cable. today, democratic presidential nomie mala harris is speaking on the ellipse in washington, d.c. whe s is excited to lays out her closing arguments to voters with one way to go before election day. you can watch the vice president's remarks live at 7:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. c-span now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. this election night, c-span -- not just the presidential race but the state races that will determine the balance of power in congress. no political pundits, no spin, just the candidates, the results, and you. follow c-span this election night beginning at 7:00 eastern live, tuesday, november 5, on tv, online, or on the free c-span now video app. washington journal continues. host: david becker the founder and executive director of the founder -- center for election innovation. remind viewers what kind of

research and innovation you are doing. guest: the been around for about eight years to support elections that voters should and do trust. i work with the democratic secretaries, local election officials to put out research that shows it is easier to register the vote than ever before, more availability of online registration, same-day registration. and it's easier to vote than ever before. 97% of all voters could vote early in the united states. 45 states are offering early voting. 36 states in d.c. offer no excuse mail-in voting. then we also run the legal defense network, which over the last several years, election officials haven't targeted for threats and harassment, sometimes even by the former president of the united states, and they often need a lawyer for advice and assistance, and we have recruited a network of lawyers all across the country who are willing to be paired

with them regardless of party and work for them for free to assist. how is it funded, and doesn't have a partisan leaning one way or the other? guest: we get funded primarily by major foundations as well as individuals who choose to donate u.s.. all of our funding and everything else is publicly available. host: millions of americans have voted early either via absentee ballot or in person early voting. what do you make of that? guest: it's going to hit 50 million today. first of all, it's very good news. the more people who vote early means more people are taking advantage of the convenience of early voting and it is actually an important security measure, how important it is to spread

voting out over a series of days and modes. that way if there is any kind of event, intentional like ransomware or unintentional like the crowd flare situation this summer that caused some delays in arizona during their primary day, or just the weather, which we seen, it spreads that out to make it easier to mitigate any possible challenges that you have. especially with this information. if voters choose to vote early to make themselves a moving target for disinformation they could try to confuse them on how to vote. it's really good news. i caution people not to take any partisan message from the early voting. we just don't know what this early vote is, it's coming from all over. it seems to be skewing slightly more women, but also slightly older, so that can mean a

variety of different things. host: when are we going to know the result? guest: it depends. first of all we should mention that it has always taken us days if not weeks to count all the ballots. there is a misconception that to get the margin used to be much wider, that states were counting ballots fast, but that's not true. they were discounting enough ballots that the media could call the race. california will have counted a very tiny percentage of its votes, but it's pretty obvious which way california is very likely to go in the presidential race whereas george is going to count ballots very fast at the margin could be very narrow so we are going to need a lot more votes before we can understand who won georgia. it's always taken that long, that's why electors don't meet until six weeks after the election, so states can actually figure out who is going to win and get their electoral vote. so understanding that, it all

depends on the margin. the margin is the biggest variable. if it is very close, then by all accounts it will be close. everyone rationally should be able to process the idea that their candidate won or lost. we will likely need a couple of days in some states, particularly pennsylvania, wisconsin, and possibly arizona and nevada. in pennsylvania and wisconsin they can begin processing mail in pennsylvania early until election day, meaning they can look at the envelope, confirm the information, take the ballot out and put it the scanner. arizona and nevada can preprocess but they've got a lot of mail votes on election day. they are going to have to take some time to do that. that can mean we are going into later in the week thursday or perhaps even friday. if i were to guess, we will probably no earlier than we did in 2020 just because we are not in covid and that means we have

more people working, and a lot of technology has been improved. philadelphia has greatly improved its processing ability to get those mail ballots counted. i think we are probably looking at thursday or friday before we know. host: phone numbers for viewers to come in as usual split by political party. republicans, (202) 748-8001. democrats, (202) 748-8000. independents, (202) 748-8002. as folks are calling and i will share this headline. it is from the wall street journal today. voting battles begin to hit supreme court. i want you to just kind of walk through what is going on. here is the graph that describes it from the wall street journal. republican national committee and election officials in pennsylvania asked supreme court justices to block authorities recounting provisional ballots cast by voters who previously sent mail-in ballots that were invalidated because of errors such as assembling the return

envelope incorrectly. guest: it's a complicated issue that is probably not going to affect many votes, but when the ballots come in, they have to be inside an inner secrecy sleeve, a second envelope that is sealed to preserve the secrecy. it doesn't need to be there but that is what pennsylvania law says. what election officials can do in some counties, is they count by the weight of the ballot whether or not certain ones have the secrecy sleeve or not because the scales are that precise. and if they don't, in some counties they rejected those voters and say if you want to come down you can cast a provisional ballot, and if your ballot doesn't have a secrecy sleeve, that will count. what the pennsylvania supreme court has held is under state law, that is a fine thing to do, and now the republicans have taken the u.s. supreme court. but this is a very state law issue. it is highly unlikely the united states supreme court is even going to take the case.

the pennsylvania supreme court has refused to stay the order pending the appeal, and the appeal relies a lot on this idea that state legislatures have complete power to do whatever they want without regard to the state constitutions or the state judiciary. this has largely been rejected in a case from about a year ago that came out of north carolina by the supreme court. so i think the supreme court is going to stay out of this. the supreme court in general doesn't want to get involved in these election disputes. i think we are going to see that repeatedly through this process for the u.s. supreme court allows the states to continue to run elections as they see fit. host: not as much of a swing state, but virginia's republic attorney general asked to revise the state voter purge with some 1600 alleged noncitizens from the roles after lower courts found that canceling voter registration so close to the election violates federal law. host: there's those co-big

problems with what virginia was trying to do. first, there is a very well-known federal law that is called the national voter registration act passed in 1993 which says that allstate are covered which includes virginia cannot conduct large-scale systematic removal within 90 days of the election. that is in there because sometimes states get it wrong. people are coming in with like that, they're doing the best that they can, but if they do that in 2023 there is still plenty of time for that person to get the register. 90 days before the election, they might not even know there is a problem. that's why that law is in place. it's been around for 30 years. the second big problem is they made a lot of mistakes. there are a lot of identified citizens on this noncitizens list when they went to court and proof were shown at court. so they kinda show through their

actions how important this 90 day quiet period is. again, i expect the u.s. supreme court not to weigh in on this. i think this is pretty clearly the fourth circuit confirmed the district court opinion. it is likely the supreme court is going to stay out of these very state-specific, although this one does involve federal law. host: how concerned are you about non-us citizens voting a week from today? guest: i'm not very concerned and that is because of the documentation and work that frankly republican election officials have done to show how extremely rare the problem of noncitizen voting is. the reason is extremely rare, one it is illegal and has been for 30 years under very specific statutes that say it is a crime with jail time and a fine if he noncitizen votes. also they are going to get deported if they vote as noncitizens.

a lot of people don't necessarily realize this, in 2002 there was a law in the u.s. that requires every single voter who registers to provide id when they register. most always a driver license which is checked against data. you have to show proof of legal presence. if you show a green card that will be flagged. a u.s. birth certificate or passport, it won't be flagged. that is really important. three single voter has a flat id will be registered to vote. and then lastly as i mentioned, these republicans documented how rare it is. just last week, ohio had alleged that there were about 499 citizens registered to vote. the attorney general found only 6 people he could charge with noncitizen voting dating back to 2014. you are more likely as an ohioan to get hit by lightning than to

find a noncitizen voter. i believe they found nine people dating back to 2008, so over 15 years, who were noncitizens who voted. it does happen, extremely rarely, almost always because of some confusion what they are supposed to do because no one would legally -- rationally put their legal status at risk to cast one ballot in an election which 116 million ballads are going to be cast. host: let me start in delaware, georgetown, line for democrats. caller: good morning. in 2020 and again this year, they were assuring everybody that these voter boxes where you could drop off your balance in these boxes.

if i'm not wrong, i saw on the news the other day that three, may be more of those boxes have been set on fire and all the envelopes in it were burned. i don't know with donald trump is going to make of that, so what you think about, or am i wrong? guest: there have been three instances over the last several weeks. one was a postal box in arizona and i believe over the last few days there was a valid dropbox, one in portland and one in vancouver, washington. only a very small number of ballots were destroyed. the rest were salvageable. in the washington case, it looks like there might have been hundreds of ballots. they also have good ballot

tracking in the states. they can tell whether or not they've got those ballots. they are protections to make sure that no one votes twice, but they can go get a replacement valid. if the ballot comes in, only the first will count. the second won't count. that's really important. we are seven days out from the election at this point, and there are tens of millions of ballots that still haven't been voted that are likely coming in. and if you are still holding onto your mail ballot, i would at this point put it in a dropbox. most are monitored, verified, cleaned out every day so it is very likely that is going to be safe but if you have any doubt that all you can take it right to an election office, handed to an election worker. it will be logged and at that point stored securely and safely the entire time. another option, you can bring

your mail ballot to an early voting site, and they will give you the most of a regular ballot. that will only count if they don't receive your mail ballot and use protections to make sure that each voter only vote once. host: i was talking to a longtime firefighter yesterday and he was talking about the training that he was going through that they have this year. they just got on how to deal with dropbox fires. to use chemical sites, election officials can be on site. in all his years of firefighting training, he doesn't remember getting that kind of training before an election before. what do you make of that story? guest: it's incredible that we live in a country like that right now where there are people who are intentionally -- and by

the way, they might be the same individuals who firebombed both the oregon and washington drop boxes. that person is going to because it is going to be prosecuted and spent several years in jail, so people should know that. but how sad a commentary on our country that there are people out here trying to destroy ballots. maybe they are doing it for partisan reasons, maybe they are doing it to serve chaos. i guarantee what they are doing is sowing a goal that is clearly trying to interfere in our election. what does it say about our country that a nonprofit like mine needs to run the defense network for election officials who are facing abuse, threats and harassment for well over four years now, and are still anticipating even more in the aftermath of the election? i'm very proud to provide that service but i can't wait to

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