This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 21st, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If Republicans and Democrats were serious about voting rights, securing elections, and discouraging partisan games and redistricting,

what would survive from the various proposals of both parties?

Cato's Walter Olson makes his case for what ought to be yet another bipartisan issue that's getting

bogged down in partisanship.

There are a lot of things wrapped up in this.

It's for Republicans.

The buzzwords are election integrity for Democrats the buzzwords are

voting rights and protecting the vote and both sides seem concerned about an election being stolen, specifically from them.

So to the extent that both sides have serious ideas about protecting, securing the intent of the people who go to the polls, eligible voters who are intending to cast a

ballot, go to the polls and cast those ballots, what are the most important things from your perspective about trying to do that?

Well, thank you for inviting me to start out on the positive because I spend a lot of time kind of blasting away at both parties for all the things they claim in this area that are just not true.

On the other hand, there are some genuine and important steps that could be

taken to bolster confidence that would bolster it potentially on both sides, wouldn't necessarily be for partisan advantage of

either side and one of them is of course after the votes are cast making sure

that there is not a rogue effort that some state

legislature has not prevailed on to try to replace the electors that the voters

actually chose in that state with some other group of electors.

There were attempts to do that last time which did not succeed.

There were attempts to get the vice president to pronounce things while chairing the joint session of common electoral votes that were not in fact true.

All those failed and so one set of reforms is to look at what might have gone wrong or nearly went wrong in some places and to tighten up the protections

...