allowing them to make changes to their sex and gender. that is always the parents rights it is not the governments rights it is the parents rights. >> democratic woman jennifer wexton and hung cal participate in virginia's 10th congressional district candidates form watch the debate tonight at 9:00 eastern on c-span you can also watch on the mobile app sees and now. -- c-span now. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government we are funded by these television companies and more including charter communications. >> broadband is a -- four of empowerment. it is why we are focused on building infrastructure, of reading -- empowering communities and -- big and small charter is connecting us. >> charter communications supports c-span as a public service along these television

providers giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> michael mcdonald is with us this morning. he is a political science presser at the university of orit and the author of the book. officials had an almost impossible task of delivering and election and allowing american democracy to continue even while the pandemic was raging across the country. that is the part tramp. we have to give them -- that is the triumph we have to give them acknowledgment. they turned out at rates not seen before in american elections. that is the triumph side of it. the downside is that there were people who unnecessarily died. because we did not offer full mail balloting in the 2020

election and unfortunately there were those forces that try to undermine our democracy. they leveraged the fact that we had to move to mail ballots in an us at time. at an unprecedented time. host: what do you say to people who deny the results of the 2020 election? guest: trump had an opportunity to provide evidence of some sort of malfeasance in the election. he went before judges he appointed to the bench, he had allies in key states that were serving on his reelection committee. these were not people who've are part of the key state in any way. these were people who were his allies and yet he could not

bring any evidence forward those people who viewed the election results they looked at the integrity of the auction. there is always going to be a few errors. 150 million people voted. there are going to be some people who have accidents and that sorts of thing happens but they were very isolated there was no widespread far -- brought in the election and trump and his allies have yet to produce any proof of any fraud that happened in the election that was widespread. widespread fraud, no. i react to people who believe this and i understand. you get upset about the election outcome. there were people after the 2016 election who supported clinton who also had theories about russian influence in the election.

they were upset that their candidate lost and rightfully. they had a lot invested in the election and they wanted their candidate to win but the election in 2016 was free and fair. the election in 2020 was free and fair. so i really ask those people who really believe, just look at the evidence. realize that no credible evidence has been put forth before a court, it has been checked over by election officials who were allies of donald trump, none of these people produced any evidence that there was fraud in the 2020 election that would have reversed the outcome. host: remind viewers what changes were made by states ahead of the 2020 election and how they were able to make those changes. guest: one of the things i do is i follow the early voting. i have been doing that since

2008. so every election year, i spent the day compiling all the early voting statistics. we have seen a slow increase in the number of people who cast ballots before election day through mail balloting and threw it in person early voting. about 2016 we have 40% of the electorate cast their ballot before election day, about half were in person early voting and half or by mail. i 2020, things were upended because of the pandemic. we started to see states encourage mail balloting. in many states those emergency provisions carried over to the general election. but there were a lot of leaf -- legal battles. there were states that had archaic laws and never contemplated the possibility of running an election and the midst of a pandemic.

they were opera paired to -- they were unprepared to run an election. it turned out that half the people who voted in the 2020 election voted by mail. that change really affected our politics. many of the people who were voting by mail were democrats. many of the people voting in person were republicans. that upended patterns we had seen in decades prior. suddenly the method of voting by mail which republicans had never really questioned as fraud suddenly it became the focus of our because the democrats were voting that way. so, after the 2020 election and that it -- it is what is

carrying forward today because of the response democrats use mail ballots more frequently we see republican states to restrict mail ballots. we have seen democratic states who when they expanded mail balloting or maybe they started the move before the election, they decided to cement in those laws and we see a number of states adopt all mail ballot elections after the 2020 election or made other moves to expand voting so there is this real intention happening across the country. each of the state governments is a microcosm of what's happening naturally -- natural nationally.

we're seeing a retrenchment moving backwards and the ability for people to use mail ballots. host: how is early voting shipping up at this point before the november 2022 election? guest: 2020 election was the unprecedented election. the highest turnout rate since 1900. quite an accomplishment. you have never seen an election like this before for a presidential election but 2018 we actually saw participation pickup for midterm elections. in that election, over half the people who were eligible to vote participated that was the highest midterm turnout since 1914. lots of things have changed we had people changing their behaviors some of them are using mail ballots. we have seen the usage of mail ballots, it's hard to predict at this point how this is going to shape out for 2022 but the

indicators that we see in a number of poles for the early voting we have seen so far over 300,000 people already voted in this election. we are at levels that are very comparable to 2018. at this time, we still have a month ago. it looks as though we are going to see a very high turnout midterm election again. we made the 2018 that's going to be remarkable but we should be somewhere around at this point i believe in that 2018 turnout. host: let's get to calls. joe in florida, republican. good morning. caller: good morning. i think the mail-in ballots were kept track of the way the lottery keeps track of their lottery tickets, you can't, you can't forge a lottery ticket.

they know exactly how many they printed and where they went. so i don't believe that a lot of those ballots were marked just president and vice president. the rest were blank. i don't think we should have mail-in ballots unless they can really keep track of them. host: michael mcdonald for the april to keep track of them? guest: there's a whole chapter in my book on this. the security election officials have around mail-in ballots and it is really difficult to forge a ballot so much so that what you have to have as some sort of inside job within an election office and there is 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, trumps attorney general have made allegations before congress that there was

going to be some conspiracy about foreign government who tried to submit mail ballots, at the end he said there is no evidence of that. there really couldn't be, it's very complex. to answer the caller's question they barcode ballots, envelopes, they even have really cool innovations on how they run the other actions. they were running ballots as they were moving through the mail system. we do have a very robust system for tracking individual ballots and to anyone who is trying to forge a ballot would have to somehow defeat that. if somebody else had if somebody else was able to forge the ballot for someone who hasn't voted yet that would be a very difficult system to orchestrate and there is no evidence that there were some ballots that

were coming in that the election officials were scratching their head sink where are they coming from they knew where they were coming from. they knew the ballots that were being back in their office and they were doing other security provisions to check the authenticity. host: president trump in june of 2020 sent out this tweet. absentee ballots are fine, a person has to go through a process to get and use them. mail-in voting on the other hand full lead to the most corrupt election in u.s. history bad things happen with mail and. 19% of ballots fraud. guest: new jersey was one of the states that really didn't have a good system before the 2020 election. they had been moving towards mel ballots but new jersey requires

an affidavit to be placed inside the envelope when people return their ballots and what happened in new jersey was that many people didn't know they had to do that particular step and a large number of ballots were rejected because people were not following procedure. this is important for everybody. i know there are a lot of people who have to vote by mail and there are people who want to vote by mail, you have to follow the instructions. i cannot emphasize that enough. the most frequent way in which people disenfranchise themselves, people who are earnestly wanting to vote is by not following the instructions. follow those instructions. they made provisions to try and fix that system, if you look at other states states that have been doing mail ballots for a long time, they had a much smaller percentage of rejection. why is that? they had better looking

envelopes and they had better directions for their voters. so people don't miss those important steps. people do still do and again, i want to emphasize follow the instructions. it was nothing like reversing in new jersey and in new york too by the way. very height of of ballot rejections during the primaries. one of the nice things and good things that happened out of the election as people learned. election officials learned and some of these archaic ways in which states that had only used absentee ballots, they learned better ways delivery -- during the election and making sure voters were following the instructions so by the time you get to the general election new jersey's rejected ballots go down significantly because people are more aware of following the instructions. host: richard in on trail, canada, republican.

caller: yes, good morning. i have some friends that they are able to count -- the same night but here in the united states where they have you don't have strict voter id laws and strict signature voting it takes days. our country doesn't have strict voter idealized it's not an honest country. if you look at mr. mcdonald's twitter feed you can tell he is a political activist for the democrat party which is why he doesn't want to discuss the interview which proved there is corruption in the democrat party. they never talk about corruption in the democrat party. his credibility is at zero. thank you. host: your response come over professor? guest: first of all, about the mail ballots or states that due

process mel ballots before election day. my home state of florida will be one of them. on election night the officials have already separated them out from the envelopes they check to make sure that the voter, make sure the ballot is not going to be rejected so it is more of a process of processing the ballots on election day. by federal law, we have to count all the ballots on election day itself. so that is what is going on in states like florida where they prepare the ballots for counting. but there were some states pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin three of the critical battleground states where the republican election officials did not allow the election officials to do that preprocessing. so they had to do all of that

other work about in making sure that the ballot would not be rejected on election day itself. that led to delays in the reporting. that is where we get allegations of fraud like in milwaukee and detroit. that was engineered phenomenon because if election officials have been like in florida they would have already prepared the ballots and they would have done it very quickly. some other states, they do allow people to return the mail ballots, they have to do it on election day but election officials continue to accept the ballots after the election. if they are postmarked by election day. so some states there are still ballots coming in. we do this for our military and overseas voters. every state does this. florida, washington, everywhere.

we all allow our military to participate. some states extend this courtesy of allowing the late ballots to come in to election officials after the election not just our military but to domestic civilian voters as well. lastly just to respond to the viewer, i work with republicans. i care very deeply about the democracy of this country i put my country over my party and other people who think about the importance of the american democracy and its experiment you do the same. it's ok to be partisan but what's not ok is to try and destroy our democracy because you don't like the outcome of an election. host: midland texas, and dependent. caller: good morning, longtime

listener, first time caller. i appreciate all the topics discussed in the different viewpoints. when it comes to the 2020 election, and over they don't think there was a significant and off fraud. may some isolated pockets but enough to make a difference. all these claims, i think they are a distraction from the real story. which was coordinated suppression of the hunter biden laptop scandal which exposes corruption in the biden family. i think this information would have had an impact on voting decisions and my opinion this was one of the bigger impacts. it has come out that the fbi was reaching out to social media companies to warn them of upcoming disinformation prepare for the hunter biden stories were starting to get weak.

higher intelligence people came out and said it was false but it turned out to be true. that is the real story here so all this talk about mail ballots and machines not working i think it's all nonsense and it's a distraction from something that is legitimate just the influence that social media has on controlling narratives and people's thoughts. housecoat let's take that, michael mcdonald? guest: social media has served as a vector for misinformation we can see our viral application misinformation on both sides. we have to tackle as a country the effect social media has on our discourse and a lot of the allegations and conspiracy theories we see emanate from information that is not from trusted sources. announcer: