-I have to come down here today and risk my life to vote.
-Voting-rights advocates like to say
that our electoral system is rickety, at best,
and it is not built to withstand stress.
It's not built to withstand the stress of a pandemic
that forced states to massively increase absentee
balloting in a heartbeat --
a process that the states that do vote by mail well
took years to do.
It's not built to withstand
the political pressure of very divisive election,
with President Trump and Republicans
questioning the security and integrity of the system.
And yet those stresses are all upon us this year.
And election officials know
that they have to do everything in their power
to prevent what happened in Georgia on Tuesday
from happening again on November 3rd.
-I've already been in line for three hours.
-Georgia and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania,
which is still counting ballots,
you know, 11 days after its election,
are not good signs about whether we're ready for this nationwide.
I just feel like -- I don't know --
I feel like maybe it's intentional
that it's so difficult to vote [chuckles] in general.
It's very frustrating.
-Raffensperger came into office pledging to be
a nonpartisan actor,
work with voting-rights advocates.
Actually defied Republican leadership in the state
by mailing those absentee-ballot requests out to everybody.
The House speaker, a Republican, was angry about that.
And I think there's some question about whether
the Republicans are going to introduce legislation this year
to make sure that he can't do that in the fall,
as is happening in Iowa right now.
There's also the fact that a lot of the problems
were actually the work of local election officials.
-We opened up an investigation last week,
and we'll continue to really research what happened there
and what do we need to do to get ready for our runoff
that we'll have in 60 days,
and make sure that we're ready for the November election.
-State law does not allow him to go in
and manage the elections locally.
On the other hand, the system is not working,
and so the advocates say, "Shouldn't it be
your responsibility to do something about that?
If it's not working, go to the legislature
and tell them it's not working.
Let's change those laws,
let's get more money for local governments
to administer these elections, let's have more training,
let's not introduce a new machine system
for the first time during a pandemic,"
although, in fairness, that was not predicted.
There are two views
of whether this was intentional voter suppression,
and I think the evidence is gray,
because certainly the counties
where the problems were the worst are the counties
with the largest minority populations,
but they're also the largest counties in the state.
And the problems, if you break it down by precinct,
don't only sort of correlate with minority population.
There were affluent, largely white precincts in north
Fulton County that had two-, three-,
four-hour waits on Tuesday, as well.
-But it is also a prelude to what could happen in November.
-As soon as Georgia happened,
and it was sort of all eyes on this debacle unfolding,
you had a couple of different reactions.
You had President Trump saying, "See?
Absentee balloting is a mess.
Everybody should vote in person.
All precincts should be open.
Absentee balloting is ripe for fraud."
You had Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee,
saying, "You know, I think that Donald Trump
is gonna try to steal this election,
and we have to do everything in our power to prevent that."
If you didn't have voting by mail in this election,
the lines would have been, you know, four times longer.
It would have been even more insane.
And so his argument doesn't really hold water,
like, just logically.
And you know, what Biden says about whether the President
is trying to steal this election,
it's an interesting point
because President Trump has said very clearly
that he thinks that if everybody's allowed to vote,
he'll lose and Republicans will lose.
And you know, some people have argued,
that explains why he's advocating
for restricting the ways in which people can vote.
On the other hand, what Biden is saying has a potential
to further undermine confidence in the elections,
and make people on all sides of the political spectrum
wonder whether their vote is going to count.