Inside the MAGA Blueprint for Breaking the Midterms

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22:19Kara Swisher:So let's talk about the actual election themselves. And one of the main fears for Democrats is that Trump will use ICE or National Guard to physically intimidate voters. Susan, what would that look like in practice? And what's the likelihood that it'll happen and where? Well, that's right. You know, you're not necessarily going to see this happening all over the country. One of the things about our elections over the last few decades, right, is the gradual winnowing down of competitive districts and states in the country. And I think that's one of the reasons this, you know, incredible polarization is one of the reasons why we're having this crisis in the first place.

22:53Kara Swisher:But it also means that if you want to go after the elections, you don't you know, you have a more limited number of places where you need to do it. And in that respect, I thought it was really notable that Trump a few weeks ago said that he was, you know, he talked about he wanted to nationalize. He used that phrase nationalize election in 15 states. Now, he didn't say what 15 states or, you know, where's that number coming from in recent years at the at the presidential level. You know, we've shrunk down to basically six states or even three states that have made the difference in in the last several presidential elections.

23:28Kara Swisher:So we all know what those states are that are competitive states. Add a few more states where there are highly competitive congressional districts or Senate races, and maybe that's how Donald Trump got to 15. And again, to be clear, you know, the Constitution is silent on many things, but it's very not silent on the notion that it's the states that have the responsibility to regulate the time, place, and manner of elections. So that's first of all. But that same week Trump was talking about nationalization, you also had Steve Bannon, you know, MAGA podcaster, former Trump strategist out there saying, you know, let's be clear, let's send ICE right to the polling places and we're not going to let Democrats steal this election again.

24:13Kara Swisher:Again, if you combine these sort of threats to, in effect, you know, militarize polling places, and again, you wouldn't have to do it all over the country, but just in targeted places where there might be immigrant voters. What's the likelihood where it will happen that they have this plan? I mean, Steve Bannon says a lot of things, but. Exactly. Yeah. So what's the likelihood do you see? Well, I mean, first of all, we have to say that Trump has already made it clear in how he has been deploying these ICE forces already. He's using them in democratic cities and democratic states as an instrument of sort of retribution, in effect, or punishment of his political enemies.

24:57Kara Swisher:So, you know, they would be looking to do this in places where there are large numbers of potential immigrant voters who might be scared off by the presence of ICE. And, you know, Democratic-run cities are often the places in the past that Donald Trump has targeted with his rhetoric. For example, Pennsylvania has been a key swing state, you know, in all of our recent elections. Donald Trump has been crying fraud in Philadelphia practically before anyone's voted. there. Same thing in Detroit, in Michigan, which has a key Senate race on the ballot, as well as various contested House races this fall.

25:34Kara Swisher:So again, I think we know the map of where they might go after pretty clearly.

25:39Natalie Adona:Can I have a note of optimism here?

25:41Kara Swisher:Yes, I'm going to ask you this because Trump's, as he said, said he wants to nationalize election. Is that just legal bluster? But go ahead saying what you were going to say.

25:49Natalie Adona:He can't nationalize the elections, as Susan said, right? The Constitution says that the state legislatures are the ones that are in charge of elections. And so he can't take over the elections. But, you know, the U.S. Postal Service, for example, is always involved in elections. And so the federal government does have a role.

26:05Kara Swisher:So what else could he do? Sending troops to the polls, obviously, etc. What are the most effective legal?

26:12Natalie Adona:Well, I'm actually kind of optimistic that the number of seats that are going to be competitive in the fall will make it very difficult to sort of target particular areas. And so, you know, if it's a presidential election, we know what those seven battleground states are. But with this election, there are going to be up to, you know, 30 to 50, maybe even more competitive congressional races. So it's going to be difficult to try to target each one of the polling places. Not only is there a kind of geographic difficulty there, but there's also a temporal problem, which is that we don't just vote on election day.

26:44Natalie Adona:And so we're going to have weeks where people are going to be able to be voting and those votes will then be, you know, banked in offices like Natalie's. And so I do think that it's easy to be concerned about these tweets because they're so unprecedented. But there's a lot of things that would make it very difficult for the federal government to try to take over local elections.

27:07Kara Swisher:So January 6th showed that Trump can use social media to summon his supporters. Obviously, you can imagine him telling them to go protect the polling sites and that sort of ambiguous U.S. language gives him a veneer of plausible deniability. Natalie, in 2020, a so-called Trump train of around 300 people held a rally in the parking lot outside your office and blocked the ballot drop box. Tell us what that was like and what you could do if a similar situation occurred.

27:31Natalie Adona:Yeah, that was, I have to say, I felt a little intimidated myself. Just for a little bit of context, it was, I believe, a Sunday afternoon, and we had just sent out all the ballots by mail. And I went to the office just to catch up on a couple of things. And it was, you know, relatively quiet until about three o 'clock. And then I heard this rumble. And then outside, I saw a bunch of cars, and they had set up a merch booth with a bunch of Trump-branded merchandise. There was a megaphone talking to people about who to vote for. And free speech is something that elections officials value, but there are rules around doing so around a voting location.

28:29Natalie Adona:And we had a Dropbox that people wanted to use but felt they could not access. One, they could not physically access it because there were a bunch of cars blocking the way. But some people who would try to walk up to the Dropbox did not feel like they could. And that is a clear violation of the law. Normally, I would go out to folks and say, you know, there's a Dropbox here. Can you please move your activities to, you know, 100 feet or more away? But because I was alone and because there were so many people, it was a situation where I did not feel like I could, you know, sort of go out there on my own and no one else was in the county building.

29:11Natalie Adona:So, you know, moving forward, you know, I think that we advertise where all of the locations are and we work pretty closely with our local law enforcement to let them know here is where people vote. And a voting location does include an official vote-by-mail drop box, and the law reflects that. You cannot do any electioneering activities or, you know, sort of any sort of political protest within that sort of 100-foot boundary.

29:46Kara Swisher:So imagine if the Trump train's activating on Election Day on a large scale.

29:50Natalie Adona:You know, I think that, you know, part of my job is not only to preserve the right to vote, but also preserve rights. And, you know, what I have told people time and again is, you know, your rights do not compete with each other. You have the right to political speech just as you have the right to vote. But there are really good reasons why there is that buffer zone around voting location. It's because this country's history of voter intimidation around the polls. It used to be way, way back in the day that you could electioneer right outside the door. And it turned out that, you know, sort of created some chaos around voting locations.

30:31Kara Swisher:So what is your preparation? You were nervous to go out and fix the problem. So people presumably weren't able to vote because if they wanted to. So people were being denied the right to vote. Right. And what's your plan?

30:43Natalie Adona:Yeah. In that particular situation, what we had done is we had worked with the local Republican Party to make sure that those rallies did not occur in sort of key locations anymore.

30:56Kara Swisher:Could you stop them now?

30:58Natalie Adona:Well, yeah. I mean, we could certainly try. It is a violation of the law to purposefully electioneer for the purpose of intimidating folks. And so we would just call the police and they wouldn't take care of it. I do not believe that there's a history of that happening in Marin County. Most kinds of electioneering are passive. It's like someone's campaign button or a shirt. And we politely say to the voter, can you just please remove that button while you are here or turn your shirt inside out? Some people have taken the extra step of just stripping. We don't encourage that. But, you know, it does allow folks to feel comfortable in the voting location and that they can vote calmly and free of intimidation.

31:51Kara Swisher:So if 2020 is any guy, Trump may do the most damage after the votes are cast. If armed federal agents showed up to an election administration site with a warrant and demand for ballots like they did in Fulton County, talk about how to stop that and how easy or hard would it be for the FBI to obtain another warrant? How do you deal with that, Susan? You know, I've spoken with election experts, Kara, who say that the key is, you know, to be prepared in advance. I was even speaking with one election law expert who suggested that one approach some people will take this year is to get injunctions in advance to try to stop activity that they fear from the federal government.

32:34Kara Swisher:Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I think heightened alert obviously has been achieved here. But, you know, I was really struck by it was almost an offhand comment that Trump made a few weeks ago in an interview with The New York Times that, you know, suggested that we may be once again overly limiting our imaginations as to what is possible here. If you're, you know, dealing with people who are willing to just absolutely go completely outside of the lines of what we see as acceptable. And to that end, I was really kind of blown away in his recent interview with The New York Times. Trump said, as an aside, oh, I really made a mistake in not ordering the federal government to seize election machines after the 2020 election.

33:23Kara Swisher:And, you know, this is essentially the almost martial law scenario that was being promoted by, you know, Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn and, you know, a lot of really just wild extremists who had Trump's ear in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but who, you know, were constrained because there were others such as the White House counsel at the time, the attorney general at the time, you know, who were indicating they wouldn't go along with these extreme measures. But how amazing that Trump is now saying out loud, yeah, I wish I had seized voting machines, you know, after 2020. I mean, imagine, And we all know the mayhem that ensued on January 6th.

34:07Kara Swisher:Imagine the mayhem if there weren't any duly certified results from certain states. I mean, that's the thing is that what Trump did in 2020 was extraordinary. And that was in a situation where there were no massive, you know, in any way proof of fraud. There were no court decisions anywhere in the country saying, you know, questioning the overall results of state elections. December 14th, that's the key date when states had to certify the election results in 2020. Every single state met the deadline and certified the results. I think what Trump has learned, and somebody once compared him to me to like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, you know, learning how to open the door.

34:51Kara Swisher:What Trump seems to have learned from 2020 is seize the machines, stop it before those results get certified. Stop the count, in other words. Yeah. So, Natalie, in California, every voter, for people who don't know, has sent a mail-in ballot, and the vote counting can be slow, and that's to the advantage of Trump. Explain how vote counting works in a state like California. And explain your experience in 2012, how you were counting the votes.

35:17Natalie Adona:Sure. So before I do that, I just want to sort of circle back on the voting equipment and, you know, sort of seizure of election materials. That would be a serious problem. Election security includes a strict chain of custody on voting equipment and on ballots. And, you know, sort of specific to this issue, I have asked our county council to provide me and my staff with training on what to do if we see a warrant and what to look for. Because, I mean, frankly, I don't know about you, but I've watched a lot of cop shows and there may be a disconnect with what I understand a warrant could be and, you know, what you see on television.

36:07Natalie Adona:So I want to be really clear that, you know, for me and my colleagues and likely for my peers across this country, if a warrant comes in, the first call is going to be to our attorneys and to sort of see, you know, what the scope is of what we are dealing with.

36:26Kara Swisher:And not handing it over.

36:27Natalie Adona:Well, I mean, I want to stress that I'm an administrator, that, you know, I know the law, I can tell people what the law is. And in some cases, I can even enforce the law. And, you know, with a warrant, we're sort of in a new world. But it would be very disruptive to the elections process to not have voting equipment. It would probably be an expensive problem, too. I cannot imagine that our secretary of state would continue to allow us to use equipment that was seized and broke the chain of custody. But as you had stated, a lot of people vote by mail in California. Anywhere, you know, from 80 to 90 percent of the electorate that participates chooses to vote by mail.

37:13Natalie Adona:And that process does require added verification. So, you know, in this state, we give voters plenty of time to submit a ballot. We send them out 29 days prior to the election. After the election, if the voter chooses to submit that ballot by mail, then we basically have seven days to accept a timely postmarked ballot. And, you know, sometimes people forget to sign or, you know, the signature does not compare with what we have on file. So we need to reach out to the voter. And so, you know, one of the dynamics that's happening that we, you know, try to ameliorate through our messaging is please vote early.

37:57Natalie Adona:But what we see in California, at least, is a lot of people are choosing to cast a ballot in an envelope, you know, by mail, you know, with an official dropbox on Election Day and then turn around and say, why haven't you counted this yet? It's because we go through the process of verifying that, you know, you haven't voted already, that, you know, the signature that you submit. Like I said at the top, you know, people provide identification when they register. And they're often registering through the Department of Motor Vehicles. So when you sign, it's got to match what we have on file. And sometimes people draw stuff or they just put their initials or print.

38:42Natalie Adona:They don't sign. And it takes a lot of time to sometimes reach out to the voter.

38:49Kara Swisher:So let's assume the elections themselves are relatively uneventful. But while the counting is underway, Trump plays these cards we've just discussed. The FBI seizes the ballots. He stokes conspiracy theories and his supporters make life hell for people counting the votes, like Natalie. And Speaker Johnson refuses to seat elected members because of the results are illegitimate so that Republicans maintain control of the House. What happens then? And let's start with Nate, then Natalie, then Susan.

39:15Natalie Adona:All right. So technically what happens is that the Congress is impaneled on January 3rd. Each one of these folks comes with their sort of certificates of election saying, here, I'm the person who won this. And so in the ordinary course of things, you would have certain people who would be sort of clearly members of Congress would then vote if there's someone who objects to one of the elections of each one of the other members of Congress. And so there have been times in our history where Congress, which is empowered under the Constitution to determine the qualifications of its members, then rejects the certificate of someone and says they can't be seated.

39:54Natalie Adona:The problem is we've never been in a situation where who controls Congress is actually in doubt. The first votes that are taken are to appoint the speakers, so we don't necessarily even have a speaker. And so we are walking in totally new constitutional snow at that point, right? This is a very different situation than even the January 6th uprising from five years ago. And so the question is whether, say, after the election but before Congress is going to be seated, whether there's somehow a new law that would be passed that would try to deal with this issue of seating electors who allegedly were elected under fraudulent conditions.

40:30Kara Swisher:Which they could do unless they don't have – unless people resist it, presumably.

40:35Natalie Adona:It's not clear what's going to happen if all these people show up and then there's an effort to, you know, say that there is no majority. The question is whether there will be new rules passed in the lame duck period that then would, you know, give Mike Johnson unprecedented power. But, you know, generally speaking, the House, you know, disappears after the election and then it has to reappear on January 3rd, according to, you know, the processes that have been in place for over 200 years. Right. But I mean, then we are we are in really dangerous territory. Right. I mean, then then we're talking about an election that was run.

41:10Natalie Adona:And then, you know, as in other parts of the world, you know, someone, you know, a leader then rejects the elections and then tries to cancel the vote.

41:18Kara Swisher:Right. What about you, Natalie? How do you look at this?

41:21Natalie Adona:I assume that folks up to this point who have doubts would have come to an office like mine. And I think, you know, one of the most important things that we do as elections officials is we open up the process to the public. You can see how we are processing ballots. You can see how many ballots that we have. Under the California Voting Bill of Rights, you have the right to ask questions about the elections process and receive answers from the elections official. And we spend a lot of time educating the public. So if there was some sort of doubt as to the election results, I would assume that we would have a high level of contact with our lawyers, with the secretary of state.

42:09Natalie Adona:We may be asked to provide statements to the court or even testify as to our process. And this all would very likely happen once the election results would be certified in California. We've got up to 30 days to certify. Many of us are done before then, but yeah, we would have to continue to do what we always do, which is show our work. Well, let me just say that it's not as if the courts are going to be silent in this, right? I mean, in the event that there's an effort to try to undermine the vote, but you're going to see action before the election. You'll see action on Election Day, and then you're going to see actions afterwards in the event that there's an effort to undermine the vote.

42:58Natalie Adona:And the courts have been a kind of shining light in election litigation. But in a bipartisan way, you've seen Trump-appointed judges, you know, Obama-appointed judges have been sort of buttressing our democracy.

43:13Kara Swisher:Right. So speaking of Tony Rourke, just for people who don't know, Natalie has had MAGA observers demanding to stand closer, using binoculars, taking pictures of signatures, and borderline harassing you and voters, just to be clear. But Susan, go ahead on this question. Yeah, I mean, look, right, we're already in a dark place because we're trying to contemplate scenarios that have never happened before in American history. So that's part of it, right, is just we're off the grid here. I think, again, certification is really key, as it was in 2020. It's also true. It's not just at the presidential level, but also House and Senate races have to be certified by the state.

43:52Kara Swisher:So we don't know the map yet of what would be contested. But, you know, the scenario we're talking about here is presumably where the House of Representatives, where control is very close. And so it would depend actually to a certain extent on in what states are the races that are very close. Because if those are states that have Democratic governors and Democratic state election officials and Democratic legislatures, it's going to be very hard to do what the Trump administration might want to do. If those are states that are more evenly divided or where there's Republican officials, okay, then the question is what kind of Republican officials?

44:29Kara Swisher:We've seen, by the way, Republican officials in many states, even if they supported Trump at the national level, who have had more backbone than their national colleagues, not just in Georgia in 2020, but also look at what happened in Indiana, where Republicans, very conservative Republicans, refused Trump's efforts to redo the district line. So it depends on the map, number one. Number two, I would just also point out that Mike Johnson is also already barely in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. So to Nate's point about, you know, could you rewrite the rules before January 3rd, before the new Congress?

45:10Kara Swisher:I think that would already be very, very hard to do. In fact, there's actually a scenario where over the next few months, Mike Johnson and the Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives even before the November elections. He's down to one vote right now, you know, in the natural process of a few hundred people, many of them older. You could have, you know, someone resigning Congress, a resignation and a death. And then all of a sudden you're talking about Democrats even possibly being in control or Republicans, you know, dumping Mike Johnson, who already doesn't have a lot of confidence among many of the members and picking someone else.

45:50Kara Swisher:So, you know, Trump may want to do this. He doesn't have a lot of juice is what you're saying. Yeah. We'll be back in a minute.

46:11Kara Swisher:This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. I'm Kathy Jones, Schwab's Chief Fixed Income Strategist. And I'm Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist. Between us, we have decades of experience studying the indicators that drive the economy and how they can have a direct impact on your investments. We know that investors have a lot of questions about the markets and the economy, and we're here to help. Join us each week as we explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds? And what sectors of the stock market are outperforming?

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48:26Natalie Adona:spring is here and there's a whole new way to chai at starbucks that's made perfect for you

48:31Kara Swisher:choose your sweetness dial it up or keep things light add a touch of pistachio a hint of strawberry or vanilla or make it a spring classic with lavender because this season there's endless ways to chai at starbucks all right let's wrap up by looking forward to election threats we'll be facing even after the midterms. The Supreme Court appears ready to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The ruling could come too late for the states to redraw their districts in time for the midterms, but the consequence could be dire for Democrats in 2028 and future elections. Nate, game this out for us. What do the Democrats' chances in the House look like without Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act?

49:10Natalie Adona:Well, if the laws of political physics haven't been sort of completely unended in the last 10 years, the Democrats should win somewhere between 20 and 40 seats, which is to say that with people having a pretty low view of the economy and low presidential approval, that that should be the kind of expected shift in the House. Now, gerrymandering may blunt some of the natural forces that would lead to a Democratic takeover in a midterm election, but the amount of advantage that Republicans are getting is not that significant. Over the long term, when you're talking about the decline of Section 2, this has been the main piece of legislation that has provided for majority-minority districts, for minority-opportunity districts, so that Black and Latino communities are able to get many more districts than they would otherwise.

50:02Natalie Adona:Because the Supreme Court has said that partisan gerrymandering doesn't raise any constitutional questions, it's statutes like the Voting Rights Act that have been the bulwark that have prevented certain types of gerrymandering. I do think the Supreme Court is going to gut Section 2 of the VRA. I think the writing is on the wall. And so that means that we may see some more redistricting maybe after this election, as well as as we come into the 2030 round of redistricting.

50:27Kara Swisher:Right. So, so far, election officials have played it pretty straight. Republicans like Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, who's running for governor, and Stephen Richer, the former Maricopa County recorder, did their jobs in 2020 despite intense pressure from Trump and fellow Republicans. That might not always be the case. Natalie, if the election official wanted to corrupt an election, could they do it or would it be too obvious? Not that you would.

50:54Natalie Adona:No, no, never. And I mean, that's serious. We all do take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of, you know, our respective states. So breaking that oath is a serious issue. It would take a lot of planning. It would not go unnoticed, as we saw in the case, for example, with Tina Peters clearly got caught. And, you know, when I read a story about Tina Peters, it was just shocking to me that any one in the cohort would— Yes, yeah, Mesa County, Colorado. It's shocking to me that anyone would really go to that length. So, you know, we in California, we do have, I think, a very strong cohort that is constantly in contact.

51:53Natalie Adona:We are also in contact on a regular basis with Secretary of State, and we all talk about what the rules are. In a place like California, you have a lot of local control over how elections are run, but we're all operating under the same laws. And, you know, we know what each other is doing. And I would venture to guess because, you know, I'm like this and I assume that my colleagues are the same way. If you're doing something that is way off base, we'll let you know, hey, what?

52:33Kara Swisher:Right. So you're saying it'd be very difficult for an election administration to purposely miss 10 votes.

52:38Natalie Adona:Yeah, it would be extremely difficult for it to go unnoticed.

52:42Kara Swisher:OK, so one of the ways it gets noticed is through the press. Trump's attacks on the press have been unrelenting, as I know, as Susan knows. Many of the legacy media's owners are caving him just today. CBS is cutting off an interview with James Tallarico because Brandon Carr is a giant jackass. But for a large portion of the electorate, facts don't seem to matter. James Madison wrote that a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue. to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Very fancy quote, but absolutely holds up. Susan, how do you think about your role in the news media's role more broadly?

53:17Kara Swisher:Is it a prologue to a farce, a tragedy, or both? Yeah, look, Donald Trump himself in the 2024 election campaign said, if we don't have free speech, we don't have a country, period. And it's against that backdrop, a very cynical statement, really, when you consider the broad array of attacks that Trump has launched, not just on the integrity of the electoral process, but, you know, you could argue that it's going after, in a pretty systematic way, Americans' free speech rights that have been a signature move of this president. And of course, that's all in the context of maintaining power and, you know, using it.

53:57Kara Swisher:And I think that, you know, for Trump, he sees the stakes in this fall's election as very significant to him. While some people will downplay it and say, well, what difference does it really make if Democrats take back the House? You can say that Donald Trump believes it makes a big difference. He himself has repeatedly, almost obsessively, already begun talking about it. He says the Democrats will impeach him once again if they take back the House, that, you know, he understands there will be not only potential impeachment, but there will be oversight hearings. There will be Congress acting in a different way.

54:29Kara Swisher:It might cause him also to lose the hold over the Republicans who remain on Capitol Hill, who he's cowed. No, it's existential. It's clear he understands it's existential. So number one, it's existential. Number two, it's the lies and disinformation that have fueled Donald Trump and his movement from the beginning. And, of course, it's lies about an election that are at the heart of this presidency. The New York Times called Trump's second term the January 6th presidency. Well, that means it's a story about lying about an election that is the foundational ideological belief of the people who are running this country right now.

55:04Kara Swisher:And so it's in that context that I think, you know, we have this responsibility as journalists. And again, Kara, I see that as a very nonpartisan thing in the same way that our election officials, you know, need to have rules of the road that are not benefiting Democrats or Republicans, you know, but that it's a, you know, essentially a technocratic role in our democracy. Without it, we can't have confidence in it. I feel the same way about journalism. You know, reporting independently without fear or favor doesn't mean saying that there's an equivalent between our two parties or everything that comes out of the mouth of a candidate has to be weighed in that context.

55:44Kara Swisher:It means being able to speak without fear or favor. And I worry that in too many communities around the country, including, sadly, the community you and I live in, Washington, D.C., which has lost its reporting about state and local elections. You know, my husband spent more than a decade reporting for the metro section of The Washington Post, including from Richmond, Virginia, the capital of Virginia. You know, we're losing our independent reporting about elections at exactly the moment they're challenged by the people who are running the country. So, you know, obviously the role of journalism is an important one to spotlight in terms of the integrity of the elections.

56:23Kara Swisher:So one of the things that's interesting is, you know, after they dumped this James Tallarico interview on the broadcast network, CBS acquiesced instantly. They put it on YouTube a second later, which I thought was hysterical. I was like, hey, have you heard of the Internet kids? In any case, my last question, there doesn't necessarily have to be anything dramatic like ICE agents patrolling voting sites or FBI agents taking ballots for Trump's prolonged assault on our democracy work between gerrymandering, voter roll purges, ID laws designed to suppress turnout, the gutting of Voting Rights Act, whatever Trump does around the midterms, we could see American democracy severely damaged by a thousand cuts.

57:01Kara Swisher:How do we avoid that, Spade? Let's hear from Susan, Nate, and Natalie, you get the last word. Thanks, Cara. I mean, you know, look, that's the thing about us journalists, right? We don't have to—we're not as good at prescriptions as we are at analysis and describing the problem rather than fixing it. And I feel like that's the role for us to play in this democratic small-D crisis that we have right now. You know, I will say that in other countries that I've observed and reporting from Russia during, you know, the beginning of Vladimir Putin's tenure in other countries around the world where you've experienced democratic small d rollbacks, it's the role of civil society coming together.

57:44Kara Swisher:And journalism, in my view, independent journalism is part of civil society. Americans just aren't used to talking in those terms. We tend to actually buy into this very polarized, like there's Democrats and there's Republicans. And frankly, the interest of the Democratic Party, capital D, isn't always the same as the interest of the democracy, small d. And, you know, I feel like this is a moment for civil society to come together in a pretty widespread and sweeping way and not to wait until it's too late. Because I think that that's what happened after Donald Trump was first sworn in last year, that you didn't see that kind of civil society coming together, the resistance, the people understanding, you know, that they needed to act collectively and stand up collectively for democratic values.

58:32Kara Swisher:That – if that doesn't happen, a lot of the things that we're warning about in this podcast may come to pass. OK. Nate?

58:40Natalie Adona:So a lot has to happen before we get to that apocalypse. I think that viewers and listeners need to understand that the courts have been quite active in particularly protecting the vote. And so while there's all kinds of executive orders and other kinds of threats that are being posed in this pre-election period, you know, the system, you know, I remain optimistic that the system is going to hold. I think over the long run that there is damage that has now been done, which is that people have lost confidence in the election infrastructure. And so long as elites send that message that voters can't trust that their ballots will be counted, that I think that that long-term distrust of the mechanics of American democracy is something to be concerned about.

59:28Natalie Adona:But as has been sort of the lesson over the last year, it's very difficult right now, about nine or 10 months away from the election, to predict what we're going to be talking about then. And so what I tell my students is that I can't tell you that there's light at the end of the tunnel, but I can only tell you that there are going to be other tunnels.

59:45Kara Swisher:Okay.

59:46Natalie Adona:Natalie? Sure. I appreciate the question because, I mean, I hear a lot of crazy stuff that could affect the work. And there's a lot of things that give me hope. And, you know, one of the big things is, you know, I'm just going to take it back to my colleagues, both here in the state and in my office and across the nation. We care very deeply about a free and fair elections process where voters get to participate if they choose to do so and that we count ballots to the fullest extent of the law. Unfortunately, nowadays, we sort of become more like referees than anything else. But a level of planning and detail and care that we put into every single election, even in the face of intense harassment, intimidation, even threats in some cases, we are dedicated to this process.

1:00:54Natalie Adona:And, you know, I would encourage anyone who has any questions to come into our office, look at our operations, see what we do. We all open up the process so people can have the opportunity to come and see the level of detail and verification that we pour into every election. We care about getting it right. were often forced to keep from getting too distracted by the politics of it all. And we'll continue to do so for this election and for all future elections.

1:01:33Kara Swisher:All right. Thank you all so much. I really appreciate you for joining us. It's really important to talk about these issues in a relatively calm and extensive way so people understand there are things they could do. And Natalie, I have to say, I believe in democracy because of people like you who are doing this work. despite all the difficulties.

1:01:52Natalie Adona:Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thanks for having me.

1:01:54Kara Swisher:Yeah, thank you so much. It is heartening, Natalie, in an unoptimistic time. I'd like to hear you. Go, Natalie. Absolutely. I appreciate it.

1:02:08Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Michelle Alloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Eamon Whelan and Madeline LaPlante-Duby. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, we get to keep our democracy. If not, we still get to keep our democracy. We're not backing down. And please, go vote. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

1:02:47Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Monday with more.

1:03:11Natalie Adona:So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great.