Restoring Confidence in American Elections

Tom Church:
Howdy. I'm Tom Church, I'm the policy fellow at the Hoover Institution, and today I'm trying to figure out why some states call their results the night of a presidential election and other states cannot, so to figure out this question, I'm talking to Ben Ginsberg. Ben, thanks for chatting with me today.

Ben Ginsberg:
Tom, great to be here. Thanks.

Tom Church:
So, you have a bunch of titles. I'm just going to try and get them right without reading them. So one, here at Hoover, you are the Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah.

Tom Church:
You are the co-chair of EOLDN, which is the Election Officials Legal Defense Network.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yes.

Tom Church:
That's a great organization, and you're also the host of Saints, Sinners, & Salvageables, which is a great podcast on election-related issues.

Ben Ginsberg:
Thank you, great, through Hoover.

Tom Church:
That's right, yeah. So, this question of how some states are able to call elections on that presidential night and others are not, I think of Florida as getting its act together. I'm really talking to you, because you were tangentially involved in the 2000 election and how Florida might've changed things. Tell me about that.

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, in 2000, I was general counsel to the Bush campaign, so I was there for a good 36 states from 10:30 on Wednesday morning till the last ballot was counted and Supreme Court had ruled.

Tom Church:
Wow. Were you involved in the actual litigation in front of the Supreme Court?

Ben Ginsberg:
I was. I helped write the brief, I helped muster the lawyers, and sort of played a liaison role between what was happening in the counting houses in all of Florida's counties with what the legal team was producing.

Tom Church:
Right, so you're at least familiar with, well, Florida's old rules, and maybe the new one.

Ben Ginsberg:
It's changed a lot.

Tom Church:
It's changed a lot. Well, we'll go over that. I'm also talking to you because you co-authored a piece with Bruce Cain titled Restoring Confidence in American Elections for Hoover's Tennenbaum Program on fact-based policy. Bruce Cain is a political scientist. He's the head of the Bill Lane Center for the American West here at Stanford. How long have you known Bill, and do you guys agree on national politics?

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, I've known Bruce for a very long time, because he's one of the venerated professors in the political science area. He's also got the credential of having worked at some practical politics in his misspent youth. I say misspent because he and I do not agree on many a policy, but I always think that my arguments are sharpened a great deal from running them by Bruce, who does have a great knowledge of American politics.

Tom Church:
Yeah, so one of the things you guys talk about in there are standards of reliability, so you're trying to increase confident and trust in American elections. One of the things I like is prompt reporting of election results, you think that's an important idea. That's why I want to switch to Florida here. Florida now is able to on election night say, "This is who won. We know that's who won." What is it that Florida does differently than other states when it comes to early voting or mail-in voting?

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, among the battleground states that we hear about, it does two things extremely well because of the way its laws are written. Number one, absentee ballots can be pre-processed. Mail-in ballots can be pre-processed when they come in, which means there is a check on who the voter is, whether their address is correct. All the formulas of Florida law for verifying the vote.

Tom Church:
Signature verification too?

Ben Ginsberg:
Signature verification. Some states have signatures, some states have numerical digits. In the age when our kids in school aren't really taught penmanship, digits have some benefits as a way to check, but the checks on who the voter says he or she is, is all done before the election, and then the ballots are prepared so they can be counted on election day along with people who vote on election day.

Tom Church:
So, processing and counting are different things?

Ben Ginsberg:
Processing and counting are different things. There are two states that we read a lot about in 2020, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that do not allow the pre-processing of absentee ballots, which means that election officials have to pre-process, check the reliability and veracity of the voters' identification on election day, and then count. Because there's so much else to do on election day, and because pre-processing, the processing of ballots is a time-consuming enterprise, it takes a while, and so that's why those two states were not able to get their results in [inaudible 00:04:56].

Tom Church:
Looking into some issues to ask you about this. I'm realizing there's a difference between in-person voting and mail-in voting. They're not one for what, right? And Florida, you can't vote early, three days before the election. They allow early voting and then they stop that in order to count those votes. When it comes to actual mail-in ballots, Florida ballots, they have to receive them by the day of the election.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yes, that's the second major thing Florida does that allows them to get prompt election results. They do require absentee ballots to be in on election, all mail-in ballots to be in on election day. There are many other states, including the ones you remember from 2020, who were causing some of the problems in the timeliness of their results, who do have deadlines for extending the receipt of ballots, and so that can slow it down.

Tom Church:
Yeah, so I went and looked this up. The National Conference on State Legislatures, their website has a-

Ben Ginsberg:
[Inaudible 00:05:57].

Tom Church:
Excellent. They have great tables on all different kinds of election rules, and then you can just go look for your state. Winner ballots, all that will be processed. Counted mail-in ballots, all the rest of it. So, 30 other states, not just Florida. 30 other states require ballots, mail-in ballots, to be in by election day. 20 states and the District of Columbia do not. I mean, that makes sense for Alaska, right? People live pretty far away, and they use planes to get away around instead of cars, and I guess that's always up to the state. That's Florida. I want to run through the battleground states, so I went to Real Clear Politics. Let's pull at the battleground states. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin all require their mail-in ballots to be in on election day. Only Nevada of the battleground states [inaudible 00:06:46].

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, I think Pennsylvania has a three-day deadline.

Tom Church:
Three-day deadline? Oh, they've changed it. Okay. All right, so we'll-

Ben Ginsberg:
Supreme Court case.

Tom Church:
Supreme Court case. I was going to ask about that too. So, let's go through. I mean, Arizona, and actually Arizona is a harder one because they had some issues in 2020 as well, but Arizona allows processing and counting to begin upon receipt, so when they get those mail-in ballots in, they're allowed to verify them and then count them. I'll note, all of these states have laws that are written where results cannot be reported early, right? It is a felony. In Michigan, if you have early access, you have to swear an oath that you won't report these things. So, Arizona does that. Arizona, Biden took it by 0.3 percentage points in 2020. Right now Trump has a four and a half percent lead at this moment. So, maybe that one. We'll get back to what happened there, and if that one will be called on the night of or later. Georgia, signature upon receipt. Counting 18 days before the election day.
There's a couple more details there, but Biden only won that one by 11,000 votes, 0.2%. Trump's got a little bit of a lead, 4% right now, so we'll see again on that night, but then I think we get into the interesting battleground states. You mentioned Michigan last time. Michigan, it only allows processing of ballots starting at 7:00 AM on election day, and then counting of ballots right after that at 7:00 AM on election day. Biden took that one by two and a half percent, but right now Trump's up three. Do you think it's likely that, come November, this fall, Michigan's going to need to wait another couple of days? I mean, in 2020, they had to wait till November 5th to actually call the election in Michigan for [inaudible 00:08:24].

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, they might. Look, one of the other variables in the law is how close to election day people can drop off mail-in ballots. And so one of the things that happened in Arizona in 2020, and in 2022, is that they allow absentee ballots to be dropped off on election day, so there was a deluge of absentee ballots which slowed things down in the counting in the precincts. Some states allowed the counting of absentee ballots in precincts. That means that they can get overwhelmed. Other places have central counting locations for absentee ballots so that election officials can pretty well anticipate the flow of absentee ballots, because they know how many went out and have historic percentages of how many are return, and so they can staff up accordingly, so Milwaukee, for example, was able to get its absentee ballots counted in a pretty timely action because they have a central count for absentees.

Tom Church:
So, you mentioned Milwaukee. Minnesota, verification. This is interesting to me, and the states are all different.

Ben Ginsberg:
All different.

Tom Church:
All different. Verification of signatures of the ballots. Okay. Upon receipt after close of business on the [inaudible 00:09:40] before the election. Fine, the ballots can be opened, put into a ballot box, but not counted yet. Counting for Minnesota begins after the polls close on election day. So, you're saying Minnesota had a centralized counting area, and they were able to... Even though all their mail-in ballots, you had to wait until polls closed?

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, Milwaukee. I'm not sure about Minnesota.

Tom Church:
Milwaukee? Okay.

Ben Ginsberg:
Minnesota also interestingly enough is a state that does not have signature requirement today. It's digit. So, the whole process becomes somewhat less complicated with matching digits.

Tom Church:
So when you say digits, you literally mean-

Ben Ginsberg:
You have random set of numbers.

Tom Church:
You do? So, on the envelope and on your ballot?

Ben Ginsberg:
Yep.

Tom Church:
Okay. Big question, why don't all states do this versus signature verification? I know it's a dicey topic among election officials, right?

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, it's not so much among election officials. Fierce federalism has always been the practice of the country. We do believe, and have always believed, that local officials making local decisions is kind of the best way to go. That one size does not fit all. That what may be right for the way Arizona counts is not going to be right for the way New York counts, and a smaller state like North Dakota is not going to want to do it the way Florida does. So, we do believe in local control, and we do not think that one size fits all. There are problems in that, but that's also the historical glory of why we have 10,000 separate election jurisdictions in the country.

Tom Church:
And, that's because? I mean, some people might look at the elections, especially 2020 contested elections, as just not good for the country, and say, "Why doesn't the federal government regulate this stuff?" And it's just because of our federal system. That's unlikely to change. Is anyone pushing for it to be regulated federally?

Ben Ginsberg:
There have been some bills that were passed, largely a democratic effort called the We the People Act. They tried to federalize all the rules for at least federal elections. Now, what was interesting about that effort was that it would have a lot of standards that would be uniform across the country for federal elections. It would've set up a system for federal elections and separate set of rules for state elections that would've been pretty messy, but in that drive to federalize, local election officials generally opposed it because the feds didn't ask the states for their input. What, I believe from working with local election officials, they would've said is, one size does not fit all, and you can't think just because you're a smart person sitting in Washington that you have an answer that's going to work throughout the diversity of jurisdictions in the country.

Tom Church:
But, what do you think about the idea of, "Let's set the standards, and then you guys figure out how." We need to make sure that there is prompt reporting, that people have confidence in elections. Is there a set of standards you think that you could say, "Here are the minimums. You figure out the details."

Ben Ginsberg:
I don't think you could do it for all the 50 states. I do believe that, under the principles of federalism, individual states could set more standards for the jurisdictions within their states, but I don't think you want New York and South Dakota operating their elections the same way, to a similar standard.

Tom Church:
Fair enough. Let's keep going on some battleground states because I'm kind of... I want to preview 2024, and give people a picture in their head of what might this look like. I want them to not be surprised if, again, votes take a little bit to be counted. So Nevada, signature verification upon receipt, counting 15 days before the election. They should probably be able to call their election the night of, would you think?

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, maybe. It depends how many mail-in ballots they get on election day. It depends if there are breakdowns that occur in jurisdictions, which does happen. I mean, the thing to remember about our election system, in addition to the multiple jurisdictions we have, is that we make it a very human process. That there are probably a million volunteers. Many of them are even older than me. Because of that, the system is subject to human mistakes. There are safeguards in it, so ultimately the results are accurate, but it is not a machine built for precision. It is a machine built for local communities to be able to do things the way they think they should have done.

Tom Church:
And there's a lot of redundancy built into the system, right? We do elections a lot in America. I feel like if there were untoward things happening, people have moved to correct them.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yes, I think that's absolutely true. I think one of the things we're doing here at Hoover is cataloging all the safeguards in the different phases of the election system to, again, provide more confidence for voters and citizens that the results are ultimately accurate. There are mistakes made, and there will be mistakes made. There are also procedures to correct that.

Tom Church:
Let's talk to North Carolina for a second. North Carolina was interesting. They're allowed to begin processing before the election day. It's the fifth Tuesday before election day. Counting 5:00 PM on election day, but if they pass a resolution two weeks before that, they're allowed to start counting at 2:00 PM, which is fascinating. I haven't read any other state that's got that, "Within this day, we'll move it. We'll start a couple hours earlier." Pennsylvania you mentioned. Pennsylvania is an interesting one. Again, processing and counting, 7:00 AM on election day, and there were some things that actually you mentioned might've changed. Now, we've got the Supreme Court case. In 2020, there were some last minute changes to their election rules. Can you take me through that a little bit?

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah, or attempts to.

Tom Church:
Attempts?

Ben Ginsberg:
There was a suit against the Pennsylvania law that allowed absentee ballots to be received, as long as postmarked by election day, up to three days after the election. Ultimately, the Supreme Court did not strike that down. It's been a subject of continuing litigation on whether that should be allowed. That is a sort of familiar theme among states that do allow the receipt of absentee ballots postmarked on election day up to varying dates afterwards. All about what you pointed out, the prompt delivery of election [inaudible 00:16:28].

Tom Church:
Right.

Ben Ginsberg:
So, pre-processing is something that the Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have stopped from happening, because they fear that there would be the premature release of results, and that would create an electoral momentum. There have also been delays in results in states that allow mail-in ballots to be received in long periods afterwards. I mean, you may remember a couple of congressional elections in recent years in New York and California. They had very lenient deadlines.

Tom Church:
Yeah, California is out a long time.

Ben Ginsberg:
A long time. So, imagine if New York and California, where the outcome determinant state for a presidential election, and you couldn't call it because it was a close election and there were lots of absentee ballots out, or even seats in Congress, which is where those delays really...

Tom Church:
I was going to say, more likely to happen. Considering California and New York, we kind of know who they're going to go for in the presidential election, but actual [inaudible 00:17:28].

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah, each has a number of contested congressional districts.

Tom Church:
Right. The fears over pre-release numbers, has that happened [inaudible 00:17:35]?

Ben Ginsberg:
No.

Tom Church:
Okay, so that's just the justification, but it hasn't happened yet. I mean, it's quite a felony if you were to maybe even falsely release early poll numbers.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah, it's a felony. It's not clear who it would actually advantage if somebody went and released the ballots early. It would be really in nobody's interest for it to happen. Election officials, it's a mark to election officials integrity that there are no instances of the pre-release of results, even if there's pre-processing the ballots, so in a way it seems like it's a measure designed to sow sort of distrust in our needs in the electoral system.

Tom Church:
Wisconsin's the last battleground state I mentioned. Processing after polls open on election day, and counting after polls open on election day. So, as soon as things kick off, then they'll take the collection of mail-in ballots and go from there. Biden won it by point six percentage points right now. Trump, on Real Clear Politics, is up one percentage point. Part of the motivation of the Tennenbaum Program on fact-based policy is to try and give people an understanding of how to go find the truth. They wonder about how these things work, and part of finding the truth is making predictions and then testing them, so I'm looking at here. Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, maybe Michigan, although Trump seems to have a bigger lead there. 2020, we waited a couple days or longer to find out who won these states. Do you think 2024 we're going to know the night of?

Ben Ginsberg:
Oh, probably not, underway the rules are currently written.

Tom Church:
Really?

Ben Ginsberg:
What you do know the night of, if there's a big margin for one of the candidates. Where you don't know is if it's really narrow. So, there will be wiley political operatives sitting looking at expected vote totals for all precincts, and they'll weigh those against the results that are coming in. Some precincts are a better indication of what will happen statewide than others. And so that's how not only the campaigns, but also news outlets who do do the predicting, will take a look at results. So, if it's a narrow margin in a state, then results are going to take longer to come in.

Tom Church:
Okay, here's the question. North Carolina's got that funny 5:00 PM, maybe we can start counting at 2:00 PM. Who is actually in charge of these decisions? When you process, when you count? If someone wants to look at their state and say, "This doesn't make any sense. We should probably count earlier just so we can call this." Is it just state legislatures, or are state Supreme Courts going to weigh in as well?

Ben Ginsberg:
It is unlikely that state Supreme Courts will weigh in at this point, just because it's close enough to the election that courts weighing in are generally thought to cause confusion.

Tom Church:
Like Pennsylvania in 2020?

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah. There's a US Supreme Court doctrine called the Purcell Doctrine that says if it's close to election day and going to cause voter confusion, then court should not weigh. Supreme Court has applied it to itself more when it doesn't want to take a case, but that is still a sort of facet of when the courts weigh in. But you ask the question is it legislatures, or is it administrative offices who do it? The answer is that's part of the fierce federalism, and it varies from state to state. If a state legislature has a very specific law that says you can or cannot do it, then that trumps what an administrative agency can do, but there are state laws and renewal. You'll be shocked to hear this. There are state laws that are subject to more than one interpretation, and that's where administrators jump into the booth.

Tom Church:
That's tough.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah, and then legislators sometimes agree with the administrative decision dealt, and so the litigation spiral.

Tom Church:
Right. I want to ask about Maricopa County in Arizona. It's one of these counties that... I think most counties that people would know in America are named after major metropolitan cities, but many people now know Maricopa County and that's because of 2020, and you mentioned 2022 as well. Even though they were able to process and count votes as soon as they came in, they got a deluge of in-person, of people dropping off ballots. Was that early voting? Was that mail-in voting? They're different things, right?

Ben Ginsberg:
There are different names for it, but that's not consistent among states either. In some instances, that would be considered in-person voting to drop off a mail-in ballot. In other places, that would be considered mail voting, and so they treat different.

Tom Church:
Would that have been allowed in Florida? To take a mail-in ballot, and show up the day of the election, and drop them off? I think they might be allowed in some county, some specific areas, but not at regular polling places, right? Because they stop early voting three days before in order to count?

Ben Ginsberg:
That is one of those things where you go to the law books and look it up to be sure.

Tom Church:
Okay. Early voting, 2020 was different than 2024. We were in the depths of COVID. The GOP was clearly against it because it looked like Democrats would benefit from it more than them. Is that changing now with 2024, or is there a partisan group now that's more for... They still want to return to all in-person voting versus mail-in voting?

Ben Ginsberg:
You need to distinguish between mail voting, which is pre-election voting, and in-person thoroughly voting. Republicans have never had an issue over the last two years with in-person totally voting. On the theory that if a voter has to go into a polling place and present their ID, or register somehow, that that's not subject to improper and illegal votes. With mail voting, that's where the controversy has occurred. There have been periods of time in which the Republican mail voting programs were just vastly superior and won a lot of elections for the Republicans. The Republican Party is an older party than the Democratic Party. As an intuitive matter, mail-in voting should be something Republicans embrace, and so they ran into a bit of a problem with the charges that mail-in voting was bad and elections rigged in mail-in voting, and there have been numerous articles written about this.
A real push by Republican political operatives to encourage mail-in voting by its supporters. You want to have votes in the bank on election day. Bad weather or something with the kids can't get in the way of your people casting their votes because they already have. It is a much sort of more solid political practice to encourage people to vote by mail. You save money because you don't have to turn out people, because you know that they've already voted. So, there are all sorts of reasons now where there's a push within GOP circles to encourage mail voting. That is also true about half the time in the statements of Donald Trump, which is causing a bit of a disconnect between some Republican state parties, like Pennsylvania in particular, and what's coming out of the presidential candidates.

Tom Church:
Utah does all mail voting. Mail-in voting.

Ben Ginsberg:
Nine states.

Tom Church:
Nine states? All completely mail-in, as in you can't... You can vote in person, you can come drop it off, but all ballots are mailed out.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah.

Tom Church:
All right, so we have evidence that this can work.

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, one of the things that Bruce Cain and I address in the paper is the ballot harvesting issue.

Tom Church:
Are there many different definitions of that? Tell me what ballot harvesting really means.

Ben Ginsberg:
Some states allow one person to collect multiple ballots and turn them in. Other states who want to prohibit that ballot harvesting process do not allow someone else to turn in multiple ballots. So, there's ballot harvesting, which can be a problem, right? You sort of intuitively think that. The classic case is going through nursing homes and collecting ballots, and maybe not everybody in the nursing home is actually voting their own ballot, so that's an issue worth trying to draw some rules about. The other thing to note about those nine states with mail-in voting is that every voter in the state gets ballot, a live ballot, and can turn it in. That raises suspicions that funny things can happen to ballots. And so in the other states, which I personally think is a better practice, and I think Bruce would actually agree with me, but it is a better practice to mail a mail-in ballot application to everyone, make the voter sort of verify who they are. Some form of identification, signature, numerical identifier. Then once that application for an absentee ballot has been received, then you mail them a ballot.

Tom Church:
I was going to ask about that, because states, some states, just mail all ballots out. Some you need an excuse, and some you need no excuse to get a ballot.

Ben Ginsberg:
The glories of federalism.

Tom Church:
The glories of federalism. Bigger picture, are there any states that had trouble in 2020 that you think, "Okay. They're going to be fine in 2024," based on rules that they've changed? Has anyone had the Florida revitalization of, "Well, we had issues in 2000, and now it's..."

Ben Ginsberg:
Not really among the battleground states. I mean, there are certainly different laws that have been put into effect, which may engender greater voter confidence. Although, these days, in the contentious atmosphere and dialogue over elections, that competence in election seems to come down to whether your candidate wins or not.

Tom Church:
Are there really good data sources that you wish people would check or look at? I mean, you are exposed to so many election officials. You are exposed to people who are skeptical. Elections is what you're doing. A lot of the time is trying to convey confidence. "Here's how we make sure and safeguard these elections." Are there places you wish people would go and look? Are there really good data sources that you can point people to?

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, it all depends what the curiosity that people have. What's really interesting in the polling that's been done of voters and voter attitudes is that people seem to have the greatest degree of faith in their own local election, [inaudible 00:29:08]. There's a little more skepticism statewide. In other words, people in rural areas tend to point to the big cities and say, "Ah, I know there's something nefarious going on there," and then people have even less confidence in the elections in other states. And so it is difficult enough for people to come up with a real set of knowledge about their own state laws, let alone a number of other state laws.
For people who do want to feel reassured about the election system, I think going to the national conference of state legislature site, the ncsl.org, can be helpful in getting that information. Looking at the different safeguards that are in the systems. There are very few different voting systems in the country, so chances are that the voting machines that people vote on, where they have confidence in their own local elections, probably the same machines that are used in the states in which they do not have confidence, so that's a bit of a disconnect, and I think that information would be helpful and give people some more confidence in elections.

Tom Church:
Is there a most common myth that you get about elections, or is there an accusation you've heard about elections are fraudulent/stolen that you think, "This isn't true, because..."

Ben Ginsberg:
Well, I think the common myth that elections are rigged should be a lie by the fact that there's been no evidence uncovered, despite decades of looking, that elections are rigged. When I worked for four years for the National Party committees, we always had election day operation, so did many outside groups, all looking for problems in the election. You have to be honest about the evidence, and in any collection of the fraud that's been uncovered, it usually is one-offs involving individual people. There are some instances, like a problem with a congressional election in North Carolina in 2018, where a Republican was actually convicted of voter fraud through violating the ballot harvesting laws.
But the basic point is, is that there is no evidence that's been accumulated to show systematic fraud that would overturn the results of an election. It is a human system, there will be mistakes. There are some bad actors who may try something, but there are safeguards in the system so that if there is fraud, you got to be able to produce the evidence, and there were 64 post-election suits filed in 2000, none of which were successful in showing any sort of problems with the election that would've changed the results.

Tom Church:
To say it another way, it's in the interest of each party to look for fraud committed by the other party, and then expose it as well. I mean, that's another check on the system, wouldn't you say?

Ben Ginsberg:
Yes. I mean, look, I think that the poll watcher rules that do allow the political parties and candidates to have observers in every polling place in the country is really important. The Trump campaign and the RNC, Republican National Committee, just announced that they would have a hundred thousand poll watcher program. That is a positive development. Observers from both parties should be in every polling place. If they find problems, it's going to be corrected, and if they don't, that is a point of validation of the accuracy of the election.

Tom Church:
Through your work with EOLDN, and other efforts here at Hoover, I've gotten to meet various county commissioners, and reporters, and election people all around the country, on the right and the left, and it's striking to me how much they just want elections to be run smoothly. It is a, I wouldn't say a completely volunteer thing, but it's not a moneymaking business for them. It is a stressful, almost contact sport at this point, profession, and they are very dedicated to making sure these elections go off smoothly and that there isn't fraud. I mean, this is the American system.

Ben Ginsberg:
They're government employees who feel a civic obligation to make sure our elections [inaudible 00:34:02], and that's a really key point to remember. They are your friends and neighbors who happen to work in elections. When you bring in all the volunteers that the election officials recruit to help out with the elections, it's even more true that it's a local enterprise with absolutely well-intentioned people to let the voice of the voters be heard.

Tom Church:
Where would you send people if they actually wanted to volunteer? If they were skeptical, or just wanted to help out and said, "You know what? I'm going to go be a part of this, and volunteer, and see how these things run."

Ben Ginsberg:
I think the places that are most interesting for that are the battleground states you mentioned at the beginning. There will be jurisdictions that have contested US Senate, US House rights that's also very important. There is a cautionary note in there, which that each state also has its own laws about whether you have to be a resident of that state to be a poll watcher.

Tom Church:
Okay, so maybe start local, right?

Ben Ginsberg:
So, starting local is good. The National Party committees and a number of 501C groups all have election observer programs. If you have doubts, you should get involved, and you should go into polling places and look for yourself.

Tom Church:
Ben, thank you. Let me see if I, at least if we can recap this a little bit and if we figured this out enough. States have different rules based on when you can send in ballots, when they need to be received, when they can be processed, when they can be counted, so every state's a little bit different. I would say if elections are close, you're expecting it to take longer to call for a state?

Ben Ginsberg:
Yes.

Tom Church:
All right, and then it's up to maybe state legislatures, or maybe administrators, to change these rules if you think we should be counting earlier, or later, or we should keep them where they are.

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah. Legislative efforts on both fronts have either been successful at this point or are not going to be successful at this point, so I think the rules that are in place now are really likely to be the rules in place on election day 2024.

Tom Church:
All right, so if we want to change the rules, wait until the election, and then go out and push and make that difference?

Ben Ginsberg:
Yeah, I think so.

Tom Church:
All right.

Ben Ginsberg:
Look at what went wrong and what went right in 2024, and improve your own state and jurisdiction's ways of running elections.

Tom Church:
Ben, thank you for teaching me more about elections.

Ben Ginsberg:
Thanks, Tom.

Tom Church:
If you want to hear more from Ben Ginsberg, I strongly encourage you to go listen to Saint, Sinners, and Salvageables, his excellent podcast on election related issues. He covers issues like we covered today and many more with people from around the country from the right and the left. It's hosted here at the Hoover Institution.
If you'd like to follow me, you can do that at Twitter at TomVChurch. Please follow the Hoover Institution at HooverInst, that's I-N-S-T, over at Twitter as well. If you have questions that we didn't answer today, please put them in the comments, ask them, and we will try to address them in a future episode, and as always, check the show notes to look through the links or other issues that we cover today that I will make sure we go into more detail.
Thank you very much for listening and watching. We'll talk to you next time.