Hi and welcome back to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the rule of law and the Supreme Court and democracy. It's out. I'm Dahlia Lithwick. We are just ticking past day 16 on the countdown to the election, and this episode that you were about to hear is brought to you by Amicus Listeners Existential Unxed.

We hear you.

We feel it too.

Over the last couple of weeks, we've had a steady trickle of emails to amicus at slate.com,

which suggests that a whole lot of you are very worried about the upcoming election and what could go wrong in terms of efforts after the election to set aside the results.

Our inbox is actually becoming a kind of catalog of worries about every

single part of the election process, whether it's vote suppression, challengers at the polls,

hand recounts, tossed ballots. And then some of you are asking very specific questions about

the possibility of governors or electors who change the certification of the election for their candidate of choice.

We've been trying to straddle the line between giving you information about what could happen,

and we are talking to people who have spent years disaster planning for precisely this,

but also the other side of the line, which is,

please don't panic.

Information is good.

And so that's the focus of this week's show.

With the election doomsday clock ticking down, we're going to answer some of your

dark night of the sole election questions, specifically some of the constitutional and statutory

questions, with contested presidential election whisperer Matthew Seligman.

Later on in the show, we're going to hear from retired federal judge, Jay Michael Ludig,

on how the U.S. Supreme Court failed to meet the moment of the 2020 election and probably

shouldn't be expected to defend democracy this time around. But first, we want to talk to

Matthew Seligman. He is a lawyer and legal scholar whose academic research focuses on election

...