Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Season 11 Episode 26
Aired on October 13, 2024
Main segment: Subversion in the 2024 United States presidential election
Other segments: Hurricane Milton, Waffle House Index
John Oliver discusses the attempts made by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the upcoming election, the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, and why Waffle House is both a light in the storm and symbol of absolute chaos.
* * *
John: I’M JOHN OLIVER, THANKS FOR JOINING US! IT’S BEEN A BUSY WEEK!
Kamala Harris released her health records, we learned Trump sent COVID tests to Putin early in the pandemic, and Florida spent the first part of the week bracing for Hurricane Milton, which—among other things—threw an awkward wrench into Tuesday’s Dancing with the Stars.
For the final dance of the night, our Bachelor star will tango to the hair metal classic “Rock You Like a Hurricane.” Now, we want you to know that these songs were chosen weeks in advance of the devastating weather events.
John: Yeah, not great! And while I’m sure the song was decided weeks ago, it’s also the middle of hurricane season! This wasn’t some freak, unforeseeable thing like if you’d had to come out and say, “Before our contestants cha-cha to the Thong Song, we want you to know, it was chosen weeks before this morning’s tragic mass thong-strangling. Please stay strong. Strong, sta-strong strong strong.”
Milton’s damage was extensive and awful, though thankfully, it wasn’t as dire as many had predicted. The run-up to the storm did provide a reminder of a weirdly widely-used metric for storm severity.
Waffle House is still monitoring the storm’s impacts. FEMA officials used the Waffle House Index as an unofficial metric during disasters.
We call it the Waffle House Index, and it’s very reliable.
The index works as an unofficial indicator to locals of the severity of an impending storm based on if their nearest Waffle House is closed or not.
John: It’s true—there’s something called a “Waffle House Index.” And it’s jarring to have something so important conveyed in terms of Waffle House. It’s like finding out NORAD relies on the “Oshkosh B’Gosh Nuclear Threat Level.” We are at red overalls, everyone, get underground.
The Waffle House Index actually originated with the government. Around 20 years ago, this FEMA administrator realized that when going into a disaster zone, “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed?” “That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.”
And that’s partly because the company’s had a fanatical devotion to staying open. Over the years, it’s seen business skyrocket at restaurants that reopened quickly after hurricanes, so they embraced a business strategy centered around keeping their restaurants operable during and after a disaster.
And they know people take this seriously, because Waffle House’s Twitter feed features sober posts like this one, with maps of which restaurants are closed, just above normal waffle-pushing ads like this, reading, “I have a lot on my plate right now.”
That’s the most jarring juxtaposition of content since Sunny D once seemed to threaten to commit suicide. By the way, the Twitter account for Satan replied to that, “I feel you Sunny D my friend,” to which—and this is true—Sunny D replied “Thank u Satan.” Twitter used to be really good.
And look, I could talk about the grim subtext here, from the idea that Americans place more trust in restaurant chains than their own government, to the fact that the same chain has somehow made “We make our employees work during natural disasters” into a branding opportunity. But I’m going to choose to focus on the fact that Waffle Houses have somehow become a light in the storm—11 Scrabble tiles of backlit hope.
Which is wild, coming from a place that otherwise embodies total chaos, from the frequent brawls to the staggering variations of hash brown bowls—described by Waffle House as “the jazz music of the breakfast scene,” which I guess makes sense, because, like jazz, the idea of a hash brown bowl sounds fun, but when you actually experience it, you think to yourself, “There’s too much going on here, and I’m not sure I’m enjoying any of it.”
There’s also their chaotic decision to stock their jukeboxes with food-specific knockoff songs, like this:
♪ Raisin ♪
♪ (Raisin toast) Raisin toast ♪
♪ Raisin ♪
♪ (Raisin toast) Raisin toast ♪
♪ There are raisins in my toast ♪
♪ Raisin toast ♪
John: Yeah, that makes sense. “Sherry, Baby” is a song about Frankie Valli being horny for a girl, and this is basically that, but for raisins. Horny for raisins. Which, not for nothing, sounds like it could be a believable title of a Joe Biden memoir.
The point is, Waffle House combines chaos with order, and nothing exemplifies that more than the bonkers method they’ve devised for line cooks to keep track of orders. Because they don’t use simple methods like “servers writing it down” or “putting it in a computer system.” They do something far more complex, as this employee showed on TikTok.
All of our orders start on a plate, right? We use jelly packets to mark most of everything. So this is a quick rundown. Over light? All the way to the left. Over medium? In the middle. Over well? All the way on this way over here. Scrambled on this bottom down to the south. Order up on top. If the jelly packet is flipped up like this, this is white toast. Wheat toast. Using apple butter for raisin toast. If you throw a butter just on the grill line, that’s a waffle. Flip it over? That’s a pecan waffle. Sometimes, people put a blue jelly packet on top. That’s a blueberry waffle.
John: Oh, fuck off. Not you, man in this video. You seem like a great hang, it’d be an honor to vape with you. But that system’s ludicrous. When he opened with “All our orders start on a plate,” I thought “Makes sense. Food goes on plate, take me on your journey.” But as soon as he said, “We use jelly packets to mark most of everything”—I’m out. I don’t have space in my life for jelly choreography. I can’t learn that code, I have a family.
“Jelly packet down to the south scrambled?” What? And then, “If you flip the jelly up, it’s white, no flip it’s wheat?” Are you fucking kidding me? Are you fucking me?
I consider myself a smart man—the glasses—but the only thing he said that kind of made sense is that blue jelly equals blueberry. Now, would I have known that to order a blueberry waffle, you have to put butter on the grill line right side up, blue jelly on top? Not in a million years. Not after several hints!
I feel like I’m having a 15-year-old explain emojis to me. “Lipstick means Thursday, blonde haircut means ibuprofen, brunette haircut means physics homework, and shrimp means haircut. Why are you not getting this?”
And it gets even more complicated, because here’s an official training video explaining how to convey a sandwich order.
Here, you can see I put two pickle slices in the number three position, which tells me this is a bacon sandwich. If I add a slice of cheese to the plate, I know this is a bacon cheese sandwich. To make this a bacon egg and cheese sandwich, I’ll add this right side up mayo packet to the right side of the plate. Don’t let this mayo pack confuse you. As long as you see two pickles on the plate, you know this is a sandwich.
John: Sorry, but if it’s cool with you, I am going to let that mayo packet confuse me. Because I feel insane right now. I was confused when you said “two pickle slices in the number three position means bacon sandwich.” You could have said, “Vince Vaughn at a christening on Fourth of July means cheese omelet,” and it would’ve had the exact same effect on me.
Because what the actual fuck am I looking at? That’s a plate with two loose pickle slices, a Kraft single, and an unopened mayo packet. That’s not a form of communication. It looks like dinner at the Fyre Festival.
If you work at Waffle House, you might be a genius! I think a YouTube commenter below that video said it best: “I’m a 911 dispatcher. I deal with genuine life or death situations. I would rather take a shots fired call than attempt to understand whatever the fuck is happening here.”
The point is, in a world that seems to be spiraling out of control, there are at least a few things we can still count on: Waffle House will stay open to a genuinely irresponsible extent. Jelly means eggs. If you put a butter container down right-side up, you’re getting a waffle. And this song…
♪ ♪
…is never going to leave your fucking head.
[…]
John: Moving on. Our main story tonight is about voting—the only adult endeavor that gives out stickers. Which is a shame. There should be more of them. “I voted” is nice, but I’d also like “I went to the dentist,” or “I did my taxes,” or “I jogged,” or “Full disclosure, I didn’t go to the dentist. I made an appointment for the dentist, but that isn’t nothing.”
That said, getting a sticker for voting is certainly welcome, and as we’ve mentioned before, if you live in Michigan, you might get a really good one this year.
12-year-old Jane Hynous is the artist behind this creation. It’s actually one of nine stickers that Michigan voters will receive after casting their ballots.
Jane: I want it to be a symbol of powerfulness. I want people to be proud of it when they’re voting. When they actually get the sticker, it’s like, “Hey, I just voted,” and, you know, it’s pretty encouraging, I think.
John: Yeah, it is! And the Founding Fathers should frankly be ashamed they didn’t include complimentary werewolf swag. I can’t believe it took nearly 250 years for a young Michigan genius to solve that obvious flaw in our democracy.
This election is inexplicably close. The average of polls in the seven key battleground states all show the candidates within one or two points. And if you heard that and didn’t shit yourself, congratulations, you just earned a sticker for that.
Clearly, we don’t know what’s ahead on Election Night, though I can confidently predict a few things. First: a little khaki nerd armed with a touchscreen will inspire some of the most depraved thirst tweets the internet’s ever seen. Second, regardless of the results, Nate Silver will tweet, “Actually, this is exactly what I said could happen,” in a heated argument with a 14-year-old with a Spongebob avatar who only tweets, “Nate Silver pees upside down.”
And finally: if Trump loses, he will not concede gracefully. He’s already said he’ll only accept the results “if it’s a fair and legal and good election.” And he’s been laying the groundwork to cry foul if he loses.
Trump: The only thing they do well, they cheat. Their policies are no good. Their government is no good. Their management is no good, but they cheat like nobody can cheat.
They cheat. They cheated in the last election, and they’re gonna cheat in this election.
Look: if we can keep the cheating down to a minimum, because these people cheat—they cheat like hell. If we can keep it down to a minimum, we win easily.
John: Look: I get he’s just trying to rile up his base, but I won’t sit idly by while he slanders dogs.
Hey, dogs: look at me. You are beautiful. You are special. You matter. As for cats? You don’t need my validation, and you know it.
Trump and his campaign have co-opted the phrase “election interference” to refer to pretty much anything: from the multiple indictments against him, to the Fed’s recent decision to cut interest rates, with Trump at one point even posting “Election interference, never surrender!” with his own mugshot.
And for the record, that’s a terrible mugshot. Johnny Cash? That’s how you do it: laid-back, cool. Frank Sinatra? My my my, that guy fucks, am I right, Ronan? Trump’s, on the other hand, looks like the photographer asked him if he could shit from standing.
The point is, we need to be ready for the possibility the mess that happened last time could happen again. Especially because Trump hasn’t faced any real consequences for it, even bragging he’s become more popular in the wake of his indictment.
Trump: It’s so crazy that my poll numbers go up. Whoever heard, you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you’re—have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up.
John: Yeah, it is fucking crazy! When the Watergate tapes came out, Nixon had to resign in disgrace. If it happened today, he’d probably be able to release them all as an audiobook and win a f*cking Grammy.
But it’s more than just talk. Trump and his supporters have taken active steps to undermine the upcoming election. And given it’s now just over three weeks away, let’s talk about some of the attempts they’ve made to subvert this election.
We’re going to focus on a few areas: the lies they’ve told to undermine confidence in the process, the steps they’ve taken to sow chaos in the voter rolls, and the groundwork they’ve laid to turn the post-election period into a nightmare.
And let’s start by briefly revisiting what happened last time. Because you probably remember the biggest headlines—Trump refusing to concede, which ultimately led to January 6th—but so much other weird shit happened that you may have blocked out. Like when Giuliani insisted Will Smith’s late father had voted, or when the theory spread that an Italian defense contractor worked with U.S. intelligence to rig the election, or when a group called “Cyber Ninjas” audited the ballots in Arizona. And as this outside observer noted, they were looking for the weirdest possible smoking gun.
There were accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in.
To Arizona?
To Arizona, and they were stuffed into the box. Okay? And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia. Okay? And what they’re doing is to find out if there’s bamboo in the paper.
John: Yeah—”Cyber Ninjas” tried to prove foreign interference by looking for bamboo in the ballot paper, which feels like the plot of a racist straight-to-streaming political thriller where Steven Seagal saves President James Woods from wokeness. The last election was incredibly dumb, but let’s not forget: it was also incredibly stupid.
And all this happened despite a joint statement from federal election infrastructure officials calling it the most secure election in American history.
Now, the good news is, there’ve been some positive developments since then. Congress passed this act which, among other things, explicitly prevents a vice president from just throwing out votes they don’t like, as Trump famously urged Pence to do. Also, Trump’s not an incumbent this time, so he can’t do things like pressure the DOJ to legitimize claims of fraud. And finally, the election deniers who ran to be the chief election officers in swing states in 2022 all lost.
That’s great!
Unfortunately, it’s also basically the end of the good news here. Because the false claims of election fraud have stuck. A poll in January found more than one-third of Americans still do not accept Biden’s victory as legitimate. And Trump and his allies have been ramping up their lies as election day approaches.
And I want to focus on one in particular: the claim that a lot of non-citizens are going to be voting. That claim’s nothing new for Trump, or indeed Republicans, but he’s now pushing it like never before.
Trump: Right now, you have illegal aliens coming into our country, many from prisons and many from mental institutions, and they want to give them votes.
A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in, practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote.
They are working full-time to sign these people—many of them murderers—to vote so they can cheat on the election.
John: Skipping the fact that this theory’s caked in racism, how does it even make sense? You really think people would flee their homes, travel under dangerous conditions to enter this country, just to vote? It’s like assuming someone would break into a bank just so they could free the pens from their chains.
Why would they do that? It’s not worth the risk!
But Trump’s not alone in pushing this claim. He has support from conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation—the same group that brought you “Project 2025.” This summer, they released this video, which got a lot of play in right-wing circles.
Narrator: The apartment complex “Eliot Norcross” in Norcross, Georgia is occupied primarily by noncitizens. We visited the complex to ask residents two questions: “Are you a citizen?” and “Are you registered to vote?” Shockingly, 14% of respondents admitted to being noncitizens registered to vote.
We come from a company that is dedicated to registering Hispanic people so they can vote in the upcoming elections. Are you already registered?
We already voted.
You already voted?
Yes.
Are you a citizen or…?
Uhh… No.
No?
Have you already been registered or…?
Yeah.
Yeah?
Are you a citizen or…?
No.
No?
John: That video got boosted by Elon Musk, who called it “extremely disturbing,” and it went viral, despite the fact the Oversight Project itself admitted it was unable to find the people they talked to on the state voter rolls. And state investigators found no evidence that any of the seven people on that tape had ever registered to vote. Meanwhile, one of the women featured confirmed she wasn’t registered to vote and only said she was because she just wanted them to go away.
And no shit. I don’t care who’s at the door: I don’t want to talk to you. It could be me coming from the future with a dire necessary warning: I’m not listening, I’m just nodding and slowly closing the door as we’re talking.
And yet, they claimed that if the 14% hit rate they’d found held true statewide, it’d equate to over 47,000 noncitizens registered to vote in Georgia.
And look, obviously, the idea that there are thousands of noncitizens voting is ridiculous. For one thing, when Georgia looked back over 25 years of its elections, it found that of the 1,600 people who’d tried to register to vote and whose citizenship could not be verified, none of them had cast ballots.
Plus, an analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s own nationwide database of 1,500 “proven instances of voter fraud” found just 68 documented cases of noncitizens voting, going all the way back to the 1980s—with just 10 involving people living in the country illegally. Ten people in the last four decades!
That’s statistically nothing. More people die from hippo attacks every year. Just something fun to think about next time you’re fawning over pictures of baby hippos. She could kill you. She would kill you. And happily.
And that video isn’t even the weirdest lie about noncitizens that’s been passed around. Maria Bartiromo spread this doozy.
Maria Bartiromo: What about all these immigrants at these DMV offices where people are going to try to go get a license? They can’t get an appointment at the DMV because it’s jam-packed with illegals. The person that spoke to me about this this weekend identified several places in Texas where he couldn’t get in. The first one was in Weatherford: a massive line of immigrants getting licenses. They had a tent and a table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote. It was all—the signs were in Spanish. It was an obvious Democrat operation on this voting, he said.
John: Okay, we’ll get into why that’s nonsense in a second, but I’m genuinely curious about the person who saw a massive line at the DMV and their instinct was “This must be ‘illegals’ registering to vote” and not “the DMV functioning like it has since the dawn of time.”
Do they blame all common inconveniences on immigration? “Shit, I burned my mouth on this coffee. The illegals must be brewing it extra hot to burn our tongues into silence!”
And while you might instinctively know that claim is bullshit, it’s even dumber than you think, as Bartiromo explained her source was “a friend of a friend’s wife.” Something that didn’t stop her happily regurgitating it on the news.
And if you like that, you can find well-sourced stories like it on “Forward Forward Forward Forward with Your Drunkest Aunt,” Sundays at 10:00 on Fox Business.
Unsurprisingly, those claims were quickly debunked. For one thing, Weatherford, Texas, doesn’t have a DMV. And in the place you can get a driver’s license—the Department of Public Safety—no such tents or tables were set up outside the office all that week.
And, even if this had happened—which it didn’t—as the local GOP chair explained, all voter registrations are uploaded to the Texas Secretary of State’s database to verify applicants’ eligibility to vote, including citizenship, and not only had there been no recent instances of ineligible individuals attempting to register in that county, there had only been two in the last 15 years.
And yet, just two days after Bartiromo spewed that on national TV, Texas AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation into “reports that organizations may be illegally registering noncitizens to vote.”
And that’s actually a pattern for Paxton. He’ll loudly start voter fraud investigations, and even when they amount to nothing, he’ll have created the impression something’s there. In fact, the same day he announced he was looking into Bartiromo’s claims, his office announced a separate investigation into allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting targeting members of LULAC—the nation’s oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization.
Some of its members—like this woman—were even subjects of an early-morning raid.
Lidia Martinez: They scared the hell out of me.
87-year-old Lidia Martinez, who says she is LULAC’s longest-serving volunteer, had her home raided as part of a voter fraud investigation by the Texas Attorney General. Martinez says up to eight officers showed up at her home last Tuesday morning. They took her phone, her laptop, questioned her for hours, and made her wait outside.
Lidia Martinez: I said “let me get dressed” and she said “no, go outside.”
Reporter: What were you wearing?
Lidia Martinez: My nightgown, and I had all these policemen around me. It was embarrassing, humiliating. I was so angry. It was horrible.
John: It’s true, they hauled an 87-year-old great-grandmother out of her home in her nightgown, which is appalling. Paxton should know, as we all do, a nightgown is one of the worst things to haul a grandma out in—right after, well obviously, coffin—duh—but then there’s a U-Haul, an anaconda, and finally a novelty T-shirt reading “I shaved my balls for this.”
I think that’s the worst one.
And while, thankfully, a federal judge recently shut down that investigation, saying it was unconstitutional, the fact is lies and bullshit investigations have real consequences. 51% of adults are apparently concerned about noncitizens voting in the upcoming election, including 83% of Republicans.
And some aren’t waiting for the Ken Paxtons of the world to take action. Which brings us to the fact that there are now well-funded groups actively trying to, in their words, “clean up” the voter rolls. Here’s the head of one of them, “The Election Integrity Network,” explaining the general idea.
Head of The Election Integrity Network: I realized that we needed to focus on this threat of illegals voting in November, because I absolutely believe that that is how they are planning to try to steal the election this year. The only way we’re going to be able to stop this is by having citizen action, looking at the DMVs, looking at the voter rolls in your county, watching, and basically creating a national neighborhood watch to try to find these pockets of noncitizens that are getting added to the rolls.
John: Okay. First, let’s agree every Rumble show looks like a high school A/V club member interviewing the assistant principal after a school-wide ban on Heelys.
But also—a “national neighborhood watch?” It’s not great that the model they want to emulate is basically “What if racial profiling was someone’s hobby?”
That woman is Cleta Mitchell, a conservative activist. For the past three years, members of her group have, among other things, been scrutinizing voter rolls, looking for anyone they think shouldn’t be on there. And they haven’t always been shy about what they’re looking for.
In one Zoom session, an activist from the Detroit area suggested searching rolls for certain types of surnames, saying that “I think it’s unfortunate, but sometimes the only way you can find out is to look for ethnic names.”
And thank goodness they prefaced that with “I think it’s unfortunate.” For a minute, I thought that instruction to do racism was coming from a bad person.
But it doesn’t stop there. Groups like Mitchell’s are now working with computer programs like these, that automate the process of finding voters to challenge. For instance, this one trawls through everything from public voter registration data, to business records, to change-of-address databases, to obituaries to find people to challenge, because they may have died, moved, or be otherwise ineligible.
Users can then make potentially thousands of challenges to voter eligibility with a few clicks and send them to local election officials. And while they often claim they’re “helping” election boards do their jobs, officials will tell you: being on the receiving end of an avalanche of challenges is exhausting—especially as they’re usually just replicating work that’s already happening.
Election official: There have been days where I’ve received a couple thousand names. I’ve had to look each of those voters up one by one. Roughly 75–80% of the names they give me we have already dealt with.
Reporter: And the rest of the names?
Election official: Well, you would catch them anyway. There are safeguards built into the whole system for any issue you can dream of.
John: Exactly. They’re basically just creating busywork for that man, who frankly doesn’t need that. He works in a giant warehouse full of suitcases that gets so little natural light, the only place he can go on vacation is on his shirt. That man needs a beach, a mai tai, and for all the vigilante vote police to leave him the fuck alone.
Most of these citizen-led challenges are either redundant—like he just said—or flawed, because they’re completely reliant on public databases that may contain errors, without having access to the protected personal information available to election officials. That is why programs like these can often generate false positives, like, for instance, flagging voters who shared the same name and birthdate but are actually different people.
And getting flagged can be intensely frustrating. Just listen to this man who lives in the same county where our exhausted official works.
Daniel Moss: I have been voting here for two decades. As we can see, I am real. I am here. I am talking to you.
Reporter: If you’re wondering why Daniel Moss is defending his existence, it’s because of this list.
Daniel Moss: That’s my first name. That’s my last name.
Reporter: Thousands of voter registrations in Denton County were being challenged as ineligible.
Daniel Moss: Finding out that I’m on some sort of hit list of people who shouldn’t be voting—I was pretty pissed off.
Reporter: Daniel Moss’s challenge came from someone he doesn’t even know.
Daniel Moss: I want to say it was Nancy?
Reporter: Nancy lives in the same county and single-handedly sent in thousands of challenges this year.
Election official: Nancy sends me something every day.
John: I bet she does. You can hear the exhaustion in his voice there. “Nancy sends me something every day. And she’ll keep sending me things until I’m a husk of the husk I am now, and a gentle breeze carries me away to some beautiful place where there are no more Nancys.”
The point is, just a handful of people can cause a huge amount of problems. Last year, in Waterford, Michigan, a county clerk improperly cut more than 1,000 voters from their rolls in response to challenges from one 79-year-old resident who believed the last election was stolen.
And challenges have been particularly intense in the swing state of Georgia, where—because of a new state law—anyone can now bring an unlimited number of challenges against anyone in their county, which have to be heard within 10 business days. Since that bill was passed, more than 180,000 citizen challenges have been filed, with the vast majority coming from just six people.
Which is ridiculous! A group sowing that much chaos shouldn’t be able to fit inside the Titan submersible. Although, since they can, I’d be happy to pay for their trip. I hear it’s beautiful down there guys!
Georgia voters have been challenged for stupid reasons, like tiny mismatches between their mailing address and where they’re registered. This man showed up at a meeting last spring after he was challenged because his address was mistakenly recorded as “North Pine Drive Drive” instead of just “North Pine Drive.”
And this woman had an even more infuriating story.
Lakendra Graham: My rights were challenged. I’ve been staying at this same address since 2011.
Reporter: Voters like Lakendra Graham. She said she lived on Confederate Avenue in Atlanta, the name of which the city changed with great fanfare to United Avenue in 2019. Not her fault she told the board in March.
Lakendra Graham: It’s a waste of my time because I’m here when I have other things to do. I have a job.
John: Yeah, it’s a total waste of her time, which could be better spent on working, shopping, or figuring out why the fuck that street name wasn’t changed any earlier than 2019.
And while the vast majority of these challenges fail, they can have a chilling effect. In the words of one attorney, they’re “more likely to disenfranchise or intimidate or confuse voters than they are to actually turn up people ineligible to vote.” Which is both infuriating and, one might suspect, kind of the point here.
And while so far, we’ve been looking at preemptive strikes ahead of the election, there’s one final string of fuckery I want to mention, whose main effects will only be seen in the days following November 5th—and that’s some of the changes made to boards that certify elections.
Because while I mentioned that deniers who ran for chief election officer in swing states lost, there are still a significant number of them on the state and local levels. One analysis found that in these six key swing states, there are nearly 70 pro-Trump election conspiracists who are currently working as county election officials.
And maybe the most striking shift has been in Georgia, where—uniquely among swing states—Republicans are in charge of the governorship, House, and Senate. And they’ve used that power decisively to, among other things, reshape the five-member state elections board.
These three Trump-friendly members have now been installed, all of whom have questioned the results of the 2020 election, and Trump loves them so much, he even called them out by name at a rally.
Trump: Three members, Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King. Three people are all pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory. They’re fighting. Are they here? Where are they? Thank you. What a job. Thank you.
John: Wow. The fact Trump’s shouting them out like they’re each the birthday boy or girl at Chuck E. Cheese’s isn’t a great sign. Nor is it great that one of them, Rick Jeffares, even told a Trump campaign adviser that, if they win in November, he wants to join their administration, saying “If y’all can’t figure out who you want to be the EPA director for the southeast, I’d like to have it.”
Which might be the first time I’ve heard of political corruption having a vibe that screams “No worries if not.”
Now, I have to tell you, all three have pushed back on the insinuation they’re working for Trump, with one saying she’s faced “character assassination, media murder, and ‘lawfare lynching.’” And, to get ahead of your question, yes, it was the old white lady who said that.
But in August and September—incredibly late in the election cycle—the board passed a bunch of new rules that’ll make it much easier to sow doubt in the certification process.
One of them requires a full hand count of ballots in each precinct to take place either the night of the election or the next day, and which must be done by just three individuals per precinct. Which might sound reasonable, but as experts have explained, that has the potential to cause chaos.
Expert: I brought with me 1,872 pages of paper representing what a stack of ballots could look like on a busy counting day. And busier, larger precincts may have even more than this number. If I were to hand this stack of paper to three random people in this room, especially at the end of a long voting day, and ask them to arrive at the same total number, do we think that’s feasible? Counting large numbers of anything one by one is an incredibly tedious process, and not one humans are well equipped for. People doing a hand count are going to make mistakes, which can then be exploited to spread lies and sow further distrust in our elections and our election officials.
John: Yeah, of course. If you handed three exhausted people that stack of paper and told them to have the same number by morning, you’re not guaranteed the same answer. At best, you get a scenario that’d give most people a panic attack and the count an instant orgasm.
Dozens of election officials have said a hand count of all the ballots would be physically impossible in all but the smallest counties.
But the thing is, that rule might trigger another new one that bars counties from certifying the election until officials can review an investigation of every precinct with inconsistent totals, and gives county boards the power to exclude entire precincts from the vote totals if they think they’re fraudulent.
Which is absolutely wild. And might be a problem, given that some local election officials are fucking nuts. For instance, this election chair in Georgia’s Spalding County tweeted, just three days after January 6, this mess of offensive conspiracy theories including the hashtag #BidenWillNeverBePresident and #BidenIsAPedo.
That’s not somebody you want empowered to throw out votes.
And on top of that, yet another new rule empowers county election board members to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities, without setting deadlines for how long they might last or—crucially—defining what a “reasonable inquiry” even means. And that’s something one of those new Trump-friendly appointees seemed weirdly unconcerned about.
Reporter: Why didn’t you guys define “reasonable inquiry”? I mean, you guys made the rule.
Election Board Member: How best should we define “reasonable”? I thought—we thought that most people knew what reasonable is. It’s more of a rhetorical question. So, I didn’t think we would have to write the definition of “reasonable” within the rule. But if that’s the case, we’ll post what the definition of reasonable means.
John: But they still haven’t done that yet—even though early in-person voting in Georgia starts this week. And that’s a problem because you do need to define the word “reasonable.” It’s a subjective term, like “funny” or “interesting.” Those words mean something different to everyone. I personally prove that every Sunday night. I’m doing it right now!
Experts say that “reasonable inquiry” rule could allow rogue election officials to drag inquiries past certification deadlines. And while courts are currently hearing challenges to these rules, if they allow them, one potential end result is that local officials in just a handful of rural counties could exclude enough votes in Georgia to affect the outcome of the presidential race.
And when you take all this together—the lies about immigrants voting, the mass voter challenges, and the introduction of new processes to slow down and question vote counts—it seems depressingly likely we’re about to see a storm of bullshit just like last time.
And there are a few things we should be probably ready for. First: unless there is an absolute landslide, we’re unlikely to know the outcome of the election on November 5th. And when it comes to Georgia, if Harris wins narrowly there, we’ll almost certainly see legal battles stretching into December or beyond, which could eventually end up in front of these guys—the Supreme Court—which is obviously reassuring.
And all the while, Trump will try and exploit any delay or uncertainty. Unless, that is, he wins outright, in which case, he’ll insist he triumphed over a rigged system.
So, that’s what we can expect. What can we do? Well, you can—and I hate saying this as much as you probably hate hearing it—make a plan to vote and help others do the same. Since the closer the race is, the easier it’ll be for Trump to sow bullshit. You should check to make sure your voter registration is current.
You can use this website to find links to your state’s voter registration verification tools, at this website below. Vote early if you can to ensure that if there’s any issue with your registration, you can clear it up by election day. If you vote by mail, you can find information at this website below.
But beyond that, it’s going to be vital to be resilient against the storm of toxic nonsense Trump and his allies will try and stir up. It could go on for months, and be stupider than you can even imagine right now. So stupid that someone you know, love, or are related to—and those are three different things—might even think there’s something to it.
But the key thing to remember here is that, as chaotic as the last election was, in the end, our guardrails did hold. And we’re going to need to make sure they hold up again. And if we can do that, then, and only then, we will all deserve the single greatest sticker ever designed.
That’s our show! Thank you so much for watching. We’re off next week, back October 27th. See you then, good night!
(End credits roll, audience cheering, and music playing)