they go ahead and count the overall votes cast and compare it to the vote totals for each of the candidates for each of the offices.
N. Rodgers: Because they should add up.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. If they don't add up, then they have to go back to the local jurisdiction or the regional office, and say what's going on here? Do you have to do a recount.
N. Rodgers: If you know 100 votes were cast, and you know that Aughenbaugh got 51 and Rodgers got 48.
N. Rodgers: Rodgers got 48. What happened to that 1%?
N. Rodgers: If there's one missing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Where is that one vote?
N. Rodgers: Where's that vote? Did that person not choose between those two candidates? In which case, that's fine, or it somehow is why is the number off?
J. Aughenbaugh: Why is the number off?
N. Rodgers: There's always a little bit of that in every election. There's always a little bit of the numbers being a little weird because you're talking about 158 million votes. If that was perfectly mathematically accountable the first time around, that would be a miracle.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it would be a statistical audit and that would probably lead to Step 4, because Step 4 is a post election audit. This is where every state does random checks on their voting equipment used during the election to make sure that the votes were counted correctly, because no state today hand counts all the votes.
N. Rodgers: We had a couple of chuckle heads in Virginia that wanted that to be a local county issue in one of the counties. We want you to hand count, and everybody around them raised eyebrows and said, ''Do you have any idea how long that would take?''
J. Aughenbaugh: It would take, and a couple counties in Georgia attempted to do this. A Georgia appellate court said, ''That's not required by law. Don't do that.''.
N. Rodgers: Well, and there is no reason to believe that a machine would make a mistake that a human wouldn't make. If you're hand counting ballots, why are you thinking that that's somehow better or less likely to have a mistake than a machine? Humans make mistakes, too. That's a weird, but anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's Step 4.
N. Rodgers: Now, wait. Can we stop and say, maybe there should have been a pre one thing? Because when they set up the machines, don't they also test them for?
J. Aughenbaugh: But that's not necessarily important in regards to the counting. Again, we're talking about what happens.
N. Rodgers: For the certification. We're not talking about the integrity of the election.
J. Aughenbaugh: Election. Yes.
N. Rodgers: We're talking about the certification.
J. Aughenbaugh: You do a post election audit, and then the last step is certification. This is where election officials in each of the 50 states issues a written statement certifying or attesting that the election results are accurate, and that there has been an accounting of all votes cast in a particular election. That's five steps.
N. Rodgers: Which is why that's not done at the federal level. Because 158 million would be ridiculous. That's why it's done at the state level.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because each state casting those ballots of casting significantly fewer, and therefore it is easier to audit and certify.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, in regards to certification, there are two things that should be noted. One, let's say, we'll go back to Nia's hypothetical just a few moments ago. Let's say Nia and I are running for the same office, and there's 100 votes cast, and the result is 51;49. In most states, a recount will occur because it was so closely decided. Recounts occur.
N. Rodgers: 50.5% and 49.5% is going to get an automatic recount because.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, that is just too close, and there could be human error in the counting of votes. Recounts typically occur after certification.
N. Rodgers: After certification?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Excuse me, before certification is issued.
N. Rodgers: Because they want to make sure that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, before.
N. Rodgers: They do a recount to make sure that when they certify it, it's the legitimate response.
J. Aughenbaugh: If, for instance Nia and I are running for governor in Virginia. Virginia is going to hold off on certifying the results through that.
N. Rodgers: It's too close.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's too close. In some states, the recount can be at the request of one of the candidates.
N. Rodgers: That's if the margin was slightly wider. Let's say it was 52:48, the 48 could say, hey, I want to recount. Am not sure if that's.
J. Aughenbaugh: In some states, if the margin of difference is greater than, say for instance 1% or 0.05%, then the person who wants to recount has to pay for the recount.
N. Rodgers: Because one should remember that running an election is not an inexpensive thing to do. All of the poll workers are volunteer, but election officials are not volunteers. They are hired.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Paid employees. There's a lot, but also almost all of those spaces have to be paid for. They're not just free to people to have an election in. You have to offset the cost of a day missed from school, if it's held in a school or wherever. There's all these things that have to be paid for. They're not inexpensive. To do a recount is not inexpensive.
J. Aughenbaugh: But if it falls within a certain percentage.
N. Rodgers: Then the state pays for it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then the state will pay for it.
N. Rodgers: Not a candidate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the state wants to make sure that the election results are accurate and true.
N. Rodgers: If it's outside of a big margin, they won't do it at all. If it's 10% spread, they'll be like, you just lost. You just lost Nia. Aughie one, you lost. Go home.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, in terms of certification, it occurs at both the local and state level, and in many non Americans. For that matter, if I had to venture a guess, many Americans don't understand, putting on elections is a shared responsibility between federal and state governments. We'll get to the federal part when we discuss certifying presidential elections in just a moment, but at the state level, it's not just the state government because when people go to vote or even when they mail their vote, they vote within a certain, if you will, jurisdiction. For instance, Nia you.
N. Rodgers: A precinct or a district.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, you live, correct me if I'm wrong, within the city of Richmond?
N. Rodgers: No.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hanover County?
N. Rodgers: I live in Hanover County.
J. Aughenbaugh: You live in Hanover County.
N. Rodgers: I'm in the first district. I could vote for Richmond Mayor.
J. Aughenbaugh: But again, the larger point here is you would either mail your ballot or go to vote in person in Hanover County?
N. Rodgers: Correct.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hanover does the first, if you will, counting of your vote, and then they certify all the results to the state level, and then the state will go ahead and certify it. You understand what I'm saying?
N. Rodgers: Got you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Certification requires in almost every state, local officials certifying the results, and then the state signing off and certifying the results. Actually, Step 5 has a part A and a part B in terms of certification. You see this in pretty much every state.
N. Rodgers: Fourteen percent of precincts reporting are the local.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Which is going to build into the state number.
J. Aughenbaugh: State number. That's right.
N. Rodgers: Because if you think about a state like Texas, it would not be hard for the state of Montana to just count everybody because basically they just call everybody on one evening and say, ''How'd you vote?'' I'm kidding. They wouldn't actually do that, but there's not very many people density wise in Montana, but if you were talking about Texas, if you didn't start at the local level, the number of ballots that the state would have to deal with if it was only one level of certification would take forever, because there's a zillion people who live in Texas.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, your example actually points to two of the time consuming variables with certification. Because even in a state like Wyoming, which doesn't have a lot of people, but it is large and spread out, you're still going to need to have local officials do the first counting because state officials just could not cover that large of a state.
N. Rodgers: That's true, geographically.
J. Aughenbaugh: Particularly in a timely manner.
N. Rodgers: We'll give you our results in March.
J. Aughenbaugh: But in states with a large population.
N. Rodgers: Same problem.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again you need local officials to go ahead and handle the initial counting.
N. Rodgers: It always starts at the local level. It always starts at the local precinct or board or district level.
J. Aughenbaugh: In most states, they have it in law when the local certification must be done, and then when the state certification must be done. Listeners, you can't see this.
J. Aughenbaugh: But in my research prep, I went ahead and provided a table of all 50 states, including in addition, the District of Columbia, as to when local officials must certify and then state officials.
N. Rodgers: What's interesting is when you're looking at Aughie's table, which you cannot see, but I can try to put in to the research guide as a PDF is the dates are all over the place, but it makes sense when you look at them in terms of the size of the state. Alabama the local stuff needs to be done November 15th. Well, that's only 10 days. That's a pretty average. But Alaska, the deadline is November 30th, because you're talking about a geographically enormous place.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or think about California.
N. Rodgers: Or California, which is both geographically huge and population wise huge. It's not due until December 5th. That's an entire month between election day and when.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you have small states in terms of population, but also land mass. Think about Delaware.
N. Rodgers: November 7th. They're going to be done in two days.
J. Aughenbaugh: In two days and the certification deadline for both local and state is the same day.
N. Rodgers: November 7th, two days because they're about I don't even know what the population of Delaware is. I will look it up real quick.
J. Aughenbaugh: You have this wide variance.
N. Rodgers: It is one million people in Delaware and it's the size of a quarter of Virginia? It's relatively small. It's compact. They should be able to get done in a couple of days. It is interesting. I'll put the table up because I think it might be interesting for people to look at the table. Just the idea that in a bigger state or a state with a lot more population, you're talking about a lot longer that it takes to just gather up all the information.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, this reflects federalism as a concept in the United States, because states are where people vote and within states, they vote in local polling places. In some states, where the land mass is narrow, small and there's not much population. Hey, we could be done with this the week of election day. We can get back to our normal work but in other states like California.
N. Rodgers: This is going to take months.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it's going to take at least weeks.
N. Rodgers: That's assuming that there's no problem.
J. Aughenbaugh: That there's no problems.
N. Rodgers: Because the state will have to audit and make sure that there's no problems. Hello, Florida in 2000. That went on and on.
J. Aughenbaugh: This becomes particularly an issue when what you are voting for are federal positions.
N. Rodgers: Because if it's your local stuff and it's done pretty much right away more or less, then it's more or less settled, but when you have to report upwards. For presidential elections or for Senate elections. That's a different animal. Well, I guess Senate is still state, but presidential.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure. Presidential, in again, what is underlying all of this is that most Americans want to know before they go to bed on election night.
N. Rodgers: Who's going to be the next president, and you're just not going to know.
J. Aughenbaugh: You might not know.
N. Rodgers: Especially if the election is close anyway. Was one thing if you were what was it Reagan where he took 49 state? Was it Reagan that did that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, 1984, in his re-election.
N. Rodgers: Took 49 states. Everybody who went to bed going, Reagan's going to be president again tomorrow.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because his opponent, Walter Mondale only took his home state of Minnesota.
N. Rodgers: There was no real contest in that sense. The FDR had one of those elections, too, didn't he?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, 1936.
N. Rodgers: He just land slid the whole thing. I just walked off with it, but if you get an election that's even remotely close, then you have this long involved, elongated and this election, as far as I can tell, is too close for anybody to call right now.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: The polls are so tight on this current election that I don't know that we'll see the results before December, will we?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, this is a good pivot point for our discussion, Nia. How the election winner becomes president, is a process. Now, you have to look at federal law requirements because this is a federal government position. Again, Tuesday, 158 million Americans go to vote. The media starts reporting results. In some cases, in some states, for instance, as soon as the polls close, you pretty much know who's won the state. When New Yorkers stop voting, almost immediately,.
N. Rodgers: They call it for a Democrat.
J. Aughenbaugh: We call it for a Democrat.
N. Rodgers: Texas, they call it for Republicans.
J. Aughenbaugh: Alabamans stop voting five minutes later.
N. Rodgers: This called for Republican.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Associated Press is reporting that the Republican candidate has won 65% of the votes.
N. Rodgers: How can they know that? It's closed five minutes ago because it's Alabama.
J. Aughenbaugh: Only five of the precincts, results have been reported. How are you making that prediction? Well, hey, you would have to have a huge snowstorm, in Florida, the middle of July, for a Democrat today to win in Alabama. Is safe bet.
N. Rodgers: That's why the swing states are so important. That's why this election watching will come down to the seven or eight swing states that are the purple states. They're the ones that nobody knows how they're going to go. Everybody knows how Alabama is going to go. Everybody knows how California is going to go unless something really weird happened.
J. Aughenbaugh: At that point.
N. Rodgers: All bets are off. At that point, aliens may also invade the next day, too. Like, it's a whole thing. Alien meaning from outer space.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the canvassing process and the auditing process.
N. Rodgers: Will kick into high gear. Can you imagine? If a Republican took California, what the auditing would look like. That's just not an expectation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let's just let's face it. Let's think about a city like San Francisco.
N. Rodgers: If it suddenly went Republican? I would be preparing for the end of the world.
J. Aughenbaugh: If Donald Trump on election night.
N. Rodgers: Took San Francisco.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or was even competitive in San Francisco, you would be like.
N. Rodgers: I should get my last will and testimony in order.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're right.
N. Rodgers: Because something big is about to happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: Tomorrow morning wake up and go ahead and buy a lottery ticket, because you might actually win the lottery.
N. Rodgers: That would be weird. That's why on election night, they'll be focusing on those seven or eight swing states.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is why the canvassing becomes so important for presidential elections in swing states because when you canvass, you perform checks to ensure that only valid votes have been counted and that the totals are correct, which I described a few moments ago. It's during the canvassing that you do the reconciliation. For instance, listeners, I'm going to take you back to the 2000 presidential election between Bosch and Gore. During the canvassing process, the day or two after the election. One of the oddities that arose was the sheer number of Floridians in democratically strong jurisdictions.
N. Rodgers: They voted for Pat Buchanan.
J. Aughenbaugh: Who voted for Pat Buchanan. Who was a hard right, Christian, talk show, radio, figure.
N. Rodgers: Host.
J. Aughenbaugh: Host. It just didn't make any sense.
N. Rodgers: It's because of the physical layout of that ballot because they did what's called a butterfly ballot where they had listings on either side, and people had to figure out which button to push through the chat, which was.
J. Aughenbaugh: Computer punch card.
N. Rodgers: Right and people were like, there's no way Pat Buchanan took Dade County or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or that he pulled higher than 0.01%.
N. Rodgers: In Miami. That cannot have happened. Then they were looking at the ballot going. We think there's a problem with the ballot and where the ballot is built. Then they're trying to hold them up to the light to try to figure out.
J. Aughenbaugh: What was the intent.
N. Rodgers: What people meant. Turned into a whole thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: We also saw this in 2020. In 2020, after the voting occurred, then President Trump and his allies, went ahead and focused on the fact that in some of the battleground or swing states, the canvassing was taking forever, and we saw this, for instance, in Pennsylvania because Pennsylvania, again, doesn't allow for the counting of mailed ballots until election day.
J. Aughenbaugh: Pennsylvania was really slow in reporting the results. As they began to count the mail ballots, what was once a Trump lead in Pennsylvania?
N. Rodgers: Turned into a Biden lead.
J. Aughenbaugh: Turned into a Biden lead.
N. Rodgers: He felt like that was election theft.
J. Aughenbaugh: That was evidence of election theft.
N. Rodgers: Which it was not. It was evidence that it takes a long time to count mail in ballots.
J. Aughenbaugh: Ballots.
N. Rodgers: In that election, more people on the Democratic side mailed in their ballots. The Republicans this year have been pushing mailed in ballots. In some states because they're encouraging that those numbers to not be so different.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, in the likelihood is my tribe, political scientists, we're still predicting more Democrats will use mail voting instead of in person. Again, that reflects the basis of the political parties. Republicans tend to view voting as a civic obligation you do in person, whereas for many Democrats, particularly younger Democratic voters, okay, this idea that you would actually go someplace in person, to vote when you could just go ahead and do it from the comfort of your living room from your apartment. That makes a heck of a lot more sense. Then, what do you mean? I have to go ahead and change my routine and show up at a voting places.
N. Rodgers: Also, there's some holdover from COVID.
J. Aughenbaugh: COVID.
N. Rodgers: People not wanting to go into big spaces.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But I put to you that someday when voting can happen on your phone, of either side. Young people of either side, millennial, generation Y, the AI generations, they will not go to the polls. Republican or Democrat. They'll be like, Wait, I could just do this on my phone. Someday that will probably happen. Although there's a lot of trying to make sure that you have a fair secure election.
J. Aughenbaugh: What most states have done in terms of the canvassing to, if you will, counter what we saw in Florida in 2000, and what Trump and his supporters alleged in a number of swing states in 2020, is that most states have made the canvassing process public.
N. Rodgers: Oh, observable. You can go and watch it being done.
J. Aughenbaugh: There are requirements in most states that canvassing be carried out by bipartisan teams of election officials.
N. Rodgers: It has always been the case that a campaign can send a representative to observe.
J. Aughenbaugh: Not every state allowed that.
N. Rodgers: Oh, okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: But most states have now explicitly allowed that in law.
N. Rodgers: That's good because it takes out the question of what are you doing? Are you doing this in secret? Are you doing this on the slide? No, I'm sitting here in the room. I'm watching you open the boxes, pull out the mail, start opening it, start putting it through the machines. I'm watching every single one to make sure that the math is working out. I think that's a good thing. I think the more transparent, the better.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the canvassing. Remember, the last step, for most elections is certification. Now, certification is basically just the official stamp of approval.
N. Rodgers: Aughenbaugh for president. He has won the state of Virginia.
J. Aughenbaugh: Typically, certification was what I refer to as symbolic politics because basically all are you doing is making sure that the tally is mathematically correct and that the canvas process was carried out as required by law, but since 2020, you have had a number of states consider changes to the certification process where certifiers, at the state or local level, could overturn canvassing results.
N. Rodgers: Or refused to certify the canvassing results?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: No. I don't believe that's how the election happened because I don't like it, and so I'm not going to certify it.
J. Aughenbaugh: This has been rather remarkable, Nia, what we have seen is that in almost every instance where that has been attempted, where certifiers have basically said, We're throwing out the canvassing results. Judges have stepped in and said, unless you give us evidence that the canvassing process was flawed, you can't do it.
N. Rodgers: Guess what, folks, there's been no evidence of that. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in our elections. There just isn't. There are occasionally weirdnesses.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah abnomalies.
N. Rodgers: Because that's 158 million people. There's going to be a few people who chuckle up and do bad things. There are going to be a few people who lie, but the vast majority of people well, are going to cast their ballot in good faith. Their ballot is going to be counted in good faith and that's how elections go.
J. Aughenbaugh: But there's even something else here. Come on listeners, keep this in mind. When you have 158 Americans.
N. Rodgers: 158 million.
J. Aughenbaugh: 158 million Americans, for that matter, 158 million pick your country's citizens. They're going to make mistakes.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Just to give you one example, in my home state of Pennsylvania, if you do a mailed voting ballot, you first got to fill out the ballot, date it, put it in an envelope. Then you got to put it into a second envelope, and then you got to go ahead and sign the back of the envelope and date.
N. Rodgers: Along the seal.
J. Aughenbaugh: If your date on the second envelope seal does not match the date of your ballot. According to Pennsylvania law, your ballot could be thrown out because you didn't follow the law. Now, I don't know about the rest of you all, but that's a really complicated process just to go ahead and vote you could just make a mistake.
N. Rodgers: You filled it out yesterday, but you put today's date on the envelope, and you throw it in the mail, and they're like, oh, no, the dates are different. Or it's a provisional ballot, we're going to stick it to the side.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or how about this? In Arizona, this election day, Nia, their ballot is two pages long.
N. Rodgers: What the heck.
J. Aughenbaugh: In Arizona, you fill out the ballot and then you go to a scanner, and you fill the scanner with your two-page ballot, there's going to be mistakes. Scanners are going to jam.
N. Rodgers: You may have only filled out one page, but not the other page. There's going to be vote totals that don't add up simply because.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's going to be biggered up because of the size of the ballot.
N. Rodgers: Because some voters are going to be like, I just went ahead and spent 10 minutes filling out one page I forgot that there was a second page, or I just don't have the brain space or I'm already running late so to hell with this, I'm filling out one page. I voted for the important stuff. I don't care about the rest of it. But if you don't fill out the second page, and those totals don't add up, and on that second page, you have close outcomes. Not surprisingly, those who lose are going to go ahead and say, why is there a difference between these vote totals and these vote totals.
J. Aughenbaugh: But they need elections more often like we have in Virginia, that keeps our ballots short.
N. Rodgers: Short, yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because we don't vote for everything and it's CAT every time. We vote every year. But anyway, so you're right. That's going to be horrible.
N. Rodgers: Let's say everything gets certified at the state level. But we're talking about the presidential election. Now we got to add on top of that federal law requirements, Nia. The first federal law requirement is by December 11, states must issue official paperwork identifying who their state electors will be to the electoral college. Now, for those of you who have not listened to our previous podcast episodes about the Electoral College, one, shame on you. No, I'm just kidding. But two, okay?
J. Aughenbaugh: We don't shame people here. Well, we shame some people, but.
N. Rodgers: The electors for the electoral college are typically state elected officials or party insiders who have sworn that they will uphold the popular vote total within their state.
J. Aughenbaugh: In a previous episode, we talked about faithless electors.
N. Rodgers: Unfaithful.
J. Aughenbaugh: Meaning people who got into the elector position and then decided to vote for someone else than the person that they were expected to vote for and what happened to them? You should go listen to that episode if you have not because it's interesting the punishments, the various punishments that can be on somebody who is not. But generally speaking, what happens is, except for the couple of states where it can be divided, if a state is going to go for Augenba, then Augenba's electors will be people from Augenba's party who kissed up to him and were whatever, and they're party insiders, and they're going to go to the Electoral College vote when the Electoral College vote is held, and they're going to say, Pennsylvania goes for John Augenba and his electoral votes that's how he will pile up his list of electoral votes.
N. Rodgers: What happened in 2020 was that in a number of battleground states, Trump and his supporters pressured state officials to submit electors, a slate of electors who would basically ignore the popular vote count within that state because they claimed that the popular vote count was incorrect. Incorrect. Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: There had been election fraud.
N. Rodgers: There had been election fraud.
J. Aughenbaugh: Even though there was no election fraud.
N. Rodgers: In response in 2022, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act. Basically, it means that state officials, when supplying the names of the electors have to accept the voting results that have been certified within their state.
J. Aughenbaugh: You can't say our state did it badly, and we're just going to go off and do our own thing. That's how this works. When do they meet the electoral college?
N. Rodgers: The electoral college meets on December 17. The electors will meet in their states and they'll cast their electoral college votes for president and vice president.
J. Aughenbaugh: They don't have a big convention somewhere?
N. Rodgers: No.
J. Aughenbaugh: That would be awesome. The Electoral College Convention. I'd go to that.
N. Rodgers: After they cast their votes, the results are sent to Washington. Now, this is where Nia talked about unfaithful or faithless electors. Because at times in previous elections, you've had electors ignore the popular vote for the office of president within their state. For instance, in 2016, we actually had some probably the largest number of faithless electors in decades because there were five faithless electors in states that Hillary Clinton won, who didn't want to vote for Hillary Clinton. There were three faithless electors in states that Trump won, who didn't want to vote for Trump in pretty much every one of those instances, those faithless electors were punished by their states, which the US Supreme Court said was perfectly constitutional for states to punish faithful electors.
J. Aughenbaugh: Faithless.
N. Rodgers: Faithless. Not faithful.
J. Aughenbaugh: Faithful was fine. That's good. We want you to be faithful. Because, really, what you're there to do is represent the will of the people and you don't get to say, the people are a bunch of chuckleheads. I'm going to change the will of the people. That is not how which gets Representative Republics work.
N. Rodgers: But this is where once again, the original purpose of the Electoral College no longer applies.
J. Aughenbaugh: Cause it was originally so that you could prevent the masses from electing giant chucklehead or else.
N. Rodgers: Overturning the will of the masses. The electoral college was designed originally by the Framers to be a check on the masses.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because they were worried that the masses. Unwashed as they were, would make bad decisions. Yes, uninformed unintellectual, uneducated decisions.
N. Rodgers: They would be hoodwinked to go ahead and pick a charismatic candidate, candidate who perhaps would be terrible at governing. All right. Good.
J. Aughenbaugh: But we generally don't do that anymore.
N. Rodgers: We don't do that anymore, and we have states that enforce, we don't do that anymore.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, basically, the electoral college is a distillation of the popular vote in most states.
N. Rodgers: It affects campaign strategy. That's all really it does.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's what creates swing states.
N. Rodgers: That's what happens on December 17th. Then on December 25th. I'm not making this up. That is Christmas Day in the United States. By federal law, all electoral college votes must be in the hands of the president of the Senate and the head of the National Archives and yes, listeners, the president of the United States Senate is the vice president which means that this December 25th, Kamala Harris will preside.
J. Aughenbaugh: Quite the present one way or another.
N. Rodgers: Will preside either over her own victory or her own loss.
J. Aughenbaugh: What I think is interesting is that the head of the National Archives also gets this. There's no way to stash this. There's no way for it to be lied about. Because it goes to both and it says by December 25. My assumption is that since nobody's working on Christmas Day in the United States, generally speaking, it's probably done a little early.
N. Rodgers: I did some research on that point because I figured Nia, you would point that out. Most states send their results by certified US postal mail within two to three days of December 17 when their electoral college members actually come together and vote.
J. Aughenbaugh: They want it done before.
N. Rodgers: Yes. Because Norway is pretty much the entirety of Washington, DC on holiday. But most states, give state governments. The state governments usually go on holiday starting on December 21 or December 22. They want all that wrapped up.
J. Aughenbaugh: We don't want to be dealing with this over the holiday. Yes. Then but that's not the end of it. Saying to the president of the Senate, hey, here's the vote. Does not finish the election process, correct?
N. Rodgers: Yes, the presidential election process does not become final until January 6th, when the new congress, which is seated at the beginning of the month of January, and usually it's not on new year's day. It's usually on second or third, they meet in a joint session and they count the electoral college votes. Once again, who presides the vice president who is the president of the Senate. Now, prior to 2021, Nia, this meeting on January 6 was viewed as pro forma symbolic politics.
J. Aughenbaugh: I was going to say? They all show up. They have some hot chocolate, they count the count.
N. Rodgers: It was usually a celebration. We, among all the countries in the world, once again had a peaceful transition of power. It was considered.
J. Aughenbaugh: Go us democracy is working.
N. Rodgers: This was considered a celebration.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yep until 2021.
N. Rodgers: Yes, in a country this large, okay, with so many different states and different political cultures, we can come together, we can vote, and we will accept the results until 2021. Because in 2021, January 6th Trump supporters rioted at the US Capitol. Some say engaged in a resurrection. Not a resurrection. Insurrection.
J. Aughenbaugh: Insurrection very different.
J. Aughenbaugh: I used the verb in our prep guide, prep notes, ransacked. I love that word, ransacked. I think my grandmother, that was one of her favorite words. She usually referred to what a room looked like after I was there as I ransacked the room. But nevertheless, disrupted the count of the electoral college votes and demanded that Vice President Pence reject the results.
N. Rodgers: Which he does not legally have the power to do?
J. Aughenbaugh: No, he does not.
N. Rodgers: Nor would Kamala Harris, this year, have the legal power. If she has to swallow a loss, she's going to have to swallow it publicly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, she will.
N. Rodgers: Because she doesn't get to say, I'm don't like these results, and I'm going to change them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Once again, the Electoral Count Reform Act that I previously referenced makes it harder for House and Senate lawmakers to object to a state's certified results.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, because 147 Congress people voted to overturn Biden's victory. They don't get to do that either.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: That's not how elections work.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. I'm saying this listeners tongue in cheek, if nothing else, once again, Donald Trump gave us an occasion to go ahead and recognize that perhaps we needed to revise our processes and laws to make it very clear what is or is not acceptable.
N. Rodgers: Before we had lived under a gentlemen's agreement that went out the window. Some would argue an attempted coup. Some would argue just a bad loser. I think we could generally agree that Donald Trump does not lose gracefully. I think that is a thing that probably all of us, even Trump supporters could agree and we at this podcast, by the way, support neither side, particularly. We're a little bit crabby about all of our choices, actually, these days. The other day, a friend of mine and I were talking about the fact that what we really need is Pete Townshend for president. We could get behind Pete Townshend or Willie Nelson. Somebody interesting.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hey, if Willie Nelson ran for president, I'm actually campaigning.
N. Rodgers: I'm telling you if Dolly Parton ran for president, I would go door to door canvassing and I do not canvas, but I will canvas for her.
J. Aughenbaugh: If any party's ticket was Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, or Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, I'm in.
N. Rodgers: I don't care what they believe. I don't care what their stated goals are, I'm in.
J. Aughenbaugh: For so many reasons, but nevertheless.
N. Rodgers: But that brings us to, I think, a point I'd like if we could make before we wrap this up, and that is, if Donald Trump had won the day in terms of influencing Mike Pence to not accept the elections results. Let's just say that that had, in fact, held than Kamala Harris.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then a precedent would have been set.
N. Rodgers: Could do the very same thing this election by just not accepting the results. The danger of that is because she's the candidate, she could crown herself president. That is not a thing we want people to be able to do. We like the fact that there is a multi audit process in choosing a president because it is counted and audited at the local, it is counted and audited at the state, then it is counted and audited at the federal level. Everybody's counting and recounting the ballots to make sure that we're not making stuff up.
J. Aughenbaugh: If anything, we've done ourself a disservice simply because we have made the process with so many accountability steps.
N. Rodgers: I'd rather have that than not.
J. Aughenbaugh: I know that sounds somewhat bizarre for me to say, but because there are so many steps in the process, it delays actually knowing officially who's won.
N. Rodgers: That does make people nervous and it does make people unhappy. They would like to have immediate.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not just candidates who want to know immediately. I still recall, for instance, the 2000 presidential election, which is one of the seminal political events in my life.
N. Rodgers: Me, too.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because I was teaching constitutional law at Virginia Tech, and I was getting asked questions all the time about, why is it taking so long to count votes in Florida? Why is the Florida Supreme Court allowing the state to blow by these federal law deadlines? That became part of the issue was that, Florida was nowhere close to finishing the recount and eventually, the Supreme Court said, sorry, you guys got to stop. Because you need to certify results. We have these deadlines. You knew these deadlines going in, you got to stop.
N. Rodgers: The longer the drags, the more painful it is for everybody in the process.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. If you thought that there were a lot of conspiracy theories in 2016 and 2020.
N. Rodgers: It's because you didn't live through 2000.
J. Aughenbaugh: 2000. Because some of the stuff that was being said on TV, and imagine what the Internet would have done, Nia, to the 2000 presidential vote recount in Florida. It would have been off the scales.
N. Rodgers: Fortunately for the country, Al Gore stopped fighting. For the good of the country, he said, "You know what? We got to stop because this is endangering democracy."
J. Aughenbaugh: Because when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Bush campaign's request, there were many in the Democratic Party who wanted Al Gore to continue -
N. Rodgers: Keep fighting.
J. Aughenbaugh: To continue fighting. Al Gore, to his credit, went on National TV and conceded the election. There are many in the Democratic Party who still have not forgiven Al Gore for doing that.
N. Rodgers: It was the right thing to do.
J. Aughenbaugh: But I think it was the right thing to do.
N. Rodgers: But do you think, as a political scientist, that aren't we given the divisions that we have in this country, aren't we more likely to see it take a long time because the elections are going to be so close that they're going to have to be audited? They're going to have to be checked and rechecked. Do you think we'll ever see a landslide the way Reagan had a landslide? Unless somebody is really outstanding or really unusual as a candidate.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's going to require some significant changes, Nia, in both political parties, because I just don't see candidates in either political party who are willing to go ahead and one, acknowledge the humanity of their opponents and the people who support their opponents.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you don't do that, then the opposition party and their supporters don't see any good reason to cooperate and support you. This is going to require a significant sea change. I know it's pretty easy to bash Trump in the Republican Party on this, but I would also ask our listeners who are Democratic Party supporters to think long and hard about how they characterize talk to and talk about the opposition. Because it's not only Trump and the Republican Party.
N. Rodgers: Well, nobody in this election is a garbage person. Nobody in this election is stupid or evil or a Nazi. We don't have Nazis in this country. Well, we have a small amount of Nazis in this country. But generally speaking, they are not running for president of the United States. Stop using that kind of rhetoric. It's not helpful on either side. And it makes it makes so much noise that nobody can actually hear the facts.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Again, listeners, one of the reasons why Nia and I keep on bringing up in our various episodes about elections, why it's so important in regards to whether or not the office of President is controlled by one political party, and both Houses of Congress or one House of Congress is controlled by the other political party is that if you have such deep partisanship and polarization, then there's no cooperation and the way the US government is set up, you need to cooperate with one another, achieve compromise and consensus to get stuff done. We have significant policy problems in the United States, like any nation, and those things don't get addressed if the opposition parties are not working with one another.
N. Rodgers: You're just too busy calling names.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because there's no desire to go ahead and work with somebody else if you know that, they called you garbage or they called you an idiot, or they called your supporters as,.
N. Rodgers: Liars or they say that you're stealing on election all of it from both sides.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or, they're non citizens they shouldn't allowed to vote. After a while, I'm just like, hey, both of you guys are not helpful. Anyways, we have drug on in terms of this episode. We need to go ahead and wrap it up. But listeners, the last thing I want you to keep in mind is, I know on election night you're going to want results. But if you want accurate election results, let the process play out. All right? These are good people trying to do an important job. Do an important job for a democracy. Give them time to do their job.
N. Rodgers: Remember that widespread fraud does not exist.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Are there pockets of weirdnesses? Yes. Have there been occasional people who voted who shouldn't vote? Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That stuff happens with 158 million people. I put to you that with 158 million people, at least several of those people have webbed feet. That does not mean that everybody in the group has webbed feet.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The few instances that you can point to of things that are bad. When you think about the millions and millions of votes that get cast and properly counted, it's a pretty good system.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, don't immediately jump to the conclusion that there has to be something nefarious or there's wrongdoing going on.
N. Rodgers: By the way, there's nothing wrong with having webbed feet. I was just using that as an example unusual, it's not bad.
J. Aughenbaugh: What we're asking you to do here on this podcast is show some patience, show some grace.
N. Rodgers: Assume that everybody's trying to do the right thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Let the process play out. If we made mistakes, hopefully we can go and correct them, but a lot of those mistakes are honest mistakes. They're not coming from this place of we're trying to screw our opponents. No, these are people who are trying to go ahead and do the right thing.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, they're trying to do the right thing. Let's get out of their way, let them do it. But last note, because it's election day when this is coming out, go vote.
J. Aughenbaugh: Vote. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Go vote. If your vote matters, your vote counts and if you don't want to vote in any part of the election, vote in another part of the election. What that means is, when you pick out your ballot, if there's a person you don't want to vote for or there's a section you don't want to do, that's fine. You don't have to do it. Just do the rest and do your civic duty, but also your fun. It's fun to go to the polls and vote. It's always fun when people watch, and it's interesting. But take part and let your voice be heard.
J. Aughenbaugh: If nothing else, remember the sage words of my 12-year-old daughter. Go vote, make it an event, and spend some time with some cool people because that's the way McKenzie goes ahead and views voting.
N. Rodgers: She gets donuts, doesn't she when she votes?
J. Aughenbaugh: She does.
N. Rodgers: Hello. Everybody should get a donut when they vote.
J. Aughenbaugh: We have a tradition, we get up.
N. Rodgers: When I'm president, that's what we're going to do.
J. Aughenbaugh: We go to vote. Then afterwards, we go to our favorite donut shop. She gets orange juice and a couple chocolate doughnuts. Me, I get a large black coffee and a couple old fashions, 'cause of course, that's the donuts I eat. We laugh and we giggle and we talk about the people we saw and what we're going to do the rest of the day. If that's not a good reason to go vote, I don't know what it is. Anyways, thanks Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you Aughie.
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