How to Run a Democratic Election: Part II

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:17

In the last episode, we began to break down the US Election process. So the processes, the logistics, and the mechanics of running a national election that is both fair and accurate.

This week, as hundreds of millions of Americans cast their vote in the presidential election, we pivot to explore how they can guarantee fairness through inclusion, representation and integrity. In the second part of our special, how to run a Democratic Election. Welcome to America A History Podcast.

I'm Liam Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places and the events that make the USA what it is today. To discuss this, I'm joined by our resident election expert, Dr.

Emma Long, but she's also the Associate professor of American History and Politics at the University of East Anglia. Emma, welcome back.

Emma Long: 00:01:26

Hi, Liam.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:27

We're almost there. We're almost at the end. It's been a slog.

Emma Long: 00:01:31

Suddenly surprising that it's this close. It feels like we've been talking about it for a very long time.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:36

Oh, it really does. But as this is going out, as people listen to it, it's election day, so the wait is nearly over.

Emma Long: 00:01:43

Almost.

Liam Heffernan: 00:01:44

Almost.

But we're also joined on the podcast this week by a teaching fellow at the University of Portsmouth whose research interests include the US Presidency, particularly in relation to US national security policy, and how cybersecurity can be used as a tool for diplomacy. Welcome to the show. Daffy Townley.

Dafydd Townley: 00:02:03

Hello and welcome. Thank you, Liam. It's great to be here.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:07

Yeah, really great to have you on the podcast.

And you know, this is the second part of our two part special where we're sort of looking at sort of the nitty gritty, really, of like how an election can be organized and executed fairly. Sort of touching on a lot of the stuff that we've talked about before on the podcast in, I guess, more granular detail now.

So, daffodil, picking up on some of the things that were mentioned in our first part, actually, we touched on this idea of election interference and so the impacts that technology can have on an election, not just at the ballot boxes, but also throughout the campaigns.

So to sort of pick up on that, I'd really like to get your thoughts on how election interference can affect the integrity of an election, and specifically this election in the U.S. cool.

Dafydd Townley: 00:02:57

Where'd we start with that one, I suppose. I mean, I'm considerably older than you, Liam.

election system went back to: 2000

ms like a long time now since: 2016

And that's really just as an onlooker, never mind as somebody who participated in the election or is in many ways impacted by the result of it.

clearly had evidence in both: 2016

th in: 2021

e're set for another steal in: 2024

And that has a major impact on the integrity and the influence, whether it's domestic. We've seen a lot of domestic misinformation campaigns and disinformation campaigns and also foreign influence as well.

So I think in all, it really does undermine the US Democratic process, which, you know, is the enduring experiment of democracy. And if that is tarnished in any way, then to a certain extent, how does it make the rest of us look?

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:10

I mean, you mentioned voter confidence. And I wonder if sometimes just the. The assumption or the perception that that there is interference is enough to undermine that integrity.

There doesn't actually need to be happening, you know.

Dafydd Townley: 00:05:25

Yeah, you know, it's. I think, you know, we've seen from.

orian me now goes back to the: 1960

And so we have that continuing conspiracy theory. So if you think that something is going on, you're gonna be suspicious of it.

And I think you're absolutely right for many people that it doesn't need to happen if they think that it's happening. And if there are, and I have to say this carefully because I'm aware that somebody has more lawyers than I do.

If certain individuals will claim that the other side have cheated or are cheating, then it in turn will lead to things like January 6th, where people will, you know, we've spoken to people in America who are fearful not of November 5, but of November 6 and January, the period between November and January, what's going to happen, which is not how you should be in election. It should be, you know, people should be celebrating and proud who they vote for. And I do miss the days where our political leaders, like George H.W.

bush, who left that lovely letter to Bill Clinton saying, you are all of us Presidents now. You know, that we have leaders that can sort of shake hands and accept defeat graciously. I'm not sure that's going to happen this year. I don't know.

Emma Long: 00:06:55

What do you think feels strange to be nostalgic for what is a relatively recent past. Right. But it's true.

I mean, a big theme of this podcast in our past episodes has been just the growth of division in American politics and how that's just affected so many different aspects of both American cultural life, but political life as well, in this kind of sense that, you know, that the election, that the outcome of the election or the process of the election or the people running the election, that they can't be trusted, that the people that outside interference can't be trusted, that you can't then trust the, the result or that the candidates are legitimate.

And that's kind of pushing the way that the candidates respond to each other as well is, you know, it's happened relatively quickly in historical terms. Right.

Dafydd Townley: 00:07:48

How many Democrats would look back to the halcyon days of George W.

ow, in comparison to those of: 2017

rotests that were going on in: 2000

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:20

I do wonder, sort of from that, because this is a very unique election year, of course, but how has events like January 6th and just the whole MAGA Trump movement, and then on top of that, these fears of election interference and whether true or not, how is that shaping the electorate sort of demographically, because, you know, it feels like there's a whole generation and a whole demographic of people in America that have now been kind of galvanized to go to the polls that maybe weren't before.

Dafydd Townley: 00:08:51

I certainly think when I look at. So I'm not quite old enough to use Facebook regularly, but I'm old enough to use Twitter, sorry, X, regularly.

I'm not into Instagram, so I talk from an X perspective.

But I see a lot of young voters, by young voters, I mean those below the age of 30, probably even younger than that, who are more politically active, politically interested, which I think is great. First of all, let's, let's just, you know, politics needs discourse across the generation.

But in many ways, the tools that they use to engage in political discourse and to communicate are in many cases allowing them to be manipulated by certain platforms and certain users through deliberate propaganda and misinformation, disinformation campaigns to go a certain way.

So it's, it's not, you know, we'd like to think that everybody who is below the age of 25 is a Taylor Swift fan, is going to vote for Kamala Harris, but that's not going to be the case. If so, Kamala would be a shoo in, although I still think she'll win the public vote.

I do think, however, that, you know, that there are enough people out there who are especially young men. And we've seen certainly, you know, over the.

Certainly in October, we've seen attempts by both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to appeal to African American men, especially African American young men, because they don't go on those platforms. And so they in some ways are not getting communicated in the same way.

So I think we see some people are getting more involved and some people are certain, feel slightly disenfranchised because they're not on the right platform or they feel as though they're not spoken to.

I think to a certain extent that that is quite revealing about how societies in general, where we get our news from, who we communicate and how we communicate puts us in different groups.

rm that I've been using since: 2007

Liam Heffernan: 00:11:08

Think, I think they sort of almost contrast this sort of barrage of, you know, fake news, sorry to quote Trump, and sort of misinformation that's out there.

I mean, this election has now been coined the podcast election because Trump and Kamala are going out there and guesting on podcasts and having these really long form conversations where it actually feels like now maybe the problem isn't that we're sort of not getting an authentic impression of the candidates, but that we're not really talking about politics at all.

Dafydd Townley: 00:11:45

I think this is an election that is going to be decided on marginal gains in various places.

So you will see people going on places like Seth Rogen's show or, you know, other podcasts because they just, people will not necessarily be politically engaged, but they will recognize that person. And when they, you know, oh, I'll go and vote for that guy because he was quite funny on the show.

And I listened to, you know, I've got a 20, 20, almost 21 year old son who, you know, I had to steer away from certain podcasts because, you know, I had to say to him, well, there are other views, other views, sorry, other than those that you're listening to. And fortunately he did listen to me. That is not to just one podcast. So I think you find, I think you're quite right.

This is, the media has become engrossed in politicians as celebrities and the public in America has as well. It's less about politics.

I wrote a piece a couple of weeks ago about the vice presidential debate in which I was more than happy that these two people were actually speaking about policy.

It was not a debate where they were shouting and screaming at each other and they shook hands after the end of the now say what you like about the policies, you know, and I have said enough about the policies, so I'll leave that for another place. But it was actual discourse about policy and that is something that we've moved away particularly.

I don't think Trump is, I don't think Trump is the sole cause of it, but Trump is very much the result of the impact of, of that sort of, you know, we, we've criticized Biden for not having enough press conferences, not having enough, you know, celebrity endorsements, if you want to put it that way. But actually he's, he's busy being president. That's what he's supposed to be doing. Let him be president to a certain extent.

I mean, Nixon hardly did any campaign at one point. There's no, hardly any organization in, in 72. Of course, we know how uncorrupt that election campaign was, but there we go.

That's another story for another day.

Liam Heffernan: 00:13:59

Yeah, and I think all of that we're going to come back to when we sort of look at, you know, sort of the voter dynamics here in terms of who can or can't vote and why.

But before we get into that, Emma, I'm wondering If you can just wrap a little bit of context around this and actually kind of explain who is eligible to vote in the US election.

Emma Long: 00:14:24

Oh, yeah. Because if you listen to the discussion that's going on at the moment, there's a whole lot of, a whole lot of illegal immigrants voting. Right.

Who, who aren't eligible to vote and that this is going to turn the election. So let's, let's clarify when they're not.

Liam Heffernan: 00:14:37

Too busy eating everyone's pets, of course.

Emma Long: 00:14:39

Well, that's also true. Yes. Yeah. You know, you might find the time to cast two or three ballots just to stuff the ballot box. But seriously.

So the only people who can vote in US elections legitimately are US citizens, and that's American citizens, whether they are living at home in the US or they are living abroad. And that might be.

So, for example, I think coming up, we're going to be talking to some of our exchange students, right, who are here from the US who are for the first time experiencing the American election from abroad. I have a lot of American colleagues here who voted from abroad for years.

So they're civilians, but they're also of course, military personnel who are serving abroad. This first thing, you have to be a citizen to be eligible to vote. And there are lots and lots of checks when you register to vote. Right.

Not just when you register, but afterwards to make sure that you're eligible. This is not a kind of a free for all. I was trying to explain this to a friend of mine recently.

He was like, anybody can just turn up and register to vote. You're like, no, no, let me talk to you about this. You also have to be 18. You have to be 18 years old.

Some states allow 17 year olds who are registered to vote to vote in primaries, but to take to vote in the main election, you have to be 18 years old and you have to be registered. So that in itself is not so dissimilar from the uk, Right? You have to have to be registered to vote.

To be clear, they're like the categories of people. You have to be a citizen, you have to be 18 and you have to be registered. People who are excluded from voting.

Just for clarity, non citizens, even foreign citizens who live in the US with a green card, they are not allowed to vote in presidential or congressional elections.

Some states will allow them to vote in state level or like county elections because that's where they live, but they cannot participate in federal elections. Certain people who have been convicted of felonies can't vote. We might come and talk about Them in a little bit.

Some who've been deemed mentally incapable or mentally incapacitated can't vote. And there are actually some US Citizens who can't vote. So US Citizens who live in American overseas territories.

So Puerto Rico, Guam, the American Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and I think a couple of others. They are technically American citizens, but they're not eligible to vote in the. In US Elections.

So there are categories of people who are not eligible. The category of people who is. Is very clearly defined.

Liam Heffernan: 00:17:19

So if I could just sort of pick on the slight ambiguity there in that you can be a US Citizen living abroad and be eligible to vote, but if you're a US Citizen living in a territory, you're not eligible to vote.

Emma Long: 00:17:37

That's correct, yes.

Because historically, I mean, I'm not saying this is right, and there are periodic campaigns, right, for people, for citizens in these territories to be able to gain some kind of statehood or more recognition than they do.

But it's about sort of the legal relationship of American overseas territories to the American, sort of American mainland national, the country per se, that means that they're not eligible to vote.

Liam Heffernan: 00:18:09

Okay, that's very odd to me, but I guess they're the rules. Right?

Emma Long: 00:18:14

I was gonna say. I'm not defending the rules. I'm just. I'm just telling you what they are.

Liam Heffernan: 00:18:18

Yeah, of course. Sort of going back a little bit. So, okay, that, that's, that's who is and isn't allowed to vote. And what does the registration process look like?

Emma Long: 00:18:30

Oh, now, we've talked about this issue before in that it's almost impossible to generalize, because if you remember when we talked about the Electoral College and things, states control their own elections. Right. States require or. State requirements are set by the states, and they are different in different places, and some are stricter than others.

I was just talking to a colleague who's four offices down from mine who is a registered voter in Kentucky, and it took him well over five minutes to explain to me the registration process and his ability to be able to vote from abroad. So it can be complicated. Some states are very easy. You can. You turn up with your identification and you. You can get on the rolls.

In other states, you have to do a whole range of other things to be able to get voted. Some states have fewer now than it used to be. But in the end of the Clinton presidency, there was the big thing about the motor voter law.

Dafib might remember this, and it was kind of like the voter to try and make it easier for people to vote. You had two things. One, one, you could register when you went to get your driving l.

So you could register to vote at the dmv, the Department of Motor Vehicles, when you went to do that, because it made it more accessible for people who were going to do those things. And you got your ID with you because that was what you were there for.

And they also sort of campaigned for things like same day registration, so you could register on the day, on the election day, and then vote at the same time.

That's become much harder as these big concerns that we've been touching on have been raised about voter fraud and, you know, ineligible people voting. A lot of states have clamped down on that. So it's quite hard to generalize, I think.

And you have to look state by state, which actually gets a lot of Americans into trouble.

If they move from one state to another and they're not massively politically engaged, they may find that the process in the state that they've moved to is actually more complicated and they may end up unable to vote because they've not done all the. Not sort of done all the things that they needed to.

Liam Heffernan: 00:20:37

I want to touch on that sort of the complexity that you alluded to in sort of the different rules and the sort of the inconsistency sometimes between states.

It has been an issue historically, and it's one that's been touched on largely by the left, that minority groups and African Americans tend to have the rules working against them when it comes to voter registrations.

And even in accessing polling stations, that does cause not illegal issues, but certainly loopholes that enable certain demographics to vote a lot easier than others. Is that still an issue? I guess is my. Is my first question here.

Emma Long: 00:21:19

Sure it is, yeah. I mean, you hear these discussions in all kinds of places. And going back to what we were talking about before, sometimes it's really happening.

Sometimes it's a perception, perception that it's happening.

But the perception is just as important because if people think they're being discouraged to vote or it's going to be really hard, they may not go out and do it. But yeah, I mean, because each state regulates itself or sort of has its own rules and regulations for things.

I mean, clearly the: 1965

So at the moment, you've got early voting in some states, Georgia, North Carolina.

The defense of early voting is that it makes it easier for people who perhaps have sort of on zero hours contracts or on minimum wage shifts where they can't get the day off to or can't get time off from a shift to be able to work in the opening hours of the polls don't make it possible for them to vote. So you have early voting. It means people can go at their convenience. They may be more likely to vote.

If you don't have that, there are certain groups for whom voting then becomes harder. Where you place your polling stations. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but my local polling station is three minutes walk from my front door.

I think the furthest I've ever lived from one is about 10 minutes walk. But in the US it can be the decision about where you put them.

If you put them in a neighborhood where, you know, just to take an example, if you put a polling station in a wealthy white neighborhood and you have sort of Hispanic, black and Asian voters all having to go to that particular polling station in a neighborhood where perhaps they're not familiar with it or perhaps, you know, historically it's been seen as a no go area. Think about some of the places in the south and the Midwest, you might well make it harder for people to go and vote. There's also the practicalities.

You know, if you put a polling station a long distance away from people, if they don't have transport, if they don't have a car, if they don't have a friend who can take them, if you can't get to it by public transport, that impacts lower income groups who don't have the resources. So there are lots of things you can do that can make things easier or harder for people to vote.

And depending on those choices, it can affect different demographics of people.

Liam Heffernan: 00:23:55

Doesn't postal votes kind of mitigate all of those access issues though to polling stations?

Emma Long: 00:24:01

It would, but not all states allow it. And also again, talking to friends who post or voting in the US is complicated. Right?

You get a whole long sheet about, you know, you have to get your, in most places you have to get your signature, you have to sign it and you have to get your signature witnessed.

And then, you know, you have to fold the paper in the right way and put it in the envelope and make sure you sign it in the right place and do this and do that.

And the risk for people who post or vote, who may well be people for whom it is more difficult to vote in person, some of those rules and regulations people may fall foul of.

So I'M thinking about, you know, potentially the, you know, the elderly, sometimes the disabled, who often would vote by post, people who are perhaps alone and for whom actually it's difficult to get somebody to witness their signature. Right.

So yes, in theory, postal voting would offset that, but you can't do it everywhere and it's not as straightforward as my experiences of voting, postal voting here in the uk.

Liam Heffernan: 00:25:06

Okay, so Dafi, I'm sure you're about to shoot down how much I'm oversimplifying this next question.

But if postal voting and polling, sort of in person sort of voting at polling stations is problematic and creates these issues of access, wouldn't technology remove all of those barriers if people could vote electronically or. It just, it feels like there are solutions out there, but they're not just not being implemented.

Dafydd Townley: 00:25:39

You'd think, right? You think that, you know, that the world is all Star Trek, whereas actually it's Star Wars. You know, there's a dark side and a good look.

I think in an ideal world, yes, everything is really easy. We can sit at home, I have a button that we can press and everybody votes, you know, and, but the matter is that we, we don't have that.

And actually the more that electoral systems become reliant on technology, not just the actual voting system, but the storage of data, the actual how we, how we communicate, then the opportunity for, how can I say, bad actors.

I think that's probably the best way of phrasing it, whether they are domestic or foreign to interfere with the process increases and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, I.e.

weaknesses within networks or hardware that control or guide or are used in the electoral process, can really affect just not who is able to vote, but also how different demographics actually engage with the electoral process. So you might think, for example, on voter registration systems, you know, it's, you know, you might have a cyber attack.

And by cyber attack, I mean anything that is denies the use of or disrupts or disables any sort of database or network or website. Well, if you have something that, you know, the night before the election destroys the electronic voter registration system, what happens?

You know, well, chaos first of all, especially if you haven't got a backup system to replace it. You can have actually have targeted attacks where you remove certain individuals of the process.

Now if voters details because very different to us in the uk, you know, apart from probably a bit old now, but when I was a young lad, people went to the Labour club and you went to the Conservative club and you know that you've Sort of associated in that way. But in the US you are generally affiliated to either Democratic Party or the Republican Party. You have obviously independence.

But if you want to remove your opponent's support, well, why wouldn't you attack and remove their ability to vote off the system? You could have all sorts of attacks and ways of doing that. And then what about, you know, the idea of misinformation and disinformation?

in, I'm trying to think now,: 2016

And then the actual process on the day, what if there were lots of cyber attacks on the day that brought down the public transport system, that the electricity grid got hit? All of these things can affect.

And then you've got the actual process of, you know, some states, as Emma says, you know, the actual state voting system is very different. Some is still across in a box and across in a box and a piece of paper and you stick it in the book. There's a complete electronic tabulation systems.

Well, that's an easy thing, you know, and we've seen things like DEF Con, the big hackers convention that's done every year, where you see these hackers, you know, who sits 10ft away from these machines. They can hack into these machines in less than a couple of minutes, you know, and tell the machine what to do.

And somebody thinks they're voting for Donald Trump, but actually they're going to vote for Kamala Harris. The system, you know, but they get everything on the screen tells them they're voting for Donald Trump.

But I should like to say that that is just an example, not a prediction. So there's all sorts of ways that technology could make it better. You know, it could make it easier for those who are disabled or as Ms.

Says, have real access problems to get into the voting station. So why wouldn't you use that? Well, problem is that, number one, some states don't have the money to have good enough security to do that.

And that's something we'll talk about in a bit about the difference between state and federal issues.

But also, we've also seen something that's happened in Georgia this month where, you know, rather than have to count it all by hand because their concerns about so called electoral fraud, that Georgia is now going to accept an electronic count of their voter system, which means there won't be a delay in the actual count, but perhaps crucially for the Trump campaign could lead to them asking questions about the validity of the vote post November 5th. So, yeah, in an ideal world, yes, technology makes everything great. Realistically.

I mean, come on, how many, how many times has your phone crashed on you or your computer won't start up or you can't do that, you know, technology fails, it's, it's, it. But not all the time. But can you really put 100% confidence in electoral system on it working correctly? Not all the time.

Emma Long: 00:31:14

It's also worth pointing out, right, that rural America is underserved by the Internet.

So if you're thinking about kind of voting online, some kind of online voting system, there are big swathes of the us, surprisingly large parts of the US that have really unreliable Internet connection.

f in the same way that in the: 1930

It's a similar kind of debate.

So actually on one hand it should make it easier, but actually on the other hand, there's a whole group of Americans who are, would still be excluded by doing that.

And actually those for whom who are rural, you know, spread out, for whom actually some of these other issues, like locations of polling stations are equally problematic.

Liam Heffernan: 00:32:12

But I think, you know, going kind of full circle here, there is still a reality right now that there are always ongoing concerns of cyber attacks, of security threats from outside the US that are impacting the propaganda and the campaign materials that are out there. But also, you know, there are fears that, that could affect the election itself.

So this isn't really a hypothetical in terms of what would happen if the election sort of was digitized to an extent. There are already very real digital problems that are manifesting that need to be dealt with, right?

Dafydd Townley: 00:32:51

Oh, absolutely. But, you know, part of the problem is the federalised system in the United States. As Emil has already alluded.

The states are in control of the electoral systems at state level and they have a very different objective when it comes to processing the election to that of the federal government. The federal government, for example, is really looking mostly on national security. So it is looking for external threats.

know, that which happened in: 2016

And it's really looking at so of trying to prevent those hacks, foreign based disinformation campaigns and other cyber attacks that could undermine the integrity of elections. But across the entire country it's not looking at individual states as such.

Whereas state governments are really responsible for administrator administering elections within their own borders which as Emma already said, you know, decides how people register, how people vote. And their cybersecurity systems are generally inferior to that of the federal government.

The federal government complains it doesn't have enough qualified people to work its systems because cyber has expanded exponentially whilst the quality trained individuals haven't matched that growth.

So there's a shortage in the federal market certainly because most people go and work for the private companies because they get paid a lot more money. Why wouldn't you do the same job for 10 times the money? And it's something also the military is struggling with as well.

The state governments who pay even less than federal governments are struggling to get that same level of expertise that the federal government has.

So whilst they control things like the machinery and so on of electoral process, their actual governance of the cyber process is really about protecting voter registration databases and securing voter machines, which are not particularly good.

The federal government on the other hand, led by cisa, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, really is about including ensuring that critical infrastructure within the United States is protected. And this includes the electoral process. But it does it in an advisory, pros, advisory position. It doesn't for example, tell them what to do.

So whilst the federal government can set standards that are required across all the states, states just have to meet that standard. They don't have to, you know, go over but, and most of them can't afford to do it. And so that's a very different perspective on it.

And for many states the, you know, the threats that they face are reasonably small in comparison to that the federal government, but they're just as important.

So say for example, you know, the swing states in this election, if three of their, if three of their electoral systems are hacked on November 5th, that could have a major impact on the election outcome.

However, three out of 50, from a federal government point of view that that's reasonably, you know, if it was 47 out of 50, they would probably look at this as being the entire election. Three out of 50 will probably just run the three events, three events again.

But you know, it is, you know, you're right, there are very real problems.

However, I do think that the biggest problems that we have in this election are around misinformation and disinformation and these are vast majority of which are promoted by digital means, social media.

And without our political leaders stepping forward and saying this is wrong or this is not true and those who support such matters matters, I think that it would continue. And how do you stop that? Well, that's a debate that is, that has been going on since the early part of this century.

You know, how do you control social media and how do you control the stuff that you got on there? X As I mentioned, since Elon Musk has, you know, removed a great deal of the number of barriers to people being restricted from broadcasted on there.

Not just all on the right, political right, but you know, a lot more than that, than those on the left.

And I think that that is, you know, not helpful to the situation and they have to be held account and not because I'm a critic of Elon Musk either, but because I think that it just needs to stop. You know, they have a responsibility in the same way that a newspaper editor has a responsibility as well for what is put in their newspaper.

They might not write it, but they're responsible for it.

Liam Heffernan: 00:37:48

Emma, kind of going back to this idea of the ambiguity and the loopholes that are in the rules just to sort of think of a parallel here.

During a court case, there's a lot of limitations over what can be reported about what's going on in a trial and what you can say because it might impede the course of justice being fair and proper.

It doesn't seem when we consider these sort of digital factors and, you know, social media and all the misinformation, it doesn't seem like the same rules are in effect for an election campaign. Why is that? And surely that's going to affect the election.

Emma Long: 00:38:28

That's a really big question. I mean, if you think about a, think about a trial legal case, you're talking about the idea of due process and the idea of a failure fair trial.

And the concept of a fair trial has existed in law for really for centuries. Even if it's not been done in practice and even if definitions of what a fair trial mean have changed over that time.

The concept at least of a fair trial has been in place for a very long time.

The concept of a fair election is, when you think about it, relatively new and you think about what that means and whether that's the extent of the franchise and who has the right to vote or the introduction of the secret ballot, which in the US doesn't happen until the early part of the 20th century, or the kind of the crackdown on things like buying votes with the party machines, that's absolutely rife in the early part of the 20th century.

So our definitions of what constitutes a fair election and whether it, you know, this idea of a fair election and, you know, what is fair game and what isn't has never been codified in the same way that the idea of a fair trial has. So everybody has a different vision of what it is.

And I think if you ask people about it in a general sense, I think you would get widespread agreement that they shouldn't interfere. You know, there shouldn't be interference.

And people have the right to make up their own mind and to have access to information to be able to do that and that they should be able to vote, you know, without too many obstacles getting in the way. The problem is when you go from that, those general principles to, well, how do you enact that? What's, what's an obstacle to someone voting, right.

Is having to make somebody drive an hour across town to a polling station. Is that an obstacle for someone?

Well, if you've got a car and a job where you can take a couple of hours off to go do it, no, it's not an obstacle at all.

If you don't have a car, live in a rural area, and you don't have the, there's no public transport, you don't have money for a bus, that's a pretty big obstacle for someone.

And these debates about what and particularly in the US Context, and actually, I was talking about this with my students this morning because we were talking about free speech and free press. Right.

The First Amendment in the US Protects an awful lot of stuff that I think in maybe other countries, they would be looking to regulate a little bit more.

And that question of what constitutes simply someone sharing their opinion and their views, which would be protected by the First Amendment and what constitutes electoral interference.

So at the moment, for example, just thinking about the story that's in the news as we record it, record this, you know, Elon Musk seems to have tied himself to the Trump campaign. Right.

And there's this, this new thing where I saw the headlines this morning, where he's offering voters in Pennsylvania sort of indirectly, this lottery to be part.

So if they, you know, if they register to vote and, and kind of register on the website, then, you know, there'll be in a lottery to get to win money for having registered to vote. Well, it's it. You know, it's.

There are some big questions like law scholars are raising questions about whether this actually breaks the law about paying people to register to vote, which is very clearly illegal across the states.

But the interesting thing is that the right has been yelling about election interference by things that the Democrats are doing right or have done or have been seen to be doing. No one on the right is yelling at Elon Musk for election interference.

But whether you see it that way or not, it's kind of the equivalent of the kinds of things that Republicans have been criticizing Democrats for doing. So that question of what is and isn't electoral interference, even if you could write a law for it, to some extent, is in the eye of the beholder.

Dafydd Townley: 00:42:35

Yeah.

Liam Heffernan: 00:42:35

And when we talk about this mentioned earlier about things like the proximity of polling stations and the confusing nature of postal votes, well, the rules that determine that and the people that are making those decisions are still in you applying their discretion as to what is and isn't fair and appropriate to set those boundaries and in some instances put up barriers that make it easier or harder for certain people to vote.

Paying people to register to vote, it comparatively feels less interfering in someone's ability to cast a vote than putting a polling station unfeasibly far away. Right.

Dafydd Townley: 00:43:21

I sort of agree. But Musk has made a complete error because he hasn't ruled out Democrats registering on this for this PAC as well and going to vote.

So he sort of shot himself in the foot to a certain degree. And Democrats are encouraging their voters to register with for a chance to win this money.

But I absolutely, you know, I completely agree with what Emma said. You know, what is good for one person is going to be bad for the other.

So Donald Trump will say a lot of spurious things that are, shall we say, dubious in the nature of their veracity, shall we say.

And then he will go on a week later on another program, say, yeah, I may have said some things and that's sort of half an apology for something that he's, you know, that he's claims is very much true, which isn't.

And in today's world, especially with social media, it only needs something for misinformation to be on social media for 2 minutes, 3 minutes and it spreads very quickly.

Look what happened in this country in the summer around the attack in Southport, for example, you know, that what was there on social media disappeared straight away.

I would like to see some sort of regulation of social media that if, you know, it either has to be apolitical or if it promotes one political party, it has to give the same amount of time to another political party, which I think the news channels have to do. The major news channels, Fox News doesn't have to do it because it's not classed as a news channel. It's an entertainment channel.

So it doesn't have to give the same amount of time to the other side. But it was interesting that, you know, that it's.

I really do struggle to see how Americans fall for a lot of these tricks year in year eight, but they do. And I think that, you know, when we talk about interference, when does a campaign, you know, go back to. I think it was the 88 campaign.

Was it with Dukakis around? The, the guy who was released on Willie Horton, thank you very much. Yeah, Willie Horton. I knew, I knew the law scholar would come in on that.

But, you know, that, you know, he was released on day release and went. And he was released by Dukakis when he was governor, you know, and that proved that he was against law and order.

Well, that's not true, but it's how you paint it. Well, how, how different is that for somebody who's saying they're eating animals up in Springfield? Well, they are.

They're eating geese, Donald Trump eventually went on to say. Or chickens. Well, yeah, they would eat geese and chickens because those are sort of normal things to eat, you know.

And in fact, squirrels are pretty normal in some parts of America to eat. So I think it is, it's that gray area of what is true, what is untrue or sorry, between those areas of order and how you regulate it.

Extremely, extremely difficult. Perhaps we do need a First amendment of social media. I'd be all for that.

But then I think you probably see all the servers leaving the United States setting up somewhere else to be outside the United States control. So I think that this is, whilst this is a particularly major influence on this election, it's an important revelation, I think, to the world about.

This is something that affects, affects every election around the globe now.

And it needs to be, you know, it needs to be not controlled, but certainly there needs to be some sort of regulation put in to stop so that we can have free and fair.

Liam Heffernan: 00:46:49

Elections, you know, to sort of wrap all of this up and try and bring it to some sort of coherent close. Everything that we've talked about in the last 40 odd minutes.

And Emma, you're going to hate me for asking this because you don't like when I ask about the future. But. And what, what does A good election look like.

Emma Long: 00:47:07

Oh, I don't know. That's a question about the future. That's a kind of redesign of everything. I mean.

I mean, I think a good election as opposed to a perfect one, which I think, you know, when you're dealing with human beings and the realities of the world around us, that is not controllable, perfect probably isn't possible.

But a good election, I would think, is one where there are few barriers for people who want to register to vote, to register to vote, and who want to vote to be able to get out and vote. I think that's the first point. Right. The ability to do that.

Good election, I mean, in an ideal world, would be one where candidates, instead of throwing insults at each other, actually discuss policies and actually find a way to inform. Inform the public about the differences between the policies. Because nobody's saying, right. That you can't disagree on policy issues.

That's the basis of politics for centuries. Right. But it's about the spinning and how you put that there.

So the way in which campaigns are conducted, and I think thinking about Daffod's point here, which is sort of an angle I've been less familiar with, but as we become more reliant on digital technology, either for enacting elections or storing data. Right.

Really rigorous protections for those that states and governments across the world actually need to take seriously to avoid the corruption of that kind of data. I mean, sort of off the top of my head, I think those would be the things that I'd be looking for.

Ask me in 10 minutes when we finished recording, and I'm going to have a whole long list of other things that I would have added to that. But for now, that's. That's what I've got.

Dafydd Townley: 00:49:00

If I was to be asked that, I think. I think no, repeat of January 6th, I think that's a start.

Okay, so let's have an election where the losing side accepts the result and welcomes the result, should we say not welcomes it, but should we say doesn't stir up antagonism towards the opponent, which I think. Well, yeah, I think. I think we're going to expect that.

We're going to expect if the Democrats lose, I think there'll be a begrudging acceptance of that, and people will be fearful of what's going to happen. And there will be protests, just as there were when Trump was inaugurated.

However, if Trump loses, you might one expect more violent protests than we've seen so far. You might see quite big regional differences in acceptance of that result.

So you might have, you know, I'm not going to talk about cessation but you know, there might be states that start questioning. I mean Trump was even mentioning, you know, why don't we just break away.

I think at one point I, for me, I think like I'd like to have an election where everybody is able to vote, everybody is involved.

A perfect election is where people debate the issues and people are elected on issues and on policies, Sorry, not on issues, but on policies and that president is supported on those policies. It might have been a completely different world had 9, 11 not happened. Because that was a unifying factor for many Americans behind George W. Bush.

You know, people have short memories and forget how vilified he was by the political left up until that point. And even after that, you know, he was begrudgingly accepted but politically everybody got behind him.

Let's hope that there's not a need for an event like that, you know, to unify people behind the next president.

But no, I think it's one where people are involved, where the result is accepted and where people hopefully can start to work on some sort of government of consensus again where both sides work together rather than two sides trying to stop each other getting any policy through whatsoever. You know, Biden was elected because he reached cross the chamber on several times in his career. He had an appeal. Harris doesn't have that yet.

And people are talking about, you know, well, I'm not too sure about voting for her. Well, if you don't vote for her, in fact you're voting for Trump. Yeah, but I don't like him either.

So if you don't vote for her, you are sort of voting for Trump. So I think that she doesn't have that peel that Biden had. I'd like to see an America that is divided on policies and, and not an ideology.

Liam Heffernan: 00:51:52

Yeah. The wise words to wrap up the episode Dafi.

And thanks so much to yourself and as always to Emma for joining me for this discussion which I think was inevitably going to have an open endedness to it.

As this goes out, people are voting and when most people listen to this episode, maybe there'll be a result, maybe there won't be, but it will certainly be a slightly different looking America than it was at the time that we're recording this. So I'm sure there'll be much to catch up on in future episodes.

For anyone that has enjoyed this conversation, we'll leave some useful links in the show notes so that you can learn more. So do check out those. But if anyone wants to connect with either of you directly, where can they do that?

Dafydd Townley: 00:52:33

Dafyd, you can find me on X under the rather Welsh sounding Haneseth, which is Welsh for historian. So if you can't remember how to spell it, just look at what Welsh for historian is. Or you can find me under LinkedIn and sure, hit me up.

Or find me under the University of Portsmouth brand somewhere. I'm sure I'm on their pages somewhere.

Liam Heffernan: 00:52:55

You are indeed.

Emma Long: 00:52:56

And Emma, as regular listeners will know, I issue all forms of social media, so the best way to find me is through the UEA web pages where my email is there. You can get in touch with me that way.

Liam Heffernan: 00:53:11

Wonderful. And you can find me on X as well. Still hanging on in there at ThisIsThe Hef. And you can find me on LinkedIn too.

If you enjoy this podcast, do just take 10 seconds at your data, leave us a rating and a review wherever you're listening and give us a follow as well so that all future episodes appear magically in your feed. Thank you so much for listening to this and if you are in America now, go and vote please and we'll see you on the other side.

Dafydd Townley: 00:53:36

Ra.