Election officials don’t want you to have blind trust. They appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism and want you to ask questions. But once presented with the facts, they hope you will have faith in a process that, according to political scientist Thad Kousser, keeps democracy alive. Kousser runs UCSD’s Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections. He sat down with NBC 7 Political Reporter Joey Safchik for a fact-finding mission on Politically Speaking this week.
A transcript of the conversation is below.
Safchik: President Trump addressed the nation last week, echoing the same false claims about election security we’ve heard for the better part of a decade now. The timing of this speech and any distrust it may incubate is notable. The midterms are just 105 days away, but who’s counting? I am, and so is Thad Kousser, professor of political science at UCSD, and you run the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections. So you’re the perfect person to talk to today.
Kousser: Yeah. Thanks. So much for having me.
Safchik: Thank you for being here. Do Americans have any reason to worry about the sanctity of their elections?
Kousser: Americans on both sides of the aisle have concerns and questions about elections. That’s totally natural. And that’s totally fair, right, they’re as important as anything we do in our democracy. And there are a lot of moving pieces behind them. But those moving pieces are run by professionals who are deeply committed to the job, who are not connected to either partisan side and, and all across the country, these state and local election officials do their job well. They follow the rules. And we have elections. That that on the whole are strong, secure as they’ve ever been in, in American democracy. So it’s important to ask questions. But the answers are we have a lot of protections keeping these elections safe and secure.
Safchik: What happens when we cast off those questions or we chastise people for asking those questions?
Kousser: Well, I think it’s, we want to when I talk to election officials. So this center, Professor Lauren Prather and I, at UCSD, we are out working with secretaries of state, with registrars, with elections directors all across the country. And we talk to them. They say, I don’t want blind trust. I want to earn the trust of voters. I want to explain to voters. So they’re doing a lot of things to make their elections transparent. So they’re bringing in people, members of the public, state legislators to do tours of their election facilities, show them how and why votes are protected. And they’re making videos explaining that they’re doing lots of things to earn the trust of the public because they want those questions. And when we tell people, stop questioning, stop asking anything about our democracy, it’s not your business that makes people feel like it’s not their democracy.
Safchik: How do you get Americans to appreciate a common set of facts?
Kousser: Yeah. So really, the main goal that we have at the center is that the election officials we work with, is when voters have questions, turn to the trusted experts, turn to the people who know the people who are not one of the candidates running in and winning or losing an election. They all have their incentives to tell you one thing or the other. Trust the secretaries of state, the state election directors, your San Diego County registrar, and come on down and see if you can take a tour and see what’s going on in these facilities. That’s the goal is to have voters exposed to this information, which before I got into this five years ago, I didn’t really know any of these protections. I didn’t know how machines were tested beforehand, audited afterwards. The members of both parties could be watching them, that thee machines were not connected to the internet. All those things are really important to building trust. And what we’ve learned over and over again in our research is that by learning about the facts people become more knowledgeable about elections and more trusting in them. And that’s good for democracy.
Safchik: Is there a common ground, though, about who the trusted officials even are?
Kousser: Yes. You know, that’s a really good question. Like are we living in these two different worlds, these two different echo chambers or three? You know, they’re people you know, many parties and independents who really don’t have a clear side in this. And so one of the things we’ve done at this Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections is we do national surveys going back to the last few election cycles. And we ask people when it comes to learning about the protections on elections and whether elections can be trusted. Who do you turn to? The number one group, local election officials, people like our San Diego County registrar, number two, state election officials. If you go on down the list, people say, yeah, maybe politicians in my party, but that’s way, way behind it. About half as much trust in as people have in those election officials. Those are the professionals who know what they’re doing.
Safchik: You said you got into this five years ago. You’ve been in politics a lot longer than not. So why did this pique your interest? Or why did you feel compelled to invest your time in this half a decade ago?
Kousser: Yeah, along with a lot of other faculty members at UC San Diego, the faculty, at other universities and our graduate students, we’ve really been paying attention because it’s been the last five years where this has become probably the largest threat to American democracy. So we saw after the 2020 election, you saw one side that was not willing to accept the results. It was reasonable to question the results. But after these results were checked, double checked, triple checked, audited recounts, court cases, and all the systems that we have put in place to verify the results. Instead, we had a violent attack on the capital, and we’ve had violent attacks on politicians, really at both parties since then. And so that’s really a danger to democracy when people not only ask questions, but when political leaders should have pushed to to violently overthrow and enforce their view of results even when the courts have told them no, that’s a real challenge. And so what we wanted to do was just start by working. And we started in 2022 with election officials on both sides, with Texas and Georgia election officials, as well as California and Colorado, to figure out how they could get the facts out there best, most effectively and whether that would increase trust.
Safchik: Largest threat to American democracy is a big statement.
Kousser: Look, the fundamental principle of democracy is the consent of the governed, right that the people think and trust, that the folks we send to Washington, DC, to Sacramento, to to City Hall and the county building here represent us, that they were there, they were faithfully elected to free and fair elections. If we don’t have that, we don’t have a democracy. And when we saw in some election surveys, you know, showing really strong almost a majority of people not trusting, that the election results represented the vote of the people. That’s a real concern. You need to have people, whether they win or lose an election, trust those results and try to fight for the next election rather than fight to overturn that election.
Safchik: So have we reached the point of no return? Where do we go from here?
Kousser: You know, there’s been a lot of hope in what we’ve learned in the research that we’ve done at UC San Diego. The first point was when we tested all these messages that our election officials were putting out there. When people viewed them, they were like, oh, that makes sense. And we saw trust really skyrocket. Some of the largest impacts and changes in opinion that I’ve seen in my career, 25 years doing political science research. So when people learn the facts to facilitate tours, by watching videos, by reading factsheets, they really changed their mind and became much more trusting. And then also just a year and a half ago, after the 2024 election, we actually hit the high watermark for trust. Members of the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and independents all were up about 80%. People trusted the elections.
Safchik: What do you attribute that to? Is that coming from the top?
Kousser: Well, I think in part that was because Republicans won the election and you didn’t hear and didn’t hear claims of fraud from either side. We know that winning elections is the best way to increase trust, but also that can be knocked down when you hear a claim of fraud. So both their party won, so say okay, this makes sense. And their party’s leaders didn’t claim fraud,
Safchik: Nor did the other side.
Kousser: Yeah. Democrats also said, you know what? We lost. It sucks. But it was a free and fair election. And so Democrats had a slight drop in trust, but not nearly as much as people usually do when they lose. So they remain strongly trusting independents right forward, you know, in that same pattern. So each party was like all these party groups were really strongly up there, high together. What we’ve seen is in the last year and a half, all this conversation about trust, all these, you know, this resurfacing of, of this old fight over 2020 that’s driven trust down among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike.
Safchik: It seems like there were a couple of partial truths in the speech last week, where maybe they were lacking context. I’m thinking specifically about the claims of noncitizens on voter rolls. How do you provide that context to people? How do you break through?
Kousser: Yeah, so it’s again, it’s important for people to know the facts and to hear that and to also hear that it’s a real concern that the election officials in every state are worried about. So every state has its processes to ensure what we call list maintenance to ensure that the people who are registered are, in fact, eligible. There are lots of restrictions on that. Being a citizen is one of them, but they’re working to check all of those. And they have systems that remove lots and lots of people from the rolls. If they find out that they’re not eligible. The context that was missing is, is, is that we actually don’t have any big list of all the citizens, the United States anywhere. Right? So what we have is a few partial lists. And sometimes, you know, when you take a first pass through voter rolls, some people, you know, thousands of people sometimes can get pot caught as possible non-citizens. Many states have actually investigated those. And what you find is that almost all of those were, in fact, eligible citizens. And you find a much, much smaller number of non-citizens. And then, you know, the state of Alabama, they recently did an investigation that over 3000 people were possible non-citizens, and they found out only about 160 were non-citizens, and only about 25 or 30 had potentially voted. Those need to be investigated. But what we don’t need to do is throw out all those 3000 people, prevent eligible people from voting in order to get at this very small and very rare problem of non-citizens, right?
Safchik: And distinguishing between a handful of potentially bad actors and some grand conspiracy of widespread fraud, right? Yeah. I mean, that’s what courts have found over and over again, is, there’s no evidence of large, widespread conspiracies in any way that would be electorally determinative, swing an election and change a result. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to keep, you know, ensuring that our systems and all these checks along the way are not in place. Those are important because they’re happening in every state across the country.
Safchik: Speaking of which, headline this week, New Jersey, right. How important is the transparency coming out of that state right now? And how do they walk that line between being honest, open, transparent and not fear mongering?
Kousser: Yeah. Thanks for bringing this up. This was a big error on the part of essentially the DMV of New Jersey, where they had a process for automatically when people came in and got their driver’s license, you know, they’d say, I’m a citizen, I’m not a citizen. And, and by mistake, that computer program, a lot of people, a lot of people said, I’m not a citizen. Say, hey, we’re not trying to do anything fraudulent. That computer system through a glitch sent those, and automatically registered them. That’s a big problem. That’s a mistake. The important thing is we had systems in place to catch that mistake. We had a governor who was willing to be public and transparent and say, here’s what we did, here’s what we’re doing to solve that. That’s a problem. But then it was a problem. But then an example of the system working to fix that problem. And by making this not a political football, it’s allowing the state of New Jersey to, to move forward and fix those voter rolls.
Safchik: And like you mentioned, no evidence that 400 people changed the outcome of an election.
Kousser: No, apparently, the people that potentially 400 or fewer people voted were kind of in different parties and all across the state. And, and so it was very, very unlikely that actually swung an election. But it’s worth investigating.
Safchik: We’re hearing about potential speculation about the motivation behind the speech, the timing, concerns about federalized elections in November. Is that a real concern and what would that look like and what would that mean?
Kousser: You know, I can’t speak to what President Trump’s motivations are. I can’t predict perfectly what he’ll do in the future. What we can see is, you know, what has he done in the past? So, he has in every election made these fairly outlandish claims of fraud. So remember back in 2016, the election that he won, he claimed that he also won the state of California, but 4 million people, who were illegal immigrants voted in the state of California. You know, no offering, no evidence. And we have lots of evidence opposed to that. So he’s made these claims of fraud and really, the claims that he made in that last speech were nothing new. He didn’t have, you know, any new evidence. And it really contradicted what his own intelligence community said after the 2020 election. So so we’re going to we’ve seen claims of fraud in the past, and we’ve also seen the president try to through executive orders that have been stopped by the courts, you know, impose new rules just before the election on state and local election officials around the country, the people who the Constitution grants the power to run elections and and the courts have overturned those. So those, you know, those election officials will follow the law, they’ll follow their state laws. They’ll follow all the applicable federal laws. But it’s unlikely that the president will be able to take over, elections.
Safchik: Overall, it sounds like you think the system is working.
Kousser: I think if you look at– yes, absolutely. The system of checks and balances that we have in American politics, where, where you have elections broken down into states and then local governments running them. So you can’t have one president regardless of their party, you know, you know, affecting and swinging an election. And each state gets to pick the rules that they think fit their values, and then they run the elections according to those rules with professionals who are all, you know, folks who are who are honest brokers, who are being transparent and letting observers in to see that there’s nothing to hide and to see all the checks, the checks along the way in the voting process. That system, which I’ve had the privilege of getting to know these people, getting to work with them and getting to see them all around the country. I think it’s a system that works and serves American democracy and its people well.
Safchik: Is anything keeping you up at night?
Kousser: Like, with elections and democracy, you’re always worried, that people will try to break the rules and change the system and and really not let the honest referees call the game, but but let one side or the other on the players call the game if that happens, if either party, intervenes to to to change these rules to, you know, seize ballots to stop people who are eligible from voting, that would be a big concern. That’s something that everyone’s worried about. And heading towards this election, what we really want to see is whatever the people decide in November, for that to determine who’s in office.
Safchik: Speaking of which, set the scene, what local races are you most tuned into? Well, San Diego yet again is one of the congressional battlegrounds. So this, you know, the House, which is still on a knife’s edge in party control. One of the seats will be this congressional district, this former district. We’re going to see, you know, an experienced Republican office holder and a new rising, Democratic local officeholder. And that’s going to be probably a multimillion dollar race blanketing our airwaves, for that congressional district.
Safchik: And you think we’ll start to be inundated with that post Labor Day?
Kousser: Yeah. So that was always back. So, you know, normal folks normally started tuning into elections after Labor Day. And they’re seeing that on their television. That was the old rule. So let’s change. Well, one, people vote so much earlier in California that the election starts earlier. So you’re going to start seeing it. And then second instead of just when you turn on your TV or when you open your mailbox, getting inundated with political ads. Now we’re seeing it every time we log on to something on our phone. Everything that we’re searching. You can’t be online without seeing politics. But you know what? It matters. And learning who these candidates are, what they stand for, what they value. That’s worth a little bit of our screen time.
Safchik: I feel like we haven’t heard a ton about an incoming blue wave. In your circles, have you been having those discussions?
Kousser: So every survey that we’ve seen nationally seems to show strong, people leaning towards the Democrats and what we call the generic congressional about who, you know, who would you like to support. And Donald Trump’s popularity is really lower than it’s ever been. The Iran war really pushed it below the floor that we’d seen before. And he’s starting to lose some Republican and a lot of independents’ support. So basically what you would see from surveys today would predict a strong blue wave, the kind that could deliver 30 or 40 seats, or more, to the Democrats. But one, there’s a long way to go between now and November. And American politics moves fast in the Trump era. Things change.
Safchik: October surprises once a week.
Kousser: Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, a 24 hour news cycle and, you’ve got to actually have the Democrats are going to have to field a set of candidates who if people don’t like Donald Trump, they’ve got to like this group of candidates better and, and, and really introduce those people to the public and make a pitch for, for not just no on Trump, but yes on something else.
Safchik: And is that something else affordability?
Kousser: That’s what Democrats are really focused on. I focus on it. The kitchen table issues, on prices, inflation, affordability and people’s health care.
Safchik: They don’t always have the best track record on that issue. So how do they form a cohesive message in the next three and a half months?
Kousser: Yeah. So that was the knock on Joe Biden, right, was inflation under Joe Biden. I think what they’re going to point to is, is it Donald Trump has been focused on other things. You know, the 2020 election, the war in Iran, rather than focused on affordability, and also that the Medicaid cuts that were done have really made health care and Obamacare.