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Help Protect Our Democracy Andrea Chalupa Sarah Kendzior Deborah Gaslit Nation Election Hacking: Help Protect Our Democracy Andrea Chalupa Sarah Kendzior Deborah Porder [Media Clip] John Oliver: But the fact is, unless you happen to personally know everyone ​ who votes for you on a paperless DRE machine, there is no way to verify the results. It's a pretty good case against them, which makes it, frankly, completely insane that New Jersey not only still uses them, but plans to keep using them for the 2020 election. And it's not just New Jersey. In 2016, 20% of voters voted on paperless DREs, and an estimated 12% will use them in 2020, meaning 16 million Americans spread out across all these states are set to be voting on machines that pretty much everyone agrees are deeply, deeply flawed. And if they malfunction, there could be no way of knowing, which is absolutely terrifying, because what we have to do here is obvious. It's so obvious, in fact, even this guy understands it. Donald Trump: One of the things we're learning is it's always good—it's old fashioned, but it's always good—to have a paper backup system of voting. It's called paper, not highly complex computers, paper, and a lot of states are doing that. John Oliver: Yeah, he's right. That's it. He's just all the way completely right. It is called paper. Paper is not a computer. It's paper. And a lot of states are doing it. Now, I'm sure everything he said around those 16 seconds was some combination of wrong, racist and horny. But for a brief, glorious moment, he was just absolutely right—and probably slightly horny. The good news is, earlier this year, the House approved six hundred million dollars for states to buy new machines, with the requirement they not connect to the Internet and provide a paper trail for mandatory audits. The bad news is the Senate has got its own plan, providing less than half that amount of money with none of those requirements at all, which is simply ridiculous. We can fix this, and we must fix this, because it is critically important for people to have confidence in our voting machines and we should have more faith in our system for choosing our leaders than we do in the one that inexplicably keeps Sean fucking Spicer doing the cha cha on national television. [End media clip] ​ Theme Music Sarah Kendzior: I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best-selling essay collection The ​ View from Flyover Country and the upcoming book Hiding in Plain Sight. ​ ​ ​ Andrea Chalupa: I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones. ​ ​ Sarah Kendzior: And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump Administration and rising autocracy around the world. Andrea Chalupa: So today we have a very special Thanksgiving episode. On Thanksgiving, as we did last year, we featured some brilliant community organizers who are doing the all-important work of grassroots power to take back our country. And this year, we're featuring an incredibly inspiring story of a community power. As we're always saying on Gaslit Nation, the only reliable power we have left is grassroots power, and community is the vaccine against the corruption virus. And if you need help joining a community to take back your power wherever you live, go to GaslitNationPod.com, and we've a whole list of ideas where you can get jumpstarted. So today will be featuring the work of Indivisible Scarsdale. This is a group of fearless, brilliant, tenacious community organizers who are fighting here in New York State for election security. Our interview is with a retired lawyer, Deborah Porder, who put together with her team, her community, legislation for New York State to secure our elections. As we're always covering here on Gaslit Nation, we had a hacking of our elections in 2016 which helped bring Donald Trump to power. The Kremlin, as we found out, targeted all 50 states, and the U.S. Government has been very secretive in giving information to us. You even had a whistleblower, a young whistleblower who served in the Air Force, Reality Winner, who came forward and thought she could trust some journalist at The Intercept by revealing proof, when she was an NSA contractor, revealing proof that Russia's hacking of our political infrastructure, our election systems, was a lot wider than previously reported by anyone. Sarah and I are no strangers to this issue. We actually met through this whole story. Sarah crashed into my DMs in the early hours of Trump being called the winner of the 2016 election, and she and I got on the phone right away, and said, "These numbers don't look normal." And through that, we helped launch Audit the Vote, where we drew much needed attention to the warnings of leading computer scientists in America that were trying to warn us for a decade that our election systems were incredibly fragile and hodgepodge and vulnerable, and that, yes, the election results themselves can absolutely be hacked and changed. So election security is very much the fight for the right to vote. We are fighting on many fronts when it comes to our right to vote, not only against racist ideas, laws and so forth, not only against gerrymandering, but also election security. It's all one. We need peace of mind. We cannot have any more debate in our country of whether the election results themselves were changed in 2016 or not. The major point is we need to secure our voting machines, and all public servants, all activist communities across the country need to wake up to this issue. And luckily, Deborah Porder and her friends in Indivisible Scarsdale have made this tremendously—relatively, I would say—easy for people across the country to replicate what they have done. They have their legislation that they wrote, that they created available to you that you can then take and adapt for your state. And Deborah Porder today is going to walk us through how her little community, their little engine that could, powered, created from scratch this legislation to secure voting machines in New York State, and how they built support for it. This is such an inspiring story, and I hope that anybody listening anywhere across America can replicate it. Sarah Kendzior: Yeah, I'm really glad that you did this interview and you're covering this topic, because sometimes I feel like we live in this parallel world where on one hand you have the presidential candidates debating health care and jobs and the economy and all the sort of normal baseline stuff. Well, meanwhile, we have the Oval Office hijacked by a Kremlin asset backed up by a transnational crime syndicate that engaged in election tampering in 2016, and that was the mechanism that got him into power. And that mechanism hasn't been remedied. We have talked about this ceaselessly, before the election and after the election. There were warnings before the election from people like Harry Reid who wrote to Comey and said, "You know, there's a good chance that the official votes will be falsified," which is an incredible statement that Reid has not elaborated on, and that Comey wouldn't act on. And so all of this has just been basically left in the dark, and we've interviewed people in the past who've discussed these issues. We interviewed Barbara Simons, who is a computer scientist and expert on elections. We interviewed Reality Winner's mother, and she told her daughter's story. What we haven't seen so much—with the exception of people like Stacey Abrams—is action on the ground to ensure election integrity in 2020. And so I basically see sort of four big problems on the horizon. One, of course, is domestic voter suppression as a result of the partial repeal of the VRA in 2013, in which traditionally marginalized groups are unable to vote. This is actually what gave Trump Wisconsin. We have foreign interference, which we talked about all the time, you know, mostly from Russia, but with other countries interested as well. I mean, why would you not exploit the system when you know that Trump and the GOP welcome it? They're not interested in election integrity. If they were interested in it, you would see them having different policy positions. You would see them not having positions that pretty much the entire country hates, like getting rid of our healthcare. They're not worried about winning this election, and so that's a bad sign. We have the machines being unsecure, which we'll get into in the show. And then we have the problem of Trump might not concede, even if it is very clear that he lost this election. He needs to hold on to power to avoid criminal prosecution and to keep all of the money that he has been making through this vast kleptocratic apparatus and to please his Kremlin backers. And what I worry about most is the intersection of all of these issues, that, of course, they're all working simultaneously, but they also cover for each other. We've talked in previous episodes about how Manafort was very interested in the states, the upper Midwest states that went to Trump and basically decided the election for him. So a lot of that was chalked up to things like domestic voter suppression, things like that.
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