Defending the Midterms from Donald Trump

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This show is supported by Odoo.

When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing.

Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

SPEAKER_2 (0:29)

WNYC Studios is supported by LiveRight, publishers of Max Boot's New York Times bestseller, Reagan, His Life and Legend, now available in paperback. Boot's masterful chronicle of President Ronald Reagan's life and times has been called a landmark work by The New York Times. The Washington Post deems it magisterial and important, while The New Yorker calls it the definitive biography of our 40th president.

Find Max Boot's Reagan wherever books are sold.

SPEAKER_3 (0:57)

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

David Remnick (1:06)

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Speculation about the midterms has reached a real fever pitch as the final stretch is now upon us. And amid all the predictions about which party will emerge triumphant and how much, there's also been some alarm. Will it be a free and fair election?

As soon as Trump returned to office, he began making moves to create disruption, demanding private voter data from states, threatening election officials with jail time, and even seizing ballots from prior elections to investigate alleged fraud. And while so far none of the White House's efforts have threatened to really significantly alter the results, the Department of Justice has hinted that there's more to come. Attorney General Todd Blanche has not ruled out using force of law to prevent election certifications.

Todd Blanche (1:59)

It's not DOJ's intention to, and it's never our intention, to improperly interfere with elections or the state confirmation process or certification process. But to say that there's no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I'm not going to say that.

David Remnick (2:13)

The Justice Department has already filed a lawsuit against officials in Alaska before a single vote has even been counted.

We've got a really interesting story about election interference in The New Yorker this week, and it's from the reporter Barton Gellman. And I asked Bart Gellman just how concerned we ought to be.

Barton Gellman (2:33)

So big picture, I'm not terribly anxious because a huge amount of what the president and his people tried to do came in advance of the election. They made a lot of extraordinary efforts, some of them plainly unlawful, to tilt the playing field, and they have largely failed up until now.

David Remnick (2:55)

Well, give me the instances of what he's tried so far and what has been blocked by, for one of the better words, the system.

Barton Gellman (3:02)

You had a vigorous effort by the Justice Department initially to decide who gets to vote. The Justice Department demanded of all 50 states that they hand over their full electronic voter roles, and then as it gradually emerged, the Justice Department would sift through them, and then come back and tell the states, the following people on your roles are ineligible because we say so.

David Remnick (3:31)

These are categories of people or individuals and how would they do that?

Barton Gellman (3:34)

They would have done individuals. They never said how they would do it.

But they have purported many times to be able to say that, for example, hundreds of thousands of people are on the voter roles nationally who are non-citizens, which is wild fantasy. Here's an example. In Nevada, they said that there were 16,000 ineligible non-citizens on the Nevada rolls. Then Nevada said, what are you talking about? They produced 185 names, which they said they had hand-checked. Nevada then, in September, announced that it had looked through, and each of the 185 was a United States citizen. So the Trump Administration has been making sort of wildly incorrect claims.

David Remnick (4:23)

It sounds pretty lame, the effort, this time around.

Barton Gellman (4:26)

Well, that's the thing. In our story, The New Yorker, we quote David Becker, who's a longtime voting rights lawyer, and he said the efforts were lame. He said they were conflicting and incompetent. He said it was a combination of malevolence and incompetence.

David Remnick (4:45)

Over and over again, we point to institutions that have kind of turned tail, that have been chickened, that have bent the knee to use all the cliches of the last few years, whether it's law firms or universities or various institutions around the country.