delivering a stem liner against john kerry at the republican national convention and challenging chris matthews to a dual. >> this is the man who wants to be the commander in chief of the u.s. armed forces? u.s. forces armed with what? spitballs? >> which state -- >> say to you -- >> switch parties if you're getting legislated -- >> if you ask a question. >> it's a tough question. it takes a few words. >> get out of my face. if you're going to ask me a question, step back and let me answer it. >> season tore, please. >> i wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a dual. now that would be pretty good. [ laughter ] >> that is our broadcast for tonight. thank you for being with us and good night from nbc news headquarters in new york.

happy to have you with us this fine wednesday night. first things first, we must poof, one of the record-breaking things about the democratic presidential field this year is that there are more women running for president in this field than have ever run for president in any one field before. it's been a landmark thing. it's been kind of inspiring to see six women up on the stage among the democratic contenders at the first two presidential democratic debates. six women running and they are a diverse bunch. they run the gammit on the number line, style, platforms. they run the in the chances of winning this thing as far as we can predict at this point, but you know, from marry ann will m williamson to elizabeth warren and kamala harris, this has been a history-making six woman panel

in terms of women's political power and aspirations in this country. the last presidential nominee of the democratic party who after all did win the popular vote by several million votes was a woman named hillary clinton. the most powerful democrat in washington now, the most powerful woman ever elected in the history of the u.s. government is the current democratic speaker of the house nancy pelosi. and these six democratic women all running for president in the same field, similarly, that is a way of melting down the glass ceiling and top tier american politics but contending at that level also inevitably entails off ramps and so now tonight for the first time, we have a woman candidate dropping out of the democratic race for president of the six women who made the first two democratic debates, only three of the six will make it on stage for the next debate, the

third debate. those three are amy klobuchar, kamala harris and elizabeth warren. of the three other female candidates who made the first two debates but not going to meet the criteria to get onto the third debate stage, well, among them it looks like marry ann williamson and tulsi gabbard hope to get on stage four for a variety of reasons too boring to discuss but we'll get into them in great detail at some point. that still leaves the sixth female contender in this pioneering field, democratic new york senator kirsten gill ibran. she's taking herself out of the running. she made the announcement with this tweet and campaign video and with a message from her campaign manager summarizing the

successes of their campaign. kirsten gill brand remains a popular senator and reelected to the senate last year among other things that means she's not up for reelection again for her senate seat in new york until 2024. should she choose to run for reelection as a senator again, which presumably she will. senator kirsten gillibrand in her political career will be absolutely just fine. but she is the first female candidate to close her campaign and so we must poof. first to go of course, was eric swalwell, john hickenlooper, poof, jay inslee, governor of washington, poof. go on. there you go. after jay inslee, it was, ready, ready, poof and now three, two, one, senator kirsten gillibrand. poof. thank you, senator. unless someone miraculously

invents and conducts and releases the results of a brand-new qualifying poll basically right now as i speak at this second, we now know the final field of candidates qualifying for the debate that will be hosted by abc news month in texas is these ten folks. it's interesting. i didn't really think about this in these terms before we got to today's deadline and got the confoco confirmation who is in and not we know that if more than ten candidates had qualified, the plan would once again have been successive nights, like we had in detroit and miami. now that we know though that only ten candidates qualified, that means they are going to do the whole thing on one night. apart from the separate and individual consequences for all the individual candidates and their campaigns, what that means for us the public planning to watch that next debate, looking forward it that debate, helping

us understand the differences between the candidates and who might make the strongest democratic nominee, for all of us that are going to watch that third debate, the fact that a nice round number of ten democratic candidates has qualified for that night means that once again, just like the first two debates, they're going to have ten freaking podiums up there at once. yeah, there's going to be ten candidates on stage at once again, all fighting to be heard. which means take it from me, no matter how many moderators abc puts up there to handle the ten candidates, all of those moderators will have 20 years added to their non-chronological age by the end of the night. they will have new ailments and new gray hair. numerically, it's weird and coincidental that the qualifying criteria made the field go from 20 for the first two debates to

exactly ten candidates for the next debate. by happenstance, that is how it worked out. it will be ten podiums up there at once. the ten podium standard for the 2020 democratic debates, which honestly is just a terrible thing. nobody planned it that way. that's essentially now settled. that debate is in two weeks. two weeks from tomorrow night. one night, all ten podiums there all at once. i wanted to get that out there. democratic presidential field saying good-bye to senator gillibrand. the lead story i want to focus on tonight is something different. it's something that we started covering here on last night's show. this is something that, other than our coverage last night and now tonight, this is not something that has had a lot of national press coverage other than what we have done here, as far as i can tell.

i do think this is a big deal. today it took a big unexpected turn. what this is is a new and importantly unannounced program from the trump administration. i say unannounced because they never put out some statement saying this is what they were going to do. the only way we learned about this new thing the trump administration is doing is because individual families around the country started getting letters from the trump administration, letters from the federal government. the letters were so shocking in their implication and so surprising and so out of the blue, again, they did not comport with anything the trump administration said they were going to. these letters were so shocking and upsetting that some of the families, as best as we can tell, they took the letters to lawyers and advocacy groups, to local public figures to understand what these letters meant and whether the u.s. government could really be trying to do what these letters

said to their families. particularly to their kids. the panic and upset of these individual families who got these letters started to come to the attention of local press where these families live. that is how we became aware of this at all. this has been particularly focused in massachusetts. the public radio station in boston and the "boston globe" picked up the story. they carry this stark headline. i feel like i'm signing my son's death warrant. children at boston hospitals face deportation. the photo is a 5-year-old boy who has a rare condition that inhibits his body's ability to absorb nutrients from food. he is a 5-year-old kid. he has a feeding tube into his torso.

he gets regular expert delicate medical care for this rare and dangerous condition that he has. he gets that care at boston children's hospital. boston children's hospital by some measures is the number one pediatric hospital in this country. here is the lead of the story. severely ill immigrants, including children with cancer, cystic fibrosis and other grave conditions are facing deportation under a change in trump administration policy that immigration advocates are calling cruel and inhumane. last week, citizenship and immigration services started sending out boilerplate letters to families with sick kids telling the families that if they didn't leave the united states in 33 days, they would become undocumented and face deportation. we covered this story last night. the response that we got to our reporting was frankly -- was overwhelming.

to be honest, pretty enraged. up in boston, the editorial board was clearly outraged by the news divisions reporting on the story. can the trump administration sink any lower than threatening to deport sick kids? here is the lead in that editorial. step by malicious step they are turning it into an apparatus of appalling intentional cruelty. the latest case is a small program known as medical deferred action in which immigrants without legal status suffering from serious medical conditions are granted a reprieve from deportation so they can have access to much needed medical treatment in the united states. trump halted the program this month, threatening to deport the patients, including children with leukemia, with muscular dystrophy, with cystic fibrosis. the program's termination means suspending or interrupting the children's medical care, which

in some cases is virtually a death sentence. democratic senator ed markey of massachusetts attended a press conference with a number of the families who have been told to take their kids out of medical treatment and get out of the country. senator markey's take on this last night as we highlighted on last night's show is this. it is unconscionable, it's just wrong. we have now reached the most inhumane of all of donald trump's policies. he said, the trump administration is literally deporting kids with cancer. there are few things that are at least at this point unusual or unknown about this story. without more reporting on this, it will take us time to get to the bottom of this. as we are trying to figure out what's going on, it's particularly interesting that this is a policy change that hasn't been announced. which i think ultimately starts to become important in terms of how well the trump administration is coping with what they're trying to do to these kids.

they started sending letters to parents whose kids are receiving life saving medical care that they can't get anywhere else, they started sending letters to the parents telling them that they need to get out now. right now. you have 33 days. yes, we know your kid is receiving ongoing life saving medical treatment. we don't care. stop the treatment and leave. it's possible -- as i said, the news that we have been getting this for the first few days has been out of massachusetts. i don't know why that is. it's conceivable that massachusetts has been targeted because they have got boston children's hospital. right? they have got arguably the best children's hospital in the country. so boston children's hospital is where a lot of kids who have life-threatening illnesses and super advanced medical needs, a lot of kids are getting treated at that hospital. maybe that's why this policy is surfacing there in this concentrated way.

we don't know exactly. these initial reports do come from the boston area and massachusetts. in massachusetts, there's anticipate organization called the irish international immigrant center that doesn't just serve irish immigrants. they have clients who have sick kids, kids getting life saving medical care. clients have received these letters. here is what the legal director told us last night here. >> they are saying they have the power to just eliminate it all together, which is what they have done. there is no appeal. i don't know why they came up with 33 days. yeah, they are telling these people they need to leave on their own. i don't know how they expect parents to pull their children from hospital beds, disconnect them from treatment. that's what they are telling them to do. >> that was here on this show last night. this emerging news the trump administration has quietly, without announcing it implemented a new policy that

targets kids with life-threatening illnesses and telling their parents they must stop medical treatment and get out within 33 days without a right to appeal. you can see why this is the story that will get national news coverage, even if it hasn't yet. as of our coverage here last night, most of what we were able to learn about what's going on is out of massachusetts, out of the boston area. "the miami herald" has the story because they say they, too, are seeing some of the same things happening to families in south florida. the trump administration is ending a federal program that removed the threat of deportation temporarily for immigrant families facing serious illnesses such as cancer. they have obtained several of the letters that have been sent to families where somebody is receiving medical care. "the herald" reviewed the case

of a man whose child had cancer. the man received a rejection letter for his application to the medical deferred action program on august 13. the man says he is desperate to stay in the country and to remain with his daughter. as i said, we are just seeing these initial news reports that these news stories are emerging locally where families are telling the local press, they are telling public officials that they have received these letters from the trump administration, essentially demanding the deaths of their children. demanding that their children stop receiving medical treatment that's saving their lives, stop treatment and get out of this country. we are seeing these cases emerge so far in massachusetts over the last couple of days in florida today. we have ever reason to believe this is happening all over the country. as we have been trying to further report this story today, what emerged over the course of this afternoon was no further clarity on why the trump

administration has decided to prioritize kids with cancer in terms of who they are going after next. to my surprise, we also got no further clarity today on where else in the country this may be happening. still, these reports that we have got are from massachusetts and florida. we're not seeing news reports from other places, at least that we could find today. we are looking for that local coverage. i think that's going to be how we figure out what the scope is of what the trump administration is trying to do. what did emerge today though is that as this new policy targeting sick kids has started to receive the first little bit of scrutiny, it's essentially already blowing up what the trump administration is trying to do. there has not been a lot of national pressure on the story yet. i think we are the first national outlet to cover this. as the trump administration has just tried to answer basic questions about why they are sending these letters and why

they have brought about this change in policy that's going to have such dire and specific humanitarian consequences and potentially fatal consequences for kids in this country, as local radio stations and the first newspapers start to call the administration to figure out what is going on to get comment for their stories, the trump administration is completely flailing on this. they have not idea what to say. apparently, they didn't understand what it was they were launching when they started this program attacking these kids and when people finally started to ask them to answer for it. i will show you what i mean. after wbur, the public radio station in boston posted their terrifying initial story about these kids in boston being targeted, kids being treated at the children's hospital in boston, kids with rare genetic disorders, with cystic fibrosis, seizure disorders, after they published their first story, hours after publication, they received a whoa comment from the u.s. customs and immigration service that sent out the

letters, the death sentence letters to these families. they told bur after they published this story that they wanted it to know this program that had been allowing the kids to stay alive, despite what you might have seen, that program isn't ending, per se. it's just being shifted to a different part of the trump administration. quote, medical deferred action requests are now submitted to i.c.e. different agency for consideration. okay. that is their first explanation when they get their first hard question. family in the boston area, you have been told you have to get out and stop providing life saving treatment to your ill mention. we didn't mention some other part of the administration might be able to help you out so you can keep staying. did nobody mention that? that was their first explanation. now it turns out, the other agency that is supposed by

picking up this program, the other agency inside the trump administration that supposedly is going to process these requests for dieing children to stay here in order to receive medical care that's keeping them alive, now we find out that agency is not doing this. they have no intention of handling these kinds of questions for kids in this kind of circumstance. they have no program like this. they say today they have no idea why some other agency in the trump administration has been telling reporters now that they do. great. here is how this played today in "miami herald." three officials with i.c.e. who asked not to be named say the agency was blindsided by the move. high level sources said that management at the agency had no idea u.s. customs and immigration was transferring over deferred action responsibilities, noting that ranking officials were scrambling to respond to the unexpected move. that's how it played.

here is how it played at wbur. an i.c.e. official told wbur the agency was not informed that that agency would stop processing the deferral requests. there's no program at i.c.e. that's going to take over that program. >> i.c.e. official speaking -- i.c.e. was blindsided by the decision to refer all immigrants applying for deferred action to them. i.c.e. has no plans in place to review these applications. they don't have a program for this. nor do we plan to. at a magazine in massachusetts, which has great reporting on this, their reporter got this. quote, i.c.e. and u.s. customs and immigration officials

allegedly had a meeting for the first time about this policy this morning. meaning this morning, wednesday morning. i.c.e. is 100% punting this back to customs and immigration. just take a step back from this for a second. we're going to talk to a lawyer in the middle of the fight. trying to represent some of the families and keep some of these kids alive. take a step back for a second. imagine being in charge of the federal government, of the richest and most powerful nation on earth and deciding what that government ought to work on is figuring out, where are all the really good pediatric hospitals in this country and trying to figure out if there might be kids in the hospitals who are currently receiving ongoing treatment that is saving their lives so you could somehow figure out a way to force a stop to that treatment and kick those kids and their families out of this country so that they can no longer get the care keeping them

alive. kids with cystic fibrosis, kids with cancer, kids with rare diseases. imagine being in charge of the u.s. federal government and choosing to use it for that purpose. to target the power of the u.s. government at children with cancer. then imagine that once you have decided to do this, you what, hoped nobody would care or nobody would notice because it's just immigrants? you are not planning on announcing it. so, therefore, you figure you are never going to have to answer for it. you come up with no plan for how to explain this. when local officials, local reporters, local news outlets, local advocacy organizations ask questions about what you are doing in the name of the american people. having come up with no way to explain this, your makeshift response is to say it's no big deal. some other agency will take care of it. we're not doing this anymore.

but we're sure somebody else is. it sounds terrible when you say we will send kids with cancer to their deaths. we're sure somebody else is taking care of it. some other agency. you guys -- they're doing it. the trump administration has no idea what it is doing. or how to handle the inevitable reaction to this from the american people. they have no idea what they are doing here except for the fact that they have decided to tell parents that they must withhold life saving ongoing medical treatment from their seriously ill kids on orders from the u.s. government so they can get out of this country because president trump wants them out. imagine being a u.s. official who has been doing that kind of work. now imagine being the parent of a sick kid who is holding on to a letter sent to you by those u.s. officials and realizing this is what you are up against and this is the exact way your child's life is being put at stake.

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here is local coverage from massachusetts on how the families of kids receiving life saving medical treatment have been told over the last few days that they would have to pick up and return to their home countries and stop this crucial

medical treatment for their kids. attorneys and doctors started hearing from clients last week that they received the notices in the mail. there was no announcement other than the letters giving patients 33 days to leave the country. many of those letters arrived inpatient's mailboxes halfway through that grace period. one attorney representing some of the families saying, our government should focus its limited resources or truly dangerous people, not on most vulnerable. joining us is that attorney i quoted. she's the head of the new england chapter of the american immigration lawyers association. she's representing some families who may be forced out of the country due to this unannounced change in policy from the trump administration. thank you very much for giving us some of your time tonight. appreciate you being here. >> thank you. it's a pleasure to be here. >> let me ask you if i have explained this right. i have been trying to piece this together from local news coverage in a couple of

locations now. have i got this right in terms of what your clients are up against right now? >> absolutely. you have described it perfectly. >> the story got a little bit strange when u.s. citizenship and immigration started saying that some other agency in the trump administration is going to keep running the medical deferral program. that agency said, no, we are not. do you have any clarity on this? have your clients been able to figure out what that might be about? the trump administration doesn't know what they are talking about on this. >> sadly, there's been no explanation of what we can expect as attorneys or what our clients can expect in terms of what they should be doing. there's been no guidance. it's been totally silent from the government. frankly, like you said, i think they didn't care to even put a plan in place to try to help these really desperate and vulnerable people. >> or to explain to the public what they're doing. the part of it that is surprising to me is there's no announcement.

there's been no plan to explain this. obviously, this is such an inflammatory thing. there are going to be hard questions. people are going to want an explanation for what they are doing. it's a gaping mall over there. i don't mean to put that on you. let me ask you in terms of your clients and what you are learning about this, what can you advise your clients to do at this point? >> i mean, sadly, i think we're really just trying to figure out the best way to move forward for our clients and whether or not applying to i.c.e. is a valid option or not. i.c.e. is really not known in being a friendly, humanitarian type of agency that would be willing to take these really sensitive cases seriously. so i think it's really frightening for a lot of people. that's part of what the administration has been trying to do over these last two years

is to sow a lot of fear and panic among immigrants and hope they will go away and not apply and not make a fuss about this, because they are scared and really -- not only worried about their safety here but about their child's life. >> are you, in fact, facing cases in terms of your own clients in which this is a potentially life-threatening situation for children in these families, for family members where they get treatment here they can't get other places, if they are forced out of the country, their lives will be in danger? >> yeah. i have a couple of clients that just got denial notices over this past one week. i have one young man really nice young man who sadly has mental health issues. he came here on a visitor visa to get treatment. sadly, his condition deteriorated significantly. he has been hospitalized now.

he is getting the best care that he can get for his condition. the government has told him, you need to leave in 33 days. there's no way this young man is going to be able to leave a hospital. he is committed there because of this seriousness. my other client is this young girl, 14 years old, who has a very serious heart condition. she had heart surgery. she's recovering now but is going to need follow-up surgery and constant monitoring and care. she came on a visitor visa. she came here legally, applied for this. sadly has been sold, no, sorry, you need to leave in 33 days. >> she's literally between heart operations? she's had one? she's recovering? she has another ahead of her and they're trying to force her out of the country? >> that's right. honestly, i'm not shocked. this administration has tried to dismantle legal immigration over the last two years on a number of different fronts. when you look at the travel ban, that's a perfect example of

against inhumanity of the administration and not caring that there are people that need urgent life saving care to come here for that or to come here to see a family member that may be dieing, to other avenues like the h1b or international students. the morale at the state department, for example, is terrible because of the conditions that these political appointees have created in these agencies. >> chair of the new england chapter of the american lawyers association who is representing some of the families up against this unannounced change in policy from the trump administration, thank you for helping us with this. as i said, there's not a lot of national coverage on this yet. please do stay in touch. we would love to keep us apprised. >> i would love to. >> stay with us. nice. but, uh...

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it was election night in mississippi last night. a runoff election to pick the republican nominee to run in this year's governor's race. the current lieutenant governor won the election last night. he beat a former state supreme court justice named bill waller. this wasn't high profile. not until this happened. >> no. >> how would that happen?

>> i don't know. >> it is not letting me vote for who i want to vote for. >> this was posted to facebook yesterday, appearing to show someone trying to vote in that mississippi runoff for bill waller. one of the two in the runoff. every time he pushes the screen for waller, it ticks the box for the other guy. we do not know what caused that machine to seemingly malfunction. what is interesting about this video is that we know for sure this was not a one off problem. local election officials said that that glitch happened on at least three machines spread across two counties. one officials saying, quote, we are doing what we can to rectify the situation. how do you rectify that? particularly when the election has been called. when the state is admitting this

is happening in multiple locations, how do they make voters feel confident the next time they touch their finger to a voting machine? we don't know exactly. in mississippi's not quite neighboring state of georgia, in georgia they are trying to figure out what happened in their last state wide election in 2018. last year, november 2018, while the country was electing a new house of representatives and us senators, in georgia, they were electing a new governor. this was a marquis race. the democrat ultimately refused to concede to the republican. kemp ran the election for the state of georgia and he ran in it himself as the republican candidate for governor. abrams didn't concede. a lot don't concede she lost the race because of reports about voter suppression and anomalies in the election that disproportionally affected minority democratic voters.

that overall controversy about that race has been well documented. what generated way fewer headlines though was a truly weird phenomenon that happened one notch down the ballot in georgia. as people are thinking ahead about the election integrity of 2020, we got details on what happened one notch down the ballot last november, which is an absolutely bonkers story. if you have not heard it yet, you will want to. we have it here next. announcer: ride the totally realistic traffic jam. ♪ beep, beep, beep, beep children: traffic jam! announcer: and the world's first never bump bumper cars. children: never bump! announcer: it's a real savings hootenanny with options that fit your budget. that's fun for the whole family. announcer: only at progressive par... maybe an insurance park was a bad idea. yeah. yep.

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quietly running the world. creating jobs and fueling the economy. you're small business owners, and there's nothing small about your business. that's why with dell small business technology advisors. you'll get tailored product solutions, expert tech advice and one-on-one partnership. to help your small business do big things. ♪ call an advisor today at 877-buy-dell ♪ the same night, election night last year when georgia had its big governor's race and abrams narrowly lost to kemp and refused to concede and there's that attention on what was going on, that same night in georgia there was a lower profile race that hasn't ever been a matter of national focus the way that the governor's race was. it turned into a mystery ever since that's getting weirder and more difficult with each passing

month. it was the lieutenant governor race that night in georgia last november. in the race last election night, the republican candidate won that race, too. when people started sifting through the results from the race, the numbers did paint an odd picture. this is a sample ballot. typically, there's a dropoff in the number of votes cast as people make their way down the ticket. if you use this as a guide, in state wide races, what i mean is the most people tend to vote in the governor race. more people vote in the governor than lieutenant governor. more people vote for lieutenant governor than the secretary of state race. more people vote for the secretary of state than the state attorney general. this trend usually happens all the way down the ballot in state wide elections. it's the opposite of a trickle down affect. kind of decay in turnout as you make your way down the ticket. more people vote for top of the

ticket stuff than vote down the bottom. people run out of steam and stop filling out the bubbles as they go down their ballot. that's almost always how it goes. that's not what happened in georgia last year. of all the races on the ticket, fewer people voted for lieutenant governor, secretary race on the ballot than any other race. by a lot. what was going on? around 80,000 fewer people voted in the lieutenant governor race than in other races even further down the ballot like votes for labor commissioner. more people voted for labor commissioner than lieutenant governor, the number two elected official? that's weird. that drop-off in the lieutenant governor race vote has been a mystery since november 2018. it led reporters to try to figure out why and how that happened in georgia. today we got this from the "atlanta constitution." they looked at one precinct that had seven voting machines.

in that precinct the democrat won every single race on every single machine except for one machine. quote, to find out a clue -- to find a clue about what might have gone wrong, look no further than voting machine number three at the winterville train depot outside athens georgia. on machine three, republicans won every race. on each of the other six machines in that precinct, democrats won every race. the odds an anomaly that large are less than one in a million. there might be a simple explanation. if you took that one outlier machine and switched the vote tallies, you wanted the republican votes to democrats and democrat votes to republicans, that would disappear and the results on machine three would fall right in line with the other six machines in that precinct. one machine had literally exactly opposite results than you would expect. in terms of party line voting.

it's like the results got reversed in terms of the parties on that one machine. it would be like if you took all the votes from one machine and held them up to a mirror before you counted them. the scoop was borne out of documents unearthed by a public records request. the documents have been given to the oversight committee in the house of representatives which is investigating what happened in georgia's election last year. more than 15,000 pages of records have been turned over. if what's in that is evidence like in that precinct with the one phantom voting machine, what's the oversight committee going to about that? what should they do? joining us now is kristin clark. thank you for being with us tonight. >> thanks for having me. >> there's always a low level -- a low level rumble of worry in this country about whether our

elections are running right. there's also a well-founded concern that people might be discouraged from turning out to vote if they don't have confidence it will matter, their vote will be cast and voted. given that balance, that concern on both sides, what is your take on these problems that we saw yesterday in mississippi and that we saw last year in georgia? >> these are red flags of a democracy that is broken and screaming out for repair. these are not conspiracy theories we're talking about. these are real issues that voters have been facing with intensifying degree over the last several years. georgia is kind of the -- in the belly of the beast, if you will, when it comes to all things that are broken in our democracy. we see widespread voter suppression. but we actually just sued the state of georgia in federal court over these very issues. the fact that across the state of georgia, they are using outdated, vulnerable machines that are hackable.

in the course of our trial, we talked about that drop-off that you just highlighted. a federal contractor actually looked at that drop-off and said, there's a one in 10,000 chance that you would see a drop-off for the lieutenant governor race that spikes back up when you go down to those races at the lower end of the ballot. in our case, there was evidence presented by the state's own expert. when you put this evidence before any reasonable person, they come up with the same conclusion, georgia's own expert, agreed that georgia's equipment is outdated and antiquated and hackable. they use a version of microsoft for their software that hasn't been updated in ten years. microsoft no longer creates security patches for this software.

the judge in our case issued a ruling about two weeks ago declaring georgia's system null and void. georgia has to put a new system in place. this is the first time a federal court has struck down an entire state's voting system because they are violating the fundamental right to vote. but it's time for states like mississippi and south carolina and texas and florida that are using paperless, antiquated systems that can't be audited. it is time for them to modernize these systems, and we have got to do it before 2020. >> is it feasible to get these systems?

is it feasible to have that whole system installed, tested and audited and running up to snuff in time for an election comi coming up around the bend in 2020? >> they don't have any choice. we are talking about the most sacred right in our democracy, the right to vote. at every turn in georgia for two decades we have seen a system that is broken and problems that are intensifying. it is time they step up. they are supposed to put a new system in place in 2020. that means for voters right now that are going to the polls in georgia for municipal elections. they have every reasons to be concerned about the integrity of their ballot. we know the problems are nationwide. we know we are up against threats domestic and foreign

when it comes to the hacking of our systems in this country. our plan now is to take the victory in georgia in federal court and hold others accountable that fail to update and modernize their systems and give voters the confidence they deserve when they go to the polls to cast a ballot. >> i really appreciate you think here tonight. thanks and come back soon. >> thanks for having me. >> stay with us. along the bywa♪ ♪ much more ♪ much more than this ♪ i did it my way (announcer) verizon is america's most awarded network and the only one with the galaxy note10 5g. right now, when you buy one, you get a galaxy note10 free. that's verizon.

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we have been following hurricane dorian over the course of the day and into the night. the u.s. virgin islands, took the brunt already. dorian hit as a category one hurricane. thousands of people in the u.s. virgin islands are without power. just two years after the disaster of hurricane maria in puerto rico that killed nearly 3,000 americans. there was concern about what would happen if this hit puerto rico full on. it avoided a direct hit and the storm is on its way to florida and is supposed to make impact sometime offver the weekend. this one has been a hard one to

forecast but dorian could become a major one hurricane, a category three storm by the time it is bearing down on florida. a state of emergency has been declared across the state. but as you can imagine they are bracing for what could be a super serious hurricane this holiday weekend. stay with us. ks] [dog panting] [dogs barking] [dogs growling] [dogs whimpering] (vo) the subaru crosstrek. dog tested. dog approved. [dog barks] do your asthma symptoms ever hold you back? about 50% of people with severe asthma have too many cells

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>> kids vo: ♪ safelite repair, safelite replace ♪ you don't let a cold ruin your day. you take dayquil severe liquicaps and crush it. dayquil severe. the daytime, coughing, aching, stuffy-head, fever, sore throat, power through your day, medicine. that is going to do it for me tonight. i have one correction to make. earlier in the show for a reason that i don't understand that is buried somewhere in my deep and aging brain i kept referring to to u.s. customs and immigration services when the correct name for that agency now is u.s. citizenship and immigration services. i was just conflating two different things and saying the name of that agency wrong because of what its name used to be back in the day. i apologize for having said that wrong. i will try to never do it again. see you again tomorrow. time for the last word with lawrence o'donnell. >> good evening, rachel, thank you. >> appreciate it. last night on this show i discussed information that