Archon Fung: Hey, welcome to Terms of Engagement. This is episode seven. I’m Archon Fung. I’m a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I’m now a senior practice fellow in American governance at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School.
Stephen Richer: We are live so uh please type in any comments reactions questions try to be nice and civil civil discourse yeah but we don’t have any guests this week so we’re counting on you to to submit some questions and to you know move the conversation forward
Archon Fung: And as always, we are speaking as individuals, not on behalf of Harvard University, the Kennedy School, or any component thereof. Before we get started, something big happened last week, which was Stephen’s birthday.
And we’d like to show a birthday wish from a special guest to Stephen.
Roger Stone: This is Roger Stone with a very special birthday shout-out for Stephen. Now, Stephen, I understand that you are a patriot, that you live in Phoenix, perhaps the site of some of the greatest voter theft and election fraud in the country, that you love diet coke fantasy books obscure movie references you ever see the jolson story and of course harry potter which I never actually got but in any event happy birthday god bless you and godspeed.
Stephen Richer: So most of those things are true. It was my birthday and I do like most of those things. It’s really amazing who’s on Cameo. I’m shocked. Have you experimented?
Archon Fung: I have not, but I will now. So Roger Stone was on Cameo and we thought that was maybe a fitting greeting given that we’re going to be talking about election administration today. And of course, I was one of the election administrators in Phoenix that Roger Stone mentions. The friend who got that video for me did not send him my last name, just sent him my first name and a few of those details about me. And so I dare say Roger Stone might not have done that if he had known the whole circumstances. But I appreciate the birthday greeting from Roger Stone.
Archon Fung: I thought he did it because he knew the whole story. No, I think he did it because he got… I don’t know what it is, but it seems like a pretty good gig for only thirty seconds. Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. So one reason to tune into our podcast is that we’ve actually gotten pretty good at predicting the near term future. So in our podcast a couple of weeks ago, we discussed the possibility of mid-decade re gerrymandering on the part of the Texas legislature and a response from California. And it turns out a bunch of that has happened. The Texas legislature voted to approve maps that would they hope will give the Republicans five more seats in the midterm elections. And the California legislature has responded by uh approving a set of maps but really what they’ve really approved is a special election where the voters of california will decide whether or not to approve those maps for the midterm elections okay so the status on that is that both chambers in this texas state legislature have now passed the new maps I believe that’s the case okay and then that has to be signed by the governor but presumably it will be and then because california has an independent redistricting commission they have to override that By a popular vote.
Stephen Richer: And so they’re going to send it to the ballot, which I assume will cost millions and millions of dollars to administer.
Archon Fung: I think maybe one hundred and fifty million dollars.
Stephen Richer: And then the campaigns will be significant because, as we mentioned when we discussed this, Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team. Charlie Munger and that money is coming in the against side. They’re going to be opposing the governor’s effort to redistrict California in response to Texas. Yes.
Archon Fung: Yes. So that’ll be a fight to look out for. So far, the early polling, my understanding is about fifty six, fifty seven percent of California voters right now are in favor of the midterm redistricting maps. But that’s within the margins or that’s within a winnable race. So that means that people will be spending lots and lots. Yeah. And that’s before all the advertising comes in to nudge it one way or another. Okay, so that’s an update on one topic that we previously covered. Yes. And then just last week, we had Juliette Kayyem on to talk about the National Guard deployment and the Federal Troop deployment in Washington, D.C. And my last question to both you and Juliette is, are we going to see more of this? And both you and Juliette thought, yeah, likely. And then just this weekend, the Washington Post reported that the administration has been developing plans for some time to deploy federal troops to Chicago. So we’ll see.
Stephen Richer: So Juliet was great, fun personality, also faculty here at the Harvard Kennedy School, but a personality on, was it CNN or MSNBC? I think CNN, former Department of Homeland Security person, so knows this topic well. now the development on that is that now in washington dc the national guard can carry weapons I believe I believe they’re carrying side arms yeah they were just walking around in uniform and now the president’s looking at deploying to chicago as well yeah but that hasn’t happened that hasn’t happened yet but we both predicted that that would happen yeah okay so that was that was pretty quick yes and wes moore is worried a little bit about baltimore evidently And then there’s this sort of back and forth between Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, and the president over whether or not Wes Moore said he was the best president ever. And then, yeah, so it’s a very online fight. I happen to know Governor Moore, pretty cool dude, pretty not the guy I want to get in a fight with. But, you know, President Trump doesn’t back down.
Archon Fung: No, no, he does not. Yeah. And on that note, this episode, we’re going to be talking about a fight that he’s picked or maybe re-picked on Truth Social that focuses on various election procedures, especially mail-in balloting, but then also voting machines. So, update, what’s your update?
Stephen Richer: So nobody knows exactly why the president chose last Monday to put this out on Truth Social. But on Truth Social, he posted a very long post with a lot of capitalizations we put it up on the screen and included it says I’m going to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots goes down and then that movement sort of goes away because he says by signing an executive order he’ll do this to help bring honesty to the twenty twenty six midterm elections and so again I don’t know this isn’t connected to any particular current event. Apparently, President Putin, when he was visiting President Trump in Alaska, said something about you can’t have fair elections in the United States. You were cheated out of the 2020 election. And the reason is mail-in voting. This seems to have gotten in President Trump’s mind because he sent out this true social post. Then he went on with. One Fox News personality, I can’t remember which, in the White House. And then he even mentioned it to President Zelensky, which it seems sort of out of nowhere, probably for President Zelensky. But President Trump, despite having been a mail voter in Florida, despite having done very well in 2016 and in 2024 with mail voting very popular in many states, including especially the western United States. has decided to once again make mail voting a target for the 2026 election. And so, of course, this has kicked off a firestorm of a debate within the elections community. Not so much a debate over the merits of mail-in voting, but whether or not the president can do this. Why the president is talking about it now. Is the president serious about this? Is he going to sign another executive order? And already it seems like he’s rolling back that executive order. From eight weeks ago or ten weeks ago. No, he signed an executive order in March pertaining to election administration. Then he was saying he was going to sign another executive order to this office. But he has not done that yet.
Archon Fung: I see. I see. So he says a lot of stuff in this long post. One thing that he says is, we are now the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting. All others gave it up because of massive voter fraud encountered. We will begin this effort, dot, dot, dot. Okay, so one thing I do like about that particular passage is I think the United States should benchmark against how all these other countries are doing elections, and we should try to understand whether we’re adopting the state of the art and the best practices. What do you think about that sentence?
Stephen Richer: This was a curious and frustrating thing in terms of election administration because hailing from the political right I consistently heard from people who said no we are unique no we shouldn’t do anything the way that I see right we shouldn’t do anything the way that any especially western european country does it because we’re very skeptical of their political approach but then with respect to elections all of a sudden Americans, especially on the political right, got it in their mind that France does it the right way because France only votes for one, you know, the presidential candidate, the hand market. Those are hand counted and it’s done ostensibly very quickly. And so a lot of people were saying we should do it exactly like France. And it was just ironic because it was coming from people who say, don’t do it like that. So, yes, I agree.
Archon Fung: We should be aware at least. Yeah.
Stephen Richer: Looking to other countries, taking best practices. I think we’d be foolish to do up to not. But I do think that we need to appreciate differences because I think I read a statistic sometime recently where the average American will vote in more contests in a four year period than the average European will in his entire life. Just because we have..
Archon Fung: All these local elections, dog catcher
Stephen Richer: All the local elections, all the city elections, county elections, state elections, federal elections. Western United States loves direct democracy. So they have a whole bunch of referenda. And so it’s an important thing to keep in mind from election administration is that while we’re typically voting on maybe fifty plus contests in the Western United States, many in Europe are only voting for a handful of contests. Are there practices that we can benefit from? Undoubtedly. Yeah. Is is it a one to one comparison? I don’t think so. Yeah.
Archon Fung: And I mean, you reminded me a couple of days ago that the factual claim is just not right, that many countries have by mail in various forms. there there are some things that president trump says seemingly just to shake the trees but I thought that this was revealing because this was just something that was so easily readily falsifiable he says what does he say no countries uh allow mail-in vote we are now the only country in the world that uses mail-in voting and that’s just one of those things where set aside the claim. The unwillingness to spend the five seconds to do a Google search and fact check that and find out that there are over twenty five countries in the world that allow mail in voting in some capacity. is to me just really telling because it plays more into this broader conversation about we’re in a post-truth society and you can just say what you want and it doesn’t really have repercussions if it’s not true and it’s more about messaging and it’s more about who speaks louder. So I found that in some ways to be the most disturbing piece of this.
Archon Fung: Right, right. And I wanted to go back a little bit to you made a distinction between two different kinds of questions we could be talking about. One is the merits of mail-in voting. Like, should we have it? Should we not? What are the protections that we should have around safety? So I do want to get into that to get into the weeds to help people understand what’s going on in the mechanics of it. But then there’s another kind of meta question is, is this the right way to do it? What’s the timing like? And so I was thinking about A sports analogy, like the rules of professional sports, all sports do change. Like you move the three point line back. Recently in Major League Baseball, there’s a pitch clock now. Great thing. And it’s a great thing. But they talked about the pitch clock for like a decade and they tried it out in the minor leagues before they rolled it out. Right. So. I guess it’s my view, you need rule revisions to make the game better and more fair and, in the case of sports, more entertaining. But the rules should be pretty stable and changed carefully, and not too frequently is kind of my view.
Stephen Richer: But now you’re speaking like a good conservative. Well, I agree. The rules should be stable. We should be cautious. We shouldn’t remove fences without asking questions. That’s like the heart of conservatism. This is very different from the radicalized grad student arc.
Archon Fung: It’s true. It’s true. I’ve learned a few things. over the intervening years. But so just so, you know, you’ve administered elections. How disruptive would it be for you if you were still running elections in Maricopa County, or if you’re in California or Washington, where a large, large percentage of all of them, basically in Washington and Oregon, are mail-in? If all of a sudden you had to get rid of mail-in voting by 2026. What would that look like at the office level and in the day-to-day?
Stephen Richer: So I’m going to answer that. But first, as far as laying out the three, the two levels of. Agree with both of those. One, we can have a perfectly legitimate public policy conversation about. Two, we can have a conversation about the political strategy, the political timing, the political repercussions. Where I’ve spent most of my energy over the past week is just on the factual allegations of President Trump’s true social post.
Archon Fung: And so that’s the fraud, whether or not there is. And just the mechanics of mail voting, because I think that’s a necessary predicate for having a productive conversation. Now, to your question about how much would it disrupt the game? In every state, it would have significant disruptions. Almost every state now allows for no-excuse mail voting, meaning that you don’t have to show that you’re in the military, deployed abroad.
Archon Fung: You don’t have to be deployed in Germany.
Stephen Richer: You don’t have to be in the hospital, which is how a lot of these mail voting programs started. And that’s especially true in the Western United States, where mail voting is either… encompasses the entirety of the state or like Arizona, where about eighty five to ninety percent. Eighty-five. And I didn’t realize it was a mail ballot, meaning that they would get about my mail and they would either return it through the mail or they would just put it in the envelope and they would drop it off at a voting location. And so when you talk about a state like Arizona or even more significantly, a state like California, where that describes every single voter that they have and all of a sudden you’d have to switch to having the right number of voting locations having people running the right number of workers at every voting location making sure that you don’t have lines making sure the logistics of getting a ballot at an election site filling it out putting it into the tabulation machine there would just be such a fundamentally different election than the elections that California is currently running and so massive switch, massive logistics switch, massive infrastructure switch in terms of money, this would have a price tag of many, many millions of dollars. And so I do think it merits the deliberative process. And of course, in the lawmaking world, the deliberative process is what’s supposed to happen in the legislature, which President Trump doesn’t contemplate, at least in this true social post, because he says this is going to be done by executive order rather than I’m going to work with Congress or I’m going to work with the state legislatures and together we’re going to get rid of mail voting. Yeah.
Archon Fung: So intuitively, let’s talk about a little bit about the merits and the claims in the True Social post about fraud and vulnerability to fraud. Yeah. So I’ve never run an election at all, not been close to that. It does seem intuitively to me like it would be somewhat easier to cheat through a mail ballot. Like when I go vote, I’m in Massachusetts, I’m Brookline, Massachusetts. They don’t even ask for my ID, but they do say, what’s your address? And they check my name off a list. Yeah. And then I go vote. You know, if another person says they’re at my residence, they’ll not be able to vote after I do. Seems like a mail ballot you could just fill in and sign, and whether or not you’re me.
Stephen Richer: Actually, some of those same processes exist in a mail ballot. So when a mail ballot packet goes out to you, it’s actually assigned to you as a voter. So then you put it in the envelope, and that envelope has a barcode that is linked to you as a voter, meaning that if you sent it back, but then you showed up and voted in person, they would have already scanned in that barcode. They would have loaded a vote to your profile so that you couldn’t just go in and vote again. And if I got two mail ballots, they’d have to have two different barcodes assigned to different voters. exactly or if somebody stole the envelope from your mailbox then you could call into the election office you could say hey somebody stole my mail ballot they would deactivate that barcode and then they would send out a new active barcode that you could use to send back most election jurisdictions also do signature matching meaning that you sign that affidavit envelope that you put the ballot in you send it back and then election workers are matching your signature to the ones that they have on file yeah yeah. Now, there is still, I would say, on the margins, more opportunity for election fraud in mail voting because what if somebody moves out of town and they register in a new state and the states haven’t shared data yet? There is no national voter registration database, so you’re relying on interstate compacts that share information. So yeah, you can maybe get that ballot, mail it back, and also be voting in a different state. or a type of garden variety fraud that we saw in arizona on every election would be mom lives with son um mom dies three days before early voting begins that doesn’t filter through to an election office in time to remove that mailed out from the mail stream yeah Son gets mom’s ballot in the mail because that’s where mom lives. And so he gets all the ballots. Son knows how mom would have voted or thinks he knows how mom would have voted.
Archon Fung: Maybe he feels an obligation to vote for mom. Maybe. He’s fulfilling mom’s wishes. Even though that’s illegal. Son knows, has a copy of mom’s signature and he knows what mom’s signature is, so he can produce a decent imitation of mom’s signature. sends it back. That is something that is likely getting through the system. Now, I think that from a public policy perspective, we can have a conversation about how much do you care about those onesie twosie frauds versus broad convenience? Maybe you’re enfranchising more people, maybe you’re allowing people to use up less of their day by having to go to a voting location. And that’s a legitimate public policy conversation. But similarly, we don’t design cars such that there are zero accidents. Right, right. We accept a level of accident because, otherwise, cars would be prohibitively expensive. We would make them all like tanks. And so we have an election system that does allow a minuscule amount of fraud, which is maybe heightened by mail voting. But again, every single study has shown that it is very, very, very infinitesimally small and no study has suggested that it’s only Republicans or only Democrats doing this. So though it might not feel nice to hear it, the fraud instances that haven’t probably balanced each other out.
Archon Fung: And I think this is a hard conversation to have with the American public. Like we don’t expect any system to have a zero error rate, whether it’s credit cards or car safety or even airplanes. Right. And election administrators are in this position where even acknowledging a single instance of fraud seems like it’s going to be the end of the world because we haven’t had an honest conversation about fraud. Like, okay, in any human system, there’s gonna be errors like that. Yes, we’ve gotta do our level best to crush that error rate down to as small as possible, but it’s never gonna be zero. Yeah.
Stephen Richer: And again, that tension exists and that’s a legitimate public policy conversation. I just don’t understand why now. President Trump misstates some of the facts about it. And he’s coming off an election cycle in which the Republican Party currently controls the United States Senate, the United States House. He obviously won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. And so I’m a little bit like, Why would you be trying to fix a system that worked pretty darn well for you? And so I don’t understand that commentators like Tim Miller at the Bulwark would say this is all setting up whatever he wants to say following the twenty twenty six midterm elections. We do have some questions. I think I need a post. I need to go to the comments section here. Let’s see. We’ve got. We’ve got one that says, in Toronto, municipal elections voting machines are used to read the vote. With a hard copy paper. With a hard copy paper, which can be accessed if the process procedures disrupt it. So, Monte… makes a comment about the importance of paper ballots. And so when you were asking the comparative question, there are some states or some countries like Estonia that allow online vote. Right. Just on your phone, probably. Yeah. Where they have the same portal where you pay taxes. You can actually you can actually vote in the United States. Almost all jurisdictions use a paper ballot. And that’s because we like that auditable verifiable paper trail so that if anything gets hacked, anything gets disrupted, you always have a post audit that you can go back to. Should we look at another question? Monte has an extra measure, though, which not all states have, but some do, which is you get a receipt, right? Do some states have So if you vote in person and you feed it into the tabulator at the voting location, or if you’re using a touchscreen that then prints off a receipt, you get a receipt. If you vote by mail, you’re not getting a receipt. Right. Now, most states allow you to track your mail ballot so that you can go to the portal, you know when they’ve received it, and you know when they’ve scanned it in, so you can feel good about it. But you don’t have a slip saying, you know, for President, I voted for Trump, not Harris. For U.S. Senate, I voted for Gallego or whatever it is. Right, right. So, so yeah, so I, you know, I think it’s opened up a few good conversations. I think one of the more important conversations is was written about in the New York Times, I forget who it was, who was talking about Male voting’s effect on the timeliness of results? Yes. Yes. And this is something that you and I have talked about.
Archon Fung: Many months ago, we talked about a 2026 meltdown scenario.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. So Jason Willett says we should be having a conversation about male voting because male voting is the major culprit in the fact that we don’t always know who’s won the presidency at the end of election night. And that’s because you got to wait till the ballots could be received in some jurisdictions up to election day.
Archon Fung: And then it takes people time to verify the signatures, to open, to tabulate. So it’s going to be later.
Stephen Richer: Right and jason in this article points out as you and I have discussed that has a material impact on voters confidence especially if they don’t understand the why of that is and especially if whoever’s leading on election night doesn’t wind up being the eventual winner Yeah.
Archon Fung: Just to flesh it out a little bit, the worry, and I would love to see people in California implement this reform. California, some jurisdictions take a long time to come back in, like weeks. Yeah. And so the worry is between the end of Election Day, you know, whatever midnight on that Tuesday and in the intervening weeks, if there’s a contest, if like the whole House of Representatives depends on a couple of seats in California and it takes whatever a month for those seats to come in, then there’s a lot of time for political entrepreneurs and other people to stir up some doubt that the Political entrepreneurs is a kind word. That the votes are being counted fairly, then all of us looking, you know, if you’re a Democrat and the Republicans end up winning those seats, or if you’re a Republican and the Democrats end up winning those seats, you think, wow, were they really playing square in those two jurisdictions? And the whole House of Representatives turns on that. That is not a good scene.
Stephen Richer: And I think you put your finger on one of the main concerns for people who are safeguarding elections, which is that the United States House, the balance of power comes down to California. And California notoriously has results that sometimes come in two, three weeks later. And if that flips it from R to D as a result of a few Californians, it just… Everything’s there to have not the most ideal conversations. Frank Miller has a question. Can you speak to how this might affect UOCAVA voters? UOCAVA voters are the military and overseas voters. you know president trump’s true social posts would doesn’t get into the specifics and I suspect that he would have a good bit of sympathy for members of the military and maybe there might be an exception but of course members of the military who are stationed abroad rely on some non-in-person form of voting and so I I don’t know what’s contemplated under you know we maybe we’ll see an executive order or maybe he’ll go through the legislative process yeah So say there’s an executive order that comes down, says mail and mail voting is not okay.
Archon Fung: I think that it’s unlikely that that would have the force of law by November, but if you’re an election administrator, especially in a Republican jurisdiction, what do you do with that? Do you say, Oh, well the law, this has no force of law. It hasn’t gone through my state legislature. The feds don’t get to determine what the voting rules are. Or do you say, well, you know, my president says this is a bad idea. Maybe I have some latitude to shift a little bit more voting to in person a little bit. I should pay attention to what he’s saying, even though it doesn’t have the force of law per se.
Stephen Richer: So if it doesn’t have the force of law, my recommendation, my non-legal advice, but legal advice would be to continue to follow the law as it is effectuated. Now, might some of that happen? Yes. And I dare say this will be the election lawyer full employment challenge. executive order if it comes to pass, because we’ll be having lots of those little battles, state by state. And that’s the other thing, is that elections in the United States are so diffused that we have eight thousand plus jurisdictions, voting jurisdictions. And so you could see this playing out on so many different levels. That, you know, somebody might get it in their head that I’m supposed to follow that executive order, even though it’s been stayed into the court. Like maybe a county clerk. Yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden you have, you know, maybe unequal treatment of that jurisdiction versus other jurisdictions, which creates a Fourteenth Amendment challenge. And so just… What we like in elections is the rules to be set well in advance, going back to the original sports game so that nobody shows up and is like, wait a second, overtime during the Super Bowl. if we score first, is that the end of the game? Right, right. Or if we kick a field goal, it’s not the… Do you remember that overtime in Super Bowl when we were like all uncertain and seemingly one of the teams was uncertain too and all of a sudden Patrick Mahomes got the ball with an opportunity to score and lo and behold, he scored.
Archon Fung: He wins, right? So… little bit up barb in the comments I think it was barb asked she thought the major effect of reducing mail-in voting would be to uh reduce turnout and somebody else asked is there an r versus d differential effect on reducing mail and what do you think I mean most of the studies have been in the having more mail voting when we didn’t previously have mail voting okay it will be what’s it like when you take it away not you know not only not having mail voting but switching back to just one day election day as I think the president has contemplated so I think it could have an effect there.
Stephen Richer: Typically, the academic studies that study mail voting say it has a small impact on voter turnout in that it increases it just a little bit. And it usually has no partisan impact. So it’s a wash partisan-wise. Or versus D, it’s been a wash according to the academic literature. Yeah. Now. In some years, democrats have embraced mail voting more like in recent years and in past years Republicans have embraced mail voting more. Some of that depends on the demographics, some of that depends on what party leaders are saying, one of the reasons why this is so surprising to me is because. the president and his allies spent a gazillion dollars in twenty twenty four encouraging people to go out and Republicans to go out and just vote, even if that was vote by mail. Yeah, right. OK, good. So I banged on a lot. This happens to be my topic. I think we are at are we at we’re at. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
Archon Fung: I wanted to bring up one last point. So forgive us. Yeah. A lot of people in the comments are uh worried about you know concerned about the turnout issues and whether or not there’s a partisan advantage you signaled one worry which is my central worry is that this combined with and he doesn’t just write about um uh vote by mail he’s some right doubts the veracity of machines the reliability of machines combined with the prior executive order it uh the thing I’m worried about is that as a result of all of this instability the rule changes the accusations or the attempted rule changes people will just have less confidence in the 2026 and perhaps 2028 elections and so I’m worried about a spiral of decline of confidence and therefore opportunities for election denial of various kinds
Stephen Richer: Yeah, I mean, we’ve talked about that a lot at the Ash Center. What level of confidence is needed in order to have a successful representative democracy republic? And You know, I think we were flirting with that a little bit more after the 2020 election. After the twenty twenty four election. It seemed good. Confidence is high right now. It’s north of seventy five percent. And that’s Republicans and Democrats have high confidence election administration right now.
Archon Fung: Which is a good thing.
Stephen Richer: We will see with all of this conversation and then depending on the results of the 2026 midterm elections, what people say after the fact. If we can hold that, I don’t know of an election administrator in the United States who has said, you know what, we solved the problem of confidence and we don’t have to worry about that anymore. So they’re still on high alert, realize that they have to do a lot of explaining and whatnot. I know we missed some questions, but hopefully we might see if we can reach out and answer a few of those in the chat. Good. And then we might do more of this, given that there are more questions. We reached out to Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, who’s somebody who’s a little more mail voting skeptic, and so we might have him on a future program. Yeah, I appreciate you letting me drone on about mail voting and go over time a little bit.
Archon Fung: You’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know. So your expertise just keeps going. Thanks, everyone, for joining us for Terms of Engagement this week. I’m sure we’ll be talking about confidence in elections in weeks to come. No doubt about that. All right.
Stephen Richer: Thank you. Thanks, gang.
