What Actually Happens to All Those Votes⁉️
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Description
In today’s episode: 🗳️ Learn how votes get counted and what happens to ballots after they're cast with correspondent Pamela Kirkland 🇺🇸 We take you on a trip through the long and surprising history of voting rights in the USA ✍🏾 Get the *really-real* on what's actually written in the United States Constitution with comedy producer, author, and activist Ben Sheehan.
Links
📖 Check out guest Ben Sheehan's book, OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say?
💥 Surprised by the answer to our Trivia Question of the Day? Read more about what happened to that drone
📧 Email us funny facts! sizzling stories! quirky questions! and caring comments... hello@thetennews.com
Transcript
Bethany Van Delft: [00:00:00] Hey there, I'm Bethany Van Delft, and this is The Ten News. The show where in the time it takes to fill in all the little bubbles on a voting ballot, we find out what's up in the world. In today's Election Day episode we'll learn what happens to a ballot after it's cast, take a trip through the history of voting rights, talk to an expert about the United States Constitution and find out what American symbol accidentally took out a government drone.
[00:00:29] Stick around till the end of The Ten to find out. Okay, let's get into The Ten News.
Countdown voice: [00:00:36] Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
Bethany Van Delft: [00:00:42] It's Election Day, the official day Americans vote for our elected leaders, but what actually happens to all those votes, how do they get counted? Let's go to our correspondent, Pamela Kirkland to follow the journey of a ballot.
Pamela Kirkland: [00:01:06] It's Election Day and millions of voters around the country have already cast their vote for President of the United States. Some of them opted to vote early instead of heading to the polls today. I decided that I would vote by mail this election.
[00:01:26] I contacted my local election office in September and asked them to send me a ballot so I could mark my vote and turn it in. Place your ballot in the white envelope.
[00:01:37] In Georgia, you choose the candidates you want to vote for by filling in a bubble form. You put the ballot into its envelope. Then you sign it. Election boards use your signature to make sure you only vote once and that the person who requested the ballot is the same person who's returning it.
[00:01:57] All right. Now we [00:02:00] gotta drop them off.
[00:02:03] After I filled out my ballot. I drove to my local election office.
[00:02:07] "Then turn right onto South McDonald's street"
[00:02:10] and dropped it in the Dropbox.
Poll worker voice: [00:02:12] "She did a good job."
Pamela Kirkland: [00:02:15] But what happened to the ballot after it gets to election officials? It's a super secret, super secure process.
[00:02:26] The whole election is supervised in each state, either by a person called the Secretary of State or a group of people called the Board of Elections, their job is to make sure everything runs smoothly. Once a ballot is mailed or dropped off in a secure dropbox election officials collect them and bring them inside their election offices to make sure each vote is counted. The ballots stay in these offices until Election Day. To make sure they're safe, they're locked in secure rooms so no one can mess with [00:03:00] the vote. Some places like New York, use a door with three locks and need three people to open it. Colorado uses cameras to monitor their offices.
[00:03:11] No one can get in except the people who are authorized to count the vote. And did you know that each state counts ballots differently? North Carolina is allowed to scan mail in ballots as they come into the election office. But certain parts of Michigan aren't allowed to start processing ballots because of a state law.
[00:03:32] And while Election Day is the deadline to either vote in person or put your ballot in the mail, certain states are allowed to count ballots, even if they arrive after Election Day. As long as they're in the mail by November 3rd. And it's going to take a long time to count all of those votes.
[00:03:53] This election is breaking records. As people turn out to cast their ballot, experts estimate as [00:04:00] many as 150 million people could vote in the general election. With so many people voting. It's no surprise we may not know who won the election right away.
Bethany Van Delft: [00:04:14] You've probably heard a lot of encouragement these past few months for everyone everywhere to turn out and vote! All US citizens over 18 years old, who meet their state's rules and residency requirements are eligible to register to vote. But this was definitely not always the case. When the Declaration of Independence was signed back in 1776 only landowners were allowed to vote. And landowners were mainly white Protestant men over the age of 21. The US Constitution was adopted in 1787, allowing states to decide who could vote. And in most states [00:05:00] that was still white male landowners.
[00:05:03] For the next hundred years or so people who were not white men were legally kept from the polls. In 1868, enslaved people were declared citizens by the 14th amendment, which meant that technically black men have the right to vote, but in practice that wasn't happening.
[00:05:21] In 1870, the 15th amendment made it illegal to deny men the vote based on race, but many states actively discouraged nonwhites from voting by enacting poll taxes, tests, or using outright violence and intimidation. After 70 years of national protest, women finally gained the right to vote in 1920, when the 19th amendment passed.
[00:05:45] But like black men, black women were discouraged from voting for decades. In 1952 people with Asian ancestry were granted the right to vote followed by Indigenous people 10 years later. And in 1965, the [00:06:00] Voting Rights Act gave Black Americans legal protection to exercise their right to vote, almost an entire century after it was constitutionally granted.
[00:06:10] Even though every eligible American has the legal right to vote, voter suppression still happens. It took the hard, hard work of people before us, for all Americans to be able to vote today. Our vote is our power. We have to use it.
[00:06:37] The Constitution is the Supreme law of the United States of America. It's pretty important. What does it actually say? And what does it have to do with voting and elections? To find out our friend Naomi asked an expert.
Ben Sheehan: [00:06:56] My name is Ben Sheehan. I'm an author and an activist and a [00:07:00] comedy producer. And I was very lucky to be getting civics lessons from my mom over the dinner table. And that's one of the things that got me interested in government and civics from, from a young age. And then I I've been working in the comedy world, making funny videos with, uh, comedians.
[00:07:20] Um, and, and I moved back into the political world because I realized through some of my, my political work that a lot of us don't know what's in the Constitution. It's written in English, but it's so old and antiquated and the punctuation's weird and the grammar is odd and it almost feels like you're reading a different language.
[00:07:38] So I wanted to try to take my passion for civics and government and use it to make this document a little more understandable.
Naomi: [00:07:47] What does the constitution actually say about voting and elections?
Ben Sheehan: [00:07:51] So the Constitution says that voting and elections are almost exclusively left up to the states. However, [00:08:00] Congress has the ability to make or alter those rules. So things like what states allow voting by mail, things like who, who can vote, who can't vote. Um, things like how many days of early voting you get, those are all decided by your state, but Congress has the ability to pass a law to, you know, override those rules.
Naomi: [00:08:23] Why do we have the electoral college?
Ben Sheehan: [00:08:27] In 1787, when all of these, uh, um, men, these white men were debating the constitution and writing it in, uh, in Philadelphia, they were worried that a lot of people didn't have enough information about the national political scene to pick a president, a president of a good character, somebody smart, because so many people were, were clued in and paying attention to their local politicians and their local leaders, but didn't necessarily have an understanding of national politics. [00:09:00] So that's one of the main reasons they came up with this idea to have people who were chosen, um, uh, you know, that, that didn't hold any office and, and, and were maybe more informed than everybody else to have good information who could then kick a national leader.
Naomi: [00:09:18] What happens if someone wins the popular vote, but not the electoral college?
Ben Sheehan: [00:09:22] Well then, because the system we have to pick presidents and vice presidents is the electoral college, it doesn't matter if you win the popular vote, because the thing that gives you the presidency or the vice presidency is the Electoral College. And the reason we're seeing this happen twice in two decades is because of the way the populations are, are dispersed. Back in 1929, Congress passed a law that said the number of representatives in the House was going to stay at 435, but that was, you know, 91 years ago.
[00:09:59] And [00:10:00] so the population has grown a lot since then. However, the number of representatives is stuck at 435 and that's most of what our electoral votes is based on. But what could happen has happened five times in the history of the United States, where the person has won the electoral vote, but lost the popular vote and twice in the last 20 years.
Naomi: [00:10:24] Why should people care about voting?
Ben Sheehan: [00:10:27] There's a lot more on the ballot than just the presidential election, because we also have representatives in the house. Every single representative, all 435 of them are up this year. They're up every two years. We also have 35 Senate elections. You have races for governor in about a fifth of the States.
[00:10:46] You have races for Attorney General, Secretary of State, your District Attorney. There are so many government jobs and it goes way beyond the President because a lot of the things we care about aren't necessarily influenced by the President. They're influenced [00:11:00] by state and, and more local races. So it's important to know who's on your ballot, what the jobs are that you're giving them, because at the end of the day, people, all of us, we're the bosses.
Bethany Van Delft: [00:11:14] A big thanks to Naomi and our constitution expert, Ben Sheehan. Thank you! There’s so much more really great stuff to hear from this interview. You can listen to it all at the ten news dot com!
[00:11:24] Time for your trivia question of the day,
[00:11:30] This past summer, what iconic American symbol knocked a government drone clear out of the sky?
[00:11:37] Was it A) the Statue of Liberty, B) Mount Rushmore, or C) a bald eagle? Did you guess it? The answer is c) a bald eagle. A bald eagle attacked the Phantom four pro advanced quad-copter while it was mapping [00:12:00] shoreline erosion on Lake Michigan. Witnesses saw the bird strike and fly away seemingly uninjured. As for the drone it's somewhere in the bottom of the Lake. Bye drone.
[00:12:17] Time's up! That's the end of The Ten for today. You can catch new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The Ten News is a co-production of Small, But Mighty Media in collaboration with Next Chapter Podcasts and distributed by iHeartRadio. The Ten News writing team is led by editorial director, Tracy Crooks with contributions from Stephen Tompkins and Pamela Kirkland. The creative producer is Jenner Pascua marketing is led by Jacob Bronstein with social media and web support by Steven Tompkins and Adam Pharr. Editing and sound designed by Pete Musto under the production direction of Jeremiah Tittle.
[00:12:56] Executive producer, Donald Albright and show creator, Tracy [00:13:00] Leeds Kaplan round out the team. If you have any questions about the show, a story idea, or a fun fact, you just want to share email us at helloatthetennews.com and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review The Ten News on Apple podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
[00:13:22] I'm Bethany Van Delft. And thanks for listening to The Ten News. Now go air high five, someone who voted today, or elbow them, or air high five with hand sanitizer or gloves, or just say, hey, thanks for voting.
