Well, thank you. Do you have a photographic memory by chance? I've been meaning to ask you. Do you actually have a you don't? You're so smart.

You know, you become like an expert in every subject. It's amazing. Oh, no, I just do a lot of research. I just do a ton of research. I'm just a nerd. I'm just a nerd.

At the end of the day, she's just a nerd. Hello, and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host, Lee McGowan. Let's get into it. Today's pod is a candid conversation with Jennifer Cohen. Jennifer is an election security advocate, lawyer and political writer. Her articles on election security have been widely published. And she's been doing this for a long time.

She's been an extraordinary amount of her time, especially since 2016, focusing on investigating unsecured computer election systems across America and promoting potential solutions. I'm having Jennifer on today because American democracy is under attack in more ways than ever before.

And the disinformation and voter suppression efforts based on Trump's big lie to the GOP abandoning democracy for their own power to foreign cyber attacks to good old fashioned voting machine manipulation. Congress seems unable to pass a voter protection bill because the Republicans keep stonewalling it. And now the GOP are actively telling us that they are going to elect people who will cheat, suppress, and even invalidate votes to make sure their candidates end up on top. And all of this is playing out in red states across the country.

We all need to vote, but we also all need to know our votes are safe and secure. So because knowledge is power and we can't hope to fix something we don't understand without further ado, please welcome my guest, attorney, writer and election security expert, Jennifer Cohen. Welcome, Jennifer.

Hi, Lee. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, no, thank you for joining me. I've been wanting to have you on for such a long time because election security is something that gets way up into my head and I don't understand it at all and you understand it so well that I thought it would be a wonderful chance to talk about this.

I mean, obviously the 2020 election was a disaster for the image of election security with the president and his enablers telling us that the election was rigged and it was stolen.

And the Republican party and the insiders knowing he was lying, but saying nothing about it just to see how it played out for them. And then the Democrats attempting to shore up, you know, the public face of democracy, insisting that the elections were the safest ever, which theoretically they were, but that doesn't mean they're entirely safe.

And it confuses the message when people like you point out election security shortcomings, right? We saw all these same false assurances after the 2016 election when we knew interference was happening both internally and externally, right?

With the DNC hack and the smeared Hillary and the Democrats and the Russian troll farms, but also with the voting systems themselves, right?

And so I feel like most of us don't really know what's going on with election security or the safety of our elections except we now all have this vague sense that something's wrong.

So could you do a cliff notes version for those of us who are just dialing into this issue?

I'm happy to give it a try.

What I would say.

Thank you.

Yes. So at the current time, we're sort of in this potential democracy death spiral that I hope does not come to fruition.

And then isn't actually fatal.

But you said it quite well.

The problem we have is that the Republican Party blocked democratic efforts to secure our election system or to really improve election security before the 2020 election.

And then had the audacity after Trump lost the 2020 election to combine the vulnerabilities that they refused to address, to combine those with the fire hose

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