In this episode, hosts Eric Fey and Brianna Lennon speak with Ben Ginsberg and Bob Bauer. These two longtime and respected election experts launched a national effort called Pillars of the Community in 2024. This program aims to educate and answer questions from trusted community members who can then assist in the fight against election dis- and misinformation.
You can find out more about the program, as well as access community engagement tools for election administrators, at https://pillarsofthecommunity.org/.
High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits:
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson
Transcription of the episode is as follows:
Ben Ginsberg: One of the striking contrasts that we came to see as we traveled around the country is that while the national debate over elections is really pretty poisonous these days, that in fact, on a community level, and even on a state level, it's much less so, right? You sort of know the people involved. You have, people have faith in what's going on in their local communities.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]
Eric Fey: All right, everybody. Welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. I'm Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St. Louis County, with my co-host —
Brianna Lennon: Brianna Lennon, County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri.
Eric Fey: And today we have two guests. Gentlemen, would you like to introduce yourself?
Bob Bauer: I'm Bob Bauer.
Ben Ginsberg: and I'm Ben Ginsberg.
Eric Fey: The first question we ask all of our guests on this podcast is, how did you get involved in elections? Kind of your election origin story? And so, I don't know who wants to kick it off. Bob, if you want to go first? Tell everybody how you got involved.
Bob Bauer: I was interested in politics from the very beginning, and I began interning for a political organization when I was 16 years old. I went to my first convention when I was 16 years old. That is a very, very long time ago. I'm going to avoid embarrassing myself by counting up the years. And when I went to law school, I went around the time that the US was about to embark on the first sustained experiment with regulating the political process that it embarked on since the beginning of the 20th century: campaign finance regulation, ethics regulation, public disclosure for elected officials. And I began practicing in that area and then, as to the topic that we're going to be discussing today, that was a practice that then was actively, very significantly supplemented when election administration and voting rights issues surged in prominence, particularly after the Florida 2000 presidential recount.
Ben Ginsberg: When I got out of school, I was a newspaper reporter — always loved covering politics. Ended up going to law school so I could be a better newspaper reporter, and as a young associate in a big law firm, looked around and there were some folks in my firm practicing election law. So, I said, “Sign me up,” and so, kind of made the pivot from reporting on elections and politics to actually being a lawyer representing them, And one of the first assignments I had was the McIntyre-McCloskey recount back in 1984, which turned into one of the most contentious recounts in the history of the House, but sort of launched a career in a very serendipitous fashion.
Brianna Lennon: So, I want to kind of jump ahead to — not your current project, but I think it's fair to say, in addition to being both incredibly prominent election attorneys in the country, there's also a number of election administration kind of support projects that you all have been involved in. What was the impetus to get involved in that particular area? Because you had been doing campaign work, you'd been doing a lot of advisory work, but now you're working a lot on election administration. What prompted that?
Bob Bauer: The immediate, the origin story, if you will, was that I went into the government in 2009, and I was counsel to President Obama. When I emerged to represent his 2012 presidential re-election campaign, I found on the other end, facing me, eyes gleaming in the dark, the general counsel to our Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, and that was Ben Ginsberg.
Now, I knew Ben. We had been across the table from each other in recounts. I, as a Democrat. He, as a Republican. Representing our respective party's interests. So, I knew him before the 2012 election, but we went through that presidential campaign as mutually respectful and friendly adversaries, and then, as you recall, President Obama, upon reports of problems with election administration and particularly long lines, announced in his State of the Union address in the year immediately following — he actually spoke to it on election night — but immediately following the election in 2013, he announced he was going to establish, by executive order, a Presidential Commission on Election Administration, and he named me co-chair. And lo and behold, my co-chair was Ben Ginsberg, so that we had a Democrat and a Republican, recently facing off in a presidential election, chairing a commission of ten bipartisan, split right down the middle, who were supposed to look at a range of issues that both contributed to line management problems at the polls, but also at a wide range of questions of election administration. And that launched — Ben, I think it's fair to say. He can speak for himself— launched the two of us, as our careers progressed, into at least a significant commitment to working on election administration issues closely with election officials and in support of professional election administration.
Ben Ginsberg: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, as practicing attorneys dealing with election officials, it's somewhat of an adversarial relationship sometimes. But I think doing the commission and spending a year traveling around the country and talking to many, many election officials and people involved in elections, we developed a real respect and much more knowledge about what election administrators, election officials, election workers do, and how important that is, and how dedicated all of you are to to that fundamental task in our country. And, as things got a little bit tenser than normal around elections, we really wanted to see what we could do to help out, really based on the knowledge that we gained doing the commission.
Eric Fey: … Kind of burning question in my mind is — you, gentlemen, have the benefit of being involved in or at least adjacent to the election administration community in different parts of the United States pre-dating the 2000 election, which is a relatively unique thing. There are very few election administrators left that had that experience. So, from that, you know, from pre-2000 and then your time on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, are there any major changes you have seen in election administration throughout that time that are particularly striking to you, that would be interesting to people?
Bob Bauer: Well, I'm happy, Ben to, you know, I'll kick it off and say, from my perspective, what we observed — and, by the way, thinking back to pre-2000 is almost very difficult to do because 2000 was such a huge event, and everything that's happened has been so intense and moved to such a rapid pace ever since — what I've observed, from 2000 to the present, and I think is reflected in the report that we submitted to President Obama in 2014, is that election administration became steadily more professionalized, and the country made a much more explicit commitment to treating election administration the way it should be treated, which is a facet of public administration that requires both experience and expertise. And that it needs to be insulated from political pressure, so that people can do the jobs that we expect experts to do in a manner that requires the application of expert talent. And, of course, one of the big issues for us today in a highly polarized politics with each side believing that the stakes are existential for them in every election, is to keep in view how much progress, at some point, was made toward that goal of ever increasing professionalization and recognition of the professionalization of election administration, and that's very striking to me that we reached a point, with the enactment of the Help America Vote Act and with developments thereafter, of understanding how important that was and setting that up as the norm and as the standard, and then observing with dismay that it is coming under an enormous amount of pressure at the present time.
Ben Ginsberg: Yeah, I certainly agree with the more professionalism. I think 2000 had the effect of, really, for the first time in a long time, shining a nationwide spotlight on what it takes to put on an election, and it also exposed some of the creaky technology involved — certainly as punch card ballots came in. So, I think there's been a huge technical ramp up in the 25 years since Florida 2000, but I think it also shows how much more there is to do.
I also think that, in addition to it being more professional and a little bit more complicated, there's also more of an emphasis because of the way our communications just generally work in the fact that there are so many different jurisdictions in the country — somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000. Nobody's quite sure. And the differences between the way those jurisdictions do their elections, both in terms of equipment and personnel and number of polling places and so many other factors, that that's become much more of something for election officials to deal with.
Brianna Lennon: I think that's a really interesting point and probably a good segue into your current project, Pillars of the Community, because the decentralized nature of elections means that every community may experience slightly different Election Day and certainly have different opinions about things, but, by and large, I think a lot of the studies and the surveys show that local election officials, the most local election officials have a pretty good amount of trust from their constituents. But the thing that I like — and I want you all to kind of talk more about Pillars of the Community — the thing that I like about it is that it leverages a really good communication source, which is other trusted people in communities. And I really would love to hear more about how you're kind of bringing that together to try to help raise the discussion and inspire more confidence in our elections.
Ben Ginsberg: Well, I think one of the striking contrasts that we came to see as we traveled around the country is that while the national debate over elections is really pretty poisonous these days, that in fact, on a community level, and even on a state level, it's much less so, right? You sort of know the people involved. You have, people have faith in what's going on in their local communities, and it's sometimes what happens in other parts of the state or in other states that strikes up some of the more heated rhetoric, and so, what Pillars of the Community is designed to do is to get respected figures in the communities to — from across the political spectrum, and we really emphasize the across the political spectrum part — to come together, to be willing to meet with election officials, kick the tires of the election system, and then sort of step back and say, “Well, we don't know who won the election, but we do have faith in our process,” and one of the things we've tried to do is to get people from different parts of the state to examine the election systems in communities not their own, to kind of do that kicking of the tires.
Bob Bauer: Yes, and that's absolutely the function of the organization. I want to take a quick step back and say it follows from Ben and I having established and co-chair the Election Official Legal Defense Network that may have a slightly darker sound to it, but at a time when election officials are under tremendous pressure, they are the subject of both political and sometimes personal attacks — we wanted to make sure that there was a bank of, again, bipartisan lawyers around the country who are available on a pro-bono basis to assist them, and I want to mention that because that came before Pillars, but Pillars functions exactly for the reasons and in the way that Ben just described. And our goal, when we say to have the community leaders kick the tires, is to have them genuinely ask the hardest questions that they have. Sometimes they may have suggestions that election officials should consider for improvement, for example, potentially of transparency programs that they have to educate the public. Sometimes they may have other questions, but one way or the other what we want these relationships between the community leadership and the election officials to produce is the basis for a constructive dialog on the community, on how hard election officials work to bring off elections and, of course, one of our favorite topics, no doubt yours, typically on budgets considerably smaller than legislature should be approving for this purpose. So, they are pressed on all sides for resources with heavy public expectation about how they should perform. We want community leaders to understand that, ask their questions, make suggestions, but then ultimately go back to the people who trust them and say, “Well, look, whatever you think about the outcome of elections, whatever questions you have, let's work through those questions thoughtfully, and then let's stand behind the people who are really trying to make this work,” as opposed to standing away from them, or sort of, if you will, vacating the stage when these controversies erupt and these officials come under aggressive attack.
Ben Ginsberg: And one other aspect of the program that's important is that we really do try and get people who are community leaders from different sectors of the community — faith leaders, veterans leaders, business leaders, labor leaders, educators, first responders. We think it's really important that the people in the community who care about the peace and prosperity in their own communities come together on this to do the, to be able to talk about elections and how important they are.
[High Turnout Wide Margins Midbreak]
Brianna Lennon: The thing that's fascinating to me — like I could think of probably a list of 20 people that I would love to be able to make a PSA campaign about elections with — what has been the feedback that you've gotten or experiences that you've seen from local election officials working on these things like, are they, are these relationships that already existed and they're just being promoted? Or are these some relationships that the local election official was hoping to somehow create, but maybe was having some challenges?
Ben Ginsberg: Well, kind of, all of the above. I mean, what we try and do is we work with local political operatives on the ground who help us identify people with networks, and we certainly ask the election officials who they know in the community have great interest and seem to be conduits to the community. So, this is a combination of both people who election officials know. We're happy to reach out to their wish list, but we also have independent eyes and boots on the ground who know the local communities and can help us find people,
Eric Fey: As an election administrator, I encounter this all the time, where I hear folks in rural Missouri say, you know, “I like my county clerk, but I don't know what they're doing in St. Louis,” or when we give tours in our office, “You guys seem like you got it down here, but who knows what's going on in Chicago?” So, just to, giving that example for the listeners that this is a real dynamic in election administration, it is happening. So, how widespread is your effort so far? I mean, kind of the nuts and bolts of how it's working. You know, how are you, are you having any trouble, for instance, convincing an election administrator in one part of a state to welcome a group of people from perhaps another part of the state to grill them a little bit on how things are working there? You know, what's been the experience so far?
Bob Bauer: Ben, correct me if I'm wrong — we've certainly encountered exactly the situation that you're talking about, and, in truth, when we have suggested that we are prepared to connect those who have questions in that part of the state with urban officials, for example, to walk through the questions they have — there's been genuine interest in that. The leadership on that is really from the election officials themselves. They know some of the election officials, or typically do know the election officials in those urban areas, and long and short of it, they're prepared to, they're looking forward to forging that dialog, and then their support means that we can bring the community leadership along with them. But no, I don't recall, Ben, that we've ever had a situation where someone said, “You know what, they're too corrupt. I just don't have any interest whatsoever into looking into the details of their corruption.” I don't think we've ever heard that.
Ben Ginsberg: No, we have not, and I think that's consistent with the increased professionalism that we talked about. I mean, the other thing that's true, we talked about multiple jurisdictions. So, there are certainly different personalities who run different jurisdictions, but what every jurisdiction in the country — whether it's urban or rural, north, south, east or west — is that they register their voters, they use one of probably a half dozen, maybe four, types of machines, the procedures they go through to register voters, sign in voters, count the votes, certify the votes, contest the votes after an election — is all basically similar, and so, it comes down to sort of how well the tasks are done in the different jurisdictions, which is why we think opening up, asking and helping facilitate the opening up of the jurisdictions to to increase transparency is helpful in this.
Eric Fey: I was reading a column in I can't remember what publication, the other day, that in a presidential election you have these handful of swing states, and if you go on the Pillars website, you can tell you have been most active in some of these swing states, but in the midterm election, there may be very hotly contested congressional races in non-swing states. The example, quite often given, is this one in, around Omaha, Nebraska. So, will you, will your program look for those potentially very contentious congressional elections and try to engage in those communities?
Ben Ginsberg: So, contentious is an interesting term. We don't necessarily go into the races that we think will be the closest because I think Bob and I have both done enough congressional races that we know that people can never predict, really, which are the closest ones. We're most interested in the places where there is a sort of longer historical doubt about the accuracies of elections. So, you know, in Omaha, it's a contested election in the very political sense of the word, but Nebraska has a pretty clean history on doing elections, and it's not nearly as contentious as some of the ones in Maricopa County, maybe, or up in Michigan or in Pennsylvania. Nevada, for this cycle.
Eric Fey: I guess to push back, somewhat, I mean, you take a state like Wisconsin, and in my opinion, historically, Wisconsin was seen, I guess, at least in the Midwest, as a kind of a good government state where, you know, the wheels of state government ran fairly smoothly, but it became a swing state, and now there's a lot of contention around the election administration in that state. So, I think a state that historically was, you know, didn't have a lot of these issues around election administration, all of a sudden there's a congressional race, and, you know, it foments, you know, feelings in some parts of the state against election officials in another part of the state, you know, is it kind of like whack a mole in that regard?
Ben Ginsberg: No, well, I should have included Wisconsin in one of the states we were in last cycle, and we'll be in against this cycle. And I'd say that the tenor of Wisconsin changed a lot between the Right to Work law referendums and the attempts to recall Governor Walker. So, yes, it has sort of a great reputation for civility, but boy, it's been a hot election jurisdiction for a decade now. So, our frame of reference for really seeing kind of contentiousness over the reliability of elections is 10 years timeframe.
Bob Bauer: And I do want to mention, we may be involved in states where the contentiousness isn't necessarily linked to close margins in presidential campaigns. For example, while, you know, Democrats continue to nourish the hope of becoming competitive in presidential elections in the state of Texas — they haven't been successful there for many years, but we have been active in Texas because Texas has been a site of, you know, very, very active, intense contestation. Of course, the legislature has been at odds with Harris County, and that's an example of a state where we have made trips and worked on the Pillars program there, as well. Even though, at the end of the day, again, I'm not going to forecast what could happen in 2028, but, up to this point, it has not generally been assumed that a Democratic presidential candidate would be successful there. In other words, it’s not a highly contested state in that sense.
Brianna Lennon: I’m wondering if you can share some of the success stories, successful messaging? Do you have tips and tricks that you have picked up over the last cycle that even if we're not working in a potentially contentious area, we could use to build relationships or to message better?
Bob Bauer: I will say the following with what I would say is a massive capital “C” caveat, and that is, we have been successful in states where the first step is to have the conversations that we want to have behind closed doors, to build trust. One of the things that is most important is to give people the feeling that they can attend, they can speak their mind, they can be in a room with folks that they may have publicly criticized — election officials or elections that they've been very critical of, and they don't have to think that they're engaging in these conversations under a public microscope with the possible result that they'll be criticized for participating or come under attack in social media. And so, we start with closed door meetings to try to find out who are the ones who are the most committed, again, across a broad ideological profile, most committed to having these conversations with election officials, and then we bring them together with the election officials, and the test has been and here's the example of what we try to do — is that even before the election, have them involved in, to the extent that they're comfortable, to the extent that they've been persuaded that it's the right thing for them to do and that has typically been the case — advocate for the process. Basically, address misconceptions within their communities by acknowledging that they've had some involvement with the election officials in those states, they understand how things are being put together, they're encouraging people to participate in the election because they should have trust in it, and to do that publicly. And we had success with that.
Here's the capital “C” caveat. The 2024 election was not contested the way the 2020 election was at the presidential level. So, we don't know whether, in fact, we're going to see, if you will, some, what's the word, flake off of people who are prepared to participate in a very public manner for fear of getting drawn into, you know, bitter political contestation, and we just have to find out. We're just going to have to work on that, but that's what we would like to do, is to have discrete conversations, informed dialog, involvement in community leaders and openly speaking on behalf of the process, but also making sure people get their questions about the process answered, and that's before, on the day of and after the election. And we had success with that before the election, but I'm going to emphasize that closed door, free wheeling, nobody's at risk conversation at the outset, in a highly polarized pot of politics like we have today, is an indispensable part of how we get to the point of having any success at all in my view.
Ben Ginsberg: Yeah, we were tempted to say that our program was so successful, it was the reason there were no contests in 2024.
Laughter
We didn't really think we could get away with that. The public expression from the Pillars of the Community, people across the political spectrum who, right before the election, will say, “We've been, we've kicked the tires of the processes. We actually think that the results that you get will be accurate because we've looked at all the safeguards in all the stages of the election system,” I think that's really important. And a number of the Pillars wrote op-eds. That was great. Television interviews, print interviews, radio interviews, to sort of say, “The process works. The election administrators know what they're doing. If you want to get involved with this and be sure yourself, go be a poll worker, go help work in the election so you can witness it firsthand.”
The other thing that we've done, which we were announcing at the Election Center meeting in Salt Lake in August was a sort of “How To” guide for communities that are not the most contentious always, but where the administrators think they would benefit from having community leaders involved in their processes, and so, that's available on our website,
if there are any election administrators who think that this might be helpful in in their jurisdictions.
Brianna Lennon: You've been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I'm your host, Brianna Lennon, alongside Eric Fey. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.
