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Welcome to Radical A.I., a podcast about radical ideas, radical people and radical stories at the intersection of ethics and artificial intelligence. We are your hosts, Dylan and Jess.

Welcome to a very special 2020 U.S. election episode of the radical A.I. podcast in which we engage with the role that technology and social media play in voting practices and discuss what global citizens should know about the impact this election might have on the future of democracy worldwide.

In this episode, we interview Shannon McGregor and Whitney Quessenberry. Shannon McGregor is an assistant professor in the USC Hussman School of Journalism and Media as a senior researcher with U.S. Forces Center for Information Technology and Public Life. Her research addresses the role of social media and their data in political processes with a focus on political communication, journalism, public opinion and gender. Whitney Quessenberry is the executive director of the Center for Civic Design. Whitney is also co-author of two influential Brennan Center reports that show just how much design matters in elections. She was previously chair for Human Factors and Privacy for the Elections Assistance Commission's committee working towards developing voting system guidelines.

For those of you out there who follow our Twitter, which is at radical iPod. We often when an event is happening in the world or there's breaking news or there's something like an election in the United States coming up or maybe in another part of the world, that's very important. We put out a call for suggestions of folks to interview. Two of the people who were suggested who are experts in their fields are Whitney and Shannon, who we are bringing on for this episode. And we wanted to bring them on in this panel style because they represent two very different perspectives on the U.S. election process. Whitney has been an expert on voting and elections in the U.S. for decades and has seen these processes change and evolve over time. And Shannon approaches these issues with a special focus on how social media influences these changes.

We really hope that this conversation resonates with all of you, regardless of whether you reside in the United States or not. And as you'll hear in the following conversation, voting and elections are complex issues, and those complexities are even more compounded during the times of covid-19. So we hope that this episode helps you begin a conversation about how technology impacts the way we vote. And we also hope that it provides a sense of hope and understanding for all of you for what the future of our elections may hold.

As a non-partisan podcast, we want to make sure to name that this is not an endorsement of any one candidate, but is instead of reflection and engagement with the very process of voting and the role that technology has within that.

However, this episode is an endorsement to get out there and go vote. So if you are eligible to vote in the United States for this upcoming election and you have not voted already, go do it.

And as always, for more of Dylan and just that's us, stay tuned after the interview to listen to our debrief of the conversation we have with our guests. And without further ado, let's get to that interview.

We are here on the line today with Whitney and Shanna, it's great to have you both here.

We're talking obviously today about voting and about elections and technology. And for folks who don't know what it is that you do in relationship to the space of voting and elections and technology, could you just say a little bit about who you are and what you do? Whitney, can we start with you?

Sure. I'm Whitney Quessenberry. I'm the director of the Center for Civic Design. We believe that democracy is a design problem.

Now, what we mean is not that it should be really pretty, but that it should be designed to function well for everybody and be designed to invite everybody in. We started out we started the organization wanting to work with voters and improve voter experience. But we actually spent a lot of our time working with election officials because they're aware of the voter experience comes from. And so we think of ourselves as needing, you know, the Venn diagram between what voters experience and what election officials both experience themselves and have to do to create the voter experience.

And then, Shannon, could you say a bit about who you are and your relationship to these issues?

Yeah, my name is Shannon McGregor and I'm an assistant professor at USC Sussman School of Journalism and Media and a senior researcher with the Center for Information Technology and Public Life, also at USC. And I study the intersection of social media and politics, which, of course, right now is very much about voting. And so I've been working with a lot of my colleagues in particular around issues of platform moderation, around misinformation, around the voting process and what is already happening in what is yet to come. And then also recently with some colleagues have launched a sort of more broad project, looking at some recommendations for the media in general and covering the 20 20 presidential election, because there's been a lot of issues at the intersection of journalistic coverage of the election, voting information in particular, and the intersection with social media and all of that as well.

And we are definitely going to unpack all of that. But first, we're going to outline a bit of what this panel discussion actually is. So what you can expect from this discussion is a journey through time from past to present to future. And we'll be discussing the non digital alternatives to voting and the election process and how things like social media and the Internet and really technology impact that process. So we're going to start off with the past and the non digital process of voting and the election. So, Whitney, for the audience of people who have just never really heard about any of this ever, what are some of the issues and concerns with the voting and electoral process that have occurred in the past?

There are two kinds of problems that have happened. One are things that I think of as perfect storms of accidents creating collisions. So that would be the Palm Beach ballot in 2000 where some election officials tried to make the text larger that created the butterfly ballot. It was a very tight election and the rest was history. The kinds of the kinds of things that we mostly pay attention to in big ways are these perfect storms where something changes in a small way and that cascades into an effect that actually changes the results of an election, potentially. But I think there's a bigger change that's happening, and that is that when I started working elections in about 2002. I think the election officials thought having an election show up. That their job was to put on the election, and I think that we have seen a real shift in their attitude to their job is to run an election, to invite people to vote, to make sure they're informed to serve the voters. And I think that happened for a lot of reasons. I mean, there are a lot of things happening in this country right now that are causing that. But one of them is the availability of social media and free media online, because if you think about doing outreach in the 1990s, you're talking about printing and mailing things. But now you can talk about every election office having their own Twitter feed or their Facebook page or their own website. And so all of a sudden, the means of actually talking to voters became a lot cheaper and a lot more possible. And so that is really the intersection. I would say we're looking at how we're bringing an army of 6000 or so jurisdiction's of people who run elections, the majority of whom have fewer than five people in their office up into the digital age.

And Shannon, on your end, when we look at elections before this current 2020 election, how did you see the role of social media or of technology in general playing?

Yeah, I mean, I think I will say even before up until and before 2016, there was one narrative which was maybe not 100 percent true, but was nonetheless the public narrative, which is like social media is great for democracy and voting. Right. Like like Whitney was talking about. There's the ability to reach many more people at a much lower cost than previously possible. We can share information. You know, we've seen I forget what year it was now, but when Facebook did their first sort of grand experiment with putting the like, have you registered sort of at the top of people's feeds and. They did, right? More people registered, more people showed up, showed up to vote, and so I think for a while there was a rather perhaps naively but mostly positive idea about the fact that, you know, these tools on social media could make voting easier, could make it more accessible, could give people more information about it at a pretty low cost, both from a financial perspective, but from a time perspective. Right. It was sort of pretty easy to get people that information and pretty easy for people to get it. Of course, in the run up to the twenty sixteen election is when we start to see this really overt role of misinformation about the voting process in particular. Right. Some of this came from foreign actors we know now, but some of that came from within our own borders as well. And misinformation about the voting process, the voting date and other really pernicious efforts at voting suppression. I suspect those had likely been going on just on a much smaller scale, but it sort of rose to the public consciousness in the run up to the twenty sixteen election. And so I think rather swiftly the public sense of whether social media was by and large a force for good in the voting process sort of swith did quite, quite dramatically from this is great and helpful to this is very bad. And we can blame everything on it. And I know we'll talk about it more later. But of course, the truth is somewhere in between those two extremes.

Yeah, I would say that if we use 2000 as a demarcation line, that everything was going on in Palm Beach County, but there were also problems across across the state of Florida where there had been the kind of misinformation campaigns where people were being told the Democrats voted on one day and Republicans voted on a different day or that that they that were police cars would show up at the entrance to the road, down to a polling place. And it goes on today. I mean, everything that makes it easy for the election official, for instance, to send out a text that says, here's where here's where your polling places, Oklahoma, where it's minus 15. Today, Oklahoma just sent out an alert that says that someone alerted them, that they'd gotten a text message that said their polling place had changed. Ask them to call to confirm this and send back their full name. It turned out the phone number was to some sort of escort service and they've called the police.

What are the goals of this conversation is to paint in kind of broad strokes just what the heck people should know about voting and technology in this particular election in 2020. And I'm wondering for both of you from where you're where you're seated, how you see elections have changed and voting practices have changed, whether that's with technology or just in general over the past, however many years based on, again, where where you're situated. So what are there like broad strokes that you could paint about just how the process or the features of voting has changed over the years?

Yeah, I'd have to say two things. And they're mostly made possible by technology. But one is that we're seeing a wave of modernizations, automatic voter registration at the DMV. This is the update of motor voter to a digital age when Motor Voter was started. But they would say, would you like to register to vote? And if you said yes, they would hand you a piece of paper. And now we don't need to hand you the piece of paper. We can simply transmit it. That means your address up stays up to date. Those voter rolls really stay much more dynamically up to date in a highly mobile society.

So that's number one. Number two, I think, is the rise of vote by mail. I don't think it's an accident that it started in the West, in part because Western states tend to have a lot of measures and ballot questions on the ballot. So when people say, I got I got a you know, I have to study to vote, if you're on the east and you're in a state that doesn't do that kind of stuff, it seems fairly silly.

But if you're in the West Coast and you have 17 ballot questions and you get a handbook that's one hundred pages long to study up for the election, they're not kidding. You're really studying for the election. And so being able to figure out how to get that ballot data to people, how to get people information about what's going to be on their ballot and help them vote, you could see how a vote by mail would be really attractive in many ways, but that's one of them. It gives people time to actually thoughtfully mark their ballot instead of cramming into a five minute moment in a polling booth.

And I think the last one is really everything that we've talked about, about about communication. There are still something like eight states that don't have online voter registration. And the only question you can possibly think to ask about that is why not?

I mean, I can understand if it's because you're still building your technology and it took a long time to get the technology to the point where you could do that. But if you're not if you don't have online voter registration for philosophical reasons, you've just got to ask why. And that sort of applies to everything else. The biggest question when we started doing ballot request forms this year for covid voting by mail was why isn't it online? So there states that did make a form online, but they couldn't always integrate it with their database. So we're at this point, I think, where our desire to be able to use electronic means, digital means where it makes sense is that is ahead of our actual ability to make that work.

And Shuen, and communication and social media communication specifically is your specialty. So how have we seen that shift maybe over the past 20 years?

Well, I mean, we've seen a big shift in it. And I would say a lot of it in the run up to voting rights. So campaigns in particular have really made use of technology not only to organize. Right. And to solicit people to go to their organizations, into their campaigns, but to make voter outreach to those campaigns do in the run up to the election. And this is not just at the presidential level, but all down the ballot to make that easier. Right. So there's apps that you have on your phone if you're doing doorknocking or if you're doing text banking now that we have and phone banking. Right. And so just the ability to do that voter outreach, which is so essential to the process of campaigning, has really been impacted by technology such as this, sort of streamlined it. And for a while we saw the Democrats were sort of ahead on that. Then the Republicans caught up with it. And now I would say sort of across the board in terms of that really fundamental infrastructure, we don't see necessarily huge partisan differences in how they're making use of that that sort of infrastructure to be able to access people to us or get out the vote. Right. And get them involved in the process. I think we've also seen, you know, especially since the advent of social media, voting becomes sort of a performative thing.

Right. That can be part of your identity that you can express online. Right. And so we've seen things like ballot selfies, right. Where you're sort of in the voting booth in some states said that that was actually illegal. Right, because they were showing your ballot. But, you know, there's pictures online and you're displaying that you voted and and so taking part in that that act that is in some ways in this country, the way we view it as this very private act. Right. It's a secret ballot. And that sort of fundamental to the way that we think about it. But with the advent of social media, it became something that not everyone, of course, but lots of people sort of publicly enacted as a sense of their identity online to say, like, look, I'm voting. And in the run up to say, here's who I'm voting for and being prodded by not only campaigns, but social media companies to say, hey, to my friends or my followers like I have registered, are you registered or I'm voting for so-and-so, who are you voting for? And so we've just seen it become sort of almost everyday part of a lot of people's online presence in the run up to an election and then really sort of talking about and displaying the fact that they have voted in these sort of very visual ways on social media.

One of the things I really love is seeing these sort of real life to digital transformations, so that, for instance, one of the things that we know about the black community is that and for that matter, the disability community, that if being able to appear in public at the polling place makes a difference, leaving aside any trust issues about your ballot and whether it will get there by mail or not. But.

And so that that's been sort of a barrier to considering other ways to vote or considering other other means of voting, you're also talking about communities that aren't very digitally connected necessarily or very trusting of digital technologies. But their traditions, like the HCB use doing, marched to the polls and having the marching band lead parades of people down to vote, which you're now seeing not only happen in real life, but actually being amplified and replayed on social media. And I think those are kind of interesting. And I wonder if they're a little bit of reclaiming the localness and the individual ness about this from the mass produced, you know, massive amount of stuff that gets pushed out.

You know, this is an interesting conversation that we're having right now and relatively pressing because we're recording this on October 19th, 2020, and we're effectively two weeks away from when we can no longer submit our votes for the 2020 presidential election in the United States. And so there's been a lot of controversial news coming out and a lot of scandals, especially in regards to voting, in terms of voter suppression and mail and voting, and because of covid throwing a wrench in everything. And people are wondering if their votes are even going to count when election results are going to come out. There's just a lot of concerns and questioning about what the heck is actually going on. So, Whitney, could you just tell our listeners right now, given the state of the world and how short of a time we have until this election comes to an end, what do people need to know right now?

Well, I think the first thing we need to know right now is that today is the pivot. Today is the pivot from yes, let's work on voting by mail to maybe it's time to consider one of the in-person options because the calendar begins to run out. And if you think about it, let's say you send something to your election office to request a mail ballot and it takes them, let's say, three days to get to it and to get a ballot in the mail and takes three days to get to you.

And then maybe you don't get to it right away and it takes it three days to get back to them. And all you need is a little bit of expansion of each of those times and you've missed the deadline.

So this is the most nuanced election I've seen in terms of thinking about the calendar and where we are in the calendar. And then you have to look at that against what are the options in your state. Right. So if you're in North Carolina, we're seeing some interesting things coming together. Right. Which one is that? As you rapidly ramp up the number of people voting by mail, you're also going to raise the number of people who have problems because not everybody is doing it because they sat down and said, I think I'd like to vote Timilty. They said, I don't want to go out in public without PPY. So different dynamics there. And we're seeing a. Well, we've always sort of known this, but we're seeing real evidence that there are racial disparities in that, that there are demographic disparities in who gets hurt. I don't think it's it's not about demographics. It's about voting demographics. It's about who is used to voting, who is strongly civically engaged, who who feels confident navigating the government system.

So one of the things you have to do as a voter is think about where you are. Do you are you confident because you're confident you'll probably succeed if you're not so confident, what are your alternatives? And some people will have a lot of alternatives and some won't have that many. And I think as we get closer and closer, that window of opportunity begins to close. This is also the voter registration deadline or the last day for voter registration for all of the states where regular registration ends 15 days before the election.

In some states that will pick up again on Election Day. In some, but most it won't.

And then Shannon, to to throw it to you just just talking big picture here for this election, because as I just mentioned, this is an unprecedented time in the world and also for our country.

And I know I've had a lot of colleagues and friends who and I heard this last election, too, as a millennial, but pretty much every election, it just seems like there's that urgency of this is the most important election of our time.

And so I'm wondering, again, just in those broad strokes, what what are the big issues here, maybe specifically for social media in this or in general?

Yeah, I guess I'll start very big, big picture and then I'll narrow into sort of the role social media in particular plays in. One of the biggest problems I think, that we see in this election is that the press, which is still by and large the main way that most Americans find out about what is going on in the world, you know, whether it's local TV or or cable or a nightly news, this is how people are finding out what's going on. And the press is, by and large, I would say failing is still covering the election, making all the same mistakes that we saw in twenty sixteen. But I would agree with you. The stakes seem even higher than they did in twenty sixteen when they already seemed high. The kind of mistakes that I mean is they are providing a platform for people, including the president and other elected officials, to make unfounded claims. And as it relates to our conversation today about the voting process. Right. About how to vote, about the safety of voting, about the sanctity of the vote, about the electoral process writ large. And frankly, I think this is very, very dangerous, even if one is reporting on it, because someone very important, like the president says it, you report on the false claim and then come with a correction.

All the research that we have in that area shows that that false claim is actually more sticky. It still reinforces that false information. And so I think at the very big picture, what we're seeing is and I think a lot of I think there are a lot of journalists and there are a lot of news organizations who are trying very hard to do it differently this time. But I think especially when we look at the national level, we see these mistakes. I'll give just one brief example. I was listening to NPR this morning, and as I always do, when I was sort of getting ready and, you know, by and large, as someone who studies the press in politics, I think of NPR as people who like they really do it. Right. Right. Like it's not sort of pundits on TV yelling at each other. It's deep reporting and it's long stories. But they were talking about the differences between Vice President Biden's sort of rallies and President Trump's rallies and how Trump is having these big rallies in person when they said Biden is having these smaller distance rallies really to play up how different his approach to the coronavirus is as compared to Trump.

And I thought, is it or is it just because that's the safe thing to do?

Because we are in the midst of a global pandemic, of a deadly virus, still framing everything as sort of the strategy, even when it's about just public health. And so I think at the broad level, we're seeing these these things really be a problem if we narrow into the social media aspect of it. Again, we can't really disentangle the two. For better or for worse, and I would say for worse at the moment, social media in general and Twitter in particular plays almost a direct conduit from elected officials, including the president, straight into the veins of the press and into the TVs in our living room. So every pernicious or false claim and the more outrageous it is that gets put on social media and in particular, Twitter gets amplified in the press again, even if it's to correct it. But it still gets amplified. And I think that's really a problem because as Whitney was mentioning, there are real disparities in people's comfort level about the voting process. There are real disparities in the tools that people have to access more incorrect information about the voting process if they don't have it. And so in that situation, when we see our elected officials and this is not just the president, these are state election officials sometimes. Right, not being able to get their voice sort of amplified at that same level, I think that's really a problem.

I came together recently with some other people who work in sort of the space of social media and politics. And we made a series of recommendations for things that platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Google could do now before the election to try and make the election work better. Right. To to protect the vote. And one of the things that we recommended was that platform should support and incentivize local and state election officials to provide good and verified information to sort of flood the zone, so to speak, of our Facebook feeds, of our Instagram feeds on tick tock on Twitter and all these places with good quality information. You know, Whitney mentioned this earlier that there's different procedures in every state. So we can't even really rely on a on a national conversation when it comes to voting. The information about how to do it is very local and that information needs to be targeted. Platforms have the ability to do that. They give these sorts of resources to political campaigns every year. There's no reason that they shouldn't be giving it to state and local election officials to flood these zones with good information about how to engage in this process.

One narrative that I've been following from the press, but then also, again, from colleagues and friends and folks from my own generation who don't necessarily know I'm a millennial and we don't necessarily always trust the institutions that are.

Is that all of that distrust has seemingly been ramped up to 11 for this, particularly along that concept of information being politicized in some way and voting seemingly being politicized.

And I'm wondering about this question of voting. And I guess my question is, has voting become a partisan issue or. I guess she should. Should it be how do we deal with that, how do we deal with the narrative that voting has become a partisan issue?

Voting has always been a partisan issue. I mean, the history of voting in this country is not one of frolicking in the grass and happily making daisy chains, it has been, you know, pitched battles, we've had voter fraud, we've had election fraud. We've had you know, those claims are not don't come out of nowhere. Right. But I also think that we're seeing something remarkable this year, which is the turnout is going to be astonishing. And I just want to go to voter registration, which is that in four years ago, California was down in the bottom quadrant of percentage. People registered of eligible voters voted voting eligible population. They have hit almost 85 percent this year. That's really high. That's a 10 point jump, and Los Angeles County has gotten to 95 percent and this has happened largely through California's new motor voter program and through concerted voter registration drives. And I think that we're going to see huge turnout because I think this has been growing since 2000, when when 2000 happened, my friends in Europe were like, what's wrong with you guys? Right. And I said, well, why is your turnout, among other things, why? Why do so few people in your country vote? And my answer was that basically since World War Two, it had not matter that much who was election. We weren't the Ukraine shifting from, you know, fascist to socialist and back and forth. We were sort of going a little left, a little right. We're pretty purple. And thousand was the beginning of this big divide that that we're now hopefully at the at the turning point of. Right. Which is that it was this year.

The consequences are so obvious and we're seeing and that we're seeing it not just in the presidential election, but we're seeing it at the senatorial in the in the congressional in the not so many governors this year, but in you know, in the state House. And we're seeing it all the way down to mayors.

And to me, one of the questions is, can we build on that? Right. Can we actually look forward after the election? A very pinus because I'm very Pollyanna.

But once we get to the point where everybody has voted, have we begun to break the vicious cycle of I'm not going to vote because I don't see how my vote counts and so therefore I won't vote and therefore I vote doesn't count and I don't get talked to because I'm not in the voter registration rolls and campaigns only talk to people who are online in the voter registration rolls. And that's gotten worse as we've gotten more fragmented in the media. We watch we don't have the town paper anymore.

Right. Those are just gone.

And so, you know, how do we use how do we bring back the sense of voting for your community, your community in the narrowest and then your community in the largest way?

And while we're on this topic of voting being political, Shannon, I'm wondering just because I noticed this week when I logged on to my Facebook, the first thing that showed up in my feed was a video about a local video about how I should make sure that my vote counts in Colorado because that's where I live. And so on the one hand, I see social media sites like Facebook really doing a good job of giving good and valid information about voting, encouraging people to register, allowing you to put those little stickers on your profile. And then on the other hand, I see people becoming increasingly more polarized politically and being presented with more misinformation and fake news. So do you think that social media is helping make voting less political or do you think that it's making it more political?

Is the million dollar question right?

You know, I guess I would say I'll try and I'll try and be fair, and I'll say it's a bit of both, right? I mean, like I agree that these sort of built-In incentives that Facebook and other platforms have put in to direct people to information about voting within their state. I mean, we have experimental evidence, right, like field experiments to show that that works. Right. And so I think that's great.

What I worry about, I think, layers on to what we were just talking about with how how it appears that voting is so partisan now and I'll tie this to twenty sixteen, you know, in the wake of twenty sixteen and Russian misinformation and Facebook and whatever the whole thing, I'm not saying that that's fine. Right. Obviously that's not good and we don't want it to happen, but that's sort of became the boogeyman in the twenty sixteen election rather than the much harder truth to face, which was just that it turned out not only that about half the people not vote didn't think it was actually a consequential election, enough to vote. But also, we're completely wrapped up in sort of a racist rhetoric, right, and exclusionary rhetoric, that's a much harder thing to reckon with as a country than it is to say, well, the Russians put some bad stuff on Facebook and these hapless voters were just duped by a couple of Facebook posts into voting for someone that was against or against their interests.

And so I don't that doesn't mean I think platforms are innocent in this. I don't think they are. But I think platforms, you know, to a certain extent, reflect and certainly amplify our own social reality. But they are not separate from our social reality. You know, the polarization, the hateful messaging, the harassment and all the positive things as well, like encouraging other people to vote.

All of that exists offline and is sort of amplified and in some ways exacerbated in our sort of online world as well. And so I think, you know, I think what is worrisome, at least for me, is to the extent that which we've seen a real lag time from some of these platforms in dealing with these issues. You know, I've been asked to comment by reporters. I feel like every day on the latest thing that is obviously against these platforms, own policies against misinformation about the voting process. Right. Not making judgment calls on what is misinformation about particular political things, but just about the actual process of voting. And we see time and time again, it doesn't get taken down until the intrepid reporter reports on it, calls Facebook or Twitter or Google. And then they say, oh, my gosh, we did it know. And they take it down or they review it for a couple of days and then they take it down. I know we're talking about the future at some point, but I'll just say that worries me not only now in the impact it may have on people not actually voting or not.

But to the extent of which they can trust any of the information that they're getting and that, I think is we're in this sort of chaotic space where even people like myself, who I consider myself a very information rich person. Right. I have a Ph.D. I literally study politics. Right. I know a lot about how this works. And I still find myself just getting overloaded with so much chaotic information at times.

And I'm like, how is this actually supposed to be working?

And so in the way that we're seeing these platforms deal with it, I don't I don't have a lot of faith that they are going to be able to actually stamp out misinformation about the election after the fact when I'm which is one of the things that I'm at least myself and I know a lot of other people are really worried about.

We if we come back to justice question, right, she said there was this she actually signed on to Facebook and there was a video from her state election director telling her how to vote accurately. I think this is the transition.

Part of the transition to the future is that that video existed. That election office has a has a video has has a Facebook feed, understanding that that information has to be out there, learning how to be a little funny about it. There's a state where the secretary of state is very short and the election director is very tall. And they sort of made a joke about that.

I mean, we can rap. Good information is something that's engaging and attractive. And I think the place where I would blame the press if I blame them for anything because I study them, but is that they sort of chase the sensational and four years election officials would say, you know, nobody reports on anything.

That's election happening on Tuesday, film 11. You know, that wasn't news. And so now now that there's there's there's problems, everybody's rushing in. And how do we how do we get the press to think about what their relationship is in this troika? They are the fifth estate, right? I mean, they're the other piece of information. But if all you report on is that one hundred and twelve ballots in Lancaster County and you don't report on anything else, you don't report on the budget problems that lead to there not being enough people to man the election office, the need that Philadelphia did not have a modern system for voting by mail.

I mean, even though they had already they already knew that they were ramping up outside of covid. Those things are our government, are our societal problems just as much as the fraud issues are.

But it's so much easier to chase that quick, sharp little story and not think about the underlying stories about why are we are we are. We are. Why are we not ready to hold an election, to take part in elections and to have the results of the elections?

I think you're completely right. We do know that one of the news values is conflict writers scandal and that this is one of the sort of metrics, both informally and formally, by which journalists decide what what goes in the news. Right. And what do we cover? One of the recommendations that I've made recently with a group called the Election Coverage and Democracy Network is to is to ask journalists to put voters and election administrators at the center of elections that elections are not about those who are getting elected. Elections are about the people doing the electing. Right. They're about voters. They're about the people like what they said earlier who are putting on an election, who are running an election. This is what should be the center of election coverage. And if we can do that, then we can demystify some of these institutions. We can talk about all the things that are going well. Right. All of the you know, that doesn't mean we shouldn't report on the problems. We should write. I mean, the press should report on problems because it's a way to hold those in power to accord. Right. And to say these are problems and they shouldn't be problems and people should be allowed to vote easily. Right. But the more that we can include the voices of citizens in this process and of election administrators in this process, we can also see what is working totally fine. Right. And again, that I think will allow people more broadly to have faith in what is still compared to the rest of the world, a very stable electoral process and election system and have faith in the election. You know, whatever happens, we won't have a day this year.

But whatever comes in the weeks to come, as we move towards closing, I do want to move us towards thinking about the future, because as we've talked about, there's a lot at stake in multiple elements of this voting process and then also how we learn from it for the future. And so I'm wondering for each of you, if you could name one thing that perhaps you're fearful of or concerned about within this election are going into the future. And then one thing that you're feeling really hopeful about in terms of voting specifically.

Well, I just want to I think I'll start with what I'm fearful of, and it follows on the theme that Jen and I have just been talking about, which is that the rush to have an instant story instead of a complete and careful story will overwhelm things. Everybody always wants to know why Los Angeles takes so long to count the five million or so ballots that they get, and the answer is because it takes a long time to count that many paper ballots and do it accurately. And so I think that that wish to have an answer today could overtake us. And I think could even if even if the election goes really well and we don't have any major meltdowns, that's going to be a problem. And add to that the fact that it's not just press and it's not just voters and it's just celebrities, but it's all the lawsuits and all the litigiousness of the society mean that instead of being able to work through and solve that problem, even the solving of the problem becomes a contentious issue. Hopeful. Well, putting my long view hat on, I was part of a project this year that were a task force, looked at the possibility of universal voting. That is where the assumption was that that every every eligible citizen would actually vote and how that might happen and what it would take. And one of the things that we realized was that you can't get there from a 50 percent turnout. You have to get there from age 70 or 80 percent turnout. And that means putting into place election administration that's responsive to the needs of the electorate. That means having more responsibility on the part of the government for doing things like managing the voting rolls. And it means a culture in which we assume that everybody will, in fact, turn out that everybody in every corner of every community will turn out.

And listening to that conversation, which I started with a big, huge skeptical hat on kind of take take over me a little bit and I'm watching it infiltrate a little bit more into the society where we're really beginning to talk about that even as we're in the midst of this incredibly chaotic, incredibly difficult moment. That, to me, is sort of the hopeful thing, that maybe there's a seed of something being planted about how it doesn't have to be like this.

And Shannon.

Yeah, we don't have all day, so I'll just mention one thing that I'm fearful about, and one of the things that I'm most fearful about in the wake of this election is in particular the use of social media and in particular the use of social media by powerful and elected officials to call into question the results and to in particular, call for violent uprisings in the wake of an outcome that they are not pleased with.

I am really worried about that. I am worried about platforms not responding to it as quickly and swiftly as they could or should, again with their own policies. There is no free speech right on Facebook. Facebook is the arbiter of whatever they would like on Facebook.

And so, you know, if they would just like to if they say this speech is not allowed, then it's not allowed. And so I'm really fearful about that.

What I'm hopeful about I'll even balance this, I'll be hopeful about two brief things.

One of the things is that I'm really hopeful that the press and the public and even other institutional actors like election administrators in the states, will be able to work in service of upholding democratic norms. You know, our Constitution is very clear. The person having the greatest number of votes for president shall be the president is such a no be a majority of the whole number of electors appointed. And if the news coverage and journalists and election administrators just unambiguously and repeatedly remind the public of this fact, explain how it works, explain why it's slow. It's not a problem that it's slow. We're having unprecedented turnout this year. Many more mail in ballots which can't even be counted in some states until Election Day itself, that this is normal, these delays are normal, and they are actually, in fact, a sign that the process works and that it is working as it is intended to do.

So I am hopeful that the press and other actors, in particular election administrators, are going to be able to remind the public of that. And I'm also hopeful to something similar to what Whitney brought up, which is that this election is not the most polarized election we've ever had in this country. And but but it is one that has brought to the fore of people who otherwise were not impacted as much by elections. How impactful elections are? You know, to the extent that we see people who have not been disenfranchised historically time and time again, that we see middle class white liberal Semin, liberal people saying, oh, my gosh, I might be disenfranchised, I better vote, I better do all these things that need to do that. There's this sort of awakening about then not only the importance of it to them, but realizing what other people in this country, black people, Native American people in this country have gone through for decades and hundreds of years to vote, I think may inspire a wave of the importance of the voting process in our system in a way that I don't think we saw previously that, in fact, the civil rights era did not accomplish in the same way for white voters in the same you know, it is important for you to exercise this. Right. And so I'm hopeful about that as well and in my perfect world. And that does lead to some support for something like universal voting.

And from non digital to digital, from past to future, Shannon and Whitney, thank you so much for coming on today to tell us everything that we need to know right now about voting in the U.S. election.

Thank you, Justin Dillon.

Thank you, Jess, thank you for having me and Whitney, so nice to meet you and be part of this amazing conversation.

We want to thank Whitney and Shannon again for coming on the show, and I know Jess and I learned so much and we hope that you learned a lot as well as a reminder to all the folks out there that are eligible to vote in the 2020 election here in the United States and who are listening to this in time to do so. Please, please go out and vote. Your vote matters. Your voice matters in this election. And with that said, just what are you sitting with right now?

Something that's really standing out to me right now. Actually, it has a lot to do with Shannon's research on social media. And I think that this episode is just really symbolic of this moment that we're in, not even just this moment in the United States and with this election this year, but this moment of technology and society and that we've really reached a reckoning point when it comes to technology more broadly, but more specifically when it comes to social media. And I think truly that if we are not intentional with the way that we design and the way that we use, the way that we engineer and consume social media, it can be our demise. But if we are intentional about these things, then we can actually utilize them to fix the problems that we've struggled with as a society for so long. And I'm really excited to hear that companies like Facebook and Twitter and Google are making a really big effort in the 2020 election in the United States to battle misinformation and fake news and to ban the spreading of political propaganda and smear campaigns. I know that a lot of companies have come forth in the past few weeks to basically ban in the week before the election any new ads to try to avoid what happened in 2016, basically, and then also to try to ban any new ads on November 4th to try to spread misinformation about election results. That might not be true yet. So I see things like that happening. And and even what I was mentioning earlier, you know, the video of informing me on how to vote, and that is so positive. And I think those are great examples of ways to utilize these platforms. And so that gives me a sense of hope. And I just I really hope that we can keep holding on to that and those ideas and positive design decisions and consumer decisions to really make social media something that's good for us, something that doesn't wreck our society and our political and democratic process.

What about you?

Yeah, I just I agree with everything that you're saying. And I also find it interesting the things that stood out to you in this conversation compared to the things that stood out to to me in this conversation, because whereas you seem to gravitate more towards how we design this technology and how we put this technology together, what stood out to me was the conversation about the media and how we talk about these technologies and especially social media, how we frame information, the news cycle, how the news cycle even functions and just jumps from the hot topic to the next hot topic to the next hot topic, like whatever will bring in views, whatever will bring in numbers, even if it's not necessarily accurate.

And I think that points to just how complex and overwhelming some of these topics can feel around this election this year, that there's so much at stake and people just want information they can count on and they want people they can count on and they just want to know what the heck is going on. And yet we're being bombarded on this news cycle and really across our culture with questions of whether we can trust information, whether we can trust politicians, whether we can trust the institutions that are supporting this entire democracy. And that's something that really resonates with me as a CNN center. As for me, as someone who studies this stuff, even then, it's really tough for me to know. Like I have to look, you know, six sources down from anything that I read and just like keep tracing it through to figure out if I'm even reading accurate information. And it's hard to know because there's like this culture in the news cycle, which is based in this like capitalist economy and all this stuff. It's just everything is so interconnected and complex and difficult. And while I'm really grateful for Whitney and Shannon sharing their hopes about all of this, I think. It's really easy to feel jaded and hopefully this conversation helps listeners out there feel a little less jaded and feel like they have a little bit more agency because of information that we now have or at least knowing what some of the issues are. But, yeah, it's I don't think there's a there's a silver bullet for that feeling of overwhelm in this election, no matter how it goes.

Yeah, well, I mean, while we're talking about agency and what we can actually do about all of this, I think it is important to maybe spread some not necessarily advice, but maybe some some actions that people can take right now besides going to vote, which we've already said a million times. I'll just say one more time, go vote if you can. But I think that there's a lot here and it's a lot to digest and take in.

And so my immediate reactions for things that I know I'm going to at least try to do is to try to be more conscientious online, to start off and to try to be a responsible citizen, but not just a responsible citizen in terms of voting, but a responsible citizen in my online and digital communities as well. And so if I'm on a platform like Facebook or Twitter where a lot of people in the United States and globally get their news, it's important for me to recognize that I am a citizen quote of that online digital community and space. And so it's also my civic duty to act responsibly there. So in the same way that I shouldn't go spreading political propaganda and flyers around in my local neighborhood, if I see fake news or misinformation online, I should not share it. I should stop endorsing those things. And if I see that other people are doing it, I mean, obviously we kind don't shut people down, but try to spread real and valid and legitimate information that is from credible sources as opposed to things that really allow people and encourage people to react emotionally, especially around times like elections. And I think this is also true of, you know, if you see people on the platform like family members, I think this is like an infamous example.

I know I have, you know, extended family members and I'm sure everybody does on on Facebook specifically for some reason, this is the platform everybody goes to for this, where there's just a lot of political opinions being shared and there's a lot of misinformation and just, you know, information that's not necessarily factual. And there's a lot of different features that we can utilize on the platform, like blocking and unfollowing, unfriending or if you don't want them to know that you're doing those things. I recently learned that you can mute people on Facebook and they do not show up in your feed. So I'm going to be doing that as well. And I think my my last thing my last piece of advice really for myself in this is if this is all just too much, if there's just so much going on in the social media sphere, in these digital and online communities that are especially around this election, is just like negatively impacting your mental health log off. There's no problem. And, you know, taking a quick social media break, at least that's my opinion. I don't know.

Dylan, do you share that opinion in part? Yeah.

I mean, I think that it's really important to remain engaged, I think would be my only pushback that I think sometimes taking a step back from social media can, especially for for those folks who are not maybe directly impacted by, you know, the ballot measures that year or don't feel like they're immediately impacted by the presidential candidate or they feel like no matter who's, you know, elected, it's the same or whatever, which. You know, those are potentially valid opinions to have, but I think it's really important to be able to remain engaged, to not use unplugging from social media as an excuse to not be engaged in civic life, because I do strongly believe that there's a lot at stake in this election.

And I think that there could be a lot loss in many different ways if we don't stay involved in our political system.

That said, I completely agree that I think it's very possible in the news cycle, in our social media and all of this political stuff of never knowing what's true, what's not to just be exhausted on it. And I think that in order to really make sustainable change, you do have to take care of yourself and you do have to take care of yourself first. And if part of that taking care of yourself is unplugging from your social media, especially so you can go be involved in another way, I think that's absolutely right. I guess one thing I would say is that sometimes, at least for me, I fall into that. Well, if I share this post and if I share a photo of me voting on social media, that I'm actually creating change. And I think maybe I might be I might be like a little bit. But I think, like, if I go join, say, a voter bank or I go make calls for a candidate that I support or get involved in local politics, if I'm using the energy that I might be spending, posting my voting selfie online on like using that energy instead to get involved in the local political scene, then maybe that might be a better use of my time and it might make me feel actually like I have more agency as opposed to just constantly consuming all this stuff. I don't know what to do with coming from outside.

Yeah. And I mean, if you're feeling like you have a lot of energy listener, do it all. Go vote and go post a shameless selfie of your voting on social media and go spread the word to all the other people you think should go vote and also go join the local community for getting others to go vote and be a part of this process. You can do it all or you can do some of it, but try to do something.

For more information on today's show, please visit the episode page at Radical A Drag and stay tuned for upcoming episodes about the 2020 election and elections in general.

If you enjoyed this episode, we invite you to subscribe, rate and review the show on iTunes or your favorite podcast to catch our new episodes every week on Wednesdays, join our conversation on Twitter at Radical iPod and as always, stay radical.

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