A talk with Jennifer Cohn (Twitter @jennycohn1), election integrity advocate, about American election security. Since 2016, Jennifer has been warning that our elections are insecure in many ways; you can read some of her writings on this topic on Medium. Her stance hasn’t changed but, after Biden won and Trump claimed that the election was rigged, it’s been understandably harder for her to get Democrats and liberal-leaning people and media interested in talking much about this problem.
I wanted to talk to Jennifer about how our politically polarized environment has changed things, how it’s affected her attempts to get attention for this problem, and how it’s changed her messaging. So there were some psychological aspects I was curious about, but I also just thought it’d be interesting to learn more about election security issues.
- iTunes (embedded below)
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Topics discussed:
- How has Biden winning and Trump claiming the election was illegitimate affected our chances of improving election security?
- What kinds of problems does she see with the election process?
- The difference between voter fraud (individuals voting) and more large-scale hacking/rigging attempts.
- What were some signs of suspicious activity she saw in the 2016 election?
- How do her concerns about election security differ from Trump and friends’ stated concerns?
- How credible were Trump and friends’ claims of election tampering?
- Is it possible to imagine an alternate reality where Trump won in 2020 and liberals/Democrats largely didn’t accept the election?