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- I don't think there's anything more basic

to American citizenship as accepting not the privilege,

but the responsibility to vote.

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- The American people are divided.

- And there seems to be so little accountability

for brazen misstatements of fact and law.

- It couldn't be more true

that democracy depends on good information,

- Their views of what is proper for the government

to do or not do are important.

- The election for the president is not actually

a national election, it's 50 state elections.

It produces a two party system.

It certainly has worked well up to this point.

I'm not sure it's working now, because it's splintering.

- The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history.

- [Man] The American people can remain confident

in the resilience of our financial system.

- Make America great again!

- There are two great aspects of America,

that it's a democracy,

and that it's a free competitive marketplace.

- The heart of a democracy, I've always felt,

is the First Amendment.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly,

et cetera, et cetera.

(upbeat music)

- [Narrator] The 2016 presidential election

made millions of American doubt the process

used to elect our leaders,

creating questions as to the legitimacy

of the election's outcome.

- The current state of our electoral system is in shambles.

- [Narrator] When the winning candidate

loses the popular vote by over two million votes,

average Americans began to wonder why they bother to vote.

Does their vote actually make a difference?

- I think we're into a essentially unregulated realm.

The federal election law is Swiss cheese.

- We have to have an honest selection,

and if it's not going to be an honest election,

I guess people have to sit down and think

really long and hard about it.

- I mean, if you look at almost any measure

of a healthy democracy or a healthy electoral system,

whether it's voter participation rates of 50%,

information that has integrity, that's not good right now,

Trust, and right now they do not trust the system.

By almost every measure we're hurting.

- The greatest threat to our system

of government is indifference.

- If you participate and you take the time to be informed

about the issues, and you actually turn out

and your peers turn out, you change the country.

You do.

It may not always happen as fast as you'd like,

but you'll change it.

- [Narrator] Before Americans even cast their vote,

they have to make it through months

of political ads on TV and social media.

Ads that are paid for by billionaires and Super PACs

or by some source of funding that can't be traced.

- Democracy requires elections.

Elections require money.

- I think most people in America believe

that their voices have been eclipsed by big money,

special interest, billionaires,

and they really don't count.

- The United States has had, I'll call it issues

with voting for quite a long time.

- What we're seeing today is a resurgence of the cold war,

a resurgence of authoritarianism versus democracy,

dictatorship versus a democratic Republic.

- The bedrock, the foundation of our country, the Republic

is our elections.

- [Narrator] The 2016 election became ground zero

for a democracy that had not kept up

with the advances in technology.

Social media and data harvesting

allowed ads to be tailor-made

to individual preferences and biases.

Foreign governments used fake news and disinformation

to sow discord and chaos within an already divided nation.

Not only did American elections come under attack,

but so did democracy

and the very nature of facts themselves.

- The most effective way to manipulate an American election

is through disinformation.

- So when we look at these platforms,

Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter.

- There is a growing need for some means

for people to be able to sort out what's actually true.

- But we know that the internet can be abused

and it has been abused,

and unless we're pay a lot more attention in the future,

it is gonna undermine our democracy.

I'm optimistic we can come up with an antidote,

but we better start talking about it.

- [Narrator] Can we still trust American elections?

- I really don't think that you're gonna know anything

on the evening, anything meaningful or anything real

on the evening of November 3rd.

- [Man] We need to realize that we're entering

an incredibly dangerous period in the history,

not just of democracy,

but of human society and civilization.

- The real threat and the real concern

is the slow but effective undermining

of the idea that our election process

is reliable and accurate.

- There's a difference between being skeptical and cynical.

Skeptical is something we should all be,

cynical is something we should try not to be.

Because if you're cynical,

you just don't believe anything, you don't trust anyone.

- The data collection,

and the failure to regulate data collection

enable you to be manipulated.

- [Narrator] Democracy is at a tipping point.

We have stood by and watched the greatest democracy on earth

become at risk of failing.

There can be no democracy without trust,

no trust without knowledge, no knowledge without truth.

The freedom of speech our democracy provides

is being weaponized against us in an attempt

to destroy the very fabric of democracy

that the United States was founded on.

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- We really need to stop and pay attention.

This is not a political issue.

- For anyone out there today, young or old,

they got to realize that the stakes are higher

than they ever have been.

That we really are determining the future

of civilization right now.

- [Donald Trump] Thank you, God bless you.

And God bless America.

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- [Narrator] When over a $1 billion dollarsare spent

in an election that has accusations of interference

and illegitimacy, the first question has to be,

where did the money come from?

Are campaign finance laws non-existent,

or are they just not working?

Is anybody even paying attention?

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- [Man] The American electoral system requires

a huge amount of money in order to properly communicate

with the American people.

It's an obscene amount of money,

and nobody knows where it's coming from.

How much is the right amount of money?

I don't know,

But if we were to try to limit the amount of money,

we would be limiting the amount of information

that people receive from the candidates.

And that's not a good idea.

- You can't have a democratic system

without the money to fund campaigns.

There are two ways to fund it.

You fund it with private money,

which is the system we have now,

or you fund it with government money,

which implies all kinds of issues of control, bias,

and regulation. that we've never been willing to accept,

with the one rare exception

being the presidential funding system,

which is now essentially defunct,

because everyone ops out of that system.

- If you're already a member of Congress,

you are collecting funds, you are collecting support

and money from people who favor what you do.

Your opponent has to start from ground zero.

The opponent doesn't have any money,

doesn't have a campaign manager,

doesn't have the person who creates television commercials

unless the challenger can raise these funds very quickly

to compete with the incumbent.

- [Narrator] In the 2016 election,

Hillary Clinton raised $768 million.

And Donald Trump raised $398 million.

When you include house and Senate races,

the grand total for that election cycle was $6.5 billion.

To put that into perspective,

that's enough money to give

every public school teacher in America $2,000.

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- with as much money as we spend, the data suggests to me

that correlation, i.e. correlation

between the amount of money we spend and the result

is not causation.

So in 2010, and this is when I was fighting

the so-called Millionaires Amendment in the Supreme Court,

successfully I might add,

the conventional wisdom was,

well, we can't allow millionaires to come in

and spend all their money and skew the election results.

And so in the oral argument,

I presented the following statistic.

Of the 58 people who self-funded in excess

of $350,000 a year,

which was the Millionaire's Amendment threshold,

11 of them won.

- If you look at the amount of money spent by a candidate,

versus the amount of money spent by another candidate,

it's simply true that sometimes the person that spends less

can still win.

- In the election of 2016,

Hillary Clinton spent something over $600 million dollars.

President Trump's campaign was about half that,

about $300 million.

The person who spent less was elected.

- But there's a caveat there.

Outspend him on traditional dollar contributions.

If you counted in Donald Trump's free media,

and remember the myths before 2016 was,

you had to spend all your money on TV and media

to get elected.

And Donald Trump put a hole in that.

He did these press conferences at Mar-a-Lago,

where he went on for an hour and a half,

and all the networks covered it.

And the same night that Hillary Clinton

was winning her primary, she got six minutes.

He got an hour and a half for free media,

she got six minutes.

So what is the impact of money?

So people often ask, does money matter in politics?

And the answer is absolutely, but you've got to identify

what kind of money you're talking about.

- The Supreme court issued a ruling, Citizens United

that allowed super PACs and very wealthy individuals

to just finance all these ads

that you guys see on TV all the time.

- [Announcer] America must stop China.

And to stop China, you have to stop Joe Biden.

- [Announcer] Our country is in crisis.

- We have the right to do whatever we want.

- [Announcer] And Donald Trump is making it worse.

- [Announcer] Joe Biden.

- Times are tough, the man is weak.

- Half the time nobody knows who's funding them.

And that makes you cynical,

partly because most of this money is spent on negative ads.

And so you're just hearing constantly

how horrible everybody is.

That'll make you feel pretty bad

about the political process.

- Citizens United is a case that basically found

that because of the First Amendment

protection for free speech,

the Congress could not restrict the amount of money

that people can spend expressing their views

on candidates and issues.

- One of the slogans that comes out of the case

is the thought that money is speech.

And obviously money isn't exactly speech,

but contributing to a political campaign

is an expressive act,

and the courts have long recognized that.

So this isn't a new thing from Citizens United.

- Well, actually there was a Supreme court decision

that went all the way back to 1976 called Buckley V. Valeo

which was the first case that actually certed

that the spending of money in the context of elections

was an act of speech, because to have speech,

you have to be able to spend money.

You have to be able to buy ads,

you have to be able to buy billboards

or newspaper advertisements.

And that therefore the act of spending money

was an act of facilitating speech.

- Citizens United was a corporation put together

for the purpose of making a campaign kind of film.

It was a negative treatment of Hillary Clinton.

When the issue got to the Supreme court,

and the Supreme Court said they didn't see any reason

why a corporation could not make a film

favoring one or the other candidate.

- That part I completely agree with,

as a former publisher and editor.

The second part of it said,

"And therefore any money spent

"producing content in the context of an election

"should be free and unlimited."

Now that in itself is not a bad thing.

What happened after Citizens United

is that a group called Speech Now came with a challenge,

and they said, okay, "If spending money on content

"is an act of speech and therefore should be unlimited,

"then shouldn't contributions to outside organizations

"also be unlimited?"

And in the Speech Now decision,

the appellate court said yes,

those contributions should be unlimited.

That's what turned PACs,

which initially had caps on giving to them,

into Super PACs, which had no limits.

- [Narrator] A super PAC is an independent,

political action committee.

In the 2016 election, there were over 2300 Super PACs.

Together they raised almost $1.8 billion.

And while they can raise unlimited amounts of money

from corporations, unions, and individuals,

they are forbidden from coordinating directly

with campaigns and candidates.

- We had a case during, I guess it was 2012,

where a candidate has had a super PAC donor

riding on the campaign plane with him,

sitting in the seats with the campaign aides,

and contending that well, he didn't have anything to do

with coordinating his expenditures with the candidate.

Now, maybe that's true,

but there was no way to examine that and say,

well, were are they discussing campaign plans?

Were people sharing ideas

about where the money should be spent?

So it's fraught area of enforcement to say the least.

- The super PAC money is almost more about the threat

of the super PAC, than the actuality of it oftentimes.

What that means is that you'll have a lobbyist

who will walk into a senator's or a congressman's office,

and they'll say,

"well, our super PAC fundraising is going well,

"we've got $60 million in the super PAC."

And then they'll have the policy conversation

with the congressman.

But what effect do you think,

what is going through the congressman's mind

when he or she has just heard

that the lobbyists sitting in front of them

has a $60 million super PAC that they can pull the trigger

on whatever they want, right?

You know what's going through their mind, right?

They're gonna listen a lot to what that lobbyist wants

and is saying to them.

- I discard and disagree with the argument

that it is bribery

for a candidate to accept funds

from an individual or a group,

because that is bribing the candidate.

The donors contribute to them because their policies

are policies that the donors agree with.

- If I were to write a check

to a teacher who's about to grade my kid,

people would say that's bribery.

If I were to hand a $100 bill to a cop

before they gave me a traffic ticket,

they would claim that bribery.

If I were to offer my car to a judge

before I went before that judge,

people would say that's bribery.

So then when people make contributions to politicians,

what the court has said, which is in line

with the common sense of the American people,

is that that is either a potentially corrupting act

or a corrupting act, and therefore it needs to be limited.

So when we talk about money as speech,

what we need to realize is that even the court today

still accepts the notion that money

is the transfer of property

when it comes to making contributions

directly to politicians themselves.

Well, right now in DC, and we were on K street

here in Washington just two hours ago,

dozens of politicians at restaurants across this town

had lunch with lobbyists

who are representing the industries that those politicians

are supposed to be regulating,

based on their committee assignments.

So if I'm on the financial services committee in the house,

I would have just had lunch with a bunch of bank lobbyists.

And those bank lobbyists, when they had lunch with me

would have each committed to pumping, to maxing out

to my campaign, to pumping the maximum amount

into my campaign war chest.

I think in the minds of most Americans and certainly me,

that is a profound conflict of interest,

and that is transactional giving.

I as a member of Congress am having lunch

with the lobbyist I'm supposed to be regulating,

because they're giving me money,

therefore they get this full hearing before me

in a way that your average American wouldn't.

And that is what distorts

the policy making process in Washington.

- [Narrator] While super PACs have allowed for the giving

of unlimited sums as an exercise of free speech,

there are also reporting requirements that in theory

should make it possible to trace every dollar to its donor.

Enter dark money.

- So everyone's heard the term dark money.

And a lot of people think that somehow

super PACs are dark money.

Well, that's not true.

Actually, super PACs have to disclose all of their donors,

but what's going on right now

is that people are pumping dark money

into super PACs through corporations.

A group of people will set up a corporation

in the state of Delaware.

Let's just call it the Blue Carpet, LLC.

That corporation all of a sudden it has money in it,

you don't know where the money came from,

because you can't ask for that from the state of Delaware.

And then that corporation will make a donation

to a Super PAC.

The Super PAC then has to disclose its donors.

Among those donors, it'll disclose the fact

that a certain corporation or corporations has given money.

And then, right after the election,

the corporation that gave the Super PAC money

will collapse itself.

And so you could have 10, 20, $30 million

going into Super PAC through a corporation

or various corporations that are here today

and gone tomorrow.

And that's a new form of dark money.

- You really don't know the source.

But I think contributors to these Super PACs

within 24 hours of their contribution,

their names ought to be published,

ought to be available on the internet,

that people can see who's giving what to whom.

Does that affect free speech?

Well, it's free and open speech.

It's corrosive if people were allowed to affect the outcomes

without knowing where the criticisms are coming from.

If you're gonna give to a candidate,

you have to be prepared to be identified with a candidate.

And frankly from the candidate's point of view,

if you're gonna accept money in support of your campaign,

but you're unwilling,

if you're unwilling to acknowledge that that was the source

of the donation, then you shouldn't take it.

Period.

So I'm a strongly believer, obviously,

in transparency across the board.

I often like to joke that money in politics right now

isn't even like the Wild West,

because in the Wild West they had sheriffs.

Right now there is no sheriff.

There's entity in Washington called

the Federal Election Commission, the FEC.

The commission itself is incapable

of making any significant decisions

that can instruct the lawyers of the FEC

of what cases to pursue and how to pursue 'em.

- [Narrator] The FEC is made up of six commissioners

who oversee campaign finance laws and enforcement.

Four votes are required to take any official action.

Since January 2017,

there have only been three commissioners,

meaning that no enforcement actions can be taken.

And if the FEC did have six commissioners,

since no more than three commissioners

can be of the same party,

there's already a built-in deadlock.

- The FEC was the basic regulatory body formed

in the wake of the Watergate scandal

to regulate campaign finance

and to attempt to put some disclosure requirements

and some limits on individual campaign donations.

And that part of the system still exists,

even after Citizens United.

The FEC is responsible for enforcing that provision

of the campaign finance law

that prohibits foreign money being used

to underwrite contributions or expenditures

in federal elections.

It has a good deal of responsibility there

to identify what money should be identified

as foreign-sourced.

For example, should a American subsidiary

of a foreign corporation be able to spend

corporate funds in our elections?

- The Foreign Agents Registration Act

was passed in the '30s, because the government was fearful

that the Nazi regime in Germany

was interfering in US policy making.

And so they passed a law that said,

if you're going to propagandize

or engage in political activity within the United States,

and you're controlled by a foreign principle,

you're gonna register and report.

So that goes back back to the '30s.

That's been with us at least since the '30s.

In fact, one of the biggest fears the framers had

was foreign interference in our system.

- And foreign money is by its very nature unaccountable.

It will be used to achieve a foreign government's

or entity's political desires in this country.

If we want to keep the integrity of our elections,

keeping foreign money out should be a priority for the FEC.

- Looking simply at the FEC to do its job,

it's too big of a task.

There are too many dollars involved,

too many campaigns involved.

- The void has been filled by the states.

Certain attorneys general in larger states,

New York, California, and others

have attempted to fill the void.

- I don't think the FEC is particularly important,

except for publishing information

about who's contributing.

- The FEC has essentially been neutered,

really for several decades.

- Right now the commissioners are appointed

based on partisanship, based on whether or not

they're a democrat or republican.

But what you end up with is hyper-partisanship, right?

Which makes it very hard for the commission

to come to any agreement on anything.

So let's just de-politicize it.

Let's just call it for what it is, which is law enforcement,

and that should never be political.

- Every alphabet agency that you can name

SEC, FCC, FTC,

on and on, and on and on, has a majority of one party

that can enforce the will of that commission.

The FEC stood out alone as evenly split,

because the Congress in its wisdom back in 1976,

'74, and then '76 decided

they didn't want one party to have sway

over the fate of the other party

in sensitive matters involving federal elections.

So they built in the potential for stalemate,

even though in the early years,

there was much more bipartisanship.

- The issues associated in my mind

with the billions of dollars involved

in national and state, and local elections

is far beyond the FEC to control.

I'd like to see the regulations enforced from time to time

that you do see some enforcement actions.

I still think the most significant antidote

to excessive amounts of money

in the political system is sunlight.

Sunlight.

- Disclosure is important, because it lets people know

who's putting up the money.

And that is critical for citizens to understand

the messaging that they're getting.

Who's behind the messaging?

Do they have an ax to grind?

Who are they?

That law, that requirement is extant.

It's not been changed by Citizens United.

Now, has it been enforced as vigorously as it might?

No.

And because of the internet,

and because of the digitalization of our world,

it's harder and harder to pierce the veil and get to that.

That doesn't mean you can't.

It means it's harder.

Special counsel Bob Mueller pierce the veil

and found Russian GRU agents

behind the expenditures that were made on the internet

and indicted them.

And now the department has dismissed

that for a lot of other reasons.

- It's pretty clear that billions of dollars

are being spent influencing opinions.

And yet the ultimate recipient, the ultimate viewer,

the ultimate voter has no idea who's paying for the ads.

And I think the voter's entitled to know.

- Now that fight is still going on in the courts,

because there are people who are suggesting

that anonymity should be part of the First Amendment.

And that if you want to give money,

and you want to shield your identity,

because you don't want people picketing your house

and you don't want people making threats against you,

that it should be private.

That's a debate we're gonna have.

- I'm quite concerned about the way that people are attacked

for making political contributions.

I think this is really shameful,

and something that shouldn't happen in our system.

- We're getting further and further away

from respecting legitimate differences of opinion

and political philosophy

It's very troubling to me.

- There was a famous case with Target.

Target gave money to a candidate in Minnesota who was,

I guess, anti gay marriage.

And that got publicized.

And somebody organized the boycott of Target and said,

"We disagree with you.

"We don't like you funding a candidate

"who's against gay marriage."

Target withdrew.

- I don't know how any organization or individual

in their own mind can say, "I really support this candidate.

"I believe in this candidate,

"but I don't want my name attached to a contribution

"to that candidate."

I think it's shameful, I think it's gutless.

And if you're not willing to be associated

with the financial support of the candidate,

then that candidate shouldn't take it,

and you shouldn't offer it.

I'm not stepping on anybody's free speech rights.

But if you're gonna throw campaign money against me,

I'm entitled to know who my opponent is,

and not just the one on the ballot,

but is also funding that campaign.

And so are those voters in my district, or jurisdiction.

They're entitled to know who doesn't think

I'm qualified for this job.

- It might hinder your ability to say certain things

if you have to worry about it getting widely reported,

the things that you say in the think.

But on the other hand, Congress has a really good reason

for wanting to identify

who's contributing to campaigns.

- And the example of 2016,

if every ad

or a political statement

that the Russians put into the system had to be

substitute to a disclaimer,

"This message was furnished

"by the Internet Research Agency,"

which was a cover for GRU agents.

Then people would know, "Oh, that comes from Russia."

In the absence of that, you don't know where it comes from.

- Facebook, Google charge for ads

like most of the social media platforms.

And foreign money being used

to place ads on those mediums

should be subject to policing

by the Federal Election Commission.

- It's against the law.

It's always been against the law.

The question is, is it being enforced?

And how difficult is it to enforce

under the current technological situation that have?

- [Narrator] Direct foreign contributions are illegal,

but that isn't the only use of foreign money.

In fact, the other uses of foreign money

are much more dangerous.

It funds attacks on our nation's voting systems,

and powers the disinformation machine using social media,

shaking the very bedrock of democracy and truth.

- Well, it's a shame what's happened with the FBI,

but we're gonna rebuild the FBI.

It'll be bigger and better than ever,

but it is very sad when you look at those documents,

and how they've done that really, really disgraceful.

President and Putin was extremely strong and powerful

in his denial today.

There's no Russia.

It was all made up by the democrats.

They're the ones that colluded with Russia.

The democrats colluded with Russia.

My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others.

They said they think it's Russia.

I have president Putin.

He just said it's not Russia.

I will say this, I don't see any reason

why it would be.

- [Man] Was there Russian interference?

- Yes, there was interference in the 2016 election.

- Clearly, unequivocally, absolutely,

there was Russian interference.

The intelligence community and the Senate reports

have all agreed with that conclusion.

I rely on special counsel Mueller

and the Senate Intelligence Committee,

and the intelligence establishment

and the director of national intelligence,

and everybody else who said, "Yes, there was."

- It was a disgrace to the FBI,

it was a disgrace to our country.

The Russian investigation is a hoax.

It's a phony hoax.

That was a total witch hunt.

Thank you very much, everybody, thank you.

- I regret that the president of United States

rejected the universal conclusion

that the Russians attempted to influence

the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

It's undeniable, and I regret that our president

has refused to acknowledge that publicly.

- When we deny that Russia is a threat

to our election infrastructure within our states,

and therefore potentially within our federal government,

then we're denying reality and we're actually

further strengthening the ability of Russia,

and other nation States to interfere with our democracy.

- I met every day for several years,

every morning in the White House with the President,

the Vice President, the Attorney General,

the FBI Director, yours truly, and a bunch of other people,

just to talk about terrorist threats.

And there were broader issues,

but that was part of the conversation I was involved in.

I know about Mueller.

I'd never questioned the man's integrity,

don't question the man's patriotism.

I don't question his character.

I don't question his intelligence.

Bob Mueller and this group,

along with the intelligence community said

the Russians interfered in the 2016 election.

Take it to the bank.

They did.

- [Narrator] After the intelligence community

discovered the attempts made by Russia

to influence the 2016 election,

the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

began an investigation that produced a five volume report

detailing Russian interference efforts in 2016,

the response by American authorities,

and the continued efforts that Russia has made

heading into the 2020 election.

- The first key finding is that Russia engaged

in interference efforts attempts from 2014 to 2017

in the U.S. electoral process and systems.

I think it's really important

to point out that this key finding

of a legislative committee was bipartisan.

- The Bipartisan Senate intelligence report

that was issued, volume one of the report in July of 2019,

identify these efforts that Russia had gone to

to actually attack all 50 States

in election systems infrastructure.

And the US is unique in that

we have our federal and states rights.

And the states run the elections..

Even the presidential election is run

through states elections offices.

We saw testing here, and we saw infiltrations

of most of the systems.

However, there was no evidence that votes,

or election systems for election tallies

were actually altered.

But we know that something that was started

in at least as early as 2014 by the Russians,

and by the Russian Internet Research Agency,

and we know is continuing at least through 2017.

- If you're looking to change the outcome of an election,

you can manipulate the machines a little bit.

So that's a kinetic threat, and I think that's real.

I think the bigger threat is disinformation.

- It has never been proven

that there's been a successful hack

that's manipulated the vote count.

The bigger thing is happening in our elections

is that you've got foreign players

like Russia, China, and Iran that have every interest

in trying to manipulate the minds of the American voters

through social media, through propaganda campaigns,

through content.

And that manipulation can be just as effective

as actually going into a machine and hacking the vote count.

- There was an active campaign

by the Russian Internet Research Agency, the IRA,

to manipulate the results of the US vote

through disinformation on social media platforms.

One of the main goals here was really to sow discord.

These active measures that Russia took

to manipulate our election results

were intended to really create a divide within our society.

To play upon our society's greatest fears,

greatest weaknesses, and to use our own strengths,

the freedom of speech and our right to communicate openly

and express political dissent against us.

And they did this through a series of trolls,

individuals who were intentionally spreading information.

They did it through bots, right?

Automated accounts that weren't real,

but they were fake personas and fake people.

And they also did it through unwitting Americans

who weren't aware that they were spreading disinformation

and intentionally manipulative messaging.

- So there are all kinds of disinformation out there,

which includes everything from the Russians

propping up Facebook accounts, and then trying to act

like they're either Black Lives Matter

or act like they're a white nationalist group

and getting those groups to come and clash

in public parks throughout the country,

which did actually happen in 2016.

Where you can talk about all of the fake news

that's out there, I'll give you one really good example.

In 2016, millions of Americans

were told one day that the Pope

had endorsed Donald Trump as president, okay?

Now, first of all, Popes don't do that.

Popes don't endorse American presidents.

But they were told that the Pope had endorsed Trump.

Where did they read it?

Well, most Americans didn't actually know

that in fact, it was a fake news site

that was propped up mainly to publish the story

that the Pope had endorsed Trump for president.

The problem is that by the time millions of Americans

had heard about that, and were so surprised

and many were encouraged by the fact that Pope Francis

would endorse Trump, they'd already heard about it,

and they'd moved on with their lives.

They actually didn't hear the second piece of information,

which is that it was 100% fake news.

- We've heard about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook,

and what happened there.

In that case, we had a Russian national

who was a professor at Cambridge

develop a app, or an interface with Facebook

that was supposedly just a sort of personality test.

And supposedly at the time, unbeknownst to Facebook,

what really happened was

it allowed wholesale data collection.

What kind of data are we talking about?

We're talking about your sexual preferences,

your religious preferences,

the things that really make you respond positively

or negatively, the things that make you tick.

And when you know what makes a person tick,

you do know how to control them or manipulate them.

This aggregation of information allowed individuals

during and leading up to the campaign

to be identified and what we call micro-targeted

to have messaging and manipulative propaganda

sent their way based upon behavioral preferences

that they had indicated through all kinds of exchanges.

Russia put great effort at studying US culture,

US idioms, how we phrase things,

what we did and didn't do on social media

so that it would be able to create very credible,

believable and persuasive content.

- [Narrator] The most effective way to divide Americans

is by taking advantage of an already existing fracture.

Russia exploited hundreds of years

of racial tension and inequality.

They fanned the flames of division, racism and hatred.

In doing so, they have stalled the dream

of a free, equal and unified America.

- People who were pro-Trump were given

additionally pro-Trump messages

and encouraging a stronger Trump Alliance or support

for the candidate Trump.

And then people who were uncertain or unclear,

or who clearly expressed that they would not be voting

for then candidate Trump were sent behavioral messaging

dissuading them not to vote,

creating a perception of voter fraud or election fraud,

like disbelief in the electoral process.

And so the goal was both actively turning away voters

who might vote against the targeted lifted candidate

and to encourage and strengthen those

who clearly would vote in the way that was desired

by a malicious acting nation state Russia.

And this bipartisan Senate Intelligence Report

makes this clear.

- [Narrator] When the intelligence community

discovered election interference

coming from Russia and other foreign nations,

it became clear that there was no cohesive plan in place

to counter these attacks.

It became imperative that a response be ready

the next time our elections were attacked.

- When does a cyber event or a cyber operation,

particularly one involving information,

constitute a use of force under international law?

So the military is hands are somewhat tied

in responding to these types of operations.

So then in 2018,

we have the National Defense Authorization Act

for fiscal year 2019.

And that involved a number of new authorities

for Cyber Command that we're going to address

these challenges and difficulties.

Probably the more interesting piece, though,

is section 1642, which actually gave the authority

for the US Armed Forces, particularly for Cyber Command

to engage in measures against adversaries

that interfered with our elections in certain ways.

Now it's somewhat cabin or constrained,

there's only four countries, right?

That we can respond to,

that is Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea.

But if any of those four countries engage

in certain activities leading to some level

of election interference,

it gives authorities to US Cyber Command to respond.

But usually if there's not a kinetic,

some type of physical manifestation,

then it's not going to rise to use of force.

- Ultimately protecting against the kinetic attack,

everybody's got a role to play.

The best, most important role, I think,

for the federal government,

is the extent that they have information

with regard to these attacks.

Codes, they got precursors.

Any digital information that they have

relative to the attacks themselves,

they need to pass that along as quickly as possible.

And frankly, as a former governor,

they might want to a few federal dollars.

Some need to buy just new and better voting machines

and build software to reduce that risk.

But ultimately the burden, the primary responsibility

protecting from that kind of influence, I believe,

rests in the states and on the governors,

and the state legislatures.

- [Narrator] For how prevalent election interference is,

and how damaging it is to the foundation of our democracy,

there seems to be very little at this time

that our government can actually do to stop it.

- Disinformation and misinformation is the greatest threat

because of where it leads

in terms of democracy, including elections,

because it makes people more cynical,

it makes people more polarized,

and can also be used to overturn elections.

- The most effective way to manipulate an American election

is through disinformation.

It's cheap.

It is effective, given how much you can micro-target

the voters that you're interested in manipulating,

and it is very hard to track.

So yes, it was an issue in 2016.

And yes, it's gonna to be an even bigger issue

in 2020 and 2022, and 2032.

- So what does disinformation look like?

Images like this of Stacey Abrams

were a doctor to attach to the candidate

to the Muslim Brotherhood and Communism.

False warnings of a citation for political signs

were created and distributed.

And photos of other persons were falsely attributed

in order to fabricate false motives

and discredit harmful testimony.

- We need to realize that this is the future.

This is the way that people,

whether they're inside our country or outside our country

are gonna try to manipulate the American electorate,

because it is very, very effective.

- There's a digital war going on.

And part of it, at least is I think,

as the Russians take a look at it, is

destabilize the United States.

And how do you do that?

Well, start questioning the legitimacy

of the bedrock, the foundation of our country,

the Republic, is our elections.

Locally, state, and nationally, particularly nationally.

Four years into it, we're still talking about it.

Some people will say that there's a kind of equivalency

between what the CIA and Voice of America,

and other entities have done in other countries.

But we've got to understand

that there's a very different intent.

The intent when America

has been involved in elections abroad

was for the most part to try to encourage liberal democracy,

to try to encourage democratic processes along.

What the Russians want to do

when they manipulate our elections

is to try to discredit the integrity of the American way.

- Putin, when he was just this ascending star

in the KGB's forte was destabilization.

And look what he's done to our electoral process.

His goal may or may not have been

one or the other individual elected,

but he destabilized our election systems

so that now we're still talking about

and questioning legitimacy

of the election of the President United States.

He accomplished his goal.

- Disinformation and misinformation

isn't just a matter of foreign interference.

That's a big deal, and it's a national security interest.

But what we're seeing is political activists

and PACs of all kinds, right and left

using their money to start phony local news sites

that look like real local news sites,

or national news sites, but they're actually financed

by people with a political agenda.

And they approach all stories from a certain angle,

and they're promoting their own brand of misinformation.

- The current administration has been quite the ringleader,

even, in a campaign of misinformation.

President Trump kind of made a name for himself

in political circles as a birther,

as someone who'd sought to claim falsely

and without justification at all

that president Obama wasn't a real US citizen.

- If we're all going to be governed by the latest rumor,

or the labeling of what is true as fake,

then we can not have a truly responsible,

responsive and functioning democracy.

- One of the byproducts of disinformation

sort of a vicious cycle, is polarization.

Because if I convinced you that the sky is green

when it's actually blue, that I've put you off

into this corner where you're gonna be much more comfortable

with people who also think the sky is green.

And then you're going to defend your position,

you're going to rely on,

or maybe even create your own disinformation

that furthers the myth that the sky is green.

- People choose the facts that they want,

but they choose things that aren't necessarily facts.

I mean, I guess that's where the challenge is

in the impact of the internet,

and its use and abuse

in terms of the electoral process.

- I think we need to realize that we're entering

an incredibly dangerous period in the history,

not just of democracy, but of human society and civilization

in which people now fundamentally distrust

most of the stuff that's before them.

Now, the problem with that is twofold.

Number one, that in a democracy,

you actually have to have a common set of facts,

and a common narrative that enough people believe is true

that a democracy can hang together.

And when all of a sudden you have a situation

in which information is being, not only fragmented,

and politicized, but then profoundly distrusted,

regardless of where it's coming from.

We no longer can have a coherent conversation

in this country, and we no longer have a national narrative

and set of facts, that we can all trust

and debate and make decisions around.

And I don't know how a democracy can function

under those conditions.

- A democracy depends on good information.

It doesn't necessarily mean that every citizen who votes

knows the name of their congressmen,

and the name of the members of the city council,

but they know a certain amount,

and they share a certain set of basic facts.

If that's not the case, if they can't even debate

how they feel about the facts with each other,

because they don't even share the same facts,

democracy breaks down.

- We're becoming a society of first impression.

We're becoming a society where

we embrace a lot of the things

that we see on the internet or on Twitter accounts

as actually factually based,

as thoughtfully conceived and presented.

I don't have the antidote.

We need to think about it, seriously,

because it is such a corrosive impact

on the most fundamental structure

in a democracy.

And that is our electing process.

I wish I had a better answer for you.

I don't have the antidote.

- What makes this really complicated is that

when unwitting Americans share a message

that they really strongly identify with,

and unbeknownst to them, they're identifying with it

because they were micro-targeted.

But when they share that information,

regardless of where it was created,

it's becoming their speech.

They're expressing an opinion and sharing information.

It really muddies the waters on how do we handle this,

and what do we do to address it.

- At the heart of a democracy, I've always felt,

is the First Amendment.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly,

et cetera, et cetera.

And retweeting false information,

is that a violation of the First Amendment?

When misinformation generated

by the bots from a Russian source,

maybe embraced by an unknowing voter

who subscribes to that particular point of view

based on whatever their political bias

or philosophy might be,

and then passes it on as if it's true.

I don't think that's a violation of the First Amendment,

but it's certainly a disruptive of our democracy.

- The traditional claim of First Amendment law

is that false speech, for the most part,

gets very little, if any, constitutional protection,

when it's simple matter of fact.

The government can often not suppress this.

But the question is when

there's a little bit more gray area,

or when something like opinion is pressed in.

Suppose you say something like,

"Kamala Harris isn't a real American."

Kamala Harris is a United States citizen,

just like everyone has long presumed,

but there might be this other part to the real American.

Then it's a bit of opinion about what values one must hold

to be truly a part of the clan or something of this sort.

Is this really misleading?

Is this really false information?

It's not quite clear what to say.

As a matter of what I think courts would do,

I think that they're probably going to say

that this is entitled to First Amendment protection,

because there's a colorable kind of opinion matter,

and not clearly under some other thing,

like false or libelous speech that can be banned.

- The government shouldn't be able to stop that,

and couldn't under the First Amendment stop that,

but the platforms can.

I don't have a First Amendment right

vis-a-vis Facebook or Twitter.

I only have a First Amendment right

vis-a-vis the government.

There are outright lies, not hyperbole,

they're just eyes being transferred through the internet.

How do we as guardians of democracy,

and guardians of the first amendment deal with that reality

without stepping all over everybody's right

to free speech and to express their point of view?

- One of the ways that we see our own greatest strengths,

the right of the freedom of speech used against us

is because of the way the laws have developed

rapidly around these communication platforms.

We have a federal law, the Communications and Decency Act.

And section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

provides a shield of immunity for online platforms

that post content created by third parties.

The immunity it provided for platforms

was also to promote the internet as a communication medium.

We didn't want websites to be liable

for removing some content, but allowing other content.

And so Section 230 worked as long as it was

content provided by a third party,

the platform itself would not be liable for that content.

So if there was information on Facebook

that was untrue about someone,

that said someone was a criminal,

as long as Facebook didn't put that information up there,

it wasn't Facebook's problem.

- There are so many sites, but the communication,

the distribution of those sites

is concentrated on two or three platforms.

And it's up to those platforms

to be completely transparent about what they're doing.

- Currently, social media giants like Twitter

receive an unprecedented liability shield

based on the theory that they're a neutral platform,

which they're not.

Not an editor with a viewpoint.

My executive order calls for new regulations

under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

- The so-called section 230 had a very good intention.

Someone would post something on America Online,

believe it or not, that's what it was worried about.

They never heard of Facebook, or Google,

or YouTube at the time, or Twitter.

And the AOL was worried it was gonna to get sued

for something I said about you online.

And the analogy they used was,

if I say something bad about you on a telephone call,

should Verizon have to be responsible for that?

And that makes sense.

- This was adopted 25 years ago

to protect the fledgling industry,

and its purpose was to allow websites that were serving

as essentially bulletin boards

for diverse third party content coming on,

to say that you're not responsible for the content

of that third party information.

- The real impetus of it was

that these online platforms like AOL,

they were beginning to censor stuff.

They were censoring pornography

and hate speech on their own.

They took it as their responsibility to do that,

and when they started to do that, they got sued.

So with Section 230 really did was exempted them

from getting sued for content decisions that they made,

not for not making any content decisions,

but they couldn't get sued

for content decisions that they made.

Meaning they could block pornography

and not have a pornographer sue them,

or they could block hate speech,

or block anything they wanted.

They could act like editors and not get sued.

- [Narrator] There is friction between the protections

of the First Amendment, and the overwhelming threat

that disinformation poses.

The United States government has to fight the war

against disinformation with its hands tied.

In this void, private businesses are starting to step up

in hopes of winning the battle against disinformation.

- One thing that is remarkable is to see the reaction

of different platforms to combat

the scourge of the attack upon our democracy.

Twitter has banned political advertisement.

You see Facebook saying,

"We're not going to get involved in the truth

"or not truth of political campaigns.

"We're gonna let the market take care of that."

Meaning the politicians should regulate themselves

and the people should call out

where there are things that aren't true.

Google has taken a much more nuanced

and really probably the appropriate approach

if we want to share information.

Rather than ban it outright, Google has limited

how its platform can be used to target political messaging.

Google is specifically refusing to allow

campaigns and political speech designed

to target individuals based upon their preferences

that wouldn't be clear to them.

So this response is something that we're seeing

these private companies trying to figure out how to do.

And what we really need here is federal regulation

that regulates this kind of targeting

and political campaigning on these platforms

that are all of our number one sources of information.

- One thing that the federal government can do

is it can make the speaker transparent, okay?

So for instance, there's a bill out there

called the Honest Ads Act.

And what the Honest Ads Act would do is basically

provide the same transparency that exists for TV advertising

for digital advertising.

Now, what I mean by that is that if a group tomorrow

were to take out a million dollars in TV ads

on behalf of a politician or against a politician,

they actually have to disclose who they are.

And then you can find out where their money came from.

The same group could take out a million dollars

in digital ads on Facebook and Twitter and online tomorrow,

and never have to disclose a single word about themselves.

- The platforms are totally non-transparent.

They will claim that they have fact checkers

and people who, if they see something is not true,

they'll secretly change the algorithm

so that it isn't shared as much, and it isn't seen as much.

Why don't they just say what they're doing?

And why don't they say why they're doing it?

And why don't they see who's doing it?

Because no, one's gonna trust them if they do it secretly.

And that's what they do.

And in part, that's 'cause their culture

is that every problem has a technology solution,

and the problem of misinformation and disinformation online,

there is no technology solutions to that.

That is a journalism solution.

That is a human solution.

- There is a growing need for some means

for people to be able to sort out

what's actually true.

- My God, in the digital forevermore,

in the digital age, data is critically important.

Facts are critically important.

But we know that the internet can be abused

and it has been abused.

And unless we pay a lot more attention to it

and its use in the future,

that it's going to undermine our democracy.

- I think with different kinds of political leadership,

we can encourage people

to at least go to places where they can share

the same set of common facts.

- We have a polarized system

that doesn't facilitate dialogue.

Without dialogue, democracy breaks down.

- How much of this is produced by the fact

that our political representatives

are not sufficiently responsive

to what the average person thinks,

and then are gravitating to the extremes?

And then pressing out really extreme positions

as if they are more commonplace.

Frankly, the internet itself has contributed

to the erosion of civility.

I mean, Donald Trump has added a layer on top of it

with his always Tweeting,

but the internet is also an influence,

and a very corrosive influence in this whole notion

of a civil exchange of ideas and differences of opinion.

And frankly, Hillary Clinton said it, Joe Biden responded.

He said, "Republicans aren't our enemies,

"they're our opponents."

And we got to get back to that notion of civility.

- So you have all these investigators, they're democrats.

In all fairness, Bob Mueller

worked for Obama for eight years.

The biggest problem is gonna be with the democrats,

not with China and Russia and Iran.

Your biggest problem is going to be with the democrats.

- The notion that somehow supporting

states' infrastructures for elections can become partisan

is really a wedge just being driven

between our citizens and our federal

and state governing bodies by malicious nation states.

- [Narrator] We cannot continue to be divided

by foreign enemies.

It is the duty of all Americans to take part

in protecting our democracy.

- I think what is critical going into any election,

and whenever exercising both the privilege

and the responsibility of voting,

is to be an informed member of the electorate.

That's harder to do.

- Don't take everything you read on the internet

at face value.

I mean, it's crazy, there's no standard.

You throw an opinion out there,

and some people accept that as fact.

And part of it has to do

with the recipient of the information.

- I think we put too much emphasis on the purveyors

and not enough on the people who are reading this stuff.

If your exclusive source of information is Twitter,

in my humble opinion, and I'm of an older generation,

you are at serious risk of not understanding

all the facts at issue.

There's a reason that newspapers have editors.

There's a reason that newspapers have fact checkers.

There's a reason that newspapers of one stripe or another

have credibility as arbiters of information.

- If a reporter or editor gets something wrong repeatedly,

they will be fired from their job, all right?

These are professionals who are engaged

in the professional act of trying to get

as close to the truth as they possibly can.

- We have to really look at clear indications

from our intelligence community,

from our national security experts

and from the republican and democratic senators

who clearly spelled out the measures that were taken

and that are still being taken against US democracy.

At the end of the day, that's what we need to preserve.

- I urge every voter to find sources that are reliable,

but then to go out and look at other sources too.

To make sure that they are not inside

some type of social media bubble

when they are gathering information.

Go to the source documents.

Read the executive summary from the Senate report,

read the law, read the constitution

as opposed to reading how someone else describes it.

Advertise your product or brand here contact www.OpenSubtitles.org today

- [Narrator] This is the new normal.

How many times has that phrase been said in 2020?

Life probably won't continue like this forever,

but the way we live has definitely changed.

The way we go to school has changed,

the way we do interviews has changed,

and the way we vote will likely need to change.

- Epidemics and pandemics should absolutely

be considered future threats

to the sanctity of Americans' elections.

And in a way, these, these viral threats,

these actual medical, biological threats

are much greater and more intense

than what we're seeing from foreign countries.

You can shut an entire country down with it.

So imagine if the coronavirus had struck

in early October of 2020?

Would we even be holding an election?

How would we be holding an election?

So, you could have a situation in which

the most powerful and established democracy on earth,

the United States of America

could have an entire election, presidential election

paralyzed, crippled, shut down or delayed

because of a virus.

- I would put the voter access and the integrity of,

the ability of people to vote in a pandemic

as a higher risk than even foreign interference.

This to me harkens back to Bush V. Gore in 2000,

and the election contest in Florida.

And what that revealed

is that the technology and infrastructure

behind our elections is not really up to snuff.

We have not sufficiently paid attention

to the infrastructure needs

for a modern, 21st Century system.

We need to do that.

And we're going to have some problems in 2020 as a result.

Not that the election officials on both sides of the aisle

are not working diligently to fix that.

And I noticed again, with all this, excuse me,

propaganda about mail ballots,

republican secretaries of state

and republican election administrators

are vouching for mail ballots,

and using an advocating for mail ballots

on a very wide basis.

So I think that's where we have to spend some more money

and pay more attention than the foreign interference issue.

- This is not an election that will test

something very important,

and that is our ability to be agile,

and to adopt different methods if there are emergencies.

- The question is, how robust can we make the vote

come election day?

Vote by mail, vote by home really is the only solution.

It used to be called absentee voting.

It's basically the same thing.

And it's safe, it's secure, the turnout rates are greater,

and so is the level of information

that the voter is able to work with when they're voting.

So it's a solution that's been kind of

on the shelf for a long time.

And right now, we just need to radically scale it up.

- They've asked for a ridiculous $3.5 billion,

that's billion,

$3.5 billion for universal mail-in voting,

a system riddled by fraud and corruption.

- The number one concern that people talk about

is that you can have a lot of fraudulent voting.

- I think that be fraud on both sides, unfortunately,

because people take this election very, very seriously

and that induces them sometimes to do things

that are dishonest, and in violations of law.

- Just as there have been many calls to stop voter fraud,

there have been displays of the fact

that there just is no great problem.

It seems to me that solutions should be proportionate

to the problems they're supposed to counteract.

Voter fraud is not a big issue in the United States,

and I take it it's for a couple of reasons.

One, the penalties for voter fraud

are actually fairly stiff.

And two, the benefit of voter fraud

is actually pretty minimal.

- I'm aware of no studies that point

to any increased likelihood of fraud

with mail-in ballots over any other kind.

In fact, some people, and some state administrators,

both republican and democrats will say that the procedures

for mail-in ballots are actually less prone to fraud,

because of the procedural steps of signing, witnessing,

comparing the signatures, having a paper record.

- The States that have done it before

would probably be all right.

I happen to live in a state that has done it before,

and that is Colorado.

- The state of Colorado has been voting by mail

for almost a decade now.

The state itself launched its own audit

to try to determine what percentage of ballots

in the last 10 years were potentially fraudulent.

And the number that it came up with was 0.006%.

That's basically a rounding error,

and probably there are more errors like that occur

every two years in polling places across America,

just because someone didn't write

someone's name down correctly,

someone didn't scan the ballot correctly,

someone didn't fill it out correctly, whatever.

So on the fraudulent front,

it seems as if voting by mail is basically fraud free.

- [Narrator] Prior to COVID-19 Washington, Oregon,

Utah, Hawaii, and Colorado had universal vote-by-mail.

Overall, 34 States have some experience with voting by mail

that is available to more than just absentee voters.

- There's nothing actually wrong with mailing ballots,

as long as they can be verified.

For those states that are just starting,

they are going to be inundated with all kinds of questions

about the validity of the ballots.

- It's not so much that there's fraud,

and it's not so much that there's a problem

with mail-in voting.

It's that the infrastructure and technology

has not caught up to or kept pace with

the volume of voting that is going to occur via the mail.

And so that's the problem we face.

- We can't give them the kind of ridiculous things

that they want that have nothing to do with the China virus.

It has nothing at all to do with China virus,

much of what they're asking for.

So therefore they don't have the money

to do the universal mail-in voting.

So therefore they can't do it, I guess, right?

Are they gonna do it even though they don't have the money?

- The other argument about vote-by-mail

is a more political argument,

and it's based on calculations about who benefits

or doesn't benefit when people vote by mail or not.

President Trump in the spring tweeted out

that it was clear to him that voting by mail

benefited democrats more than republicans.

And as a result, he said that it should be discouraged.

Now think about how profoundly morally offensive that is,

that the president of the United States of America

was openly advocating

essentially a form of voter suppression,

meaning not allowing people to vote by mail

during the time of a pandemic,

because he doesn't think it's good enough for his party.

Now, not only is that morally offensive,

but it's also just in-factual.

And since he released that Tweet,

many, many republicans have come out and said,

"Actually, typically the way the Republican Party

"has thought about vote by mail,

"is that it benefits Republicans,

"because older people are the ones who vote by mail."

And typically older people are ones who lean Republican.

- If it's them, let's say, that are doing it,

and it's mostly democrat states that want it,

and the democrat governors,

they're gonna send them to certain areas, I guess.

I guess people are gonna be getting them,

and said, "Oh, all right, that's fine."

And they'll send it back.

- So not only was the president undermining

the very constitution that he swore to defend,

but he also was putting a piece of information out there

that even his own party disagrees with.

- I say this for the media,

this will be the greatest catastrophe,

one of the greatest catastrophes

in the history of our country, that's how serious it is.

- Because of the overwhelming massive increase

in mail-in ballots during a pandemic,

we have a question about the ability

of the postal service to deliver,

to get all those ballots in time, that's number one.

And number two, we have a gap in the education

and experience of the electorate

to properly qualify and fill out absentee ballots,

because they're not used to doing it that way.

534,000 mail-in ballots were thrown out in 23 States

in the 2020 primaries.

In California, 102,000 such ballots were thrown out.

In New York, 84,000.

That's a lot of ballots to be thrown out.

Now, remember in Michigan, Trump won by 10,704 votes.

In Michigan in the primaries,

10,694 ballots were disqualified in the primary.

The margin of victory.

So depending on what happens, this could be critical.

If people don't have any confidence in the balloting

in the election of who was actually the winning candidate,

that will cause disputes that would go on for years.

- You're not gonna able to know the end of this election,

in my opinion, for weeks, months.

Maybe never.

- The fact is that the people who are judging these ballots

then have to go through them,

and that will become a source of a lot of dispute.

Those disputes will eventually get to the courts.

The courts will take a long time as they always do

to resolve these things.

And we don't have that much time.

The election is in November, November 3rd.

And if you have a dozen, or two dozen lawsuits going on,

would they all be finished by January 20?

Which is only a matter of two months,

two and a half months from the time of the election.

That's not very long

when there's a lot of litigation going on.

- So the president himself

does not have the power to delay the election.

That would have to be an act of lawmaking by Congress.

Federal law would have to be changed

to move the election date.

But what the constitution says is that no matter what,

the President and Vice President's term

terminates on January 20th of the year after the election.

It's not just the president, of course,

all of the house members are up for election

and a third of the Senate.

- If there's a contested election,

the constitution clearly states

it will be decided by the House of Representatives.

- Is that the full house,

or just the house that has been elected

in unchallenged elections, November 3rd?

And if it's a republican house,

then they elect the president.

This is all very, very dangerous.

- But the fact of the matter is

not that many house districts actually are very competitive.

And so one would think that

even if there are some contested elections, perhaps,

there probably will be a pretty clear majority,

and they will then vote as they will,

provided the law is followed.

But there are some questions

about whether the law will be followed.

One such example in my mind, is of course the 2000 election.

There are a number of legal scholars who wonder why

the Supreme Court soft fit to decide

how this election dispute was to be resolved,

because it's not clear that it is the court's role

to resolve election disputes.

The constitution is quite clear

about who resolves disputes about the presidency.

So I think there's a question about whether

a slightly activist, you might call it, court

might try to jump in and then usurp the role

of the House of Representatives.

- For too long, we have neglected

our system of elections in this country.

And the virus at this point has just exposed that neglect.

It's exposed the lack of adequate funding

that Secretaries of State have.

It's exposed the crazy patchwork of local election officials

all around the country.

Setting up polling places in little churches

and community centers with volunteer staffs.

It's exposed the very nature of the way

that we fund our elections.

And so I think at this point,

we've got to take a much clearer look

at what's going on here.

We are the greatest, most powerful democracy on earth,

and it would be pretty hard for us at this point

to try to go to other countries

that are either aspiring to be democracies

or are democracies, and suggest to them

that we should be lending them advice

about how to conduct elections.

- Elections are important,

because we cannot address the national challenges

without doing it through government.

We cannot rely upon private business, private institutions

to address the challenge presented

for jobs, education, climate change,

safety around the world.

People at this time on both sides seem to be despairing

with the ability of government

to address these nature problems.

But without government as the solution,

there is no solution.

And if you aren't participating,

and if you aren't electing the right people

to help solve those problems,

then the system will continue to collapse.

And it'll give the authoritarians all over the world

the ability to mock us, and to prove to their people

that they're way, that the authoritarian way

is the right way.

People spending millions of dollars

because the vote is powerful.

So use that power.

- You're are the future.

And only if you know and educate yourself,

and work to bridge this divisiveness,

is there really any hope for our democracy.

- One of the things you must participate in is voting.

That is the fundamental right,

and the fundamental function you have

to influence where this country goes.

- People in government make decisions

that affect many, many tomorrows.

They decide today on actions that will affect the future.

Young voters have more vested interest

in that future than order voters like me.

And so for no other reason, a self-serving reason,

whether it's a local race for judge,

for County commissioner,

a state race, or a federal race,

Your futures will be affected by those you vote for today.

So vote, it's unexcusable.

There's no reason not to.

It's in your best interest to do so.

(dramatic music)

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