This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 17th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If Red States were serious about election reform, what would they be doing?

Are they doing some of those things now?

Or are they simply cow-towing to the dubious fear that the election of 2020, at least the

one for president, was stolen? Cato's Walter Olson comments.

A new economist U-Gov poll indicates that 83% of I believe Trump voters and 76% of conservatives believe that

quote millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2020 general election. That has animated a lot of political

activity, especially in state legislatures to change voting laws. What are they going after broadly speaking?

There's a lot of activity in state legislatures that is sold to much of the Republican and Trump constituency as being election integrity,

which sometimes relates to that, sometimes relates to general Republican objectives, that there has been a lot of skepticism about the liberalization of voting methods to the pandemic brought in in particular, and there was bound to be some tightening up of that, whether or not you had this constant drumbeat of Stop the steel, stop the steel. But disentangling

those motives can be difficult and we know that there is a wider problem which we ignore at our peril, which is that we have no

guarantee that the results of the next election will be taken as legitimate, even if the system works properly, and even if by the standards of most of the people in the middle who are expert about it that there was no millions of votes

stolen though there was no rigged election.

Things have reached the path with public opinion where what happened between

November and January this last winter which is the large portion of one party viewing the results is illegitimate,

viewing the wrong person is having been inaugurated, repeats itself again four years later. And we have no guarantee

that that would not lead even further into constitutional crisis. It didn't last time,

for various reasons, the US Senate and the state officials and

to the extent it participated the Supreme Court did not ever give in to these

allegations but we can't be assured that everything will go the same way next time.

All right, so for the moment, assume that it is true that 20 million illegal votes were cast in the election that I got to say

...