What is the difference between mailin voting and absentee . Guest there is no perfect definition. Ways. Them in different broadly, there are different pools of the way in which we might vote a valid ballot. States that only want to get ballots to people who really have an excuse. They have a requirement on them. On the other end of the an outlet for only those who need it [indiscernible] state starting the process. North carolina will be the first state to send out absentee ballots today, september 4. Minnesota will be the first allowto allow state to in person voting. What is the reason for starting early . Advice is toece of know your own state rules and laws. [indiscernible] you if you are worried about your ballot. Etting there. Heck your Voter Registration if you need to request a ballot, request it early. If youre going to vote by mail, get it in earlier. States that require that by like today. There are challenges getting it there. Starting early, knowing early, also, if youre going to a polling place, knowing where that is, perhaps going there as well. Those are things voters can do, no matter what the rules are in their state. Go ahead and make sure thereve host you wrote the book on the subject. You have studied this subject. Do you have concerns about absentee or the early voting process in the u. S. Now . Concerns withre every part of the Voting System normally. Things that could be better. Voters can help by being proactive. There are challenges from covid. More people will be looking to vote by mail this time. Many states and administrators have changed laws and rules to allow that. Is willwhat your system help mitigate problems. Problems with states not processing ballots as quickly as expected. The process would be longer. If you want to ensure your ballot gets counted and does not miss the deadline, getting it in early would be helpful. There are issues. Issues withtegrity parts of the Voting System. There are access issues. There, the administrators are doing the best they can in a difficult situation. Host our viewers can take part in this conversation. We will open up special lines. If you plan to early vote, i want to hear from you. What are your plans . How do you plan to early vote . Male in or in person . Person . In or in 202 7488000. If you plan to wait and vote on election day, i want to know what your plans are, how you plan to vote. For those of you voting on election day, your number is 202 7488001. Mail,re going to vote by i know there are several states that require you to vote by mail, tell us of your experience. Your number for voting by mail is 202 7488002. One last line. If you dont intend to vote at all for this upcoming election, we want to know why. We have a special line for those who dont plan to vote, 202 7488003. Once again, early voters, 202 7488000. Election day voters, 202 748 8001. Mail invoters voters, 202 7488002. Nonvoters, 202 7488003. You can always text at 202 7488003. Im still reading on social and ontwitter, cspanwj facebook. Com cspan. John, with all the talk of the pandemic, we are expecting a large number of early voters. Early votinglain every year. I have had to vote on election day every year. Will this cause any stress on the system in getting votes counted and letting us know who wins the election . Guest there are significant challenges. States are having to deal with a flood of voters. They not necessarily to have the workers they want. Many of them will deal with more ballots coming in. Some systems are changed dramatically and how they count. There could be issues. People have mentioned the possibility that we will not know the results of the election on election day. I am not as negative as some. It depends how close the election is and certainly, the states. There is more pressure this time on the Postal Service and accounting period. If we get a large number of ballots coming in by mail, later than usual, dealing with new systems counting them, perhaps at a slower rate, with legal challenges and recounts, we can see how that can stretch out postelection. With all the votes, there is a likelihood we will take longer. If it is not closing many key states, we may know the Election Results soon after. If it is razor thin, we will place more problems. Host lets let some of our viewers join in. Carolina,cing, north he will early vote. Caller morning. Im going to vote early, when the polls open. I will be online. In line. I dont trust this mail in system. [indiscernible] 175 miles away, days from the Postal Service to do everything [indiscernible] they have got it screwed up. They dont care now. [indiscernible] we are hurting. Carolina in north [indiscernible] summer homes, then they go back and vote in the state where they are from. They vote twice right there. It is something that needs to be multiple sites within your county. That has risen dramatically over the years. It was close to 18 or so. Voters voting like that in 2016. Then voting by mail has also risen dramatically. That was over 20 , close to 25 . Those numbers have been going up steadily. I expect the mail number will go up again this year. We are a system that we dont have one big National Registration list. We dont run the elections from washington, we run them in the states. And the states have made great progress within their states about having databases where they know that john smith in this county moved to this county, its this in person, we dont have them on the list twice. A lot more of a challenge across states sharing information. Have gotten better of taking them off the stateless. We have typically a small number of cases of people voting in two states. At a think it is a widespread problem, but we dont have a perfect system partly because our states are all doing Different Things and they are not all sharing information with each other. It is something we can work on as we go forward. Im going to try to help our viewers during these conversations, because i have a list of voting times and deadlines that im going to try to help our viewers out with. In north carolina, you have until october 27 to request an application for an absentee vote. Are goingvoting dates to be from october 15th until october 31. Your mailin ballot date is going to be november 3, has to by 3 00 p. M. , lets go to steve in anaheim, california. Caller good morning, professor. Rant, i would my like to commend cspan for excellent coverage for the entire year. Your programs, the contenders, ourt reviews of all the cases, very insightful. And very enjoyable. Would like to congratulate steve scully for being the moderator for the president ial base. Here. S i will jump on if you want to get an absentee vote and you want to go down to the post office and have it mailed to you, i have no problem with that. But for the states to willynilly send out voter or qualifications to vote, have a problem with that. This year, i received two ballots in the mail from california. This is the way they are going this ticket me off the rolls. They told me if i go down to vote in person and they have already mailed me for cards, i may not be able to vote in person. I am going to find out on voting day. That is a problem i have. I will actually text you the two ballots i received in the primaries to show you i am not lying about this. This is the problem i have. If they had a tracking system out here to where i could find out if my vote really counted, i would have no problem. But you have people that have no idea, who registered their dog, who register as mickey mouse, who dont live at these addresses. And the state is just shipping off these ballots. That is a big problem. Host go ahead and respond, john. Guest going back to the history of this, for a long time, most states only allowed ballots to people who requested them and requested them for a reason and had strict requirements of witnesses and notary publics to certify ballots. There are still some states that are like that. The selection in the northwest, washington and oregon have moved to all voting by mail in the last 15 years. That is a different system. I do think the states that have done that and done that early, washington and oregon and colorado, they thought about these things and try to work out the kinks. It is important to have a very clean Voter Registration list. If you are going to mail out ballots to people, you want to make sure you are mailing them out to those who are registered voters. Some of the states moving to this in the short term have some real challenges to make sure they are doing it well with the states who have done it for a while have these things in place. I think ultimately things will go reasonably well. But i do think there are some significant challenges for the way one implements this and another point the caller brought up, sometimes you can vote in person but you also have a mailin ballot and states have to figure out how to deal with that. They will check you off the list if you show up to vote in person. Or perhaps they will have you cast a provisional ballot which they will deal with later if they think youre absentee ballot is outstanding. These are complicated matters. I think there are going to be some kinks in the system. Working them out over time will help. It is such a challenging environment for this election. Host President Trump talked about this very issue recently at a stop at the Wilmington International airport. Im going to play for you what President Trump said in north carolina. [video clip] 600,000 people could vote by absentee. Pres. Trump i dont like that. They will go out and vote and they will have to check their vote by going to the polls and voting that way because if it tabulates, they will not be able to do that. Let them send it in and let them go vote and if their system is as good as they say it is, obviously they will not be able to vote. If it is not tabulated, they will be able to vote. That is the way it is. That is what they should do. I dont like the idea of unsolicited votes. I never did. It leads to problems. They have 11 problems already. I am not happy about it. At the same time, we are going to see if it can be stopped. Send in your ballots, whether it is solicited or unsolicited. The absentees are fine. We have to work to get them to be something. You send them in and you go to vote. If they have not counted it, you can vote. That is the way i view it. Host President Trump clarified he does not mean people should vote twice. But if you do mail in early or absentee vote and you want to be sure that your vote was counted, what do you do . Guest i want to reiterate that no one should attempt to vote twice. Sometimes there are some questions about people who voted absentee as you mentioned and want to know if they have had their vote counted or people who have forgotten that theyre going to do so and state laws vary on this. In a number of states, you can track your absentee ballot through the state website. That is not true everywhere. You could be in touch with your local election official. Some will be more likely to provide that information. If you do go to the polling place and you have casted an absentee ballot or even if you have a ballot, there is likely going to be some procedure to catch someone voting twice. There is going to be some procedure. Whether it is a live computer link to a database that notes that you already voted, or perhaps the state does not know for sure, they might actually ask you to cast a provisional ballot. One in an envelope that they will figure out after the election. Make sure that only one of your votes counts. These are difficult things. Procedures are in place, but they are different everywhere and there is some confusion. Checking with your state if they have the capacity to tell you whether your vote has come in, or perhaps whether it has been accepted, that is a possibility for some voters. Host let me add that i forgot to tell for our california voters, you can apply for absentee by mail or in person. The deadline to request your application will be october 27, the beginning of early in person voting is october 5 and the mailin ballot deadline, you have to be postmarked by november 3. Lets go back to the phone lines and talk to tom calling from baltimore, maryland. Tom says he is not going to vote. Good morning. Caller good morning. It is funny. When i was in seventh grade, they taught me about the Electoral College. Im glad to see it is finally getting the attention that it needs. I have never voted for a president , i dont see the point. Until they fix that. Aside from the fact that i think both candidates are subpar. I will take my comments off the air. Thanks. Host Electoral College. Guest i have a new book on the Electoral College, a new addition, an explanation of how it works. I think the Electoral College has been controversial. Certainly polling has been against the Electoral College. It is also difficult to change. I think the caller might be referring to the fact that perhaps his state is not a closed state and it is true in the Electoral College, the key states are the ones that are competitive, that is where most of the resources will be spent. I would encourage voters to vote anyway. There are a lot of things on the ballot. Your vote, even though it is a small part of the electorate, it still does matter. Even if we have the National Popular vote, your vote would still matter even if it were on the losing side. It is a good thing to put up your preference to vote. I dont think the Electoral College is the one reason you should not. This caller has a strong word about it and Many Americans would prefer a different system. Host i will point out as well that there are more races than just the president ial race this fall. You have your senate, house, local mayor, governor, city counselor, School Boards on the ballot as well. There is a bigger thing going on than just the president ial election. I would encourage everyone to vote. By the way, in maryland, this great chart comes from axios. Com. In maryland, you can apply for your absentee ballot online. The deadline is october 20. The early in person voting date is between october 26 and november 2 and your mailin ballot deadline will be november 3. Im going to go to a question that came from one of our social media followers. This person wants to know if our vote is 95 accurate, what can be done to get that last 5 . Guest i am not sure where the number 95 accurate came from. I think our vote is pretty accurate. If the caller or the social media commenter is asking about could there be some ballots that are not counted, that is going to be true. There are restrictions and deadlines in different states. There are ways in which sometimes voters make mistakes on their ballot. We have done a fair amount to remedy that. If you remember in florida in 2000, we were looking at things like the punchcard ballots, we dont have those systems anymore. We have many things in place to keep people from making mistakes. I think it is a complicated system. All of the different states with different rules. There are some places where people can make mistakes. There are going to be some mistakes made in the accounting and casting process. I think we are pretty high on the scale and we have done pretty well. As a voter checking your Voter Registration, knowing what the rules are and how and where youre going to vote, i think those are important. There are some things after the election we can talk about to improve the registration and the system as well. I think we should feel confident that your vote will be counted especially if you are proactive. Host im going to go to another question from a social media follower. It is a similar question that i would ask myself. What procedures are in place to protect the chain of custody of a mailin ballot . With an absentee ballot, people request it. With a mailin ballot, people do not. Guest it varies from state to state. Typically you are going to have a ballot and you are going to fill out the ballot and then put it in an envelope. That envelope will have certain information you will have to put on it. It is there to verify who you are. In some states, it is more extensive. You might have to provide a reason or get a witness. Other states maybe you have to put your name. Also there is a privacy aspect and that nobody in the mail system is going to treat it like another envelope. Once the local officials receive them, typically you are going to have a system of looking at that ballot or opening the ballot which is monitored by representatives from both parties. You will have an election official and both parties watching out for the other making sure that no one view is represented or not. Sometimes there are disputes about whether a ballot is legitimate or not or has met the requirements. Many states, if you have made a mistake on the envelope, they may contact you and give you an opportunity to correct that, to get the right signature, to get the witness requirement. Getting it there on time is important. There are things that we can do that keep the ballots safe and a lot of it has to do with the fact that we allow the parties and their representatives to watch over the system at every step of the way. The rooms are guarded. There are cameras and there are people from both parties watching out. Host lets go back to the phone lines and talk to bill who was calling from columbia, maryland. He plans to vote by mail. Good morning. Caller good morning. Two reasons why i plan to vote by mail. First of all, i am a hard worker and i dont want to take time off. Second thing is as a trumps supporter, i voted before at the polls where i live and i live in a very blue section of maryland. There is a certain amount of hostility that i face. I have not faced long lines but i suspect there will be long lines this year. I have three comments. The first is, when i order something online, i get a message saying where it is received and it tells me when it is going to be delivered and all that. I dont know why we cannot have technology set up where when the ballot is received by mail, you get a notice via email or some other way that it was received and then you can go online and look at it and see that it was actually tabulated for the candidates that you chose. The second point that i wanted to raise is there is all this concern about manning the polling places and i am wondering why they cannot take members of the National Guard, young people who are healthy, who are not that susceptible to Serious Problems from covid, why they cannot have them man the polling places. The third thing that concerns me as a trump voter, the postal union has come out in support of biden and we are expecting them to make these deliver the mail. I have read stories about postal employees just throwing the mail out because they did not want to go through the trouble of delivering it or potentially postal employees who are very probiden and they are like, im going to throw them out because im in a red district where there is a lot of potentially trump voters coming in. Those are my comments and i would like to hear your response. Guest first point, in many states you can track your ballot. It is a process that is evolving. You can often go on to the state election website and track the ballot coming into you. If you requested it, it might be able to tell you that it has been sent out or it has reached the post office and on the way back, that the officials have received it or not. That is possible for a number of jurisdictions. You just have to check your own circumstances. On the National Guard russian, i think there are some significant issues about poll workers. Voting in person will be an important part of this election even if we do more voting by mail. We are worried that we are going to see some dropoff in poll workers. On average they are older. Some of them have not wanted to show up at the polls. There might be lastminute illnesses or reasons people cannot come. It is a big push to make sure we have that capacity. Some of it is more volunteers and many of you out there can do a Great Service by volunteering to be a poll worker in your state. I think there is a place for some more permanent employees to take over. Something the states do is they often have other state workers, not election workers, maybe work on election day. And a number of states have used the National Guard. I think that is a real option for places. We have seen it in the primaries and we will see it again in some states where National Guard members could be helpful in supplementing the poll workers that are already there. We are going to need that capacity in this election just because of the difficulties we are facing. And then the last question was about the postal union. Generally the post office is not going to do these sort of things and individuals are taking their responsibilities seriously. I think there are some safeguards in place. Postal mail or election mail is tracked more seriously. It is not something that is just subject to the whim of an individual, a person in the post office. They are identified and prioritized. There are deals with specific states and the local post office to make sure those ballots are at the right place at the right time. Anything that is absolutely a problem, i think there are a number of safeguards in place to make the postal delivery less subject to that than some worry. Host one of our social media followers is asking my followup question. With mailin ballots, cat people no whether you are a can people know whether you are a democrat or republican from the envelope . Guest the general answer is no. There are some questions in the primaries where there might be more identification. The best practice is most states will not identify which party you are 44 in the general election. I cannot say that is absolutely universal. It is broadly the case you are voting for in the general election. Host we know that there are different voting rules in every state. My question to you is that should states be more uniform with their voting by mid . Guest that is a debate we have had for a very long time. We have federal Voting Rights laws. We have registration laws. We have laws for overseas voters. There are some things done at the federal level but the primary responsibility being at the states and at the administration at the local level. We have great differences. I think there probably are some areas where we could do things a little more uniformly. I think there is a long history of states wanting to do Different Things. The states of washington and oregon who went very early to voting by mail, that might not be a preference for people on the east coast or in the south where there is a lot more early voting. They may prefer that system. Some of the difference or regional difference or just the opportunity of voters to craft the system they want. It does make our system much more complicated than a lot of systems around the world. It has some virtues and that it allows it to be tailored to each particular state. Host that is a great lead into our next caller who is carroll calling from washington. She is going to vote early. Good morning. Caller good morning. Host go ahead, carroll. Caller hello, hi. Host you are on, go ahead. Caller we have had in my county which is 20 miles north of seattle, they mail us our ballots and we have drop boxes all over the place where you can mail your ballot back in. I have used a dropbox and that works wonderfully. Our drop boxes out here are big heavy secure things. I have seen the ones on the news and in other parts of the country. I suppose they are in really populated places, but they do not look as heavyduty. Im going to vote way earlier this time because of the problems are National Government is doing with our post Office Getting things delivered and picked up. I will be voting as soon as i get my ballot and i hope we receive those ballot three weeks ahead of time this time. The dropbox system works wonderfully, especially in these times of the problems with the u. S. Mail because of our National Government. I am hoping that people who want a change in what is going on nationally get out and vote and do it early so we can get america back to being normal again. Guest i think carroll puts her finger on a good feature of many of our states process which is the dropbox. In various systems when the ballot is mailed to you, you dont necessarily have to return it by mail. I know oregon and colorado, states that have done vote by mail for a long time, they have a very extensive system of drop boxes. In colorado, a majority of people return their ballots to the boxes rather than put them in the mail. It is going to vary from state to state. Some states dont have them. Some have put them in more recently. We would not expect those states to have as extensive systems as the ones out west. Carol mentioned how they are very secure in washington. Many of them are monitored by cameras. I do think it is a good option for people, again, getting the ballot in earlier and not missing the deadline. If you get it into the dropbox before election day, it is going to be counted. If the ballot is dropped in the mail later and closer to the election day, you might not have it there in time for your states deadline. Drop boxes are a good option. Host once again for Washington State voters, you are voting by mail but your early in person voting day will be october 26 and your mailin ballot deadline will be on november 3. Im going to take a quick break and tell you about some breaking news that just came out about the nations Unemployment Rate. The Labor Department reported today that the Unemployment Rate dropped to 8. 4 while the u. S. Economy added 1. 4 million jobs in august. A little bit more from the hill newspaper. The Unemployment Rate declined from 8. 4 to 10. 2 . Falling below 10 for the First Time Since march. August is the first consecutive month of declining unemployment since april. More than 20 million americans lost their jobs pushing unemployment to post Great Depression highs of 14. 7 . The news today is that the Unemployment Rate dropped to 8. 4 and 1. 4 million jobs were added in july. Lets get back to our conversation about the voting processes and we will go back to our phones and talk to maria who was calling from atlanta, georgia. She says she is not going to vote. Good morning. Caller good morning. How are you doing . Host just fine. Go ahead. Caller i did not vote in 2016 and i dont plan to anymore. It dont seem as though anything is being accomplished. I would not vote for obama if he was running. I am done with voting. When i vote, it puts a lot of people in office who make money and the majority still suffered. Minimum wage in georgia is still seven dollars and something. No healthcare, no free education. It dont take decades to solve this problem. Im not voting anymore. Host go head and respond, john. Guest i encourage people to vote. I think it is an important civic activity. It is true that your vote is not necessarily going to change the world in the way that you always want. Sometimes you are faced with two choices you dont really love. If you sit down and think which one would be the closest or the least worse, that is also an option. Host lets talk about the history of mailin voting. Is this something that started in the 1900s . Tell us about the history of voting in the United States. Guest we have little bits of voting by mail in the 19th century. We dont know a lot about it in normal times. We had a big burst in the 1864 election during the civil war. Most of the ablebodied male voters were soldiers in the field. There was a big effort to get them to vote. Starting in the 20th century, we started to see states adopt pres. Trump thank you, everybody, very much. Thank you. As we begin weekend, americas unprecedented recovery. You see what is going on. It has been pretty amazing. The United StatesEconomy Today announced this morning 1. 4 million jobs last month,