LISA:
Welcome to Brainwaves: a podcast about big ideas, produced at the 暗网禁区.听
I'm Lisa Marshall, if you haven't already please, like share and subscribe.
This week we're talking about the 2020 presidential election. Yes it's still more than a year out but it's already shaping up to be one for the record books. At last count twenty two Democrats and two Republicans are officially running. New rules for how the Democratic nominee is chosen could make for chaos at the convention, and concerns about election security persist. Then there's fake news鈥�
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...we'll start this week's show with a conversation with Liz Skewes. She's a former political reporter and author of Message Control, how news is made on the presidential campaign trail. She's also an associate professor of journalism and media studies at CU-Boulder last year Liz traveled around the state offering workshops at local libraries on how to recognize fake news and how not to be fooled by it. Our executive producer Andrew Sorenson sat down with her this week.
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So I understand you traveled with Al Gore on the campaign trail in 2000, you spent some time with John Kerry, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton in the past election cycles. How is political campaign coverage changed in the last few years, how has it changed since 2016 even, and what are some of the new challenges that reporters are facing and then you know to kind of wrap that all up what does that mean for the rest of us, the voters out there?
LIZ:
So campaign coverage has changed significantly, in the sense that it's gotten more contentious. What you didn't mention was I traveled with Sarah Palin's campaign in 2008, for about a week and I noticed in that campaign cycle that there was more intentional pointing out at the media and kind of blaming the media if you will for bad coverage; the liberal media, the lamestream media she used to call it and I think that gave voice to some of what Donald Trump did in the 2016 election cycle and what has continued. And so even just recently this week the White House just shutting down a lot of the hard passes that some reporters had to cover the White House, means that there is more of a, might be strong language, but kind of a war on the press if you will and I think that's affecting the ability of reporters to cover the campaign in a way that is seen as neutral. Now they do a lot of neutral coverage and they're really trying to do the best job they can, but when journalists keep bumping up against problems, restrictions, things that impede their ability to do their job, it means that the public doesn't get the information that they need in order to make informed decisions: which is really at the heart of all of this.
ANDREW:
Do you see on the campaign trail, a liberal bias from these reporters?
LIZ:
It depends on how you define liberal. If you just find liberal as left-of-center politically then I would say no, if you think of liberal as being people who believe in the power of the media to be part of a solution, an agent of change where there are problems then yes. That's what draws people to journalism is the goal to tell stories that motivate people to solve the country's problems.
ANDREW:
With the advent of social media, the role of traditional media: newspapers, TV, radio is shifting, how do you see that playing into this new election cycle in 2020?
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Social media is a beast, it really is, because anybody can do it traditional journalists use social media but so do people from all walks of life and social media exists for those purposes so that anybody can say anything it's a free speech right. But when anybody can say anything, it all looks the same and so for people who used to get their cues about quality of information by saying well this is in my newspaper, this is on my broadcast station, this is my news radio, on social media it all looks the same and it gets harder to discern what is real from what's not, what is fact from what's opinion, there's data that shows that people have a harder and harder time distinguishing fact from opinion. A study conducted last January, 2018 said that only 33 percent听of Americans felt with any degree of confidence that they could tell the difference between听fact and opinion in their news: that's a problem. So if it all looks the same then we treat it the same and because we can't tell the difference between fact and opinion, we discount it all which听
means we don't know what to trust.
ANDREW:
And that kind of leads me to my next question, there's been a lot of talk about fake news since 2016. A lot of reports detailing concentrated disinformation efforts spread via social media including, coming from you know the United States Senate Intelligence Committee, just detailing these very concentrated efforts of Russian troll farms and things like that. Is the idea of fake news, new even? I understand we've kind of seen this before, and then what do you do about that going into 2020?听
LIZ:
Well we have seen it before. So you can go back to the Muskie campaign, right where the what the Nixon campaign was in 72 and the whole Canuck letter thing and that was fake news right? The committee to re-elect was the one who created the dirty trick team created this fake letter, but social media puts it all on steroids, if you will, I mean things move so quickly misinformation spreads as fast as accurate information. I think where that leaves us going into 2020 is really that; we've got to be a whole lot smarter. Voters, individuals have to take it upon themselves to read broadly, because if we only stay in our own comforts on our own channel the place where we are most comfortable then we don't get exposed to the breadth of ideas. We can't make good decisions if we're not being exposed to the full range of ideas, that's what our open marketplace of ideas requires of us, so we need to be smarter about that. We need to be smarter about saying, what news can we really trust and what news can't we trust, because some stuff is crap.听
ANDREW:
Do you have maybe a couple of tips for people listening at home, on how they can kind of protect themselves against fake news? When you're right it is hard to differentiate between real news and something that some kid out in Siberia came up with.
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So one of the easiest things to do is, look at some of the web browser extensions that you can install. So there's things like trusted news or news guard, you can install them right on your computer and they color code your news there's a green checkmark if it's from a reliable source, there's an icon with a bunch of little people if it's crowd-sourced news, there's a red X if it's you can read this if you want to but don't trust it. So there are things that you can do that are just easy to kind of say how much faith should I put in this? Vanessa Otero, I believe her name is, does a media bias chart. Now she's done a pretty good job with it you can take, you can quibble with some of her judgments about where things go. But her media bias chart looks at news both from where it falls on the political perspective but she's got another layer of grid which looks at how high quality is it, so it might be slightly left or slightly right of center but if it's high quality great. But if it's not if it's down at the bottom leave it alone, or read it just for entertainment you know read it for entertainment like you eat a Twinkie because it tastes good but not because you expected anything valuable out of it.
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And then kind of final question. Do you think we're actually going to see this kind of fake news coming into 2020, or are we taking the advice of experts like yourselves are we doing a better job or is it just gonna be kinda 2016 part do?
LIZ:
I think there is going to be as much attempt as ever to push fake news, and the question is going to be how smart are we about resisting it. But it was successful in 2016, so the people who did that in 2016 sure they're gonna try it again and they're probably going to be a little bit smarter about doing it.
ANDREW:
Okay the skews thank you so much.
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You're welcome, thank you.
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LISA:
Another issue that's popped up through the Russian investigation: voter machines are hackable. The US Senate Intelligence Committee found that Russians tried to do it across the u.s. in the 2016 election. The committee says there's no evidence votes were changed, but now the听
people in charge of elections are trying to figure out how to stop that from happening again. Brainwaves Paul Beique talked to Trevor Timmons to find out what they're doing. Timmons is the chief information officer for the Colorado Secretary of State.
PAUL:
What are secretaries of state paying attention to regarding election security?
TREVOR:
Well since 2016 there's been a lot of information that has come into public view, really kind of leading to a broad recognition on the part of election officials and the public generally, about concerns about the security of our election systems, and also really bringing into the light some of the tactics that bad actors, that malicious actors are using to try to influence public opinion about elections in the United States. Some of the examples; there's a molar indictment from February of 2018 around social media manipulation, there's another molar indictment from July of 2018 specifically indicting twelve Russian intelligence officers that were involved in trying to leverage those social media platforms to influence public opinion and one of the more interesting things to me is a criminal complaint referencing something called Project Lakhta, and that criminal complaint is related to a conspiracy to sow, division and discord. Because of a lot of the activity from 2016 against the election system most of the successful attacks were not really directed at elections systems per se, but they were actually aimed at sowing discord in public opinion around the candidates and around the 2016 presidential election.
PAUL:
It sounds like the lower tech you are, the safer you are. Is that correct?
TREVOR:
It kind of depends, I'll start with Colorado as an example. In Colorado we use paper ballots, and so what that means is that every paper ballot that is filled out by a voter, is what they call voter verified; meaning the voter actually looked at the ballot and they marked the choices on their ballot as part of the process of voting. Those paper ballots, they also lend themselves to very rigorous audits after an election. In Colorado we have a particular model for doing post-election audits that are called risk limiting audits, in terms of how you can actually verify that the winners of an election were accurate based on examining those original paper ballots. Some states are still using what are called direct recording electronic, or D-R-E, voting machines, where it's a touchscreen and the votes that are cast by a voter; they're actually recorded on a memory听
card in the computer. There may be no paper evidence you know that can actually be used after an election to audit the results of an election and to verify the outcome.听
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What other changes have been made since the last presidential election, to make our elections more secure?
TREVOR: Well Congress actually approved funding to states to support state and local cybersecurity initiative. So in Colorado we have a total of six point six million dollars, that is allocated specifically for election cybersecurity improvement.听
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What does that look like, those improvements?
TREVOR:
Some states are looking at replacing aging voting equipment, many states are looking at听
technology improvements around cybersecurity that can be assessments of state and county systems that are connected online, it could be monitoring of access to those systems and then a lot of states are also moving into doing penetration tests: looking at white hat hackers and听
hiring them to actually take a look at their systems and serve the role of an attacker so they can try to discover some of the potential vulnerabilities, and then have a chance to remediate听
those before it's actually the bad guys attacking.
PAUL:
Well that brings us to the election in 2020 what should voters be looking for in 2020 for improved election security?
TREVOR:
In 2020 as an American voter, I mean one of the things is to make sure that you're looking for legitimate sources of information on voting and on candidates. You know one good way of doing that when you're interacting with your local election official is to make sure that you're you're on their website and you're receiving information directly from a legitimate source. Most election websites you know have a .gov designation rather than like a .com or something like that. You know I think we all need to be wary of scare tactics, you know whether those come from you know Facebook or whether they come from some media sources; but just being aware of the context in which information is presented and making sure that you're looking at things with maybe with a little bit of a skeptical view. And then I think most importantly is to be an informed voter, make sure that you understand you know what's on the ballot what are the issues and how can you make sure that you're registered to vote and where you can go on Election Day to vote.
PAUL: Is there anything that we haven't covered that you think is really important for people to know?
TREVOR:
We've established a good relationship with platforms like Google and Facebook and Twitter, to make sure that as they're seeing malicious content being distributed from their platforms, that听
they're actually recognizing that and actually taking that content down instead of leaving it up in public view.
PAUL:
All right Trevor Timmons, thank you very much for joining us today on Brainwaves. Glad for the opportunity, thank you.
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LISA:
Fake news and election hacking aside, there are other more nuanced factors that could make the 2020 election unusually chaotic. The Democrats recently made some changes to how their nominee will ultimately be chosen. That combined with the seasons huge field of candidates, could potentially make their big Milwaukee meeting quite a spectacle. Brainwaves Cole Hemstreet explains.
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The way democrats used to pick presidential candidates, the way they pick candidates going back to the 1980s, the way they picked President Barack Obama鈥�
OBAMA:
Thank you. To all my citizens of this great nation; with profound gratitude and great humility I accept your nomination for presidency of the United States.听
COLE:
All of that changed this past year and a lot of powerful people could lose some of that power. The Democratic National Convention has two kinds of people who vote: there are regular delegates people who are supposed to vote on the convention floor for the candidate there precinct chose, then they have these super-delegates. Party leaders and elected Democratic officials who could kind of, vote for whoever they wanted. That was a big deal in 2016 for reasons we'll get to later. But in 2020 super-delegates cannot vote in the first round if their support would decide the selection. That means if no candidate wins in the first round of convention voting: super-delegates get to vote for any candidate in the next rounds front runner or not, and with a packed field of more than twenty Democrats running there's a chance no听
one would have a majority of pledged delegates entering the convention.
KEN:
So what happens, what that could mean... we won't know until we watch it unfold.
COLE:
Ken Bickers is a political science professor at CU-Boulder.
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They're gonna be sitting on the sidelines in that first vote, again听
unless it's such a large majority that their votes don't matter they do they're not pivotal, so we could see it go to a second ballot or a third ballot at the at the Democratic National Convention. At that point, who knows who will become the nominee; the super-delegates are not selected by the voters in caucuses and primaries, so they're gonna be selecting somebody who might not be the first choice of a plurality of Democrats out there.
COLE:
In short, political havok. Super-delegates are unique to the Democratic Party, they became a controversy during the 2016 primary fight between Bernie Sanders and Clinton. The reason party leaders changed the rules? Sanders supporters complained that a majority of 2016 super-delegates had already pledged their votes to Clinton before the primaries even began, creating an unfair advantage for Clinton.
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If it goes to a second ballot, then the super-delegates get to vote and the pledged delegates are no longer pledged they can vote any way they want. We haven't gone to a second ballot for way over half a century on either the president or vice president last time I believe was 1952. The Republican vice presidential, choice which ended up being Richard Nixon.
COLE:
If the nomination process goes to a second, or even a third round Bickers can't say whether this will hinder the Democrats in the race for the White House; but he says if the fight gets nasty it could take some time before party leaders lick their wounds and join together.
KEN:
I think that sort of determined by how unified they can be after that contest. If there are strong feelings and hurt feelings that get chiseled in, if that's the case it hurts the party. Now I don't think that's a big problem for the Democrats in 2020. I'll give you two words as the answer from why I don't think that's a problem for the Democrats in 2020 and those two words are Donald Trump. They are so unified in wanting to see Donald Trump defeated that I think they will rally round whoever it is that is the nominee of the Democratic Party, but getting to that point could be very messy.
COLE:
A mess the Republicans, don't have... for Brainwaves I'm Cole Hemtreet.
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LISA:
Thanks for joining us on Brainwaves, I'm Lisa Marshall join us next week when we take a look at wildfires and how bad experts think this summer could be across the West. Dirk Martin and Paul bake produced today's episode, Andrew Sorensen is our executive producer, Andres Belton wrote our theme music: we'll see you next time on Brainwaves.听