News Snippet: The Election Board in Georgia now has voted to require that poll workers count ballots by hand this year.

Micah Loewinger: On this week's show, we track efforts across the country to make voting harder. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke: I'm Brooke Gladstone. News outlets are bracing for waves of disinformation on election night and beyond.

Benjamin Mullin: The challenge for news organizations is going to be reaching people like my mom, who are very smart, but who may just be getting their facts from different places than the traditional mainstream media.

Micah: Plus, the intensified role of music and celebrity in this year's campaign.

Mark Clague: A cacophony of music that surrounds each candidate. One of the sources is the fan group itself. If we see democracy as the responsiveness of our candidates to the needs of the people, this is at least a pathway.

Brooke: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

News Snippet: Voting machine maker Smartmatic has reached a settlement in its defamation case against Newsmax. The deal came as jury selection began for a trial in Delaware. Smartmatic had argued the cable channel's hosts and guests made false and defamatory claims that the company played a role in stealing the election from Donald Trump. Newsmax said it was only reporting on allegations being made by Trump and his allies. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Micah: The settlement comes nearly four years after Newsmax's guests and hosts spread a series of bizarre conspiracy theories about Smartmatic and Dominion, two companies that operate voting machines and software throughout the US.

Newsmax Newscaster: Chinese money comes into Smartmatic Venezuela, and then it bounces to Smartmatic Panama.

Newsmax Newscaster: There's only one reason why you buy a Dominion machine and you buy this Smartmatic software, it's so you can easily change votes.

Micah: In April, Smartmatic reached a settlement with One America News Network for its voting machine conspiracy theories, which, of course, followed the big settlement from the big daddy of conservative news.

News Snippet: Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems a staggering $787.5 million, just under half of the damages claimed in the lawsuit.

Micah: This week, Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in Washington, DC following his defamation lawsuit, which wrapped up in December.

News Snippet: The federal jury today in Washington ordered Giuliani to pay a total of $148 million to two former Georgia election workers who were at the center of baseless claims he spread in the wake of the 2020 presidential election down there in Georgia.

Micah: In Georgia, the big lie continues to wreak havoc. A 2023 poll from the Atlanta Journal Constitution found that 61% of Republicans in the state believed there was widespread election fraud. Sam Gringlas is a politics reporter at WABE in Atlanta, where he's watched GOP leaders and activists use vote fraud conspiracy theories to justify new rules that could deepen distrust in the November elections. Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Gringlas: Thanks for having me.

Micah: Among Georgia's most vocal and influential conservative activists is a woman named Cleta Mitchell. She's a lawyer who helped advise Donald Trump in his attempt to block the certification of the 2020 results. She hosts a conservative podcast. Can you talk a little bit about the efforts she's made to help change the way elections are run in Georgia?

Sam Gringlas: Cleta Mitchell leads a group called the Election Integrity Network, and this is one of several groups that have cropped up in the last several years to continue to raise these false claims of widespread election fraud and also to lobby local officials and state officials to pass laws that they say will help crack down on election fraud and promote free and fair elections.

Micah: I want to introduce another group of key players in Georgia, the Georgia State Election Board. Donald Trump is so fond of some of these new board members that he's actually called them out by name at a recent rally.

Donald Trump: Janice Johnson, Rick Jeffries are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory. They're fighting.

Sam Gringlas: This is a five-member board, all appointed. There's a Democrat, there's a non-partisan chair, and then these three Republicans who were mentioned at Trump's recent rally. This election board has been long controlled by Republicans, so that partisan breakdown is nothing new here. What has changed is that the Republicans on this board used to be lawyers who had some experience in law or elections, but slowly, those folks have been replaced by more activist leaning members who have become involved in election law since the 2020 election, driven by some of these claims of widespread election fraud.

Micah: Lately, the Georgia State Election Board has been all over the local and national news because of some changes that they have made to the upcoming election process, rule changes that may lead to potential delays on election day and thereafter. One of the new rules allows county election officials to hold up certifications with "reasonable inquiry into ballots". What exactly is a reasonable inquiry?

Sam Gringlas: The ambiguity of those words is something that is causing election officials and opponents of these rule changes a lot of concern. Essentially what this rule and a similar rule like it related to certification do is they seem to suggest that local election board members could vote against certifying election results if they're not able to complete that reasonable inquiry, if they're not able to access all of the election related documents that they want to get their hands on and see before certifying if they turn up any questions about the results that they're not able to verify on their own. All of these things could potentially lay the groundwork for local board members to vote against certifying the election result.

Micah: I mean, what exactly is the harm in county officials taking extra care to make sure their ballots are in good order? Is more scrutiny such a bad thing?

Sam Gringlas: That's exactly the explanation that you'll hear from these republican board members who have supported this rule. "This is basically a cross-check, and if you don't give local board members the ability to verify the results that they're signing off on, then they're really nothing more than window dressing." Where this has created conflict is that Democrats, election experts, even some Republican state officials say that the duty of these local board members is not to have this discretion. Their duty is just ministerial, that they have to sign off on these results so the process can continue.

Micah: Just to be clear, Republicans have added this "reasonable inquiry exception" but there was already a process for discrepancies in vote counts, right?

Sam Gringlas: Yes, the courts. Challenges can be filed in the courts. Judges work these things out. There's also worry that even if these election results are certified in the end, individual votes at the local board level to not certify them opens the door for misinformation or provide the space, basically, for skeptics of the integrity of the election to start spreading false claims that there was something wrong with these election results.

Micah: I can just imagine news reports of this county and that county doing reasonable inquiries, and that just sounds suspicious. It just sounds like they found something and they're not telling us about it, et cetera, et cetera.

Sam Gringlas: That's the fear here. Not that these election results won't be certified in the end because this is not totally new. In many states, there have been pushes to not certify election results since the 2020 election, but in all of those cases, either state officials or the courts have stepped in to make sure these elections get certified. The point that you're making, I think, is what election officials are really worried about. It's that it creates an opening for conspiracy theories to spread, and we saw how dangerous that could be in the 2020 election.

Micah: Earlier, we were talking about Cleta Mitchell, the pro-Trump lawyer. She runs the Election Integrity Network. Through reporting from ProPublica, we've actually learned that she may have had a hand in helping push through that reasonable inquiry state election board rule, right?

Sam Gringlas: Actually, during one of these election board meetings, the Democratic member of the board asked directly the sponsor of one of these certification rules. "Who helped you write this? Where did this come from?" And she pointed to individuals and groups who have been among the most vocal proponents of these unfounded theories of widespread election fraud.

[laughter]

Micah: That's transparency for you.

Sam Gringlas: Yes. It was a good question because there was a lot of, like, where are these coming from? Anyone can propose a rule for the state election board. It's not the members themselves that are writing these rules.

Micah: I want to ask you about the other big rule change that's been getting a lot of attention. Approved by the Georgia State Election Board, it now requires counties in the state to hand-count the total number of ballots this year. Can you break down what that rule change means?

Sam Gringlas: You're right. We're talking about the number of ballots, not what's on the ballot or tallying results or anything like that. What would happen is at the end of the election night or in the days that follow, a poll manager and two other election workers for each precinct will have to go into the ballot boxes, count the number of paper ballots that are in there, and make sure that that number matches up with the total number that the ballots scanner has tallied over the course of the day.

Now, election officials worry because hand counts are known to be slower and less reliable than machine counts, and so there's certainly the possibility that these local election workers might come up with a different number from their paper count than the machine count. Again, just as we've been talking about, this could open the space for misinformation or disinformation that something went wrong with the election.

Micah: The Washington Post reported it might cost Georgia millions of dollars to hire enough people to do the hand counts. It could also potentially compromise the security of the ballots. The change also rebukes a federal court precedent recommending a 90-day quiet period ahead of elections that's intended to reduce the "risk of confusion, error, and insufficient training".

Sam Gringlas: One of the things that I heard regularly from election workers is concerns about the last minute nature of these changes. You mentioned that 90-day quiet period. We are well within that at this point. Overseas and military ballots have gone out. Poll worker training is literally underway as we speak, and so trying to ensure that local election officials, local volunteers know how to do these hand-counts, have the physical space in election offices to do them, there's not much time to adapt to these changes and to be ready for them. This is something that we've heard over and over again from local election officials.

Micah: Now, Democrats have already sued multiple times, first against the state election board and now Governor Brian Kemp himself, for not stopping the board. What are the odds, you think, that these rules from the state election board that are not laws are actually enacted in time to affect the election?

Sam Gringlas: In Georgia politics, it's very hard to make predictions, but I think it is fair to say that these rules will ultimately be decided by a judge whether they're able to take effect. At the moment, they are certainly set to take effect ahead of this election. The certification rules are going to be in court on Tuesday. A trial will kick off to consider whether they can take effect. I would not be surprised to see a lawsuit over these hand ballot count rules as well. With so many things in elections, it's often litigation and judges that make the final call here, even in these final weeks and days before the election.

Micah: It feels like all eyes are on Georgia once again; back in 2020, during the midterms two years after that, so much attention is paid to Georgia in the national press. As somebody living there covering Georgia state politics, is there anything about the coverage of these rules that strikes you as missing the point or not helpful?

Sam Gringlas: I think it is important to both track these changes and take them very seriously without being too alarmist about the implications for the possibility of a free and fair election. These changes are certainly worrying local election officials and even some state officials, but at the end of the day, in conversations I've had with election officials, they feel reassured by the fact that local elections are run by your neighbors, your local firefighter, your local teacher, who are volunteering and giving their time to work an election. That provides them confidence that people should feel good about the election results.

Now, we know historically that has not always been enough to assuage some of the people who are concerned about the integrity of elections, especially when we're hearing from the very top, from former President Trump, that there are problems with an election. But we have to find this balance between not making people so worried that they don't want to cast their vote because they're worried something's going to be wrong or there's something nefarious afoot, while also being clear-eyed that these rules could present real challenges and we have to track them closely.

Micah: Sam, thank you very much.

Sam Gringlas: Thanks for having me.

Micah: Sam Gringlas is a politics reporter at WABE in Atlanta and host of the podcast Plugged In, a roundup of Georgia state politics.

Brooke: Coming up, election fraud conspiracists have been busy in other state houses, too.

Micah: This is On the Media.

Brooke: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah: And I'm Micah Loewinger. We just heard about new rules in Georgia that could delay and even alter the outcome of the election. These changes are part of a national effort.

Ari Berman: Since the 2020 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 63 restrictive voting laws were enacted across 29 states, so more than half the states in the country changed their voting laws to make them more restrictive in some shape or form.

Micah: Ari Berman is the voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones. For over a decade, he's been covering voter suppression tactics that since 2020 have been supercharged by Trump's election fraud conspiracy theories. Berman walked me through some of the most egregious new laws, starting with Arizona.

Ari Berman: Arizona is one of those states that has passed a number of changes to voting, has also had battles over how elections are run and certified. This all came to a head quite recently when the Supreme Court, just before mail voting was set to begin, ruled that voters who did not show proof of citizenship when they register to vote would not be able to vote in state elections, and there's a lot of important state elections in Arizona in addition to the federal elections that we all know about.

There were about 100,000 people that the state found who did not show proof of citizenship when they registered largely because it was a long time ago and it wasn't even required at the time, and then the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that those people were able to cast a ballot in November, both for state and federal races. That's indicative of the type of confusion that's going on right now in terms of what the laws are and who will be able to cast a ballot in November.

Micah: Can I ask you a kind of elections 101 question?

Ari Berman: Of course.

Micah: We often hear in conservative media, and just like in American politics for a while now, that there is a threat of non-citizens voting. These laws that are aimed at curtailing that problem, are they responding to something that is really affecting our elections?

Ari Berman: Well, there's no evidence of non-citizens voting in US elections, and this has been looked at over and over and over. The Georgia secretary of state, who's a Republican, went back and did an audit over 25 years and didn't find a single non-citizen who had voted.

You might remember that Trump himself set up an election integrity commission that was supposed to search for non-citizen voting after the 2016 election. It disbanded abruptly without finding any evidence, but in response to that, you do things like put in place proof of citizenship, for example, a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote.

Kansas did this not too long ago, and it blocked one in seven people from being able to register to vote. That was more than 30,000 people, and they weren't non-citizens. They were everyday people who were disproportionately younger voters, because younger voters are more likely to register for the first time, who didn't have this documentation when they went to register to vote. That was an example of how a law that was passed, basically in response to a myth, ended up having a lot of real-world consequences.

Micah: Tell me a little bit about how voting access has changed in North Carolina.

Ari Berman: Last year, they passed a law that that undercut election day registration. It gave voters less time to cast ballots by mail. It made the rules for mail voting a lot more restrictive. They also have tried to change the composition of their state and county election boards, much like Georgia has done.

In North Carolina, the governor, who is now a Democrat, has the authority to appoint a majority of election boards. They changed that so that the legislature would have the power, which could theoretically lead to a lot of changes at the local level because county election boards decide things like how many early voting sites, for example. If people who don't have a pro-voting agenda get in charge of these county or state boards of elections, they can make decisions that really impact voters lives in a real way.

Micah: If I understand it correctly, a state law enacted in North Carolina in 2023 requires that counties must wait until polls close at 07:30 PM to begin the process of tabulating and reporting ballots cast during the early vote period, meaning maybe we'll see delays in their vote count.

Ari Berman: It's kind of ironic that Republicans are the ones who are arguing that there needs to be a quick vote count, then they're the ones also taking the actions that are going to lead to a longer and more delayed vote count in these key swing states.

Micah: What about Mississippi? You wrote about a decision from a conservative court in Mississippi that might affect the ability of tens of thousands of people to vote.

Ari Berman: Mississippi is one of the only states in the country that prevents people with past felony convictions from voting. This dates back to the Jim Crow era. The law was struck down by a lower court but it was put back by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the most conservative.

There's also another case challenging mail ballots in Mississippi because Mississippi is one of those states, and there's about 17, that allows mail ballots to be counted after Election day if they're postmarked by Election day because there could be mail delays or other reasons why ballots don't arrive in time.

That law is being challenged also before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the very conservative appellate court. If the Fifth Circuit strikes down that law in Mississippi and it goes to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court rules that mail-in ballots have to arrive by Election day, that could change voting laws in more than a dozen states.

Micah: Tell me about what's been happening in Florida.

Ari Berman: The election integrity police force created in response to Trump's lies about the 2020 election, those police members have been going door to door questioning the identities of people who signed petitions supporting an abortion rights initiative that's on the ballot in Florida in November. This is extremely unusual because these signatures have already been validated by election officials, so there's no dispute over these people's identities. It feels very authoritarian to me.

Micah: There was also the mad dash to change the electoral college rules in Nebraska. Can you explain what happened?

Ari Berman: The Trump campaign was pushing hard to change how Nebraska allocates its electoral college votes because Nebraska is one of only two states that allocates its electoral college votes by congressional district, and there's one district in Omaha that is bluer than the rest of the state and that Joe Biden carried in 2020. Now, you might be thinking, why are we talking about one electoral college vote? Well, if Kamala Harris wins Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she only gets 269 electoral college votes, one short of the majority you need to win the presidency.

The Trump campaign is thinking that that electoral college vote in Omaha could put Harris over the top, so they wanted to change it so that Nebraska would adopt a winner-take-all system, so that even if Harris carries those northern industrial states, she would need one more swing state to win. Now, it was pretty brazen for the Trump campaign to try to do this right before early voting began in Nebraska, and there were enough Republicans in the state Senate in Nebraska who had reservations about this to block the governor from calling a special session to do it.

Micah: There are some places where voting access has actually expanded, right?

Ari Berman: There are, 41 states since 2020 have expanded voting rights in some way, shape, or form. Some of these are quite minor, and some of these are the very big. You look at Michigan, a really important swing state, through ballot initiatives, they've done things like pass automatic and election-day registration, no-excuse absentee voting, ending gerrymandering through a citizens redistricting commission. These are things that are happening across the country, so the voting laws are changing in good and bad ways. The thing that makes me nervous, though, is it feels like we're becoming a country where your right to vote depends on the state you live in.

Micah: You've also written about how some voters have taken the initiative to restore some fundamental rights with voting through statewide ballot measures. Talk about what you're keeping an eye on for November.

Ari Berman: There's over 140 initiatives on the ballot, more than 70 that are initiated by citizens. One really big thing I'm looking at is an initiative to ban gerrymandering in Ohio. That is a very heavily gerrymandered state. Connecticut has an initiative to do no-excuse absentee voting. About half the states in the country allow citizen-led ballot initiatives, and there's a lot of appeal to them because they can win bipartisan support in a way that is otherwise likely impossible. There was a lot of support across party lines for these initiatives, even in heavily divided swing states.

Micah: Is there any kind of messaging around anti-gerrymandering or expanding voting rights that you think has broken through the conspiracy theories around voter fraud and the like?

Ari Berman: With gerrymandering, if you look at how it worked in Michigan, if you look at how they're talking about it in Ohio, they're saying, "We don't want politicians to rig the rules," and that's a message that appeals across party lines. Same thing about making voting more convenient. I think most people, even those people that believe the election was stolen, want the voting process to work better for them.

They want it to be easy to register to vote. They want it to be easy to cast a ballot. They want to make sure their votes are counted. Now, they want to make sure there's protections that are built into the system to make sure that voting is secure. I think, by and large, in both red and blue states, voters want the same thing.

Micah: What do you think the press can learn from 2020 about how to prepare people for potential delays? Like, we've just talked about some new laws in Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona that very well may likely draw out the count.

Ari Berman: Well, I think what the media needs to tell people is that these delays are just part of the process of counting votes. One of the problems in 2020 was that all the major Republicans knew Trump lost the election, but they were afraid to say so because they didn't want to incur Trump's wrath. You had, for example, Mitch McConnell saying:

Mitch McConnell: President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.

Ari Berman: Well, what ultimately came of it was an insurrection at the Capitol, so you would hope that trusted figures in both parties speak out earlier about this, and if they get the sense that Trump's trying to undermine the results again, that there's a bipartisan coalition that is willing to speak out about it before the wheels start coming off.

Micah: Ari, thank you very much.

Ari Berman: Thanks so much, Micah.

Micah: Ari Berman is the voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist it.

Brooke: News outlets brace for chaos on election night and perhaps beyond. That headline in Thursday's New York Times sums up the general trepidation pretty well. The story was written by Benjamin Mullin and Michael Grynbaum, and we managed to get hold of Mullin. Ben, thanks for being here and welcome to the show.

Benjamin Mullin: Thanks for having me.

Brooke: We thought we'd just jump in by having a quick review of the election chaos we witnessed in 2000. Errors plagued the leading exit polling service, Voter News Service. That led to premature calls by a range of outlets that Gore and later Bush had won Florida.

CNN Newscaster: Big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column.

CNN Newscaster: Turn the lights down. The party just got wilder.

CNN Newscaster: Folks, it might be premature.

Benjamin Mullin: Back then, news organizations called elections using election returns, but some of their calls were made using the Voter News Service exit polling data, which isn't actually the vote tally, so that was a big problem. The other big problem is that they called Florida for Gore before all of the polls had closed in all of the counties. That was a huge mistake.

Brooke: Another thing about the Voter News Service is it didn't have a reliable way of estimating the number of Florida's absentee ballots, which were almost double what VNS had expected.

Benjamin Mullin: Oh, my gosh. Such a colossal disaster.

[laughter]

Brooke: Tell me about what's changed.

Benjamin Mullin: Most of the major TV networks use what's called the National Election Pool, which is done by Edison Research, a third-party research organization that collects votes and advises news organizations on when they should call an election.

Brooke: You're talking about ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC, right? They work with Edison but each network employs its own decision desk.

Benjamin Mullin: That's right. On election night, there's a call bridge between this guy, Joe Lenski, who works for Edison Research, and who's been doing this for decades, and the leaders of the various decision desks. Fox is the one outlier among the major TV networks. They use Votecast, a voter survey that's done in partnership with Chicago NORC. Fox uses that along with election returns to make its calls.

Brooke: In 2020, Fox News played a big role on election night and in the days that came after. It was a pretty fraught affair.

Benjamin Mullin: In 2020, Fox News called Arizona, one of those Sunbelt states that can go either way, for Biden.

Fox News Newscaster: Are you 100% sure of that call, and when you made it and why did you make it?

Fox News Newscaster: Absolutely, we made it after basically a half hour of debating. "Is it time yet?" Because it's been clear for a while that the former vice president is in the lead in Arizona and was most likely to win the state--

Benjamin Mullin: This was a very big deal because it made it pretty clear that Biden had a lead in the electoral college.

Brooke: It was also a big deal because no other news organization chose to predict the outcome in Arizona so early.

Benjamin Mullin: Right. It sets off a huge firestorm among their own audience, who basically views this as a betrayal. Fox News' ratings dipped, and the ratings of other right-wing TV networks, including One America News Network and Newsmax, showed an increase. Fox News was hearing loud and clear from some of its viewers that they did not like this call.

Brooke: One of whom apparently was Donald Trump, whose aides demanded that Fox News retract the call. The network refused. It was ultimately proved correct, but a few weeks later, Fox News pushed out a pair of top political journalists who'd been involved with the coverage, although they did stand behind their lead pollster, a guy named Arnon Mishkin.

Benjamin Mullin: Yes, Arnon Mishkin will be calling the election in 2024.

Brooke: I think Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported in their book that during the last election, Fox president Jay Wallace "overruled the decision desk team", refusing to let them call Nevada for Biden, even though the other networks did.

Benjamin Mullin: You're right. On November 6, he said, "I'm not there yet since it's for all the marbles. Just a heavier burden than an individual state call."

Brooke: Nevada was a bridge too far? That's a worrying precedent. Let's talk about the other outlets reporting on election night. How are newsrooms planning to head off false claims that the election and the coverage of it on election night was unfair and misleading?

Benjamin Mullin: CNN is lining up legal experts so that they can weigh in on examples where counties are contested by either Vice President Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. AP is hiring additional journalists to explain their race calls to their customers and to their readers. CBS News has hired a bunch of people for misinformation and fact checking units.

Brooke: 20 journalists?

Benjamin Mullin: Right. That's going to be working around the clock on election day. The other thing that news organizations are doing, including NBC News and the New York Times, are dispatching correspondents to contested counties to see how fast the vote is coming in, how much is still outstanding, and whether that vote is in person or mail-in, to try to give viewers a sense of where the election stands on a second to second basis.

Brooke: Last time around, the abrupt addition of large batches of votes to the networks onscreen counts sometimes flipped a state from red to blue, and because Democrats rely on mail-in ballots more than republicans do, that led leading allies of Trump to falsely accuse news organizations of inventing votes.

Benjamin Mullin: The news organizations want to be able to explain that that lump of votes that just got dropped in that contested county is just total routine because that county always reports a lot of mail-in ballots for either a democratic or republican candidate.

Brooke: AP seemed to acknowledge that they need to do more to communicate that information than they did last election.

Benjamin Mullin: This is crucial because the AP is kind of a bellwether for the entire US media industry. When I asked Julie Pace about this--

Brooke: She's the executive editor at AP?

Benjamin Mullin: That's right. She said, "We've assumed that because we've been doing it for so long, it was understood by the public that when we called a race, people believed it, and now we've got to do more than that."

Brooke: Ahead of election day, it's clear that in some states, counting the votes will be a long process. How are outlets preparing their staff and their audiences for that excruciating wait?

Benjamin Mullin: They're trying to do preemptive education to sort of let people know that we're going to be probably in a very tight race, looking at voting week instead of voting day.

Brooke: They said that last time, but I guess most of us didn't believe it.

[laughter]

Benjamin Mullin: Right? I talked to somebody close to Steve Kornacki, who's the data guru over at NBC, who said that he's been pouring over reams of election data, especially in areas where the vote might differ from the polls. He also, interestingly, is planning to sleep at his desk at 30 Rock if the election goes for days at a time, and he is switching for some reason from Diet Coke to coffee this year.

Brooke: [laughs] Because Diet Coke is bad for your bones. Newsrooms are also preparing for things that never happened before, like a cyber attack?

Benjamin Mullin: Joe Lenski, who's running the election pool for Edison research, told me that they're spending time securing the data feeds that come in, scanning them for any data feeds that look questionable. He said the one upside for the US electoral system is that data comes in from 50 different states and 4000 different counties or local township officials, so it's really hard to hack that end of it because there's just so many places the data comes from.

Now, if you look at other countries, you have a central election commission, the one place the vote gets counted and distributed from, so those are a lot easier to hack. Fortunately, the US election system, very difficult to hack, but they are preparing for that eventuality. Joe Lenski said that one of the big challenges in 2024 is that there are a lot of new election officials this year.

A lot of people just left because they decided it wasn't worth the abuse they were getting or they've retired or left the job, so you have a lot of new people running the elections in these counties that haven't done it before. He said that when you've had the same county clerk that's been running it for 30 years, they know the systems, they know the timing, they know who to report the data to, but when it's newer election officials, there's always a few bumps in the road, so the biggest challenge for them is just sheer turnover.

Brooke: With regard to the changes that the networks are making, building trust in journalism is going to be tough. Do you think that the measures you've learned about are sufficient?

Benjamin Mullin: I think it would be naive to think that this is going to persuade all consumers of news that the electoral process is above board. I had a conversation with my mom last week. She believes that there should be international election observers in the United States because of these claims of voter fraud.

Brooke: Does she believe them?

Benjamin Mullin: Yes, and so I think the challenge for news organizations is going to be reaching people like my mom, who are very smart, who may just be getting their facts from different places than the traditional mainstream media. I almost think it's like a really wonky audience development problem. We just need to be figuring out how to expand the pie of our audience and reaching people that may have different ideological backgrounds.

Brooke: Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Benjamin Mullin: [laughs] I do think that there's a ray of hope here among local news organizations, which as you know, research shows are more widely trusted across the political spectrum than national media. What I think I would like to see is more partnerships between national news organizations and local news organizations to get some of this information into their hands.

Brooke: Actually, I think NBC News is dispatching a core of correspondents called county captains to monitor vote counting efforts in pivotal counties.

Benjamin Mullin: Yes, and a lot of the people that are working with them are from local affiliates, so rope in some of these reporters from local affiliates, send them out to some of these contested counties and help them verify that the vote is the vote is the vote.

Brooke: Thanks so much, Ben.

Benjamin Mullin: Thanks, Brooke.

Brooke: Benjamin Mullin is a media reporter for the New York Times.

Micah: Coming up, political music and the music of politics.

Brooke: This is On the Media.

Micah: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Wednesday, Chappell Roan announced on TikTok that she is voting for Kamala Harris but not endorsing her because she disagrees with Harris' stance on the Israel-Palestine conundrum, among other things.

Chappell Roan: Endorsing and voting are completely different. There is no way I can stand behind some of the left's completely transphobic and completely genocidal views, and you're not going to make me feel bad for that. Yes, I'm voting for Kamala, but I'm not settling for what has been offered.

Brooke: Some may ask, who is Chappell Roan? Others may wonder, why is this news? Well, she's a 26 year old chart-topping singer, songwriter whose lyrical voice and drag-inflected performances inspire much love, especially from the LGBTQ community. It's news for the same reason Taylor Swift's and Beyonce's and Billie Eilish's Harris votes matter. Politics and music this year in particular seem inextricable.

Mark Clague: There has been political campaign music as long as there have been political campaigns.

Brooke: Mark Clague is a professor of musicology at the School of Music, Theater & Dance at the University of Michigan.

Mark Clague: We're talking about the days of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and it was about bringing emotion and passion into public life.

Brooke: You said that when the popular vote started in the '20s, in the 1820s with Andrew Jackson, he had a tune called the Hunters of Kentucky.

Mark Clague: Andrew Jackson was a military hero, and he was from the west, and the west at that time was Kentucky.

[MUSIC - Samuel Woodworth: Hunters of Kentucky]

Mark Clague: That song was celebrating his military heroism, and so those themes of patriotism, military sacrifice have always been a standard of campaign playlists.

Brooke: In the 19th century, before the invention of recording, if you wanted music, you had to sing it or perform it or play it yourself, and so you say a lot of political songs circulated as text?

Mark Clague: What's common in the 19th century was something called the broadside ballad, so broadside being another name for, like, a newspaper ballad. They look like poems on the page, but they're actually lyrics. They're meant to be sung to well known popular melodies.

Brooke: Something that I would call the Allan Sherman or the "Weird Al" Yankovic effect.

Mark Clague: Exactly. Yes, exactly.

Brooke: The invention of radio and recording changed things a lot. You say that songs at that point became tied to the celebrity who sang them, which presents a direct line to where we are today.

Mark Clague: Yes. In the 19th century, if you're going to have music, you have to make it yourself. You have Edison inventing recording in 1877, and then you have in the 1920s, the growth of radio, which you're able to not only have a specific recording of a famous artist, but then you're able to broadcast that to the entire nation.

That's really a game changer in the world of political music, and so something like I'm Just Wild About Harry, which was a Broadway tune, got adapted as a song for Harry Truman.

[MUSIC - Judy Garland: I'm Just Wild About Harry]

Mark Clague: The real game changer in terms of the celebrity connection to a specific candidate, I think, is Frank Sinatra. In 1960, he re-records High Hopes, a hit song, with a lyric that's customized for John F. Kennedy.

[MUSIC - Frank Sinatra: High Hopes (Kennedy Campaign Song)]

Mark Clague: The whole Rat Pack embraced Kennedy. They became known as the Jack Pack. Their celebrity and that specific tune gets tied to John F. Kennedy's campaign.

Brooke: You have Ariana Grande, Beyonce, John legend, Charli XCX in her viral "Kamala is brat" tweet, Billie Eilish. They've all come out for Harris. You've had Jason Aldean, Kid Rock, and others continue to throw their support behind Trump. How much does this really matter, though?

Mark Clague: We have such a razor-thin difference between the candidates. Small things can make big differences. Typically, with a campaign song, you have your consultants. You historically have had a theme song. Right now, we actually have a whole playlist, a cacophony of music that surrounds each candidate. One of the sources of those choices is actually the fan group itself.

Say someone like Chappell Roan doesn't endorse Harris, what happens is that her fans remix Femininomenon, one of her hit songs, using video clips and audio of Kamala Harris speaking.

[music]

Mark Clague: Kamala is brat is a great example. It starts with the fans remixing Charli XCX songs to audio with Harris, then Charli XCX tweeting that Kamala is brat, and then the Harris HQ adopting that chartreuse bright green color as part of its banner. The campaign is actually the follower responding to its fans rather than the other way around. If we see democracy as the responsiveness of our candidates to the needs of the people, this is at least a pathway. It's a musical pathway and does it open up other pathways, I guess, is the question.

Brooke: You have noted that Trump's got a very long playlist because those rallies are very, very long.

Mark Clague: Trump is an entertainer who's picking these sort of classic rock tunes, really hits from almost Trump's own childhood. The Trump playlist is all about nostalgia, nostalgia for when America was great, the sort of mythical notion that they're going back to, the music reinforces that sense of connection to the past.

Brooke: Let's talk about another song that Trump really likes, Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen isn't thrilled with him using it, but do you think it's a little odd that Trump has chosen it?

Mark Clague: Trump isn't the first one to make this mistake. This repeated chorus, "Born in the USA, I was born in the USA"-

[MUSIC - Springsteen: Born in the U.S.A]

Mark Clague: -has this kind of powerful patriotic hook, and it does appeal to this sort of nativist, keep-the-immigrants-out ideology. What the song's about is something very different, right? It's about working class economic justice. It is not a song about the glory and exceptionalism of America. The way the song is used politically is to sort of cover all that up. Born in the U.S.A. was also used by the Democratic National Convention this year. It was part of the roll call. Really interesting that the DNC is reclaiming one of these Republican anthems as its own.

Brooke: Let's talk a bit about that DNC roll call, which you found mind blowing.

Mark Clague: I did. It was incredible to me that music would be used to sort of create a dance party out of what's really a pretty boring procedural. For every single state and territory that was called to present their votes, the state would be called out and then emblematic music that reflected the state would be played in response.

Brooke: You noted that within hours of the completion of the roll call, Axios had a playlist on Spotify.

Mark Clague: That goes back to Obama, who started using playlists at least as early as 2012. By not having just a single song, you in a sense try to appeal to a whole range of Americans rather than just a very specific demographic.

Brooke: The theme song is less important than the playlist these days. Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, The Clinton Theme Song, today, they would have a whole lot more than a single message.

Mark Clague: I think so. Trump doesn't seem to really have a single song at the moment. With Harris, Beyonce's freedom, I think, has been the theme song.

[MUSIC - Beyonce: Freedom]

Mark Clague: It was used in an early campaign ad. It was the song that was played as she came out to accept the nomination and after she finished her speech at the convention. I think the fact that Kamala Harris got permission to use Beyonce's song and that Trump did not is a significant moment at least within the musical warfare that is the current campaign.

Brooke: You noted that on the upside, this emphasis on music and celebrity pop star endorsements jazzes up the energy, even helps with the turnout. You suggested that the downside is really about the fact that maybe that music and celebrity is a distraction from the issues.

Did we really need that to distract from the issues? Having covered campaigns since 1980, a focus on the issue has been a struggle for the electorate, partly because it's a struggle for the political press, which will focus more on the horse race than on policy. I just don't know whether that's a real problem. It's not like the kids are going, "Oh, I love this Taylor Swift song, so I'm going to close this policy paper on housing."

Mark Clague: [laughs] Yes, I think you're right that it's not taking people away from the issues. For me, it's more that the issues are even further in the back. It creates a sense of familiarity and engagement and devotion that supersedes and doesn't require any kind of discussion. There are some messages, I think, that are being subtly communicated.

Like Femininomenon which is really putting gender front and center in the campaign. The Trump campaign, of course, uses James Brown's It's a Man's Man's Man's World. The details of the song are about devotion to a woman, but on the surface, it seems to be a claim that only a man could lead the country. Whereas Femininomenon is really about the fact that men, in many ways, have fallen short in meeting the needs of the world and the needs of women-

[MUSIC - Chappell Roan: Femininomenon]

Mark Clague: -and women need to become the leaders who are going to fulfill those needs. There are messages that actually do reflect really substantive campaign issues that are right under the surface of some of these songs, and they speak to the fans who know the lyrics, who know the details, and they're pretty much run completely over the head of someone who doesn't know Chappell Roan.

[MUSIC - Chappell Roan: Femininomenon]

Mark Clague: If you know that she's a female drag queen, you realize that the sort of genderqueer, the expansiveness of her message, the embrace of youth culture, like all those things are there. If you just know it as sort of a fun, upbeat song and you don't actually know the words or who she is, that positive energy hits you but all of the detail washes over you. It has the ability to speak policy without offending those who would disagree because they don't know the joke, they don't know the message.

Brooke: There's always been a kind of presidential fandom. What's going on now, you suggest, is an intensification, a matter of degree.

Mark Clague: You're right. This is not something new, but the focus on these giant arena rallies, which has now become through Trump-- a lot of this is his influence on what it means to be a political candidate these days, right? That it means to command a crowd, to entertain.

Brooke: Trump says that if Harris gets crowds, it's because she has the entertainment.

Mark Clague: The live artists there, right? There definitely is a Democratic advantage in the soundscape because top 40 tends to track young people and tends to track therefore progressive new ideas, that more sort of fluid notion of self-definition of identity. Harris is very much tapping into that, so the artists who are speaking to that generation are happy to be affiliated with the Democrats. They are not happy to be affiliated with Trump.

Brooke: Mark, thank you very much.

Mark Clague: Thank you, Brooke. It's been a pleasure.

Brooke: Mark Clague is a professor of musicology at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan. He wrote the book O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of "The Star-Spangled Banner".

[music]

Micah: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah: And I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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