Close Encounters of the Coos County Kind

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: It's Monday, October 28, 2024, and you're listening to Saint, Sinners and Salvageables, a Hoover Institution podcast examining America's democratic process and the many challenges inherent in staging elections in these charged partisan times. I'm Ben Ginsberg, the Hoover Institution's Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow, and I'll be your moderator today.

On the last installment of Saint, Sinners and Salvageables, we had a broad conversation about the upcoming election and what states have been doing to put safeguards in place. Today, we're going to shift gears and talk about some vital work that's being done here at the Hoover Institution, what we call "Restoring Confidence in American Elections", which is part of Hoover's Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy and the Restoring American Institutions Initiative.

Joining me to talk about these endeavors, plus his own observations about our democracy, my colleague Justin Grimmer. Justin is a Hoover Senior Fellow. He's also the Morris M Doyle Centennial professor in Public Policy in Stanford University's Department of Political Science, as well as Co-Director of the Democracy and Polarization Lab.

Justin's research focuses on Congress, elections, social media, and data science. Justin, welcome. Thanks for coming on the podcast and we can't wait to hear what you've been doing in your research. Some recent encounters you may have had right in the middle of the election debate over the accuracy of elections and what you think is gonna happen.

We may put you on the spot a little bit. Justin, tell us what you've been focusing on in your research.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here right before the election. So my research has really taken two tracks, both broadly interested in better understanding why Americans often distrust our elections and what steps we can take to rebuild that trust.

One component of studying the sources of distrust focuses on arguments that come from the left about voter, quote, unquote, voter suppression. I think we've all heard these sorts of arguments, arguments that are made, for example, that voter ID laws deter voters and disproportionately affect some number of voters, maybe from one party, or that other modes of election administration enable more voters to turn out that could benefit some other party.

Broadly, what that strand of my research has shown is that while it is the case some election reforms can affect the extent of turnout, what we've found is that across all of these reforms, there's just not gonna be a systematic benefit from either party and how elections are administered.

And the basic insight there is a pretty simple one. Modern changes to election reforms tend to really only be targeted at a very small share of the electorate, for example, only a small share of the electorate doesn't have voter identification. And then among that small share of the electorate, the effect turns out to be relatively small when we think about these changes.

And then finally, even among the people who might be deterred or encouraged to turn out, among that relatively small group of people affected on turnout, it turns out that these laws tend to affect Democrats and Republicans in very similar ways. So even if they're slight imbalances, what we'll find is that this has a pretty minuscule effect on election results overall.

 

And this framework can be applied to lots of laws and in lots of different places. In a second strand of work, we take on a variety of claims that are being made that American elections are subject to illegal voting manipulation and in some cases, outright fraud. In there could be a whole series of podcasts probably about these sorts of claims.

There's two broad classes of them. Some of them come up in post 2020 litigation. These are claims made about either illegal votes being cast, votes from dead people, or non citizens or people who have moved out of a jurisdiction. Or they're claims that are made about some sort of anomalous result based on some statistical analysis, with the claim being that this result is so surprising, it must be the case that the election was manipulated.

And in a variety of series of papers we've evaluated those claims and it turns out that they don't hold much water. And in fact, what's remarkable about those claims is just how flimsy the evidence often is. These were produced in a very short time frame by individuals who, my general impression is, don't have much experience with election data.

And as a result, they tend to not be valid indicators of manipulation. In addition to those sorts of claims, which are very specific, there are a whole series of claims that are much more expansive. So many election skeptic influencers are touring the country and claiming that every election, everywhere is being stolen through conspiratorial manipulation.

That means not only is the presidency stolen from Donald Trump, according to these influencers, but their school board races are being influenced by some sort of secretive cabal using a variety of mechanisms to steal elections. And these sorts of conspiracy theories about elections, they're on their face outrageous, they're very easy to show they're not true, but they have very real consequences.

They're leading to a real climate of distrust in a variety of communities across America.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Yeah, which is why you see in the polls that at least a third of the country has doubts about the validity of our elections, which of course is going to cause great problems for whoever wins an election and tries to govern, given the credibility.

But you had a recent encounter up in Coos Bay, Oregon, where you were asked to testify by the county commission opposite someone who expressed a great deal of skepticism about elections reliability. Tell us a little bit about that.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yes, okay, so to give the sort of long version of the story, an individual, Douglas Frank, he's a PhD Chemist turned high school math teacher.

Now, a sort of full time election skeptic influencer. He tours the country and pedals a particular theory of how elections are stolen. In early July of this year, he was in Coos County, Oregon, and he gave a presentation to the county commission where he made the claim that elections in Coos county are being subject to widespread manipulation through computer hacking and that all of the elections in Oregon are subject to this manipulation, which he can prove with a simple statistical analysis, is the claim he made at that meeting.

He made the offer to come back for a work session for the county because two of the three county commissioners were very sympathetic to what he had to say and were very worried that their elections are in fact, subject to manipulation. He was invited back for this work session, I was then invited.

Well, just to say why I was invited, I have spent a great deal of time producing a variety of analyses to show that what Douglas Frank has to say is not at all valid. Ahmed's face, and I'll talk about this in a second. And you can show that.

It doesn't really make much sense, but they must have,, searched up Douglas Frank's name and to see if anyone had analyzed his claims. And I think my name pops up pretty quickly there. So one of the county commissioners invited me to come testify or participate in this work session opposite of Douglas Frank.

It is an interesting environment that I certainly found myself in. So Coos county is beautiful, one of the most beautiful places in the country, I would say. It is a place that has been hollowed out by the decline of the timber industry in Oregon. And so the first thing on everyone's mind is the budget shortfalls that come along with the restrictions on harvesting lumber in southwest Oregon.

And so that every conversation very quickly would go to what's going on in the lumber industry. So in this sort of county room, it was about half of the people there were adamant Doug Frank supporters and were certain the elections were being manipulated. And then the other half were individuals who were certain that must not be the case.

What's interesting is Douglas Frank's argument hinges on statistics. My reputation hinges on statistics. But as best I could tell, no one who is certain about who is correct in this, in this dispute had any sort of statistical expertise themselves, which leads to. I think, some interesting issues on both sides.

So there is some, I think conclusion shopping happening, some evidence shopping going on where people have some idea in their head and they want to say. This is now evidence that,, confirms what I've long believed. And so there seemed to be an element of that which is a very interesting communication issue.

So just before I go into what happened in the meeting, I just want to make clear that what Douglas Frank is saying is like, on its face, really crazy. So I'll just give a simple distillation of it. So according to Frank, over the course of the couple years before federal election, some group of individuals who he calls.

They load the voter rolls up with what he calls phantom voters. Individuals who perhaps previously resided in the area or perhaps weren't even real at all, and are attributed to addresses. Then on election night, after observing some set of results from legitimate ballots, these phantom voters are then used to inject votes, according to Frank, into the election results.

And of course, you might think, well, we'll easily identify those phantom voters because they won't have real ballots to go along with them. If they're only injected in the machine, then it wouldn't,, the hand audits would reveal this. But according to Frank, across the country there are a wide variety of Paper mills that print off absentee ballots that are then inserted into circulation.

So that you never would be able to tell what was a legitimate ballot and what wasn't, and thereby committing, according to him, an undetectable amount of fraud. So his evidence for this is a claim that he can exactly predict elections in all states across the country. The key to this claim is his belief that in every county in the country, the turnout rate for every age group is the same.

Sorry, every county in a state, the turnout rate is the same. So that 25 year olds in Coos county turn out at the same rate as 25 year olds in Multnomah, which is where Portland is.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: But the problem, Justin, is that half the room believed them.

>> Justin Grimmer: Half the room.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: So the question is, in the debate, back and forth, how do you deal with the claims he's making? So you win over that half of the room.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, this, an interesting point, and I'm not sure that I was able to do it perfectly. At the core of Frank's claim is what I think is just a point that everyone can get that doesn't require much statistical expertise.

If he's saying in every county, 25 year olds turn out at the same rate, and I show you that is not the case, there is a wide variety of turnout among 25 year olds across counties. Well, then certainly that must place a pin in his, the balloon of his argument just a little bit and let some of the air out.

So I tried that and I thought it was,, very clear. And immediately he says, like, you just, you did something else. You did not do what I did and that's why you reached a different conclusion. In fact, he accused me of putting together a straw man. I know that not to be the case because from litigation where we were on opposite sides at one point, I have the spreadsheet he uses to produce these results.

So I know I'm using his exact same same data. But nevertheless, he's undeterred by those assertions. And at one point he just. Even though I repeatedly told him, look, what you're saying is incorrect, I'm refuting you. This is exactly. Refutation. The thing you just said is nonsensical. Finally he just said, well, I found it, and therefore it must be right as an assertion.

Yeah, so. So is difficult to engage with.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: It is so that's the big question here, is you've got a third of the country sort of believing that elections aren't accurate. How do we move forward to be able to get through the different bubbles on each side about this issue.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I think there's going to be two strategies. So among that third, there are not a lot of people who are citing Doug Frank or Mike Lindell or another person in this cabal, Jeffrey O'Donnell. People who are believing everything everywhere is being manipulated. That's a very small share of this third.

So I think the best way to get at that third of people who are skeptical is to have candidates who take credit for their victories but also accept blame for their defeats. That's not an easy policy prescription, but I think it would go just a long way to restoring trust.

And it's unfortunate that both parties have now devolved into a situation where they have lots of incentives to attribute defeats to something other than their own campaign decisions. So with Hillary Clinton, we've heard a variety of explanations. It was Jim Comey or maybe it was Russian disinformation or the Russian hacking.

At the end of the day, we can spend lots of time on any one of those issues. They're not enough to explain that defeat. And obviously that pales in comparison to what happened with Trump post 2020. But we've seen smaller versions of this happen in primary elections. So Joey Gilbert in Nevada makes the claim that his primary was stolen.

Carrie Lake in Arizona says her Senate race was stolen from her and as a result leads to people being skeptical of those races. But if we can get candidates to commit before the election to say this is how the election is going to be administered. We do not believe that election administration is going to cause me to win or lose this race.

I think that's going to be the first big step to reducing that third of individuals.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: And of course, especially in this election cycle, election officials have been far more transparent about their processes than they were four years ago. So I think you've got to give some credit to election officials for recognizing that dealing head on, Tom, with people who doubt the reliability of elections is really important to do.

Let them in to kick the tires. Take a look at all the safeguards That exist in the process.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I think that's a huge component of rebuilding this trust. It's also just simply the case that we're not dealing with the situation we were in four years ago where no one's quite sure about how to handle running an election in the face of a global pandemic. 

Lots of anxiety pointing in a lot of different directions. People trying to either modify rules or come up with ways in which to ensure participation while also having people concerned about COVID I mean, that's just a recipe for people who don't normally follow elections to be concerned because there were so many concerns around Covid.

And then just to think we have that can of gas and then we're just going to strike a match and throw it in there. To have Donald Trump be so skeptical about the election after the fact, I mean, I think that just could not be a worse situation.

So I agree. Election officials opening this up and then also, you know, swamp the vote. Donald Trump arguing and telling his voters to vote earlier. I think that's going to be helpful as well. We're going to see less polarization across different means of voting this time. Almost certainly Republicans have been turning out much more early vote.

They're more likely to vote mail in than they were last time, at least on a relative basis. And as a result of that, there won't be those sorts of cross tabs that I'm sure people were looking at before saying, well, there's huge discrepancies across these modes of voting.

Something must be wrong.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Yeah. And you're also likely to get less of a red mirage, blue wave effect.

>> Justin Grimmer: Exactly.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Where election day votes that tend to be Republican got counted first, then as mail votes, absentee votes were tallied in states, Democrats gained. If Republicans continue to vote as heavily early as they appear to be, then that phenomenon should be a little bit less.

But of course, no one should think that there will be results on election night. There's just too much built into state law to allow that to happen in a razor close election.

>> Justin Grimmer: That's right. So if this were a blowout, and and if this were a blowout, we could know very early in the night who's going to win.

It's quite unlikely to be a blowout. And just because of state laws waiting for military ballots, you know, all of these things are just going to be built in to take just a long time to get the results. If it's a 10,000 vote margin, just Turns out it takes a long time to make sure we have all the votes counted, that those there can't be outstanding vote that could change the results.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Yeah. Just so folks know, most jurisdictions will tabulate about 70% of their votes before midnight on Election Day. If it's not a close election, then networks will feel comfortable, news organizations will feel comfortable making a call. If the margins are close, they really can. And that's what takes a long time.

And of course, the official results aren't done until the certifications take place in the states, which is not for a two to three week period after that.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I mean, just really on that point. There was an interesting exchange between Stephen Richer and Senator Mike Lee on Twitter last week where Mike Lee was expressing his surprise at how long it took to count ballots in Maricopa.

And then Stephen just pointed out it actually takes longer in Utah. It's just we know the outcome in Utah much earlier. The Republican will win in Utah. Donald Trump will take Utah this cycle. I think we can, you know, bet a large, large amount of money on that.

That's going to be known very early in the night. And so folks just aren't paying attention in the way that they are to Arizona because it's gonna be such a tight margin.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Yeah. And of course, the reason in Arizona, there are specific reasons. In Arizona, people are allowed to walk in absentee ballots, mail ballots, up until 7 PM on Election Day.

So there's a huge number of ballots that then need to be processed and authenticated before they can be counted. There's something like over 200,000 in 2020, which is what slowed down the results so much. So I want to go back to talk about your research on the state laws that have been passed and that it doesn't appear to have a great advantage for either party.

So the laws that have been passed, I think this really comes from the polarization in the country that there is more single state, single party control of more states over the past decade. That's when the party in power passes laws that thinks it will help. So Republicans pass laws in their states that they believe enhances election integrity and ballot security.

Democrats pass laws in the states where they are that they think makes it easier to vote, especially makes it easier for their supporters to vote. The minority party has no real recourse but to file litigation. So we've heard an awful lot of really contentious rhetoric about fraud versus suppression.

But yet you're saying all these laws that are causing all this dust up really don't have an effect on Voting. Can you explain a little bit why that is?

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, absolutely. Not to avoid the question which I will answer just to, you know, the sort of premise of this is that there's this narrative that Republicans pass one kind of law and Democrats pass another.

But I think that's, it's also just a touch more complicated than that. So even looking at the state of Georgia, for example, no excuse mail in voting happens under Republican governor in Georgia in the early aughts. Democrats oppose it. They say this is just a way for you to get lots of Republican votes in.

That's what they claim at the time. Georgia is an early mover on automatic voter registration. So automatically registering people to vote at the DMV in 2016, bringing people involved there, and even a bill that was Criticized by Democrats, HB316 in 2019 revised a series of aspects of the absentee ballot to make it more likely that ballots would be accepted and not rejected because people didn't fill out a certain component of the of the ballot correctly that had nothing to do with whether they were who they claim they were.

So I think oftentimes states also want to be in a position where they run good elections. And so sometimes laws get passed for those reasons. Not just to advantage one party or the other, but to think about, you know, why don't these laws have a big effect? We can you know, just sort of work through this idea about how would a law have an effect.

And I think, you know, the clearest example to work through is voter identification. So I'll just go through it again. So suppose in a state, the state, the state legislature passes a law that says you now have to show photo identification at the polling place in order to vote.

And you have to have a certain kind of identification needs to be state issued. And so we'll have a driver's license and maybe a few other ways, which is usually how these laws are passed. Okay, so immediately what's of interest is to think about who would be affected by this.

So the most obvious group of people who could be affected are people who don't have a driver's license. They would have to either come up with some way to get some state issued identification, or they would simply just not be able to vote. We could also think there's some small share of people who might forget their license when they show up to vote.

That turns out to not be a huge number. So I think it's for this example worthwhile to think about just the people who don't have a Driver's license. So across states, that number will vary as a percent of registered voters. It turns out to be about 4%. What's interesting is that in every state in the union, you have to have identification in order to register to vote.

That's been a requirement since 2002 with Help America Vote Act. And so you know, that identification is, not surprisingly, a lot of registered voters have it. So say about 4% of individuals don't have that driver's license. So in research that I've done with my former grad student Jesse Yoder, we found that not having a driver's license causes about a 0.7 percentage point decline in an individual's turnout to vote.

And so, okay, so now we have 4% of registered voters. And then the, the effect on turnout as a share of registered voters then would be 4 times 0.7. So already we have pretty small fractions here. So 4 out of 100 times 7 over 1,000. And then finally, okay, so that's the total number of people who would be potentially deterred from voting because of photo identification.

And then finally we have to think, well, not all of those people would belong to one party. And so this is often an error that's made in the sort of logic about these arguments. Folks will think law has a disproportionate effect on a particular group, but that doesn't mean that that group is the majority group that's affected. It just means that the effect on that group is out of proportion to their share of the population. And so if we supposed that there is even a 60/40 imbalance, so suppose 60% of the people who don't have that ID are Democrats, and about 40% are Republicans. Well, then now we're multiplying a series of very small fractions together.

4 out of 100 times 7 over 1,000 times 20 over 100, and that would give you the total number of votes that Republicans could expect to pick up in a relatively large electorate. That's still going to be a very, very small number. And it turns out that number is going to be so small that even the tightest races, like we're Talking Florida in 2000, tight races, it's very unlikely that these sorts of laws would be decisive there.

And that means that in any instance where the law would be decisive, there are a million other things that were also decisive. If you're down to Florida in 2000, that means whether people have coals or flat tires are going to also have swung the election. So you could point to a lot of things that would swing the election.

So as a result, you're multiplying those three fractions together. It just means that there's just not a lot of people who are affected.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: So that's fascinating because the political parties and really the nonprofit community spend an awful lot of money talking about the massive impacts of either fraud or suppression.

So that takes us to the role of the political parties. Some have argued that part of the reason voter ID laws have such small effects is that the turnout operation of the political parties sort of can overcome for any of those potential negative effects. Have you seen instances of the parties being able to do it?

I guess in the case of voter ID, it's Democratic party turnout efforts with their low propensity voters.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah. So the short answer is no, that we're not going to see counter mobilization, parties responding to different rules put in place mitigating the effects of these laws. And we have some pretty good evidence at least that we haven't seen this counter mobilization happen yet.

So in at least one paper about voter identification laws, they suggest that potentially political parties are more likely to contact minority voters after a voter identification law is put in place. But that process of contacting those voters potentially and seeing what its effect on turnout would be goes through the exact same sort of arithmetic that I was describing with the voter identification laws.

And very quickly, you realize this could not explain the lack of an effective voter ID law. The, the increased rate of contact that they're describing could only explain, you know, very hand small handful of voters being encouraged to turn out who otherwise wouldn't if it weren't for the party. So that doesn't seem to do the trick. Other individuals have pointed to a study by Nick Valentino and Fabian Nooner that claims that they have evidence that voters have a psychological reaction to these laws. Voters get mad, and as a result of getting mad, voters turn out to vote.

So the first thing you have to think about just to like situate ourselves in this is you have to imagine that there's someone who wasn't going to turn out to vote if there's no photo identification law. And then according to the theory in this paper, they get so mad about photo identification laws that they then do turn out to vote.

Okay, so that would be a very surprising person. I think you have to be pretty in the weeds to know about photo identification laws, and you're quite likely to turn on anyways. But when my colleague and I, Eitan Hirsch, who I've done the work on the suppression with, reanalyzed the data from that paper, we find that their own experiment actually didn't show any evidence that voter ID laws mobilized anyone.

In fact, what they had done is that they created a dependent variable that was an index of a variety of things you might do in response to photo ID laws. One of which might be that you say you're going to turn out to vote. And that would be the sort of key thing for this analysis, say you're going to turn out to vote.

But they also included in their activities like educating fellow citizens about photo identification laws, which of course have nothing to do with counter mobilization. It would just be some sort of different participatory action. And so when we asked Valentino and Nooner to rerun the analysis because they didn't share data for that analysis, we asked them to rerun the analysis just for the variable that would actually be relevant to their hypothesis, which was that individuals said they were more likely to turn out because of the photo ID laws.

We found there was no effect actually in sort of contradiction to the claims made in the paper and certainly how the paper's often cited. And so at the moment there's not evidence for it. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be counter mobilization efforts. I would just say though that we, even as a definition, it's, it's a bit odd.

In every campaign in the country, political campaigns who want to turn out to vote do that by educating people about what's going to go on about the steps in order to turn out to vote. So if you want to vote, this is how you register, this is how you fill out your ballot, this is how you return your ballot.

Are all of those instances counter mobilization? That doesn't seem right. You'd have to be able to show that there's some differential effect, that there's some way in which the campaigns are reallocating resources because of photo ID laws, which no one has shown and no one's really come close to showing.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Interesting. So let me throw a hypothetical from this election. That some of the laws that have been passed do reduce the number of early voting days, weekend voting days in person, voting opportunities, absentee ballot periods. That's been particularly true in Georgia and North Carolina, Arizona before the 22 election and a little bit in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

So the question is, as Donald Trump says, that part of his victory is going to be motivating low propensity voters, especially males, young males, to get off the couch and go vote. Do any of those laws put in place by Republican legislators come back to throw up a barrier to that plan?

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, so again, I'll answer the question, but first, like, provide a little bit of the backdrop. It's another thing that Eitan and I talk about in our paper, and this is a theme that was picked up by in a nice Law review article by Nick Stephanopoulos. It turns out that because of the changing bases of support for the parties, the party who has low propensity voters that are the most reliable partisans are now Republicans with white, no, college males.

They're the most reliable Republican voters now. And they're the individuals that, if there is an effect, would be most affected by these sorts of laws.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Reliable because they like Republican powers.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, sorry.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: But low propensity voters.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, sorry, let me, let me clarify that.

They don't turn out regularly. They may only turn out in presidential elections, but they're reliable in the sense that a high proportion of them would support the Republican candidate if they get off the couch. Yeah, exactly. So reliable from the point of view of the Republican Party. And so, any one of these laws, how much will it affect turnout?

We, the best evidence we have across political science papers is that changing the number of early voting days, some small amount, that won't really change much at all. People who are really excited to go out to vote do it on the first day of early voting and they kind of like standing in line for a long time.

Kind of like people standing in line for a new iPhone. It's like a fun thing to do and you're really showing you support your candidate or you really dislike the other candidate by, by doing that. Changing the number of early days of voting, that doesn't seem to have much of an effect.

Changing the, you know, sort of application deadline, moving it from eight to 10 days, that really doesn't seem to have much of an effect on turnout at all. Either. So I would be pretty surprised if any of the laws that Republicans passed could then be pointed to as a reason for their defeat. 

Even though, and just to drive this point home because I think it's a very important point for thinking about these laws. Even if we thought that, for example, minority voters were disproportionately likely to use absentee voting or early voting, it's still the case that a majority of the voters in most states using those means of voting would be potentially white voters and potentially white low education voters.

And if that's the case, that means numerically the number of votes that could be shifted around if it affects just low propensity voters. The majority of people affected would be these sorta white low education voters who are then these Republican voters. So it's certainly a theoretical possibility, but when you start thinking about what the size of the effects would have to be, given the margins that we know, it just, it doesn't seem like moving a deadline from eight to 10 days could possibly do it.

You'd have to, you know, you'd have to telling a very, very weird story about how the election turned out.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Yet so many dollars spent on litigation makes the society of hourly billers very happy.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, and I, I would just say one more thing about that. Just how we sort of reach this point with rhetoric.

The way people who are doing this sorta billing talk about these bills or people who are, for whatever reason, opposed to these sorts of laws, they often don't characterize the effect of the laws and instead they stop at only one point in my three-part chain. So they'll say, well, 4% of voters don't have a driver's license and therefore 300,000 voters are affected by this law.

And that's just not how any causal analysis should work or would work. And I think it's just downright misleading because it is not the case that everyone without a driver's license was going to turn out to vote in the absence of this law. And so it's super misleading to pretend like the law deterred all of those people from voting.

And we saw a lot of this in after 2016 with, for example, voter ID laws in Wisconsin. There's a lot of arguments made like this which I think are quite disingenuous.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Or labeling the Georgia law Jim Crow 2.0, when in fact turnout went up in 2022. And now early voting seems to be off the charts in 2024.

>> Justin Grimmer: It's difficult to understand how that label could come to be. And frankly, I think it's offensive to what Jim Crow was, which is just a horrendous stain on American history, to pretend that small modifications to election administration come close to that horrendous system I think is totally inappropriate.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Look out, from your experience, especially your experience up in Coos Bay, Oregon, how do you think this election cycle is going to play out? You've been an expert witness in a lot of litigation over the past few cycles. There is an historic number of court cases that have been filed in this election cycle.

Do you see yourself busy as a expert witness following this election?

>> Justin Grimmer: I mean, hopefully not. Right? Like hopefully the, the thing for the best thing for America would be, you know, we wake up two days after the election, there's been a decisive victory. The losing candidate says well, we fought a hard election, it was a fair election and I lost.

I think that's only going to be possible if there is a very unanticipated close to landslide victory where all parties agree this is well outside the bounds of anything that could have been manipulated.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Contrary to every poll that's out there.

>> Justin Grimmer: Contrary to every poll that's out there.

I think it's a different question about how reliable those polls are the place. But it would have to be an Obama 08 size victory to the point where the public would look at the results and say there's just no way. It's exceedingly unlikely that we're gonna be there in that situation.

 

And so I think we've seen lawsuits that are filed certainly based on the timing of those lawsuits and the content of those lawsuits from the rnc, which is an indication that they are going to litigate the election based on individuals who they think are casting illegal votes, people who have moved from county to county or non citizens on the voter rolls.

So I think that they've sorta set up an operation to already begin to challenge on those fronts. And so if we see a narrow Trump defeat, I think it's almost certain that we'd see a flurry of lawsuits. I also think there will be objections that are be difficult to anticipate based on the results or some patterns or things that that happen.

On the other side, suppose Harris loses in a narrow way. And suppose the Democrats win the House and win a majority of state delegations and suppose Harris trounces Trump in the popular vote. I don't know if it's outside the complete realm of possibility that an argument starts to percolate that Donald Trump is so dangerous to America that the popular vote is the, you know, legitimate indicator of who won this race, that there isn't a concerted effort to create a contingent election in the House.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting theory. This is not, this is not a situation that goes only one way. I mean imagine if there are incidents either in the polling places so that there are so many out of bounds objections to voters registration that long lines are created and people don't get to vote and therefore there will be cries of vote suppression. 

Or suppose there are natural disasters or not so natural disasters like two hurricanes hitting on November 3rd and 4th instead of three weeks out. Or suppose there is a situation of, say a fire in an absentee ballot counting center in Milwaukee or the post office boxes that caught fire today up in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon.

Then how easy is it for the five Democratic governors in the seven swing states to certify those election results?

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, I mean, we saw what I would argue our profiles encourage in 2020, number of Republican officials who put themselves squarely in Donald Trump's target because they did what was right.

And I guess the question is going to be, when facing similar sorts of pressure, will the Democratic governors do the right thing? I wanna believe the answer is yes. I also wanna believe that they're gonna be compelled by law to do that, that they'll be facing a lot of pressure.

However, you know, around December 4th, these arguments for those governors are going to feel, I think, very pressing, particularly if they're in that situation. And it would be an unenviable position. But my sincere hope is that they'll do the right thing. But, you know, this is an election where I think it could go both ways.

And that's what makes me very worried for the state of election trust in 2025. After the election, it is indeed a weighty issue to have to study and to have to deal with.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: So let's close out with one question, which is the most encouraging sign that you've seen in the run up to the 2024 election.

And I know you've spent a lot of time with election officials.

>> Justin Grimmer: Yeah, you know, it's easy to focus on the negative. We hear about all this suppression and all this fraud and you looked out, you could look out in the world and think, goodness, American elections are just so fundamentally broken.

But then you actually start hearing stories of participation. Georgia is blowing the ceiling out of its records. It's just crushing records and early voting. I'm from Indiana. I've been talking to friends in Indiana and they've seen just swarms of people going to early vote in Indiana. There's so much participation.

I just spent the weekend in Nevada and signs everywhere that Nevada is going to break all voter turnout records this election and therefore people should be participating as well. So for all of the claims that American elections are done, we are in a just high watermark of participatory democracy.

Never before in my lifetime, and certainly over the last hundred years, have so many American citizens decided that, that it was worth their time to cast a vote. And I don't think that is a fact that should go unnoticed or undiscussed. We should be celebrating this period in American democracy.

American elections are being administered in a way that lots of people are able to find their way into a polling place. They're able to cast a vote and they're able to feel passionate about their candidate or passionately oppose the other candidate. And I think that's really important. And I'm just hopeful that that's the story that we can focus on at some point here and not the story about the negatives which turn out to not even be true.

>> Benjamin Ginsberg: Justin Grimmer, thank you, Hoover fellow researcher, Stanford Political Scientists we really appreciate your coming on Saints, Sinners and Salvageable. And you've been listening to Saints, Sinners and Salvageables, a Hoover Institution podcast exploring America's election system and the many challenges in the Democratic process in this charged partisan environment.

If you've been enjoying this podcast, please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to our show. And if you wouldn't mind, spread the word. Tell your friends about us. The Hoover has Facebook, Instagram and X feeds. Our X handle is @hooverinst, @hooverinst. Our next installment of Saint, Sinners and Salvageables will be a few days after Election Day.

We'll assess the landscape, discuss where the system worked and what, if any, problems occurred regarding election integrity and vote counts and what legal options the two parties and their candidates might pursue. For the Hoover Institution, this is Ben Ginsberg. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for listening.

And if you haven't already, don't forget to vote.