Doug Hess in a classroom at a table with large books

Voting Rights: Devil in the Details Transcript

Season 2 Episode 9

Ben Binversie:

The National Voter Registration Act was passed in 1993 to equalize access to voting, so why are we still talking about it in 2020? This is All Things Grinnell, I’m your host Ben Binversie. On today’s show we talk with Grinnell political science professor and alum, Doug Hess ’91, and two of his students, Takshil Sachdev ’19 and Greg Eastman ’19, about their research into the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and see what results from the Grinnell College National Poll can tell us about voter confidence in elections and how they may impact turnout. That’s coming up next after I remind you that the information and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent the views of Grinnell College.

Ben Binversie:

Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993 and states were supposed to implement it by 1995. Pretty much since then, Doug Hess has been working on implementing and researching the policy. I sat down a few months ago to talk with him and two graduating seniors who had worked on the research with him. They’ve been monitoring implementation throughout the United states and examining potential solutions to these obstacles. First, I had Doug take us back to the origins of the legislation.

Doug Hess:

Well, so this was an act that was proposed in part by two academics. Actually, this is one of the few cases where some political scientists and sociologists actually had a large impact on legislation. This was Richard Cloward who’s passed away and Fran Piven who’s retired from Columbia University. But they kept this idea in the 80s of registering voters as a way of pushing back against perceived inequalities and policy in the 80s. And they began to work with states on reforming voter registration laws and then slowly built that into a national campaign to push for national law. It was passed earlier, but vetoed by then President Bush. And it was passed again and signed by Clinton in 1993 and then states were supposed to start implementing it in 1995.

Ben Binversie:

And what does it do or require of states?

Doug Hess:

So the most famous part of it is section five, which is the motor voter part. So when you go to get driver’s license or state ID, they’re supposed to have integrated into that process questions about voter registration so that you don’t have to fill out additional paperwork. It should be built in. And that registers a lot of people to vote. And motor voter is very effective, although we’re starting to learn that some states are also failing to do that, in fact, or stopped doing it. But there were also other parts of the law that don’t get as much attention. So, for instance, all states have to use a mailing voter registration form now. All states have to have less than 30 days deadline for registration before election. And states are supposed to also implement this law in programs serving people with disabilities or people who have low incomes.

Doug Hess:

So programs like food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, or program serving people with disabilities are supposed to also ask about voter registration and provide assistance with it. And we’ve just found that a lot of states simply stopped doing that a long time ago.

Ben Binversie:

Yeah. So it’s not just the DMV, although that’s probably the one that people are most familiar with. And I know I recently had to get an Iowa license and change my vehicle registration and sure enough they asked me about voting which is good. So fast forward a couple of decades from the passing of the law, implementation is spotty and shoddy as you kind of indicated and several lawsuits have been decided against states for failing to implement the law. I know you said this is the most often ignored election statute on the books.

Doug Hess:

Yeah. Actually that was a statement after Obama was elected in 2012. There was a lot of news stories about people waiting in long lines, so he funded a presidential commission to look into some election reforms and suggestions about how states could better implement elections. And in their final report, they commented on the NVRA being the most ignored of the federal laws. They didn’t say much more about it unfortunately in part because it’s a tricky law to implement it. It’s very technical and it brings up a lot of controversies. Almost anytime we talk about this in the press, you immediately see comments from people slamming the poor, slamming minorities in the comment box. So it’s a bit of a hot button issue. A lot of people view it as like a Democrat’s only law, which is not the case. The DMV part of it registers people pretty broadly across the perspective of politics and the point of the other sections of the law’s to just equalize access to registration.

Doug Hess:

So unfortunately it gets a little bit of political heat because it’s about this issue that since the 2000 election of Florida has drawn a lot of heat in general. Voter ID laws, early voting restrictions, all these kinds of ... I mean, how many precincts, I mean, ballot boxes, you have, all these things that relate to access to voting have become very politicized.

Ben Binversie:

Yeah. So the lack of implementation on the state’s behalf is nothing new. But Greg and Takshil, can you give me a picture of what implementation maybe looks like right now in the research that you’ve done?

Greg Eastman:

So implementation’s kind of very different across the board, which is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult for states to always follow the law because even things just like recording how you’re giving out forms or what the forms are, are totally dissimilar. Even just in views of how to hand out the forms, a lot states are different. So some will just give out a form for people to fill out, others will allow people to fill it out online, and others won’t. And even within offices, sometimes there’s people there who are making sure that this is being done, other times there’s not. So the amount of actual follow through on this law varies heavily. And even just how to document it varies heavily, which generally means that when there’s kind of a gray area it’s easier to ignore or act like you’re doing something when you’re not. So the implementation’s really, really different.

Takshil Sachdev:

Yeah. But at the same time we’ve seen ... at least in my research, I’ve seen that if states are prioritizing this, if they’re prioritizing registrations through the National Voter Registration Act, then there is a scope of improving the process like implementation, it’s hard, but it’s not necessarily something that’s not feasible for states to do. Often this just gets put on the back burner and not prioritized. Section seven registrations, which is through public assistance agencies, that’s what I’m looking at in North Carolina. There’s a lot of fluctuation and it usually varies when the board of elections is either prioritizing, making sure that they’re following NVRA procedures and when they’re not. So I think that’s a big part of it is how important it is on the radars of the people, of the administrators who are running these processes.

Ben Binversie:

And then I imagine different states have varying levels of implementation. Is there any pattern that you can see with certain states that are more inclined to implement this law and have followed through on it? And is there some relationship or some sort of, yeah, pattern?

Greg Eastman:

So my personal view is going to be a little skewed because I tend to work on the states who aren’t really following through, right? So that tends to be the ones that I look at.

Ben Binversie:

Well, is there a pattern among those states?

Greg Eastman:

I would say that if there was a pattern among the states, it’s usually if you see somebody passing a voter ID law in the news, you can make a good bet that they’re probably one of the states that aren’t following the NVRA or maybe aren’t following them and need to be looked into. And within those, when looking into them, they’ll often record for a few years when they’ve settled and said that, “Okay, we’re going to follow these procedures.” They’ll start off really following them quite well. And then after about a year, it just drops significantly. And you’ll see that there’s a lot of effort at first and then once they think that nobody’s looking anymore, they tend to kind of drop off. In some cases, I know Iowa, for example, just stopped altogether and just said, “We’re just not going to follow this period.” So you see like there will be a point where at first they’ll follow it really well and then they’ll just stop following it or their effort will go down a lot.

Ben Binversie:

Doug, since the law was passed in 1994, you’ve worked in some cases with states and implementing the law. What have you learned about why states are ignoring the statutes?

Doug Hess:

Yeah, that’s the big, big question. So whenever a policy fails or succeeds, then fails and succeeds again, people always look in the environment and they always look for political reasons. It’s also important to look at the law itself. And I think that when you have a law that requires two agencies that otherwise never worked together, so in this case, election officials and DMVs or election officials and food stamp offices, if they never have to work together, and this is the only reason why they work together, then you can imagine how weak that relationship is. So if the election officials change the forms, for instance, in New Mexico when our lawyers found they stopped doing the DMV part of the NVRA, they went into some offices and asked. One of the officers said, “We used to do that, but they changed the thickness of the card stock and it wouldn’t fit in our printers anymore, so we stopped.”

Doug Hess:

Well obviously that was a problem that could have been solved, but if there’s just isn’t sort of the interdepartmental task force, that’s one of the big recommendations that we make whenever we work with states. And when I say we, I mean the groups I used to work for such as Demos, and Project Vote, and now the National ACLU, but also League Women Voters are very involved in this. When we give advice to states on how to improve the policy, one issue is that you need to have agency staff designated as NVRA people who have a cross agency team that meets every so often to look at policies to talk to each other. Even things like if an agency runs out of registration forms, do they know who to go to to get more? That’s one way.

Doug Hess:

In a lot of lawsuits we proved that they’ve stopped doing it. But by asking these agencies, “When did you last update the number of forms that you had? Because you don’t have any.” And they’re like, “We don’t remember when we last asked for new forms.” So a lot of it’s just managerial stuff that’s very mundane and is not politically sexy. Occasionally there are states that have resisted this for political reasons, or they’ve reduced it in a project priority for political reasons, but not as often as people would think. We’ve sued states with democratic governors and Republican governors, we’ve sued states with democratic secretaries of states and Republican secretaries of states. And some of the lawsuits take so long that they span several different administrations. So it’s as much a management and administrative question of how to get the nuts and bolts right as it is occasionally a political question.

Ben Binversie:

Yeah, I was going to ask if ignoring the statute is even the right word because it seems like in some cases maybe it is technical things that are like the card stock and the printer kind of thing. Maybe that’s not ignoring, but maybe both of you said putting it on the back burner, but also with voter ID laws and things like that it sounds like in some cases it may lean more towards actively suppressing instead of just a lack of effort.

Doug Hess:

Yeah, occasionally. I mean, we had occasionally just ignorance of the law. It’s also staff turnover in these agencies that you train people and then there’s staff turnover and now people aren’t trained. So if someone doesn’t stay on top of that and do trainings every three months to six months, you had those problems.

Doug Hess:

In North Carolina, there was a case several years ago where two counties, one county in particular the county commissioners voted to not do it. And so the State Election Board told the Department of Justice this and the Department of Justice’s voting section chief wrote a letter to that county saying, “Well, you can’t not do this. This is a federal law and the Supreme Court says it’s a constitutional law that you have to do this.” So that county then basically they said, “We’re going to sue you if you don’t change this.” And so that kind of commissioned re voted and all, but one of the commissioners voted to implement the law to avoid the lawsuit. But the idea that there’s still a commissioner out there thinking, “Bring it on, come after us, take us to court to make us do this.” Is frustrating.

Ben Binversie:

Yeah. What is the potential scope of people that would register via this route if states were properly implementing the law?

Takshil Sachdev:

Yeah, I mean that’s been the focus of my research, especially looking at low income people of color. Because the public assistance agency route of registration here is one that, I mean it would be reasonable for us to assume that that’s people registering where the most vulnerable in society who are the least likely to register because they face the most like the opportunity cost to the two step voting process where they first have to go register and they have to maintain their registration and then vote. So in order to encourage participation among those people, I think this is probably one of the laws that really helps them get involved in the political process and close that gap between the high education, high income, usually white people who walk more often than the people of color.

Takshil Sachdev:

So in North Carolina I find that there is like this ... the law like because it registers a small number of people and there is a large number of people of color who are already registered, even so there is still like a positive effect of the law. So it does affect our registrations among Black individuals and Black women especially. I think there’s a very positive effect on people who might not otherwise register. And definitely since the passing of the law, there’s been, I think, millions of people who actually registered through different parts of the act. So I think that’s very, very important.

Ben Binversie:

And other than obviously not registering to vote, what are the consequences of the failure to implement this law?

Doug Hess:

Well, the two groups that are at least registered in the country are younger people and low income people if you want to look at it that way. So if you kind of have a law to help people register, you need to make sure that it targets those groups otherwise you might actually exacerbate the situation, which is one of the concerns I have with the sort of DMV registration or the so-called automatic registration, is that you’re just helping groups that are already overrepresented. There’s nothing wrong with helping anybody to register, but if you ignore those communities that are least registered, you might make the gap bigger even if you help some of them too. So I think the evidence cross research over the past two decades is that the law works and it does help equalize registration rates.

Doug Hess:

So in some states we saw phenomenal increases when states began to implement it correctly. And if they’ve kept up, as Greg mentioned, some states after we stopped pushing them, things go bad again. But in some states they’ve kept up the procedures and kept up, especially the data collection and monitoring, which is the key thing to make sure things are consistently happening. Those states have actually kept producing large numbers of people from these offices, which surprises a lot of people. But the food stamp agencies and Medicaid agencies are huge. At one point during the economic downturn, one in eight households had somebody receiving food stamps in them. And so there are millions of applications filed each year for food stamps alone. And then you add to that WIC and Medicaid and other things, and it gets to be a sizable chunk of people from the community that’s not registered.

Doug Hess:

I should also point out that it also gives people a chance, same with the DMV program, for people to update their registration. So a lot of folks who think they’re registered aren’t registered where they now live because Americans move so often. And a lot of these surveys, if you ask Americans, well, any resident of the United states, if you asked them, “Were you at this address a year ago?” One in eight will say no. That’s how often people move. And again, that’s particularly amongst low income and young people, although very wealthy people move a lot too. And those are groups that rural communities, people have less internet access for online registration, low income people the same way. These are offices where someone can help you register. So if you have a literacy problem or a language problem, they’re supposed to help you register just as they would help you with any other form in the office. You can take it home and do it yourself also. But you can do it there and they’ll help you and then you can leave it with them and they’ll mail it for you.

Ben Binversie:

So what are the obstacles to kind of measuring the implementation and monitoring these processes? Because it sounds like a lot of it is like go into a DMV and see are there forms or things like that, but is there a more formal way and what data have both of you been looking at to kind of analyze this?

Greg Eastman:

So I’ve looked at data for a number of different states. And the recording procedures are always different. But I would say the two things that is most common and most important that I look at is you can see the number of forms that they’ve given out to people or mailed to people. And so that kind of gives you an idea of like, “Okay, are they actually handing these forms to people?” But what’s really interesting is you also get to see the number of forms that people have actually returned to be able to register to vote. And oftentimes you’ll see agencies that are declining in their effort level will still be handing out a bunch of forms, but you’ll see the number of people who actually registered a vote will significantly drop. And you’ll see that only a few people are actually registering to vote, which kind of tends to indicate that they might be giving out these forms, but they’re not actually working to try and help people register to vote.

Greg Eastman:

And then additionally, it’s just a lot of reading on what did the individual states require, can people do it online? Some services just mail out to your address when you sign up for their forms. And then also what’s the activation method? So for some places just walking into the office, anyone automatically can just ask for a registration form and get it. For other offices it is a little more like you have to actually apply for department services to be able to do that and they don’t really record things otherwise. So it is a lot of reading about individual states. But the most important things that I commonly look at are who, and how many forms are being given out, and then how many people are actually returning those forms to register.

Takshil Sachdev:

Yeah. I mean one thing that I’ve observed is that states definitely don’t like getting sued because it increases the amount of work that they have to do. Because what I notice is that people say to be reporting very low numbers on how many people are registering and then some active pressure will be done like either they’ll receive a letter warning them that they’re going to get sued or they’ll actually get sued and suddenly the numbers will shoot up, which makes me think if the forms were just piling up and weren’t being ... because part of the act is once they received those forms, they pass them on to the election commission. And so in that case, if they’re not doing that, then the numbers aren’t be recorded. Until suddenly you’ll see like a county and a state reporting like, “Three, two, three, 59.” And so it’ll just spike all of a sudden, even in a small county. I think that’s an interesting part of the implementation is they aren’t pressured to do it right at the moment they get it.

Greg Eastman:

That’s not just like one or two states. Almost every state has this. They receive a letter or something and you see a huge spike at least for a short period of time.

Ben Binversie:

And what are the most promising solutions to solving this lack of implementation?

Doug Hess:

I think over the years we’ve developed about four or five standard recommendations that we give to every state. One is there has to be people whose job description says at the state level and the county level that they’re in charge of checking in on the NVRA, right? They need to know how to train other people, so they’re the trainer for their county or their agency, and they report data upwards to the state. So there’s somebody in the county offices who knows that every Friday or every other Friday they send in data to somebody else and that somebody needs to then look at that data. So states that have kept up the data collection, even if they’ve declined afterwards, people have been able to see it and then get on them again. And the numbers shoot back up. And states that don’t collect it, we don’t know what’s happening. We have to go back and look again and do investigations.

Doug Hess:

So having the teams, having a job description, collecting the data, actually using the data, not just collecting it, is essential. And then there’s a lot of recommendations on just how to design the forms so that they comply with the law and that they’re easier for people to respond to. So a case like here in Iowa, the WIC form is incorrect. It just simply says, “Are you registered to vote?” Which is a survey question. It’s not a question if it doesn’t say, “The law requires it to say, if you’re not registered to vote where you live now, would you like to register to vote here today?” And then you can say yes, no, or you have the right to skip the question. So they just don’t have the right question on there even that would help people know they could register. Otherwise, it just seems like a survey question, which seems kind of weird.

Doug Hess:

So designing those sorts of things makes a big difference. And making sure they have the proper policies and regulations in place, I mean, it’s really an example of where the devil’s in the details or God is in the details, whichever phrase you prefer. Both are in the details. So that’s some of the technical assistance that I don’t do as much of anymore, but used to in that some of these think tanks provide states with.

Ben Binversie:

So you mentioned that this is in many circles a political issue and that also states are dragging their feet and there’s implementation issues with this. Is it even realistic to think about something like automatic voter registration? Which obviously we do not have in this country, but, well, North Dakota has ...

Doug Hess:

No registration, actually.

Ben Binversie:

Right, no registration, which isn’t quite the same thing, but some countries do have automatic voter registration.

Doug Hess:

Yeah. It works in different ways. I mean, we’re one of the few wealthy countries that requires citizens to primarily go out and register themselves actively. And the NVRA helped a lot with that by also cutting back on how often states can remove you from list. So once you’re on the list, in theory, you should stay on unless you tell them you’ve moved or if you stop responding and stop voting after a while, they might remove you under some complex procedures. But in a lot of countries, well we don’t have a national ID card, for instance, a lot of countries has a national ID card. So they already have a simple system for that. Some of the systems in the United States recently haven’t always been great about tracking or maybe didn’t want to track citizenship. So we don’t have an automatic system.

Doug Hess:

It’s super easy for this, but we can cobble together systems. But that requires these systems to talk to one another. And even then you have to confirm with people, that they are what we think they are and Americans moves again so often and they don’t have to tell anybody when they’ve moved. Now the NVRA did include a procedure for using the US postal service change of address system as a way of updating registrations, but that’s never worked out well. I don’t think anyone’s ever really solved and that’s just kind of bureaucratic snafu. Same with the DMV. If you tell the DMV you want to update your driver’s license when you move, unless you tell them not to, they’re supposed to automatically update your registration and most states don’t do that either although there’s been some pressure on states to fix that.

Doug Hess:

So there are all these ways we could cobble it together to make it better. It just requires the sort of bureaucratic and political will to solve administrative problems when they come up. I don’t know if we’ll ever have a simple way of doing it. My own fantasy would be that you do what you do in North Dakota and that is you sign an attestation that you are who you say you are. If people are obsessed with photo IDs and you don’t have one, cameras are cheap nowadays, they can just take your picture right there. And as long as nobody contests the election, they’ll just destroy them afterwards. If people are that concerned that folks are running around putting on fake mustaches, voting three or four times, which nobody does because there’s no benefit to doing it, right? The cost is extremely high and there’s not much benefit for you to take that risk no matter how much you like a candidate, right? So we could find other ways to do this if this is really an outgrowth of fears about race and immigration in the 1800s really is what this is.

Ben Binversie:

Greg, you kind of mentioned before that voter ID restrictions are kind of maybe like an indicator that there’s lack of an implementation of the NVRA. Are the voter ID restrictions a separate issue or does that tie into your research?

Greg Eastman:

I mean I think it’s really a separate issue. I’ve just noticed in my work that there does tend to be I’ll work on a state and go, “Okay. Yeah, I just read a news article yesterday about this state going into lawsuits.” It is a separate issue though. Something I always kind of keep in my mind is that a lot of the people that this registers to vote are the groups that are least likely to have an actual photo ID. So it is even more important to make sure that this is implemented, especially in those states which might be trying to pass voter ID laws because these are the groups that are at risk to really being punished by those laws.

Ben Binversie:

Doug, I know you worked in D.C. For a long time before coming back to Grinnell as a professor. How did your time in DC kind of influence this research?

Doug Hess:

Well, this is a good example of how you don’t know what you’re going to end up working on in life. I only worked on this because I was looking for work in 1993. And so starting January, 1994, I started working on the NVRA. Some foundations gave money to several different groups to start watch dogging because they were concerned that the states wouldn’t implement it right. They knew some would not implement it right, that would even sue to not implement the law entirely. So I began working for project vote on NVRA project then for about almost three years. Then moved on to other things, then came back to it, then moved on to other things and came back to it again. So I keep getting pulled into it. So this has been now over 25 years of working on this law, on and off.

Doug Hess:

And the other area that I work on is food stamp policy, which again was just coincidental and accidental in a way. Just getting a job offer and working for several years with a think tank on food and hunger issues. And the two actually overlap, oddly enough, both in a sense that these are federal laws that states implement and what citizens receive from this federal law depends heavily on what your county officials do or don’t do, either out of discretion, or options they have in the policy, or just out of preexisting traditions or institutional arrangements. So it’s related to my overall research in that sense of asking how do citizens receive the benefits from federal laws? Because it’s on paper and passed by Congress and signed by the president, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get it the same way that somebody else gets it in another state.

Doug Hess:

But all of that is to say that research topics sort of just came up by accident and had a coincidental relationship to one another. I like working on this law because I think for social change you have to ask yourself, given how few resources most of us have, unless you’re very, very wealthy, like Ben is, I’m sure off his philanthropic [crosstalk 00:28:21]-

Ben Binversie:

This podcast is filling my pocket.

Doug Hess:

Yes. Your philanthropic interests are extensive. We just have our time, reputation, or our skills. And so you have to find the right sort of lever and the right fulcrum to stick your lever to make social change. And it seems to me that if we can with a bit of leverage help a state register 10,000, or a hundred thousand, or a quarter million people to vote from communities that aren’t registered to vote, then that’s significant. And even though it’s not real sexy and it’s a bit mundane, most of the time it’s about paperwork, and regulations, and rules, and fine points of oddly written laws and awkwardly written laws, I think that that’s for me, the satisfaction and then the research angle on it is that through this litigation we’re the only people who have ... I mean, some of the think tanks have the data, but they don’t have an organized. So Greg, and Takshil, and maybe another eight students in the past four years have helped me to organize a huge database for about a dozen states on county level monthly data on how these agencies perform.

Doug Hess:

And so we’re the only people who have that data really. And so that makes us sort of the national experts on that topic. So slowly it’s leading to some research publications on my part. It’s more immediately leading to discussions with DOJ. They’ve asked me to come talk to them a couple of times about the data, either to fly out there or talk to them on the phone. And then it helps these nonprofits to know a little bit about whether or not what they’re doing works. And it helps the funders to know whether or not this is worth funding and how it works.

Ben Binversie:

Greg and Takshil, how did you get involved and get interested in doing this research and what have you maybe learned? What has surprised you by what you found? Any reflections?

Greg Eastman:

So I got kind of involved through probably a little bit of a different aspect than Takshil did because I’m very statistics-oriented, and so I saw this as the chance to actually get involved with a unique data source and be able to actually learn new skills and implement them. But also not just working as some jockey in the middle of the back of some office, but actually to do something that kind of matters, and work can help people. So I got involved because I saw this as an awesome opportunity to work with cool data and make an actual change. So it was largely what Doug just talked about with, we have this data and nobody else does. And so that was the large reason why I got involved. So that’s what I spend a lot of my time doing is I work with the data. I try and make sure that everything’s accessible, readable, understandable, organized. And then I work on various states when I get the chance.

Takshil Sachdev:

Yeah. I mean I feel like I started off with the data and looking at it and I was at that point not as adept as using Stata and other things that we needed to clean the data. It was a learning process in that. But then once I was looking at the data a lot I had so many questions about what was actually going on with, not just all the numbers on the screen, but also what’s going on? Why are things dipping and then going back up? Why is registration varying so much at different places? And so I think all of those questions that I had then kind of motivated me to keep going and look in more. And so I feel like literature in the field it’s studying this act has kind of fallen out of fashion. A lot of people haven’t done that since the 90s, early 2000s because people aren’t keeping it in the front of their mind, it kind of encourages administrators to not care about it as much.

Takshil Sachdev:

I think it’s important to keep looking at whether or not it’s working for people, who it’s working for, how well it’s doing. And I think that’s important because this is something that we’ve talked about. It has a huge scope in terms of how many people you can register and who we can register and it really changed the electorate in those states.

Ben Binversie:

All right, well thank you all for taking the time to come talk with me about the NVRA and the important research you’ve done. I appreciate it.

Doug Hess:

Thank you.

Greg Eastman:

Thank you.

Takshil Sachdev:

Thank you.

Ben Binversie:

Doug Hess is an assistant professor of political science here at the college and a graduate of the class of 1991. Greg Eastman and Takshil Sachdev both graduated last spring. Greg is in graduate school for applied statistics at UCLA and Takshil is working in New York as a research associate at Nera Economic Consulting.

Ben Binversie:

A lot of the resistance to voter registration efforts has been pushed under the guise of increasing election security. On that note, a recent Grinnell College National Poll asked citizens about their confidence in our elections. Doug placed that question in the poll and I wrangled him back on the podcast to break down the results and why they matter for the upcoming election.

Doug Hess:

There’s some concern that elections are being stolen, that there are fraudulent votes, or non-citizens are voting, or voting machines have been hacked. So for many years, some surveys and now the Grinnell College National Poll has been asking people about how confident they are in past elections or upcoming elections. So we’re going to be asking this question in the poll this year as well as well asked it last fall in October. And the gist of it was somewhat surprising to me. I expected perhaps that Republican, or conservative, or White voters would be less confident in elections because often it’s accusations from a Republican party saying that non-citizens are voting or that there’s fraud. But there are people on the left who also say the machines are rigged and things like this.

Doug Hess:

But when it comes to race, it’s really African Americans who are the least confident in the elections being counted fairly. White voters say about 75% are either somewhat or very confident in the vote count, whereas for Black voters, only about 53 and a half percent are somewhat or very confident.

Ben Binversie:

It’s a big difference.

Doug Hess:

Yeah. And this could matter for turnout. If you think the election is somehow rigged, or fixed, or there’s cheating going on, you might not participate. So we know that of people who say they will definitely vote, 71% are very or somewhat confident. But for those who are not certain about voting in 2020, it’s only about 55% or 54% say they’re very confident or somewhat confident in elections. So that could be an association there one way or the other between confidence in vote count and turn out.

Doug Hess:

When it comes to region of the countries and looking at that by race, we also see that in the South, that’s where we have the lowest confidence, that black voters in the South perhaps due to the history of civil rights issues and voting rights issues in the South or perhaps due to the issues that were brought up in Georgia in the recent election there as well as some cases of election problems in North Carolina. But for whatever reason, either historical or contemporary black voters in the South, only half of them say they are very or somewhat confident in the election count.

Ben Binversie:

Yeah. The geographic element of it was interesting because it kind of made the difference between black and White voters even more apparent because whites in the South are perhaps one of the most confident groups that elections are secure and votes are going to be counted whereas blacks in the South complete opposite.

Doug Hess:

Right. Now some of that has to do with who won the election too. Surveys over time have shown that if your candidate won, you think the elections are more likely fair. If your candidate lost, you’re more likely to suspect something shady was going on. So we don’t yet have data to look into that. If we continue the poll after the 2020 election, maybe we can. If there’s a change in who’s in the white house, we can maybe look at that and see if that changes the white-black relationship.

Doug Hess:

We do know looking at party that I was surprised also that 83% of Republicans are somewhat or very confident. And again, compared to 63% for Democrats, that’s a huge gap, 20 point gap between Republicans and Democrats. Independents are right there in the middle on this issue. So if there was a change in who’s in the white house perhaps Democrats, Republicans would flip on this. Republicans would be less confident in Democrats and more confident that it was a fair election. So it’s unfortunate that people interpret the world that way, but it’s consistent with other findings. Also, we haven’t asked about people’s local elections or state elections. We’ve only asked about the national election. Other studies have asked about what about your state election, what about your local election. And the closer you get to somebody’s home turf or their neighborhood, the more confident they are.

Doug Hess:

So perhaps this question is actually tapping into a sense people have, that there’s something dissatisfying about elections in general. And it’d be interesting to know to what degree any sort of actual election fraud, which is rare, but occurs, to what degree does that last in people’s memory, to what degree is your confidence undermined for a decade or two because you heard of it in the past. In recent elections there’s been some fraud mostly with mailing ballots because they’re the easiest to commit fraud with. And there was a case in North Carolina where there was not a member of Congress for a congressional district recently due to concerns about fraud that might’ve made a difference in the outcome. So people in that state or that area of the country may remember that for a very long time.

Doug Hess:

People tend to distort rare events in their memory like people are more afraid of airplane crashes than car crashes even though they’re very rare, but they stand out in your memory because they’re rare when they do happen. So it’s possible that these events, because they are rare also become exaggerated in people’s memory because they do get a lot of coverage when they happen because it is big news.

Ben Binversie:

Yeah. So as we get closer to the 2020 presidential election, election security has been talked about quite a bit, maybe more so than in past elections. A lot of it from kind of a international interference perspective because of what happened in the 2016 election, but also with voter ID laws. So from your perspective, what are the legitimate concerns that we should have about election security and having our votes be counted that we should be thinking about as we kind of enter this election season and how might it affect the election?

Doug Hess:

Right. Well, I know that the various security agencies and intelligence agencies have working groups on this issue, and they’ve hired new staff to work on this issue, and there’s been a lot of training and even scenario playing with election officials around the country they’re doing. So I know there’s a lot of activity happening on this front. For me, the biggest worry I have again, the easiest way to commit fraud is through ballots that are mailed in. Right? So absentee ballots, in other words. But again, if an unusual number of absentee ballots were coming in and maybe hard to know which are legitimate and which aren’t, that could be an issue.

Doug Hess:

If there was some sort of a violence, or terrorist act, or a way of disturbing election days by preventing software from working or something like that, that actually would be a nightmare. But most states can handle that because it’d be a horrible thing, but you’d have to then hold the election on a Wednesday or Thursday and redo it, which would mean a lot of other security issues, but from my sense is that that’s the less concern they have. The bigger concern is just what unknown’s might pop up out there.

Doug Hess:

Personally, I’m more concerned about the ability of people to create these deep fake videos and images and put out fake information. It sounds like people are getting more savvy, but still aren’t savvy enough. And just things I see floating around my own network on Facebook and whatnot I think it’s pretty disturbing what people are going to believe about the impeachment trial or about candidates and corruption. And that seems to be where a lot of the propaganda from overseas is going, trying to disturb people’s confidence in democracy, so people no longer think democracy is something to care about, which is exactly what anti-democratic forces ... democratic with a small “d,” that’s exactly what antidemocratic forces want people to think is that democracy is just as rigged as anything else, therefore don’t fight for it.

Ben Binversie:

Yeah. Yeah. And as these studies have shown and poll results show that even just talking about election fraud has the potential to decrease voter turnout. So maybe we should stop talking.

Doug Hess:

That’s right. Well I guess, we depend upon a Grinnell podcast audience to check their facts.

Ben Binversie:

Yes, yes. We’ll accompany the discussion with a direction to go and vote as well.

Doug Hess:

Yes.

Ben Binversie:

Well, thank you Doug for breaking this down and talking to us about voter registration act and also this Grinnell College National Poll results. And I guess we’ll look forward to the next iteration of the poll and see how the numbers might change.

Doug Hess:

Nope. My pleasure. And I assume you’re high quality skilled on policy analysis banter due to your training-

Ben Binversie:

Of course.

Doug Hess:

... in Grinnell College policy studies courses.

Ben Binversie:

Nothing but the best things. Thank you.

Doug Hess:

[inaudible 00:41:43]

Ben Binversie:

You can find more information about the Grinnell poll at grinnell.edu/poll. And that’ll do it for this episode. Next week we’ll hear from Ed Fallon, a former member of the Iowa legislature and current activist who walked across the country to raise awareness about climate change and is now hounding democratic presidential candidates to accomplish the same goal. Music for today’s show comes from Brett Newski, Seth Hanson, and Podington Bear. I’m your host Ben Binversie. Stay weird Grinnellians.

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