No, You Stole the Election! (Part 2)
Hackers and Thieves
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Hello listeners,
While the 2024 election draws nearer and the constant coverage can at times feel lacking in depth and context – we are here with our second installment into the history of claims that a US election was stolen.
Today we’ve got angry voters, disappointed politicians, and a few tech-savvy democrats who see signs of hacking, fraud, and illegitimacy in three different elections.
We’ll discuss the allegations about hacked voting machines in Ohio in 2004, claims that the 2016 election was stolen from Hillary Clinton, and how stolen election claims in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia helped make Stacey Abrams a national star.
Next time in Part 3, we’ll dive into the unprecedented 2020 election and the Stop the Steal movement. We’ll also share our thoughts on the 2024 presidential election, and our expectations for what might happen on Election Day.
We appreciate your time and attention, and if you like this episode, please leave us a review on Apple or Spotify (it helps others discover the show!) or share this story with your friends.
Telling stories like this is what we love to do. It’s also a time and resource intensive endeavor. We spend many hours going through old political speeches and documentaries, interviewing guests, and sitting in front of our computers editing into the night. The best way you can support our work and ensure more episodes like this is to become a paid subscriber. As a paid subscriber you’ll also get early access, bonus episodes, and our eternal gratitude.
Our thanks this week to NYTimes Magazine staff writer, Yale Law School researcher, and all-around-wonderful-reporter Emily Bazelon who gave Reflector a hearty recommendation over at Slate’s Political Gabfest. We are fans of both Emily and the Political Gabfest and are honored to hear they are now listening to the show.
We always love hearing from you. Send us an email to hello@reflector.show or leave us a note in the comments.
–Andy and Matt
Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to the famous civil rights advocate and law maker John Lewis as a Senator. He was, in fact, a longtime member of the House of Representatives. We regret the error and have corrected the audio.
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I have now listened to two of the episodes in this series. I think they are well done. As a former social studies teacher, I really like the first one. It provides an excellent analysis of what we teach about Nixon/Kennedy and the complications of the 2000 election. This is one I would assign my students.
I will say the second election episode was equally good. I think it is a better compliment to some of what we get from the A Braver Way Podcast. It really dives in on how the rhetoric and media coverage of the furor over elections helped to whip a narrative where no one trusts the polls.
I always find the rhetoric around our elections, and "interference", really disheartening. I am an election judge in my precinct. Because of this I know, probably better than most, how the process works, how individuals cast votes, when they get counted, how they are counted, and how secure they are.
In the future I think it would be good to start to see media organization speak to something that is really unique to America, that no one really talks about. Outside the US most ballots are single issue, meaning most ballots have one candidate or initiative per ballot. That is so different from our ballots in the US. For most primaries the ballots are 2 pages, and general elections can be 5-6 pages long with multiple candidates, offices, amendments, and laws. We have an overabundance of democracy, and it makes it so much harder to count, both by hand or machine, exactly how many votes have been allotted to a candidate, issue, or office. This is something that you start to address with the chads, but I know this is an important issue as candidates, this year, talk about how quickly other countries turn over their election results.
Finally, I look forward to the final chapter of this series. One thing that I think people do not realize, and I always find missing from any conversation around elections is the geography of our country. We have such different processes in each state, and sometimes even each district. Part of the problem is people do not trust the processes in states whose processes they do not understand. I have lived/voted/volunteered at the polls in different states, so I know how radically different it can be. The disparity between how elections are run across America creates a lot of the problems-people just do not understand place. Unfortunately, this remains the untold invisible thread of the "Stole the Election" story.