it is major garrett. thank you so much hope that the great ideological middle, as you call them and everyone else out and buys your book. the big truth and yeah, thank you so. michael mcdonald is with us this morning. he's a political science professor at the versity of florida and also the author of this book from pandemic to insurrection voting in the 2020 us president election.

professor mcdonald, morning you describe 2020 election as a story of triumph and tragedy. explain. well, we have to recognize that the 2020 election had the highest turnout, the most number of people that predicted. since 1900. i mean, that's quite an accomplishment in the midst of a pandemic. so election officials managed almost an impossible task of delivering an election and allowing american democracy to continue even while the pandemic was raging across the country. so that's triumph. and it's the triumph of election. and we have to give them a lot of credit and acknowledged their contributions to running the elections and the voters because they turned at rates that had not been seen in american elections. that's the triumph side of it. the the the the downside is that

there were some people who unnecessarily died and because we did not full mail balloting in the 2020 election and unfortunately there were those forces that tried to undermine our confidence in our democracy and they leveraged the fact that we had had to move to mail ballots to run election, an unprecedented time to raise doubts about our democracy and we're still feeling the reverberations of those of all that rhetoric even today. what do you say to people who deny the results of the 2020 election? well trump had an opportunity to provide evidence of some sort of malfeasance in the election. he went before a friendly judges that he had appointed to the bench. he had allies as secretaries of

state in key states that were serving his reelection committee. i mean, these were not people who part of the deep state in any way. these are people who were his allies and yet he could not bring any evidence forward. those people who have viewed the election results, they looked at the integrity of the election. there's always going to be few errors, 160 million people voted on any day on a commute into work. they're going to be some people who have and those sorts of things happen. but they were very isolated. there was no widespread fraud in the election. and trump and his allies have yet to produce any proof of trump any that happened in the election that was widespread. again, isolated. yes. but widespread fraud. now. and i really would ask people who who believe and i understand

you upset about the election outcomes. there were people after the 2006 election who supported clinton who also had theories russian influence in the election. they feel upset that there candidate lost and you know rightfully they had a lot of investment in the election and they wanted their candidate to win. but the election in 16 was free and fair. the in 2020 was free and fair and so i really ask those people who still believe that they just look at the evidence and that no credible evidence has been put forward before a court. it's been checked by election officials who are allies of donald trump. none of these have produced any evidence that there was fraud in the 2020 elections. the level that would have reversed the outcome, remind viewers changes were made by

ahead of the 2020 election. and how were able to make those changes. yeah. so one of the things i do, i is i follow the early voting. i've been doing that since 2008. so every year i'm spending most of the day compiling all of the early voting statistics we've seen over time a slow increase in the number of people who ballots before election day through mail balloting and through in-person early voting and about. in 2006, we had 40% of the electorate cast their ballot before election day. about half were in-person early voting. half were by mail in 2020. things were upended because of the pandemic. and early on in the primary season, we started seeing states encourage mail balloting and. in many states, those emergent provisions carried over to the

general election. but there were a lot of legal battles. we had some states that had archaic and had never contemplate the possibility of running an election in the midst of a pandemic. they were ill prepared to run a massive election mail because by the time we got to the general election and we did make emergency provisions available to it turned out that the people who voted in the 2020 election voted by mail and and that change really affected our politics. some very deeply in deep ways, because many the people who were voting by mail were democrats. many of the people voting in person, early republicans ended up ended patterns of voting that we had seen in decades. in the early voting and suddenly a method of voting. mailbag which republicans never

really questioned about its suddenly became the focus of fraud because the democrats were voting way and and so after the 2020 election and this is what's carrying today because of the rhetoric and the belief about mail balloting and its insecurities are so deeply ingrained among republican we've seen. and the fact that democrats now use mail ballots more frequently. we've seen republican states move to restrict mail balloting on the other side, though, we've seen democratic states who when they expanded mail balloting in the 2020 election or maybe they already started that movement before, the election, they decided imagined those flaws. and so we've seen a number of states adopt on mail ballot elections, on after the 2020 elections or made other moves to expand voting. so it's there's this real battle and tension that's happening across the country.

we see it in our national politics. but it's each of the state governments is a microcosm what's happening nationally and places where the democrats are ascendant. they're moving forward with expanding balloting options. and in places where the republicans control the process, we're seeing a retrenchment and moving and the ability for people to use mail ballots. how is early voting shaping at this point? with a month to go before the november 2022 elections? yeah, well, the 2020 election was an unprecedented election. again, i said the highest turnout rate since, 1900, quite an accomplishment that we've never seen in an election like this before for a presidential election. but in 2018, we've actually seen participation pickup for midterm election. and in election over half the people who were eligible to vote participated that election. that was the highest midterm turnout election since 1914. now, lots of things changed. we had people their behavior,

some of them are moving using mail ballots. we've seen the usage of mail coming up. so it's hard to predict this point exactly how this is all going to shake out for 2022. but the indicators that we see in a number of polls in the early voting that we've seen so far in the states, over 300,000 people have already voted in this election. and we're at levels are very comparable to 2018. so it looks as though at this time and we still have a month to go it as though we're going to see a high turnout midterm election again where we may be 2018 and that's going be really remarkable. but we should be somewhere around at this point. i believe in that 2018 turnout. let's get calls. jones in florida, republican joe. good morning to you. good morning. you know, i think that if

there's mail in ballots kept track of the way the lottery takes keeps track of their lottery tickets knowing you can't you can't afford your lottery ticket. they know exactly which they printed and, where they went. and so i don't believe that a lot of those ballots were marked just a pleasant and vice president. the rest of them were black. so i don't think we should have mail in ballots unless. they can really keep track of them. michael mcdonald were they able keep track of them? yeah, i have a hunch chapter in the book on this about all of the security that election officials have around mail ballots. and it's really to forge a mail ballot much that what you really have to have is some sort of inside job on within an election office. and there's no evidence anywhere

that any of that actually happened. so i could go through the litany it's in the book, but even bill barr, trump's attorney general, who had made allegations before congress that there was going to be some vast conspiracy about foreign governments and tried to submit mail ballots here at the end of the election. so there was no evidence of that. and it really couldn't be. it's a very complex system. and to answer the caller's question, yes, election officials barcode ballots, envelopes they even had in some states really cruel innovations in how we run our elections. they were tracking ballots as they were moving through the mail system with that barcoding and so on. we do have a very robust system for tracking the individual ballots. and anyone has tried to forge ballots would have somehow had the feedback and they would have

to know that somebody else had had had not voted and were able to forge that ballot for the person who hadn't voted yet. again, that would be a very difficult system to orchestrate. and there's no that there were some ballots that were coming in that the election officials were scratching heads at saying, where are these ballots coming from? they knew where the ballots were. they who had the ballots in their hands and knew the ballots that were being back into their office and they were doing other security provisions to check the authenticity, those ballots. president trump in june 2020 sent out this tweet. absentee ballots are. a person has to go through a process, get in, use the mail in voting. on the other hand, will lead to the most corrupt election in us history. bad happen when mail ins with mailings just look at special election in paterson new jersey. 19% of ballots a fraud michael mcdonald.

yeah, new jersey was one of these states that really didn't. a good system of voting and implement before the 2020 election. they've been moving towards mail ballots. new jersey requires an affidavit to be placed within the envelope when people return their ballots and happened in new jersey was that many people didn't know that they had to do that particular step and a large number of ballots rejected because voters were not following procedures. this is really important for everybody. i know there are a lot of old people who have to vote by mail. and there are other people that to vote by mail. you have follow the instructions. i cannot emphasize enough the most frequent way in which people disenfranchize themselves. people who are earnestly wanting to vote is not following the ballot ballot instructions. so carefully follow those instructions. now, new jersey had a bad system. they made provisions to try and

fix system. if you look at other states that were more mature ballot states, states that have been doing balloting for a long time, they had a much smaller percentage of rejected mail ballots. why is that? well, they they have better looking envelopes and they have better directions for the voters. so that people don't miss. those important. people still do. and again, one emphasize follow the instruction. but nothing like what we were seeing in new jersey and in new york, too, by the way, they had a very high level of mail ballot rejection in some of the elections were happening in new york during the primary. so one of the nice things and good things that happened. out of the election is people learned. election officials learned they weren't works and what doesn't work. and of these archaic ways in which states that had only used absentee ballots, very limited prior elections, they learned better ways of delivering the election and making sure that voters were following

instructions more. and so by the time you get to the general election, new jersey's rejected ballots go down significantly because people are more aware and the instructions. richard in montreal, canada, republican republican. yeah. good morning. morning. had them in france. in france, they're able to count 70 million votes with. no problem. you know, the results of the election, the same same night. but here in the united states, where they have where you don't have a strict voter i.d. laws and strict signature sequence, your verification page stays a country that doesn't have strict voter i.d. laws is not an honest country. and if you look at mr. mcdonald's feed, you can tell he's a political hack for the democrat party, which is he doesn't want to discuss. tony bobulinski, his interview with tucker carlson, which would prove that there there is corruption in the democrat, but he never talks about corruption, the democrat party.

he only attacks republican on twitter. so his credibility is. thank you. your response, professor? well, first of all, about the mail ballots is that there are some states that do process those mail ballots before election day. my home state, florida, would be one of them. and on election night, the election officials have already pre process those ballots. they've separated them out from the envelopes. they've checked to make sure that the voter is who they say they are, that made sure that the ballots aren't going to be rejected. so it's more of a matter just processing those ballots on election day. by federal law, we have to count all the ballots on election day itself. so that's what's going on. and states like florida, where they prepare the ballots for counting. but there were some states, particularly pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin, three of

the critical battleground states in the 2020 election where the republican officials did not allow. they election officials to do that pre-processing. so they had to do of that other work about verifying the voter and making sure that the ballot would not be rejected. on election day itself and led to delays in the reporting of the election results within those states. and that's where we get allegations of ballot dumps in like milwaukee and in detroit. and that was really engineered on phenomenon because. if the election officials had been like the election officials in florida, they have already prepared the ballots for counting and they would have done it very quickly. now, in some other states, they allow people to return their mail ballots. they have to do it by election day. but election officials continue to those mail ballots after the election, if they are postmark

marked by election day. and so some states are still ballots coming in. now, we do this for our military, our overseas civilian voters. every state does this. we're not washington everywhere. we all allow our military to participate in both. it's that some states extend this courtesy of allowing those ballots to come in to election officials on after the election. not just our military but all domestic civilian voters as. well. lastly, just to respond that the viewer i work with, i've worked on rc gerrymandering cases for republican and i care very deeply about the democracy of this country. i put my country over, my party, and i would hope that other people who think about on the what the importance of the american democracy its experiment is all about that you do the same.

it's okay to be a partizan, but what's not okay is to try destroy our democracy. because you don't like the outcome of an election. james. sugarland, texas. independent. hey, good morning. long time c-span listener. and first time caller. i really appreciate c-span and all the variety of topics that discussed and and different viewpoints. and it's nice to get a pulse on the american feelings about all these things when it comes to the 2020 election. you know, i really don't think there was, you know, significant enough, maybe there were some isolated pockets, but significant enough to make a difference. but in reality, you know, all these claims, i think they're really a distraction from the real story, which was coordinated suppression of the hunter biden laptop scandal which exposes corruption in the biden family. and, you know, i think that would have likely had an impact on people's voting decisions and my opinion, this was probably one of the major things that had a big impact. the outcome of the election.

you know, it's come out in that the fbi was reaching out to social media companies to warn them of upcoming disinformation right before the hunter biden stories were starting to get leaked and lots of high level previous intelligence all came out, said it was false but turned out to be true. you know, so i think that that's that's the story here. so all this talk about mail in ballots and fraudulent ballots and, you know, machine that are working, i think that's all nonsense and a big distraction from something that's that is legitimate, which is the influence that social media has and on controlling narrative and people's thoughts. well, let's let's let's take that. michael mcdonald. well, without a doubt social media has served as vector for misinformation. we can see viral allegations that are made both sides, which are clearly fabricated and and so. we have to tackle as a country the corrosive effect that social

has on our discourse. and a lot of the allegations and the conspiracy theories that we have emanate from information that is not trusted sources, but it gets shared widely and no one has come up with a solution. this. i. i. we at fragmented our media that started with cable news and it has accelerated. there is however, i would a period of time in this country where we had partizan media and so it's not the first time that we've experienced phenomenon where instead of sort of the hollywood trust that news sources that we would see in the evening and that would be our only evening only source that newspapers we did have partizan press. and what's interesting about that observation is that the last time that we had very high this country was at a time when there was partizan press people

believed very deeply that elections mattered. they were being fed information to sell that that the different media sources, the newspapers in particular back in the 1800s from those sources were very partizan. they were trying to hype up allegations that may may not have been true back in the 1800s. and so we're yet again in a very high period of polarized fashion. and part of that is likely due to this fragmentation that people can go out and find information sources that agree with them, rather than trying to seek out other sources that might counter that narrative that they're hearing and be more closer to what the truth is. we've heard claims here on this program from viewers who say there were multiple ballots or ballots that weren't requested by voters. did that happen again on an isolated scale? it can always happen. but election officials have ways of checking the application and

verifying that the voters were requesting those. and then again, if the ballots are coming in, something was sent to a polling location and they've already voted by mail and here's the person saying, i didn't do that that will raise some red flags for election officials and especially if we started you know people forget i mean, there were instances of that happening where on site people forgot that they cast a mail ballot. i know that seems very strange to some people, but, you know, unfortunately, there are some people who are older who don't remember. they're very earnest. and we want to make sure that they voted when they sort of forgotten they've done so. but in those cases, election officials have a paper record. they can go back and they can look at on the ballot that was cast by mail and they can confirm versus the person who's trying to vote in person. and in all of those instances,

those sorts of allegations were being made and they were very sporadic. so talking about one or two, we're not talking about rights, but in those cases where those that happened, election officials able to go back and they were able to verify, yeah, this is the signature of the person that they're on their mail ballot that's trying to vote in person say in like las vegas where one of these instances happened. oc williamsport, pennsylvania dentist democrat of color. good morning thanks for taking my call. i vote by mail. the republican controlled in pennsylvania passed a vote by mail by mail law in 2019 and i have voted by mail every election since. in 2020 they would not allow drop boxes in this county. and i went to turn my in at the election office and the line was 100 yards long a turning in their mail in ballots.

when their call leader fewer turned against mail in ballots. that same legislature passed the mail in ballot law all turned against it, have tried to repeal it and in fact it had to go all the way to the supreme court to be codified as legal and as an aside. our county commissioners. two of which are republicans, just voted to hand recount the 2020 election because you still have people that don't like the results and trump got less votes and. some other republican candidates in this republican county, and they don't accept the election this day and so they're gonna recount by hand the election ballots in january. hey, have a nice and thank you michael mcdonald so it's incredible how so many aspects

of our election system have become politicized and so drop boxes was one of those and the irony for drop boxes is that there's actually a stronger chain of custody of the ballots are placed within drop boxes because they're placed into drop box and election officials go out and collect those ballots. often those drop boxes are special containers that are at government locations. they have security monitoring that's going on. maybe video cameras or others and on. and so those those receptacles have a very high level of and it's an election official who's taking the ballot that's deposited in it and returning it to the election office. so there's a very clear chain of custody on the ballot instead. what instead of having drop boxes? there are republican legislatures who have restricted

the drop boxes in favor of using the mail system and actually creates a weaker chain of custody because. now you have a mail carrier has to take the ballot. it's got to transfer to system, mail system with, several hands along the way of sorting that mail. it's got be going it's got to be delivered through trucks to central processing facilities and then it's got to get back to the election office again. and another person, another truck has to bring that mail back to the election. so it's it's a curious thing how a system that if you really cared about security, you would say, yes, we drop are the most secure way in which people can return mail ballots, election offices. there's no evidence one way or another, by the way, that having a drop box facilitates higher turnout. it's no evidence that there's democrats using it more frequently than republicans are people who do have mail ballots. it just became part of flash

point of the whole system to say, here's a weakness. and it may be that if can restrict the ability for people to return ballots and like the caller said, had stand in a long line to return to mail ballots, somehow that's going to depress turnout for certain people. and that's not really how democracy should work. everyone should have an opportunity to participate in the election. i have in the past worked for the federal voting assistance program that encourages our military to vote which widely regarded surveys to confirm this. but it tends to be a republican group of people. so just as i'm advocating for mail ballots for the general citizenry, i'm also advocating it for our military. and i just think that democracy works best when everybody can have their voice heard and the election outcome can be based on what the will of the people are. but a fork river, new jersey juries, a republican, good

morning to you. good morning. two things. when trump got into, we heard four years of russian collusion to me and two impeachments while he's in. and then one impeachment after he even left. to me, that kind of makes me feel like that. the democrats didn't accept him either. and then i just need to know, is it true zuckerberg. spent $150 million in drop boxes across key states? because i did see a video of one of the drop boxes and and the same woman came on three different occasions with like. 20 different ballots. so i was a little confused, that dropbox thing. zuckerberg spent 150 million in in dropbox boxes. is that true? so it's it's not true that

zuckerberg. provided $150 million in drop boxes, but zuckerberg did was and a lot of other individuals and organizations was provide to election officials to help them administer the election and. so on. it looks election officials are underfunded in this country. it's not something that we really fund very well. we take it for granted that our election officials have the support and resources they need. and ironically, it's a lot of the rural, small republican counties are the ones that are most stressed and are in most need of outside because they're underfunded by state governments and local governments. so here in florida, example, we our republican legislature, a law that outlawed any outside support for the administering of elections. and here we just had em brought through some of the most

republican areas of the state and election officials there are struggling to run an election. and unfortunately because i think there would be a lot of people who would want to help those election officials provide them with and in some way to run the election. unfortunately for those election officials in the south of florida, they are unable to accept any outside because of the law that was passed because of this misinformation that came out that zuckerberg was trying to somehow sway the results of the election by support to election officers. so, you know, that's it's not true. and but it's the perception that it's true has infected our discourse in this country. and now it's coming back and hurting republicans a way because they didn't anticipate maybe in a future election it

would be republican areas of a state that would desperately need that help for the administration of their elections. here's a mercury news headline to what michael mcdonald was talking about. mark zuckerberg helped fund the 2020 elections. now republican seek to ban future. keith in palm, florida republican. hey good morning. or on a great day out there probably pretty nice on your up to the. first i'd like to make a suggestion to c-span. you know you guys this place you go first organization to have an adult with no name calling from both sides. it's getting a little painting up here about the has all these people but i don't i was living in america. we're supposed to be open i hope c-span says something this on every call because it is just getting ridiculous. 30 years ago, you guys can do this anyway. you know when comes to election,

there's always been an undertow. on the you know what we've learned if you know that there be feeling this flow but the modern stuff started in 2000 with the bush gore and ever since there's been a bigger and bigger, bigger undertow on and you the easier you make it the vote you got to be lebanon who doesn't know that you can vote? we begged people to vote. and the easier we it, the more opportunities. let's have analysis question 50 state every has a different system of voting so when you're talking going over and you know before thousand and eight or even now in the media was always always from the left it seemed like the vote fraud was in the news. and then when the carolinas

thing happened, the republicans started getting it. we're all turning the wrong way. and so and wrong. okay. several points there, michael mcdonald, go ahead and respond. well, it's absolutely true that the united states says elections much differently than any other democracy in the world. we do have 50 states that run their elections. if you look at other countries in the world, by and large, they have one national election commission that runs the elections, the entire country. and most countries in the world on have a national id that serves as your voter registration and also serves lots of other purposes well. we don't have that in the united states. instead, we have a very clunky system of voter registration that does not work the same way. in all the states. and so there is, i think, some real discussion that needs to be happened in this country. and maybe some of these callers will be surprised to learn.

i unlike donald trump in that i a national id card. i think it's the right way to go. think it will solve some other problems that have with immigration this country to identify every one who is here as is american citizen and have a card to do that rather than having a clunky system that's a 50 state system for driver's licenses. that's what other countries in the world do, but not us. instead, we're mired in politics. and again, if you look across the country, the world, our politics are much, much more politicized. our elections are much more politicized, i should say, than other because we have personal officials who are running our elections. other countries don't do that. and so we have that aspect to it and then because we have very decentralized elections and we have partizan who are trying to sway the election in one way or

another on we have the most litigated elections, the country as well. and if you look back at the 2020 election, it's a case study and all those pathologies that are going in the united states. and the way in which we run our elections, i think we would be much better having professional wise, not person election run in elections nationally, but we're never going to have that because. we have a tradition of having hyper decentralized elections in this country. we have a very complicated for running things. and so the interests that we have in this country to have something like a professional wise bureaucracy that runs our election like every other country in the world does. that's just not in the for the united states. andy in kentucky, republican, good morning. your next. good morning. thank you. you just said something there and i've got three points that affected my son. but you just said something there about the voting system.

how how would you administer a national registration process like that with cards? who would be in charge of that? also, the in california new york, i used know how many i have to allow, but many other states do not. recognize kentucky's concealed registration gun so that yet those states have motor voter laws and those motor voter laws these eagles get license. i think that's what 20 some states now that have that. so they get these driver's drives through by state but actually carry into their states a concealed weapon responsibly. so how do you with things like that and just so many points to these things. let's take let's take those couple of points that you just made. michael mcdonald.

yeah. so again, federal ism has its pluses and minuses. it allows some states to enact laws that best suit. the culture and the citizenry of their states. and so here's a good example where. we have concealed carry laws that vary across the states and. we have driver's license laws that vary across the states, but i think in some cases and we of course we see this nationally there some national laws that we have in this country. and for example, a passport, because i'm going to answer the other on the federal issues are passports and it would not be a stretch to put together a system allows people to get a national id card when they are on become of age and background in some countries do this very early in their life right as soon as they're born they're given all of the information that's needed and then that card is tracked

throughout their life. and i won't be very clear about how system would have to work. we see again states when they deliver their driver's license availability. states do not provide the resources to allow people in all parts of their state to have the same access to driver's licenses and in places, alabama, particularly in rural african-american areas in the black alabama, the offices not open or they closed on the very open for very limited hours. they are open on that's not fair. and we to have a fair system and having a national system where the federal government can put its resources behind it to have a fair system that works. everybody in the country not certain areas that are benefited and by and large, those areas that are more urban. i mean, again, this there are some pathologies that we have in

our elections that we we we even realize that election administration is better done at urban areas because those areas are wealthier and have can use the economies of scale to run more efficient elections. but you go out to rural areas of this country and there's a real problem with professionalized election administration. and i'm not blaming the election officials. i want to be clear on that, too. they're my heroes for many reasons. it's because we don't give them enough resources to conduct their jobs and and so we really do need to rethink about how we serve our elections in this country. and again, ironically, because we we can't have this discussion, we're so paralyzed as a country about the politics of we can't have this discussion that it's actually rural republic and areas that are being hurt the most by. the way that we underfund our elections in this country. let's go to brian, pennsylvania, independent.

good morning, greta and michael i'm curious as to why you would have stated that in pennsylvania, the republican voting officials set up not to count the ballots until election day that the voting officials in pennsylvania are democrats. so and they passed a law and they reformed it and a of voting mail in voting and they were the democratic officials said you didn't need signatures to verify who you were. and i wondered if you had done any work on that. yeah. i again, i all of this in the book and so what happened in pennsylvania was there was a

transition that was done before the election. so pennsylvania was on a road to expanding mail balloting, but before that, pennsylvania had an excuse required absentee. and if you looked at the person of the electorate that was casting ballots in pennsylvania it was around 5% or so. so it was a very limited number of people who were casting mail ballots. no one anticipated that suddenly in 2000 election, 2020 election, i should say suddenly that we would have such expansive use of mail ballots in an emergency procedure and so election officials never really contemplated the fact that they would need to be able to prepare, process those mail ballots. and it only became evident as we ramped up into the election that that was going to be needed in order get those election results out very quickly. now, i actually don't think that we need to see election results quickly.

i think that we could spend a day where election officials are telling the votes and that they're checking over the results, looking for any outliers, some of the conspiracy theories were launched, involved antrim county, michigan, which because of a local election that got put onto the ballot the very last minute, the tabulator got programed from and instead of a change to a precinct that should have happened on that change got propagated throughout the entire state. i mean, excuse me, the county of antrim. i worked for the national exit poll on election. we were looking at those antrim county results that had biden leading and we didn't believe it. we knew that something had gone wrong with the election reporting in antrim. and so we just said, would you disregard particular county until can figure out what was going on and it was very quickly that the associated press identified that with this

programing error they corrected it hours later it gets fixed and. fortunately, there's also paper. there have been audits of antrim county verify what happens there they've been recounted by hand the paper ballots. so we know that the election results reported from antrim are correct. but because someone did a programing error on the tabulation machine that launched a million conspiracy theories about dominion voting systems, that have proven to be untrue and. we've seen organizations like fox have to retract some of the statements they've said about dominion under the threat of a lawsuit from the company. so if we just took a little extra time, we don't need the election results on election night. if. had the election officials internally check over the results, make sure that everything is as it appears to be and it should be, and then

look for any errors and try to diagnose what possible excuse explanations are after years, i think we would all be better served as a country because we wouldn't have. these sort of ballot dumps coming, which are just the tabulation of the election results. that's all that's going on there the the mail ballots that had to be tabulated and they had to do it on election day. they weren't like florida, where those election results came out immediately because. election officials had prepared this results before the election or those ballots for counting if we just took that extra real time. a lot of the things that have conspiracy theories, i think would fade away because election officials could check things over. then we could accept maybe noon on wednesday on we could look at the election results and we could not have this sort of messy process and under the hood, everything that's happening with the sausage making, that's on with the reporting of the election. michael mcdonald is a political

science professor at the university of florida, the author of this from pandemic to inside. voting in the 2020 us presidential election. professor mcdonald, thank you for the this morning.

and now joining us on book tv is mark scorsone, who's an but he is also the founder of freedom fest. mr. scales and we're sitting here in the mirage hotel in vegas. what's g