(dramatic music) - Good morning and
welcome to the homecoming and the Goldman School Center on Civility and Democratic
Engagement panel. The panel is An Election Like No Other: Ensuring Democracy's Survival. My name is Dan Lindheim. I'm professor at Goldman and the faculty director of the center. The center was created
by the class of 1968 for their 40th reunion. Some classes give benches. Class of '68 gave a center. The center promotes democratic engagement and civil discourse through
faculty and student research, teaching, providing student
fellowships and internships, and putting on public
events like this one today. More information on the center
is available on the website and it could be found by Googling Center on Civility and
Democratic Engagement or by going to the Goldman
School of Public Policy website and selecting centers. Election experts, both
Republican and Democrat, know the turnout determines elections, especially close elections. Maximizing the turnout of your own supporters is campaigning 101. There's also a more nefarious side where deliberate efforts are made, whether by government or
organizations or private parties, or now even in international
agencies or entities to create impediments to voting. These are sometimes designed
with the express purpose of depressing the other side's turn out. Today's panel focuses on efforts to promote democratic engagement by encouraging voting, by
ensuring voter turnout, and avoiding efforts to suppress turnout, whatever the reasons, political, pandemic, or in this election, some
combination of the two. We've already seen insanely
long lines for early voting. We've seen efforts to
possibly delay the U.S. mail. The good news there is
early and mail-in voting, especially during the pandemic. The bad news, long voting
lines, fears of slowed mail are often too often a
strategy, not a necessity. Today's panel will speak
to the most critical issues of this election. The very issues that the two
candidates were asked about in the first debate COVID-19,
voting and ballot counting under the reality of COVID-19, efforts to both promote
and suppress voting, charges of election irregularities, and president Trump's
effort to separate Biden from his progressive base in an effort to reduce the Biden vote. Our panel includes some of the leading, nation's leading experts on COVID-19. We have the most knowledgeable
official regarding voting and vote processing in California. We have the campus's leading legal expert on voting and election law. And we have a national expert on probably the most determinative
issue of this election, whether the Democratic base will turn out in substantial numbers. The presentations will be followed by a brief panel discussion and then questions from the audience. To ask questions, there's
a link on the sign in page. I want to now introduce today's panel. Our first speaker is Bertrall Ross Professor Ross is
Chancellor's Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. He has a wide range of
expertise and teaches courses on legislation, election
law, and constitutional law. He's widely published and
his most recent work is "Fair Elections During a Crisis: Urgent Recommendations in
Law, Media Politics and Tech to Advance the Legitimacy of
and the Public's Confidence in the November, 2020 Election." Next will be Aimee Alison, the founder and president
of She The People, a national network elevating the voice and power of women of color. Alison leads national
efforts to build inclusive, multi-racial coalitions
led by women of color to increase voter engagement and advocate for racial,
economic and gender justice. She is the author of "Army of None." John Swartzberg is
Clinical Professor Emeritus of the UC Berkeley
School of Public Health. He chairs the editorial board of the school's health
and wellness publications. If you subscribe to a wellness letter, he is the chair of the board. He is past director of UC Berkeley and UC SF joint medical program. He is board certified in internal medicine and infectious disease. He spent 30 years in clinical practice and he is on all forms of
media, almost on a daily basis talking about COVID. We'll go first to Bertrall Ross. - Thank you Dan. Thank you for the introduction. It's great to be here. I wish we could all be together in Berkeley right now
as we were last year. But I hope you are well,
wherever you may be. So I consider this to be the
most consequential election for African-Americans
and communities of color since the 1860. That election of course came in the face of the existential threat
to this Republic, slavery that destroyed the lives
of African-Americans. This election comes in the
face of existential threats to this country and to the planet. The existential threats to
our country are a pandemic and the potential for a social
disorder arising from it that has coincided with
governmental promotion of race-based hate, designed to distract
from that very pandemic that feeds further into
that potential for disorder. And in the background
is an existential threat to the planet that is climate change. That's the United States
as a leading contributor is doing little to counteract, and that will continue to
disproportionately impact people of color around the world. And what we have seen
in the various primaries since the pandemic and what
I expect to see much more in the general elections is the same old voter
suppression practices to target low propensity
minority voters in particular. But this time those who
promote voter suppression will have the pandemic
as both a justification for those practices and a tool to suppress, to
support those practices. And we've all seen
President Trump's efforts, delegitimize mail-in
voting during a pandemic. In the minds of the Trump campaign limiting mail-in voting will
force people to go to the polls and vote in person. Whereas it is difficult to
prevent our disincentivize people from physically mailing in a ballot, There are tried and
true methods to prevent or disincentivize people
from voting in person for which the pandemic would
provide justificatory cover. One tried and true method is limiting the number of polling places, particularly in minority neighborhoods. Such limits of course, lead
to long lines and long waits like we are already seeing
in the early voting. In the past limits on the
number of polling places in minority communities
was said to be justified by the number of voters
in minority precincts in prior elections. But that justification did not hold much weight with observers. But this time, state election officials who might've pursued the
same actions in the past can now point to the decline
in the number of poll workers as a reason for the
reduction of polling places. The typical poll worker's
an elderly person volunteering to do a service
for his or her community. But in this pandemic of course, the elderly are the most vulnerable to the fatal consequences from the virus and so many have decided
during the pandemic during the primaries at least, to not put their lives at risk. Fewer poll workers, fewer polls, and if things go according
to how they have gone in the past elections, that will mean even fewer polls in minority neighborhoods and communities. And the Trump campaign appears
to be banking on the hope that low propensity voters
of color will not wanna wait in long lines to vote, which will be made to look even longer by social
distancing requirements at polling places in the
middle of a pandemic. And polls showing that
Biden's likely to win might paradoxically bolster the strategy as it reduces incentives
for supporters of Biden to wait in the long lines and
and vote during the pandemic, because they might decide that their vote will not be necessary for a Biden win. For those brave souls who
persevere in the long lines, they will have waiting for
them near the polling places people hired by the Trump campaign and others to engage in
so-called election protection. Ostensibly, they are there
to protect the integrity of the election, but I expect that most, if not
all, will be placed at polls in predominantly minority communities. And while I am cautiously optimistic that these election observers
will not participate in violent acts against
people trying to vote like their counterparts from the past, they will be there to discourage voting through more passive intimidation and challenges to the voter's
qualifications at the polls. And it's important to
recognize that in many states, an elector or poll watcher can challenge a voters
qualification at the polls. And even though there will
not be a legitimate basis for almost all of the challenges, and even though the voter will
eventually be able to vote the effects of these
challenges is to delay voting so that those long lines
will be slow moving and contribute to voter attrition. None of these voter suppressive
efforts are possible with mail-in voting, which is reason why the
Trump administration is trying to do legitimize mail-in voting bringing legal challenges
against mail-in voting practices and has threatened the
funding of the post office. Now, Republicans are not all in agreement with this strategy as
some see mail-in voting as advantageous to their
electoral prospects, but as has been the norm over
the past four years at least, divergent Republican party preferences tend to be subordinated to
those of President Trump. A second age old voter
suppressive strategy that will be bolstered during the pandemic is a campaign of misinformation targeting communities of color. This strategy was used effectively
during the 2016 campaign and may have contributed
to the lower than expected turnout numbers of African-Americans in places like Milwaukee and Detroit. One form of disinformation
will be to supply voters of color with damaging and often false information about Biden to reduce the desire to vote for him. But in addition to this
strategy what will likely move to the forefront is a
misinformation campaign about the logistics of voting. In fact, we're already seeing that happen through social media and other outlets. Misinformation about how
and where you can vote will be even more effective in a pandemic when people see in the
news and by word of mouth, that ways of building are being adjusted in states throughout the country. Since information about
how and where to vote is surprisingly hard to come by, misinformation campaigns
can be quite effective, as it will lead people to
try to vote in the wrong way or at the wrong polling place that could come at the cost
of their ballot counting or them voting at all. Finally, in the case of a Trump loss, there might be an election
delegitimation nation campaign similar to the one
operationalized by Trump in 2016. If Trump is willing to
delegitimize an election he actually won, you can actually, you can only imagine what
he will do to an election if he loses. There will probably be
claims of illegal voting by noncitizens as subject to status and belonging to Latinx of
Latinx voters to question. There will probably be the
targeting if mostly female and minority election officials in states and localities
alleging that they engaged in the corrupt processing
and counting the ballots, leading to the questions about their competence and integrity. And all of these efforts
will likely be focused on rallying the base to engage in more civilly
disobedient forms of protests targeting minority communities to test the public's
tolerance for disorder, in hopes of using backdoor mechanisms to secure that election if necessary. Now coming out of my mouth this always sounded rather outlandish in the days before the pandemic or even the early months of the pandemic. But with the president's
consistent questioning of the validity of forms of voting and his recent remarks refusing to commit to the peaceful transition of power, unless he decides the
election is free and fair, significant doubts have
been raised about whether we will be able to avoid
disorder after the election. And this threat to post-election disorder can have turnout effects as
those low propensity voters who might be conflict averse and not intensely invested in
a particular election outcome decide it's not worth the
potential for disorder to vote for Biden or to vote at all. At the end of the day, voting
is a fundamental right, that in an ideal world would
be exercised by everyone. In the unusual circumstance of a pandemic voting is more uncertain, more risky, and more costly in terms of information needed to know how to vote. And these unusual circumstances
are likely to have a greater impact on low propensity voters. These are some of the
challenges we face going forward in these last two and a half
weeks leading to the election. And I thank you all for listening. I'll pass it over to the next panelist. - Thank you, Bertrall. Aimee. - Thank you. That was, first of all,
thank you for having me here. It's an honor to be
part of this celebration and Dan, thanks for asking me to be part of the Center's celebration today. I'm Aimee Alison, founder
of She The People, a national network elevating the voice and political power of women of color. I started the organization after the 2016 elections
told us a couple of things about the widely held, but
fictional understanding of who is actually in
the American electorate. You see women of color,
Black women, Latinas, Asian-Americans, Pacific
Islanders, Indigenous women were never really discussed
when it talked about the calculus for a winning. Wasn't talked about in
terms of investing in or turning out the communities, but the fact is that women of color are the fastest growing
voting block in the country. And 17 days out from the election, our eyes are fixed on a
certain handful of states that are gonna make all the difference for the presidential contest. Those states are mostly
majority people of color, where women of color
or more than a quarter of the electorate. We gotta keep our eye on Arizona, on Texas Georgia, Florida, Michigan,
Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And in there is also North Carolina. Those are the states where, when we look at the
numbers from 2016 'til now women of color are really gonna be the margin of victory for the Democrats. And let me tell you why. Even though we had been ignored as we are definitely have
been a political force and a driver in election after election. Black women are the highest turnout voters of any race and gender and the numbers of the fastest growing Asian American, and also the the huge numbers
of vote eligible Latinas, as well as the critical
role that Indigenous women are playing in traditional
red states like Idaho has been undercounted and
undervalued until now. But if we look at some of the key states that I just mentioned, look at Arizona. The gap that Trump won
Arizona was 91,000 in 2016. Yet women of color who did not vote, who were eligible to vote on
the voter rolls was 341,000. If we look at Georgia, Trump won that state by 211,000
and yet the women of color who did not vote in 2016 was 521,000. So we have a lot of, we have the same kind of a set of data that helps us to understand both who's living in these states, these states in the South and Southwest, many former Confederacy states or former states that were Mexico at one point in our history, have a population of
majority people of color. And women of color have been
discounted, dehumanized, and sidelined by both parties. As a result an underinvestment,
in speaking to, and more importantly having
messages, having policies and politics and leaders
that really activate and speak to women of color has been the biggest, I think, positive
message in this last year. She The People spent
a lotta time listening to women of color, particularly in the battleground states hearing what it was gonna take, understanding what the
politics need to look like. We understood, even as
far back as the primary, the caucus in Nevada, Nevada being the first people
of color majority state in which women of color
were 26% of the electorate. We understood that back then, the rise of white nationalist violence was a big top concern. Healthcare was another big concern and ongoing economic health where even before the pandemic had a stranglehold on our
economy and people's wellbeing, the fact is that women of
color understood COVID-19 to be an extension and exasperation of the already crisis level
of that women of color were experiencing on all levels in terms of access to healthcare, in terms of safety and security, in terms of economic stability
and ability to build wealth. And so we knew then what was important. We also heard loud and clear way back at the beginning of the year that we needed a woman
of color on the ticket to activate the numbers of
women of color for high turnout. And so we spent many, many
months making the argument on the national stage that
when it came down to, you know older white men who are not
representative of the base and just to understand, I
don't use the term minority in any of my conversations
about women of color, because here in our home
state of California, we're the majority of women. And in the states I'm talking about, in the battleground states that count, where the majority of women. And so we need to rethink and recast the way that we're
using language to describe this powerhouse block of voters. When Kamala Harris was
announced to be on the ticket, understanding the critical
nature of women of color, both Black women and Asian American women and just women of color in
general, it was a huge, huge win. Her role has been as a Senator, okay, you know she comes
from our most populous state and she has cut her teeth on building multi-racial
coalitions and speaking to us. And nationally she's
played a critical role advocating for economic justice, cash payments for people who government support has run out for people, unemployment in a state like Florida, a third of the people who
applied for unemployment have not received a single check. So she's been advocating for that. She has been out front
talking about racial justice. She has been a leading voice and continues to be on the ticket, speaking to the multiracial
groups of people many of whom were out in the streets in July and June this year calling for America to
deal with its racism. And you can see the
pushback in the way that just like women of
color who run for office or who are living our lives, we see people like Senator
Perdue who outta Georgia, who's facing a tough battle
with Jon Ossoff in Georgia, getting onstage talking about her name and try to mispronounce
it and dismissing her. The use of the particular
combination of racism and sexism is not new, but we recognize it and we're in a position now with our increased political power to push back against that and say, we want, this is not about policy, this is about the humanity of people and so many people who live here. We think of it as a new American majority. So our work has been in helping
solidify women of color, not as a racial identity, but as a political term of solidarity, that forms a core of a
inclusive multiracial coalition that can include everyone. But the fact of the matter is
for Democrats high turnout, high turn out a women of color by two to 4% in these specific
states would flip the states and win the electoral college votes needed for the Biden Harris ticket
to win the White House. And I say all that to say,
it's been critically important that we have a woman of color
at the top of the ticket who can articulate those concerns. Now I did the numbers and it
was widely reported yesterday, in 2016, around this
time about 18 days out, 1.4 million people had cast an early vote. And yesterday 21 million
people had cast an early vote. This is good, not only, it's not just good news for
the Democrats who have the, have the people who live in these states, who are likely, who are
basically, this is a referendum about Trump and about
this kind of politics, but it's also bigger than that. It's about our democracy. And you'll see women of color, you know, Texas Organizing Project, who's been registering and speaking to and organizing communities
of color for a decade, who have led to a historic
turnouts in Harris County, which is in the Houston area. First day of early voting
over 100,000 people cast and you saw those big lines which Dan was talking about earlier. You see women of color who are leading the New Florida Majority
who are right now, training legal scholars and
defenders of voting rights, so that it's not just the right wing, scary people with guns who
are intimidating voters at the polls in these long
lines that we anticipate, but people who are pro-democracy advocates who are really an extension of those who have been fighting to expand the franchise of democracy to make sure that everyone
who's eligible can vote. I just wanna say just in concluding my
remarks is that we do, it was laid out all the
challenges that we have and women of color are
really at the center of the most targeted
for voter suppression, both by not engaging and investing in us, but also the attacks and
creating a culture of hostility. And the practical matters
where we're getting still, we have to make sure that
we're on the voter rolls, we have to stand in
inordinately long lines, or try to vote early with
the questionable post office. Even in California we have
the Republicans putting up fake ballot boxes collecting ballots, which our Secretary of State and we have an expert from
the office will talk about. But all of these things are really, naturally trying to depress the vote. But I take Stacey Abrams
and Fair Fight's lead in all of this. I worked with Stacey Abram's gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. I can tell you the heartbreaking and ugly, lying, and cheating around around preventing people from
exercising the right to vote. But I've also seen something else. I've seen incredible certitude, people holding up democracy and being willing to crawl through glass, to cast their vote. I've seen the lines and
we will continue to see high vote turnout amongst women of color who are gonna make the
difference this year. I gathered a group of women
of color from 38 states. There were 600 of us
and we started texting women of color in Pennsylvania
and Texas and now Arizona. It was the largest national,
specifically targeted, turnout effort by women of
color for women of color. And so far we're almost texting
400,000 across those states and we're gonna continue. I think that's it. Even though we have challenges, we have an incredible opportunity to really change the calculus
and a new center of gravity about what our democracy and
what our politics can produce. And so I thank you very much for being part of this conversation. - Thank you, Aimee John. - Thanks Dan. And thanks to you other panelists, and thanks to everybody who's watching. I'd like to talk a little bit about the significance of COVID and the implications for
this election going forward. Let me begin by just giving
us an idea of where we are in the United States and the world. Right now the world has
around 40 million cases that have been reported. That's way less than the absolute number, but we'll use that number. And there've been about 1
million deaths so far from COVID. In the United States, we have about 8 million
cases with about 220 million sorry, 220,000 deaths. The important numbers tucked into that are that the United States has about 4% of the world's population, Yet the United States has 20% of the cases of COVID on this planet. And we have 22% of the
deaths on this planet. So I'd like to address with you for just a very few minutes
where we've gone wrong, because that will inform us
as to how we wanna go forward. Where we've gone wrong in one place has been that we may have the
wrong culture for a pandemic. And by that I mean, we don't have the most
empathetic of cultures in the United States. And empathy is what makes people recognize that we have a terrible
problem in the United States even when we can't see it
amongst the people around us. More specifically, it's
estimated that on average, each American knows 600 people. For every American to know
somebody who's died of COVID, if COVID was equally distributed
throughout our society, we'd have to have about 500,000 deaths, when we have about 220,000 deaths. So a lot of Americans don't
know someone who's died. Without knowing somebody who's, without knowing someone
who's died of this pandemic in the United States, people who don't have
a great deal of empathy are not gonna react very much to it. The invisible people with
COVID in the United States are the majority of people
who have this infection. By that I mean, roughly
about five times more Latinx or African-Americans are hospitalized for every white or Asian
that's hospitalized with COVID in the United States. That the deaths in the Latinx population and in the African-American
population greatly exceed the number of deaths seen
in the Asian population and the white population
in the United States. People who are underserved
in the United States in terms of homeless or
challenged for shelter, challenged for food, have
roughly five times the death rate of people who have shelter, have food. People who are insecure
in their environment because of stress are about
two times at risk of dying. So if you come from a more
privileged part of our culture, you're less likely to
see someone who's died and you're less likely to
therefore react to the severity of this culture, excuse
me, of this pandemic. Some of the other problems that
we faced with this pandemic in terms of going, that can inform us about going forward are that there's been decades
of public health underfunding. We've known about pandemics
coming to the United States for at least the 1960s. Just look at the 21st century. In 2002, we had SARS. In 2009, we had influenza H1N1 pandemic. In 2012, there was the MERS pandemic. And now in 2019, we had the, and we're having SARS-CoV-2. That's four pandemics in 20
years in the United States that have included the United States. We're gonna be seeing many more. There's gonna be SARS-CoV-20,
SARS-CoV-23, SARS-CoV-28. We need to be better prepared. And yet this pandemic occurred
when we've had decades of underfunding in public health. We also know that action
came much too late here in the United States. That even though, we well
knew the severity of COVID by the third week of January and the toll that it was gonna take on this country and the world, there was complete inaction by leadership. It's been estimated that
just between January and May had we acted more promptly, about 50% of the people who
died in those four months would not have died. Another problem that COVID is under, has really laid bare is our tremendously fragmented
healthcare industry. With a fragmented
industry we can't perform, we can't react to a
pandemic in a unified way. And that's why we see different states popping up with higher rates
of infection than other states. We see some states where
governors forbid masking and we see the consequences of that. And those states have paid
the consequences for that. It's made no sense how we manage things on a statewide basis, much less even in a local basis where hospital systems
compete with each other. Another area that COVID
has really demonstrated that I think most Americans
have been well aware of is that the messaging has been disastrous. When we have a President
of the United States who lies on a daily basis, multiple times, and who has given not only dishonest messages about the pandemic but has led people in the wrong direction, for example, with masking, for example, with
congregating people together which we know is so risky, how can you possibly expect a society to respond rationally to a pandemic? We know that there's been
tremendous inadequate testing here in the United States. We started with a fiasco with the CDC and we've never really
caught up from that. We still are doing less testing than we need to hold
this pandemic where it is much less mitigate most of the risk. Attached to that of course, is the inadequate stockpiling of PPE. Our healthcare workers
still don't have enough PPE. We still tell our population
don't wear an N95 mask because we need to reserve them
for our healthcare workers. And they still don't have enough. So fundamental problems with that. And finally, the politicization
of our key agencies. I've been a physician now for 50 years. I've been an infectious disease specialist for 45 of those years and I'd always highly respected the Centers for Disease Control. And yet the messaging coming out of the Centers for Disease
Control during this pandemic have been very disappointing and it's not because of
the people who work there. I know a lot of them, they're outstanding. They're so dedicated and so well-educated, and they can solve a lot of our problems. But it's the people who are
messaging out of the CDC that are controlled by the White House, that have led to a very
disappointing response. So no trust in the CDC and the same can be said for the FDA because of its politicization. Outstanding, dedicated
career people in the FDA, and yet their voices aren't heard because it's been so politicized. So think about what happens
when we get a vaccine. Who's gonna trust Donald Trump? Who's gonna trust even the CDC or the FDA when they're so politicized? This presents a tremendous problem for confronting the pandemic, because in spite of what
we've heard recently with the Great Barrington Declaration, which is as Tony Fauci
describes as nonsense, which it absolutely is, we do need to get to herd immunity, but we need to get there with
a safe and effective vaccine. Yet, even if we have a
safe and effective vaccine, our society has been
so lied to for so long that it's hard to imagine
a lotta people trusting, and this presents a tremendous problem. So we're really confronted with a myriad a problems that
are all self-inflicted by a regime in this country that has perpetrated that upon us. And it has really been the perfect storm of a pandemic coming at a time when we've been underfunded
in public health and when we have an administration that is not at all interested
in the health of our public. - Thank you John. When I was introducing people, my screen went blank and I did
not introduce James Schwab. James is the Chief
Deputy Secretary of State for Policy and Planning
from the State of California where he oversees implementation
of recent election reforms. James previously served as
Chief of Legislative Affairs for the agency. He's also worked as a legislative staffer and has managed several
local election campaigns. James works directly with the
Secretary of State Padilla. James, go ahead. - Thank you for having me here today, especially during this important time. We are 18 days away from the election and it's no better time to catch up and learn what's going on than today. So I'm gonna start off with a little bit about how we got here. In a certain sense, California
has been preparing for this for a long time. For over 40 years California has offered no excuse vote by mail. And for about 20 years we've offered permanent vote by mail status. So for the past several decades, the popularity of vote by mail
has grown to the point where in our March primary, 75% of voters got a ballot in the mail. So California has been well
poised to adapt to the changes, which we'll speak about a moment,
that have come with COVID. And this is in contrast what
you see in other states. And that's sort of where
oftentimes there's a blurring of the lines between what's
happening in California and what you see in other
states in terms of vote by mail. Many states had little to no vote by mail. All states offered some amount of it, but there's many hurdles
or just wasn't a lot of usage in past elections, but now those states are ramping up. And more often than not
what you see is just the errors that come with ramping up vote by mail in other states. And California is worked
through those over the years. And so, like I said made sense where we've just been better prepared given our history of vote by mail. So we also dodged a bullet too, because we moved our primary this year. Traditionally it's in early June and we moved at the beginning of March to make our votes more relevant
during the primary process. And the day after our March primary was the first state State of
Emergency order for COVID. So we dodged it there. And if you recall, early June, if we hadn't moved our
primary from early June, we had curfews, we had
National Guard deployed. It would have been an extreme challenge to have held our primary in June. So we got lucky this year as well. And we were able to
learn from other states that held the primaries after us about how and what we should
do to adopt for November. So after the first
emergency order in March, we began to hear from election officials that they were losing poll workers, that poll workers that
had committed to November were backing out and voting locations, polling places that had committed to November
were also backing out. So we knew we had a problem on our hand and we knew we had to change and adopt. So we convened civil rights organizations, community groups, election officials, policymakers, and we met for about a month through March and into April, and came up with a set of recommendations that ended up being
both an executive order from the governor as well as two pieces of legislation that were signed into law. So I'll go into a little
bit about those changes that were built upon collaboration with a whole host of groups. So there's gonna be
two ways folks can vote and we wanted to make
sure that was possible. We didn't wanna make, we didn't want voters to have to choose between their health
and the right to vote. But we also understand that while vote by mail
is popular in California, in-person voting is just as important for many, many reasons. One, some people are just more
comfortable voting in person, or they might need language assistance, or they might need physical assistance because they have a disability. Maybe they lost their ballot and they want to get a new ballot or they need to register to vote. So we knew the importance
of in-person voting and maintaining that. So our approach was to offer county election official the choice, that you maintain what
you're able to have in March and in previous primaries, in terms of in-person voting
locations and drop boxes, or we'll provide you with
an alternative model. Most of the counties in California are choosing the alternative model. I think the one exception in the Bay area is Contra Costa County. I think they're going with what they had in previous elections. But all the other counties,
Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco are taking
on this alternative model. And what does that look like? So we maintain a certain
level of in-person voting. We require one voting location for every 10,000 registered voters. And then we also require
a one official drop box for every 15,000 registered voters. And that makes sure that there
is both the in-person options and the drop boxes. Those drop boxes must be open for 28 days. And the in-person options must be open for a minimum of four days, election day and the three days prior. So to make sure that the
reduction in locations didn't lead to any disenfranchisement, we expanded in person early voting and expanded the
availability of drop boxes to ensure that those
options were available. Now, the other important
factor of in-person voting was health and safety. So we worked with the California
Department of Public Health and from feedback we were
getting from our colleagues in other states, we established in-person
public health guidelines for polling places, as well
as county elections offices. And with those, we were able
to procure and purchase PPE, cleaning supplies, new
trainings for poll workers, and ensure that that
in-person voting experience is gonna be a healthy and safe one. And that's why I want
definitely to emphasize is in-person voting, there'll
be socially distanced. Poll workers will be wearing masks, there'll be disinfectant. There'll be a hand sanitizer,
masks will be offered to folks who don't wear masks. So we wanna make sure
in person was a healthy and safe option as well. And as you might've heard there's new types of polling locations because we've lost the old type, right? Garages, senior centers that
were oftentimes polling places in the past are no longer available. And what's been really encouraging, and I have to, you know,
I'm from Sacramento, I'm a Kings fan, but I
gotta give respect to LeBron James for taking the lead on really changing the attitude of the entire sports environment. Every major sports team in California is helping out in some way. Most are gonna be in-person
building locations. They're also helping with
poll worker recruitment and just promoting the election as well. So that's a big change. I believe in the Bay
Area, you have the A's, the 49ers, the Giants, the Warriors using their facilities to promote voting and and in-person options. So that's been one of the positives out of this whole thing is really more people coming to the table to support elections. We also had the concern about poll workers and that's actually was, as we move through the year became less and less of an issue. There's been some national efforts by groups like Power the Polls, and we ourselves put together
a new centralized spot for voters to sign up to be poll workers. And we were able to sign
up 120,000 volunteers through those efforts. California regularly probably uses around 30,000 poll workers. So we have more than enough to satisfy and meet the loss of the old
generation of poll workers. A little bit about vote by mail, which is the other big
change for California. Every registered voter in California started receiving their
vote by mail ballot in the beginning of October. And again we went from 75% in March to a 100% in November. And so not that much of a leap, but there was still a lot to get done, especially the concerns
around the U.S. Post Office. Now, again, California has a long history of working in the U.S. Post Office. And it's important to remember that what we hear coming out of D.C. is different than what we
have here in California. We have established working relationships. We meet weekly at this point in time with our USPS partners that have been here and working at USPS long before
the current administration and will be working there long after. They are dedicated public servants and are committed to making sure election mail goes in and out. And that's what we've seen so far. We closely tracked the delivery
of vote by mail ballots to USPS plants, and there
was, they were out to voters within a day or two of
arriving at the USPS plant. So we've been happy to see that. We've also seen quick turnaround times of the return of vote by mail ballots. So far, I think as of this morning, we're over three million
ballots cast in California, which is, compared to what we saw in 2016, where we had 500,000 ballots
cast at this point in time, it's an enormous jump in early voting, but also a testament that
the system's working. Ballots are being returned on time and election officials are counting them. That's important, I mean
we also did do things to potentially protect ourselves
from impact to the USPS. First we changed what we
call the postmark law. So in prior elections, if a ballot arrived within
three days of the election, but was postmarked by election day, it was able to be processed and counted and that was to protect voters who might be military or overseas voters, or oftentimes in disparate
parts of the state, mail goes to another state and comes back. Might go to Oregon and come
back or Nevada come back and there could be a delay. So we've always had that law in place and it's helped count
10s of 1,000s of ballots. This year we extended it from
three days after the election to 17 days after the election, so plenty a time to get that ballot back to the elections official if it's postmarked by election day. So I like to, you know, remind voter, is it safe to use the mail. It is safe to use a drop box as well. We do have postage prepaid on all of our vote by mail envelopes. So it's no stamp needed and it's just as cheap to use the mail as it is to use a drop box. My only advice is just not to
try to mail your ballot back on election day, because you
might put it in a mailbox that's already been picked up that day. So that's my only little tip
for returning your ballot between mail and drop box. The other challenge we've
had besides adapting to COVID and getting these changes
in place, is misinformation. We have not seen this
level of misinformation, I don't think in any
election officials lifetime, we've seen this level. Even in 2016, the
misinformation out there was, was more, was targeted. It was more about, you know, suppressing the vote of
certain demographics. They've expanded it now. It's just suppressing the to vote widely. In terms of, you know,
undermining people's faith in vote by mail, undermining people's faith
even in voting in person by closing polling places and creating these long lines
as a earlier speaker noted. And so that's been a tough job for us is trying to make sure
that voters feel confident in all their options to vote. Just wanna make it clear that voting my mail is safe and secure. In California, and in many other states, our vote by mail ballots are printed on watermarked paper, that's
uniquely watermarked for each election. We place those ballots in envelopes that have barcodes unique to that voter. When that ballot gets back
to the election official they verify the signature on the ballot and they check to see if
that voter had tried to cast a ballot anywhere else before
that ballot is counted. So there is a whole process
in place to make sure that vote by mail is safe and secure. So don't believe the misinformation you might hear out there. And the other piece of misinformation that came up this past week is that the story about fake drop boxes. So last weekend we became
aware of drop boxes placed in some public spaces with the
label official drop box. And as we investigated, it turns out that they
were being operated by the Republican Party. So the Secretary of State
and Attorney General sent a cease and desist
letter to the state part, the California Republican
Party to take the boxes down. And a little bit of background before I go down that path a little more. So California has been
criticized from Republicans for number of elections over what we, how we allow voters to
return their ballots. The Republicans like to
call it ballot harvesting. And that's again, a nefarious term for a law that's meant
to enfranchise voters. So in California, we allow voters to designate someone they trust to return their ballot for them. That person who returns it for them, has to sign the ballot envelope and return it within three days. If that returner doesn't do that, they don't return it, they
don't sign it, that's a felony. You can get in trouble for that. But we allow the voters
to have that option because guess what? If you're stuck at work, I trust my coworker to return
my ballot for me, right? If I'm stuck at home, I trust my neighbor to return my ballot for me,
or maybe I trust my pastor or I trust my kid's teacher, right? There's people we trust
outside of our family circle to help us vote and California
allows that to happen. So what we've seen outta that law, and this is an encouraging, this is a way to get more people to vote, is organizations have sort of
ballot return parties, right? Where community organizations, churches will come together and say,
hey, bring your ballots here, and we'll go and bring them
back to the county for you. That's perfectly legal and encouraged, 'cause that's how we get more
people to trust the system and turn their ballots in. But what we saw is these drop
boxes were left unattended. They were out in public spaces. They were misleadingly labeled as official and that's illegal. Only county elections offices
can establish drop boxes. And two, it was misleading,
labeling them as official. So what we've heard this week is back from the Republican Party, there's an ongoing investigation, but this is what's I can
talk about and what's public is they've agreed to not
use those drop boxes. What they have agreed
to is following the law, which is they'll collect, someone will collect
the ballot that person, that person will sign the ballot envelope as the law requires and they'll put that ballot
back into the drop box and use that drop box as
a receptacle to return. They're not gonna have
a stand alone drop box that's labeled official that's unstaffed. So they've agreed to follow the law. And, but we are continuing
the investigation because we still are getting reports of unofficial drop boxes
throughout the state. So we're trying to understand
the scope of the problem and that's where the investigation
stands as of yesterday. So those are the details on that. I'm sure we'll get some in Q and A, but I wanted to make sure
I addressed that as well. You know, the other
issue I'll end on here is beyond COVID, beyond misinformation, election officials are dealing with the public safety power shutoffs. We're dealing with the
effects of climate change. We've been preparing for that this year. Counties have been able to receive funding to make sure to have
the equipment in place to respond to power shutoffs or you know or emergencies
where they need to evacuate their central county offices. And we've been working with the utilities in both Northern California
and Southern California to come up with plans. They've provided us with
analyses of where polling places and drop boxes and county election offices may be in vulnerable areas for PSPS. So that's help us with planning purposes and making sure that the
right county elections offices have backup generators
or a plan to evacuate in case of an emergency. So we feel prepared for PSPS, which unfortunately does
peak in traditionally in late October, early November. But I wanna make sure
I address that because we are in the elections world are dealing with more than just
COVID and misinformation. We're also dealing with, unfortunately, the effects of climate change. But I'll leave you with some good news. Californians are voting
early in record numbers, as I mentioned. Californians are using our
new tool, Ballot Tracks, which allows you to sort
of track your ballot like a FedEx package. Over 2 million Californians
have signed up for that. If you haven't yet, I please
encourage you to do so. And we are reaching historical numbers of voter registration. We'll probably hit 22
million registered voters by the time we hit election day, which is a historical high, not only in a rate, but number. So voters are paying
attention, they're engaging and it's gonna be I think
an overwhelming turnout even compared to the last
time highest turn out, which was the 2008 presidential election. So again can thank you for having me. I know that was a lot, but here
to answer questions as well. - Thank you so much James. Before we go to questions
from the audience do any of the panel members
have questions for each other from the presentations? So we've gotten quite a few questions. Some of them actually have
already been responded to, but let me start with John. Do you have health concerns about many of these
vote in person centers? Are these gonna become superspreader sites or do you think that these large voting not by mail, but voting in person sites
are actually dangerous from the point of view of COVID-19? - Yeah, superspreading
seems to be an event that occurs when someone's
infected at the peak of their contagion which is typically 24 hours
before they become symptomatic, who's in a, usually in
an enclosed building and not wearing a mask. So I think that as long as
people are wearing a mask and social distancing, even though the voting
is going to be inside it should not be a risk
of superspreading events. And frankly, if I'm wearing a
mask, I'm social distancing, I'll bring some alcohol with me for disinfecting my hands and I will be meticulously careful. And if everybody else has
a mask on in that room, I'm not gonna worry one bit. - Great, thank you. For Bertrall, how would this election potentially end up in
the U.S. Supreme Court? And then somebody also
asked a separate question, can a court with the new currently nominee be trusted to do what's right? I'm not gonna ask you that question but how would this wind
up in the Supreme Court? - So there are at least two pathways by which you can see the election
going to the Supreme Court and there are more, and
there's multiple variations and hypotheticals you could run to, but I see two main
pathways by which the case, this election could go
to the Supreme Court. One will be something that looks like that look like the 2000 election in which there is a dispute about the administration of the election and the counting of ballots. And I think that a potential flashpoint for such a dispute might be Pennsylvania. And a particular aspect
of Pennsylvania law provides for the potential
for contestation. That's the aspect of Pennsylvania
law that provides for persons can vote and
as long as their ballot is postmarked by election day,
their ballot will be counted. And the postmarking system, unfortunately, is not regularized to such
an extent that all ballots are necessarily cast on election day will be postmarked by the post office. And we saw this with respect
to the Wisconsin primaries, and we might see this with respect to the
Pennsylvania general election. And what that could mean
is that there'll a contest over whether these non-postmarked
ballots should count. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court
has ruled that if they are, if they have been more
likely than not have to have been cast on
election day or prior, they will be counted. But I imagine that there will
be contestation around that. There also be contests around signature verification probably and also the process for curing errors on election ballots that
different states provide. And so these election and administration points can be points of contestation that could reach the Supreme Court. As for these second,
perhaps more troubling one is if we have a situation, which seemed more likely
a couple of weeks ago, less likely now, but could become likely
again in a couple of weeks, is if we have a situation
where President Trump for example wins, or is in the lead, excuse
me, on election day in enough states to count up to 270, he proclaims himself the victor, other sort of media outlets
perhaps follow that declaration and validate that declaration. And then later you find as a
result of the full accounting of mail-in ballots, that
there has been a shift and that Biden has won enough states to win an Electoral College count. And what you have is a situation in which Republican legislators in those states to see the shift decide even though the
total counting of ballots leads to a Biden victory that they are going to slate the electors for the Electoral College
for President Trump and a Democratic governor in a state like Pennsylvania or whatnot, decides on the basis of the
full counting of the ballots that they're going to slate their electors for president or for candidate Joe Biden. And so then you have a
contested elector situation in which there's no clear
process for resolving in the Constitution that could perhaps be addressed by the court. So it's not clear if the court
would wanna take this on. They might leave it to
the legislative branches to deal with it, but that
could lead to paralysis with the Republican controlled Senate and a Democratic controlled House if that continues to be the
case after the election. And so there's no clear resolution, but that's about another possible point of intervention by the Supreme Court. - Thank you. Aimee, one question is, you talked a great deal
about the importance of women of color voting and the organization of women in color. Clearly, one of the aspects
of the Trump campaign and it was manifested in the debate was to try to separate Biden
from this base of support. Do you think there's going
to be any success in that, or do you think that women and particularly women
of color are going to be high turnout voters? - I appreciate the question. First is women and then
there's women of color. The term, the political
use of the term women has always defaulted to be white women but we need to acknowledge
the majority of white women have been Republican, supported Trump and are
likely to do so this year. Of course, support amongst
white women has softened this year amongst particular
sub categories of white women. But that is not the
case with women of color and that's across the spectrum. Black women were over more than
more than 97% of Black women voted against Trump last time and the percentages will be
high across women of color. So I think part of what we're, what we need to do is to
understand that is a strategy to at least in part we've
heard of attacks directly on a whole slew of Black and Brown women in political office in, you know, and in others sports figures, and people in the media. The fancy word for that is misogynoir, which is the particular attacks racist and sexist attacks against Black women. This will continue to be, this has continued to be
the case of last four years, but it's something that women of color we saw through and have been
fighting against consistently for the last four years. And so, yeah, the other thing is remember we had an historically
diverse set of candidates in the Presidential Primary
for the Democratic Party. It was Black women over 60, who delivered the
ultimate victory to Biden, those who lived in South Carolina. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but ultimately it was you know, both Biden and a
combination of Kamala Harris that a lot of women of color
are very enthused about. So the attempt to kind
of divide and conquer, which has been, you know,
has worked for Trump very effectively in terms
of activating people who can hear and respond
to racist messages and convert that into votes,
that has been consistent. The thing is focusing on women of color, there isn't, there has
not been a serious play in terms of policy or
embracing women of color in terms of any political calculus. And so the likelihood of a percentage, a higher percentage going
to Trump is near nil. I will say though, the
percentages are high, but ultimately in states
that we were talking about, like in Pennsylvania, in other states, those key battleground states that'll determine the electoral votes, it really is the turnout numbers, which is why women of color
need to increase turnout in order to be decisive in
the presidential contest. But no, we're not seeing, if anything we're seeing
the Biden, Harris ticket, particularly Kamala Harris
playing this very unique role of bringing people together
across race and gender, and really articulating
hey, we're Americans and upholding all of that, that's in influencing
and incentivizing people who are otherwise might stay home. - Thank you. James, what are
expectations about counting? And isn't the process of
processing mail in ballots where every signature has to get checked just unbelievably
cumbersome, slow process, or has technology intervened and now we actually might get results at some point relative
soon after the election? - So California for many election cycles has allowed four weeks for
county election officials to complete the ballot count. This year because of what
the increase in vote by mail, we actually allowed counties to start processing vote
by mail ballots 28 days before the election. Before it was 10 days. So counties now have a lot
more runway to prepare ballots, get them ready to hit
count on election day. Because this is all new, we don't know how much that will impact the count on the backend. But I like to remind
people that in California we like to get the results
right, and not fast. And we're prepared to fight for, against the misinformation that we expect. As, Bertrall mentioned, it's coming right, in terms of, you know, we saw that in 2018 with House seats in Orange County, where as the vote by mail
ballots are coming in, the, you know, someone who was in the lead was now in second place and
people screamed voter fraud. So we're prepared to fight against that. But I like to remind people that want to get it right, not fast. Because not only do we allow for those ballots postmarked by election day to come in within 17 days,
we allow voters to fix issues with their vote by mail ballot. And especially this year with so many new people voting by mail, they might forget to sign their envelope. They might forget how
they registered to vote with which signature and their signature gets
flagged as a mismatch. California allows voters to fix that. And so there's gonna be time
even after election day, where that's possible and counties will be contacting
voters to come and fix it. After we process the
ballots, we then audit them. You know, ballots are counted by machines, but to make sure those machines
are accurate and working, we do a an audit of them
to make sure the hand count matches the machine count. So we wanna get it right, not fast, and we wanna get it accurate. So that's what I like to remind people is, you know California, this is nothing new in California. In other states where
they try rush the count, that's where you're
gonna see the mistakes. One of the battles you've
seen in some of these states that are ramping up vote by mail is whether or not they can even, how many days they even have to count the vote by mail ballots. And that's where it's gonna be concerned. In states where they don't
have more than a couple of days to count vote by mail ballots, that's where you're gonna see the problems rather than here in California, where we have ample time. I think, in terms of the bigger picture in the presidential race,
I don't think California is gonna be much of a surprise for anyone. It never really is. But it probably will come down
to those House races again, in certain parts of California that will be sort of the you know, the source of some misinformation around you know, late vote by mail ballots. - Thank you. We have already reached
our appointed time. I wanna thank all of the panelists. I wanna thank the audience. And if you have additional questions, we will still be receiving questions. And to some extent we'll try to respond if that's at all possible. So thank you again for attending. Thank you panelists. And I wish you all a very good election. Thank you. (dramatic music)
