on c-span's q and a. you can also listen to q and a as a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. next, a conversation about presidential election integrity. voting law. and ways to improve the administration of elections. the american enterprise institute hosted the discussion. >> welcome to this american enterprise institution event on election integrity. i am your host. let me give you a road map about how our program will proceed over the next 90 minutes. first i am going to say a few words about why we are having this program. second i will introduce our panelists and we will talk until about 11:00. after that, we will have audience q and a. to get your question in the

queue either email mail it or go to twitter. to be clear, you don't have to wait until after 11:00 to enter your question. the sooner you get it in, the better your chance of getting an answer. with that, let me move to our program. distrust of the results of presidential elections has been particularly intense in recent years. some democrats believe donald trump won the 2016 election through interference by russia disinformation campaigns carried out via social media. more recently an even larger percentage of republicans believe democrats stole the 2020 presidential contest. while it is certainly the case that phrase of we was robbed the political reaction to last year's political contest was exceptionally intense.

it featured a sitting president who regularly complained the other party was trying to steal the election. filed dozens of lawsuits. and january 6th, 2021, significant numbers of republican members of congress voted against accepting the electoral slates of a couple of states. disbelief then became action. action that resulted in protesters storming the u.s. capitol. six months later the controversy continues and the reverberations continue. a recent blog pos by aei showed only one quarter of republicans polled believe that joe biden was legitimately elected president. this denial of election results is indisputably corrosive to american political systems' long term well-being n. short, representative democracy doesn't work if people refuse to accept the results of elections, if they don't trust what they are

being hold. we need only look overseas to various countries where young democracies can collapse due to allegations of stolen elections. having said my say why we are here and having this program let me introduce our panelists. david becker of the center to have election innovation and research. he aims to help elected officials of both parties around the down to ensure that all voters can vote conveniently in a system with maximum integrity. david poland of the american survey center on american life. john fortier is also a rent scholar ear at aei. he is the author he three books, two of which are on the elections. one entitled after the people vote a guide to the electoral college. the other is called absentee and

early voting, trends, promises and perils. fourth we have justin brimmer a for fellow at the hoover institution. highs recent focus is on congress, elections, social media, and data science. he also recently published a report on the allegations of election fraud in 2020 and published peer review articles on the allegations of voter id policies. last, david johnson founder of voters network advancing structural change in u.s. election systems. kevin has spent even seas in overseas democracy promotion. a decade on the board of common cause in massachusetts and is on advisory bodies for american purpose, fair vote, issue one, rank the vote, and the carter center. let's move to our conversation with the panelists. i would like to pitch the first question to my colleague, daniel cox. what does polling tell us about the long term and short-term

trends on public trust in elections? >> thanks for the question. i really appreciate the invitation to jane this really important discussion. i think from the outset it is helpful to restate the problem. we are experiencing historic lows in confidence in government. this is widely known. pugh and gallop have recorded it. over the past decades we see the number of americans who believe that government does what is right declined. we are looking at 50-year lows seeing the lowest purported score was in a poll conducted october 19th, 2011. this is wiredly known, that americans simply don't trust their government. and there have been fluctuations. we have seen a reintegration of public confidence after the september 11th terrorist attacks. we are actually seeing a little bit of resurgence now after the pandemic. there is a slight increase in

confidence in government to do what is right. but the really interesting thing is that this low point in support of confidence in government is disassociated from what americans think about the administration of u.s. elections. despite concerns that americans have about the operation and the function of government in the ability to address some important issues, americans have been remarkably upbeat about the functions of the u.s. election system. for instance for the past two decades, gallon has joined the majority of americans saying they are at least somewhat confident that the votes will be cast and counted accurately. and we have seen some fluctuations across elections but the lowest support that the gallop has reported in its polling is 59%. that is ream as 2020. a couple caveats to this genuinely positive view is that there is a significant decline

over the 15-year gallop conducted at polls. we started with 3/4 of americans being confident with the elections are being administered. that's down to 9%. that's a pretty significant decline. the number of americans who say they are very confident in how elections are being run, that has relatively -- it declined relatively as well, as we are seeing one in five americans saying they are very confident. the really interesting thing about this, and about sort of what happened ream is that the differences in confidence in the administration of elections didn't used to be a partisan affair. there weren't difference between what democrats and republicans thought about the administration of u.s. elections until recently. so, again, looking at some gallop data we have seen ebbs and flows in terms of who trusts elections. but it was mainly the winners being confident and the losers

being less confident is what we saw. given how the two political parties enmeshed in recent years no one side can claim a series of unbroken victories. the pendulum has swung back at forth at the presidential level and there were no consistent winner or loser. the loser was less trustful of the process, but that shifted when their side won. that shifted. polling organizations tracked week by week results of public confidence in the election. and up until the votes were past democrats and republicans were roughly parallel in terms of how much support they had for the battle to be counted accurately. immediately following the election the poll shows a three-point drop by republicans in confidence in elections. i think it is fair to say that

we don't have a general problem with confidence in our election administration. we have a specific problem with republican confidence in administration of u.s. elections and 2020 does seem to mark a turning point. there is another poll showed by reuters that 55% of republicans believe the election was stolen and that donald trump is really the real winner of the 2020 election. there is a little bit of good news in all this, that although we see on the national level significant challenges in terms of how confident americans are, at the local level people to be much more confident in how their voting system is running. typically among republicans both democrats and republicans feel confident that in their local presinks anyway things are being tallied accurately. gallop shows nearly eight in ten americans and a majority of

republicans and democrats say that where they are voting things will be counted accurately. >> thank you very much. next question for professor justin grimmer. you studied the allegations about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. can you tell us about your study, and its assessment, and also approximate the sorts of fraud that were being talked about? >> absolutely. thank you for having me for this important discussion. so, first, just think about what the broad types of fraud claims that are out there? i would put them into three buckets. the first that's i think sort of the most repeated is there were illegal rules changed in anticipation of the election, changes made without the cop sent of state lurges and as a result that's the tree that is bearing the pavinous fruit. everything that comes subsequently is somehow illegal. the second set of claims that come up quite often is there is

some amount of illegal votes being cast. the most often made claim i think in this bucket is there are dead people who are voting, or people who moved out of the state and nevertheless are voting in a state where they are no longer allowed to vote. the final bucket of claims is about counting of the votes. here this could be allegations about the way say dominion or other voting machines operate, or it could be about how election administrators, perhaps, insert ballots that were not legitimately cast. you can think about a number of ways to try to assess it. folks go out and try to identify individuals who are deceased and cast a ballot. that's one way to proceed. another way a number of people have tara readed is they look for statistical signals that there is something weird about this election, and then they say given the deeviation this is

clear evidence something is amiss and gives us indication there is more of the fraud happening in one of these three buckets. in the study we took the claims seriously. we went out to identify as many of the claims of a statistical nature as we could and dove into those. what we found is they fail in one of two ways. the first way that some of these claims fail is they have identified some true pattern in the world but it turns out this pattern is not surprising, doesn't provide the deeviation one would expect if we were seeing a lot of anomalous voter fraud for the first time. perhaps the issue that comes up the most when i discuss this with people. i played poker on friday night with someone who is an election concepter is well weather counties. the claim that it is surprising that joe biden won the election while securing only one of 19 bellwether counties.

i mean a county that had correctly voted along with the winner of the presidential election since 1980. at the start of this election there were 19 of those counties still around. donald trump won 18 of them. this on its face seems surprising. but the claim fails in a couple ways. first, to better understand what's going on with dynamics across counties of u.s. elections what we have seen over the last 40 years is that democratic support is concentrating on a small number of urban counties whereas republican support is creating in a larger number of more rural counties. the result of this is that when democrats win presidential elections they tend to win with many fewer counties than republicans. then it is not surprising that joe biden didn't win a lot of counties. but that doesn't explain the bellwether counties just yet. what happened with with weather counties, in 2016 those counties swung very hard towards donald trump. he won a high proportion of the

vote in those counties. if we were to run a simple model to predict the democratic vote count in the county using democratic vote share and then who is going to win that county? what we found we would expect joe biden to win 1.2 of those bellwether counties. the projection is in line what the normal state of affairs across other counties. we have done that reflection in other ways i am happy to talk more about it. briefly, there is related claim that i think is up with that -- the most attention to it that was made was the texas lawsuit, that joe biden had a one and quadrillion chance of winning the election. that's based on two different kinds of analyses. one analysis looks at deeviation of vote returns from georgia in

2016 to georgia in 2020 and not surprisingly find that joe biden had a different vote share than hillary clinton. we identify in the paper a number of just statistical issues in the way that was dong. the hypothesis was tested. nevertheless, it is not surprising that things change from one election to the next. as another example we show that viewership in the super bowl from 2016 to 2020 also changed dreemtly. given a test wields find very few similarities that the viewers of the super bowl were the same. the second broad pattern that we discuss in our analysis or the second way these claims fail is that the pattern that's identified simple low isn't true. one champl of this is a high-profile study that was released at the ends of 2020 that made the claim that there

was very clear evidence that there was a suspiciously high absentee voting return for joebds in a number of georgia counties. what we did there is dove into that claim and looked at the replication data. what we found this was if fact an artifact of the way the data were entered in the spreadsheet. once we corrected that we found in evidence of an overperformness. this is a similar claim we find about claims about overperformance on kmin onmachines which simply is not there. and the number of battle. these claims usually aren't true and they are usually the result of some basic error in statistical reasoning. we are happy to keep investigating the claims. as they come up we will look at them. we are doing this in an objective way. as of right now the claims failed for these two reasons, they are either not true or they are true, and not a daviation.

>> thank you. thank you for that. john fortier, based on what we've heard so far, it sounds like on the political right there's a disconnection of sorts. distrust is high, but actual proven evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential contest is low. certainly, evidence that there was widespread fraud that could tip the scales one way or another in the contest that just hasn't been proven. do you have insights on how we can interest and explain the divergence? >> thanks, kevin. and thank you to dan and justin. i want to go back to something that dan brought up, and emphasize it maybe a little bit more than he did. look, i think there are all sorts of reasons we should be unhappy with the fact that election results are not being

accepted, that people are doubting the legitimacy of people who are in office. but i do think there is a strong component of this not only in the lower measures of do you trust how your vote was counted or your election officials, you even more broadly about how the election went or if the person is legitimate of the winners feeling good about the results and the losers feeling bad about the results. the simple point is those numbers flip. if donald trump had won the election in 2020, the numbers would look different than they are today. and that's not the say i think there is some evidence that the reaction on the republican side has been stronger. i think we are early on to say that it's long, long-term trend. but i do think it is a difficult problem to say we are going to up voter confidence in this when a lot of the movement -- the overall movement of the trust in the election doesn't move as

much as the movement between the parties when there is doubt. and this is a national phenomenon, too. close elections especially have the loser being upset for a while. i know we are going to get to potential solutions in a second rounds of questions. i don't want to get there too soon. i am, you know, cautious that there are solutions. i don't think the solutions -- where i think we are going to have a hard time going is the idea that we are just going to debunk all election claims that are not true and that everyone is going to believe it. i'm all for debunking. i think that's a good enterprise for people across the political spectrum. some of it, of course, is not going well. look, i think the arizona you a edit by a lot of measures is not going to be helpful for the republicans, and certainly, you know, any post election audit like that is going to be something that's going to be criticized by the other side.

so it is hard to imagine persuading a lot of people, even if were run better than it has been run. but i do think there are some things that we could do that would limit some of the uncertainty, limit some of the lack of clarity. i don't think it is going to change every mind in the book, but i do think making elections somewhat more transparent, more clearly resolved at an earlier stage and i can get to some of those things in a second round of questions would be somewhat helpful. again, i think it is a very difficult problem because there is deep distrust in the other side. there are also very different understandings of what's appropriate, and how we should run elections. and you know, one last point is that we sometimes hear that there was not a lot of voter fraud. i think that's true in many ways, and certainly in a limited sense. but i think that claim sometimes gets expanded to say let's not

think about election integrity issues that the right is interested in. let's not think about cleaner voting rolls, or the way we count, or transparency of observers or other things that do get at some of those issues. and we have a difference of opinion on how to vote on the right and left. and some of this feeds into that. and nagging down conspiracy theories because we say there really isn't a lot of fraud is true in one sense but it is also i think dismissive of some of the concerns that the parties are divided on and probably isn't going to help us in the long run. >> thank you, john. david beck, let me turn to you now. we have been focusing our conversation pretty heavily on the political right and its confidence in the elections. as i have alluded to earlier, we have also seen some election result denialism on the political left. you know, in 2016 some on the left claimed that trump had

stollen the election with the help of russians. in 2005 some prominent congressional democrats claimed george w. bush's operatives rigged the ohio results to tip the results if his behavior. and of course there were claims that the 2018 gubernatorial election in georgia was stolen from stacey abe ams. how widespread is election denialism on the left? and where is it coming from? is it just a perennial? is it getting higher? lower? what's your read? >> thanks for the question, kevin. and thanks for allowing me to join this great panel. it is really remarkable. we appear to live in a kpun that is closely divided 50/50 as we could be. yet tens of millions of people can't process the idea that their candidate might have lost in a country that is so closely

divided. you are quite right. this is something that is not unique to the right. there have been instances going back to 2005 with allegations, completely unsupported by any evidence that voting machines in ohio flipped a roughly 120,000 margin victory for then president biden from john kerry. there were allegations in 2016 of voting machine issues that maybe led to donald trump winning the election. and of course the jill stein campaign actually paid for full state recounts in michigan, wisconsin, and pennsylvania as a result of that. and there have been others where left leaning or democratic candidates have denied that they lost or somehow raised questions about it. i also want to state very importantly, this is not a moral equivalence. this is -- those efforts were generally not supported with rare exceptions by the

candidates, john kerry and hillary clinton did not support the challenges to their election losses. and in general, what we are seeing right now is far greater on kind of the extreme right of election denial. and it's of course being fueled by former president trump who used the platform of the white house to claim rigging before the election every happened. actual lesion it goes back to august, and maybe even earlier of 2016, where he preceded his supporters with the idea that the election was going to be stolen and invested in the idea that he was doing to delegitimize the election, the exercise of democracy. i will say one other thing i think is really important. i really like justin's three buckets of classifications of kind of election denial claims. there is the issue of the rules

changing. of course, this is something that sometimes comes up in other elections, not to the extent that we have seen it this year. but what we saw in 2020, especially with covid, is there were some rules being changed. sometimes by republicans. sometimes by democrats. but in every single case, the campaigns and parties were well aware of these rule changes. they cosmos to challenge some. they chose not to challenge some. i think a really good example was in pennsylvania, where the pennsylvania supreme court, many people particularly in the trump campaign raised the fact that the supreme court had ruled that postmarked ballots in pennsylvania could be received as long as they were postmarked by election day, could be received up to three days after election day, which is something that the trump campaign republicans then did not like in that state. in the same decision the pens pen supreme court ruled that any ballot not sealed with an inner

secret sleeve could to the be count. the biden campaign didn't like that. they ultimately decided not to appeal because it was a split decision, and the trump campaign did. the u.s. supreme court didn't find a question there. this was true in many other states. the texas decision to deliver only one drop box in harris county, the largest county in the state -- you ultimately we have a system where you respect the rule of law. it was played out. by november 3rd we all knew the rules of the game. we liked some of them. we didn't like some of them. but we all knew the rules of the game. similarly, with illegal votes, you know, these -- we have a system right now where our voter lists, the ability to make sure that the votes are cast by legal voters is better than it has ever been. significantly better than 2020, our voters lists are better and

more accurate than ever before thanks to the electronic volter registration center which 30 states belong to, blue and red. so -- so that is not really as much of a concern. then concern that's similar is this vote counting, vote machine concern, which we have seen the left embrace in some cases. but now we are seeing the right embrace it to a much larger degree. and when i think -- what i think we have to take note of is that objectively speaking, when dhs trumps dhs and others came out and said this was the most secure election in american history, objectively speaking, that is 100% accurate. that we -- we just went through the most secure, transparent and verified electronic election in american history. we had more paper ballots than ever before, 95% of all voters including all voters in battle

ground state cast their ballot on paper. we had more audits of that paper than ever before. in almost all of the gattle grounds states we had audits. multiple in arizona and famously we recounted every single paper ballot in georgia three different times, three different ways including once entirely by hand. so the voting machines had no impact on that. and every one of those confirmed the result. georgia didn't have paper ballots in 2016. we saw more preelection litigation than ever before that clarified the rules. the rule of law won out. some things the democrats liked. some things the democrats liked. and most importantly, we saw more post election litigation before, all of which verified the outcome. so we were very successful in 2020. that's why i think some of the election denialism is so

concerning. i want to make a point about something john said which i think was a really good point. we are kinds of seeing the election denialism -- it's normal to see some of that from the side of the losing candidate. we are seeing something a little bit different right now where it is exceptionally so on the side of the losing candidate in the presidential race despite the fact the republicans did very well down ballot. and because it's so disproportionate, because the delegitimization things of mail ballots, the delegitimizing of things like vote counting is happening and really only affecting republicans and not democrats to the same degree what we are seeing a disastrous result for republicans that the georgia runoff was a hare binger of. we are seeing a lower turnout where republicans were voting in the runoff for senate than we did in the democratic areas

because the election denialism was successful in telling them the election was rigged falsely. those are the kind of things, did although we have seen these things on the left i think when we are seeing on the right now is at a different scale than anything we have seen before. >> thank you. let me turn now to kevin johnson, and ask you, the phenomenon of election results denialism, do you think it is a cause to some degree by particular features of americans' election system? you worked overseas. you have seen many other election systems. are there things that we do here that kind of invite distrust. >> thank you, kevin. it's a good question to talk about the structural side. thank you for including me in this panel. it has been great to hear what the other panelists have had to say. i have been fascinated by it. there are a couple of structural pieces i want to talk about. in doing so i want to kinds of echo what you said in your intro, and also what david

mentioned. that those things don't really fully explain what we have just seen. the primary driver of what we have just seen, we should be clear s really about individual malfeasance and the willingness to sort of tolerate disrespect for the rule of law that's really, you know, at a new level i think with these elections that said there are a couple of structural things to talk about. i am going to mention two, maybe a third if i can squeak it in. i think the key issue in compare sob with other countries is ow election disputes are resolved. most of them have a national body arc judicial body, a tribunal or a court with the responsibility of rendering decision on who won in a close election. that makes clooirt clarity from the beginning what is going to happen if it is close. and it puts the decision where it belongs, in the hands of judge who is are institutionally positioned to weigh the evidence

and come up with a decision. our case is remarkably mig, what will happen if there is a close contest. it is at the state level, on the national level. that uncertainty in a way kind of leads us to treat disputed elections as bad luck or a strike of lightning. we are not prepared for it if it happens. it is a little bit like what do we do now. arguably a democracy should be measured by how well it handles close collects. you build a vessel designed toer the worst weather it is going to face not for average weather. likewise systems should be designed with a close election in mine. there was a 2010 survey, the question was, if the election for governor in your state was closely disputed do you think it

would be resolved fairly. 30% said yes. 38% say they don't know. it is us a about no one really knows, there is so much lack of familiarity in the population about what the mechanics are. you take a country that has a true bunal, everyone knows what the mcknicks are. the electoral college. a significant percentage of the population believes that -- doubts the legitimacy of the electoral college because it violates a principle that they hold true, which is that the candidate with the most votes should win. alex indicate czar's book is a fantastic book is a fantastic example of the way in which the american leaders have pointed out the flaws in the electoral college, tried to change the electoral college and it endures because we have a high amendment

hurdle, and because one side or the other always sort of benefitted from its distortions. but the risks are many and manifests. i think 2020 added a an additional risk, what we might call faithless legislature risk. we are seeing state legislatures positioning themselves to be able to declare that a election has failed and take back the right to nam a slate of detectivors. a dangerous trend. the problem with talking about the electoral college right now, it assumes that you either support national pop lieu vote or you defend the status quo. i would argue both positions are risky to the point of recklessness to our country. there were intermediate solutions that maintain the federalist basis of the electoral college and prevent that prince pell super being

violated that we ought to pursue. the last thing i would mention briefly is the absence of the fairness doctrine of the it used to be that media -- companies given the right to use broadcast spectrum had to reflect that obligation to society by balancing both sides. obviously the sort of tech thickcal context of that changes when you go from spectra to the internet. but there ought to be a way to put that idea of public responsibility back into media companies. and sort of we were talking before the show started. daniel threw out the -- or david threw out the line the anger industrial complex. it is just enormous. companies are minting money by making people angry. and that's a lot of what's really fueling what's going on here. there is a whole first amendment budge of issues about how we can curtail that, but it's something that we should keep on the table. >> all right. thank you. well, i should note that we are a little over halfway through

our discussion portion of the program. at this point i would also like to remind viewers and listeners out there to please get your questions in. email them to elaine.ellen at aei.org or send them to us on twitter #aei election security. let's talk about ways that public trust might be bolstered. we have already heard some comments that it won't be easy. but let's talk about it anyway. i first want to speak with our panel of public opinion expert, daniel cox. could you talk to us a little bit about the ways that public opinion is shaped? and then tie that into whether those factors can in some way be drawn upon to bolster faith in presidential election results. >> right.

yeah, of course, as a public opinion scholar, i don't have a lot to say about the potential solutions. but i think we can look at some of the perceptions among democrats, republicans, and the public at large to better understand maybe the nature, you know, of these challenges. first off, you could frame this either as a lack of civic education or misinformation but i think because our election laws are varied and fairly complex, there's a lot of just lack of knowledge among the public about what are the rules? who can vote? who can't vote? when you can vote. there was a study released a couple years ago that found that half of americans said they are not sure if you are allowed to vote if you are late in paying your taxes. a similar number said the same thing whether if you had an outstanding utility bill or a rent payment, they weren't sure if you were allowed to vote. 60% of americans said they were

not sure if their state allowed someone to vote if they didn't have a permanent address. it is not just about who can vote, who can't, and why. it is also about when you are allowed to vote. that's the source of a lot of confusion. of people living in states voting, only about two thirds correctly identified their state where you can vote early before election day. this was back in 2018. close to half said they weren't sure if they could vote before election day. i think the lack of knowledge about voting rules is a significant impediment to voting. the other thing i thought was notable in the same study is that the election voting reforms that are often discuss d i make no pretense of knowing whether they are effective or not, but they are incredibly pop laugh.

whether it is plenty reenfranchisement -- people convicted of felonies and they have served their term, whether or not they should have voting rights reinstated. whether you are dealing with the dmv or other public agency you should be automatically registered to vote -- these are largely policies with bipartisan support. making voting day a federal holiday. this enjoys widespread bipartisan support. on the other side, making government issued ids mandatory for voting. that's something that historically has been associated more with the right than the left. but it is a policy with bipartisan support. the other thing i thought was really interesting because i had not heard a lot of discussion about it is the idea of mandatory voting. i am not saying there is any

denies this policy has any chance in the u.s., but it is interesting that more than half of appearance said they would support mandatory voting. it is lower in places like germany, france, and the uk, but it is significant that 51% of americans supported this idea. when it comes to understanding the sources of distrust, i think there is a couple things that are worth mentioning. first of all, a number of the panelists alluded to this, but i think the rise of political polarization is playing a role. that we had got tony the place where the other side winning is being perceived as like the ends of the world, the absolute worst outcome. it is going to be a threat to the democrat see if the other side is going to take control of the government for two to four years. i think that is incredible ble detrimental and leads to people having so heavily invested in the outcome they cannot perceive or cannot accept the other side

winning an election. i think that creates a whole host of problems, particularly, in trust in the system. the other thing, is political leadership. because the election system is so complex, people really rely on the media and political leaders to help them make sense whether the contest is fair, particularly among losers. if your candidate lost, you need to hear from the candidates saying oh, yeah, the election was fair, i lost, and everything, despite the fact that it was imperfect, the election system basically worked as it was supposed to. the losing side is not hearing that from political leaders. that undermines support and can sow mistrust. i think the goal should not be supporting a flawless process, but it should be largely open and transparent and competent.

i think all indications are that 2020 was such a contest. the last thing i will say on this part before adding one more thing is the thing called gracious losers. we talk about the importance of winning elections and everyone wants to be associated with a winner. but i think when it comes to losing an election the concession speech is really important. it allows for a coming together. allows for both sides to say this is one of the most important aspects of american transparency. the peaceful transfer of power. again, it may not have been perfect but it was ran well. i think the fact that trump didn't give a tripcal concession speech to bring folks together after he lost, he continued to sow doubts about outcome i think it marked a first at least in modern election history. the last thing i will note when

talking about the sources of doubt has to do with political segregation and media bubbles. a lot of my work focuses on the idea that the people around us, our immediate friends and family and neighbors influence the information that we have, what we know, and frankly, what we trust and who we trust. so we are seeing among both democrats and republicans an increasing number of folks have only close friends and family members who reflect their political predispositions. so they are surrounded by people who basically share their political beliefs. and that really leads a host of research into adoption of extreme attitudes, conspiracy theories, begun we see this both on the right and the left. because partisans are socially segregated it becomes easier to retain the kind of false ideas because no one is challenging you. i think these are the things that you know when i think about some of the source of political

misinformation and lack of confidence i think we really need to pay attention to. >> yes. yes. i think the bully pulpit, and its ability to establish opinions either for or against can't be understated. i mean won wonders what would have happened in 1960 if richard nixon had gotten up and said that he was robbed and he was not accepting the results, et cetera, et cetera. anyway, let me move on. the question for justin grimmer. it is something that daniel just alluded to. one reform that has been enacted in some states that conservatives often turn to in bolstering voter id requirements. there seems to be a lot of public support for it generally, particularly on the write. you have written about this. give us your take on voter id. is it good policy?

should we be looking at something else in addition or instead of voter id to bolster confidence? >> the quick answer before giving the much longer answer there there doesn't seem to be good evidence that imposing a voter id requirement leads to a subsequent boost in trust in elections. but if we look more generally at voter id policy and what it does i can't think of a policy with a bigger disconnect with the political discourse around it and the actual effects. it is portrayed as a massive disposition that's going to create insurmountable hurdles for many team to vote and going to result in perhaps the plummeting of volter turnout particularly among the democratic party. if you look at the similarly literature on voter identification that is not the case. time and again, research papers estimated close to a null or in some instances where an affect

is found it sends to be a very small affect. in a paper that focuses on north carolina in voter identification law with jess yoder we find on the order of 3,000 votes were deterred in the primary election where a voter identification law was in place and because of some confusion after the requirement was removed 5,000 votes. these are a small number of voters. what's going on here? why is there this disconnect? the first thing is that many people have identification. 9 to 98% of registered voters have identification. among the people who don't, these tend to be individuals who turn out at a really low rate. even if you impose an additional hurdle to these folks it is not as if you are deterring people who otherwise would have been likely to turn out. as a result of that, we tend to find very few effects on turnout

of voter identification laws. on the other side, though, it ant as if when weiss laws are imposed that we are seeing the kinds of returns that perhaps the right portrays they might. one is a lower instance of fraud. in a paper published vincent pons and collaborators show there doesn't appear to be an increase in the number of fraud claims once identification policies are put in place. what's more, there doesn't seem to be a bump up in trust after voter identification laws are put in place. i think we are left with a an interesting policy discussion. certainly among the right, in the public generally but intensely on the right there is a sense that voter identification laws make sense. everyday folks have this intuition that perhaps it makes sense to show your identification when you vote. because of the anger complex and

the rhetoric on the left it is difficult to convey that sort of intuition to people on the left about these policies. i think stepping back from that folks on the left might also point out if there are 2,000 voters deterred, if this policy is not getting the returns that we have perhaps it is not a good policy and not a good idea to deter those 2,000 voters. i think we should look elsewhere if we want to bolster trust. it doesn't seem that voter identification laws are going to be the place where people will buy into the veracity of elections by making this nationwide. >> all right. thank you much. david becker. let's hear from you. what policies would you favor to try to strengthen public trust in elections. >> thanks. first of all, i should start by saying i tend to be an optimist

about things generally. i was someone who before the election, even during covid, even as election officials were underresourced, i was very confident and said toe publicly that the election would be run very well. and i think that was correct. i think that the election was run very well, objectively speaking, given particularly the challenges that election officials faced. but i -- i'm less optimistic today than i think i have ever been. i am pretty pessimistic right now and i worry quite a great deal. i am -- you know, as was mentioned i am going to regret having coined this term. there is an entire ecosystem, this anger industrial complex that -- whose livelihoods now, they are not the best and the brightest, but they have become wealthy by pushing anger and division and lies and they are grifting off the sincere disappointment of people who voted for the losing candidate

in the presidential election. and that -- that really disturbs me. furthermore, you see the people who are doing the right thing, the people who are performing their jobs impeccably well, people like secretary of state raffensperger and georgia in his staff, in nevada. al schmidt in philadelphia and his staff. these are all republicans. and they are being attacked. they are being send sewered. they are being threatened. we are seeing more threats, physical threats against election officials and their families than ever before. and so that's kind the place i am in. but i think there are some potential solutions. i think so many of the panelists alluded to this, justin made this point i think particularly well. for too long, the -- you know, the idea of increased access for eligible voters was something that was just perceived to be only on the left. and the idea of increased

integrity for the election process was perceived to be entirely on the right. but those of us who go on in in the field and work with election officials those two are not only not this opposition, they are complimentary in most cases when you actually look at policy. you can come up with policies that increase both real and perceived integrity while making sure that eligible voters are not excluded from from the poe cess and don't face barriers they don't have to face. those are unifying themes amongst election officials from the most conservative republican to the most liberal democratic. i think one possible solution is to create a floor, in a sense arc federal floor for election policy. i kind of thinking about it as taking some things just off the table. they are just so fundamental to an effective democracy that we -- and they are both -- they are both integrity and access oriented. things like the idea that we should have access, pretty easy

access to mail voting and early voting options. those are not only good for access, voters find them very convenient. i ten to call them convenience voting. very importantly, they are a key aspect of election integrity. the more ballots that are cast early, the more ballots that are cast by mail and received early, the more they serve as an early warning system for potential malfunctions in election following, for potential fraught, for potential cyber interference in the election process. all of those thing can be disclosed before the close of the polls the more votes that can be cast early. in 2020, we were successful. that was in by far and away the most mail-cast ballots. it made our system have a lot of integrity. that being said there might be provisions in there that also respond legitimate concerns that folks usually associated with

the right might have, things like election day receipt of ballots, no more postmark ballots, no ballots coming in after election day. that's the law in most states, including most blue states, that ballots must be in by election day. and drop boxes help with that as well because people who do wait until the last minute can deliver them to election officials through the drop boxes. i think there is an aggressive transparency that can be included as a floor. election officials like transparency. they want to be as transparent as possible. there were questions about observers not being allowed into locations counting the ballots. those were false. observers were in every counting location, and polling places but we can enshrine that into law

that poll watchers with the campaigns w the parties should be allowed to observe, not interfere with but observe those processes as they go. and lastly, a lot of this derives from concern that the voter lists aren't accurate. voter lists absolutely must reflect both all eligible voters and only eligible voters. when i talk about only eligible voters i am not talking about fraud. the biggest challenge is mobility. people move a lot. about a third of all americans move within a four-year period of time. and most of them don't think about changing their voter registration until before an election. if someone moved right now, odds are they wouldn't think about changing their voter registration until sent or october of 2024.

eric is a non-profit that i led the effort to create that participating states voluntarily join. it started with seven states in 2012. it is now up to 30 states in 2020. and going into 2021, more states are going to be joining this year. it helps states identify when people moved between states, move within their states, identify when they might have an eligible voter who hasn't been registered yet. it helps them get eligible voters on the list so they can contact them and try to get them to update their information. because of that, because two thirds of all voters live in a state that is a member of eric as of 2020, we actually have the most accurate voter lists we have ever had. and we are going to have more accurate voter lists in 2022 and 2024 as more states join. keeping those lists clean and accurate is an aspect of

integrity and access. it is really important because we just saw an election where the losing candidate used perceived differences between the states, really, fake perceived differences to try to leverage the idea that voters couldn't trust the results in states where they didn't like the outcome. if you look at election laws in states like ohio, georgia and florida, they are almost identical. whid spread male voting, widespread early voting, drop boxes, election day voting, paper ballots, et cetera. the only difference between florida and ohio on one hand and georgia on the other is the outcome. that's why we are trying to leverage the perceived differences to create distrust among the electorate. so i think there is benefit to creating some kind of law at the floor at the federal level to counter that. >> same question to you, john.

which policies do you favor do you think that the left and right can agree upon. there has been recognize that david's comments illustrate. that should be something we build on. one way to build on it is to help election officials do more. a lot of surveys show election officials are among the most trusted at the local level. they want to do more education and don't have the resources or the capabilities to do so. there should be a lot more funding. this is critical national infrastructure and it is not funded like critical national infrastructure. more money for election officials, some from the federal level to support voter education. exactly this dispute resolution side that i mentioned. we need voters to understand how it works, how it happens that a

result is determined, how it happens that that result is confirmed. that one suggestion one. suggestion two, also on the administration side is you know the threats that were posed against election officials are outrageous. we need to elevate that position sort of the way frontline workers were elevated during the pandemic. these are the critical supporters of our most important infrastructure, our democracy. people are talking about a provision to criminalize harassment and threats on election officials. i think that's important to think about at the federal or the state level. i think we need likewise this notion of respect for the institution. office holders take an oath in which they reference god. candidates should likewise treat candidacy with a solemn knit and respect. an oath or what, i am not sure.

but you should not be a candidate for office if you don't tlar your willingness to abide by the rules of law for that election determined by law in courts. candidates should meet state provisions that -- for the filing of candidate papers can include your concession speech. you file your concession speech in advance so it is clear that you are prepared. and this notion that presidential debates would ask the question, do you intend to accept -- it is a ridiculous kind of absence of norm there. this is the rule of law at its most essential and needs to be respected that way. those are a couple of thing. i mentioned the electoral count act. you covered that last week. i won't say more there. clearly a lot of work needs to be done there. looks like there may be progress, to be bipartisan progress from. the last topic i will touch on was not an issue very much this

election. but if we were talk 2001 about that election or 2005 or 2054, we would be talking about the office of the secretary of state. in both elections one state decided the election. the secretary in that state was a formal member of the presidential campaign of the inwithing side. there is a fair amount of evidence that harris and blackwell put their thumbs on the the stale a bit. not determinative but certainly not the neutral role that a democracy should expect from its leading state election officials. so in recent years, many, many secretaries of state performed tremendously in this last election and many kind of rise above the structural limitations of a position that's inherently partisan. but that's a risk factor. i think it could increase as a risk factor now that we have candidates for that position who are explicit result deniers and who may well be running elections in swing states in

2024. over time, i think we need to be thinking about how do we create election leadership that is independent and impartial and how do we give the election leadership more discretion over the actual limitation of results and make state legislatures back off into policy setting and not the finds of micro management they have been doing recently. >> thank you. last, let me put the question to you, john. you have got a deep knowledge of a long history of elections, how they are rough-and-tumble events and the politics can be nasty around there. all that in mind, are there policies that you see some hope in in terms of trying to strengthen public trust in elections? are there any lessons that we might learn from the past? >> sure. let me start first by reminding everybody -- i think what everybody on the panel has said

to some extent and i said before, i think these problems are pretty deep. and they evolve with winners and losers, some policy fixes on election administration are not going to be the sole answer to this. that being said i think there is a fair amount we can do in our election system that will limit the field of conflict to make people feel a little more confident that elections are resolve quickly and more have the accurately. it is interesting. my list agrees with a lot of things on david bicker's list. i may come about it from a different way. i think it is helpful because right and left have to think about these issues. i wasn't going to mention but the issue that should always be mentioned is voter prejudice administration. david is right, we have come a long, long way on voter registration because of reforms, help america vote act, reforms the states have made. david's program he birthed at pugh, the eric system is gaining

steam, it is a great system for states to share information with each other because we don't have national lists. but i think there is more to be done. i think it is politicized a bit by the terminology we use. broadly speaking i do think there still is lot of work to be done and we can build lists that people people like are as comprehensive as can be and as accurate, and kept up to date. i think there is -- thatnd lie as lot, even in terms of voter turnout, if there are any gains to be made, that's the area where we might look. the other areas, again, david mentioned transparency. i am going to agree in part with kevin jenson, and disagree in part. a lot of the world has a union terry system of elections, they have judges that can make a final decision on things. a lot of what we do has to do

with transparency of both parties watching each other. we see that at polling places where there is supposed to be most places there are both democratic and republican watchers, of course there is debate what they can do. i think that can be resolved. but this election raised some of those issues, i don't think they changed the election results. but i do think thinking about new procedures that were adopted for types of getting the ballots and mail voting and other areas we haven't thought there where some of those observers are. i guess i am willing to double down on let's look at the processes we put in place and make sure both parties are there watching each other. sure there can be cameras and other ways of looking at them. but having both parties watching each other is on issue. i think that's an important thing that we can go forward on.

the stability of elections. here david mentioned we have seen a huge increase in election litigation, both since 2000, certainly, and again, another increase in this election. that's all to the good to a certain extent. but i do think, you know, we have seen the supreme court with its purcell prince well-being more skeptical about decisioning being made that change elections while the election is going forward. our elections are longer now. they begin at least with the mailing of overseas ballots, at least 45 days will election day. changing the rules, changing procedures, close to the election you could argue is very undemocratic. it confuses voters. obviously there is some emergency. the question is what is an emergency? if something happens on election night and there is a poll

problem, maybe the courts can step in and extend the hours of the poll. that's controversial. and i do think the state enhancing really saying let's keep it as stable during the election period and resolve our difference earlier on would be more helpful. i certainly talked to some democratic election lawyers. they are split on these issues but some of them argue from their perspective, from the democratic party's perspective, it is not always helpful to make changes in elections even if you win a lawsuit that opens up something at the last minute. the questions of voter confusion, lentle maes, others, you know, are problematic. counting, counting with some speed. again, david mentioned this. there are a lot of factors both emphasized by the left and right. but i do think there has been a trend towards less of the vote

coming in on election night or near election night. broadly speaking, that is caused by a lot more voting by mail. more provisional ballots. i think specifically, in some cases some states i will point to colorado for example, it is not impossible -- in fact it is done very well in colorado where you can have a very open to mail voting progressive system in all sorts of ways and get the ballots in by election day and get them counted quickly. certainly we heard issues about when can you begin counting the absentee ballots, the mail ballots. i favor being able to count them and process them at an earlier stage. there are issues you have to resolve and you have to do it well but that would be helpful. but i do think moving towards a system where ballots would be counted by election day there would be a big difference because many of the states that are dragging out the election -- we don't have 10% off the vote in or some larger percentage of the vote in on election night,

people are asking questions, where is that vote? and when votes come in, i believe they are legitimately coming in but we don't always know where they are coming from. getting better about counting quickly, getting votes in and being better accounting for the ballots that are counted slightly after election day. i think it would be helpful to people and to some extent address their concerns that there might be something going on that isn't quite official. couple more things with accounting. we haven't mentioned audits here. there is the arizona audit. i am going leave that aside. i don't think that's going well. but we certainly have moved towards things like risk limiting audits. i think it is a good development. it is a very specific type of audit for a specific purpose to efficiently assess whether votes were counted as cast. but broadly speaking audits or even post election looks. maybe run in a much more official way than we are seeing

now, custom wouldn't affect the election results, those could all be good things. i will mention kevin's point about election judges one more time. i do agree with him on this point. i think our judges are not election specialists and we have many countries with election courts, states do that to some extent. more of that would be helpful and states training their judges to do some of these things or to look at things that don't affect election results, judges could be trained and focus on these issues so they are set before future elections. i think that is important. lassly, the electoral college. i am one who think things didn't go that well, and didn't go well in a number of ways thinking about the machines of the electoral college after the

legislators cast their votes on the machines in november. i think one principle, this would apply to democrats who did it earlier and republicans who did it in this election is that when the legislators, elected by the electoral college meet in december and cast their electoral votes there is not much more to be said about what happened in the state before that happen. states get the results they pick the person. that doesn't mean that congress doesn't sometimes have the role in asking question questions about their votes or in extreme cases -- put those electors in place, and those sort of results we really shouldn't be going behind when congress then meets in january to count those votes. >> john, thank you very much. let's move to the audience q and a portion of the program. we have got about 20 minutes

left here. and we have a number of questions that have come in. let me put this one out there first. an audience member asked, can we assume that if voting was only in person, with picture id, at one's designated presink on cereal numbered paper ballots, in english, during voting hours, with counting to begin immediately upon the closing of the polls and not stopping until complete that recounts could be easy and that we could achieve the desired confidence in the integrity of the voting process? david becker, would you like to take a crack at this one? go ahead. >> i think that's an excellent way to actually yield much more distrust because what's going to happen is many more voters are going to have difficulty voting, people who have to vote by mail. in every state there are some voters who have to vote by mail even if they have to have an excuse.

there are military and overseas ballots that come in sometimes days and weeks later. there are provisional ballots that have to be reviewed and adjudicated. the more you concentrate voting in a single location, at a single point in time, the longer counting will take, the more uncertainty will creep into that period of time. and what we know is the solution that works for the best integrity putting aside the delegitimization of election is what states like ohio and florida have done. those are states that largely implemented procedures under raur legislators and republican secretaries of state to allow for voting through three different methods, early in person, mail voting without an excuse, or election day, allow for proprocessing of ballots well before election day. then if you noticed, florida and ohio in particular had results almost immediately. the only reason georgia didn't is when you have a very, very close margin, in a the small

number of ballots that need to be reviewed like provisional. abouts like military and overseas ballots, that can lead to some extension of time. but overall, the way to maximize integrity is to spread voting out over more time rather than concentrated in a single 12-hour period. >> could i jump in? because i agree with david on a lot. i think people know that i have been somewhat of a critic of large scale voting by mail for a long time. but it's a big country, and there is decentralization of elections and some states are clearly going that way. i do think that the trend of course has been away from voting on election day. both generally and certainly a jump up on that net in the last 2020 election. i also don't think that we are going to have a union terry system of voting. we are not going to have all states moving to mostly vote by mail. so i think david is right that -- i guess i am more of a fan of in-person voting early,

of course there is a rule for mail voting but i think states with run good elections without having an enormous a. voting by mail and still have early voting. and look, election day can be done well, too. again, i don't think that's the future. i think we are down to six or seven states that were doing a lot of voting on election day. but i do think that the set of processes for even a state like colorado who does a lot of things like voting by mail for most people, a lot of progressive, open things, yet trying to get in those ballots by election day, however one does that, i think that's important because they can come out with the results pretty quickly because most of their system takes place by election day. i think that's the key point. >> all right. thank you. there is a number of questions on electoral college reform as a vehicle for improving public trust and understanding in the

election. i will lump them all together. do the panel members have suggestions about how the electoral college could be reformed without scrapping it in a way that would make it more understandable to the public and bolster trust? who would like to start with that? >> i will take a crack at that. i mean you have to say up front that electoral college form is always going to be difficult. it's in the constitution. and, you know, primarily the changes that are needed really you have to think about an amendment process. that said, the policy that we have been developing along with some other groups i think has the potential of creating a middle ground. and that policy is two changes, basically. the first is that states change from actual human electors to

cast one vote to casting electoral votes that can be expressed in decimal form. the second change is that each state is required to give its electoral votes to the top two candidates proportionally. this follows on or sort of modifies an amendment that passed the senate in 1950, with two thirds support called the lodge gossett amendment. it does a couple of things. it means that swing states don't dominate. it makes every state matter in the competition. it effectively makes it impossible for the popular vote winner to loose. and it makes it truly a national election. at the same time it protects a lot of you know what the right wants to see, which is calculation of the results at the state level, not at a national level, and it maintains the electoral college math, marining each state is given a number of electors equal to the

two senators and representatives. that would work for both sides and fix a lot of what's wrong. >> a lot of questions coming in. this one is interesting. it is kind of a twofold question, might be good for both justin and dan. a member the audience asked, could the panelists comment on the dozens and dozens of election counters who reported witnessing problems of double and triple counting of ballots for democratic votes? and just more generally, these reports. these independent reports which the internet can spread particularly quickly about ampls examples of malfeesance. kind of a fraud question but also if there is information that can spread quickly, what can we do about it.

do you want to start with it justin? >> yeah. it is an interesting question and it builds on something commonly cited when people express skepticism. even if there is not statistical evidence there are thousands of pages of affidavits making claims about the process. they saw something untoward. we were in the process of analyzing a bunch of those right now to better understand the claims. one time of claim like we see here is that ballots are put through the machine two or three times. of course if you sort of read the manuals on these machines or talk to experts on the machines, this is standard practice to deal with jams or make sure the batches are being processed correctly. it sounds like there was some misinformation among workers about understanding about the way that the ballots are processed. another common claim that comes up a lot in the arizona audit

and pristine ballots. clearly they couldn't have been mailed. you can have a transipgs that happened from damaged ballot and you will have workers tran describe the damaged ballot to the new ballot to make sure that it is counted correctly. the third thing is the vague claim that it looked like something weird was happening. there was the allegation of votes being delivered to different places by sem truck drivers or other instances where poll workers merely said there looked like something odd was happening ballots being moved in a way they didn't understand. all of these instances. it is going to be nearly impossible to stop these sorts of rumors from spreading. one way to combat them is to make easily available information about how elections

are administered. another way, once a conspiracy is out there it is very important to tamp them down. you need to have election officials who believe in the process. it is going to be unreasonable to unring the bell of these sorts of allegations because people are hearing exactly what they want to hear when they are upset about the results of the election and don't want to believe their candidate could have possibly lost is this let me jump in to add one point and echo jumps. look at georgia. two senate runoff elections. extremely subsequently for the republican party. very close. no one is talking about them. none of these accusations are being mentioned about why the republican senators lost in georgia. just to emphasize, you know, the good faith statesmanship and leadership as that critical, key factor in sort of helping this work. >> if i could chime in, just one

quick comment as well. i read a lot of the affidavits. the stacks of affidavits is a common theme. what you see when you actually read these affidavits is they are either false and i am in the attributing any motive to the people who have written them or the people don't know what they are watching. they are unfamiliar with the process. and that unfamiliarity has been leveraged by the election deniers to try to portray something as being wrong when it wasn't. and the best solution to that to understand how elections work and the fact that every ballot is tied to a registration effort in every case and the fact that ballots are cereal numbered and that you can track a ballot back -- you have on the a voter on the record on the voter registration list to get a ballot. then a ballot can only be counted once in every tabulation device. then to understand the best thing that every person can do is volunteer to ab poll worker. poll worker see it intuitively,

they get the know this. they understand this. and then you see things. kemp, used to be secretary of state. duncan, raffensperger,ological republican election officials in michigan, local republican officials in arizona they have been very -- they can testify to the fact these are mistaken claims at best and outright false at worst. the best way to see it is get inside the process. once you get inside the he process you see all the checks and balances that are in place and the reason why fraud is extremely rare and why we can be confident in the results. >> i think some people may have taken that to mean an individual ballot can be traced back to an individual. you meant the university of ballots that are given out. >> two processes that are

disconnected. a ballot can only be gotten by a registered voter. and then disconnect a ballot, and what's the content of that ballot can only go through once. but there is a disconnect there. you cannot track a vote back to the registered voter who made it. that is to maintain ballot accuracy. that's a great clarification. john, thanks. >> this taps into something we were discussing before the program and which also has come up in audience questions. it is the issue of perception versus reality. there are many well intended americans who saw things on the internet that were alarming, that were persuasive to them and raised questions in their mind about the integrity, the way the election was covered. we had an awful lot of fact checking going on. a lot of debunking type efforts.

i think this is a broader question of public opinion. ban,ness perhaps you could chime in on this. once stuff gets out there that's believable, are there was that politicians, administrators or others can somehow address it without kinds of putting people off, without hardening attitudes and creating a kind of camp of believers versus disbelievers? >> yeah, i mean ideally you have this program beamed into everyone's household. you would somewhere it primetime, address where facts are being presented in an even-handed and very clear way. and that's really, you know, what you would want. the media doesn't operate like that. americans don't consume media that way either. there has been well documented ways where americans to you choose the media outlets or

media personality that reflect their predispositions. it is really hard to break through because you are remember primed to think there is potential fraud and friends and neighbors are saying my friend saw something, too, i saw that last night on msnbc, or fox news, in a thing that looked pecuniary. then on the leadership side we talk about roles of political leaders and media elites but this whole idea of oh, we are just raising questions i think is pernicious because what you are doing is undermining confidence in the system because the questions are for the most part unanswerable and supposed to be that way. right? i think that's really a critical concern. the other thing, i think, you know, if our goal is to try to take some of the heat out of the discussions and depoliticize them.

one of the things you seen in polling -- you have seen it for a while and it has become conventional and received wisdom is that when more people vote it advantages the democratic. when fewer people vote it advantages the republicans. to my knowledge, science has shown that's not the case. as we are seeing a realignment among the gop with white non-college voters moving from democratic voters to republican voters that's probably even less true today than it was. i think if we can sort of have a broader conversation about, yeah, what does it mean if more people vote you are not going to see the sort of politicized opinion where republicans now are far less likely to kind to prioritize more people voting than they were each just a few years ago. >> thank you. we are down to less than four minutes left. so i will pull out one more audience question and perhaps do a little bit of a speed round. we touched on this before a little bit.

but let's do it again. because it's an important one. question, what can congress do to further strengthen trust in the integrity of presidential elections or is that a hope ls cause? i will start with you first, david becker. >> yeah, i would honestlily most likely to hear from the others because i am looking for ideas. i think there is some reform of the electoral count act to be done. i think that for presidential elections in particular i think the electoral count act as enacted is well over 100 years old. held up pretty well. i think john alluded, this making clear the ceremonial nature of that joint session and limiting the grounds for object -- objection os.

i think there is a role for the federal government to establish a federal floor here. then, you know, i don't know how to make this happen, but the leadership of people like liz cheney, like brad raffensperger, like secretary is a gas kyi, like al schmidt. these are people who did their jobs exceptionally well, and continue to. and i think finding ways to support courageous leadership is really important. and that does not mean trying to turn republicans who are supporting the rule of law into democrats. that is absolutely not the case. we need to have a comfort level with the fact that we will disagree on policy, but we will support, support certain foundational elements of democracy because that is who we are as americans. >> thank you. dan cox, do you want in on this? or do i move on? nope? "bleacher report." john fortier, your thoughts

here. >> i will be quick. i made this point before. first while in theory i think there are some things congress can do at the federal level it is unlikely big things will be done and most action is still going to be at states. if i had to pick one thing out of my list before i think we should be not afraid of being able to count the votes more quickly. we can do it accurately. we can do it well. and getting ballots in by election day is a part of that. there are some other parts that maybe the right doesn't like as well. but i do think getting quicker more accurate counts that are clear to the people who those additional counts were would do something to dampen the tensions in that period after election day where things -- where rumors start and people rhett worried about integrity of the elections. >> down to a little over a him. justin grimmer do you want to comment? >> i do. the first thing i would say is

funding. if congress could give the states money it could solve a lot of problems as they are thinking about how do they balance and books and make various changes. second thing, cyber security around election is still very big. big issue in 2016. perhaps, kplart and better best practice around campaign donations and logging and publication. >> excellent. last word to you, kevin johnson. >> one thing they should do is consider passing redistricting, independent redistricting position. pull that out of s-1, hr-1. 68% of americans support it. could reduce polarization and reduce conflict of interest. one thing they should not do is judge elections. they shouldn't. one good news this past year was the democrats not ruling on the iowa 2 election. >> alrighty.

let me first thank david beck e dan cox, john fortier, david becker and david grimmer. and thank you to the audience out there. there are many of you. i apologize that i couldn't get to all of your questions. i will flag as many as them on the twitter and respond to them today. thank you for tuning in to this event. we look forward to seeing you at the next one. have a great day. tonight on american history tv we will feature a first lady symposium co-hosted by the white house historical associates. that is at 8:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv. >> janet yellen testified before the president's 2w50 budget request at a finance hearing. she also testified about tax trade, and