AI's Election Threat: From Voter Holidays to Misinformation Mayhem

Alex: 00:00:00

Rob champions holidays for shared engagement, while Jerremy

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probes teen education gaps.

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The stakes tighten—if communal acts build

trust, how does AI's misinformation flood

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threaten voters' fragile confidence?

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Jerremy: General take on

national voting holiday.

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Rob, what'd you think?

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Rob: It's a nice principle.

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It's interesting one part of the

country that does this, I won't

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quiz you, but is Puerto Rico.

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So Puerto Rico, part of the United States.

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And they don't get to vote for

president 'cause we do not enfranchise

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citizens that live in territories.

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Parenthetically, let me just say

if one of us were to say, I'm gonna

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move to Puerto Rico and it's a great,

beautiful place to be and I'm gonna go

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move there, and we establish residency,

we can no longer vote for president.

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If we say, you know what, I'm gonna go

live in Portugal for the next three years.

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I can vote absentee from Portugal, but

I can't vote absentee from Puerto Rico.

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Like I can't vote from within

America because we disenfranchise

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that whole set of people.

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Something I'm not a fan of.

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But anyway, they do have a national

holiday or a Puerto Rican holiday and

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does create not just this simple idea

of oh, you have more time to vote, but

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it actually creates a bit of a communal

gathering opportunities and, and that's,

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I think a cool part of it if we did that.

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It's not, that's, you can't bake that

into the law, but if there's a because

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voting at the end of the day is a

communitarian act, we often think of

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it like the individual, but your voting

power comes from voting with other people.

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And our democracy's healthy when

everyone, when more people vote.

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And it's just this sort of communal thing.

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So if it can reinforce that practically,

because so many people today vote by mail.

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Or when I say vote by mail

that I often wanna hedge that.

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'cause it's often people drop

off their ballots, but anyway,

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they get a ballot in the mail and

then they somehow get it back.

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But they usually do it

before the election, right?

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So they don't need a holiday to do that.

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And then we have early voting in more and

more places, and that's a good practice.

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And it's oh, I'm gonna be busy

on election day, but I can go

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vote on Saturday or something.

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And so we've changed from the idea like

there's a one day of voting and we should

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have a holiday of things to we've already

created access through other means.

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So I think the date of the election, the

day of the election's, an interesting one.

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A lot of countries do vote on the weekend.

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But as long as we have early voting

and early voting's accessible and

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the lines aren't long, or something

like I think in some ways that

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building on that is probably the more.

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The more sensible across every state.

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But hey, if a state wants to join

Puerto Rico and have a state holiday

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or something like that that, that

seems like I'm all for that creativity.

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Jerremy: Yeah, I like that.

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Awesome.

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So Rob, if you had to teach a

teenager to vote with confidence,

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so I have a 15-year-old where would.

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Or how would you start?

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Rob: We'd start with the building

block that our young people in

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schools are soon to be citizens.

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If they're citizens, well

soon to be eligible voters.

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Maybe that's the way I'd say it.

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A lot of them let's hope that they

are and we should treat them that

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like we should treat it seriously.

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And I think there's

different components of it.

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One.

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Piece of being a good voter is getting

practiced in critical thinking.

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And there's ways of evaluating

information and claims that actually

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goes deep into how we teach our kids.

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And so often people think about learning

as about the what rather than the how.

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But it's like we should always

teach people how to think rather

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than what to think, right?

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And that's, that becomes a

lifetime skill and we don't

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actually do that consistently.

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So that's step one.

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Step two is to say, okay, let's

really learn about what it is

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to be part of governments at the

local, state and national level.

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So the local level is most accessible.

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Schools could go visit town hall and

maybe attend a city council meeting.

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Like the turnout rate among young people

in local elections is just incredibly low.

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And it's right after an opportunity

where we could have introduced them to

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like, what does local government do?

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They're right here.

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They affect, what the parks look

like and, ba basically regulations

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that affect you very directly.

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And a lot of kids never really

learn that until they're older and

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there's something that happens,

which relating to town government.

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But then they can go to states.

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Here's a practice that several

Scandinavian countries do.

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They have every single high school

student go to their national capital.

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So our analogy would be going to

your state capital, go through a mock

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legislature, learn how laws are passed,

learn how things are done, go view

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and watch the regular legislature,

get that hands-on experience, and then

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just have that much more appreciation

of what state government is.

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And today's fractured media

landscape, it's all the more

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important to do something that

people can learn about this stuff.

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And of course, just understand the basic

civic traditions of the country and the

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civic history and what the Constitution

is and you know what the rules are.

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And of course, being a voting nerd.

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Give 'em a lot of chances to do mock

elections and rules and think about

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voting and try out some different systems.

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I really like the idea, I'll finish

here, but sorry I won't just keep

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going on forever, but the, but to make

student government more interesting.

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To give student governments some

real power of a certain kind.

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Not to override the administration

or something, something interesting.

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So they're not just popularity

contests and not like how do we spend

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money for the prom or something.

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But something that's, that includes

some real governing things.

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Give students some agency and

then have elections for them that

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are interesting and involving.

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And so people's first

experiences of voting.

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Are actually more meaningful

than these sort of oh, it's

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just a popularity contest.

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And those people are just vain people

who wanna have something on their resume.

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So we get this negative first

uses of voting, but instead,

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Hey, let's try things out.

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It is very cool for me that a lot

of colleges and universities use

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rank choice voting for their student

leaders more than a hundred now.

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And that's just an organic thing,

and I think that's happening in,

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in, in more K through 12 as well.

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And I, I think that kind

of creativity is great.

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Jerremy: Yeah, man, you're really easy

to talk to about this on this subject.

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I love your enthusiasm.

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Love your passion.

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So thank you.

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Just wanna say that I'd be, I would love

to know, Rob, just your general thoughts,

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ideas, takes on what's coming up.

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Meaning what is AI's role

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Campaigns like how could it impact,

trust and proportional systems for the

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average person or just anything else

that you are generally considering.

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Rob: Yeah.

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Every new technological advance

affecting communication can be used

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both positively and negatively.

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Going back to the printing

press or something like

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Jerremy: Oh yeah totally

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Rob: you can print things that help

people get educated, or you can

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print things that, that miseducate

people or are disinformation, right?

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And that goes way back to 15 hundreds

or 16 hundreds or what have you.

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And, the role of the internet and social

media and newspapers and television.

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Huge impact for television, right?

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You're like, all of these changes,

some positive, some negative, right?

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And I think AI fits in with that.

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I think we're still in a real learning

mode about what AI can do positively

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and ne negatively, but I think the

negative is easier to understand, which

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is that we tend to trust what we see.

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And what we see now can be much more

easily manipulated to not be real.

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So you can have candidates you can

have people running for office, an

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AI generation that makes it seem like

they're saying things they didn't say.

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And then it gets spread on

social media and it's never true.

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But a lot of people never learn.

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It's not true, right?

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That just seems really scary

and and complicated to regulate.

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But we need to, figure out

that kind of regulation.

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'cause so much of that information

can be passed, just person to person.

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It's not even, whatever.

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It's just hard to regulate how

people transfer information.

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But we need to look at that because

there is a lot of efforts to disin

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or misinform people and confuse

people and steer them to vote in

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certain ways in the positive sense.

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Just like AI can be useful for curating

information and supplementing what

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you're finding out about, just being

like, where do I vote tomorrow?

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Or something like that.

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Or, but also like modern voter guides,

like learning about the candidates

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and that's just something we need to

creatively think about what we can do.

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I would say maybe as a last

musing is, I think the whole world

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is having some challenges with

democracy in different level.

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It's not as pronounced in all countries.

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Some countries are less are degrading,

deteriorating less, but there's a

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general deterioration across the world.

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So if you look at the international

ratings of the health of democracy

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in civil society, like Freedom

House is a group that does this.

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We've had 20 consecutive years

of decline internationally.

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So not every country

at the same time, but.

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It's really problematic and there's

no magic bullets out there, right?

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There's no simple solutions.

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But I think what can we do for people

to feel agency and ownership and,

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consent of the governed principles.

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Yeah.

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Outside of elections too, people only

have wanna put in so much time into

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this stuff but maybe I'm not so that's

a general question that I think is worth

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exploring when I'm exploring some and

expand democracy and but I think AI

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could be some contributing piece of that.

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If in the positive sense of helping

curate information and give more, ways

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for people to understand their choices

and what's going on where they feel

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some positive feelings about democracy.

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'cause right now there's a lot of negative

feelings about democracy and, some of

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the countries that seem to be doing well

in their government, I'm no defender of

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China, but China's doing some things that

seemingly like they're economically and

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people say maybe we don't need democracy.

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China doesn't have it, right?

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It's ah, so I think we need to make

democracy work and we just to do that

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we never need to feel we're settled.

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It, democracy is an ongoing

unfolding and I really love the

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fact that the constitution has

that principle a more perfect union

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because it's never per perfect.

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It's always on pro progress or we hope

progress, it's always about change.

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Anyway, that's a long-winded way of

saying that AI, I think is there's a

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lot of things to fear about it, but

I hope there's some promise as well.

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Jerremy: I love that.

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So speaking about progress

and speaking about change.

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Last question for you, Rob.

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Name one reform that you do not want.

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What problem does it actually

make worse for individuals?

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Is there something out

there that you know that's

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Trickling down that you

really are opposed against?

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Rob: it's a good question.

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I feel that almost

everything is in context.

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Like I am very concerned about

pushing voter id, but if you make

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voter ID accessible and you work out

the edge cases where people don't

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have it, maybe we can make it work

and if some people really want it.

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So I'm really ready to have in,

conversations with people about

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how to make their reform work.

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One that I think is intuitive

for some people, but has

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some real challenges is like.

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We should all just vote on one

day and count the ballots that day

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and have the results that night or

something like that, and vote on paper.

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They do it in Canada so we can do it here.

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One of the things like that's

intuitive oh, let's have fast

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elections and vote on paper.

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Of course people vote on paper, but

count them by hand, but when Canada

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does that, or some other countries,

they're voting for one thing.

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They're

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Jerremy: Yeah.

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Rob: There are elections in some of

our counties like Los Angeles County,

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there will be choices on your ballot.

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You go to vote one election, there'll

be more choices on your ballot

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that some people in a European

country that vote their whole lives

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will vote on their whole lives.

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And so I think we have to

come that we created a lot of

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things to vote on and consider.

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And so that governs the fact

that we should not believe.

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It's if you couldn't do hand counts

for voting on 45 things, and and

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you don't need to if if you build

in guardrails for how to do that.

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Maybe I'll mention one other because,

'cause I think there we haven't

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really talked about rank trust voting.

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So lemme just say a little bit more

about why I think that's good and why

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there's a ref reform that is not good.

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So rank trust voting is the idea

that if you vote for, if you have

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more than two choices and you're

only electing one, or you in a

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multi-member district more, your ballot.

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If you just are limited to vote

for one, you're leaving blank.

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Your preferences about

all the rest, right?

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And you actually might have

preferences about the rest.

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And a rank choice ballot changes from

voting for one, a single choice ballot

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to a rank choice ballot where you say,

here's my first, second, and third choice.

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And then you you add up all and

say you're electing one person.

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The goal is to elect a majority winner.

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That's the most representative outcome

when you're electing one person.

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So if you add up all the first

choices and it's 40 to 35 to

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25, you don't have a winner yet.

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The candidate who's on

last place is eliminated.

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And those voters have had a

chance to rank candidates.

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And then the ballot counts for the second

choice between the other two candidates.

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And you get a head-to-head

simulation and get an instant

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runoff kind of majority winner.

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That kind of allows third parties to run

independents to run in primaries that

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are crowded, incentivizes candidates to

build true consensus within their party.

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A lot of positives to it.

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There's some reaction to it.

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Where it's saying oh,

that's too complicated.

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And by the way, for voters, it

isn't complicated, but they're

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less, it's too complicated.

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So there's this push to say, let's require

single choice voting like a single choice.

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Whoever gets the most votes wins,

even if it's 35% and 65% oppose.

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That's the way we go.

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So you're seeing some states starting

to require that kind of election

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and imposing that on their cities.

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And I think that's a real mistake

because they are preventing

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voters from this chance to have

more representative outcomes.

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So I would really push back on those

who say, oh, all your cities have to

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use a single choice plurality system.

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Is a real degradation of

representative democracy.

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Jerremy: Rob, what a pleasure.

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Thank you so much.

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Is there anything you would like to share

or promote with our listeners today?

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Rob: Let me just end by lifting

up the fact that there are

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a lot of good organizations

out there doing work on this.

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I have the good fortune to actually,

right now I'm advising FairBot, which is a

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group I led for 32 years now, led by this

great leader, Meredith Sumter who I really

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appreciate that how we did the baton pass.

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And they're like the go-to group for

rank trust, voting, proportional, rank

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trust, voting, but they work with a

whole bunch of state groups and other

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national groups like Rank the Vote and

the Rank Trust Voting Resource Center

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and represent women and other having this

conversation about structural reform.

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The national Popular Vote

movement that I've referenced.

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There's a group called National

Popular Vote, which leads the advocacy.

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And has done a really heroic job over

the last 20 years, winning state by

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state and that keeps moving forward

and I think can, will be successful.

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Group Call Unite America does work around.

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Taking on the question of if almost all

elections are not competitive in November,

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what do we do to make the primaries more

competitive and give voters more agency?

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And they do a lot of work around what they

call the primary problem and represent us,

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which works on corruption and issue one.

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And, they, there's just do some

Googling and realize there's

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a lot of people doing work.

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And we're talking about elections,

but of course, so much about

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democracy is this other broader.

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Questions about, about the

health of our civil society.

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That is exciting too.

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I'll just share that

with expand Democracy.

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What I'm excited about doing and had a

chance to do some at FairBot, but hope to

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do in this ongoing way is to keep looking

at that next generation set of reforms,

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the ones that should be looked at.

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We have this really exciting ability

in the United States to often get

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change going from the bottom up.

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We talk about states as the

laboratories of democracy.

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You can talk about local

government as the test tubes of

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democracy through that metaphor.

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And, not all states are cities.

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Not all states allow their

cities to be innovators.

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I live in Maryland, they allow

cities to be real innovators.

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And I think that's a good

principle to to push for.

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But it also means that a lot

of places you can do things.

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You can do things in your NGO and

just realize that democracy is

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not just a spectator sport, it's

something that we all can engage in.

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And so expand Mxi is trying to lift up.

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Ideas and mobilize resources in an

incubation way to support an idea getting

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from here to there, and then give them the

tools to take it from there to we hope,

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scaling And we can't shepherd them the

whole way, but we can get 'em started.

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And there's so much to

do and it's never ending.

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But that's not a negative thing.

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It just means we always have

opportunities to learn and look

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for best practices and keep making

this experiment work for all of us.

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Jerremy: That's right.

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That's right.

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We will put the links in the show

notes for all of those organizations.

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Rob, it was truly a pleasure.

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I just, I like speaking with people that

are positive and happy and just have a

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beautiful enthusiasm about change and the

betterment of our society and our country.

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'cause as you mentioned a few

different times, we're not

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perfect, but we're making progress.

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And that's really, I think, ultimately the

goal that everyone can get behind regards

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to what side of the fence you're on.

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Let's go forward, let's find the

solutions that are definitely going

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to make the betterment of this

country and just work towards those.

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So this is really remarkable.

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Thank you.

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Rob: Great to talk and Dave,

I hope your voice gets better.

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And, but Jerremy, thanks so much

and I look forward to hearing

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how you pull this all together.

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Jerremy: You got it.

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Thank you so much, Rob.