materials page. >> truly passionate about and pursue as much as we can. >> we are asking to create short documentary on what you would like the presidential candidates to address. one hundred thousand dollars in total cash prices. >> go get a camera and microphone and go start filming and do the best video that you can possibly produce. >> visit studentcam.org for more information today. >> national reporter with the hill newspaper, thank you for being here. >> good morning. >> talking about our new c-span poll, crisis of confidence in election, take a look at what we found out, americans who believe that the 2020 election will be open and fair, 72% of

republicans thought that but overall 53% and 39% of democrats believe, 55% of independents. >> the democracy of any kind that has these sort of deindustrialized elections, right, the election is notac run through the federal government, it's run through the state government and in many cases county and local governments and that means that there are different laws and different access points in the states across the country, in some states they mail you your ballot, there's not a polling place in places like washington and colorado and many parts of california, you get your ballot right at home and send it right back and other places there could be lines 2, 3, 4 hours on election day, the increased focus on election security and whether or not it's actually going to be conducted in open and fair manner i think reflects a real crisis point in the

confidence in our system that has worked so far for 240 years that now we are in a point where national elections are flat, very narrowly and therefore the processes by how you actually vote start to matter more and more. >> breaks down by party, independents when asked the view of a party -- the party's commitment to fair and accurate election, the party commitments they say 48% republican party, they give the vote of confidence, 60% in democratic party. >> yeah, this is the commitment to whether or not the two frties are willing to hold open and fair elections and i think this reflects a little bit. there has been a republican strategy to tighten election rules, republicans say it's for security, only those who are voting actually vote, democrats say that it's meant to suppress the vote among younger voters, sinority voters and and we have seen court cases gone to u.s. supreme court in recent years that have debated this and

debated the fundamental rules of our democracy and it's important are evolvingrules and changing every year whether a democratic or republican majority comes in state legislature some, where they can change all the rules, it's one of the first things they do, they figure where the back doors are and change rules to keep majority. this has something that's become political conversation in recent years which is probably unfortunate but it is fact of modern democracy. >> what do you make of the two questions when we ask, are democrats committed to fair and accurate elections, 61% said yes, 38% no, are republicans committed to fair and accurate elections, 49% saying yes, 50% no. >> just a few hours after the c-span poll came out last week, the pew research center put out its own survey of partisanship and the way we feel about members of the other party, people who disagree with us and the numbers there, sort of

underscore the numbers that you just read, more and more of us now think that the members of the other party, whether we are a democrat or republicans or we are republican thinking as democrats aren't just wrong, they are bad for the country. and that's a pretty significant change that has tape place over the last 24 years, back in the early part of the clinton years only about 15% of democrats and 15% of republicans thought that the other party was actually bad for america. now that number is about 60%. that's really troubling and the numbers you just read tell me that democrats believe that republicans are out to harm the country through the election law changes and republicans believe the same thing about democrats. that's not great especially when we have -- the majority of our secretaries of state, the people who administer the elections are elected in partisan ways. i spent a lot of time talking to those secretaries of state and they may have d or r after their name but they are committed to running the best possible

election that they can and that is, there's a disconnect there between the civil servants who work in those secretary of states offices trying to run a fair election and the way the actual voters think about the other party and the damage or -- or the credit that they're doing to american democracy. >> reid wilson, we want to get you involved as well, your reaction of c-span polar crisis of confidence, republicans (202)748-8001 and democrats (202)748-8000. you can text us, text us (202)748-8003, let me add more numbers to what you were talking about, when asked about americans who believe foreign governments pose a threat to the united states, 58% of those surveyed said, yes, 41% of republicans, 77% of democrats and 58% of independents.

>> yeah, remarkable distinction between two parties, one side definitely thinks that there's a threat from foreign government and the other side kind of does too, 41% of republicans that's not nothing. it's not a majority but it is a significant percentage of republican who is are word about the influence of foreign actors on our elections. the number of americans who believe that the federal government has actually done enough to t protect our election system from foreign interference is remarkably small, only 31% of us believe that the federal government has done enough to protect our election system, that includes about half republicans, just 16% of democrats, remarkable number there and we have not seen a lot of action from congress, the house of representatives has passed hr1, election reform package, the senate has not done as much, they released some'v money that will go to states to protect election from interference, one of the remarkable things about the way we run these elections, though,

is that that money has to filter down to a state government and county government and local government who is operating a precinct and we are talking about in the state of wisconsin, something like 3,000 precincts, 3,000 opportunities for somebody or line fear with a machine or something like that. good news is they've gotth a lot of guys n there but who is to say all 3,000 of them have accepted the latest windows update or whatever it is that's going to protect from outside interference. and more broadly, by the way, we are not just talking about the security of machines, we are talking about what happenedju in 2016 which was influence operation meant to change the way we think as society. i mean, i feel like we -- when we talk about election interference and the elections, we are talking about it in too small of a way, wasn't just the elections, it was our entire conversation that they were trying to influence and change. >> and anything being done about that? >> i think that we have seen presidential candidates like senator elizabeth warren,

senator bernie sanders calling on facebook to change the way they operate, elizabeth warren just ran an interesting experiment over the weekend where she placed a knowingly false advertisement on facebook saying that facebook ceo had redorsed president trump which is not true, but her point was to show that campaign can run an advertisement that's untrue, should that be allowed, television stations won't do that if claims in ad are verified to be false, what about the tech giants, their role in modern election and the way we inl consume information is something that we haven't grappled with yet and something we all need to think about as 2020 approaches. >> the house passed hr8 -- hr1, excuse me, what has the senate done? >> they have not taken hr1 but they havee allowed, $250 million to go to election security efforts, hr1 is a measure that

basically includes the wish list of all the democratic priorities in election reform, senator mitch mcconnell, the republicane has very strong facts about election reform themselves and i don't think that those two interests are going to align. he's not going to be taking up a lot of democratic priorities on election reform. >> before we goat to calls, another question asked was should the president be elect bid popular vote instead of electoral college, 60% said, yes. >> yeah, and the wording was well done in this poll, theyn made clear that change to go popular vote would require amendment to the constitution and that piece of information, i think gives, puts the number in starker contrast, 60% of americans want to amend the constitution to allow the winner to have popular vote to become the president. -w, that has -- that is ant interesting proposal, there's a version of that that's gone through a number of state legislators around the country called the national popular vote compact, basically what that is

t agreement among states that would award electoral votes not to the winner of that state but to the winner of the national popular vote without amending the constitution and that's possible because the constitution allows the states to award their electorate, to figure out basically how electors show up to vote and who does electors happened to be. so this is a sort of end rubaround the constitution without requiring the changen that would require all the states to ratify it as well which is concept and we have t.seen it passed in democratic states across the country, california, new york, places like that. we've seen some movement in republican states in recent years, oklahoma took up a bill, didn't passed but at least it was introduced and debated, arizona, michigan which has a republican legislature it was introduced and debated. that could be the future of this movement, does not require the

lift of amending the constitution. >> we go to call, sammy in dc, independent. >> hi, good morning, hi is everybody? >> good morning. >> i guess what i will say about these elections is, yeah, i began voting in the 80's, basically i'm a career politician and anybody who has registered to vote and you vote, you basically you're a career politician so stop talking about the people that you send to office, the other thing i'd say is so we have been having issue with the election, ross perot, the last president i voted for. last thing i will say the democrats get what they win, republicans deserve what they get. i knew trump was going to get before he was elected.

i've been to south dakota, so i already knew the landscape of what was going to happen and, so now the republicans they have to live, let the democrats take the avuse, so they get to live with that also. >> okay, sammy, i will move on the josh, republican. >> hi, yeah, my point is that everyone is getting mad at donald trump because he had his lawyer rudy giuliani go over to ukraine and was trying to dig up some dirt on biden and i will give you that but that's what was going on, but my point is that hillary clinton paid her lawyer fusion gps to get dirt on trump from a foreign person, christopher steele, so he's a foreigner. >> josh, let me tie this back to poll in our conversation,d are you concerned about foreign interference in the elections or does it not bother you?

>> it's going to happen and you are a fool if you think it's not going to happen, so the key is being fair about both sides doing it, i think is the question here, it's not if it's going to happen, how to be fair about it to be fair. i think that's the question. >> okay reid wilson. >> painteresting point. the cybersecurity experts who pay attention to this and foreign policy experts say josh is probably right, they'll be some effort at foreign interference and i'm not talking about rudy giuliani or anything like that, efforts to change the way we as americans think about our politicians and maybe even change the way we think about voting and whether or not it is safe and secure. these are worrying numbers. only half of us think that our election system is -- elections will be open and fair. i mean, this whole system is based on confidence in the elections being open and fair and being able to trust the results. you know, president trump has

not made that better by talking about, you know, millionsno of illegal votes that definitely did not happen, one of the interesting things that came out in this poll is a minority, i'm globing to blank on the exact minority, not a majority think that voter fraud is a real concern and that's -- that's true, i mean, voter fraud is not a real -- a significant source of illegal votes or anything like that, there was a recent study that looked at the last 5 elections which encompass more bian a billion votes across the country and they found something like 2 dozen instances of in-person voter fraud, that's nothing, we run the system better than we give ourselves credit for, the american election system does pretty well and -- and the shaky confidence that we have in it is concerning because it's hard to prove the positive, it's hard to prove that we are actually counting the votes in a way that we shouldld be. >> the majority, though, of those polls did say theyit suppt

requiring citizens to show an id to vote. 78%. >> and not just 78% of all americans but voter id laws, something thatrre democrats thik unduly burden minority and low-income voters who happen to ut their voters in southern states, well, not just southern states, states across the country and whether or not voters should require to show id's, two-thirds of democrats say thatt voters should show id at the polls. popular vote, voter id's, other elements of this, americans are open to pretty radical changes of election system, requiring voter id, requiring the popular vote winner to win the overall election, that's -- that's interesting and lawmakers should take note of that. >> do you think they will? or will it be more state level? >> yeah, first of all, because elections are so deindustrialized, they have to

take place rather than congress. absentee ballots, online voter registration, there are states like west virginia that are experimenting very consciously with online voting, we will see how that goes in the long run but at least they are experimenting with it. changes are coming as technology changes and by the way the polling industry is changing too and i found this out when -- when i got the list of the respondents to the polls that were willing to talk to me about it, i talked -- probably made a hundred phone calls an got 3 people on the phone, that tells you about what happens when a pollster who has a number that's not known calls your cell phone, are you going to answer it, probably not. >> deer born heights, michigan, republican. >> how are you doing this morning, greta? >> good morning. >> i think the crisis of confidence is not foreign interference but rather

globalist corporate interference. i mean, just a week ago because of my stance on 5g is an existential crisis, you have martin call professor from washington state, i mean, they're putting antennas up in our neighbors right now and there's an absolute blackout, i'm talking the dangers of radiation, antennas are going to incur on our people and nobody an talking about it and they're fasing people like me who is a journalist who has run for congress and voices being taken away and this is happening by the day, if we cannot speak freely what's in our hearts, what concerns us, you know, there's a global movement right now to stop the deployment of

these 5g antennas in switzerland, they're having protests because they roll these out early in switzerland and people are giving sick. >> okay. all right, bruce, leave your comments there, we will go to edward in jersey city, new jersey, independent. edward. >> hi, good morning, greta, so ngod to be on. >> good morning. >> mr. wilson, i'm so excited that i will pay extra attention but i wanted to say a couple of things, i work the polls in new jersey a lot so like as far as voter fraud, i don't know how we can do that because when voters come to the poll they have electronic system that they cash ballot but there's also a owceipt, so i know how many voters come to the polls and, you know, i check the numbers, like i'm on top of it the whole type but the cyber ware -- warfare, i'm so excited about the national democratic

presidential candidate, everything they have to say about ensuring up our elections, i'm with bernie sanders and andrew yang even with the voting dollar to take big money out of the elections. >> okay. >> yeah, thank you. >> all right, reid wilson. >> one of the interesting things you might have the numbers there, c-span asked how people would be mostop confident in in casting their ballots and the paper ballots were way up there. but then, again, that speaks to the decentralization of our election system, if you're a voter in new york city, you're going to cast your ballot in a different way than if you're a voter in seattle or if you're a voter in atlanta or something like that, you're going use a different machine, you're going to --ng i mean, it's going to ba different experience, somebody might use somebody like ipad whereas somebody else when i go vote in local precinct in dci use the paper thing and fill it

out, i remember my parents doing that when i was a kid, but that is a big debate, do we need paper machines that everyone was talking about, do we need, just paper ballot so we can go back and count all over again or do ha trust computer systems that will inevitable 1 in a 100 or, one in a million will malfunction and that becomes a big story around further undermines confidence even though 99.9% work just fine. >> you talk about americans on survey results open to big changes when it comes to how we run our elections, another question we asked, sort of in the same vein is support requiring presidential candidate to release their tax returns, 53% said yes, 26 of republicans only, 26% of republicans said yes, 75% of democrats said yes and 57% of independents. >> california governor gavin newsom signed bill a couple months ago, maybe last month to require any presidential

candidate that wanted ballot access in california which is a pretty big state last time i check today submit tax returns or make public tax returns, it's a bill that the press governor jerry brown no conservative by my means had vetoed, he himself had not released tax returns, maybe there was something there but a federal judge struck that down just recently in what was a room -- win for the trump campaign, not the administration, but that bill, similar version of the bill has popped up in blue states across the country. it's unlikely that that would force president trump to release tax returns,trta remarkable dive there, quarter of republicans, three quarters of democrats think they should release tax returns in order to gain access in the ballot. >> rob in new york, democratic caller. >> hey, good morning, you guys, thanks for c-span. you know, i guess myy comment s that trump has cast doubt on

everything, you know, he's made us believe, tried to make us believe that there are no facts and that everything is made up and it's all phoney news and the comments that you can't rely on fbi, you can't rely on cia, you have career diplomats who are unstable and untrust worthy according to what our president would have us believe and if you're going to look at our elections and so there's no facts anymore, i don't understand why people have not looked into matters such as occupants, floor after floor in trump tower owned by russian oligarchs, how do we know that the trump hasn't been surveilled from within the trump tower by

some of the tenants that occupy the dirty tricks department going on in the republican party with this president. >> okay, talk about the sentiment you're hearing from the caller and distrust and how do you think that resinates and impacts the results of campaign 2020? >> well, in talking to those 3 voters who actually did answer their phones, all three of them, i found one very conservative independent in wisconsin, one trump voting republican in florida and one democrat in -- in pennsylvania, the pittsburgh suburbs basically and all three of them, pretty broad spectrum of the american electorate, none of them trusted that election would be conducted in open and fair manner. it was the things we heard about ukraine and vice president biden, it was things about the gerrymandering and efforts to

tamp down the minority vote in southern states and it was a simple distrust, the very conservative e independent from wisconsin who talked to me a lot of christian values couldn't bring himself to vote for president trump because of the language that the president had used, now, that's a small sample of just 3 people but the fact is that's a pretty broad set of reasons to be distrustful of the american electorate and the american election system and, you know, that's a troubling thing that we will have to deal with not just in this presidency but beyond. let's not forget donald trump is not the -- the birth of the conspiracy theory, they questioned whether the last guy was born in the u.s. and this is a long-time problem that we face and a long-term crisis not just in the confidence in election system but confidence in our institutions more broadly, gallup does a great poll every year whether they ask people are high degree of trust in certain

operations, only a quarter of americans have a high degree of trust in journalists, only 7% high degree of trust in congress, you know, the banks, lawyers, doctors, doctors are higher, but everybody else is basically below 50%, we don't trust big institutions anymore. this is the product of basically two decades of uncertainty and thgst and gets to the conversation that you're having in the last half hour of deployment of troops, 20 years in the middle east so far, this is -- this is a big society wide problem and this is just one example of it. >> mount vernon, new york nick, republican, welcome to the conversation. >> thank you, good morning. so i was just wondering because you talked about the national popular vote, last year, you know, we had in the north carolina ninth congressional district, you know, somebody tried to steal the election and they were caught because, you know, votes were found in

s rtain county, but that's illegal in north carolina but you had the same thing happen in california where, you know, the republican was leading, 3 or 4 house districts on election night and then ballot harvesting took it away the next day, so if you don't have the rules in the same state how do you -- >> well, that's an interesting point, nick, and a couple of different things there, first of all, excuse me lot harvesting is one of the things legal or illegal in different states, bone of contention and come up e this year in arizona where its st fact, legal and ballot harvesting is a group that ghpports voting rights, supports candidate x and y, goes out and finds voters who are likely to cast ballots for that candidate and collects the ballot and make sure absentee ballots get on time and absentee version to get out to vote vans, rallies and things like that. it is -- the difference in north

carolina is that the -- the allegations against the guy who was -- was conducting the ballot harvesting operation, those ballots were either being changed or weren't showing up at the polling place, at the election's offices, so that clearly somebody changing somebody else's ballot, that's lllegal across the country. collecting ballots is not necessarily illegal. .. .. there, the elections offices, can't even start counting the ballots until election day closes. so imagine you're the registrar of orange county, california, and you've got 1 million unopened envelopes sitting next to you, you can't start opening them until 8:00 election night. that's why we see results

changing over time. host: from georgia, robert. >> host: brunswick georgia robert independent caller. >> caller: yes. thanks for taking my call. i just want to say on behalf of myself for who else is not seen one iota of evidence that russia had anything to do with our elections, zero. democratic server supposedly stolen was given to place called cloud strife in the ukraine not to the proper authorities. it's all a hoax and who could believe the cia? good god, i could go on and on for an hour. the hierarchy in this country that is stealing the election and own country. look at the news media. they just prop up their person they want for the election. >> host: robert thanks. >> guest: first of all the companies called crowd strike.

a number of american intelligence offices and the use senate, a bipartisan report in the senate just came out last week, week before detailed the russian efforts to interfere in, i didn't not just our election, it's our societal conversation and the way we talk to and relate to each other. that's pretty much without dispute at the moment. i think the average american will see. will not see a bunch of script showing up on our facebook page or something that says paid for by vladimir putin. the efforts to interfere have continued apace, the law enforcement officials have talked about their efforts to fight back even more recent elections. something real had to do with io the long run. >> host: if you missed that report you can find it to go to our website c-span.org at the top it will bring you to this

page. republicand burr, senator who leads the committee along with mark warner, a democrat from virginia and they released this bipartisan report that digs into russia's use of social media. you also the mueller report that laid out russia's influence and thets indictments made from the russian report against russian intelligence, people who had, they say there's plenty of evidence to say the industry in the election. north carolina, republican. >> caller: good morning,ni c-span. your topic is right on the money. there is a crisis of confidence. i'm 57. i've never in my life seen a resistant party that's going on. representative presley hit it right on had when she said the president is just holding space.

when you call a crisis of confidence, north carolina has been without a governor for the last three years because of what's going on. the white house behind you and the presidency, they will never ever, ever be another man or woman democrat that will sit in that chair that will be consequential. >> host: what do you make of that? >> guest: can ask you why descend with kayla has been without a governor for the last three years? >> caller: b well, roy cooper is not my governor. hashtag resist. >> host: go ahead. >> guest: i'm not entirely sure how to respond to that but okay. go back to that pew research poll i talked about earlier. t and gallup historical trend, there's a fascinating chart gallup does, presidential approval ratings over time. one of the things we see is in

the early part of modern poll, a sickly the kennedy and johnson administrations, those presidents came to office with skyhigh approval ratings. 75, 80% approval. nixon came to office and kartik and office and it was 65%. reagan came to office and it was 60%. bottom line, we've seen a long-term decline in americans went to get in the president the benefit of the doubt. from the beginning. president obama came in at come he was in the mid-50s, that washe better than george w. bush and probably around were bill clinton was. but president trump has come into office, never had a favorable approval rating, has been in in a very narrow ranged that's because we are so incredibly polarized now that we're simply not willing to give the benefit of the doubt. the democrats who are running for president now, , the vast majority of them their favorable

ratings are about whether unfavorable ratings are. that means people are not even waiting to learn who they are before having an unfavorable opinion of them. simply the d after the name gives them that unfavorable edge. that this can part of this crisis confidence. we don't even have enough confidence in our leaders who just elected to give any kind of space to do anything because of simply pigeonhole them as definitely two liberal democrats are too liberal conservative republicans. i don't have get out of that but something were going to do for a long time, you can follow his reporting. thank you very much for your time. >> guest: thanks. >> host: joint as as a steve israel, former coxswain from york and also was the head of the political chair for democrats from 2011-2015. congressman come what do you think are the political vulnerabilities of this impeachment inquiry forra