joining us now is the director of pew's election initiatives, david becker.thank you for joining us. >> thanks for having me. >> so let's start with the good news here. the improvement to 2012 over 2008, what accounted for that? what improvements did you see? >> well, there were several things we saw nationwide. for instance, wait times, the amount of time people waited in line to vote actually went down in 2012 compared to 2008 by an average of about three minutes. now, that wasn't true everywhere. places like florida did see very long wait times on average of about 45 minutes, but overall nationwide wait times went down. in addition, we saw some very positive developments like on-line registration, which was offered in only two states in 2008, was offered by 13 states in 2012, and now it's up to about 18 states. >> yeah. you mentioned that about on-line voter registration. it was interesting reading that part of the report because it does show an area where there's progress and in a modern world, why can't you vote or at least get registered on-line? i want

becker, forcing the spring, inside the fight for marriage equality. this is an amazing book. you've gotten behind the scenes and working on this for years, when you first saw it with david greget the press" -- you were already halfway through -- >> i heard about this meeting that took place two weeks earlier at the home of a gay couple and it was sort of a meet and greet for l.a. people. and he was thinking, why bother asking the question of sort of where the administration was on marriage equality and he was sure it was not going to happen until after the election. the first lady told him that -- >> told chad that, yeah. >> so -- >> chad is a frequent guest here, head of human rights campaign now. at the time he was in california and he was an organizer and political activist and running affirm. >> yeah, so he basically thought i'm not going to ask that question. here's the vice president and he's in the home of a gay couple with two children, out in the backyard playing with these kids, i'm not going to let him get away with it. and the vice president started to talk, once he got started he didn't seem to be able to talk. my kids don't understand why this is an issue. we h