Thank you all for being here. Sorry about the cold weather. Were here because with the controversy over president trumps refusal to accept the results of the 2020 president ial Election Results, our country has entered some precedented unprecedented territory. Voter registration and public trust in Election Results are on the radar screen and away they have never been before in our lifetimes. One of the questions on the midterm ballot this fall is how our democracy itself will weather the storms. We are here to discuss that today with a true expert on these issues, sean moralesdoyle, director of the Voting Rights program at the Brennan Center for justice. Hes a seasoned litigator with experienced civilrights and constitutional matters, and has handled a wide variety of labor and employment cases. He got his undergraduate and law degree from northwestern university. Sean, thank you for being here. So, a lot has happened since election day 2020. Lets start with voter access. Your center issued a report a couple weeks ago showing between january of 2021 and last month, at least 21 states enacted 42 laws that restricted access the voting in some way. Of those 33 in effect for the midterms that are happening in a couple of weeks. What shape do these laws take and how the will they affect the process we will go through as a country . Sean the shape they take varies from state to state. Not all these laws are the same. There are some trends. The majority of these new restrictive laws target male voting mail voting and put restrictions on voting by mail. I think that is a reaction and a demonstration and illustration of the fact many of these laws are reaction to the 2020 election. In 2020, as many of you probably know, we saw a shift towards a lot more mail voting because we were in the height of the coronavirus pandemic and many voters felt less comfortable going to the polls. Many states expanded access to mail voting in 2020 many people took advantage of that. In large part, because people were able to access voting by mail and other forms of voting in 2020, we saw record turnout in 2020, more than we have seen in a century of president ial elections. That turnout happened for a lot of reasons, but i think it was possible because of the access voters had to options like mail voting. Rather than seeing the response to that massive turnout being a celebration that we had americans participating in our democracy like never before, unfortunately we have seen a bit of a backlash. That backlash has been unabated by animated by lies about the vulnerability of our Voting System to fraud. About the 2020 election supposedly being rigged. It has motivated this state of new restrictions, many of which are aimed at mail voting. There are plenty of other restrictions as well but that is the primary focus. What effect it will have in 2022 is hard to know for sure. But we have already seen some clear examples of the effect it might have. Perhaps the best example, the most clear example of the kind of affect one of these provisions could have with regard to mail voting is in texas. Texas is among the states that passed these restrictive laws. S. B. 1 is really an omnibus bill that contains many restrictions on voting. One of those, just one of those many restrictions is a new rule in texas that you have to put either your drivers license number or the last four digits of your Social Security number on both your mail ballot application and on your ballot when you return your mail ballot. I think that requirement sounds at first brush like not that big of a hurdle to clear, either putting down your license or last four of your Social Security. But it resulted in thousands and thousands of applications being rejected in the march primary alone. And the reasons why are many. One is the way this works is you put down your number, you mail in your application, and that number is matched up with your Voter Registration record. If it doesnt match, your application is rejected. But if you registered to vote using your drivers license number and when you fill out your mail ballot, you put the last four of your Social Security, no match. Vice versa, same problem. Or if you registered it while back when you did not have to put either of those things down , then you wouldnt have either in your record and your application gets rejected. On the mail ballot that you fill out, on the envelope is where you put down this number but that cannot be on the outside of the envelope for everyone to see. It is underneath the flap to keep it private. And a lot of people just missed it. The way these things work is not always obvious to people. Just that one little restriction that ever sounds like is not much literally lead to thousands of peoples votes being rejected in just the march primary. That can give you a taste of what it looks like when we have many provisions, many laws across the country in november. Not all of them will have that severe of an impact. Some of them will be less than that. But when these restrictions are layered on top of one another, restriction after restriction, and voters are having to adjust to new rules they didnt have to follow just one election ago, i think we could see serious impacts. Ill just finished by saying it wont always come in the form of voters being rejected and outright disenfranchised. Some of it is just about the costs that are imposed on voters when they are trying to exercise their fundamental right to vote. That means theres a lot of work that has to be done to help people clear those hurdles. They may end up clearing them, but all of the work that could be done to just turn out the vote, get people engaged, and see that turnout like we did in 2020, so much of that now has to go towards helping people clear these hurdles. We should care about that too, both because it ultimately detracts from just getting people excited about voting, but because i think if someone waits in line for eight hours to vote, they may be willing to do it. We should not be ok with the fact they have to. In fact, going through that experience this time may have a real effect in elections down the road. Gerald let me offer the devils advocate argument. I think what people advocating these laws would say is that it was necessary to respond to what happened in 2020 when election procedures were changed on the fly to some extent in many places because of the need to hold a National Election during a pandemic, and that the changes that were made were not systematic and there was a need to tighten up the process. And thats a logical and understandable reaction to what happened in 2020. Are they wrong in saying that . Sean i would say, by and large, yes, they are wrong. Part of the reason is that most of these restrictions are not what you are describing. Texas did not rapidly expand mail voting. Some states did. Texas did not. It has some of them most restrictive mail voting. They just added more restrictions on top. There was not a problem with people returning ballots. So, so much of these so many of these researches are aimed at solving a problem that didnt exist. We actually looked at the litigation that followed the 2020 election and many people have heard now as a result of the january 6 committee, there were some 60 lawsuits filed by the Trump Campaign and allies to try to resist the outcome of the president ial election, and they didnt go anywhere because for the most part, they were entirely baseless. They put forward these conspiracy theories that have now turned into widespread disinformation about the election. We traced those conspiracy theories through to the restrictive legislation that is being introduced in 2021 to see how many times the conspiracy theorists pushed forward an in a state in 2020, do we see legislation that is addressing that Conspiracy Theory . It was quite prevalent. In almost every state where this was happening, we saw those kinds of socalled problems being addressed in the legislation in 2021. So many of these bills are not addressing real gaps in the system. They are addressing problems that were made up in an attempt to resist the outcome of the 2020 election. I do think that there are ways our election system can be improved. I just dont think most of these new restrictive laws are actually aimed at doing that. Gerald how would you describe the character of the voter fraud problem in the country . How much is there really and what form does it take . Sean we so often hear the word voter fraud and i think people use that to describe many different things. Voter fraud is vanishingly rare, almost never happens. And certainly does not happen at a rate that will impact the outcome of major elections like a president ial election. But, we do sometimes see misconduct in elections. It does not tend to be voters who are engaged in it. Sometimes political campaigns do bad things. I think maybe the most prominent example in recent memory was in North Carolina in 2018. A candidate for congress, his campaign was tempering with peoples mail ballots. That is a problem. It is also a good example of the fact that when people do things like that, they get caught, they get prosecuted. That election outcome was not certified because of this misconduct. We actually do have a lot of checks in our system to ensure that people cant get away with that kind of thing. And so, occasionally, someone in a position of power, a political candidate engages in misconduct. Even that is fairly rare. But the idea that there is some sort of widespread conspiracy among voters to cast ballots in someone elses name or cast ballots when they are ineligible, that is extraordinarily rare. It makes sense that it is because the sort of calculus does not really make a lot of sense. Going and casting one pallet for somebody else ballot for somebody else when that is a felony offense you are likely to get caught for an prosecuted and prosecuted, what is the motivation . You are not really going to change the outcome of an election that way. Instead, you will put yourself in serious risk of prosecution. Gerald let me ask you to address one law as a case study that captured a lot of attention, the georgia law which did restrict voter access in some ways. Proponents argue that was overstated. It makes registering to vote harder in some ways but also requires drop boxes for early ballots, expands the early voting period, and reduces the window for requesting an early ballot down to three months. What is your reaction to those arguments . Sean i think some of what happened in the way of that legislation being crafted is that they it mandates drop boxes but limits how many of them you can have in a particularly county. You can say we are mandating drop boxes but the reality is these large counties, the number of drop boxes are dwindling down to a small amount. Some of this is just semantics and people playing games with the pieces they want to highlight. The pieces you highlighted then leave out Something Like the line ban. It makes it a criminal offense to provide someone with water and snacks while they are waiting in line in a state that has a history of very long lines. Its also true theres a difference between deciding not to expand access to voting and restricting access to voting. What i mean by that is a state that decides that they will keep their 30day period for applying for a ballot rather than expanding it is probably doing less harm than a state that had a 60day period and cut it down to 30. Voters get used to the way they are able to cast their ballot. Taking away early voting is going to have more of a negative impact than deciding not to offer more early voting, if that makes sense. So, i do think that those restrictions matter even if georgia started from a more expansive position. I think what is interesting about s. B. 2 in georgia is that georgia has had a fairly expansive mailin Voting System for a long time. Far more expensive than the new york and many of its neighbors. In that anybody could cast a ballot by mail and that is not true all over the country, certainly not texas. They didnt seem to have a problem with it until 2020 when a lot more voters started using mail voting and a different set of voters started using mail voting. There was a major shift in that it emboldened the partisan makeup of who was voting by mail but also the demographics. Far more black voters relied on mail voting. The response is that is where we will restrict access to mail voting. Making it more painful to wait in long lines. Research has demonstrated that voters of color are much more likely to wait in long lines. These restrictions seem to be targeting the voting of certain communities. There was a proposal in georgia that ended up not making it into the law because of how much of a reaction it received to get rid of voting on sundays. That matters in georgia because theres a long history of black communities using sunday voting through souls to the polls initiatives to get people out of the polls on sunday. Targeting sunday voting is a very particular choice. That is why the department of justice is suing georgia for intentional race discrimination for passing the law. I think, as i said before about this texas law, some of these restrictions may not on their face sounds so imposing to people, but part of what is happening here, the way restrictions work on voting in 2022, it is not the same as the way this happened in the jim crow era. These are not the blood tools of that era just this infringing wide swaths of the community. There are still examples of that, like felony disenfranchisement. More often than not, we sometimes talk about death by a thousand cuts. It is little restrictions layered on top of restrictions on top of restrictions. And the way that those interact with one another, it often creates this sort of byzantine system for people to navigate in order to cast a ballot. It does not disenfranchise everybody, but an ox enough people out here and there. One of the other things that happened is there have been changes in the way elections are certified and who decides the winner and who declares the winner, who certifies the results. That is perhaps an equally controversial part of the georgia law and other places. Gerald what is going to be different and is anything about that process were you, about this years midterm elections . Will decide who won and who lost . Sean i am not so worried about that for 2022. But there are some caveats to that. I am worried about that a little bit for 2024. We did see in addition to you referenced earlier about the restrictive laws passed around the country. The Brennan Center has tracked every piece of state legislation and every state legislature affecting Voting Rights. Weve historically always categorize those as either restrictive laws, expansive laws, or neutral laws. They make it harder to vote, expand access to vote, or they are just changes to the rules and dont do either. We did see this unprecedented wave of restrictive legislation in 2021 and 2022. Also expansive legislation, that tended to be in different states. But in 2021 for the first time, we saw this new category of legislation that we did not have a name for that was aimed at changing, like you said, the process for how elections work. And it didnt necessarily make it harder to vote but it might change who is in control of the count. It may create a higher risk of partisan actors playing a role in the administration of elections. So this year for the first time, we comprehensively tracked that in our Voting Rights tracker, our roundup. And we actually saw just as many of what we call election interference laws passed in 2022 as restrictive laws. That does give me concern, but i will say the worst of those laws have not passed. There was a bill introduced in arizona that would have given the Arizona State legislature the power to reject the outcome of elections. Thats crazy. The arizona leadership in the legislature agreed and they did not let that bill get anywhere. They reverted to every single committee so it would not go anywhere. This bill in texas, the predecessor to that which came literally hours from passing, s. B. 7, it only did not pass because the democrats in the Texas Legislature walked out and killed the bill basically. It contained a provision that was called overturning elections. That was the title written into the bill. It would have given judges, partisan judges the power to reject the outcome of election even without proof there was an issue that should have called into question the outcome of the election. The next day after the democrats walked out and broke q uorom, the legislatures responsible for it started backtracking, saying we dont know how it got in there. The entire house already voted for it so they did in fact support Something Like that. I think they realized just how bad it looked and maybe some of them did not realize what was in this bill. Most terrifying changes to the rules have not passed. The ones we have seen pass sort of tweak the system in more indirect ways. Senate bill 202 in georgia and other laws that changes who is in control of county Election Administrations. Some counties change it in a way that makes Election Administration more partisan. They give the state more power to remove county Election Officials. That is a concern because of the risk it creates for somebody to do something wrong in the future. Whats troubling about 2024 is that now we see many people running for office to be Election Officials, to be the people that run elections who themselves denyy the outcom of the last election and say some pretty scary things about future elections. If the people who run our elections dont believe in democracy, then we are in a scary place. Gerald i obviously want to come back that to that. I want to make note of one thing you made note of briefly which has gone unnoticed, there have been some states that have done the opposite. They have actually expanded access to voting. Your report said at least 12 states have enacted 19 laws that expand access to the vote. Where is that happening and what is its meaning for this years election . Sean its happening in a lot of places. Unfortunately, as i said before, there is not often overlap between who is expanding access and it was restricting access. We have these diversion trends in different parts of the country that are maki