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] ​

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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 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. But you have to wonder: why was he meeting with Konstantin Kilimnik? What exactly was he doing? This is an understudied topic in a holistic way, and I encourage people to look broadly at how badly and in how many respects this can go wrong and pressure your representatives, pressure your officials. Listen to this episode. Listen to the guidelines that are brought forward here, because we do still have a year. And, you know, you could say, I mean, you could be pessimistic and say it's too late. But we know that doing nothing is not an option here. Doing nothing is spelling certain doom, so you might as well try.

Andrea Chalupa: Find out how your state votes, what kind of voting machines that you use, and there's instructions on how you can do that if you listen to our interview with the computer scientist Barbara Simons. We did an interview with Barbara Simons on Gaslit Nation. That's essential, so go to our website, GaslitNationPod.com. We have all our episodes and transcripts there. Look up, it was an August 2018 interview with Barbara Simons, a computer scientist that for over a decade was warning us that our elections could be hacked. And so listen to her interview as a base to start from on how you can check how your state votes in terms of what machines they use. And then listen to this interview with Deborah Porder of Indivisible Scarsdale on how you can create legislation in your state to secure your elections, and that will benefit everybody and future generations. That's a matter of securing our democracy, and I know this is a highly technical issue, but the way to simplify it is this: all the leading computer scientists recommend hand-marked paper ballots. Hand-marked paper ballots. They are essential for making sure that every vote is counted and auditing the vote. So that's the rule of thumb. Make sure that your county, wherever you vote, that your state, wherever you vote, relies on only hand-marked paper ballots. And if they do not, then you need to find your community, build your community, and follow the case study here in this interview with Deborah Porder on how you can ensure that your state only uses hand-marked paper ballots.

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Andrea Chalupa: Welcome to Gaslit Nation, Deborah. We're excited to learn all about your incredible experience and figure out how volunteers across the country can replicate it in their states.

Deborah Porder: I'm really excited to be here.

Andrea Chalupa: So tell me a little bit about who you are, your Indivisible group and the legislation that you guys have created and that whole process. I'm just so grateful for what I've heard so far and I'm excited to learn more.

Deborah Porder: I am a co-leader of Indivisible Scarsdale. It's a grassroots organizing group that was founded right after the 2016 election. And I've been working really hard on voting rights and voting rights security, which is a very important issue now, especially as we've all learned about how the Russians have tried and are trying to hack into our election systems. And I wear a couple of other hats. I'm on the legislative team for smart elections. We have a website, SmartElections.US, which is a coalition devoted to voting rights. And I'm also a member of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council Legislative Affairs Committee, and their sub-committee on Election Security and Technology.

Andrea Chalupa: Awesome, so you are living the dream that you are creating legislation yourself. Tell me about that process.

Deborah Porder: Well, in the past, I have drafted legislation, and my representative, Amy Paulin in the New York State Assembly, has always been an advocate of good government and particularly voting rights. And when I found out the problems with the hybrid voting machines that had been certified for use in New York by the state board of Elections, I was looking at the election law to see how we could draft a bill that would make them illegal in New York State. And I spoke to Amy Paulin about it and she agreed to introduce the bill. And in addition, I was able after she put it in to convince the Senate Elections Committee Chair, Zellnor Myrie, who's a senator in Brooklyn, to put the bill in as well, so now it is pending in the state legislature.

Andrea Chalupa: Okay, so let's get into the bill itself. So what are you trying to do in terms of election security here in New York State?

Deborah Porder: Well, there's been a big problem, because the State Board of Elections certified a machine called the Dominion Ice. That's what is called a hybrid voting machine, and I will explain what that is. It's a machine that's both a printer and a scanner, and the reason that's a problem is because after a voter marks their ballot and reviews it to make sure it's what they wanted to vote for, they put it into a scanner and it's counted. But these particular hybrid machines have a feature where the ballot passes under the print head after a voter reviews it, and it's physically possible for the machine to be hacked to add votes to your ballot that you didn't make. And why is this a problem? I'll give you a specific example. Let's say you were voting for governor in the last election and you chose Andrew Cuomo. It is physically possible with this machine for a vote to be added for his opponent, Cynthia Nixon. And if that happens, when there's an audit of the paper ballot, the vote for governor will be invalidated, because it's called an overvote. You can't vote for two candidates for governor, and there would be no way for you to know that that was happening. And once those votes are added to the ballot, all of the technology experts say it would be physically impossible without a forensic analysis. So, in other words, an eye. You couldn't eyeball it and see that a vote was added to distinguish the false vote from your real vote.

Andrea Chalupa: Why would the industry allow that to be built in the first place if it's that vulnerable?

Deborah Porder: I couldn't answer that question except to say that those machines are super expensive. A separate ballot-marking device for disabled voters and a separate scanner are about four thousand dollars apiece. So that would be a total of eight thousand dollars. But these machines cost fourteen thousand dollars. So that's their motive. I would guess it's profit.

Andrea Chalupa: So, they want to add on all these features to make their machines more expensive, to increase the money they can earn.

Deborah Porder: Exactly.

Andrea Chalupa: That's horrible. Okay, so then that's where good government needs to step in and protect the public from greedy corporations.

Deborah Porder: Absolutely, and let me just say that the trend is away from these hybrid machines. I just want to backup and explain one more thing about a hybrid machine, because I mentioned something called the ballot-marking device. So that's the printer function on these machines, and the reason we have those is because persons with disabilities who are unable to mark their ballot with a pen—they can't fill in the bubbles—can use this kind of a machine, a ballot-marking device. And they either talk into the machine or press a touch screen and it prints their votes onto the paper, and after it's printed, it can be scanned. But the question is, should it be scanned in the same machine? And our answer is no. And you know, the State Board of Elections, which is an appointed body, the one that decides what machines to certify in New York state, they certified this machine, even though their own technicians said that it was a problem. They did a review of it because we raised this issue with them. We asked them to re-look at it, and they suggested completely ridiculous modifications, like putting a piece of foam into the printer when it's not being used by a disabled person or having the people who work at the elections listen for extraneous printing noises. And most recently, they're testing some kind of a patch that would record how many times it prints so that they could do some kind of after the fact audit. But basically, all of these measures that they're suggesting are indications that they know there's a problem with these machines.

Andrea Chalupa: They're just doing it simply to meet the needs of disabled voters, or voters that just need extra support when voting?

Deborah Porder: It's required by federal law—the Help America Vote Act, which was passed when George Bush was president, which is why we went away from the lever machines to computer machines. And people with disabilities do have a right to vote just like everybody else. And of course, we should accord them the ability to vote, even if they can't mark a ballot with a pen and for some reason. So that being the case, they created what are called ballot-marking devices. And by law, we must have them. But the question is, should the ballot-marking device be separate from any machine that counts the votes? And the clear answer is yes. And it's not just my bill that I had Amy Paulin put in and Senator Myrie put in, but also federal legislation is now mandating that ballot marking devices not be used to tabulate votes or scan votes. The scanner/tabulator is one machine, right? You put it in and then it gets counted. That's what tabulate means, count. So anyway, there are two bills in the House of Representatives. Both of them already passed, and they specifically say that a ballot-marking device cannot be a tabulator. And there are also two bills that were introduced in the Senate, but of course, they're being blocked by Mitch McConnell. He won't put them on the floor.

Andrea Chalupa: Well, Mitch McConnell is owned by the Kremlin. We know that. That's what this show's about. So, he's like, "Nope, nope. We're not going to do election security because I need my campaign staffers in the Kremlin to keep me in power."

Deborah Porder: Let me say, it's not only the Russians or foreign actors who have a voting machine. Anybody can hack a voting machine.

Andrea Chalupa: Absolutely. We've seen that. We've seen that over and over and over again. It's sort of like we're past having a debate about this. It's a known fact. So we just need to get to the point in the country where there's no longer a debate. We have peace of mind when it comes to our election security. So, Congress, the Democratic House, is passing and promoting and pushing this legislation. The Republicans are, of course, blocking it in the Senate because God forbid, if it's easy for people to vote in this country and we have the security of the vote in this country, Republicans may not even be in power if that's the case. Right? We've seen that again and again. That's why the Republican-dominated Supreme Court got rid of some key provisions in the Voting Rights Act, for instance, that made a big difference in 2016. What do you think the chances are that your legislation is going to get passed?

Deborah Porder: Well, it really depends on the pressure we can bring to bear on our elected representatives. And I have found through my grassroots organizing that it is really up to us to call them to meet with them, to email them and urge them to sponsor the bills and to vote for them. And that's what I do.

Andrea Chalupa: Okay, and how big is your team?

Deborah Porder: Well, you know, it's a big team. We have a lot of different volunteers, and we go to Albany. I work with—it's not just my Indivisible group in Westchester. But what happened was in November of 2016, three ladies who live in Larchmont, which is in Westchester County, the suburb, called a meeting at a church to form an Indivisible group. And Indivisible was a thing that was posted on the Internet by former Democratic congressional staffers that outlined how the Tea Party was able to become so influential in the United States. And it basically is an organizing drive, and the principle is very simple. Your elected representatives want to get reelected, and the way to get them to be responsive to you is to make them realize that their constituents want them to do something, and so you have to show up when they have public meetings. You have to meet with them. You have to call them, and that's what we've been doing anyway. More than 600 people showed up in November of 2016 at this church, and we divided into Indivisible groups by town or region, and I became the leader of my town group. And I work very closely with the leaders of Indivisible Westchester and the other local groups in the area, and we've all been working on this.

Andrea Chalupa: Consistently since 2016?

Deborah Porder: Correct.

Andrea Chalupa: Wow. Okay. That's phenomenal.

Deborah Porder: We don't just work on elections. We work on a lot of things. We got candidates elected. We have an incredible turnout machine for elections, and that's one reason why the elected representatives listen to us, because they know we don't have to walk door to door for them unless we think that what they're doing is the right thing.

Andrea Chalupa: Exactly. What we always say in Gaslit Nation is if you don't show up for the base, the base won't show up for you.

Deborah Porder: Exactly.

Andrea Chalupa: This is incredible. So, Audit the Vote. Sarah and I, along with my sister, we got Audit the Vote started really in the early hours of election night, right after it was announced Donald Trump was president. My sister wrote a Facebook post, which was essentially the cliff notes of the Mueller Report, which was come out a couple of years later. And Sarah and I put that online on . We put that on Twitter, and then that led to the audit the vote hashtag, which we promoted to give voice to the computer scientists like Alex J. Halderman that was warning us, they were warning us for years, several years, that our election systems are hodgepodge and vulnerable. And we just need to have 100% security, just knowing that every security step has been taken to minimize any vulnerabilities and so forth. So, it sounds like all that work, even other recount movements in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan were, of course, not successful, as we know, because now we're in this horror show of the Trump presidency. But your work also proves the point we're always making on Gaslit Nation, which is there are no failed movements. Even failed movements fertilize the ground for future movements. So, it sounds like all that attention, all at work that the computer scientists and Audit the Vote did to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of election hacking, you were there at the start of all that, and you just kept working and working, and now you have this phenomenal product which is very close to getting past in in New York and finally giving us that peace of mind.

Deborah Porder: Well, I'm glad you're so optimistic about it getting passed. I think it's going to be a lot of work, and I'm hoping that people listening to this podcast who live in New York will call their Assembly and Senate representatives and ask them to support the bill. I could give you the bill numbers.

Andrea Chalupa: Yes, please.

Deborah Porder: The bill number in the assembly is 8597. And in the Senate, it's 6733.

Andrea Chalupa: Okay, so New York residents, voters, are the only ones that can call, right?

Deborah Porder: Well, yeah, because they're the ones who have representatives that would have the ability to vote on these bills. What we need them to say to their representatives is that they don't think hybrid voting machines are secure, and that they would like them to sign on as sponsors of these bills.

Andrea Chalupa: Okay, great. So, they should call both their state senator and also their state rep in the assembly. So, two different phone calls.

Deborah Porder: That's right.

Andrea Chalupa: And could you kind of walk us through a script for that? So you're calling me up. What do you say? I'm your I'm your state rep.

Deborah Porder: So, I'd say, "Hi, I'm a constituent in your district. Here's my address. Here's my name. I would like you to support a ban on hybrid voting machines. The bill number is A8597 or S6733." And that's all they have to say. And if you call their offices, there are people taking down the calls as they come in. And the number of calls they get, the more calls they get on an issue, the more interest they are in signing on or passing it.

Andrea Chalupa: Great.

Deborah Porder: And this is a nonpartisan issue, by the way. Whether you're a Democrat, a Republican, a Green Party, a Working Families Party constituent, this is for you, because they represent you no matter what party they're in, and election security is something everybody should care about. And what's really pernicious about hybrid voting machines is that everybody counts on having a, quote, "paper trail," unquote, to be a backup in case something goes wrong with the machines. But if these paper ballots can be hacked into and votes added to them, the paper trail will not be a reliable backup anymore. In the federal legislation, it just says that it's mechanically impossible for it to add votes. And the manufacturers are trying to convince the legislators that their hybrid machines are making it mechanically impossible because they say they'd say that they can't be hacked. And that's just a lie. Any voting machine can be hacked. Especially, these voting machines, because they have flash drives on them.

Andrea Chalupa: Ugh, okay.

Deborah Porder: And they have removable memory drives. And every time there's an election, they have to be reprogrammed with software from the voting machine manufacturer to put the ballots for the particular election onto the machine. And that's always—anytime you put a machine, hook it up to any kind of device that's been on the Internet ever in its life, it's vulnerable to hacking. All you have to do to understand this is read the Mueller Report. According to the Mueller Report, 50 states' election systems were hacked into, but they didn't get all the way in in all of them. But they tried for 50 states. They got there. They got into the actual network of one of the voting machine manufacturers and completely took over the network and controlled it because one employee clicked on an attachment with a virus. That's all it takes. Our elections are governed by the counties, not even by the states in most cases. In New York, it's the counties, and they don't have a lot of money for election security. Some of them are still running Windows 7.

Andrea Chalupa: Wow. I want to really emphasize for people how horrifying, how horrifying things are right now in terms of our nation's future. If we get stuck under these corrupt voting practices, including machines that are so easily hackable, systems that are so easily hackable, we're stuck. We're stuck. There's no getting out. Even if you got rid of Electoral College, for instance—there's a big movement to get rid of the Electoral College, that's still a long way away from being successful. It's in progress and it's made great strides, but still, it's not going to be ready for 2020 by any means—but even if you got rid of the Electoral College, if you do not fix election security, any determined actor could still determine the President of the United States through hacking our systems. That's it.

Deborah Porder: And don't forget, don't forget how close the vote margins have been. They don't have to change a lot of votes.

Andrea Chalupa: Exactly.

Deborah Porder: Like, for example, people may not remember this, but in 2012, Obama won Florida by less than two points.

Andrea Chalupa: Exactly right.

Deborah Porder: And look what happened in 2016 in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It was very few votes that determined that election in just those three states. So, they wouldn't have to hack into every single state.

Andrea Chalupa: Election security and passing legislation like yours, state by state by state, is what is going to protect our country from the Far Right. If we do not do this soon—this is such a critically urgent matter—if we do not do this soon across the board in every single state, the majority of states let's say, so we can at least protect the majority of the vote, if we do not do this, they are in power and they are keeping these machines in voting booths across the country, and these machines can just election cycle after election cycle remain deeply vulnerable and insecure to any type of bad actors. So, we need to hurry up and get your legislation passed in the majority of states in this country. Now, tell us, if anybody wanted to contact you in any state, could you pass on your legislation so they could see? You’re basically a starter kit, so if anybody listening anywhere, the indivisible group in Missouri, in any state across the union, if they wanted to get what you're doing passed in their own state, they could just reach out to you. You'll hand them the entire starter kit. They can then adapt it for the laws in their state for their systems, however their state works, and get it passed, and get their ground game going just following your model.

Deborah Porder: Yeah, I can give you—they could email me at IndivisibleScarsdale, all one word, at gmail.com.

Andrea Chalupa: And you'll just send them the legal language, which includes the technical language, and you can walk them through, and they can get this going in their state if it's not already there.

Deborah Porder: Yes.

Andrea Chalupa: Okay, so this is why on the Gaslit Nation Action Guide we link to Indivisible. We have an entire section on groups. If you're not part of a group, join a group. When you have actual taking root, your protection are your communities. It's your communities that you need to turn to now, and that's how we win. Its community by community, by rising up by smart organizing and fighting back. And that's why I was so excited and made it a priority to sit down and speak with you, because you are providing an invaluable model for communities across this country. Indivisible groups, MoveOn.org groups, any sort of group across the country to emulate. Because I'm telling you, election security, protecting the vote, that is how we protect our nation's sovereignty. That is how we protect our children. That is how we protect the environment. That is how we stop more species from going extinct. We have to flush the Far Right out of power. Remove the idiots from power. And we're only going to do that with communities owning their power, because grassroots power, as we always say on Gaslit Nation, grassroots power is the most reliable power we have left.

Deborah Porder: I just want to say one more thing. If you want to learn more about election security, I suggest you go to the website SmartElections.US. SmartElections.US. There are articles by the computer experts that we are working with. It's a coalition of groups and it has a lot of information about voting security.

Andrea Chalupa: Give us your email one more time for people to contact you and just get your starter kit.

Deborah Porder: [email protected].

Andrea Chalupa: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Deborah, for being on Gaslit Nation today. Keep us posted as your bill goes through both the New York State Assembly and the Senate. We put the call out to all New York state listeners. It's your more obligation to call and support this critical legislation. We need to have election security in New York state, or we could be stuck. We could be really stuck big time, and it's game over if we don't protect the vote.

Deborah Porder: Thank you for having me on your program.

Andrea Chalupa: Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by sending up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.

Sarah Kendzior: We want to encourage our listeners to donate to RAICES, a Texas-based nonprofit agency that provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families and refugees. They're helping with the crisis facing migrant families at the Texas border and need your support.

Andrea Chalupa: We also encourage you to donate to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry. Donate to the Orangutan Project at TheOrangutanProject.org.