Welcome to the first episode in TPTM’s brand new series on Democracy!

Do you ever wonder why our voting and election systems work the way they do? Has anyone ever preached to you the virtues (or evils) of rank choice voting, blockchain, or eliminating the electoral college? Then tune in to the lastest TPTM episode where Colleen (MPP ‘21) sits down with elections-policy experts and fellow Goldman students Rachel Wallace (MPP’20) and Ben Raderstorf (MPP ‘20) to break down the “hows” and “whys” of our voting systems. Listen in as they chat about the values we embrace when designing our elections, break down a bunch of elections-policy proposals, and argue why we should care about any of this in the first place. Be sure to keep your eye out for upcoming episodes in our Democracy series. We’ll be talking about the upcoming election in the era of COVID-19 and trying to answer the pressing questions that arise given this unprecedented context.

Transcript

Colleen: [00:00:06] Hi, everybody, and welcome back to Talk Policy To Me, Colleen Pulawski here. Like so many in the country and across the globe, we've transitioned to a remote workplace. We're learning a lot, and we were all really excited to get some of our most pressing thoughts about coronavirus and policy lessons on tape in our virtual roundtable just a couple of weeks ago. Now, we're hard at work on a brand new series spotlighting democracy in the U.S. in light of COVID 19 will be shifting our lens on this series to grapple with our collective policy hopes and fears that are all emerging in real time as the coronavirus crisis evolves and as time keeps chugging on toward the 2020 election. So to kick us off, I'm here to share with you a conversation I had just a few weeks ago. But really it feels like a lifetime ago with two Goldman School MPP's on Super Tuesday, we chatted about the values, trade offs and structures that are all baked into our voting systems, and we broke down a laundry list of policies that are often touted as ways to improve our democracy by tinkering with how we vote. So we hope this gets the juices flowing for future episodes about how our elections work in the U.S., things we might take for granted in our voting systems, and how to think about the changes that might occur in these systems in the era of COVID 19. So stay tuned as we continue exploring all of these questions and more. And for now, listen in on this excellent conversation with Goldman School students and voting policy experts Rachel Wallace and Ben Raderstorf. Okay, Let's just start off by having each of you introduce yourself.

Rachel: [00:01:55] As my name is Rachel Wallace. I'm a second year MPP student here at the Goldman School. Who am I and what do I do? I like elections. I think they're important, and I've done a lot of advocacy work and policy work around election policy. Mostly voting rights and felony disenfranchisement laws is something I'm really interested in, as well as redistricting and gerrymandering. So hopefully we can talk about some of those things today. But I'm just excited to be here.

Ben: [00:02:24] And my name is Ben Raderstorf. I'm a second year graduate student at the Goldman School. I research elections, policy and democracy, sort of in a big and small sense, interested both in the sort of big challenging questions of why democracy doesn't seem to be working so well all around the world. And then also the more minutia about how do you reform democracy to nudge it in a more positive direction.

Colleen: [00:02:45] I brought all here today because over at the podcast we're doing a whole series on democracy. And I was thinking about our voting institutions and how they're structured and why they're structured that way. I feel like we often take that entire system for granted and so have a lot of questions, and I'm hoping you all can help us answer or unpack. I would like to just kind of open up a discussion about what the objectives of voting policies are here. Some of the categories that I came up with are fairness or security or voter participation. Do those resonate with you all? Are there more? What should we be thinking about? Our goals are when we're structuring our voting institutions.

Rachel: [00:03:25] As I was just kind of thinking about the history of our voting institutions before the podcast and and kind of the objectives of the whole voting institution as we know it. It just struck me that really the objective was never inclusion was actually explicitly exclusion. And so I think now we're moving in a time where people are valuing inclusion or valuing access to the polls. But historically, really the objective was to exclude groups and to concentrate voting power among those in charge of creating it essentially, and creating these policies. And so that's something I think that's important to orient our conversation around. There's been more of an effort to include certain people, but as the electorate has diversified, there's also been more of an effort to try and exclude them in other ways.

Ben: [00:04:10] I think and this is this is a bit of a diversion, but I think something it's really important to understand before we go into all of this is that the questions about how we design our elections, again, unlike a lot of other countries, that there are no sort of central decision makers. So unlike a lot of other democracies that have a national electoral administration agency of some sort that makes all these decisions and sort of thinks this through. Elections in the U.S. are designed all the way down to the hyper local level. The questions of what we're what we're selecting for, what we're maximizing for in any specific electoral context is going to be really local. I mean, at the at the highest level, electoral decisions tend to be made by the states. But really, I mean, counties have a lot of power, political parties have a lot of power. You know, there always are going to be different directions and goals that the different actors throughout the system are going to be trying to solve for which is part of the reason why elections are just so unbelievably complicated in the U.S. is because there is no sort of central what are elections and what are elections for the for something else and all sorts of different levels.

Rachel: [00:05:12] You know, from my perspective, the North Star is, I think the two objectives that we need to hold really central to election policy is access to the polls and the affirmative right to vote. So if we can get to a system that mimics that in any way, we don't currently have that kind of system, a system in which growing up thinking the right to vote is a thing is actually a thing that would be great. As a North Star.

Colleen: [00:05:36] What do you see as the biggest trade offs that we face when designing our election system or voting institutions? And when we're faced with those tradeoffs? How do we decide? And I think even more importantly, who gets to decide which are most important.

Ben: [00:05:53] I tend to see a really helpful way to think about tradeoffs in our democracy is that democracy actually sort of has two steps. The first step is, is who gets to participate, who gets to vote, who gets to have their voice heard and how. And that, to me, is just as much as possible. More democracy we can have, the better the more people we can bring to the table and in some way incorporate their voices into the process, the better. But then the second half of the process, after people have voted, after they've had their voices heard, how are we then going to translate that Democratic set of instructions? Right. The sort of popular will that the voters are trying to communicate into policy? And that's a much harder question. And that to me is when the trade off start to happen.

Rachel: [00:06:34] I think another trade off that is important. And we run into this a lot at the Goldman School and as policymakers is whether we should be incremental in our approach. And, you know, the way that election policy is designed now is yes, because it is done on such a local level or state level. And it's these little seemingly small on the surface changes in state constitutions or legislation that change the voting schemes of different states that actually do have a large impact. But it's not like a system shattering impact. And so I think the tradeoff of like, do we go for this imaginative world where we actually do have an affirmative right to vote if we take these incremental approaches, are we kind of undermining that bigger strategy is a question that I've been grappling with a little bit and I'm kind of settled squarely for now on. Well, the incremental wins are still wins.

Ben: [00:07:23] I think something that often is presented as a tradeoff that I really I think is really not a tradeoff, which is something that I think really deserves to be heard and said so much more, you know, broadcast from the hills is that there is no tradeoff between accessibility and security, that there's no evidence that any measures to make voting more accessible to more people, whether it's repealing voter ID laws or make. Same day, voter registration or automatic voter registration or expanding early voting. All these things are often criticized that they're opening up holes or sort of flaws that that voter fraud could sneak through. But there's no evidence anywhere that that's true.

Colleen: [00:08:00] I think there's something to tease out there about how we think about what it means to have secure elections. Who gets to decide what the definition of security is? Who gets to decide what the biggest threats are? I'm going to let you go.

Ben: [00:08:13] When I think about election security, I think of three very separate, different buckets. The first one, which is the one that is most weaponized in our discourse, is this idea of voter fraud that people who aren't allowed to vote are going to go in and sneak in, somehow get into the polls and cast a ballot and tip an election in favor of somebody else. And it's a legitimate fear. Right. I mean, if voter fraud were real, if it were possible in any sort of systematic way, then it would be a disaster for our democracy. But the good news is we're actually really, really, really good at finding and preventing voter fraud at sort of remarkable success of our government. And I think that's something that is not hurt enough that we're really, really good at fighting voter fraud in this country. It's not something we have to worry about. But then the second two buckets, I think, don't get enough attention in turn. The second bucket I see is like systemic vulnerabilities. So that's things like potentially hacking into election servers or more importantly, just just breakdowns of election machinery of various kinds. But then third, what I see as the most important area of election security that gets almost no attention is the broader information security around our elections. I mean, there was so much attention to Russian interference in the 2016 election, but there's a ton of social, scientific and other research that looks at the various different things that they did and all the things you think of, you know, fake news on Facebook or fake ads or trying to hack into voting machines. There's no evidence that any of that worked. But what worked is that they were able to hack into the email servers of the DNC and John Podesta and put out real information, you know, real in real emails that were designed to be embarrassing of the Clinton campaign in particular, that had an enormous impact on the media narrative around the race and really fueled a lot of divisions within the Democratic Party. And that's election security, too. If we have foreign powers and malicious actors who are able to steal private information from political actors and leak it selectively in ways that it's intended to be damaging, that's sort of election fraud, too. And that's something that I think we spend almost no time talking about.

Colleen: [00:10:33] So there's a lot of policies and ideas and systems floating out around there that claim they're going to fix our democracy. So I want to talk about some of them with you. Can we do a rundown of these different policies and ideas? Because I think there's a lot of confusion around them. I think there's a lot of misinformation around them. I think it's hard to keep all of this whirlwind of ideas straight in your head. And so I would love to hear you guys break them down. So in thinking about participation, let's talk about automatic voter registration, maybe pitting it against same day voter registration.

Ben: [00:11:06] So automatic voter registration basically is the idea that it shouldn't be the voter's job to make sure that they're registered. It should be the state's job to figure out who all is eligible to vote and just automatically register them to vote so that if they choose to show up on the polls on Election Day, they're allowed to do so. And then same day, voter registration takes a problem from the opposite end, which says, you know, everything we do in voter registration today is automatic. It's all instantaneous. You know, with with modern technology, states have the ability to know if you are eligible to vote like that.

Rachel: [00:11:35] I will say regarding participation, we can see sometimes the effects might not be as large as we might want, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't do it. But the research hasn't really showed that it might have the level of effect on participation as we think it would. And so I think the same day registration shows much more promising.

Ben: [00:11:54] Effects, and these are often presented as different sort of competing reforms. As Rachel said, there's a ton of interest in how they impact turnout. It's still really early for AVR, but I think it's fair to say that there are some fears that it's not going to necessarily lead to a radical increase in turnout. Some of that makes sense. You know, a lot of people who don't vote do so, not necessarily because they show up at the polls and are prevented from voting. They're not trying to vote one way or the other. At the end of the day, my view is it's sort of silly that we've let these be presented as competing policies. I see them as really naturally symbiotic for me when I think about, you know, my fears as a voter of automatic voter registration. I don't know if I'm that quick to trust the state to make sure that they're going to get everything right. In that case, why not just have same day voter registration as a failsafe, as a sort of essential backstop to automatic voter registration that says even in that rare one in 100 case where there's a there's a there's a false negative, you're able to vote. But for whatever reason, you didn't go to the DMV or whatever it is, you still can go to the polls and register last minute just to make sure I said, you know, it's a security check. It's a necessary verification step to make sure that everybody who's eligible to vote is able to. So I think these really should be presented as one package.

Colleen: [00:13:10] Can we talk about preregistration for youth who are under 18 but will be a voting age by a general election?

Rachel: [00:13:18] Pre-registration would allow individuals, like you said, under 18 to register in advance, and the idea is to get them excited about voting. And it's actually been shown, like in some studies, that it can increase the turnout of young voters and actually by a pretty significant percentage preregistration I think is an exciting idea. The Pandora's box here is that sometimes this conversation can lead into like the conversation on voting age in general. They're actually very distinct. But oftentimes opponents of pre-registration might complete the to and say, well, now it's a slippery slope and now everyone's going to get to vote. Next thing they're going to want to do is vote at 16. And then why do we even have voting ages? And I think that's a completely different conversation. But pre-registration, as it is, has shown to increase turnout. So I think that's promising. It is a conversation that deserves more discussion around voting age. It wasn't I was 18 and people don't necessarily always know that. It's important to realize that it is arbitrary and that those conversations are really valid given our history.

Colleen: [00:14:16] Okay. Continuing on the theme of participation and access conversations about Election Day being a holiday, why is it not a holiday in the United States? Should it be a holiday? Should we vote over the course of a week?

Ben: [00:14:28] Certainly it's an antiquated conception that you would vote on a Tuesday. It makes perfect sense that, you know, we we have a number of federal holidays, some of which frankly don't seem all that central to our national identity. Something like Columbus Day. I don't see any reason why that federal holiday can't be moved to Election Day.

Rachel: [00:14:46] There's another kind of benefit to Election Day as a holiday, and that's the social aspect of voting that's actually really important in driving turnout. So making it fun in a way, just making it desirable as a community activity, I think is something that's really important. I also think with this conversation around Election Day as a holiday, there are certain things we need to be honest about is who has the day off, what kinds of jobs are included in federal holidays. It's certainly not retail, it's certainly not a lot of tipped workers. And so that could be, you know, a population that's kind of left out, not you, not intentionally, but kind of by default.

Ben: [00:15:20] Yeah, I think Rachel gets to one of the central and most confusing and complicated things about election policy is it turnout doesn't seem to behave like you would expect it to. I mean, one of the most notorious findings recently in. Political science is that expanding early voting actually drives turnout down, which is bananas. It does not make any sense that giving people more days to vote on it means that fewer people are going to take us up on it. But there are a number of different studies that have pretty consistently found the same effect. Now, that doesn't mean that early voting is still always a bad idea. And there's plenty of arguments that even if it decreases turnout overall, it helps ensure that the electorate is more representative. That's definitely a trade off that we have to have to grapple with. But really the sort of explanation here is that people vote when it's exciting, people vote when it's fun, when it's social, when it feels like a patriotic duty because everybody's talking about it and it's on the news and there's sort of, you know, this this flag waving, you know, feel good idea of voting. And an Election Day holiday to me is the clearest way to just take that pressure and magnify it.

Colleen: [00:16:26] I think also to this point. To these like, lofty ideals of like voting is this social event and voting is part of my identity as an American. Another another lofty ideal is that everybody votes, right? Everybody should vote. It's your it's your right. It's part of being a member of a democracy. So two policies that I think are often touted as just getting this number up are paying people to vote or making voting mandatory. And I think making voting mandatory gets at these kind of lofty ideals of like, everybody should vote. This is what we do. And paying people to vote, I think gets to your point, Rachel, about like maybe that comes in alongside making Election Day a hard holiday because maybe that leaves some people out.

Ben: [00:17:09] Something that we don't always hear about in an American context but is really prevalent around the world, is this idea that voting is not a privilege. Voting is a civic responsibility, that it's something like jury duty or, you know, military service if drafted that that voting voting is something you owe your country. So, you know, several dozen countries, including countries like Australia and Belgium, Argentina, have various forms of obligatory voting, which in practice basically means that if you don't vote, if you fail to show up and cast a ballot, even if you just, you know, cross out everything, send in a blank ballot, whatever it is, if you don't mark your voice in some way, you get a fine. That's something that is often highlighted as being really effective at driving turnout. I think there are a ton of reasons to be a little worried about it in an American context. First is just a sort of constitutional basis. It feels to me very incompatible with American ideas of freedom of speech. The ability to not participate politically, I think, would be seen by almost everybody as a as a sort of central part of American political freedoms, but something that I think doesn't get anywhere near enough airtime in sort of serious policy circles is what if we just what if we just flip it? What if instead of fining somebody 25 bucks for not voting, what if we just paid everybody $25 to vote? And the idea that, you know, as part of reflecting that your vote is civil service, your vote is contributing to your democracy, why don't we compensate people for that labor? And I think that could get us a lot of the way there, too, that the sort of benefits of obligatory voting without having to deal with the constitutional concerns. And then also really importantly, the burden of this tax on not voting would be really regressive.

Rachel: [00:18:54] Something that I grapple with a lot in general regarding participation is with communities that have been historically disenfranchised or have been to service by our government. I want people to vote. I want people. I want to make it accessible for people to vote. I want I always tell, you know, I'm always talking to my friends like, are you voting today? Do you have a plan? And so, of course, I'm a proponent of voting very much to make sure, however, I understand why people might not want to participate in a system that's failed them for generations, centuries. Taking away that choice is kind of in a way undermining those concerns. So I think that's fair. I tend to push back on that argument a little bit. I think that we have a lot of political power that's gone on harness because of access issues and because of maybe the political systems unwillingness to actually cater to disenfranchised voting populations. But I do think that I hear that concern. [00:19:42][47.2]

Ben: [00:19:42] Yeah, I think that really that really gets to a central dilemma in elections policy right now. We we have almost no good ideas for how to decrease the turnout gap between wealthy and poor voters. I mean, far more than racial turnout gaps, gender turnout gaps, even age turnout gaps, really, that like the defining differential in terms of democratic participation in America is income. I think that like the deep, sad, cynical truth of that is that that people aren't participating because they don't feel like it's it's worth it. And I think that's a problem you can't solve with any Election Day or voter registration tinkering. I think it goes to much deeper structural problems in our democracy where for many people in this country, the ballot box does not feel like a promising avenue for change.

Rachel: [00:20:31] I think as people who are interested in voting policy, we can't lose sight of that. And I do have to think about those tradeoffs a lot when I'm thinking about trying to encourage people to participate, but realizing why it might not be that simple in practice.

Speaker 1: [00:20:47] As we're thinking about the election in the context of COVID 19, there's an upcoming event that we wanted to be sure that everyone was aware of. We know that COVID 19 has already impacted the election from a battle over when to hold the Wisconsin primary to the postponement of the Democratic convention. From election security to voter disenfranchisement, the pandemic is raising questions about the electoral process and influencing the debate about who will be our next president. As a part of the Berkeley Conversations COVID 19 series on May 8th, the topic will be COVID 19 and the election. A panel of Berkeley political scientists and election experts will discuss election law and. Purity, voter participation, and how COVID 19 may permanently change how America votes. Tune in on May 8th at noon to hear from our own Sarah Anzia and Henry Brady, as well as Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law. Bertrall Ross, Chancellor's professor of law at Berkeley Law. And Philip Stark, a professor of Statistics and the Associate Dean at the Division of Mathematical and Physical Scientists. So I'm going to hop on to a conversation about fairness. Maybe we can talk a little bit more about that and maybe the trade offs with ranked choice voting.

Ben: [00:22:12] At its core, American elections are plurality based, so whoever gets the most votes wins. That's pretty straightforward. In a system with weak political parties or no political parties at all. That makes a lot of sense as time has gone on and our system has become more entrenched in sort of strong partizan identities, and then at the same time increasingly weak political parties that don't have the ability to corral their voters in one direction or the other. We no longer have a system that I think sort of encourages consensus building. The idea of ranked choice voting is if you if you go all the way down to the lowest level of democracy, it's what the ballot looks like. And instead of just picking one person, you rank as many as you like. You can tell the electoral process what your preferences are all the way down. So if it's not this person, then I want it to be this person. If it's not this person, I want it to be this person. So the idea that that everybody's preferences should be reflected in the final outcome and then in turn, in theory, every election winner should be representing a majority that, you know, whoever the top vote getter was was preferred by more people to the second most vote getter. But I think some of the most exciting sort of potential benefits are that it means that candidates no longer get to play to the sides, that they're always trying to build a 50 plus one coalition. And the idea idea there is that it encourages more cooperative, both campaigning, but then also politics and subtly nudges the incentives of our electoral system away from conflict and towards cooperation.

Rachel: [00:23:44] I think in the way that we think about preferences, it's not like all or nothing. We don't think about preferences in that way. Like if I want a burrito for dinner and then I get to the remote place and they're closed, like I have a backup in my head, right? I'm not just like, I'm not going to eat dinner today. That's like a very simplified version of ranked choice voting. But that's how like we think as people. And so I think it's not out of the question and I think it is really exciting option. I think it allows for a little bit more flexibility, which is just more realistic and I think healthier for our democracy.

Colleen: [00:24:12] Next thing that I think gets a lot of conversation, which is getting rid of the Electoral College.

Rachel: [00:24:18] Often it's claimed that the Electoral College was basically to balance the interests of like kind of like the Senate, like high population and low population states or representatives of those states. A lot of conversation in political science circles around the Electoral College. And was it more of like a North-South issue? So was it that they wanted to be able to balance the interests of the North and the South? And that's just a racial issue when it really comes down to it. And so I don't think we can ignore kind of the racist context, the context in which the Electoral College was established and what kind of power the people who established it were trying to protect. I'm not a fan of the Electoral College, but I think that argument around the history of it and really understanding the context in which it was set in place really helped us solidify my opinion that it is inherently a racist class's system.

Ben: [00:25:05] I mean, the idea of the Electoral College was that it was a delegate of body that would come together and actually select a president in a way that isn't all that different from how parliamentary systems would select a prime minister. But that's not how it happens anymore. I mean, the very idea of Electoral College members going to a single room and selecting someone is purely formal. And as a result, the system that we have is just, you know, anachronistic, clunky, ineffective, unnecessarily distortive feature of our democracy. And I, I tend to have a little bit of a contrarian view on it in that I think the representational imbalances of it aren't the central problem because, yes, right now in 2020 as in 2016, one party the Republican Party has that has an advantage. But that's new and that probably won't last all that long. It may not be that long from now. When Democrats actually get a structural advantage from the Electoral College. It's just hard to predict how these things happen. To me, the problem of the Electoral College is that it means that the presidency is meaningfully only contested in a handful of states, which means I'm a California voter. That means that I don't meaningfully get to elect the president. And I think the idea that a very intense competitive election would only be fought on some small portion of the country seems really antithetical to me, to the idea of what a healthy, vibrant democracy should look like.

Rachel: [00:26:22] And we talked earlier about trust in the system and people believing that their voice matters, especially when you're talking about new voters, Right. So people who, for whatever reason, haven't been motivated to vote in the past, you want to be able to say like your vote counts. But if the popular vote isn't deciding elections, then what do you tell those people? You know, you went out of your way. You overcame all these barriers that were put in place to stop you. You overcame whatever concerns you had about participating in the system because we told you it was going to be a system that would work for you. And then it doesn't because we don't even listen to the popular vote. I think it really just undermines the integrity of our of our elections. And so I don't agree with the electoral. College as it stands for a lot of reasons. But I think that when we're really talking to underrepresented in terms of political representation communities, it's really important to keep in mind.

Colleen: [00:27:25] Let's talk about security. Let's talk about digital voting, paper voting, paper records. What's best? We're in this era where every startup wants to sell every state a new way to vote. And we've had a lot of missteps this year as well as in the past. How should we be thinking about this?

Rachel: [00:27:45] I think we talked about this a little bit earlier. We we're talking about kind of the buckets of security, I think, when it comes to digital voting. Certainly hacking and like actual cybersecurity concerns are at the top of the list, but also a legitimacy question. These digital voting platforms are, you know, created by people and as such are prone to failures. Iowa is a really good example of that. I think that the legitimacy of that caucus was the biggest concern at the end of the day. I mean, quite frankly, it was embarrassing in my opinion, that we have this big caucus that everyone is so stressed out about for months and months, and then it comes down to an app and all of a sudden you can't trust the results. And we need to have the trust of the results. There's been research done by people who are experts in cybersecurity who are like, We're not there yet. These these technologies are not they're not immune to attack. There was a recent paper I read from a group of MIT engineers, and they had basically looked into a blockchain voting app. And blockchain by design is supposed to be like safer just by the way it's designed. But they had all sorts of privacy concerns about side channel attacks and third party services that were needed for like the app's functionality and how those maybe didn't have the same level of security as blockchain itself. So it's just not ready in my opinion. But I'm sure you can speak on this one.

Ben: [00:29:05] To me, the very idea of online internet voting just is nonsensical because we know how to run secure elections. We have, you know, 200 plus years of running, secure, verifiable elections in this country. And that means things like auditable paper trails. In my mind, if it isn't broke, why open up the door to re breaking it? And that you know that the entire idea of shifting how we're voting in a digital age to me is just opening up the door to potential chaos. We live in an era where we expect everything really fast, but as time is going on and we're getting better at election administration, the big thing that we have to sacrifice, you know, if you're if you're selecting between reliability and integrity, then the tradeoff is always going to be expediency. And I think one of the bigger challenges that we face in the elections community is that people have grown to expect election results, you know, within minutes of when the polls close. And if you want to run a safe, secure, you know, reliable election, that that's less and less going to be a sort of reasonable assumption. I think we need to do a lot of work to start convincing people that actually having returns take longer to come out can be better. That means that we are doing our elections better and more secure and that we are opening up participation in ways like mail in voting that allow for more people to vote in a secure, reliable way that can't be hacked, like something like like Internet voting. But that just takes longer to count.

Rachel: [00:30:32] I think you're right that a lot of the impulse to support digital voting is because we want things immediate, immediate gratification that we want. I also think some of the motivation is, you know, the private companies have their own motivation to provide apps that I'm not entirely convinced is to support our democracy. So that's a little bit questionable. But I also think one of the reasons why a lot of people have been supporting digital voting, that actually makes some sense. I don't think digital voting is necessarily the answer. I don't actually know what the answer is, but the lines at polling places, that's a real threat to our democracy. I have been in lines during elections where people leave. People turn out because they can't you know, you can't be there all day. They have their lives to live and they try they did their civic duty. They went they're like, okay, I'm going to participate. Maybe it was like their first time. Could you imagine if it's like your first time voting, you go and there's like a four hour line and you're like passing out because it's hot and there's no water and all these things. That's not what you want democracy to feel like. So I think that argument for digital voting makes sense to me.

Ben: [00:31:34] That's a that's just a funding problem. That's this idea that we want a safe, reliable democracy, but we also don't want to pay for it. Long lines at polling places are just a resources issue. It is states having not getting significant or sufficient appropriations to put in the voting infrastructure that's necessary. And that's a really easy, at least from a policy point of view problem to fix. The political side of that, I think is trickier in my mind. The real problem with with decentralized electoral administration, it's just that it all it takes is one or two bad apples to cast doubt on a broad electoral system. Oh.

Colleen: [00:32:30] We started to touch on this a little bit earlier, Rachel, when you were talking about how you often grapple with that. It's important to have election policy reform, but it's obviously not going to solve all of our issues. But you still think it's really important? You still think it's crucial. It's something we should focus on. So I would love to hear from both of you. Just why should we care? Why are these things important? Why should we prioritize fixing our election system when we're often faced with so many competing issues? And not to say that it's a binary that we can just do one or the other. Why does this deserve our attention?

Ben: [00:33:10] Sometimes I think it's really, really helpful when talking about the importance of democracy in democracy reform to other people, as is to encourage them to to think about, you know, the the issue that they really care about, whatever it is that is most important to them. And let it go. Just look at the polling on that issue and look at how many Americans tend to agree with them on what the correct solutions are on everything from, you know, climate change to racial justice, to housing, to health care. The majorities tend to be there. You know, we have a pretty clear sense of as a country of who we want to be, at least in the most, you know, sort of directional of senses. But when you have a democracy that's that's clunky, that doesn't work very well, that is inefficient and ineffective, that puts up a lot of different roadblocks and barriers to representation in different places that even a pretty clear democratic will for something isn't going to get translated into the change that you want to see in the world at the end of the day. Democracy is the machine through which everything else has to flow. And if you want anything to change anything at all, I believe I firmly believe that it has to be democratic. You know, if you if you can grease the wheels of democracy, if you can make it work a little bit better for everybody, then it's going to be a little bit easier to do everything else.

Rachel: [00:34:24] Yeah, I think I think those are all really good points. And I also just want to add, if the representation question, we look at the US Senate, it's like 91% non-Hispanic white, and that's just not the reality of our communities. There is something to be said for, you know, having representation that looks like your community, that sounds like your community, that values what your community does. And I think that that's where it really comes into play. I think about the untapped political power and voice of historically disenfranchised communities is very, very strong. And that's why people have fought for hundreds of years to keep it small. They know that it's very powerful for me. A fair democracy and equitable democracy and actual workers and representative democracy looks like one in which the people in office reflect the communities that we live in. And to what the public thinks about a particular issue is reflected in policy. Neither of those things are the case. And so that's why I always, you know, I advocate for people participating in the process, even if we aren't quite sure that the system is going to as is work for them, it really won't ever unless we challenge it.

Colleen: [00:35:30] Well, thank you both so much. This has been a particularly poignant conversation in light of where we are right now sitting here on Super Tuesday. I'm excited to continue thinking about all these things and having these conversations with folks in the lead up to November and hopefully beyond. So thank you both.

Rachel: [00:35:47] Thank you.

Ben: [00:35:48] Thank you, Colleen.

Colleen: [00:36:03] Talk policy To Me is a production of the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. Our executive producers are Sarah Swanbeck and Bora Lee Reed. Michael Quiroz is our audio engineer. Music on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Colleen Pulawski. Tune in next week as we continue the conversation on democracy, elections, and coronavirus. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll catch you next time.