Aside from going to war, or maybe the census, holding an election is the most complicated thing we do as a country.

You just expect them to work until they don't.

We need to do more to recruit and train a talented workforce of election workers on Election Day.

Hi, and welcome back to Amicus.

This is Slate's podcast about the law, the rule of law, the constitution, and the Supreme Court.

I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover those things for Slate.

And this is the second part of our five-part series, Election Meltdown.

Rick Hassan is the author of the book of the same title.

He's also professor of election law at UC Irvine.

And he's here to help us think about the increasingly desperate pressing question,

can American democracy survive the 2020 election?

You know, it's a pretty serious question we're asking, but we're trying to ask it in a way that

we'll get people engaged and thinking about these issues before it's too late.

You can't wait until October to worry about what's going to happen in November.

What, I ask, could possibly go wrong with November's election.

So I've got two scenarios that really worried me.

Imagine a Florida 2000 type situation with Trump in the White House.

Then those precincts can't be counted.

Pretty wide scale voter purge.

We've been asking civil rights lawyers, public officials, local journalists, and disinformation

experts for their election

doomsday scenarios. Imagine deep fake the night before an election. A scenario in which people did

...