The Lawfare Podcast Special Edition: An "Election Meltdown" in Iowa
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2020
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The 2020 election cycle opened up with a dramatic failure, as the Iowa caucus was marred by a delayed announcement of the caucus results and an abundance of misinformation about its cause. It was a painful demonstration of the importance of election security and election infrastructure. We put together a special edition podcast to discuss what went wrong in Iowa and the factors that have increased mistrust in American elections. Benjamin Wittes interviewed Richard Hasen, an election-law expert and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.” The two talked about Hasen’s new book, about the flaws that can plague elections and about how to think about electoral legitimacy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.9 | I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the LawFair podcast February 7th, 2020. |
| 0:36.8 | It is not quite emergency edition, but an almost emergency-ish edition and we don't usually |
| 0:43.3 | do election coverage on the LawFair podcast or on LawFair, but we do do election security |
| 0:49.8 | and election meltdown coverage. |
| 0:53.1 | And that is what we're doing today because of the mess in Iowa. |
| 0:58.3 | Coincides with the landing on my desk of a book called election meltdown, dirty tricks, |
| 1:04.6 | distrust and the threat to American democracy by the great law professor Richard Hassan, |
| 1:10.8 | who joins me by the magic of telephonic communications. |
| 1:15.3 | Welcome. |
| 1:16.3 | Great to be with you. |
| 1:17.3 | First question I have for you is how much did you pay the Iowa Democratic Party to give |
| 1:24.8 | such an incredible proof of concept to your book? |
| 1:28.6 | Yeah, well, it was a little crazy when Tuesday morning election meltdown came out and we |
| 1:35.5 | had an actual election meltdown in Iowa and it's great for marketing terrible for the |
| 1:40.8 | country. |
| 1:41.8 | When my phone is ringing off the hook as it has been all week, it means that we're in |
| 1:45.5 | trouble. |
... |
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