but only on c-span2 get it straight from the source. no matter where you are from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased. that happens here, care, or anywhere, america is watching on c-span, powered by cable. >> michael mcdonald is with us this morning. from pandemic to insurrection, bullying in the presidential election. good morning. you described the election as a story of triumph, and tragedy. guest: we have to recognize that the 2020 election at the highest turnout, the highest number of people that participated since 1900. that is quite an accomplishment

in the midst of a pandemic. so of the 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. no one has come up with a solution to this. we have fragmented our media that started with cable news and

it has accelerated. i. of time in this country we had partisan media and it's not the first time we experienced this phenomenon. these trusted news sources and have it be our only sources we did have partisan news. what's interesting is the last time that we had very high turnout was at a time when there was partisan people believed deeply that elections matter. back in the 1800s from sources that worked very partisan they were trying to hype up allegations that may or may not have been true back in the 1800s.

part of that is likely due to the fragmentation that people can go out and find out information sources that agree with them rather than trying to seek out other sources that might counter that narrative and be closer to host: what the truth is. we have heard claims on this program from viewers who say there were multiple ballots or ballots that were not requested by rotors did that happen? guest: it can always happen, but election officials have ways of checking the applications and verifying that the voters are requesting those ballots and taken if the ballots are coming in to a polling location and they already voted, and here is the person saying i didn't do that that raises red flags for election officials. especially if we started, there were instances of that happening

where people forgot that they cast a male ball atmail ballot. they sort of forgot that they just voted. in those cases they keep records. they can go back and look at the ballot that was cast by mail and can confirm versus the person trying to vote in person. all of those instances where those allegations were being made and they were very sporadic so we are talking about one or two not lots. those cases were that happened but election officials were able to go back and verify that isn't the signature of the person on the mail ballot that is trying to vote. like las vegas where one of these instances happened. host: dennis, democratic color.

--caller. caller: thank you for taking my call in vote by mail. 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 ballot at the election office and the line was 100 yards long. when the cult leader turned against mail-in ballots, that same legislature that passed the law all turned against it and tried to repeal it and i had to go all the way to the state supreme court to be caught a fight as legal. and as an aside our county

commissioners just voted to hand recount the 2020 election because you still have people that don't like the results and trump got less votes than some of the republican candidates in this republican county and they don't accept the election to this day. so they are going to recount my hands in january. have a nice day, thank you. host: michael mcdonald? guest: it is incredible house on many aspects of our election system has become a lettuce sized. drop boxes was one of those. the ironing for drop boxes is that there is actually a stronger chain of custody that are placed with drop boxes because election officials go out and collect those often they are special containers that are

covered -- at government occasions they have security monitoring going on. so those receptacles have very high level of security and an election official who is taking the ballot deposited and returning it to the election office there is a chain of custody on the ballot. instead, instead of having drop boxes the republican legislatures restricted the drop boxes in favor of people using the mail system. that actually creates a weaker chain of custody because now you have a carrier that has to transverse the system, with several hands of on the way of sorting the mail it has to be delivered through trust. it has to get back to the

election office and again another person has to bring it back to the election office. it is a curious thing of the system if he really cared about security you would say drop boxes are the most secure way in which people can return ballot. there is no evidence that it facilitates higher turnout there is no evidence that democrats is it more frequently the republicans. it just became part of the flashpoint of the whole system were it says here is a weakness and it may be that if we can restrict the ability for people to return ballots like the caller said having to stand and along line. it will suppress turnout for some people. everyone should have an opportunity to participate. i have been for federal voting

assistance programs. it attends to be republican group of people. just as i am advocating for mail-in ballots i am also advocating for it for our military. i think democracy works best when everybody can have their voice heard and the election outcome can be based on what the will of the people is. host: there is a republican, good morning to you. caller: good morning. two things, when trump got into office we heard four years of russian collusion. and to impeachments and one impeachment after he left. to me that kind of makes me feel like the democrats didn't accept him either. and then i just need to know is it true zuckerberg spent $150

million in drop boxes all across key state? because i did see a video of one of the drop boxes and the same woman came on three different occasions with like 20 different ballots. i was a little confused about the dropbox thing. zuckerberg spends 150 million in drop boxes is that true? guest: no, it's not true that zuckerberg provided $150 million for drop boxes. what zuckerberg did was and a lot of other individuals and organizations did was provide grants to affection officials to help them administer the election. election officials are underfunded in this country. it is not something we really fund very well be taken for granted that our election

officials have the support and resources they need. ironically, a lot of the rule, small republican counties are the ones that are most stressed and in most need because they are underfunded by state governments and local governments. so here in florida for example, our republican legislator passed a law that outlaws any outside support for the administering of elections. here we just had 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 support in some way to run the election. unfortunately for those election officials in the south, florida, they are unable to accept any outside help because of a law

that just passed because of this misinformation that came out that zuckerberg was trying to somehow sway the results of the election. so, unfortunately it's not true. but the perception that it's true has infected our discourse in this country. now it's coming back and hurting republicans and await because they didn't anticipate that future elections it would be republican areas of the state that we desperately need the help for the administration of their elections. host: a headline related to what michael mcdonald was just talking about arc zuckerberg helps fund the 2020 election now republicans seek to ban future grants. heath in palm bay, florida. republican. caller: good morning, hope you're having a great day.

just to make a suggestion to c-span you guys have two be the first person to have an adult conversation. all these people i thought i was living in america we are supposed to be all americans. c-span knows something about this because it is getting ridiculous 30 years ago you guys were the best. anyway when it comes to elections there was always an undertone [indiscernible] but the monitors in 2000 with the bush/gore ever since then there has been bigger undertone. the easier you make it to vote,

who doesn't know that you can vote? we beg people to vote and the easier we make it, the more opportunity this is 50 states every state has a different system of voting that when you are talking this is going on over here and before 2000 the media was always in the news. when the carolina thing happened the republicans started to get into it. we are all turning the wrong way. host: several points there, michael. go ahead and respond. guest: is absolutely sure the election is done differently than any other democracy in the world. we do have 50 states that run their elections. if you look at other current --

countries they have one national election commission that runs the elections in most other countries have a national identification card that serves as your voter registration and also serves a lot of other purposes as well. we don't have that in the united states. we have a very clunky system of voter registration that does not work the same weight in all the states. so there is, i think real discussion that needs to happen in this country and maybe some of these collars will be surprised to learn i liked donald trump and that i support the id. it will solve some other problems we have in this country. i have a card to do that, rather than having a clunky system that is a 50 state system for drivers licenses. that is what other countries in

the world do. but not us. instead, we are minors in politics and again if you look across the world our politics are much more politicized. our elections are much more politicized than other countries because we have person elected officials running our elections. other countries don't do that. we have that aspect to us and we have centralized elections and partisan actors trying to sway the election one way or the other. we have the most litigated collections in the country as well. if you look back at the 2020 election it is just a case study all of those other elections i think we would be much better having election officials rent elections nationally but we are never going to have that because

we have a tradition of having centralized elections in this country. we have a very complicated system so that entrenched interest we have in this country to have something like a professionalized bureaucracy like every other country in the world does, is just not in the cards for the united states. host: andy in kentucky, republican. your next. caller: you just said something there and i'm not a big on it that you said something about the voting system. how would you administer a national registration process like that? it would be in charge of that? also, in california, new york, and other states do not recognize kentucky's concealed

carry registration laws. so those states have motor voter laws. and those laws, illegals get drivers licenses. i think there is 27 states now that have that? so they get these drivers licenses the contractor my statement i can't carry into the states. a concealed weapon. so, how do you deal with things like that? there are so many points to these things. host: let's take a couple of those points that you just made. guest: there are pluses and minuses. it allows some states to enact laws that it is best for the culture of their state this is a good example where we have concealed carry laws and drivers license laws. in some cases and of course we

see this nationally there are some national laws we have in this country for example, like a passport because am going to answer the other question the federal government issues a passport. it would not be a stretch to put together a system that allows people to get an identification card when they become of age. some countries do this very early. i know they are given all of the information needed at that card is tracked throughout their life. let me be clear on how the system would come to work. we see again states when they deliver their drivers license availability some states do not provide the resources to allow people in all parts of their states to have the same access to driver's licenses. places like alabama particularly

in rural communities the offices are not open or they closed or only open limited hours. that is not fair. we need to have a fair system and having a national system with the government can put its resources behind it to have a system that works for everybody, not just certain areas that are benefited and by and large those are areas that are more urban. there are technologies we have that we don't even realize that the administration, those areas are wealthier and use the economy for scale to run more elections. if you go after rule areas in this country and there is a problem with professionalized election administration.

it is because we don't give them enough resources to conduct their jobs. we really do need to rethink about how we serve out elections in this country. again, it is ironic because we can have this discussion. we are so paralyzed in this country you can have this discussion that it is republican areas that are being hurt the most by the way we underfund our elections in this country. host: escoto brian in pennsylvania, independent. caller: good morning 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. the voting officials in pennsylvania are with democrats.

when they passed a law and they reformed it as a lot of voting by mail-in voting but the democratic official said you didn't need signatures to verify who you were and i wondered if you hadn't any work on that? guest: yeah, again, i cover all this in the book so what happened in pennsylvania there was a transition before the election. they were on the road to expand mail-in ballots. if you look at the percentage of the electorate that was casting mail ballots it was around 5% or so so it was a very limited number of people no one

anticipated that suddenly in the 2020 election that we would have such expanded use of mail ballots for emergency procedures so russian officials -- election officials never complicated contemplate the fact they would need to process the ballots. it became evident as we ramped up into the november election that that was going to be needed in order to get the election results out. i think we could spend a day and they are checking over the results looking for any outliers. some of the conspiracy theories that relaunched involved michigan. because of a local election that put onto the ballot, at the very last minute, they got program

drawing and instead of changing single recent that change got propagated throughout the entire state. excuse me the county. i work for the organization on election night we were looking at the interim county election results that had leading and we didn't believe it. we knew that something had gone wrong with election reporting so we just disregarded that particular county until they could figure out what was going on. it was very quickly that the associated press said it was a programming error. they reported it, several hours it was fixed. the have recounted by hand so we know the election results were correct that launched one

million conspiracy theories about the dominion voting systems we have seen organizations like fox have to retract some of the statements they said under the threat of a lawsuit from the company. so if we just took a little extra time, we don't need election results immediately on election night. if we have them check over the result and make sure that everything is evidence not to be accused of what it's being accused of. i think we would all be better served as a country because we wouldn't have these sort of ballots coming in. that is all that is going on there. the ballots had to be tabulated and they had to do it on election day they weren't like florida where the results cannot immediately because election

officials prepared for this before the election. if we just took that extra little time a lot of the things that have lunch conspiracy theories i think is to check things over and then we can except maybe in by wednesday? we convict the election results and not have this sort of process and seeing under the head everything that is happening with the sausage making that is going on with the reporting of the election results. host: michael mcdonnell is a boater -- political science professor. voting in the 20 20th use at usa

state university's mccain institute. >> hello, everyone. you should be inspired now. i am the executive director of the mccain institute, every day we are motivated by the late, great senator mccain. we are committed