Latest / The Nation Podcasts / How Abdul El-Sayed Can Win Michigan, Plus an Election Protection Test Case / Start Making Sense

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How Abdul El-Sayed Can Win Michigan, Plus an Election Protection Test Case / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Weiner, later in the show, a rehearsal for our election protection groups.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: The California Sheriff who seized 650,000 ballots from November's referendum, claiming he needed to recount them.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zach Roth, of Democracy Docket, will explain.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: But first, in Tuesday's big primary and Michigan,
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: A progressive one, the Democratic nomination for the Senate, John Nichols says our analysis in a minute.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Obduel Elsa, yet one Michigan's Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, defeating the establishment candidate Haley Stevens by one percentage point 49 to 48 percent.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: Here with our analysis is John Nichols, of course he's executive editor of the nation.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_03]: John, welcome back.
• 1:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's good to be with you, my friend.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, first of all, it strikes me that this was important as the most expensive, democratic primary in American history, $80 million spent on a democratic primary.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: That, that is not good.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: More than 60 million was spent on ads supporting the Stevens campaign, 97% of that money came from super PACs.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: More than 40 million came from APAC alone.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: The Stephen side outspent L. Sayed by more than 10 to 1 and that did not work.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Money did not decide this one.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: How did L. Sayed defeat all that money?
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: by working very hard.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's one of the things that a lot of our national media struggles to figure out how to report on, how to cover.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because hard work, the old fashioned model of campaigning where you often get in a car and drive a long way to get to a small town to talk to five people,
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: is not what most of our media covers these days.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: A tencent of focus very much on fundraising.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm so called call time.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: How much time a candidate spends on phone calls and things of that nature.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And still in Michigan, a state where there are Democrats all over, including way up in the upper peninsula, Abdul also had actually went out and found them and taught to them.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when you look at the map from the primary, what is fascinating is that, yes, I've do all say I did very, very well in college towns like Ann Arbor and Lansing.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did very well in communities with large Arab American population.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did very well in areas where the UAW, in some areas where the UAW, which had back to was very strong.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: okay all that there but then go up on that upper peninsula and look at all those counties he won up there and or in the the cherry growing regions along Lake Michigan which one doesn't necessarily think of as the you know the cutting edge of progressive politics in America
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: and yet they voted for.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it was a very, very close race.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no question of that, don't underestimate that Haley Stevens did a lot better than a lot of the polls suggested that she would do.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But at the end of the day, what I'll do alongside had had was a base of voters, many of whom he had been talking to, not once, but again and again and over many months, and I think that came through for a minute a big way.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Second big thing here is this was a defeat for the party establishment, the moderates, the middle, the mainstream, and a progressive victory.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Steven said been endorsed by Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Governor Gretchen Whitmore, retiring Democratic Senator Gary Peters.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Elsa Yidd had been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, a lot of the house progressives.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: This was a progressive victory over the establishment and it shows, let us say, a certain weakness on Chuck Schumer's part.
• 4:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Frankly, shows a certain weakness on the part of a lot of folks who spend a good deal of time in DC or maybe in a few other places, but not in Michigan.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look, here's where the problem came in.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that Schumer in this case, and many of the people around him, always like to fight the last fight, right, and they look at models that they think will do well, and you know, don't underestimate this.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the upper Midwest, if you look around the various states, you've seen that nominating women who've served in the House of Representatives.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: for the U.S. Senate has worked very well for them, right?
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of Tammy Baldwin and Wisconsin, Duckworth and Illinois, you know, other can and emission even of examples there, right?
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, so at the end of the day, I think they thought, okay, we've got a plan here.
• 5:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: We know we know what will work.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Two things kind of took him up on that.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Number one is that I feel all side is an incredibly capable, very exceptionally talented communicator and candidate.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: In any state in the country, he would stand out because he's just very good at it.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that helped him.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other thing is the mood of the year and the fact is that being a candidate who can fundraise very, very well from out-state sources, build up a big pool of money, be it from groups of wine, do they pack or from groups of wine with corporate interests or billionaires, whatever.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is not necessarily a benefit.
• 5:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: In fact,
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll say, in this race, made the fact that Stevens was so strongly supported by leadership, by the establishment, by a lot of money, a liability.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: He actually talked about it at length in the debate, and it was fascinating, because he had a strong line on this, which I think applies both in the primary and potentially
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: tens of millions of dollars and using that to profit your campaign up is not a show of strength.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's actually a weakness.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: What it means is that you're not as good at that traditional grassroots politics of going out and doing, you know,
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: face-to-face people-based politics as you should be and what his argument of course was that he was better at it and that as a result that actually made him more electable in November.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fascinating, fascinating kind of twist on how a lot of the media covers
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: politics, and whether that's fair to Haley's students or not, when you begin to frame things that way, or when he begins to frame things that way against Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee, who run against, I think it makes people think and do, and they start to see fundraising prowess ties to establishment ties to leadership things like that, as potentially something that they don't want.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: For a lot of pundits, and for some voters, this was a proxy battle over Israel, Palestine, Gaza, and the power of APAC.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was certainly APAC's most significant defeat since it started supporting candidates, what was it six years ago.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it suggested APAC,
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: has become a kind of electoral liability, at least among a certain group of democratic voters.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is not an important issue to ordinary voters as affordability, but it matters a lot to pundits, it matters a lot to the big money people, and it matters a lot to Arab-Americans and Jewish Americans.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Of course, and this morning, and his Wednesday morning, and his remarks after the primary, it was notable that I'll do, I'll say, I had spoke specifically to Jewish American voters and to Jewish voters of Michigan in an extended message.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: of solidarity and attempt at the Australian attempt to reach out and obviously he is spoken to Arab American voters and so yeah that is that's a part of this I did think he hit on something though John when you said that this is something the media is really interesting right and I do think that a lot of media tries to
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure not saying this isn't a factor, right?
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a huge factor and I think there's been a shift in view of APEC over the last, you know, actually better part of 10 years that has really come into focus at this point.
• 9:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I will tell you something else and it's beyond APEC, it's in the broader sense of raising a lot of money.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: When a candidate relies on big money, huge amounts of money coming in to help buy ads, sort of pay for negative messaging, things like that, that candidate spends an immense amount of time talking to the people who write the checks, who give that money.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: They know a lot about where the donors are focused, where their heads are at.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, and I think, you know, that that has an impact on where that candidate may ultimately focus their message.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, if you don't rely as much on big donors, be it a pack or utility companies or Wall Street corporations, whatever, wherever that money is coming from, and you have a smaller amount of money in your campaign treasury, but a lot more time,
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: to go out and talk to real people, you sometimes get ahead of the curve on the issues that people are talking about, you know, grassroots voters, you know, the actual participants in the in the process.
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, um, uh,
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is where it gets interesting because I guess I should use the term real people, right?
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody's a real person.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Good.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, but what I'm saying about that is that people who are on the ground in Michigan, the people who will actually cast the balance.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that that when.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do, I'll say, in some of the other candidates in Michigan, people like Will Lawrence, who want a congressional primary, when they went out and talked to the voters, they heard a lot about AI data centers.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, the consultants in Washington, at the start of this campaign, we're not saying, run on AI data centers, talk about, you know, about this issue, but it was very notable during the campaign that I'll say, at Will Lawrence, like candidates in a number of other states,
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: and what happened was I think it put him ahead of the curve on talking about not just the issues that the national pundits talk about in that that sincere people on the ground talk about because they're very personally concerned with it but with a broader set of issues including issues that are
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: sort of new to the discourse, and I think that both will arms and outside benefited tremendously by being out front and they're in a big way as regards data centers.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we've been talking about how we got to this point.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: We also need to talk about where we go from here.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is the issue with this generally called electability and one of the big criticisms of El Sajad is that he's too far left.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: And there are some polls, the latest poll on the November election, the Epic MRA poll, which was conducted just a couple of days ago, showed that Haley Stevens,
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: was a head of the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, 44 to 42.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: Elsie had was behind the Republican candidate.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: He had 43 in this poll, the Republican had 46, and of course the conventional wisdom is progressive candidates.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can win in deep blue districts like Manhattan or Los Angeles, but if you're going to run statewide in mid-America You better be a moderate and now we are going to get a test of the conventional wisdom Let's note Elsa yet is not a democratic socialist.
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's not a member of the essay hasn't been endorsed by the essay
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: he has an economic populist message.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: What do you see as the status of the conventional wisdom here that you can't win as a progressive in middle America?
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, you can win as a progressive in middle America.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: People don't in the past and in the current in the current moment.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've seen it in many states, including Michigan over the years, where they've since over the years, they've sent some very progressive people to Congress and the U.S. Senate.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So here's the dynamic on it or at least where I think we're at first and foremost, these pools that set you up for a test of November, they're very significant if they show like a 10 point difference, right?
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: That one candidate is way, I had another candidate's way behind.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's, that is something you should pay attention to and you know if, if you're voting on
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: three points that way.
• 13:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's your margin of error, right?
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And politics is all about the margin of error.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's what you do with it.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll load in both of those matchups.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: You seem to have a lot of undecided still.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that there is plenty of evidence.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: that I'll say it can be as competitive a candidate as Haley Stevens would have been.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're different candidates.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: They would have brought different things to the race.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And my sense is that both of them could have beat microtters.
• 14:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that I'll say it can indeed do so.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And let me give you a quick example from another place.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: just across Lake Michigan, the United States Senator from Wisconsin, the ultimate swing state state that also sends a very conservative Senator to the Senate that has had Republican Democratic governors, the Trump is one that Biden will, you know, the whole divide politically.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Tammy Baldwin has for a very long throughout her career been a progressive.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: and quite progressive on a host of issues and continues to be so.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right now she's one of the most outspoken critics of Trump's war in Iran and on a host of other things that Trump does in a very pointed, again, very progressive way.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, she keeps winning, right?
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: She won when Trump won Wisconsin 2024 and narrowly, she won reelection.
• 15:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: How did she do it?
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I did a school you go talk to and how you talk to him.
• 15:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It isn't about being a progressive or not being a progressive.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's that you make sure that a lot of people hear you.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Tammy Baldwin, throughout her career in Wisconsin, has been out there in small industrial cities, in farm towns, speak into veterans, speak into people who frankly often feel let down by the federal government.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: right, and she's given them a connection.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's shown them that as a progressive, she cares about them and she's got ideas for how to make their lives better.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: If I'll say he runs that same kind of campaign in Michigan right across the lake, which I think he will.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Going to those small industrial towns, emphasizing that UAW endorsement, talking to people where they're at about the issues they care about.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that, yes, a progressive can win in Michigan and perhaps win quite well, just as I think a progressive can win in Minnesota, you know, despite the loss of John Weiner is one of their reps.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And let's not forget there's another candidate in the ballot in November.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: Mike Rogers, Republican Trump supporter voted for the slush fund.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: What kind of candidate is Mike Rogers going to be?
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Mike Rogers is a very interesting candidate and a lot of regards.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was a Republican who didn't have any
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: enthusiasm for Trump initially.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was one of those.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a neocon, right?
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, he didn't like Trump on on so many levels, right?
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And was outspoken about it or at least clear about it in many ways.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then he figured out, well, you know, he got to be for Trump, right?
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the Republican Party, that's where you are.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: So now he's ended up as this candidate who's very aligned.
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: with Trump.
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it couldn't be at a worse time, right?
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because Donald Trump's approval ratings are now, you know, literally in historic low levels.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And more than that, they're low on the issues that once were strong for Republicans like Trump and Mike Rogers, right?
• 17:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: That historically, there was a sense that Republicans could do better with the economy.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I never believed it, but you know, that was that was there.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Historically, since they could do better on
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: never agreed with that, but that was a reality in the polls.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now on those issues, it's going to rise for Trump and for Republicans like Rogers.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so if you look at the dynamic in Michigan, there are two things that are that are very notable.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Number one, Rogers is run before, right?
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now finds himself in a much tougher political playing field because of Trump's
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: uh... decline popularity and let me just have the last time here he did run for the senate two years ago and he lost
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: very narrowly, but he lost.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then another subtlety which else I eat, loves talking about.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that is that my rocker seems to have spent an immense amount of time in Florida since the last election.
• 18:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as in Michigan, if you know Michigan, to stay with a lot of pride in itself, and a lot of pride in the fact that they have winter there.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And even this morning, as he was talking about my Rogers,
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I understand why it goes to Florida.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't like the cold.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some of us do.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's just, you know, at the end of the day, I think that Alsaid is sort of ready to take on mic Rogers.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And mic Rogers has vulnerabilities at the final end, though, if we keep starting through all of this, what we should come to a conclusion.
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: of, I think, is emissions going to be right at the front of our attention through an November.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be one of those battleground states where Democrats have to win in order to take the Senate.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, yeah, we'll be watching it, just as we'll be watching Maine and Ohio and a whole bunch of other states because against expectations, there's a genuine fight for control of the Senate going on.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, how can Abdul El Saiyad defeat microutures in November?
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: He can do it because he's a talented candidate.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a masterful communicator.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's a relentless campaigner.
• 19:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: And he knows the right issues.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: The democratic issues are the ones that are winners this year.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Affordability, health care, opposition to Trump's corruption.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's the kind of candidate people get excited about.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: John Nichols, read them at thenation.com.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: John, thanks for talking with us today.
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't need to be with you, my friend.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: One of the most ominous threats to free and fair elections came in February.
• 19:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: When Chad Bianco, the sheriff of Riverside County, East of Los Angeles, seized 650,000 ballots that had been cast in the November 2020 five election that was the referendum on California Prop 50.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Where Californians voted to reapportion the state.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: creating five more democratic congressional seats in response to Texas, creating five more Republican seats.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sheriff Bianco claimed he was investigating vote counting discrepancies.
• 20:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now, at the time he sees the ballots, he was also running for governor in the Republican primary
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: hoping that stunt would get him Trump's endorsement that didn't work and he went on to lose the election badly, but five months later today he still has possession of the ballots, despite being sued by the state attorney general Rob Bonta, and that case goes to the California Supreme Court later this month.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: For comment, we turn to Zachary Roth.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's managing editor at Democracy.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Docut, the Voting Rights News Organization headed by Mark Elias.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zach is also work as a national reporter at MSNBC and is editorial director at the Brennan Center.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: He's also the author of the book, The Great Depression, Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zach Roth.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to the program.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me.
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, no sheriff or police chief has ever tried to do what Chad Bianco did sees ballots in a recent election and claimed to investigate vote counting discrepancies.
• 21:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Of course, there are well-established procedures for recounts in all the states.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: Does any state give the power to recount ballots to sheriffs?
• 21:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, I don't believe so.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: One thing to understand about this action that Chad Bianco took in Riverside County, it wasn't just a spur of the moment thing.
• 21:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: This came out of,
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: about two years of efforts by anti-voting activists in Riverside County, a group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team, who had been trained as part of a larger national group that has worked to sort of so fear and confusion about illegal voting.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they had been working for that time to try
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: convince Chad Bianco's office to do this, and other groups around the country had been exerting similar pressure on their local sheriffs to say, you know, there's these discrepancies that we've found between the number of ballots cast and the number counted, and we think you need to go ahead and seize the ballots, and eventually this local group in Riverside County found a sheriff.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was willing to do this, probably as you say, with his political considerations in mind.
• 23:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, that's where that came out of.
• 23:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a group.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the members of the group was also active in the far right movement to secede from California.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Just so you understand kind of where these people are coming from.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, in this case, the election challenge is long gone.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: election has been decided Democrats won over willingly, including in Riverside County, and Bianco's purpose, as you said, was basically the wind Trump's endorsement and that didn't happen.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: But the case is immensely significant today as a possible precedent, it's kind of a nightmare scenario for the election protection groups of the Democratic Party.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right-wing sheriff sees ballots in swing districts one-by-democrats, claim to recount the votes and then declare Republicans the winners, and Republican governors certify those results, and send that information to the House in Washington.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: And thereby they could preserve Republican domination of the new house when it meets on January 3rd, 2027.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: I know that attorneys like Mark Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket, and his colleagues are preparing for this possibility.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's one of the things we want to talk about here.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: But I want to start with this case, since it's kind of opening the door to this possibility,
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: And to the measure, the countermeasures that Democrats are planning, what was Bianco's evidence that he got from this local citizen's group you talked about, that there was a discrepancy in the voting.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: What evidence did he submit?
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: The numbers that they passed on to him were pretty vague, and evidence would be sort of a misleading term to even use to describe them.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: A number of
• 25:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: election administration experts have looked at those numbers put out by that group because they had presented them previously to the Riverside County election administrators and a number of experts have looked at that and said this is simply a misunderstanding of how elections work and how votes are counted.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Sheriff's are supposed to enforce criminal law what was the crime the
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: when he went to court to get a warrant to seize these ballots.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: He said that it wasn't clear that a crime had been committed, but that he had was acting on this tip and was simply gathering information.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: The warrant was issued by a judge who he had endorsed when the judge was running and who had endorsed him in his own campaign for governor.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Never was any solid evidence put forward that either any crime had been committed or that any miscount or errors had been committed in the count.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's been a lot of questions raised as you likely know about the role of the registrar in Riverside County in a seeding to the demand that these ballots be handed over, which he seemed to do without insisting on
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: his right to maintain possession of the ballots, which in fact is part of California law.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Bianco did not claim that there was any voter fraud that he had evidence of.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's interesting that Trump did claim that there was voter fraud in that election in California.
• 26:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: that day a Trump tweeted quote, the redistricting vote in California is a giant scam.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: The voting itself is rigged.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: The mail in ballots where the Republicans in that state are shot out is under very serious legal and criminal review.
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: Close quote, that was November 4th election day.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: But Bianca didn't say that, right?
• 27:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: He just said,
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: He had reports that there were discrepancies.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's right.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Trump also said a very similar thing about the California primaries from June that he has a particular feelings about California elections in large park because they're very pro voting laws that allow voters to return to male their ballots and not come in until seven days after and give voters a lot of time to cure their ballots.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: just one note here.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think we should explain for people who aren't sure about this.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: What curing ballots means?
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meaning, if you mail in your ballot and there's a discrepancy that's flagged by election officials, they can't tell if the signature is the same as the signature on your voter registration card, for instance, or it's missing a piece of information.
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, different states have different rules, but in most states, there's a, there's a, there's a period of a week or two after the election where voters will be contacted and then can come in and fix whatever the problem is on their ballot so that it will be counted.
• 28:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you have recently reported that in California, there are hundreds of thousands of ballots that have identified problems that could be perhaps cured.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, and that's another piece of this.
• 28:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was reported, well, based on data that California put out in the last two weeks, they rejected around 150,000 ballots from the primary, which was a much larger number.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: that in previous years and those rejections, they list the reasons why most of them work because of lightness, but in those cases, experts and advocates believe that in many of those cases that were rejected for lightness,
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: The ballot was mailed on time, in other words, by election day or on election day.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: But because of delays in the way that USPS does its postmarking where they have made some changes in that process, the postmarked didn't get put on until after election day.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And therefore, the ballot gets rejected as late through no fault of the voter who put it in the mail on time.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's a huge number of voters in that category, being disenfranchised.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: You then had about 40,000, I think, that were rejected for signature reasons, meaning the signature didn't quite match up with the signature on the voter registration card.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nobody believes that any significant number of those ballots were illegitimate, were fraudulent, or were not by the voter who claimed to be voting.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And people's signatures differ at different times.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: So again, that's a huge number of voters being disenfranchised.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: So let's talk about the litigation here.
• 29:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: The State Attorney General Rob Bonta argued that Bianco's search warrant granted by this friendly judge lacked probable cause and that in any case, the sheriff had no jurisdiction over ballots.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: So he asked the courts to do two things, halt the recount.
• 30:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: Bianco said he was conducting and returned the ballots
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: The state Supreme Court heard this case on April 8th and they did the first.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: They ordered Bianco to stop the recount, but they did not order him to return the ballots.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what's that issue in this month's hearing.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Why not?
• 30:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in stopping the recount, I mean, it's just worth pausing to point out Bianco had said that his own office and his deputies, who, of course, have no training whatsoever in the election administration procedures or in counting ballots, we're going to be doing their own count, and this seems to have begun before it was halted by the court.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But yes, the judge did not do the second thing that was requested and returned the ballots.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: By this point, it's a move point.
• 31:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: The redistricting vote, as you said, has taken place and been certified and gone into law.
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the important point is the precedent it sets.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's one reason, I think, why California has since passed a new law,
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: and been signed into law by the governor clarifying that ballots cannot be taken out of the chain of custody of election officials and administrators and law enforcement does not have the authority to seize ballots.
• 31:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then, of course, we've seen in other states, we've seen the Trump administration do versions of the same thing.
• 31:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I just want to stick for one more minute with the California Supreme Court hearing and there are actually two plaintiffs and two different lawsuits.
• 31:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's the one brought by the State of California Attorney General Rob Bonta.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a second one brought by the UCLA Voting Rights Project on behalf of four individual Riverside County voters.
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: They're both seeking the same thing return to the ballots to the register star, but they make very different kind of claims and represent different kind of challenges, tell us about the difference.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, the voters in Riverside County who are represented by the UCLA voting rights project are really, I think, seeking a ruling that would establish a very clear precedent that law enforcement does not have the authority to seize ballots.
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've spoken to election administrators in other counties and state level in California who say that there is still some uncertainty and confusion about what election administrators are supposed to do if that scenario arises again.
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: If there's another sheriff who says they're doing an investigation is looking to obtain ballots.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: This argument is about the rights of voters.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: The voters have a right to have their ballots protected from being seized by the sheriffs.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Correct, and that's different, of course, from the Attorney General's lawsuit, which I think really has to do with the balance of power between the Attorney General and sheriffs.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Bonta's lawsuit is focused in large part on establishing the authority of the Attorney General in those situations.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: The most important point in either of these
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: to get a ruling from the Supreme Court, which makes absolutely clear that law enforcement does not have this right, and that ballots need to remain within the chain of custody of election administrators and election officials.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Now let's talk about the implications for seeding the new Congress on January 3rd, and the nightmare scenario for the midterms, let's imagine Democrats win November 3rd in the midterms,
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: ten-seat majority, Republicans then claim that 11 seats were subject to fraudulent voting or erroneous counts and get their officials to declare that Republicans won enough seats so that Republicans will control the new house.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: the house is the final judge of its own membership.
• 34:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: So this could all happen on January 3rd.
• 34:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: So Democrats are planning what to do before January 3rd to prevent this.
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: What's your understanding about Mark Elias and his colleagues and what they're thinking about how to protect against this possibility?
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm not really part of those internal discussions in Marx law firm or in other democratic leaning organizations that are doing the planning on this, but I know that work is underway.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, California is sort of a hotspot for this and perhaps the most likely place where it may happen.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's in part because, as you know, I think there's
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: four or five swing seats in California, which is as many or more than any other other state.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you really could have a situation where control of the house comes down to California.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then as we talked about a little bit before, California has really been the epicenter of the Trump administration and Trump himself.
• 35:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: claims about illegal voting.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: For a long time, it didn't get as much focus in the voting and elections world, because it was such a solidly blue state, and I think Republicans kind of left it alone.
• 35:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: But because California has such pro voter rules in terms of when male ballots can arrive and in terms of the deadline given to voters to cure their ballots, because the state wants to do everything possible to avoid disenfranchising voters, that has led Trump and his allies
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: both in that register ding vote we've been talking about and in the primaries to claim that this is you know a riged election and that as votes get counted in the days and weeks after election day and they changed the totals that that represents fraud.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And of course, there's the other possibility of red states that have Republican governors and Republican secretaries of state who have the power to certify the winner and report that to the House, Texas, Florida, and so on, also have swing districts.
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: In those cases, we'd obviously see sea litigation in the same way that we've seen in the past.
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's hard to feel totally confident that the Supreme Court under its current makeup would stand up for voters and for democracy in that situation.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: The other part of this I should have mentioned is that Republicans have been trying for years, but especially in the last year or two to ban what they call later-riving male ballots.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So ballots that come in that are postmarked on or before election day, but that come in afterwards.
• 36:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: It wouldn't be surprising at all to see that issue be at the center of an attempt in California or elsewhere to subvert election results.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Zach Roth of Democracy, Doc at Zach.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks for talking with us today.
• 37:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Start making sense.
• 37:14
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• 37:20
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• 37:25
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• 37:35
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• 37:39
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• 37:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.