For the last several years, Hoover fellows Justin Grimmer and Benjamin Ginsberg have been working to confront election disinformation and its negative impacts on America’s electoral system. By debunking conspiracy theories, challenging falsehoods about voter turnout, and supporting election officials and poll workers themselves, Grimmer and Ginsberg have demonstrated a solemn commitment to preserving the integrity of America’s election system, acting in support of the Center for Revitalizing American Institution’s core objectives. They spoke to Hoover’s Chris Herhalt about their recent efforts and how they found themselves at the tip of the spear fighting election falsehoods.
Chris Herhalt:
Can you both describe for me what you're working on right now for the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions (RAI) and how it relates to revitalizing American institutions? We'll start with Justin.
Justin Grimmer:
A big focus of my work right now is studying ways we can develop election administration practices to build trust in American elections. I think there's two components to designing election administration to build trust. So, the one component is attacking arguments that tend to come from the left that claim that a series of laws have been passed that will suppress turnout in American elections or otherwise deter particular groups of people. Sometimes the allegation goes that the deterrence is made to ensure that Republicans will win elections.
In this big component of my research, I show that these allegations are essentially unfounded. There's not good evidence that passing these sorts of laws is an effective way to bolster a party's chances of winning office. In fact, as best we can tell, turnout has gone up substantially over the last twenty years and participation is much more robust in American elections than it was twenty or thirty years ago, certainly more than a generation ago.
The other big component of this about building trust is addressing what's now I would say is an epidemic problem within the American public, and that is skepticism that American elections are an accurate way to record the preferences of the American public. To address that, one component of our work has been finding claims that are made—specific claims that are made about why elections are inaccurate or subject to manipulation or fraud—and evaluating those claims. To date, when we evaluate those claims, we tend to find that they fail to hold water, so we end up debunking those claims.
But another component of this is trying to understand who these people are who express these skeptical ideas. So, this comes in the form of surveys, and we just published some evidence about that. In addition, [we have] a long-running project where we study individuals who believe a very fringe kind of skepticism that every election everywhere is being manipulated. And so, we're trying to understand their attitudes so we can help design remedies that could bring at least some of these folks back to trusting American elections.
Chris Herhalt:
And, Ben, what have you been working on right now to revitalize the American institution of free and fair elections?
Ben Ginsberg:
There's the long term, which—much like Justin—is looking at the myths that are involved in the election process. But the work that I've been able to do through Hoover over the past few years has now really telescoped down into what happens in the next four weeks before the election. And that really comes down to revitalizing faith in the institution of elections and is a very practical matter in the next four weeks. That means working with election officials to help them put on an election that does meet the sort of public test of reliability.
So as part of that, in co-sponsorship with Hoover and a nonprofit I run called Pillars of the Community, we held a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, last week that brought together the top election officials from the six battleground states and an audience of national media to talk about all the safeguards in the process. That was the sort of second step after a conference we held back last January at Hoover to discuss the safeguards in the process with election officials.
And the work that I do with my cochair, Bob Bauer, a Democrat, in the Pillars of the Community, has been going into the five most contentious election jurisdictions in the country and bringing together community leaders from across the political spectrum to kick the tires of the election systems and to let them ask all the questions they want of the election officials. We have been very careful to include, in our Pillars of the Community, community leaders and not elected public officials, those people who studies and surveys have shown have the most credibility with the public, and that's people like faith leaders and veterans and business leaders, educators. And so, we've given them a chance to ask all the questions they want of election officials.
Chris Herhalt:
For both of you, when did you first identify that this was going to be a real, durable, lasting problem in America, particularly the disbelief that the institution of election administration was even functioning properly and that any of the results could be trusted? We'll start with Justin.
Justin Grimmer:
For me, I studied some election administration problems in graduate school. I had primarily worked on Congress as an assistant professor. And then, after I got tenure, I [had] just this persistent curiosity about the voter (identification law) effects literature. And there had been a paper recently published that made a claim that this was the definitive study to show that voter identification laws deterred large swaths of people from voting, and in particular minority voters.
And so, I took a look at that study, and I found that there was a sort of basic and huge mistake in it that drove all the results. And what was remarkable was that even though we could demonstrate there was this basic and huge mistake, the mistake being that the results hinged upon no one turning out to vote in Virginia in 2006, and then in 2008 there were people who voted, which obviously did not happen, and once you corrected that, the results all went away. So, even though we could give this very clear explanation of what happened, there was this big machinery of left-leaning groups and partisans who dismissed our work on that paper and said, "Regardless of what you might be saying about this paper, we think that there's some broader truth here," which of course is not how science works. So that was my first inclination about this sort of problem as it exists on the left, that people were more interested in perpetuating the idea that there was a problem than actually diagnosing and then trying to solve those problems.
And then on the election skepticism, I was exceedingly frustrated I think initially with the discussion after the 2016 election about Russia's alleged role in that election. The claims being made about social media were obviously ridiculous. And there was a similar tenor to that where I would point out the obvious ridiculousness to it with some pretty simple arguments and folks would say, "Well, you must not believe that," or "I don't care that you have that weak evidence."
And then obviously after the 2020 election with Donald Trump's continued contestation, it became clear that the sort of skepticism that perhaps had been latent from some wings of both parties was made manifest in a much more serious way. So, at that point, I think it became clear to me that there was this problem that was going to plague both sides of the aisle, sort of skepticism that was originated in different ways.
Ben Ginsberg:
I spent forty years as a Republican Party attorney for candidates and the political party committees, and an integral part of that was always being sure that elections were run fairly and accurate. Republicans are always mindful of the history of fraudulent voting in the United States, Tammany Hall, what happened in Chicago. So, these were not vain searches for things. We took very seriously having observers in polling places and where ballots were tabulated. And we worked really hard for four decades to find evidence of fraud. There certainly was evidence of some human mistakes because it is a very human system with 10,000 jurisdictions, but never enough mistakes to overturn the outcome of an election due to fraud.
So having spent all that time in precincts and running nationwide boiler rooms in which we got all the reports and all the evidence of fraud, I had a fairly granular look at the inner workings of the election system, and I always believed that really rigorous polling place observation and ballot integrity operations were crucial to validate the elections and the way they were run.
When the charges started in the lead-up to the 2020 election about how elections were stolen and fraudulent, I knew what the evidence was because I had helped gather it and the evidence did not in any way, shape, manner, or form justify the charges or how vociferous they were. So, I think it was seeing and knowing the evidence and listening to the charges that made me realize this would be a real problem.
Fast forward to 2022 as the charges of fraudulent elections took on even more volume, and public surveys showed that roughly a third of the country didn't believe in the reliability of the American institution of elections. Three retired federal judges, a former solicitor general, all from Republican administrations, me as an election lawyer, [and] a couple of political operatives got together to take a look at every case and every bit of evidence that had been presented in sixty-four court cases by the former president and his supporters. And we were dedicated to the mission that if we found problems, we would help correct them, but if the charges were not justified, we would say that.
And indeed, after looking at all sixty-four court cases in which there was no hard evidence of fraud, we did issue a report called Lost Not Stolen that we hope will help shed some light on the charges that are made in the coming weeks and post-election should the election be challenged.
Chris Herhalt:
You’ve both obviously encountered people who espouse the very misinformation you've now devoted years of your life to unpacking and debunking. Have either had a moment where you encountered someone proliferating this stuff? What did you say, and did it change anyone’s mind?
Justin Grimmer:
I spent an inordinate amount of time as an expert witness in (Trump attorney) John Eastman's disbarment proceeding. That was a sort of persistent confrontation with people who still believe, true believers in these sorts of fraud claims. There, at a minimum, we got someone like John Eastman who really, really believes that there was fraud in the 2020 election, at least admitted that he had to change some of his evidentiary basis for those claims. Over the course of that proceeding, we were able to convince him that he could have checked the reasons that ballots were rejected in Georgia, or he could have actually understood how ballots arrive on election night so that his speech on the ellipse wouldn't have worked.
But more—not in a sort of courtroom setting—there is a fellow who I've had a long, ongoing Telegram conversation with, which is this sort of social media site that is unregulated, so it's a sort of place where a lot of election skeptics hang out. So, this person who will only ever give me his first name called me on a Saturday because he had heard I presented evidence contrary to this person, Doug Frank, who's another prominent election skeptic, and the person who called me said, "I'm also very skeptical about elections, but I also think Doug Frank is full of it." And so, it started this ongoing conversation that's been going on now I think for almost two years. I think I've slowly convinced this person that many of the things that they thought were wrong with elections aren't.
So, on the one hand, what does this exhibit? This demonstrates that it is possible to change someone's mind. On the other hand, it could be a very depressing story because if the thing we have to do is spend—every individual—two years talking to me, that's going to be pretty difficult to replicate, but this is someone who I think was very in-depth on the most extreme of these election conspiracies.
I'm also going to Coos County, Oregon, in a week to present to a county commission. The county commission invited an election skeptic to present at a work session about elections, and one of the county commissioners who was not excited about having the skeptic present invited me to present after that person. So, I don't yet know what's going to come of that, but at the very minimum, I think I can present lots of evidence that the claims that they're going to hear are not particularly well-founded or thoughtful.
Ben Ginsberg:
My travels to these five battleground states or jurisdictions have actually resulted in a lot of really interesting conversations with people who are skeptical about the reliability of elections. And in the meetings, we have, we do bring people from across the political spectrum who are invested in their communities together. And the essential point we try and make to them is, "Some of you root for Arizona and some of you root for Arizona State and you all hate each other except you find common ground and joke about talking about this subject of college football in which you've got vociferous likes and dislikes." And so, we try and foster conversations like that over elections.
There are a number of instances with real community leaders who doubt elections where we get into conversations about their reliability. And the unfortunate part of how polarized we are today and with people living in bubbles is that you always have this assumption about people with whom you don't agree.
And what's been remarkable about these face-to-face sessions is that you can have candid conversations about those disagreements. So the particular instances, and this has been true in each of the jurisdictions, is when somebody who is convinced the election official they're sitting before is running an inaccurate or even corrupt election, to hear them talk out what really goes on in elections, whether there are false voters on the voting polls, and how do you know noncitizens sneaking in and voting, and how do you know only real people—valid voters—are submitting mail-in ballots without them being fraudulent?
So hearing the conversations as they evolve and as the questions go back and forth is actually what gives me hope that if we can change up the model enough of, sort of, “national abhorrence” of our opponents and get into more local conversations where people do recognize the peace and prosperity in their communities is what's best for everyone, this is actually the solution to the real problem that we've got.
Chris Herhalt:
Ben, what are you hearing right now about how election administrators are feeling going into the last couple of weeks for the vote?
Ben Ginsberg:
One of the truly admirable traits about the election officials is that I would not say that the harassment of them has abated, but they are, to a person, putting their heads down and concentrating on the task of putting on elections, and they're really remarkable in both their dedication and resilience. And so, while I think they would love to be able to have all the loud noise go away, they will put on an election that is transparent and reliable to a person among the election administrators. They say that the best antidote to all the noise and all the skepticism is transparency. And they have been living up to their word in terms of making their processes, their systems, their facilities transparent. And the loudest request you get from any of them is, “Please become a poll worker. Come on in and actually work the election. Especially if you think there's funny business going on with an election, come on into the polling place. Work the polls. See for yourself what's going on.” So, I just admire the resilience and dedication.
Chris Herhalt:
All right. Now I just want to end with what's next for both of you. What projects do you have in process in the next couple of weeks, but also after the election? Because I have the sneaking suspicion that this might not all go away regardless of the outcome.
Ben Ginsberg:
Tell me what's going to happen, and I'll tell you my projects.
Chris Herhalt:
Okay. If the general doubt and belief in conspiracy theories continues at the level and volume that it is right now, what do you guys think you're going to do next?
Ben Ginsberg:
The answer to that really depends on how close the results are. If the results are close, then the temperature is going to be turned up a lot. And if the results aren't close, it will not be quite as contentious, just as it was not contentious in 2022 in all but a handful of jurisdictions. If the elections are just as close, then the post-election period is going to have to be asking for facts to justify the charges and really truth-squadding those allegations.
Chris Herhalt:
Justin?
Justin Grimmer:
Part of what we're setting up to do over the next four weeks or so is to be in the best position to do that sort of truth-squadding if the election's going to be close, so assembling relevant data. On election night, Andy Hall and I are going to be running a sort of war room of political scientists to be monitoring election results to see how the results are coming in, if there are reports of anomalies, and then to be in a position where we can quickly investigate those claims as they're popping up.
And then after the election, assuming life returns to normal at some point, I'm working on a book with Eitan Hersh called Democracy Thrives: Why the Left and Right are Wrong that American Elections are Broken. And in the book we're taking on, as the title would suggest, arguments that are being made on both sides of the aisle about criticisms of American elections. What we show is that many of these criticisms lack any evidence at all. They're often just assertions where the total evidentiary basis is because an analyst says, "Because I said so." That's obviously not good science. It's really bad politics. And what we're hoping in that book is, by pointing out these sorts of arguments, to redirect attention to places where we can improve the electoral system and provide an antidote to some of this misinformation that's circulating.
