CNN Political Briefing

'Hey, everyone. I'm David Chalian, CNN's Political Director, and welcome to the CNN Political Briefing. Early in-person voting kicked off this week in two critical battleground states, Georgia and North Carolina. In North Carolina, despite extensive damage from Hurricane Helene, all but a handful of the state's early voting sites are expected to be open. In the Peach State, voters turned out in record numbers. Now, Georgia is being closely watched, especially after the role it played in former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the results in 2020. Trump has continued to sow doubts about election integrity during this year's campaign, and this week he spoke about potential clashes on Election Day. In an interview with Fox News, trump downplayed any threat posed by his supporters. He instead claimed trouble could come from the, quote, "radical left" who he described as the, quote, "enemy from within." He went as far to suggest that the military could interfere on Election Day.

It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military.

Vice President Kamala Harris responded to those comments, casting them as dangerous.

He considers anyone who doesn't support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country.

'The events of 2020 have changed how election officials, voting rights advocates and many American voters see the election process. Election experts say patience may be required again this year, as it will take time for election officials to process and count mail ballots. And election officials in swing states say they have aggressively been working to prevent the disruptions seen four years ago in some places. So, is America prepared for Election Day? And what are experts and officials worried could go wrong? CNN's Sara Murray has been reporting on all of this, and she's here today to talk about what we know and what we're watching in the lead-up to November 5th. Sarah, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

So I want to start big picture, 30,000 feet here. You have more than anyone else of our colleagues here have been remaining on this story of America's administration of elections and all the things that go with it, whether it's the security of those elections or the politicization of those elections and how they're administered. And my first big question for you is, are we prepared? Is this election prepared to come off in a clean way, given all that elections officials have been facing over the last many years.

'I think that we're as prepared as we can be, because even though we've seen this huge rise in skepticism and concern and ways to challenge election results and that kind of thing, the election officials across all these states have also been paying very close attention to that. And I also think that one of their lessons from 2020 is that these tabletop exercises you do are not just kind of like a pie in the sky thing that's never going to happen, that you're doing these tabletop exercises because you really don't know what's going to be thrown at you, whether that is a global pandemic, whether it's some kind of last-minute rule change, whether it's a polling location that suddenly is inoperable or whether it's people that are, you know, banging on the doors or the windows outside of your counting center. So, I think that they went into these tabletop exercises between 2020 and now very much eyes wide open like anything can happen.

As you look, especially in these seven battleground states that will decide the presidential election, what are the hotspots of where we should be looking to see, hopefully not another global pandemic, but some of these other things that you're saying that may just occur in these places?

'Well, I think that there are the kinds of sort of big Democratic growth centers that have really become kind of bogeymen for Republicans. So, if you look at like a Fulton County, Georgia, which of course, is where Atlanta is, if you look at Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, these are always places that are so highly scrutinized just because they're cities; they've had in the past a couple of issues with their elections. And Republicans have really taken things that can be human error or mistakes or just, you know, elections that may not have been perfectly well-run in the past and really blown them up into, you know, the notion that something more nefarious is happening.

And we should make clear, right, no election is perfect. There are mistaken counts or ballot issues or things that occur all the time in elections. As you said, it doesn't mean that it is A. Necessarily nefarious or B. That it would have any impact on the outcome.

Absolutely. Because, you know, elections are run by human beings. So, of course, there are going to be errors here and there. But elections are also backstopped by so many machines. We have so many more, you know, backstops in place. If you vote on a machine, the odds of there being a paper ballot that somehow also is recording your vote are so high this time around. It's the vast majority of places that you are going to cast your vote. There are so many checks and balances. So it's not like there is, you know, an ability for a machine to suddenly just start flipping votes and nobody's going to notice or a way to show up at a ballot drop box and just invent a thousand ballots and shove them in. And nobody's going to check on that. People are checking on this.

'Now, you said some of these urban areas and population centers, I mean, it's also where the votes are. I mean, that's where the greatest number of votes in these states are being cast in terms of concentration because they are where the people live, right? And so in a very small rural county with few votes, as much potential error may not occur. And I don't mean error again, in a not-to-be-believed result; it'll be a legitimate result. I just mean the human error that can occur.

Right. You know, if you are dealing with millions of votes, you just have a lot more work on your hands. And if you're in one of these small counties and you're dealing with, you know, tens of thousands of votes or maybe, you know, 100,000 votes, it's just more votes, more potential, again, also for things to go wrong. You have more polling places where somebody could make a mistake checking something in. You know, a machine could go down. There could be a long line because something just happens to go wrong at that location.

What about the role of misinformation and disinformation that we know exists in our politics? How does that exist in this voting space?

'This is sort of the hardest thing, I think, in my conversations with election officials. For them to really feel like they can get ahead of and get their arms around because they feel like especially since 2020, they've tried to be so much more transparent. And I hear this from election officials across all of these seven battleground states, you know, inviting the community in for an open house, making even more public the logic and accuracy test they're running on the machine. Just saying like, please, please come watch how we run our elections because we really want you to trust it. But, you know, if you are in Fulton County, Georgia, and you're running an election and somebody who is sitting at home in Wyoming decides that they're going to start a rumor on the Internet about what's going on at a polling location in Fulton County, Georgia. There's only so much an election official can do to try to combat that, especially when it gets whipped up by an ecosystem of media outlets that are designed to, you know, feed outrage on one side or the other. And so that is the part where election officials are paying close attention to misinformation that may be spreading about their locations. But there isn't a perfect or easy solution for how you can combat that in real-time. And the big concern is that that can have real-world impacts. And we have seen that. You know, we've seen people decide to take things into their own hands and show up at vote counting centers, show up with weapons. And, you know, that's the kind of thing that is still a point of fear for election officials. They say, look, if someone shows up with a gun, we know what to do. We know who to call. We know how to make sure that we secure the location that we're at. But it's hard to kind of nip these things in the bud really early.

And have you seen these elections officials staffing up in a different way to combat this kind of misinformation? Like do they have more rapid response people in their communications offices? Like is there — do you feel that they are better armed to go after and combat this as best they can?

I think that it's sort of been across the board of how much people are really going to get involved in knocking down every single rumor, you know, from their office or from their media partners or from other state partners. I do think that on the security side, everyone across the board has taken it so much more seriously and put so many more measures in place. And again, there was a lot of security around these places in 2020. But I think some of, you know, the anger, the protesting, that kind of stuff that we saw around, especially the vote counting centers in 2020, really made people take seriously, you know, what happens if someone is followed to their car? What happens, you know, do we need a panic button? Do we need, you know, something you can push on your cell phone? Do we need bulletproof glass? These are all provisions that some of these election officers have taken in the wake of 2020.

What about these election workers themselves? Many of them are volunteer positions, but some of them are local county workers. What do we know about the population of people that actually administer America's elections — which we know is a localized, decentralized kind of process — given all the scrutiny they're under, have they seen a lot of attrition, retirements? People are like, I don't need to deal with this being such a political hotbed. It used to be just counting the votes. Like, are these people properly staffed with people who've been trained and know what to do? Or are we still relying on the same sort of human infrastructure that we have?

There's definitely been some attrition, but, you know, the folks who are in charge of hiring these armies or finding these volunteers have known that going into this. They knew that there was attrition. They knew that there were people after 2020 who didn't want to do this again, and they've taken that into account. And they have, I think, done a good job of attracting a lot of people who really just want to help people vote. And one of the messages that the folks who run these elections really want to drive home is that the people who are volunteering at the polls, the people who are getting paid to work at the polls, these are your neighbors. These are not some, you know, nefarious swamp creature who's crawled out to try to steal your vote. Like, you know, this is like the friendly grandma who lives at the end of your street. So, like, please keep that in mind when you're showing up to vote. Please be kind. Please be respectful. Please remember that these people are people in your community who are just there trying to make sure that you can, you know, safely and securely show up and cast your ballot and get on with your day.

Sara, stay right there. We're going to have a lot more with my colleague Sara Murray in just a moment.

Welcome back. We're here with CNN Political Correspondent Sara Murray, who is owning the beat for us of all things casting and counting of ballots. That is what we are discussing here. Now, I want to dig into some of these states that you have been visiting and reporting out of what is going on there. And you have just been doing a tremendous job in this front. First, in Georgia, you mentioned Fulton County a bunch of times, and I know you spent a bunch of time down there in Georgia. There were two critical rulings that came out of the courts this week as it relates to the election administration and the counting of ballots. What did we learn?

Yeah, Georgia has been really interesting because the state election board there is really one of the places where, you know, folks who are backed by Donald Trump have really taken a majority on the state election board, and they've kind of run with it to pass all kinds of new rules. And one of them was a rule very recently that they passed saying that you have to hand count the number of ballots at each polling place, and you have to match it to the number that the voting machine tallies. And this week, a judge put a pause on that rule and basically said this is going to create administrative chaos. It was supposed to go into effect in late October. He pointed out there is no time or no way to train election workers or to put protocols in place to be able to actually run this thing. And he said it was too much, too late. So this is a subject of litigation on multiple fronts. We'll see if that somehow changes between now and Election Day. But the judge was very strong in basically saying it's time to back off of something like this.

And is that the end of it or no, that that is being appealed or the elections board is revisiting their policy, or what happens next?

'We could still see the election board appeal it. So it's kind of TBD, although I do think that a lot of judges who look at this, you know, if it goes to a different judge, if it is appealed, it's a safe bet that they could come out in the same place, which is to just say this is too big of a change to try to be shoving through when you are so close to November and also when people are already voting in Georgia. I mean, early in-person voting has already begun in the state.

And a lot of the research on this topic has shown hand counting a ballot and machine counting a ballot — it is not like hand counting is proven to be more accurate every single — that's not the research we have on this.

No, I mean, this is one of the things that voting rights activists and election workers sort of were pleading with the state election board about when they were considering this rule. They said, think about poll workers who have, you know, been working for 16 hours, even if they're coming back the next day after spending 16 hours working at the polls, they then have to go through these stacks in hand, count every ballot and get an exact match to what the machine got. I mean, what are the odds that this is going to go smoothly and not going to create problems? So that's been, you know, one of the issues. There was also this second issue that a judge in Georgia was considering. And this is the question of whether if you sit on one of these local election boards, do you have to certify the results? And I think one of the important things to know about these local election boards is that they're not necessarily made up of people who are experts in elections. In some cases, there are people who serve on these boards who have worked in elections and have a vast expertise. And in other cases, you know, it's people who are interested in elections who were put in place by the local parties and are not necessarily experts on how these things run. And we've seen a lot of 2020 election skeptics take these on. So what the judge said in this case is that if you are on one of these local election boards in Georgia, you have to certify the results. You don't get to decide that you've seen a bunch of this information and you feel like something is fishy or you feel like there might be voter fraud and so you're just not going to certify. There are other avenues that can be pursued if there is something that needs to be investigated further. But if you're the person on the local election board, you don't get to make that call by saying, I'm not certifying the results.

Well, and on the grandest of scales, we saw the language around certification in the halls of the Congress on January 6th and whether or not Mike Pence had the ability to not certify or certify. And I mean, just that goes all the way up the chain about whether or not this is sort of perfunctory and required certification or whether or not there's actual sort of adjudication to happen in the certification process.

Yeah, and you know, you might have thought folks would walk away from the 2020 process and everything that happened with then Vice President Mike Pence and say, okay, certification has to happen. And instead, it's almost been the opposite takeaway for a lot of these local election boards, not just in Georgia, but in states across the country, who said, no, we don't think that we have to certify the results. We think we have a role to say, you know, we believe that there's fraud, so we're just not going to sign off.

'You went to Pennsylvania a few weeks ago and you were able to sort of observe the process by which they open up their mail ballots and how they get processed, and, in Pennsylvania, they can't do that until the morning of Election Day. There's no pre-processing of all the mail ballots that will come in. So what do you want to explain to our listeners about if Pennsylvania is still counting after Tuesday, November 5th, if that means something is askew, or that is just the nature of the process.

Election officials there are very sensitive and they say do not call this a delay, even though we will inevitably call it a delay because it will feel like a delay in getting the results. They say it's not a delay. It just takes a long time to count all of these votes. And so if you go to bed on election night and it looks like Kamala Harris is winning and you wake up in the morning and all of a sudden Donald Trump is winning the state of Pennsylvania, it doesn't mean that, you know, there were votes that were manufactured overnight. It doesn't mean that there were machines that were flipping votes. It just means that election workers worked all night long, and they kept tallying these ballots, and this is where the count stands now. And that's what they want people to know. They want people to know, you may very well go to bed on election night and not know who won the state of Pennsylvania. In fact, that's very likely if the polls are accurate, and it's a really tight race, but the election officials are going to continue doing their work. They're going to continue counting the votes until every vote is counted, until we know who won the state. And again, that doesn't mean that anything is going wrong. It just means it's a process that takes time.

Now, last time in 2020, it took until the Saturday after the election for them to count enough votes in Pennsylvania to know where the result was going to be. Do they anticipate it taking that long this time?

'They really don't want to put a day on when they think that they're going to know the election results. I think they hope that it's going to be a speedier process. They have made a number of changes, the changes that they can make within the law to speed this up — everything from electronic poll books to check people in quicker to more machinery that helps process these mail-in ballots to a change where the state legislature made a ton of money available to counties, but if they took it, they had to basically agree to just keep counting overnight. And so there are a lot of reasons to think that this process could go faster. And also one of them is there probably won't be as many people casting mail-in ballots because we're not in the middle of a global pandemic this time around. So there are reasons to be optimistic that it could be faster. The one reason I would say to be pessimistic is that it's looking like a really tight race. And if it is a really razor-thin margin, then it's not just going to take a while in Pennsylvania. It could take a while everywhere.

But just remember, folks, a close race that takes a while to count does not mean that something is off. That something is — it's just a close race. And so we need the votes to be counted. The last state I want to check in with you about is Wisconsin. You hear a lot about this issue of drop boxes. We heard it in Texas last cycle a lot. What is it drop box for voters that may not experience that, especially those that show up on Election Day? And why is there political controversy around this notion of drop boxes? And what did you find in Wisconsin?

'Well, for states that allow vote by mail or absentee ballots and especially no-excuse absentee ballots, some of these states offer a ballot drop box, and it looks like a mailbox, except it's called a ballot drop box. And it's just for your ballots to be dropped off. And, in a lot of cases, that means, you know, Wisconsin, for instance, we were in Wausau, Wisconsin. If you drop your ballot into the mailbox, your ballot goes to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and then it comes back, and it takes about three days. Your other option is you could just drop your ballot in this drop box that's right outside of city hall, and it stays right in the neighborhood. And so there are certainly people who feel like, huh, that's a safer option. We don't want to deal with the mail. But these drop boxes really have become huge targets of misinformation. We saw a ton of this around 2020. There was a movie called "2000 Mules" that just made it seem like, you know, the voter fraud was rampant around these drop boxes, and it just wasn't true. But it really got into the psyche, this notion that these ballot boxes can be compromised, that they're an easy way to try to, you know, promote fraudulent voting and that there is no one watching them and that kind of thing.

And Donald Trump has echoed these theories, right?

Donald Trump has been one of the loudest purveyors of misinformation about these ballot drop boxes. And we've really seen these like neighborhood fights playing out in Wisconsin about whether there should or shouldn't be a local ballot drop box because it's up to these municipal clerks to decide if they want to offer one or not.

'So we have seen early votes start in a bunch of places. Georgia was reporting a record — more than 300,000 people voted on the first day of early voting. That's more than they've ever seen on the first day of early in-person voting. More than 5 million people and growing have already cast ballots in this election. Is there anything you're hearing from elections officials about how the early vote is going thus far that indicate to them whether or not they believe this is going to be a smooth process all the way throughout or they're already experiencing some bumps, some disinformation that needs to be combated and the like?

I think most of what we have heard so far, honestly, is pretty smooth. There are some, you know, things that have popped up here and there where people are concerned that there might be, you know, an effort to maybe try to intimidate voters via there was a text message issue in Wisconsin. And, you know, there are little dollops of sort of concerns about misinformation here and there, but there is nothing that sort of like whipping around the collective psyche in the way that we saw around 2020. Again, it's still, it's early in the early voting. We have a couple more weeks to go. But I think so far people are really encouraged. And they're also, I mean, in Georgia, they're just really encouraged by the numbers of people voting that people really took it seriously to say we have this opportunity to show up early to bank our vote. We're going to do it.

Sara, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

'That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. We want to hear from you. Is there a question you'd like answered about this election cycle? Is there a guest you really want to hear from? Give us a call at (202) 618-9460. Or send us an email at [email protected]. And you might just be featured in a future episode of the podcast. So don't forget to tell us your name, where you're from, how we can reach you, and if you give us permission to use the recording on the podcast. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Our senior producer is Felicia Patinkin. Dan Dzula is our Technical Director, and Steve Lickteig is the Executive Producer of CNN Audio. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. We'll be back with the new episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening.