Election Panel: Jocelyn Benson, Stephen Richer, Ben Ginsberg

- In a close election, separating fact from fiction on how the votes are counted.

This week on "Firing Line."

As Election Day approaches and millions cast early ballots across the country, misinformation about voting is spread by the richest man on earth.

- Take over, Elon, yes, take over.

(crowd cheering) - [Hoover] And a torrent of lawsuits attempts to cast doubt on the voting process.

Before a live audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York, I hosted a bipartisan panel committed to standing up for the integrity of our voting system.

Stephen Richer, the Republican Recorder for Maricopa County in Arizona.

- It has to happen with leaders.

And so that's why I say to some of these people, you have to do better.

- [Hoover] Michigan's Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

- We all have stories as to how we take on these lies and stand up to powerful figures, whether they be Putin or Elon Musk.

- And veteran GOP election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg.

- It seems to have escaped the genius of Elon Musk that tearing down the system will make it harder for whoever wins this election, to govern.

- [Hoover] Amid threats to election workers.

- [Crowd] Stop the count!

- [Hoover] How will officials prevent the chaos of 2020?

And what does it take to restore trust in our elections?

What do these election experts say now?

- [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa add Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. (audience applauding) - Michigan Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, Maricopa County Recorder, Stephen Richer, Ben Ginsberg.

Welcome back to "Firing Line."

Secretary Benson, I have to ask you about what has happened today, because this is about the real consequences of people who are on the front lines of the election.

The Republican National Committee and Elon Musk have seized on this idea that Michigan currently has 500,000 more people on the voter rolls than its eligible voting age population.

You and Elon have been tweeting at each other today.

You say that this is a misleading number.

And so can you, please clear up what the controversy is about?

And then I want to talk about the real consequences of that controversy.

- Yeah.

So in Michigan, like in every state, we have voter registration database and it includes active registered voters, of which there are about 7.2 million in our state.

The eligible population is 7.9 million.

So easily to say less people registered than total.

But in addition to that, there are a number of records, actually 1.2 million records we've identified as inactive.

But it's really easy to add those two numbers together, the 7.2 million active registered voters and the 1.2 million who are inactive records, who are, you know, about to be eliminated from the entire database, add those together and say you've got 8.4 million people on your rolls.

- [Hoover] You said, "Let's be clear, Elon Musk is spreading dangerous disinformation."

You cleared it up.

He replied, "Jocelyn Michelle Benson, shame on you for blatantly lying to the public.

You only plan to remove ineligible voters after this election.

That necessarily means that there are far more people registered to vote than there are eligible voters."

- Yeah.

Again, the two buckets of people added together is what he's conflating.

And what I'd love for him to say instead is the facts, which is you've got active registered voters, 7.2 million, and then you've got the inactive records that are slated for cancellation.

And so the fact that he won't clear that up and instead chooses to reiterate the misleading information is really dangerous because, you know- - Well, let's talk about who it's dangerous for.

- Yeah.

- It's dangerous for everybody who believes it, but it's actually dangerous for you because right now, as you told me, you have now state troopers surrounding your house and your small child and your family because of the threats that Elon's platform creates for your security.

- I mean frankly, my first reaction after this unfolded today was to call my security team to ramp up our security, because the last time this happened where I got into a tussle because Elon Musk was trying to mislead voters in our state a few months ago, saying, "Register to vote on my website," his website, "and you'll be registered to vote in Michigan."

And that actually wasn't true.

When we called that out, within, you know, a few days, I was swatted twice.

And so, you know, there are real life consequences for those of us who try to stand up in the name of the truth and the law to face down individuals who would choose to use their powerful platforms to divide rather than unite.

And that's real, I think, for all of us.

I think we all have stories as to how we take on these lies and stand up to powerful figures, whether they be Putin or Elon Musk or the former president, and the consequences of doing so mean we have to, the nicest way to say it is watch our backs even more because we know that speaking truth to power can lead to challenges.

And I know, Steven, you know that too.

- Steven's had his fair share of this as Recorder of Maricopa County, okay?

Maricopa County is one of the largest voting jurisdictions in the country, second largest to Los Angeles.

- Yep.

- 60% of Arizona's votes come through Maricopa County.

You have distributed 1.9 million mail ballots so far.

- Not me personally, but the SBS.

- Not you personally.

But in 2020, it took 13 days, it took almost two weeks for Maricopa County to count all its ballots.

There were protests, there was misinformation.

- Yeah.

- Do you expect it to be faster and more orderly this year?

- It depends on the behavior of the voters and if they hold on to their early ballots until Election Day and they drop off their mail ballots on Election Day, then- - At 7:00 p.m. - At 7:00 p.m., then we will be in another situation where if we have razor thin margins, Arizona won't be able to be confidently called for 48 hours.

And I think that very well could be the possibility.

You know, we're in that situation.

We do the best we absolutely can.

We throw more bodies on it and we encourage people to get their mail ballots back earlier, but beyond that, there's not much we can do.

- One of the concerns that is spiraling out there, the conspiracy theories, is this notion that non-citizens- - Yeah.

- May vote in robust numbers in this election.

And I want you to clear up something that's happened in Arizona.

At least 218,000 Arizona voters were improperly recorded to have provided proof of citizenship.

But this has to do with longtime residents who received their driver's licenses in Arizona before there were citizenship requirements to do so.

The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that these individuals can all vote.

So explain how you're going to combat this notion that 218,000 non-citizens are voting in Arizona's election.

- I think it will be challenging and it won't surprise me if this crops up after the election, no matter who wins and who loses.

But in Arizona, we have a documented proof of citizenship law.

In all other states, you simply have to attest that you are a United States citizen in order to be able to participate.

But we have to provide an actual documentation, so a birth certificate or a passport.

And most of that comes through the Motor Vehicle division because most of that's on file because the Motor Vehicle division requires it.

But there were a few people, that number, who were marked as having documented proof of citizenship on file, but didn't actually.

But they still lived in Arizona prior to 1996, and they attested that they were United States citizens.

- So Elon had a field day.

- Yeah.

- He got 38 million views for this tweet.

Quote, "Arizona is refusing to remove illegals from voter rolls?"

So you responded to him directly.

So what impact did Musk's interfacing with you have?

- He's very able to drive conversations.

And to Jocelyn's point about this is a man who has access to everything he could possibly want.

And so I just wish that he would use some of that access to find out the facts and be an advocate for the whole story.

And so that's why I usually piggyback on those and usually get 1/100th of the traffic, but hopefully it does some good.

- The conservative Heritage Foundation has its own database about this, and it has found 85 allegations of non-citizens voting in the last 21 years.

- Nationwide.

- Yes.

- Nationwide.

- So that's the same organization that put out Project 2025 has found 85 allegations of non-citizens voting in the last 21 years.

So Ben, what is going to be the playbook here for how to best combat this narrative?

- You saw an example of this in the 2020 suits that Trump brought, especially in Georgia.

When it came to court, to the legal proceedings, there was no evidence of it.

And so I think that it will be raised in post-election lawsuits, but they are going to have to have evidence of who these individuals are.

And they're not going to be able to find them.

And the basic underpinning of the argument is going to fall away.

- One more on Elon, then we're going to move on, I promise.

Elon is campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania.

He has announced that he's going to give away $1 million to voters who sign his petition.

He's tweeting that only in-person voting is secure.

He's resurfacing these debunked claims about Dominion's voting machines.

How concerned are you about the way disinformation is being spread by the most influential sort of purveyors of conspiracies like Elon Musk?

- He is acting as an advocate in a way that is pretty much beyond the bounds.

Paying for votes is not permissible under the law.

Election interference is sort of a no-no when it comes down to the Constitution.

I would love to see the legal memo he got from his well-paid counsel about why what he's doing is legitimate.

But I think he has probably taken the position, well, okay, I'm going to do this anyways because I want to.

Let them come after me.

But I think even the most damaging part of this is that it seems to have escaped the genius of Elon Musk that tearing down the system will make it harder for whoever wins this election, including his candidate, Donald Trump, to govern.

And that's a real problem for the country as a whole.

- We know that the plan is to try to debunk the elections very quickly.

That is the plan.

The RNC has telegraphed this by massive numbers of lawsuits that it has already instigated in both Arizona and Michigan.

But from one sort of in-depth reported article from "Rolling Stone" last week, quote, "With just weeks left in the 2024 presidential contest, Donald Trump already has plans in place to aggressively challenge the election results if he fails to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris.

According to four conservative attorneys and other sources who have spoken to the former president on this matter, Trump intends to declare as soon as election night that the race is being rigged or stolen from him by pointing to slow counts of mail-in ballots in crucial battleground states as his evidence for supposed Democratic shenanigans."

- He did that last time.

It didn't work because there are basic institutions in this country where if you're going to make that allegation, you have to come up with proof of it eventually.

Sort of a basic thing.

And of the 64 cases that he brought, none succeeded, and all failed for a lack of evidence.

- They all failed for a lack of evidence.

But how much does it gum up the system and instill a lack of confidence and create a space for conspiracy theories to begin to permeate and cast a shadow of doubt on the integrity of the election in the interim?

- It is certainly a problem and a worry and a concern, and that's the disservice to whoever ends up winning the election, that people don't have faith in the basic institution, despite the fact that Stephen and Jocelyn and their colleagues really are running the safest, most secure, most accurate election in history.

The safeguards that are built into all 11 stages of the election system are ones that they describe on a regular basis, and they are available to anyone who doubts the reliability of elections to go in and ask them.

And so it is a system with safeguards.

It does produce reliable results.

People doubt it, kick the tires of the election system.

- I want to ask you, Secretary Benson, since 2020, we've seen a rise of amateur election fraud hunters who have swamped election offices with public records requests.

And your office has experienced this.

What is your take or your perception of these fraud hunters?

- There are many tactics: meritless lawsuits, sham legislative hearings, showing up at election offices demanding information, and when you don't get it or you can't get it because of privacy restrictions or whatever, then somehow using that to allege or build this narrative of fraud or, again, sow seeds of distrust.

And you start to see that all of this is a PR strategy more than a legal strategy, or legislative strategy.

- Do you want to respond to how this has showed up in Maricopa County?

- Audits are good.

The right type of audits are good.

(Ben laughs) So we don't just turn on tabulation equipment and say, "Hey, we hope it works well."

We do pre-election tests.

We do post-election audits.

The political parties do hand count audits after the election to make sure the hand count matches the machine count.

But at some point, it stops becoming productive.

And so in 2021, Arizona got to spend an entire year with a group called the Cyber Ninjas- - Remind people who the Cyber Ninjas are.

- The Cyber Ninjas were a sole proprietorship in Sarasota, Florida, that had alleged that the election was stolen and said that they had some pretty novel ways of uncovering stolen elections, and they were enlisted by the Arizona State Senate to come spend what turned out to be about eight months in Maricopa County, Arizona.

And it cost the state about $15 million and it cost private donors about $15 million as well.

- Remind us, did they have experience auditing elections before?

- They didn't, no.

Problematic usually.

- But remind me what their audit discovered.

- Well, their audit, I don't put any credence in it, but they- - But just for the record.

- They said that Biden won by even more.

But they used it to sort of- (audience laughing) they used it to sort of backdoor all of these other conspiracies that have been really damaging.

And that's why I think that we in Arizona, more than any other state, are still stuck on November 3rd, 2020.

And really, that has been like the entire last four years of my life.

- That's been part of the last four years of your life.

But another part of the last four years of your life has been, three people have been prosecuted for allegedly threatening you personally.

- Yeah.

- Maricopa County has faced numerous threats- - Yeah.

- for defending the integrity of the election.

There is now a fortress around the recorder's office and the facility where you count the votes.

You were primaried by Republicans and then lost.

Do you see any path back from the level of hostility and the intensity that surrounds the current elections?

- It has to happen with leaders.

And so that's why I say to some of these people, "You have to do better.

You have to do what's responsible."

When you have millions of people listening to you, to ignore the fact that one of those people is going to get it into their mind to do something fairly extreme, if they think that the country, the country is being stolen from them, because that's what the accusation of Jocelyn represents.

It represents that the country they know and they love is being stolen from them by this lady.

Then it's not too hard to understand why there might be a low percentage, but still a handful of people who might say, "I want to find out where she lives, and I'm going to bring a gun there."

- Which has happened.

All right, let's go to Georgia.

We haven't talked about Georgia yet.

Georgia is a bright spot in many ways, but also a trouble spot for 2024.

After 2020, Georgia Republicans removed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from his role as the chair of the state election board.

And they have filled the board with election skeptics who have attempted to implement significant rule changes.

And one of them requires the mandating of a hand count of all of the ballots, which is currently stayed in court.

But how do you understand the changes, the recent changes in Georgia, Ben, and how do you think it's going to go in Georgia?

- A court has stayed all those changes.

And they were changes designed to slow down the process.

There are other attempts to allow local boards to examine things that they think are inaccurate before certifying the results.

And all these attempts to slow things down and deal with certifications are basically self-defeating.

You can't just refuse to certify a presidential election.

You are refusing to certify every race on the ballot.

These are red counties, Republican counties, that might refuse to certify.

So those are Republican members of Congress in the state legislature who won't have certifications, won't be able to take their offices.

So ultimately, they're ham handed attempts in Georgia by unelected bureaucrats that the courts have rightfully put on pause.

- What is your degree of confidence that Georgia will be able to expeditiously count its votes and have a result within a reasonable sort of 48-hour time frame?

- Well, to sort of explain where things are, the answer to that question depends on how tight the margins are.

So if the margins are as tight as all with polls.

- Let's go with tight.

Let's go with, how about 11,870 votes.

(audience laughing) Just to pick a number.

- Hypothetically.

- It never gets that close.

And that's not Florida close either.

So Georgia has its systems down really well.

I believe that they will be able to count efficiently and quickly.

They have taken steps to be able to do that.

But in a tight race on election night, you're only going to be able to count probably 70, 80% of the ballots.

In a tight margin, that's too close for news organizations to call it.

And so it is going to take a few days.

And it's going to take a few days around the country.

And I think overall, if the polls are right and it is this close, we should not expect to know the winner on election night.

- Audience questions.

"Trump says he will not accept the election results if it is determined that he lost."

You know, there are fears from the audience in this question about another January 6th happening.

I think my question for you is, forget January 6th, because we've seen the Electoral Count Reform Act passed.

We know that there is going to be slates of electors from every state sent to the Congress, and the Vice President will proceed with their ministerial role of counting those electoral ballots.

So we know that that part will go well.

But what about the intervening time?

Is there a chance of violence if there is uncertainty from November 5th until December 12th when the electors cast their ballots?

How is that going to affect you and your job?

- We're going to have a lot of people show up almost immediately.

The way that we tabulate results is- - You mean at the place where you're counting the votes.

- At the tabulation center and it will get loud and it will get uncomfortable.

And it's unfortunate because we'll have thousands of temporary workers filtering in and out of our central tabulation facility.

And so, we have a fortress out there and we deploy more resources than are really reasonable.

We have drones in the air for elections.

And so we're going to do everything we can to make sure that the workers are safe, the voters are safe, and the ballots are safe.

And I would just ask, you know, to the extent that anyone cares what I think, I would ask leaders to be judicious in their remarks, though I know that's not really the hallmark of politics these days.

- Jocelyn, what are your concerns?

- Well, first of all, to be clear, candidates don't get to decide who wins or loses an election.

Voters do, right?

- Right.

(audience applauding) - You know, and they'll try and they can say what they want to say, but it doesn't change the facts or the truth.

And so our number one goal from the minute the polls close to whenever our unofficial results are announced through the certification process, through January 6th, 2025, is to just make sure that the facts and the truth and the law holds.

Because when people do come to us, to our offices, to our homes, threatening us with every way possible, or online, or challenging in different ways, we stand in the breach, because we know that if we don't, the voices of millions of citizens in our state get overturned or unheard.

And so I'm proud to dig in to that reality when the darkness comes, and it will come, just as it did in 2020, but we'll be ready.

- What I don't worry about this time is the preparation of election officials.

I've really been impressed in going around the country how local community leaders across the political spectrum know that this election dysfunction is bad.

And I think there is a great deal more support from community leaders, again across the political spectrum, for election officials and the jobs that they do that I think is going to have a really helpful effect should the margins be close, should the dysfunction jump up.

- To that end, Jocelyn, you were telling me that there is a degree of hope that you're seeing in terms of the preparation that Ben mentioned.

- Yeah.

We've been through the thick of it and we've had people show up, armed protesters outside our state house, outside my house, outside our Capitol on January or in December of 2020, trying to propose a false slate of electors.

All of that darkness has been real.

But there's also been an enormous light of more citizens stepping up to be a part of defending democracy and speaking the truth.

And that's really how we counter this at the end of the day, by having more citizens engaged and being a part of protecting elections, being a part of defending democracy and speaking the truth and spreading the truth and protecting those in the process that are on the other side.

And if we can do that, if we can use this moment to actually harness that positive energy and have more citizens care about the process, then we can actually emerge from this moment with a stronger and healthier and more robust democracy than we had coming in.

(audience applauding) - Bravo.

You're laughing, and I know you always think.

- No!

It just was it very cheerful.

- You're from Arizona, and it reminds me of the John McCain line that it's always darkest before it goes completely black.

(audience laughs) - I'm not as rosy about our situation.

It just there's such a political economy right now to perpetuate this lie.

There's so many political incentives.

And so, you know, I don't know.

But it doesn't feel like we've made much progress despite all of our effort.

- Thus far, the Trump election denial strategy has not been a successful political strategy.

Wasn't in 2018, certainly wasn't in 2020.

Republicans way underperformed for a midterm election where the other party was in control.

It's not been a successful political strategy.

So 2020 should be in the rearview mirror.

Try and fix 2024.

Recognize that those folks who are your neighbors are putting on this election and get involved.

Go be a poll worker.

You can be on the inside looking at the system and the way it works and spotting any problems.

- To the three of you and to the audience at the 92nd Street Y for joining us for this taping of "Firing Line."

Ben Ginsburg, Secretary Jocelyn Benson and Stephen Richer, thank you all for being here.

Thank you for joining us.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) (bright music) (gentle music) - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.