Restoring Trust In American Elections: Challenges And Opportunities | Reimagining American Institutions

>> Erin Tillman: Good morning. My name is Erin Tillman, an Associate Director at the Hoover Institution, and we'd like to welcome you to today's webinar organized by the Hoover Institution Center for Revitalizing American Institutions, also known as RAI. Today's session will consist of a brief opening remarks from our panelists and a facilitated discussion with our moderator, followed by a period where our panelists will respond to questions from audience members.

To submit a question, please use the Q and A feature located at the bottom of your zoom screen. We will do our best to respond as many questions as possible. A recording of this webinar will be available @ hoover.org/rai within the next few days. The Center for Revitalizing American Institutions is a testament to the Hoover Institution's motto, Ideas to Advancing Freedom.

The Center for Revitalizing American Institutions was established to study the reasons behind the crisis in trust facing American institutions. Analyze how they are operating in practice, and consider policy recommendations to rebuild trust and increase their effectiveness. RAI works with and supports Hoover Fellows as well as faculty, practitioners, and policymakers from across the country to pursue evidence based reforms that impact trust and efficacy in a wide range of American institutions.

Today's topic is extraordinarily timely and important. The past week saw the certification of our most recent national elections, and our panelists will discuss factors that have conspired to undermine trust in American elections and the impact that misinformation and polarization have on voter confidence, as well as efforts underway to rebuild public confidence in these processes.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce today's moderator, Brandice Canes-Wrone. Brandice is the Maurice R Greenberg Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions at the Hoover Institution. She's also professor of Political Science and Professor by courtesy of Political Economics at the Graduate School of Business.

She served on faculty at mit, Northwestern, and Princeton until several years ago when we were able to entice her to return to the farm. I will hand you over to Brandice Canes-Wrone to introduce our guests. We have two today, Ben Ginsberg and Justin Grimmer. Ben has been having a little bit of technical difficulty, so we will start with Justin until Ben is able to join us.

Brandice, over to you.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks so much, Erin. So I'd like to introduce Ben and Justin, but I'm going to actually hold off on Ben's introduction until he's on air. I'm delighted to already have Justin with me. Justin Grimmer is the Morris M Doyle Centennial professor in Public Policy in Stanford's Department of Political Science and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Justin's also the co director of the Democracy and Polarization Lab at Stanford. His research focuses on Congress, election, social media and data science. Currently he's working on projects involving American political institutions, elections and developing new machine learning methods for the study of politics. Justin's also co leading with Ben a project at RAI on improving American elections.

Very relevant today. Aaron noted that each of the panelists will be giving some introductory remarks before we have a moderated panel, hopefully with Ben as well. But Justin, you're here. Could you lead us off?

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, sure. I'm happy to do that and thank you for having me, Brandice, and very happy to be on having this conversation.

So I just wanted to sort of set the stage a little bit and talk about what I view as some of the threats to trust in American elections. And the way I see it is that there's two real broad threats to current trust in American elections in the public.

One threat to the public perceiving elections as trustworthy are claims made that US elections are subject to substantial voter suppression. That is that as these claims go, there are parties or political actors who go out of their way to erect barriers to exclude certain kinds of voters from participating in elections.

This would obviously, if true, would be very bad because it would indicate that the results of elections didn't reflect the will of the electorate, but rather the selected set of individuals. But across a wide range of studies, some of which are my own, what we consistently find is that there's just no evidence to support claims of broad voter suppression in American politics.

So take, for example, the controversy around voter identification. Many individuals on the left have argued that voter identification laws are a means to exclude particular kinds of voters from participating in elections. But study after study, including some of my own, have found that voter ID laws really have a minuscule effect on turnout and essentially no effect on who's in the electorate.

We actually see a similar pattern if we take a step back and look more generally at laws. In 2013, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling, Shelby v. Holder. That ruling ruled unconstitutional the criteria used to decide which states would be subject to pre clearance from the Justice Department, that is which states would have to clear how they run their elections with the Justice Department.

Again, the concerns from many on the left was that this would lead to a flood of voter suppressing policies and excluding particular kinds of voters from the polls. And yet, again, what we find time, and again, is that there's effectively no difference in turnout rates across states that were formerly covered by section five of the Voting Rights act and states that weren't.

So those concerns didn't manifest, in fact, in research we're finishing now, what we find is that in many instances individuals will assert that a policy increases cost. And really what they mean by that is that the policy deviates from their own personal normative view about how elections should be run, rather than the than that statement being the result of some empirical assessment of how hard it is to cast ballots.

Nevertheless, we see that these myths persist. In fact, there are prominent lawyers for the Democratic Party who daily will declare that the goal of much policymaking is to insulate Republican majorities through election administration policies. Now, there's a parallel claim lately in US politics, primarily made on the right, though it is not a claim only on the right, that US elections are besieged with manipulation, manipulation, fraud and illegal votes.

And here again, if this claim were true, we could see how it would be so toxic to American democracy. If true, this claim would imply that the results of elections reflect who who was better at manipulating the results of the vote or who was better at eliciting these illegal votes, rather than again, the sort of true preferences of the electorate.

And again, fortunately, what we've found is that time and again these claims simply just don't stand up to scrutiny. So take for example the claims that were made in the run-up to the 2024 election. There's sort of three broad claims. First, that voter files were filled with errors and enabling people to double vote across different states.

Second, that there were many undocumented or other non citizens registered to vote, perhaps casting ballot. And third, there were claims made that voter identification, that presence or absence would significantly affect election results. And just like the claims with voter suppression, these claims really lack empirical backing. Having done a very extensive scrutiny of claims about double voting, what we found was that in many instances individuals who were thought to be double voting were actually just individuals who the analyst grouped together inappropriately.

It was basically a data analysis error. Rather than the result of someone actually casting two votes. Second, when we we did an extensive analysis of claims about non citizens being registered to vote, and here again we simply just did not find evidence. One reason for that is that many of the claims were based on discredited survey methods.

Another more affirmative piece of evidence, though, is that many states conducted audits of their voter rolls to see how many non citizens were on them. And time and again what those states find is that there's only a very small number of non citizens, many of whom are registered to vote because of an error from the state, not from the individual.

And this is important. The final number that results from the audit is almost always substantially smaller than an initial headline claim about individuals who could potentially be non citizens. And finally, on voter identification, those same results I mentioned before that voter identification laws don't have a big effect cut the same way to undermine claims that voter ID laws are really important or the lack of voter ID laws are really important for Democrats in order to conduct fraud.

We know that voter ID laws don't have a big effect, so we know they're not suppressing votes. But we also know that the absence of voter ID laws do not enable Democrats or individuals who want to take advantage of the system to conduct wide amounts of voter fraud.

Okay, so where are we at the moment? And then I'll turn it back over. I think on the whole, I'm optimistic about American elections. I think on the whole, American elections perform well. But that does not mean that it is not the case that we need reform. The reason that I think that we need reform is not that there are big problems with voter suppression or that there's lots of voter fraud, but rather the challenge for policymakers is going to be to design an electoral system to convince the public that these empirical patterns are true, that their elections are accessible, and that they're not subject to manipulation.

And thinking through exactly what that policy looks like, I think is a big challenge and hopefully one we can take on an REI over the next couple of years.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Great. Thanks so much, Justin. I'm delighted that Ben Ginsburg, the technical difficulties are done. Someone commented recently at a presentation they just wish the challenges were the same each year because you learn how to solve them.

And I guess that's true with elections and building election systems as well. But I'm glad we solved this one. Ben Ginsberg is the Volcker Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's a nationally known political law advocate representing participants in the political process. His clients have included presidential candidates political parties, political campaigns, members of Congress as well as many other types of political organizations.

Ben served as National Counsel to the 2000 and 2004 Bush Cheney presidential campaigns. He played a central role in the well known 2000 Florida recount as well. In 2012 and 2008 he was the National Counsel to Romney for President. Ben was a partner at Jones Day from 2014 to 2020 and before that at Patton Boggs for 23 years.

Ben, we're delighted you're part of REI as well as here today on this webinar. So we're in the point of the webinar of opening remarks, so I want to open it up to you and then we'll bring Justin back for the panel discussion.

>> Ben Ginsberg: Great. Well, thank you Brandice, thank you for having me.

Thank you for putting on a discussion of this really important topic. And thank you for all the work that Reai was able to do during this past election to try and bolster confidence in American elections through work with state and local election officials. And I'll talk about that a little bit.

Let me agree with Justin's comment about the institution itself is basically sound, but there is sort of a crisis of confidence in it right now that will require policymakers to think through both what's been happening to the institution over the past couple of decades and really longer, as well as kind of what to do in the future to strengthen the institution and make it really more credible.

And we may well be at a magic moment for that at this point in time. The reality is that public faith in elections has taken some hits for a number of years. This is not really a new phenomenon. There were vote buying instances in the Tammany Hall and Big City machine days.

There have been more recent voting wars between the two political parties on whether there's fraud, where there's suppression. And that goes back and forth in sort of the get out the vote mechanisms of the parties. But that can damage really has damaged public confidence in the system. Certainly Bush versus Gore was an example of a really close election where the system itself came under stress.

But as it came under stress there were improvements that were made that has stuck with us today and form of the Help America Vote act, but also other infusions of dollars to make the system better. And of course now we've been in a recent period really since 20002016 election where the reliability of elections has been sort of a central tenet of political campaigns and that is a significant difference for from where we've been before.

So that there really has been unprecedented scrutiny and attack on the election system since 2016. Obviously those charges grew in intensity, he said in a massive understatement with the November 2020 election and its aftermath. Remember that it was four years ago that the country was processing the events of January 6, 2021, which of course is like the ultimate challenge to the reliability of elections and the peaceful transfer of power that elections provide us.

In the run up to this most recent the 2024 elections, their reliability was questioned in well over 100 lawsuits filed more by Republicans than Democrats, but by both parties talking about either flaws in the system itself or unfairness in the laws that sort of govern the system. All those suits challenged various aspects of the accuracy and fairness of elections.

And there was an awful lot of rhetoric to go around it about elections being rigged or stolen. Now, given the closeness of the polls pre election in the seven key battleground states, it was not crazy to expect an all out assault on the institution of American elections in 2024.

But then the election itself happened and the Election Administrator's Prayer please Lord, don't let this be a close election was in fact answered. And miraculously, all those challenges to the election system that we've been worrying about and Hearing went away. It is important to note that in all those 100, more than 100 cases presented in 2024, there was actually no found evidence of any illegal voters casting ballots of non citizens voting, of absentee ballot fraud or anything else.

So the results themselves were not challenged. The cases did not go forward to make a finding like that. The question for us now, and we'll be discussing, is the institution of American elections now universally loved and admired, never again to be subject to challenge or question. Let me echo what Justin said, which is that's real unlikely.

The way to deal with the situation is I think, both short term and long term. The short term suggests that all the litigation challenges at least, were more tactical. And it is not surprising that those cases did not go forward. After all, if the results are clear, and especially if you're a candidate, one, you're not going to shake up the apple cart by continuing to challenge a particular election result.

But that does not mean that there isn't still a sizable segment of the population who has real questions about elections systems in the way they run. And so the magic moment is in this moment where there aren't challenges to the results of the election, to really study what people think the flaws in the system are and really take the administrative weaknesses and try and get the evidence for them on the table to deal with fixing those problems at a time where it's not going to impact any particular election result.

That's a short term process because polling shows that there are still a number of people who don't have faith in the reliability of elections. The longer term issue is that, truth be told, and I say this as someone who's done recounts and contests, where you really do kick open the hood of election systems, is that our system is not built for precision.

We made a policy decision as a country over 200 years ago to have very local control of our elections. We determined it was best for our friends and neighbors to run the elections in their communities. The result of that today is that there are over 10,000 different jurisdictions responsible for the casting, counting and certification of votes.

In 10,000 of anything, there are bound to be inconsistencies. And so there is a way to look at the system. It is perhaps a time to reimagine what our election system would be, because as a matter of institutional design, it would not be this. We have challenges with technology, we have challenges with consistency.

We need to keep improving as the systems themselves can be improved. So with that, I think rai's commitment to the Institution of American elections will really, I hope, take both the short term. Let's look at the problems on the table that people say were wrong with the system in the short term, but also long term to reimagine what a system, if we were designing it today would look like.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Great. Thanks so much, Ben, for those comments. I wondered if you and Justin could say a bit more. You've had several convenings and some here, some in Michigan about the how to prepare election officials, you know, in the short term. If you could say a bit more about what you've done there and what you think the right strategies are to prepare, say for the, you know, next congressional elections or for states that have off year state elections next year.

>> Ben Ginsberg: Sure, well, I mean the heroes in this election were really the local and state election administrators who conducted the elections under unprecedented challenges and assault. And really adopted a strategy of being very transparent about systems. Like people didn't really much care before 2020 how votes were processed.

And election administrators really uniformly decided that the best way to deal with that was transparency. To aid that, we held two conferences at Hoover over the course of the cycle with election officials from around the country, the real sort of boots on the ground people to talk about, first of all, best practices for restoring public faith in elections and transparency was the tactic, and also to talk about the safeguards in the election process.

There are 11 stages of the election process. Each has really great checks and balances in it that is not terribly well understood by the public at large. And so those two conferences helped with that. In September, we held a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a number of our fellow groups that brought together the Secretaries of State as well as the key election officials from six battleground states before an audience of national media folks to describe the safeguards so that their reporting during the course of the election would point out all those safeguards that are in the system.

And so that was, that was a very interesting and I think helpful conference in terms of the way the battleground state election officials were able to meet the challenges presented to them.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Thanks, Justin. Did you want to.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, yeah, just a slightly different tactic. So I've spent a lot of time evaluating and then engaging with people who believe that elections are being manipulated in some way.

And that's resulted in also me spending a lot of time with evaluating these very fringe theories that every election everywhere in America is being manipulated. On its face, it sounds a little crazy, but there is a dedicated group of activists, particularly in deep red conservative counties, who, who spend a lot of time advancing these theories, trying to gather evidence.

And I think this sort of interaction really speaks to some of the challenges in designing an electoral system. Individuals who are propagating these theories make them very vague. Anything really could count as evidence that their theory is correct. And so what you see in these small localities is that a population gets very motivated so to gather more evidence.

They gather whatever evidence they think is gonna be consistent with the theory, and then that leads them to distrust their local officials more and then gather more evidence. It's a real cycle of distrust. So I've spent some time trying to intervene in those situations, including spending time in Coos County, Oregon, where I testified before a.

County commission meeting facing off against a particularly prominent conspiracy theorist in the space.

>> Ben Ginsberg: Justin deserves a huge amount of credit and a lot of questions for his work in really listening on a granular level to the complaints about the election system. And then presenting really terrific evidence to show that those fears were not realistic.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Agreed, yeah, agreed. So, in addition to the short term challenges that each of you has been doing so much to try to address and successfully address. There are also some longer term recommendations about the laws, or let's be optimistic and call them medium term recommendations about the laws that states localities and where it's relevant.

Maybe perhaps the federal government, though maybe it should all be done at the state and local level that might enact about the election process to minimize distrust. Could you say a bit about which sort of procedures in which states seem to work better and have less distrust due to these procedures?

>> Ben Ginsberg: Sure, you wanna go first Justin, or you want me to?

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, go ahead, Ben.

>> Ben Ginsberg: Well, look, the, the complaints about the election system fall into really three categories. The first is clean voter rules. Are there ineligible people voting either because they moved out of state or they died or there are non-citizens?

So being able to clean up the voting rolls is really, really important. You can do that by a number of measures, including figuring out better absentee ballot verification processes. Maybe use digital signatures as opposed to wet ink signatures. For example, there can be programs between states that have been reduced in recent years to cross check across their voter registration databases so people aren't voting in more than one place.

Another reform is prompt reporting. I mean the 50 states are really laboratories for the way you do things. And some states, like Florida and Georgia this year, can report results really, really quickly. Yet here in California and in New York state it takes a really long time and they may still be some races in California.

So there are ways to look at different state laws to get prompt reporting. The prompter the reporting, the more confidence people have in the results. A whole lot of time has been shown to sort of be a petri dish of conspiracy ideas. So really important to get results.

There are a certain number of checks that have been shown really through polling to provide increased confidence in elections. Voter ID is one of them. It is a red hot partisan issue, but nonetheless it is, for example, something that polls indicate that that gives voters more confidence. So it really is a question of best practices among states and then political will in states.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Justin.

>> Justin Grimmer: I would just, you know, I think there is an inclination to have this run at the states in particular because that's what the Constitution says about where our elections will be run if we sort of stack up. A lot of the complaints though, we see that there's an impulse, I think, from both parties to want to have more federal control over elections, which is a…

What I would suggest is a surprising fact. I think that's pretty obvious from the Democratic side with the bill that had been HR1 under recent Democratic majorities which proposed a variety of reforms. But many of the complaints that we saw in the run up to the 2024 election from Republicans would be solved with more federal intervention into the election system.

For example, if people are worried about double voting or individuals registered to vote across multiple states, there's systems to deal with this. Ben mentioned your crosscheck or Eric. But a federal voter registration list seems like the most obvious way in which one would manage that. There's obviously a huge number of problems with trying to do that, but that would be one way to address that problem.

A second, you know, just basic thing that we could imagine from the federal government would be a requirement for voter identification laws across the states, which so Republicans were very worried about the absence of voter identification laws. So in fact. And also on the registration list thinking about not having non citizens on the registration list, obviously they're not allowed to vote in federal elections.

I think there's an opportunity for a pretty grand bargain here if the two sides are willing to deal. I think the Democratic Party would be silly to not accept a bargain that said something like we'll impose voter identification for all federal elections across the United States, allowing for individuals to have a variety of ways to show that identification and enabling people to get access identification.

And by the way, we're also going to create a federal registration list where we're going to make it relatively easy for citizens to register to vote. That's a trade off that I think the Democratic Party should make. And I think if that reform were made, it would go a long way to improving trust in American elections.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Interesting. Yeah. I don't know how politically.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I think dead on arrival, but I think they should.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Interesting, yeah, but sometimes these ideas after years. Yeah, yeah, you gotta get them out there. Okay, shifting gears just a little bit, cuz we have some great audience questions coming in.

So if you are waiting, go ahead and start writing those in. Other audience members have already started doing so. Okay, the 2024 elections. Ben, your comments in particular mentioned some of the lawsuits, but each of you alluded to them. So they didn't have the same level of contestation as recent elections, but there's still stuff happening, right?

I've been seeing headlines. The North Carolina Supreme Court recently blocked the seating of a Supreme Court justice. I realize that's a state level election, but still, that's an election challenge by one of the candidates. Some of these others, quite a down. But in Pennsylvania, right, there were these disputes about the counting of ballots with undated envelopes, right, and kind of tight race between McCormick and Casey.

That has settled down. But I mean, how should we think about these constitutions? Are they sort of just par for the course? Is this just kind of where we are? Is there something distinctive, you know, about our current politics that makes them more prominent now than they were, say, 30 or 40 years ago?

Or do they just seem more prominent?

>> Ben Ginsberg: I think they just seem more prominent.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay.

>> Ben Ginsberg: There have been a standard number of recounts in every cycle since, I think, the beginning of time. And when there are tight contests, lawyers being lawyers and candidates being candidates, there is contestation.

I don't think there was more contestation in 2024. For than there has been in previous ones. In fact, less really just by the numbers. But I think whenever you have a tight election, people are going to try and find an advantage. I think what has changed is sort of the national awareness of election challenges, starting with Bush versus Gore, but certainly the 2020 election, so that we do pay more attention to it in.

And the marvels of those Internet tubes get information around to us in much more heated and sort of diffuse ways. So it can seem a lot hotter baseline, it seems higher and maybe in some level we are getting the information.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Yeah, the information environment is distinctive. Since this information, both of you referred to the fact that trust has declined, perhaps due to the accumulation, right?

Over time and then due to recent very high profile situations. What can we as citizens do to try to help build this trust? Are there things, is this something that has to happen kind of from elites, from academic organizations such as ours, or are there things that everyone in the audience could be doing to play a role?

>> Justin Grimmer: So I, I do think there's a big role for political candidates in securing trust in elections. So when candidates recognize results as legitimate, that's going to go a long way to restoring trust for citizens. There's a number of things I think people can do. If someone is suspicious about elections.

I would encourage them to go work as an election official, go volunteer on election day, learn about what, what is actually happening. I want to offer a little bit of a caveat there because time and again, what we see across many of these small counties is that people will volunteer.

They'll go in looking for an investigation, and they will look for something that they perceive to be anomalous. And therefore evidence of fraud, when the anomaly is that the individual volunteering just doesn't understand how elections work. So, for example, in Coos County, there were people who were volunteering.

They noticed there was a particular barcode on the envelope for primary ballots that indicated which party a person belonged to. This was quite a controversy in the county because they said, you could figure out my party from my ballot from my envelope. But it was a primary. So, it's not all that, not all that information deal that's public.

>> Justin Grimmer: So going in and volunteering and having this sort of open mind I think is really important. The other thing I think that's a bit of a syndrome that happens when people talk about elections and politics more generally is that they accept a sort of received wisdom, sometimes uncritically.

So I see this time and again, maybe it's just the people I interact with, where people will say something about the extent of voter suppression to me, and I'll say, well, how do you know that? What is that based on? What is that assessment? And then it quickly becomes clear that they're sort of summarizing a headline that they heard on Rachel Maddow rather than having deeply read about a law or the consequences or what they think the problem is.

And so I think taking a bit of a critical eye to statements made about any policy, but elections in particular is really important, whether it be assertions that people are being excluded or assertions that in elections being subject to manipulation, knowing where that evidence comes from, its reliability.

Who's saying, it is critically important?

>> Ben Ginsberg: Yeah, let me echo what Justin said. Look, one of the positives that came out of the 2020 election was election administrators recognizing the need for transparency of their process so that if you have doubts about the election system, it is far easier to go in and actually kick the tires yourself, as opposed to sort of parroting what you do here in either on the Internet or even worse, cable tv.

The other thing that's true, and this sort of relates to the overall nature of the country, how polarized we are, is that there is not nearly enough talking to people who hold different views from your own. And elections is one of those areas because of the increased transparency, where there are opportunities to meet with people who do not agree with you on the soundness of the election system.

I was part of a nonprofit called Pillars of the Community that went into the most contentious election jurisdictions this cycle to recruit people all across the political spectrum to meet with election officials and kick the tires and engage with people who didn't agree with them. RAI was very helpful in terms of amplifying that program.

But it is opportunities like that in any jurisdiction to talk to the people on the other side of the political aisle and sort of burst those bubbles that are so harmful not only in elections but in other aspects of the community.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Excellent. Thanks for those insights. I want to turn to some of our audience questions to make sure we get a chance to bring those in.

I have a host of other questions of my own, but let's I can always talk to you a little offline. So let's go to the audience questions now. So one of the questions that's come in is about mail ballots, which of course on the one hand are not new in that we've had absentee ballots for a long time, but on the other hand are newish in the sense that the extent of mail voting has and the ways in which those procedures have changed in the states has obviously accelerated the level of mail ballot voting.

Are they at the question from the audience member is, are they ever audited? Can they be audited? How can they be audited? So what's the role of auditing mail ballots particularly? I'm going to add my own. That's the general question which I think is the most important. And then we have these states, like California, where everybody gets the mail ballot, right?

So, this is sort of central in certain states.

>> Ben Ginsberg: Well, this goes to the kick the tires aspect of things. I mean, all mail ballots that come in are first of all verified under a system where they're both participants from all parties involved in verifying those ballots. There are also post election audits of all votes cast.

So in a state like California, that's virtually an all male ballot state, all of the risk limiting audits that do take place, I believe as a matter of law in California, but as a matter of law in many states do include absentee ballots. It is also interesting to note what happened with mail balloting in this campaign.

Why they may be regarded a little more reliably. There's a report in the New York Times over the weekend showing how much better Republicans did on mail balloting in 2024 than in 2020. Of course, in 2020 the Republican Party was by and large very critical of the accuracy of mail ballots.

And in 2024, recognizing the political power of mail balloting and actually Republicans traditional superiority in mail balloting programs, things shift. It around and the results demonstrated that. So there may be more bipartisan faith in mail ballots even while there are a number of safeguards and procedures that states could impose to improve it even more.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I'll just take up a little bit on those safeguards. So I think there's just a number of interesting issues with mail ballots that's worth thinking about going forward. We know, just sort of setting the stage. Before I talk about this, we know from great research by Hoover senior fellow Andy hall that there's maybe a small turnout increase from all mail ballot elections, but there's no consistent partisan effect from all mail ballot elections both in 2020 and elections before 2020.

There are still a number of issues that I think we need to sort out with mail ballots, one of which is how to deal with the lack of privacy in voting and how do we ensure that the individual recording the votes is actually the person who should be casting the ballot.

None of these are going to be systematic issues. But on a local level, like local, I mean like in your house, you could imagine someone feeling pressured to vote a particular way. Certainly my wife put pressure on me to vote a particular way in the presidential election. And you could, you know, so that's, that's humorous.

But there's other versions of that that are much less funny about of imposition. Also, without naming how I know this person, in a conversation with someone, they reported that while their daughter is not particularly interested in voting, it doesn't matter, he'll just fill out the ballot for her.

In this all election state, I suspect the person who reported that to me is not the only person who engages in that sort of behavior. That is highly illegal behavior. Again, not going to be systematic, but it certainly is a thing to think about. One other big issue with all male voting that we're going to have to figure out is that young people don't learn cursive anymore and therefore cannot consistently sign their names.

And so in California there was a huge issue among voters 18 to 25 having many of their ballots rejected because the signature on their ballot did not match the signature on file. Likely what they recorded when they received their driver's license. This led to the need to do a lot of curing or going in after the fact and proving that the person who cast the ballot is, you know, the sort of real person who should be casting it.

But that's going to be a big issue. It seems to me this is a great example where actually requiring something like an ID number, the last four social would make things much easier, it's more objective. So I think these sorts of issues are gonna be big as we're thinking about how to implement and continue implementing close to all mail elections.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Following up on that question, we have one from the audience about ballot harvesting, which obviously relates to the mail ballots. And we do read about the concerns about ballot harvesting, at least in the news. I mean, to what extent is it a threat to the integrity of elections?

Should we be concerned about it? Are there ways this is from the audience member in which how the ballot harvesting is conducted, you know, matters in terms of the extent to which it's a threat to election integrity?

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I think the real place that's entered into the conversation in a prominent way is with this unfortunate movie 2000 Mules, where in the movie they used or claimed to have used cell phone data to track individuals that were moving close to dropboxes.

And so just to back up, ballot harvesting is generally understood to be the process whereby political actors will collect ballots from individuals and then return them for those individuals. So in 2000 mules, the allegation was that there were nonprofits or other sort of NGOs going out in the world collecting these ballots and returning them to particular dropboxes.

Now, even as stated, that didn't really make a lot of sense in the movie. Like why use a dropbox and not a mailbox? Subsequently, the person who created the movie, Dinesh D'Souza, has pointed out that he didn't really have the evidence to make the claims in that and offered an apology.

Nevertheless, concerns about ballot harvesting persist. It's a very difficult thing to study because we don't have a lot of markers of it when a ballot's returned. So it's not something that's recorded officially in survey data. It looks like ballot harvesting in the sense that someone is giving their ballot to someone else to turn in from them that's not a family member.

It looks like it's fairly rare. There are still some concerns there that I think we want to think about that are sort of like the all male election. Even if it's not a big prominent thing, we still want to think about how the elections are run. So there's really an opportunity for coercion.

If someone's being hired as an operative to go collect a ballot, there's a concern that someone who might be elderly or otherwise in a position to not really assert themselves, that interaction might be induced to vote in some way they may not want to. And a state may have some skepticism about that, but in separate from ballot harvesting, there's this other big issue that goes along with groups effectively trying to blanket a state with things like applications.

And what, what I found across a number of states is that there are often errors in the numbers of hundreds of thousands of names put incorrectly on absentee ballot applications. This leads to a lot of confusion. People think that their pet received an absentee ballot because they don't know the difference between absentee ballot, absentee ballot application, and the proprietor at a bad list.

So to circle back, give a concise answer, it doesn't seem like ballot harvesting is having a massive effect on any election. Nevertheless, we could enact better policies to deal with, I think a small number of instances where there could be coercion.

>> Ben Ginsberg: The states are all over the map on the legality of ballot harvesting. And so some states prohibit, some states, like California, almost encourage it. I do think in terms of confidence in elections, there is a special challenge for the states like California, the nine states that send out universal ballots to people. So in other words, there are live ballots going out in households.

That is a greater risk of people claiming manipulation with live ballots as opposed to the states that require absentee ballot applications and then sending out ballots. So I do think California and the eight other states with universal live ballots going out face more of a challenge in confidence than the other states who require applications first.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Okay, so we're gonna go to another question about confidence in the election process. And we've each of you has mentioned 2020 and Trump, and this question wants to kind of dive into that a little more, which is that their sense is that the loss of confidence is largely due to the Trump campaign.

They note the 2000 Florida recount and 2004 sort of Iowa controversy, but think that those didn't really have the same effect. And they note that they believe the 2024 Trump campaign would have repeated the effort had Trump lost. So they'd like to know what's the solution to this kind of systematic and using their language based on the 2020 outcome, unfounded effort to discredit the electoral process by one kind of candidate.

But I think here they mean one national. Candidate, you know, not state supreme court justice in one state, but a national candidate and national party. And how do you combat that? Which is kind of, you know, let's say, less typical.

>> Ben Ginsberg: Well, that's why I do think we're at a magic moment here after the 2024 results to be able to address that issue.

There were a hundred lawsuits filed before this election by Trump supporters. There was, you know, they got over the threshold of presenting charges for which they would eventually have to have evidence. I think it is sort of a time for groups interested in elections to get together. I would personally like to hear the evidence from the lawyers who filed those 100 cases.

And let's see if there are really problems with the system. And if there are, there should be universal agreement that you have to fix problems that you can prove exist. Again, the lawsuits didn't produce that evidence. But this is a different time, and I think it is a positive for groups across the political spectrum who have questions about the reliability of the election systems to get together and put it all out on the table and see where it can lead.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I think it's certainly a matter of scale. So we've seen other people try to do similar efforts post election to say that these ballots were cast in some inappropriate way. And usually what we find in those instances we're able to push back using some, some facts.

The key, I think, going forward is if there's an election system that both sides can agree to that's functioning well, that's making it possible for the, for everyone to participate while maintaining security, the better we can push on that frontier, the, you know, security access frontier, I think it'll be less likely to get a repeat of the Trump efforts.

It's very difficult to insulate from that, taking it very seriously. It's very difficult to say that we have a perfect way to keep a candidate from going on a sort of two month rage campaign, from losing the rates. There's not a lot that can be done to stop that particular instance, except having a system that works well, where we can point to the many ways in which it works well.

And that's a lot of what we saw in the 2020 election, was that in court cases or when evidence was presented, individuals could point to the fact that the claims being brought up did not have an evidentiary basis and that the election could produce data that would refute the claims, which I think is useful.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: We have a related question which is about the fact that the losing party, basically whether it's national or more local or State basically has an incentive to sort of do this and that. The voters have an incentive and so they're wondering what can be done. And I'll add to that.

I know you've mentioned proactive things if you have suggestions of what should election officials do when these claims emerge. Right. Because you can do a lot of, you know, probably the most important is what you do proactively and preemptively. But then the claims still emerge. It was a close election, somebody lost.

What should election officials do and how can those efforts be successful? Ex post well, when there are complaints about elections because of the direct results of an election, there are recounts and contests.

>> Ben Ginsberg: And I think election officials will tell you they want to be very open and transparent in those processes to allow the public to look at.

But if anyone has a specific complaint about a specific close election, then you really do get to kick open the hood of the election machine and take a look at all the records. To Justin's point, it doesn't always guarantee that a losing can. An embittered losing candidate is going to accept the result of that recount or contest or litigation or even audit.

But nonetheless, in an objective sense, election officials will make that process open. Do make that process open for. For. For people to be able to see.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I think there's couple reactions that can happen. Sometimes you see election officials who are under a lot of stress and they hear something, a claim being made, it's very clearly a sour grapes kind of claim, and they respond very dismissively and say, well, that's impossible or that can't happen.

I think that that's an unfortunate response from an election official, even though I'm very sympathetic to the energy and that would lead them to, to have that sort of response. People are raising complaints and you know, they want to be heard and they want to understand. And I think offering, you know, clear explanations based on the facts and how elections are run is going to be very important.

But you know, for example, Stacey Abrams after the 2018 election raised a series of objections, not really any of which were based on any sort of facts. I think that that responding to those claims did make election officials in Georgia enable them to communicate more clearly about some challenges they would then face in 2020.

So I do think there's some practice involved. But again, it's just really hard to design a system to say if a candidate is going to be quite embittered that we can guarantee they won't erode trust. That's going to be very hard to do.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: We have a question A different angle on the mail in ballots, which is from someone who moved from Florida to Washington and had been an election, you know, volunteered as a poll worker in Florida.

But then of course, in Washington, where it's all mail in, they're not doing that. And their experience as a poll worker was that there was a lot of excitement from people who showed up at the polls and that and participated in that way. And, and they're wondering if there's thoughts on whether, you know, this sort of, that loss of real time physical involvement in the election process and seeing the poll workers and the process firsthand may contribute to a loss of confidence.

>> Justin Grimmer: Just to take that very briefly. So I personally always vote on election day because I also like the excitement of going to the polls.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: I do too. Voting here on campus.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah. And I, you know, I like seeing the democracy in action. I like being able to thank the election workers.

Our colleague, Emily Booth Chapman, who is a philosopher in the political science department, has a wonderful book where she makes an affirmative case for election day voting. Not based on skepticism about the security of absentee voting, but that in her view, it encourages a sort of civic performance together as people are going out to vote.

So I think, you know, that's certainly part of it. Among the things that lead to skepticism from all mail ballots, I don't know how much it is about going in that would be a very hard thing to get data on. I think the, you know, the thing that probably leads to the most distrust from all male elections is that it's very hard to.

To maintain a registration role that is exactly calibrated to people who are currently eligible to vote in the state. So by definition you're propagating ballots to people who cannot cast those ballots. I don't think those ballots get returned very often, but people think that they will, which leads to the crisis of confidence.

>> Ben Ginsberg: Just to agree with that. I mean, I think that the excitement and being able to touch the election system by going in to vote in person, actually, whether it's election Day or even early voting. I live in Washington, D.C., which is far from a typical election jurisdiction, but a lot of people do vote early, and that sense of excitement is there as well.

It's a little less personal with mail in voting, but rates of participation in mail in ballot states are certainly as high, if not higher than in other states. So it is hard, hard to make the argument that it actually hurts participation. The sort of not having trust by not seeing the system is a more interesting argument.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: Hey, thanks so much. I want to extend a great thank you to both Justin and Ben for their sharing all their insights and description of all they've been doing. And especially thank you for all you have been doing to build confidence in our election process. Special thank you to our audience members.

We regret we can't get to every question since we're out of time, unfortunately, but we do hope you'll join us again. And I'm going to turn this over to Erin to say a few words about our next webinar and the like.

>> Erin Tillman: Thank you Brandice. Thank you Ben and Justin.

Great conversation to echo Brandice, we really appreciate your audience questions and your participation and a special thanks to our events team for making sure things run smoothly. We just want to remind you that this recording will be available on the hoover event webpage hoover.org in the next three to four business days.

Our next webinar will take place on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 from 10 to 11am and will feature a discussion with Princeton University Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer Lauren Wright on why conservative students get the most out of liberal education. We'd like to encourage you to visit our series webpage and to sign up for the next session.

You can access recordings of previous webinars and subscribe to the RAI Newsletter to receive updates and events. You can find that in the chat and it's also at www.hoover.org/reimagining-american-institutions. Have a wonderful rest of the day and thank you for joining.