The Surprising Strength of Elections (For Now)

A Q&A with the founder of Votebeat

Votebeat doesn’t do the typical horse race coverage of elections. Rather, with reporters in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin, it delves deeply into how elections actually work in this country, and the threats they face. As you might imagine, Votebeat has had something of a surge in traffic of late. So I reached out to Elizabeth Green, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit journalism outfit Civic News Company, of which Votebeat is a part. 

Green’s Google calendar looks like level thirty of Tetris, but fortunately I had an in for a last-second interview request. (We’re married.) I’ve been learning new things about elections lately from reading Votebeat, so I asked Elizabeth to share a few important points from recent coverage. Our chat is below.

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David Epstein: For me, the most surprising thing about reading the recent coverage is that it seems like, practically speaking, U.S. elections have never been more secure. At least, that’s how I’m interpreting some of the coverage. Does that seem fair to say?

Elizabeth Green: First of all, I’m glad you’re reading our coverage, but I hope you’re not doing it while procrastinating finishing your book —

DE: I’m actually ahead of schedule just FYI, but thanks for your concern…

EG: Really, though, I think what you said is fair. Four years ago, when we started Votebeat, I was worried that amid accusations of fraud, and the pandemic, that the process would actually fail — that the United States might actually fail to pull off a fair and peaceful election for the first time, that a president might actually not be selected, and we’d have a constitutional crisis. But I’ve learned a lot more since Votebeat started, and I’m incredibly heartened by how strong our voting and elections systems are. You can reasonably argue that they’ve actually never been stronger. That doesn’t mean there aren’t potential long-shot catastrophe scenarios for this election, but I think those scenarios, basically the stuff I was thinking about four years ago, are actually a distraction. 

DE: A distraction from what, exactly? 

EG: From problems that aren’t just hypothetical; they’re already here. Namely, a third of Americans have lost confidence in our elections. So, on the one hand, we have stronger systems than ever. On the other hand, we have less trust in them than ever. That lack of trust can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we can already see this in motion. Growing mistrust has caused some people who are extremely concerned about fair elections to start attacking the systems that protect them. 

DE: How will we see those attacks manifest in this election?

EG: At the most important level, we probably won’t. There are a ton of headlines about disaster scenarios, but the Votebeat editors and reporters who are on the ground covering this stuff at the local level every day agree that the most likely scenario is that votes are counted fairly and the election will be certified on a normal timeline. 

DE: You’re getting at something I wanted to ask about, which is that I feel like basically every article I’ve read from a national outlet is firmly in the fear-and-loathing, disaster-scenario category. And I do think it’s important for people to consider disaster scenarios, even if they’re unlikely, if the impact is really bad. At the same time, understanding likely scenarios, I think, is extremely important and unfortunately not great for generating headlines. But, for example, I just read an article about the attempt last election by some of President Trump’s advisers to convince Electoral College electors to go against the final results. The article was suggesting this could happen again at a larger scale. 

EG: There are all sorts of potentially problematic scenarios, and former President Trump and some of his supporters are making it clear they’ll go to extraordinary lengths to win. But I was telling you recently about things that have actually already played out. So what’s the empirical evidence? For example, the Votebeat team pointed out that, since 2020, there have been some local officials in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Pennsylvania who actually already declined to certify elections. This happened. And in some cases this occurred at really tense public meetings with allegations of fraud flying back and forth. But, in the end, when courts and state officials got involved, every single election was certified. 

DE: Ok, but as a regular Votebeat reader I’d like to point out how more people who deny the results of the last election, and who don’t trust our elections generally, have been getting elected to positions where they’re involved in administering elections. So I’m not sure that past performance is an indicator of future results here. 

EG: That’s true, but you also know that Carter Walker, Votebeat’s reporter in Pennsylvania, worked with Spotlight PA to review more than 400 candidates running for positions like county commissioner or county council across the state in 2023. And those positions they’re running for, people usually barely pay attention to them, if they’ve heard of them at all, but they have a lot of influence over elections at the local level. In Pennsylvania, 45 of those candidates expressed skepticism about the integrity of elections, and eighteen of those candidates did in fact win their races. There are a few counties where they now hold a majority of seats on their local board of elections. So that happened. At the same time, they have still failed to introduce new rules that threaten fair counting of votes. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen in the future, but I’m telling you what we know has actually happened in reality so far. 

DE: So, yeah, will this change in the near future?

EG: It could. You’re more into assigning probabilities to future scenarios than I am. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think there’s a clear lesson: when election conspiracy theories go viral, some people who are influenced by those theories, and who care about fair elections are going to run for office, and some of them are going to win.

DE: So…no chance I’m going to get some predictions with probabilities assigned here? 

EG: I predict a 0% chance that I’ll give any other probability predictions even if you ask again. 

DE: Huh. So I’m not even in Dumb and Dumber “So you’re saying there’s a chance” territory? Seriously though, what sort of policies do some of the people we’re discussing try to implement?

EG: Obviously, a simple one is just refusing to certify elections if they don’t like or believe the result. But, for example, there are also people who are just really skeptical of electronic voting machines, and so they want all votes hand counted. And even when that’s well-meaning, the problem is that hand counting turns out to be much more susceptible to error, which isn’t really surprising. If you want a visceral illustration of this, read our reporters’ coverage of Gillespie County, Texas, which is more famous for hosting destination weddings. In March of this year, Gillespie County Republicans rented out a popular wedding venue just to hand count more than 8,000 votes for their party primary. Our reporters stayed at the venue while the count dragged on from 7:30 in the morning until 4:30 a.m. the next day. Suffice it to say, re-do’s were necessary.

But Gillespie County is the exception. Attempts to switch to hand counting in Arizona and elsewhere in Texas have failed. So have other policies when they’ve ended up in courts, or when state-level officials have gotten involved. So the layers of protection that block drastic changes, or switches to what we know are less accurate methods, have worked. But the protective layer is wearing thin. We had a story this summer about how five of the Republicans in Arizona who protected their election system all lost their primaries. 

DE: That seems ominous. 

EG: There are a lot of people who I would say have been punished for their integrity. Our reporter Natalia Contreras profiled the elections director in Tarrant County, Texas, for Votebeat and This American Life. His name was Heider Garcia, and he was regarded by Texas state officials as one of the best in the business, particularly for the way he peacefully coexisted with increasingly intense skeptics. But he resigned sometime after that broadcast when his office came under attack. A longtime election official in California was getting accused of witchcraft, and resigned. When veterans like these leave, even if the people who replace them are earnest and conscientious, they’re less experienced and they just make more mistakes, which shouldn’t be a surprise. There was actually a recent Justice Department report which found that some of the fuel for the January 6th riot at the Capitol actually came from a minor clerical error by an election temp worker in Pennsylvania. 

DE: Woaa. I actually think, from my time as an investigative reporter at Sports Illustrated and then ProPublica, people regularly see conspiracies in what is actually…I don’t want to say incompetence, because mistakes just happen even for competent people, but I think accidental errors or just unwitting bad decisions are vastly underrated as a source of dysfunction in all things in general. Actually, my time as a fact-checker also influenced my thinking on that. In any case, I don’t have a great question here, but what’s a takeaway you can leave us with?

EG: I like this quote from one of our stories, by Mark Lindeman, the policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, which is a nonpartisan election technology group: “U.S. elections are one of the best things we do as a country. Vast numbers of good people work together across party lines to keep our elections free, fair, and honest. Well-designed procedures help them prevent, detect, and correct any problems.” At the same time, the protective layer is under serious threat. I wish elections would just automatically be free, and fair, and safe, but you can look at history or look around the world right now and realize it’s actually a real privilege to have elections that are free and fair and secure. And we can’t all just free ride and expect that system to continue. People need to get involved. For me, that was adding Votebeat to our other work at Civic News Company. And, obviously, I think people should support our work at Votebeat. But most importantly, I think everyone should realize that we have something special in this country when it comes to our elections, and it is strong, but it can disappear. If it’s an issue you care about, and everyone should, get involved. This is all built on people. It’s like that Steve Jobs quote about how people just like you built everything around you; that’s true for elections, too. 

DE: At the risk of torching your eloquent ending there, final question: since we like to push reading on one another, what’s the best reading I pushed on you this year? 

EG: Outline, by Rachel Cusk. 

DE: Let the record show that I got a signed copy to make sure you’d really feel obligated to read it. 

EG: It’s really late. Can we go to sleep?  

DE: Sold.

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Until next time…

David