You want to ask rick a number of questions about the book and talk with him about it, and then want very muchn to get your questions so please be sure to send that in to the youtube chat. Rick, i find the title of the book quite provocative and you call it cheap speech. What do you mean by cheap speech . First let meti think the Commonwealth Club for putting this forum together. I wouldve hoped we would at this time be doing it in person but hopefully next time were together having a conversation we will be able to do facetoface. And thank youor as always for agreeing to be the interlocutor here. So the term cheap speech is not mine. Its a term that originates with a professor at law school. He wrote an article back in 1995 where he was talking about the coming information revolution. In many ways quite a prescient conversation, a discussion in that piece. He talked about things like what we would now see as the rise of netflix and spotify. He knew that what was going to happen is we are going to move from a trickle of speech, Something Like your few local tv and radio stations and your local newspapers and if you national newspapers, to aas flod of information and he knew this was going to make intermediaries like newspapers less important. He was optimistic about it so what he meant by cheap speech was cheap that it is inexpensive to produce and disseminate. We have that world and theres a lot of benefits to that world. You can get the knowledge and a palm of your hand with your smartphone. But but, i mean, cheap speecha second less positive way as well. I mean that we have as we have eliminated intermediaries and made speech move more easily, move to a world where lower valued speech, thats the other cheap speech, has an advantage over higher valued speech. So what i mean by that is if youre a local newspaper today and youpp want to investigate whats happening in city o hallr whats happeninge in county government oryo state governmen, its very expensive to do that work. You have to pay a lot of people, takes a lot of time and effort, and you have to sell newspapers to gethe that out there and because of the changing economics of the whole situation, local newspapers have been decimated. They dont carry classified advertising or advertising like they used to before. Its really hard to get good information out there because people are not supporting these local newspapers. Whats happenings instead is tht its very easy to spread misinformation, disinformation, opinions not backed by any facts. This is just lower valued speech was as an advantage in the market, and voters were trying, who are trying to get reliable information about politics or having a harder time because they dont know if what theyre saying is true or false. Just this week we saw stories about how there are these false news sites that really propaganda outfits set up by the Democratic Party, the Republican Party or the allies, some setup by the government of russia to look like local news but to give people propaganda and sometimes misinformation. We are in a world where the speech is cheap, if was easily but is not necessarily what voters really would value from being able to have easy access to. The problems with regarded chief speech. You just alluded to some of them, but could you elaborate more on what you see as the harms from what you call cheap speech so the book i should say. Id written a full draft of the book and i think you had given mements on that. And this was well over a year ago. And then after i had a first draft in which i warned of the dangers of disinformation about elections in particular and how it could lead to violence we had the events of january 6 2021 where the president of the United States aged people on to come to washington dc after perpetuating a kind of incessant lie about the election being stolen and this led to the insurrection of the capital as we all know led to the deaths of some people 140 Police Officers injured and i think as the news comes out. We know we came much closer to the loss of the peaceful transition of power in this country. Then people recognized one of the claims i make in sheep speech is that if we had the same polarized politics of today, but the technology of the 1950s that kind of situation where our democracy came perilously close to ending would have been much harder to achieve donald trump was able to go to twitter over 400 times between november 3rd on election day in november 19 less than three weeks later to directly speak to the American People on the world making his false claims about the election being stolen that those claims were not filtered if he would have done that in the 1950s. He wouldnt have been put on tv 400 times. His claims would have been put in context. He wouldnt have just had an open mic and now we have the open mic and not only that the internet allowed for people and we know this from some documents that were released in connection. Criminal investigations. Thats january 6 that people saw the be wild message come to dc and they used facebook groups to find each other and to organize for violent political action. And so one of the main problems is that that i detail in sheep speech is that this atmosphere could create disinformation about elections which undermines peoples confidence in elections makes it more likely that theyre not going to accept the lecture results legitimate. They might be willing to bend the rules next time to try to even the score they might be more willing to accept violence. And so those are you know, some of the very urgent kinds of of problems that arose the book talks about other ones as well such as the fact that if you are a Margery Taylor green, youre going to have a much easier time raising money than if youre a moderate political candidate you can go directly to vote if you dont have to rely on your Political Party anymore, so its not just newspapers that have been undermined. Its political. So were in a situation of high partisanship but weak political parties, which makes room for demagogues. So these are some of the concerns that i address at the beginning of the book. Let me play devils advocate for a moment. I wonder with regard to january 6th, if youre not blaming the messenger whether the medium is really responsible. I mean donald trump was going to claim that he properly won the election even if there wasnt the internet and social media, he was gonna file all of his lawsuits and even the Mainstream Media was going to pick up that and conservative Media Conservative talk radio was certainly going to get the message for him. I wonder if you can blame the medium for donald trump for those who wanted to follow him. Well, so the first thing id say is that my claim is not just about social media itself cable news plays a major role here, but cable news is part of the problem. That is we dont have a Walter Cronkite anymore who can tell us what the truth is and we can believe them because hes abiding by journalistic ethics. So its not just that their social media. Its that we have partisan political media that i think is in a kind of feedback loop with social media amplifying the false claims and i think it would have been much harder for donald trump to have organized people and for those people to have found each other and so right now today, there are millions of people in the United States who believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Ive been studying elections for more than two decades. I looked very closely at the 2020 election. Theres no reason to believe theres any credible evidence that the results of the president ial election were different than those that were reported anywhere else and yet not only do vast majorities of republicans believe the election was stolen in part because trump was able to to you know, repeatedly spread these messages, but also cnn poland september found that 59 of Republican Voters say that believing the false claim that the 2020 election stolen is an important part of what it means to be a republican. I dont think that those kinds of messages were what have been as likely to resonate without the ability to spread these kinds of lies unchecked and unfiltered. Let me play devils advocate in another way as well your book very much focuses on the harms of chiefs speech. These are things you were just talking about. But what about all the benefits of cheap speech in some ways . Were in the golden age of freedom of speech that it used to be in order to reach a mass audience to be rich enough to own a newspaper get a broadcast license. Now weve really democratized the ability to reach a mans audience anyone with a smartphone or access to a modem can do so is you alluded to earlier theres the ability to Access Unlimited information just from our phones. Why i believe that the harms of chiefs speech outweigh these benefits. So i dont think you need to claim that the harms outweigh the benefits. I think you just need to recognize that there are significant harms and i do recognize that there are great benefits if you think about george floyd and the Racial Justice movement the ability to post videos of Police Acting in ways that are illegal and immoral that helps to galvanize a movement too that help people to organize and im not saying the bad outweighs the good overall what im saying . Is that that whats happened has created a challenge to our elections. And so i know were gonna turn to solutions later, but i think its important to point out now because the day after my book came out there were headlines at both fox news and the daily mail saying professor calls for censorship and they obviously not read my book because the only speech that i argue in the book, that should be limited our lies about when were and how people vote which the Supreme Court a 2018 case that is perfectly acceptable to limit and we can talk about that. And foreign spending which the Supreme Court has on elections, which the Supreme Court is that is perfectly well implement. What i want to do is give voters tools to be able to get access to more valuable information so we dont have to to accept that the that there are many problems with how voters get information. They we dont have to agree that the bad outweighs the good we just have to see that there are significant negative outcomes as i say in the book. I dont think any of us would want to go back to a time where if you dont like what the New York Times prince youre only option really to get the word out is to send a letter to New York Times and just hope that it among hundreds of others would be printed. Its great that we can get additional conversations going but its a doubleedged sword because it also invites the kind of dangers that weve been talking about. I think would be good to transition to talking about your solutions and as we look at them think about are you right . Will they make the situation better or might it make it worse just for those who are watching. Im ruinter morinsky from berkeley law and the great pleasure of talking to rick hassan the chancellors professor of launch local science a university of california irvine and foremost expert on election law in the United States. What i specially liked about the book rick is how detailed you are with regard to the potential solutions. Let me some of them you see change Election Administration. Its the first one that you talk about in the book. What do you mean . Well, so the first thing i should say just to frame it is that i believe that there are changes in the law that would make things better. But that changes in the law are not enough even if we get everything enacted that i propose which is you know, a long shot and even if the Supreme Court accepted everything i said, which is i think doubtful given the current supreme. Or it still wouldnt be enough. So when i talk about solutions, yeah to recognize that. This is a multifaceted problem. It requires multifaceted solutions. No one theres no one magic bullet to deal with these kinds of problems and i do recognize that its kind of odd in a book thats focused on speech to talk about how elections are run. And what i mean there is that one way to take the fuel out of the the fire is to run elections in a fair way. And so there are some people are going to be convinced and want to be convinced that the 2020 election was stolen, but there are a larger number of people in the middle who say okay if thats your claim as as the courts did show me your evidence. And so if you run a sloppy election, and ive written two earlier books one called election meltdown. Ill call the voting wars where i point out that when you have slack in Election Administration when elections are administered poorly. Of then theres room to claim fraud and it becomes more plausible when you hear about people forgetting to count ballots or you know, people not sent ballots those kinds of things. So i do think fair Election Administration is a really important first step to at least help those in the middle who want to look at the election and figure out, you know, was it run in a fair way or not and let me give one very specific example here to make this concrete. You may remember that one of Donald Trumps claims was that the election was stolen from him in georgia and he made a call to the secretary of state of georgia brad. Raffensburger republican a call that bradfordsburger recorded in later released in which trump asked for reference broker to quote find 11,780 votes and refuses. Theres no way im gonna do that and that was the end of the conversation but they did a full hand recount of every ballot in the state. And they were able to say that within a few hundred votes because theres always some slack the results that were announced was were correct that biden had won the state. Imagine if georgia was still using Voting Machines that were wholly electronic that didnt produce a piece of paper. And so all you had was software you push a button and it says this is the vote total. Just imagine the kinds of conspiracy theories about elections being hacked that would have flown. So one way to deal with election disinformation is you sound principles of Election Administration like always have a piece of paper that a court or another body could count to tell us what the truth is having a physical tangible piece of paper. Thats what we need for our elections because of the lack of trust even if those electronic Voting Machines work. Well the great point i just want to focus on election registration for a moment. Theres been a lot of changes since november 2020 with regard to election and administration. Do you want to speak about those and whether theyre going in the right or wrong direction . Well, so one concern that i bracket in the book is concerns about Voter Suppression laws that make it harder for people to register or vote those earlier books that i mentioned talk about those issues. Im very concerned about them today though. I havent even greater concern about elections subversion, which is the risk that the winner of the election wont be declared the winner and have a peace coming out that will post next week at the harvard law review website talking about how to minimize the risk to thats thats kind of tangential to my project in shape speech, but i am very concerned not only about laws that make it harder for people to register and vote for no good reason, but also laws that potentially make it easier to manipulate election results. And so one of the things that im worried about is reference burger or just mentioned hes a primary election facing a member of congress named jody high schools a republican congressman who has embraced the the lie that the 2020 election was stone. He may be one running elections in in 2024, if its biden versus trump two and lets say that heist runs a completely Fair Election and announces the trump has won are people on the left actually going to believe him. I think the kind of doubts about Election Integrity that we see on the right that were fermented by trump are going to boomerang and were actually going to have people on the left start having the same kind of doubt. So really having fair rules having transparency having good Election Administration makes it harder for elections to be stolen, but also harder to lie about elections being stolen. I want to go through several of your other proposals, but i do want to pause and remind everyone please put your questions in the youtube that chat and well get to the questions pretty soon really. Look forward to getting your questions rick another proposal you have is for greater disclosure. Is you know better than anyone efforts to impose greater disclosure with regard to Campaign Finance reform have been unsuccessful since Citizens United versus stephanie c in 2010. The disclose act never made it through congress. Why believe that disclosure laws here are any more likely to be adapted . Well first, let me talk about why i think disclosure is a good solution. So our election laws are outdated as you mentioned. So today if an ad says joe biden is a true leader, and its run close to the election and you see that at on tv and you see that ad come through either your cable box or a satellite like directv that ad is subject to certain Disclosure Rules under a law that passed 20 years ago this week called the mccain fungal. On the other hand if youre watching that same tv ad and it comes to you through hulu or youtube tv, which are not cable or satellite that ed is not subject to disclosure. Similarly if the ad appears on facebook. That is not subject to disclosure unless it expressly calls for the election or defeat of a candidate. Thats a non