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 Slates Podcasts 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. We can't wait till October to worry about

what's going to happen in November. What I asked 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 deepfake the night before an

election. A scenario in which people did leave the internet and take much more

physical action. Our system is only going to work if people have enough

confidence in it that they can accept the results. We're not asking these

...