4.4 • 102.8K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hi, my name is Eli Saslow, and I'm a writer at large for the New York Times. |
0:17.0 | As a journalist who spends most of my time out in the country talking to voters, I hear about election denialism constantly. |
0:25.4 | This is not some far-flung conspiracy theory. A third of people who are in our |
0:30.5 | Congress right now and more than 60% of Republicans in the United States |
0:34.7 | believe that Joe Biden was fraudulently elected. They do not believe in elections. |
0:39.9 | They think our democracy is fundamentally broken and not working. |
0:43.8 | I wanted to try to understand that better, and also to understand what it meant in places |
0:49.2 | when they had lost all faith in elections and in our ability to run them. |
0:56.5 | So I started calling election administrators all around America. |
1:01.1 | I became particularly interested in Nevada because it's a swing state where |
1:05.2 | potentially every vote matters, every county matters, and it's also a place where some of |
1:10.9 | these conspiratorial ideas about what's happening in our elections have taken deep root. |
1:17.2 | So I started talking to more than a dozen clerks around the state. |
1:25.6 | What I learned from many of these clerks was that their lives had become massively difficult and their jobs frankly had become a living |
1:30.7 | hell. Death threats are relatively common. All kinds of skepticism from |
1:36.0 | people that they meet in the grocery stores in these small towns where they know |
1:39.9 | the voters and the voters still believe about them that they're doing a bad job. |
1:45.2 | But the phone call that shocked me the most |
1:47.7 | was when I reached out to a woman named Cindy Elgin, |
1:50.6 | who's the clerk in Esmeralda County. It's a really small place. Everybody knows |
1:56.2 | everybody. The whole county has less than a thousand people. And it's a place that voted |
2:02.2 | 82% for President Donald Trump in 2020. |
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