EPISODE TWO: REDESIGNING
THE ELECTION

HOSTS: John Hockenberry &
Adaora Udoji

Produced by WNYC Radio and PRI,

in association with the BBC
World Service, WGBH Boston, and the New York Times

DECEMBER 2007

[THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER:

All across the USA, this is Your Billion
Dollar President, with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji, from WNYC
and PRI.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Adaora, I can’t find Iowa and New Hampshire
anywhere.

ADAORA UDOJI:

You mean on a map, John?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

No, in the Constitution. I mean, where is
the part about Iowa and New Hampshire going first in the election?

ADAORA UDOJI:

It’s not there anywhere — John.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

So the Iowa caucuses came to prominence
when?

ADAORA UDOJI:

Nineteen-seventy-two.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Seventy-two? That’s just the other day.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Yeah, well, that’s when the Democrats —
they wanted a more intimate setting to debate the issues.

[BOTH AT ONCE]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Intimacy!

ADAORA UDOJI:

So Iowa moved its caucus to January. George
McGovern used the state to propel himself to the nomination, and by
1976 Iowa was the first step on the way to the White House for Jimmy
Carter.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Go George, go Jimmy.

ADAORA UDOJI:

[LAUGHS] Of course, then the GOP, they got
the message and moved its caucus to the same date. And not to be
outdone, of course, New Hampshire officials changed the law requiring
the state to hold the nation’s first primary, and that happened in
1977.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Dueling primaries. And the New Hampshire
primary has gone from March to January, and it keeps getting earlier.
The U.S. Constitution, of course, says nothing about how we elect
presidents. And when you look at the process, it looks more like some
tribal folk ritual.

ADAORA UDOJI:

And John, on Election Day itself, the
federal government has to hire two million people in more than
100,000 precincts, to deal with 125 million or more voters. It’s
different enough in every state to ask this question, which is,
mathematically, do we actually get it right when the votes are
counted across the country.

CHARLES STEWART:

There are people who go to the polls on
Election Day who cast ballots. And at the end of the day, something
has happened and it hasn’t been counted. From the research that we’ve
done at MIT and in other places, that can be around one million, two
million votes on Election Day.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

That’s Charles Stewart, political scientist
at MIT. Because of the state-to-state differences, we don’t really
know if that two million is a lot or a little. It all depends on
where the votes get lost.

Here’s a question: What if we changed this
process, actually decided on a system that wasn’t such an accident?

ADAORA UDOJI:

All this hour: small changes and big
changes, redesigns and reconfigurations. And I want to go first.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

I, I figured that you wanted to go first.

ADAORA UDOJI:

[LAUGHING] What if we didn’t start in Iowa,
but we picked another state to go first?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Hawaii.

ADAORA UDOJI:

No. How about Ohio, a four-letter state but
one which couldn’t be more different than Iowa? It’s rural, it’s
urban, it’s southern and northern.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

It’s big and diverse. An Ohio primary
starting off the election, what do you think? Your Billion Dollar
President hit the road to do some caucusing, sort of, in the state
where the 2004 election ended, in Ohio. And, you know, they were
still talking about that election around America’s watercooler in
northern Ohio on a cold morning in December.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

How’re you doing?

WOMAN:

Good morning.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

This is America’s watercooler. You got a
minute?

WOMAN:

Yeah, give me some water.

WOMAN:

Do you want some water?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Sure, come on over. I have a question for
you. You know, the first primary, you know where that is, right? The
caucus, right —

MAN:

In Iowa.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

In Iowa, right. It’s always first. It’s
always a big deal. Why not — Ohio?

MAN:

I’ll tell you what, any — any state
could go first. And if we make the case for why we should be first,
then I think it should be allowed.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Why will Ohioans do it better?

WOMAN:

I think that Ohioans do it better because
we’re more diverse. I don’t know how many blacks are in Iowa, but
last time I checked was what, two percent, if that?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

We’re asking people about the campaign here
in Lake County. You know, Lake County has picked the president every
time since 1960. What do you know that the rest of us don’t know?

MAN:

I didn’t know we were right, for sure.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Yeah. No, it’s true.

MAN:

I thought Iowa took care of all that.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

What if Ohio was the first primary?

WOMAN:

I think Ohio’s more of a Republican state.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You think so?

WOMAN:

I do.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Really?

WOMAN:

And I think that it might give the
Republicans a little — a little head, head start.

ADAORA UDOJI:

That woman you talked to, John, makes a very
good point because no Republican candidate has ever won the election
without winning Ohio. The voters have a knack in that state for
picking the right person.

The man with his finger on the pulse of
Ohio, the man who talks every day to Ohioans, is Dan Moulthrop. He’s
the host of Cleveland’s Sound of Ideas on WCPN. So Dan, what
would happen if Ohio went first?

DAN MOULTHROP:

You look at Iowa and there’s lots of
farmland and there’s very few large cities. You look at Ohio, you’ve
got Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati. You have a lot of
African-American voters. You’ve got a lot of immigrants. You’ve got a
huge diversity of not just those voters though, but also of the
issues that they care about.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

It’s interesting, even those three cities
you mentioned, Cleveland, Columbus -

ADAORA UDOJI:

Very different.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- and Cincinnati could not be more different
American cities.

DAN MOULTHROP:

That’s true. That’s sort of what makes Ohio
so interesting. People talk about it sometimes as thought there’s
five different states. You know, you’ve got northeast Ohio, northwest
Ohio. There’s Toledo - we didn’t even mention Toledo and Dayton, and
some of the smaller cities in Ohio.

You also have farmland. You know, you have
the Amish. You have the folks who live in Appalachia who are still
coal mining. You have — and you have all the urban issues, as
well.

ADAORA UDOJI:

What’s so interesting about that is perhaps
that really does explain why Ohio has managed to pick every president
the past 104 years, except for two.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Rural Ohio is overrepresented in Iraq in
terms of military service, so the Iraq issue is more represented in
Ohio. Foreclosures, more represented in Ohio. Fiscal urban issues,
more represented in Ohio.

DAN MOULTHROP:

Yeah. You talk about the war, it’s huge. It
was in 2005 that members of the Third Division 25^th
Marines - I’m sure I’ve said that wrong - but there were over 40 of
them killed in the summer of 2005. And they’re based right outside of
Cleveland in Brook Park.

And those issues about the war resonate so
strongly. No one has — seems to have any answers, though. And
if you ask Ohioans, they’re pretty much evenly split about end the
war now, bring them home or keep them there, finish the job. Nobody
knows what to do about it.

But forcing that issue — that would
very much be at the forefront right now.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

We’ve got lots of redesign ideas. Ohio going
first - that’s our little idea.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

And you’re going to hear more about how the
2008 election would be different if it started in Ohio throughout our
show.

But we’re going to start with some redesign
ideas from all across America. The first few come from a 21-person
team of election designers -

ADAORA UDOJI:

Mm-hmm?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- we assigned in Central Pennsylvania to
help us for this program.

NICOLE:

This is Nicole, and my suggestion for
improving national elections is that the people that are running
should have to wait a year before campaigning.

JACOB:

Hi. This is Jacob. My suggestion for
improving national election is that the president or candidate, be
tested on how to run a country. And then whoever could score best
would run our country.

P.J.

This is P.J. My suggestion for improving the
national elections is having the CIA investigate all of the
candidates’ dealings and stuff to make sure they’re not corrupt and
they haven’t been communicating with lobbyists, like whatever this
dude is who got, like, arrested a couple of years ago. Thanks.
Bye-bye.

ALEX:

This is Alex, and my suggestion for
improving the national election is having younger kids vote, like a
younger voting age, like 13 or 14, so you can hear kids’ opinions on
who the president should be.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Those are some fifth graders from Mrs. Jan
Kunkel’s class in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania. They created posters
with their terrific redesign proposals, some a little scary - some
not, for the 2008 election. Check them out at
Billiondollarpresident.org.

But, let’s stay in Iowa for just a moment.
All the folksy warmth to the caucuses that you see every four years,
the pictures of people’s living rooms, the potluck dinners; all that
retail politics that looks great on TV actually scares Tova Andrea
Wang. She studies democracy for the Century Foundation.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Let’s start with this, Tova: You’ve had some
thoughts about caucuses being undemocratic?

TOVA ANDREA WANG:

I do have some issues with the caucuses,
particularly the Iowa caucus. I know that Iowans are very devoted to
it and very jealously protect it. But there are a lot of problems
with it, from a voting rights perspective. There are a lot of people
who are cut out of the process.

Perhaps, first and foremost, are overseas
and military voters. All of these men and women who are serving
overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places are completely
unable to participate in caucuses.

There’s no absentee balloting in caucuses.
There’s no early voting. You have to be there at a certain time. on a
certain evening, and if you can’t make it for whatever reason, you
don’t have a vote.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You know my brother lives in Iowa? He lives
in Dubuque.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Uh huh?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And he’s got like pictures all over his
house of him with every presidential candidate, going back for
decades. I think that’s undemocratic right there.

ADAORA UDOJI:

That’s not a bad thing. That’s actually, in
my mind, a plus of the process. Wouldn’t you agree, Tova?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

It’s just because he lives in Iowa.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Well, no, that people actually get a chance
to see the candidate up close, ask the questions that they want, and
gauge this individual and decide whether or not they believe they are
fit to be president.

TOVA ANDREA WANG:

That’s great, but that has nothing to do
with needing it to be a caucus.

You can have a system where you have, you
know, a few small states, maybe not necessarily New Hampshire and
Iowa, dare I say, but a few small states where candidates could do
that kind of retail campaigning and have a primary.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Just have a vote, just have a regular vote.

TOVA ANDREA WANG:

Yeah. And if people really enjoy so much
having this deliberative process where they get to argue with their
neighbors and their friends and their coworkers, which some people
may like and some people may not, then let them do that. Do that.
Have a day of deliberation one day and then the next day, go and
vote.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Tova Andrea Wang studies elections at the
Century Foundation where she’s a democracy fellow.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Next up, Roberto Lovato. He’s a contributor
for The Nation as well as the author of the blog, Of
America.

ROBERTO LOVATO:

My idea goes to the heart of what democracy
is, I think, and what sovereignty means - what, if anything,
sovereignty means now. And so, the question I’d like to address of
mine is who is sovereign, who is the primary source of power in our
political process.

I think any person that’s awake right now
has a simple answer. It’s not the people. It’s corporate citizens. A
lot of people don’t realize that in the eyes of the law corporations
are now citizens, with the rights of citizens.

And because of that, these citizens use our
political process to determine what we eat, what we drink, the
quality of our air, the use of our public resources, who owns our
DNA, who influences whether and when we go to war, and what appears
on our political ballots and who gets elected.

So in the face of this, I propose redrafting
the Constitution to strip corporations of their corporate
citizenship, of their personhood. As long as you have corporate
citizenship, we, the people, is going to be dominated by corporations
and our process is going to be flooded with their money.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

That’s writer Roberto Lovato. And I like
this idea. It sounds radical, but actually it’s the only idea that
really gets to the issue of speech equals money, which has confounded
so much of the campaign finance law.

ADAORA UDOJI:

No, absolutely. And we certainly got an
earful about the money, the money: if you’re going to redesign the
election, then you’ve got to take a look at the way they raise the
money.

Of course we want all your election
redesigns. There are plenty ideas to get you thinking on our website
and more redesign still to come this hour.

ANNOUNCER:

This is Your Billion Dollar President at
Billion Dollar President dot org.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER:

You’re listening to Your Billion Dollar
President, with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji, from WNYC and PRI.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You know, Adaora, I mean, it’s worth
remembering that in 2008 Americans are going to exercise their most
precious right, the right to vote. In a process full of tradition and
shrouded in mystery, Americans make their choice after a long
campaign, with the fate of the world in the balance.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

When the votes are finally counted, the most
powerful nation in the world, the longest working democracy in
history, will have a president - a transition of power, a legacy of
freedom, a two-century-old light to all the nations of the world.

[MUSIC]

[ROBOT-LIKE VOICE]

All votes for president are non–binding.
Only electors in the Electoral College are permitted to choose the
President. Actual vote count can change by as many as millions of
votes without affecting outcome. System should not be used by people
applying for citizenship or people who might become citizens. Right
to vote not guaranteed for people who have moved since the last
election or people registered in wrong, redrawn or poorly managed
precincts.

Elections should only be administered by a
qualified partisan secretary of state. Voting more than once a day is
not recommended in all states. Actual voting counts may vary in Ohio
and Illinois. Recounts may vary in Florida. If problems persist,
consult your Supreme Court. Results not valid in Puerto Rico and
Guam.

America is a democracy, but there are some
side effects. I think that’s the message.

ADAORA UDOJI:

[LAUGHS] Well, let’s - we’re going to head
back to Cleveland. We thought we’d talk to some young people voting
in the election for the very first time. You remember the first time
you voted?

They are students at John Marshall High
School. Here’s Jewel Dunner, a 17-year-old senior.

JEWEL DUNNER:

Well, earlier we were talking. I was just
like they should — some of this they do like over the airwaves,
like over TV, like, and stuff like that, like you know how they order
stuff on TV, like vote that way. Or you could vote like online or
like, someone said like to mail in ballots.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Did you say vote on TV?

JEWEL DUNNER:

Yeah. Like, you know, how you order news on
TV? Something like that.

ADAORA UDOJI:

You mean like vote on demand.

JEWEL DUNNER:

Yeah, on demand. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHTER]

Something like that, yeah.

ADAORA UDOJI:

So now, let’s back up. Like how would that
work? Let’s think about that for a second.

JEWEL DUNNER:

Yeah. You know how they have the machines?
And some people can’t get out of their house to vote, so that would
help them.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Right.

JEWEL DUNNER:

They’d have their different categories,
easier mode like A or B arrows and stuff, and you can chose who you
want.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ADAORA UDOJI:

Vote on demand.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

I love that. It certainly deals with the
issue of how difficult it is for people to vote in certain states,
like Ohio. However [LAUGHS], I’m a little concerned that if it’s like
TiVo or your DVR on your cable system that you could actually set up
your votes for the next like 30 years.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Yeah, but then you wouldn’t even know who
the candidates are.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, and so some party could do that for
you.

ADAORA UDOJI:

You can’t vote for 30 years. [LAUGHS]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Some party could do that for your and your
household would be voting Democratic or Republican for, you know,
forever.

ADAORA UDOJI:

But we kept hearing over and over again
throughout this whole journey of doing this program that people said
if you could make voting a lot easier, you’d get a lot more people to
do it.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

No, that’s definitely true, I guess working
out the sort of bugs in the cable system. Imagine how long you’d have
to be on hold to get your vote changed. It’s tough.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER:

Your Billion Dollar President is produced in
association with the BBC World Service, WGBH Boston and The New
York Times.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

It’s worth noting though, all right, that
voting is actually hard. Running an election in a nation the size of
America is hard.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Mm-hmm.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You’ve got one day. You’ve got to hire two
million people, we said, in hundreds of thousands of precincts, 125
million voters coming to the poll, wanting to vote.

ADAORA UDOJI:

It’s a lot.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

The system to deliver that should not be
accidental. Professor Daniel Tokaji at Ohio State University just
completed studying what he likes to call “the election
ecosystems” across the Midwest, and he’s got a bunch of
recommendations about how things could be done much differently.

DANIEL TOKAJI:

In most states, elections are run by a
partisan secretary of state, a secretary of state who is elected as
the candidate of one major party or the other. Now, that presents an
inherent conflict of interest. It’s not just that the umpire is
taking sides, but the umpire is actually a player for one of the
teams.

So what we suggest is that states look to
more nonpartisan structures. An example is Wisconsin’s newly–enacted
system where they’ve got what’s called a Government Accountability
Board made up of six retired judges who are selected by bipartisan
consensus.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Out of curiosity, I know you’ve described
the election process, as in each day, as an ecosystem, that there is
this interdependency that exists. But is there one particular idea
that you think would have the most impact on the overall system?

DANIEL TOKAJI:

Election Day registration, which has
repeatedly been proven to increase turnout — there’s no
evidence contrary to the claims of some critics that it increases
fraud — Election Day registration also has the important
advantage of reducing reliance on provisional ballots, which
threatened to throw Ohio’s 2004 election into turmoil and would
surely have done so if the margin had been narrower than it actually
was.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Obviously, I think it’s easy for all of us
to forget at the end of the day you’re talking about human beings -

DANIEL TOKAJI:

Yeah.

ADAORA UDOJI:

- who are facilitating that culture, who are
actually working those machines. And in your view, it’s critical that
those people be better trained.

DANIEL TOKAJI:

Well, that’s absolutely right, and I’m so
glad that you raised this. I mean, I’ve talked about two long-term
changes, but if we want to talk about short-term changes, I mean,
things that are likely to make a difference in this coming election –
[LAUGHS] and the election season is already upon us - poll worker
recruitment and training would have to be at the top of the list.

This is one area that is absolutely
essential to a smooth-running election and one where there are huge
problems in virtually every urban area that we looked at in our
report. We’re talking, you know, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland,
Detroit. All these places have really serious problems with getting
enough able poll workers there and getting them trained properly.

And, you know, it’s something that anybody
who happens to be listening to this broadcast and is wondering what
can I do, well, that’s something you can do; volunteer to be a poll
worker. And if more people would do that, that would at least help
make our election system run better.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

All right, well Daniel Tokaji, thank you
very much.

DENNIS OKAJI:

Thank you so much for having me.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Daniel Tokaji, election law professor at
Ohio State University. We could have an enormous impact on the
election if we just made the polls run better.

ADAORA UDOJI:

And we found someone who couldn’t agree more
with that. Fannie M. Lewis is a councilwoman in Cleveland. She’s been
at it for more than 20 years. And her experience fixing problems at
the polls in 2004 was actually documented in a short film titled No
Umbrella.

[FILM CLIP]

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Yeah, my name is Fannie Lewis. Who am I
talkin’ to? I’m sitting here now, and we got people jammed up
against the wall. So we need some voting machines and some workers
out here.

Hello? The voting is heavy out here. We got
some precincts that have already voted 150. Yeah hi, you’re talking
to Fannie Lewis. How you doing? Fannie M. Lewis, councilman ward
leader. I need 10 more voting devices out here at Addison. The line
is at least a hour and a half. And I need some more workers.

I knew the votin’ was going to be
heavy. It’s like a man praying for rain and don’t take an umbrella.

ADAORA UDOJI:

So Fannie, what went wrong that day in 2004?

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Well, the thing of it is, is that they
didn’t check to see how many people were in the precinct that was
registered to vote. And you had elderly people and folks with babies
who was comin’ in to vote and it was raining slightly and
people had to stand out in the rain.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, we saw you in there. I mean, you were
fighting [LAUGHS] like crazy. I mean, there were some —

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Yeah, well, I was -

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- angry people that were -

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

I was trying to get them to go and get the
voting machines. The voting machines was about 12 blocks away, and
all they had to do was go and get them and bring them and set them
up.

When they did bring them and set them up,
they did not have the inserts that go into the machines that people
have to vote on.

ADAORA UDOJI:

The actual ballots.

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Yeah, the actual ballot, yes. So they had to
go back and get them, and —

ADAORA UDOJI:

Which doesn’t sound so hard really. I mean,
you knew you had a lot of people there in line, you knew you needed
more machines and you knew you needed more ballots. So what went
wrong?

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Well, the point of it — the people who
brought the machines did not know how to set them up. And that was
just ridiculous.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Now, you’ve been —

ADAORA UDOJI:

You kept saying that day that it was like
you had prayed for rain and then nobody brought an umbrella.

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Well, the thing of it is that it had always
been — trying to get people out to vote, and we had did a
yeoman job of talking to people about coming to vote. And people came
out to vote.

But evidently the Board of Elections didn’t
expect a lot of people to come out. That’s when — that’s
where that come from: you pray for rain and don’t bring the
umbrella.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, Councilwoman, what gives you the
patience to hang in there for a whole day?

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Because you work for people; you work for
people and you know how important it is. Some people said if I don’t
vote, I am devastated. Some people don’t miss no elections. And some
people don’t care whether they do or don’t.

You have a population that really cares,
especially your elderly people, like my age, who spent a lifetime
wanting to vote, who had to go through the struggle of not being able
to vote.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

All right, but we can’t have one of you at
every precinct in the United States.

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

No, you can’t.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

So what do we do to change this now?

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

You have to educate people. You have to
allow people to be educated. The thing of it is that the Board of
Elections need to take time. They need to start training people and
making sure that they are well trained in handling the instruments
that they have to handle.

We went from the paper ballot to the
computer ballot. They even lost some of the keys that go to the
computer ballot when they got ready to close up at night and put the
machine away. People didn’t know how to do that.

You need to do massive training out in the
community. In fact, you can even do it in the schools. You can even
go to the schools and train high school students how to deal with
that. My grandkids know how to vote on electronic machines.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Well, let’s bring it back around to
this next coming election. So, 2008 November rolls around, Election
Day. You wake up, what are you going to do?

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

I’ll go vote, if the good Lord is willing.

ADAORA UDOJI:

And then are you going to go back to some of
your precincts and make sure everyone’s getting the ballot?

FANNIE M. LEWIS:

Oh, I always check. I always check the
precincts to see how they’re doing and whether they have any
problems. I do that. As the ward leader, that’s my role. Yes. People
have my phone number and if they have a problem, they can call me and
I’ll call the Board of Elections.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Councilwoman, Cleveland legend Fannie M.
Lewis, representing the Seventh Ward. She’s so devoted to the right
to vote and yet, sees these kinds of problems in every election.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Oh, exactly. In local elections this
November there were some serious problems there. They had about an 18
percent turnout. And in addition to that, the electronic voting
machines had some problems. The computer server counting the votes
crashed twice, delaying the result until noon the next day.

So just imagine what that would be like if
you were talking about a 60 percent-plus turnout.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Oh, it makes me worry about 2008. I got
another little idea for you - Project White House from the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop. Fifteen contestants, chosen by celebrity
politicians. They get a different political challenge. They need to
broker a truce between Rosie and Donald, or elect a suitable bride
for George Clooney. Each week one contestant is voted off the show by
the call-in audience. The last person standing gets a four-year,
all-expense-paid trip to the White House. That’s from Joe Blair in
Iowa.

ADAORA UDOJI:

From fiction writers to another election
redesign from a John Marshall High School student in Cleveland,
Francisca Ong.

FRANCISCA ONG:

Instead of having an election day, we should
have an election week, so we have, like, longer voting time, ’cause
some people have to work and do other stuff with their busy life.
And another way we were talking about is changing, like, the season –
so like move it up to August, cause the weather is kind of crazy in
December and November.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Any idea, John, why we vote on the second
Tuesday in November?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Because that’s Election Day?

ADAORA UDOJI:

Well, that’s part of it, but it was a law
past in 1845 mostly because the country was full of farmers, and they
wanted to get past the harvest and they didn’t want anyone traveling
on a Sunday because that was a holy day. So they figured the second
Tuesday in November, harvest is done and people can worship on Sunday
and still travel. And travel. They had to travel far distances to
vote.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

1845 – maybe it could use a little bit
of an update. But thinking about the election as a whole, the whole
vote tally that takes place that second Tuesday in November that’s
[LAUGHING] so important to the farmers, how do we know how accurate
it is? I mean, when the final tally is in, are we dead on, or is
there some margin of error?

MIT professor Charles Stewart focused on
that question.

CHARLES STEWART:

That’s a really hard thing to calculate.
What we do know is there are people who go to the polls on Election
Day who cast ballots, and at the end of the day something has
happened and it hasn’t been counted. The hanging chad business in
2000 is probably the most famous example of that.

From the research that we’ve done at MIT and
in other places, that can be around one million, two million votes on
Election Day.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And that’s nationwide?

CHARLES STEWART:

That’s nationwide.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well but I’m doing the numbers here a little
bit, and more than 100 million people voted in 2000.

CHARLES STEWART:

Right.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

If you’re talking about a margin of error of
roughly a million votes that kind of vanish into the ether -

CHARLES STEWART:

Right.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- that’s a better than one percent margin of
error. That exceeds the accuracy of most polls that I’ve ever seen.

CHARLES STEWART:

Yeah, that one percent is a relatively small
margin of error, absolutely.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

So we should feel good about that, maybe.

CHARLES STEWART:

You would feel maybe better if you could be
convinced that those so-called lost votes were because of just sort
of innocent mistakes and what–not.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

How close does an election have to be that
it, in effect, statistically opens up a whole kind of control panel
for people who want to manipulate the process and do things that,
under normal circumstances, might have no impact at all, but in a
close election can be decisive?

CHARLES STEWART:

If you wanted to really manipulate the vote,
you would, one, have to know that it was close, and you would have to
know that it was close within just a couple thousand votes, say, in
the presidential election.

And then you would need to, you know, get
access to thousands, potentially tens of thousands of voting machines
or voting precincts. And that just seems to me, you know, a pretty
tall order for nefarious people who would want to rig an election in
a huge way.

ADAORA UDOJI:

If you assign a certain percentage in a
state where it’s close, then doesn’t it have a greater impact on the
credibility of the end result?CHARLES STEWART:

It could conceivably, and that was, of
course, why the election in Florida in 2000 was so controversial,
because it turned out Florida was one of the states that had among
the very highest of the lost vote rates.

And so, you know, you could argue,
specifically in Florida in 2000, it really did make a difference.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Or, in Ohio in 2004.

CHARLES STEWART:

It could have. Ohio in 2004 was, by this
measure at least, run much better than the election in Florida in
2000. So it’s less clear to me whether — if literally every
vote had been counted in Ohio, if things would have turned out
differently.

ADAORA UDOJI:

You’re making a lot of assumptions, because
the whole process really starts way before the voter actually gets in
the booth.

CHARLES STEWART:

Right.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Somebody’s got to make a list. They’ve got
to make sure that people who actually registered to vote are on that
list. So in a close state, like say Ohio or Florida, it’s a little
bit of not getting the people on the list. It’s a little bit of not
counting the votes. It’s a little bit of some machines breaking down.
If you add all of that up, it’s potentially going to hurt the end
result.

CHARLES STEWART:

That’s a really good point. If you think
about voting as a chain, which starts, you know, the moment the voter
wakes up on Election Day and ends at the end of the day when that
vote is counted, there’re a number of steps along the way in which
the chain can be broken.

And it looks like that actually the voting
machines themselves are not really all that weak a link. Where the
weak links are, are in some of these other areas you’re talking
about, particularly, you know, getting the voting list up. If you’re
not on the list, in most states you can’t vote.

And so, to the degree that we have any hard
numbers about why people don’t get to vote, it turns out that things
like not appearing on the registration list when you thought you were
on the list, or showing up and discovering that there’s a really long
line, or that the poll workers are incompetent, those are things that
are more likely to, you know, in a sense, steal your vote than
actually, you know, having a hanging chad or maybe at the end of the
day someone not quite counting your vote the right way.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

So, you know, those errors accumulate up the
chain and so when you get to the machine it’s kind of a
garbage-in/garbage-out situation, if the list wasn’t right to begin
with.

Quick question — are you saying that
if we’re talking about an election that’s down to one million votes
or less that it’s basically flipping a coin?

CHARLES STEWART:

I’m not saying a million votes and less. I’m
saying 50,000, 20,000 in a large state, then you’re flipping a coin.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Professor of Political Science at MIT, and
an expert on election technologies and practices, Charles Stewart.

So good news, because statistically we’re
actually within one percent, if you look at the election as a whole,
but the bad news is we don’t know how significant that one to two
million votes is. It depends on state to state.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Just to concentrate on the good news, it
actually was shocking to me that the margin of error was just that
small. We’re so used to three, four percent either way that getting
it down to one percent sounded pretty good, although I understand
it’s not without questions, ultimately. I still am surprised it isn’t
greater.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY

Take away for me is how the errors go up the
chain and there are so many weak links in the chain as you even get
to the voting booth.

ADAORA UDOJI

Okay, more redesigns on the way.

[MUSIC DOWN AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER:

Your Billion Dollar President is produced in
partnership with BBC World Service, WGBH and the New York Times.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER:

You’re listening to Your Billion Dollar
President, with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ADAORA UDOJI:

Well, John, we’re redesigning the election.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And thank goodness for that. And America has
responded. They’ve stepped up to the plate with a flood of ideas. But
one thing kind of bothered me when we were back in Cleveland. I mean,
we didn’t check with any local celebrities.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Mm-hmm.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And I wanted to fix that. So on the way out
of town, I stopped over at the home of cartoonist Harvey Pekar. You
saw the movie American Splendor?

ADAORA UDOJI:

Yes.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You’re familiar with Harvey’s work?

ADAORA UDOJI:

Cartoonist.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

He’s a cultural icon. He’s got his sort of
eyes on the culture of Ohio and Cleveland. And he had some really
rather controversial things to say about his own state.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You have an audience, a nationwide, a global
audience, really, for your work, your cartoons, your writing, your
graphic novels, your graphic, you know, storytelling. How do we
mobilize that to make the point that we need better-educated voters
to make this democracy work?

HARVEY PEKAR:

You run this tape that you’re making. That’s
one thing, ‘cause I’m telling you -

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You reach more people than we reach, okay?

HARVEY PEKAR:

Well, what do you, what do you want me to
do? I’m gonna give you — a cartoon?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Yeah.

HARVEY PEKAR:

I’ll give you, I’ll give you a comic
page that you can put on your, you know, your website.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You would do that?

HARVEY PEKAR:

I would do that. I would do that for you.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You would do that for us?

HARVEY PEKAR:

Yeah, yeah, I understand I’m supposed to get
paid a little for it.

[BOTH AT ONCE]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

This is — this is a great, a great
country.

HARVEY PEKAR:

Not that, you know, like I - the milk of
human kindness flows through my veins or anything like that.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And that’s not what I feel when I look at
your face, the milk of human kindness.

HARVEY PEKAR:

Nah.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

I don’t, I don’t — that’s not
the first impression that I get.

HARVEY PEKAR:

That’s right.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

No.

HARVEY PEKAR:

Some other kind of liquid or something.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

[LAUGHS] All right, give us a couple of
panels here.

HARVEY PEKAR:

Okay. I say, you guys are coming over to my
house.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Yeah.

HARVEY PEKAR:

So I say, come on in. What are you guys
here to report on? You think Ohio was such a pivotal state?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

We do.

HARVEY PEKAR:

And, and somebody else says, what if they
held the first primary in Ohio, would the outcome be different than
in Iowa?

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Good question.

HARVEY PEKAR:

And I would say I don’t know what, what
would happen, but I do know that, you know, the people in Ohio have
not made very good choices over the last several decades.

Most of the people in Ohio are pretty much
like they are all over the country, average. And average is dumb.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, certainly nobody’s going to call
Harvey Pekar an optimist, whether he’s describing the American
electorate or the -

ADAORA UDOJI:

[LAUGHS]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- people of [LAUGHS] Ohio. The comic he did
for us is actually available on our website at
Billiondollarpresident.org. It’s actually terrific.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Okay. Check it out, a bit of a pessimist, as
you said.

We’re going to head out to Los Angeles where
we’re going to find a man who’s actually a bit of an optimist. Joe
Hicks — he’s a community leader and activist, currently
vice-president of Community Advocates, Inc. Joe, so give us your
redesign.

JOE HICKS:

There’s a lot of ways to come at this. And I
guess there are a lot of, you know, people who are very critical of
the electoral process, and we all love to, you know, whine and moan
about it but, you know, there’s another way to look at this.

And I guess we could step back and say,
well, you know what, is anything really actually wrong here? I mean,
we keep electing some pretty impressive leaders. We can go back to
certainly Truman and Reagan and Clinton, and all these people have
been, you know, some of the best leaders the world has seen.

So I guess in that light, there’s another
way perhaps to come at this by saying, well, if it ain’t broke, why
are we trying to fix it?

ADAORA UDOJI:

Particularly, as someone — as a former
official of the Southern Christian Leadership Committee, does it
concern you about some of the allegations that have made, the long
lines in some of our urban communities that affect people of color,
or any of the other real issues that have cropped up, particularly in
the last couple of elections?

JOE HICKS:

Well, of course, but those, again, are
practical kind or maybe I should just say functional kinds of issues
we need to deal with about how at various polling places, you know,
the system works. And that’s about enforcement of electoral laws that
I think we certainly need to take a look at and make sure that nobody
is getting excluded.

My God, we already have extremely low
turnout rates, and we want to make sure that anybody that wants to
vote can vote.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Doesn’t it disturb you that we begin with
Iowa and New Hampshire? I mean, nobody decided that. That wasn’t in
the Constitution.

JOE HICKS:

Well, of course — yes!

[BOTH AT ONCE]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

We didn’t like set that down and go this is
a great idea. I mean, wouldn’t it be better to start with some other
state?

JOE HICKS:

John, listen, I could make some other
arguments here that, a) we need to completely eliminate the primary
process. It’s foolish. It’s stupid. It results in a coronation
process as opposed to the –

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Hey, go there. Come on. Like work that. Work
that. [LAUGHS]

JOE HICKS:

The olden days, we had the back room,
bare-knuckled stuff –

[ADAORA LAUGHING]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Yeah!

JOE HICKS:

— and people smoking cigars, and there
was real struggle about who the party was going to nominate.

The other thing is clearly we’re taking too
long. This process, you know, people are falling asleep here.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

[LAUGHS]

JOE HICKS:

Let’s, let’s shorten the process
up. There’s no reason why this thing should take that long. Even
though the people think the primary system is good, nonetheless,
there’s no serious position on the table that’s going to eliminate
the primaries.

So we got what we got. And the question is,
is it that bad we need to be really thinking about whether or not we
should fool around and somehow change it?

My argument is it has served us well. It
continues to serve us well. Unless we’re going to radically come at
this and say, you know what, let’s go back to the old days - some of
the old days weren’t so good because Adaora, [LAUGHS] I’m sure you
know, that some folks somehow always seemed to get left by the
wayside in that, you know, process.

[TWO AT ONCE]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Oh, what do you mean “I’m sure you
know, Adaora”?

ADAORA UDOJI:

[LAUGHS]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

What’s that?

JOE HICKS:

Well, you know, listen -

ADAORA UDOJI:

Well, once upon a time, black people could
not vote, and the only people who could vote, in fact, were
landowners. And that essentially excluded a great proportion of the —

JOE HICKS:

And certainly women just trying to -

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Were you alive in the early 1800s?

ADAORA UDOJI:

No, but I’m aware of our history, John —

— which is important.

JOE HICKS:

Adaora and I are both 114 years old.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Yes.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Okay, fine.

ADAORA UDOJI:

No. It’s important to put it all into
context — Joe, wouldn’t you agree? And, I guess, are you
convinced that the system as it exists - it’s one thing to say, okay,
we have what we have so let’s try to make it work as best as we can,
but do you think it’s actually fair?

Do you think that the will of the people are
actually reflected in the end result, given the process by which we
elect that president?

JOE HICKS:

Yeah, Adaora, I think it actually is. You
know, see, I’m not one of these that thinks we need to coddle voters.
If you can’t get your lazy rear end up out of a seat on a given
Tuesday in November and actually vote - see, if you don’t vote - I’m
telling people that I consciously know have not voted, shut up, you
don’t have the right to complain.

If you didn’t engage the process and take
your lazy rear end down and vote, then just shut up and go sit and
accept your fate, because you didn’t engage the process.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Joe Hicks, vice-president of Community
Advocates, Incorporated.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You know, I love Joe, but I just think he
can’t be so confident about the system doesn’t need to be fixed.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Well, there’s an argument here. Charles
Stewart says the margin of error’s not so bad. Joe Hicks says, look,
we end up with decent leaders and, you know, the majority of people
vote, and this is what we get.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

I’d like to look more closely at the decent
leaders’ criteria there, maybe, before I accept that wholly.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Yeah, let’s move on before we get on a
tangent. Next up, Lisa Renee Ward. She’s a blogger in Ohio with this
idea:

LISA RENEE WARD:

If I had one thing that I could change, I
would switch to instant runoff voting or ranked choice voting. Right
now with the way we have the two traditional system, what happens is
people feel as if they’re forced into the lesser of two evil votes.
And you have a lot of talk about spoilers, where if you have a third
party candidate running, that that candidate would be a spoiler.

With the instant runoff, what you would do
is if there were three candidates, you would rank in order of your
first favorite candidate and your second favorite candidate.

And then what would happen is if the person
you ranked as first didn’t get enough votes, the votes that you made
for your second choice would then count, which ends up creating a
larger mandate for a candidate who is elected.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

We’ve got a link to Lisa Renee’s blog on our
website.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER:

Your Billion Dollar President, on the air
and online, at Billiondollarpresident.org.

ADAORA UDOJI:

So, so far we’ve heard from a lot of folks
about redesign ideas - MIT professors, high school students, fifth
graders. How about adults who come to this country? They work very
hard to become citizens.

Two of our friends at New America Media,
Sandip Roy and Odette Keeley, are voting for the very first time in
this presidential election. Sandip, what do you think of the system?

SANDIP ROY:

I think that the biggest thing that would
actually help elections here and make you feel like your vote counted
was to be able to increase voter turnout, as opposed to constantly
feed into this vicious circle about an ever–shrinking, ever
more sort of homogenous minority elects the people who end up serving
in office, and the people who go to the polls look nothing like the
rest of America.

Every time India goes to the polls, you can
see these stories ad nauseum that come out here in the papers about
the world’s largest democracy going to the polls and you see an
elephant carrying ballot boxes and the -

ADAORA UDOJI:

[LAUGHS]

SANDIP ROY:

- toothless old 103-year-old woman being
helped into the polling station, you know, the same 103-year-old
woman who’s been voting for the last 50 years.

But [LAUGHS], but in America, sometimes you
don’t have that kind of sense of sort of people’s democracy
excitement about it. And, of course, in India, Election Day is a
holiday.

ODETTE KEELEY:

Exactly.

SANDIP ROY:

Maybe make a holiday. Make it something to
actually look forward to, as opposed to this duty you need to squeeze
in, in between your work.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Odette, you’re eligible to vote in next
year’s presidential election. Will you?

ODETTE KEELEY:

Certainly. What alienates, Adaora,
first-time foreign voters like myself, and Sandip is just — as
you said, the complexity of the process, you know, and surely Sandip
here is probably laughing — the one thing that helped me is a
seventh-grade Junior Scholastic that finally defined what the
difference is between a primary and a caucus.

But I completely agree with Sandip about it
being a national holiday, as it is in the Philippines as well,
because the —

SANDIP ROY:

You know, we immigrants, we just love
holidays.

[LAUGHTER]

We think there aren’t enough of them in
America.

[LAUGHTER]

ODETTE KEELEY:

And, of course, a lot of is the logistics.
People trek from the provinces, line up at the schools at 4 a.m. And,
of course, there’s a lot of capacity here. The schools don’t have to
shut down. They’re not voting centers.

But if there is just that intrinsic value of
casting your vote and it’s something that the country needs to stop
and think and devote time to, I think it will really make a
difference.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Let me ask you this. Obviously, you’ve
identified a lot of problems with this system. What do you like about
it? Obviously, you both went through a lot to get your American
citizenship. Sandip, what’s your thought here?

SANDIP ROY:

You know, when I see somebody who might be
the next president of the United States, whether it’s a Hillary
Clinton or a Giuliani or a Romney, go into some senior center or some
icy diner somewhere and pressing the flesh, it does fill me with some
sense of awe and marvel that this is the person who will make —
sort of determine the future of the world in a way and yet is still
out there on some September, October morning trying to get the vote
of those few people who are clustered over their steaming cups of
coffee. That is really impressive to me.

ADAORA UDOJI:

That’s Sandip Roy and Odette Keeley of New
America Media.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Jonathan Lykes, am I to understand that you
believe the U.S. election system should be redesigned?

JONATHAN LYKES:

Yes, that’s it.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

All right you are a high school student at
Shaw High School in East Cleveland. We’ve been asking all kinds of
people this hour to redesign the election. What’s your idea? Pitch
it. Come on. Pitch it to us.

JONATHAN LYKES:

This is my idea, okay.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Okay. Let’s hear it.

JONATHAN LYKES:

I don’t think anybody should be able to
vote, unless they have a college education.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

[LAUGHS] Get out!

VOICE:

Oh–ho!

JONATHAN LYKES:

It has to be, it has to be explained in more
detail, because not only do they have to have a college education but
our country has to offer free education for everyone at a college
level.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Why do you think that’s important? What
difference does it make? There are certainly lots of smart people -

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

That’s radical.

ADAORA UDOJI:

- who have never gone to college.

JONATHAN LYKES:

Well, I think through the college education,
one thing they should offer is some kind of class to inform people,
because I think one of the greatest problem in America is people
aren’t informed who they’re voting for, and that’s how we get people
like Bush.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, let’s, let’s —

[LAUGHTER]

All right, well anyway, let’s keep it out of
the party system for a second.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Let’s - who went to college, by the way,
Yale.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Yale.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

All right. And he —

JONATHAN LYKES:

Well, we won’t get into that. [LAUGHS]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Yeah, yeah, so let’s - I mean, everybody
can’t go to a traditional four-year liberal college, or nor would
they necessarily want to. But you’re saying offer a free
post-high-school education that would lead to, I guess, a college
degree, maybe a vocational -

JONATHAN LYKES:

Yes.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- degree, something like that, but also at
the end of it, your right to vote.

JONATHAN LYKES:

Yes.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And that would be offered free, a four-year
program?

JONATHAN LYKES:

A four-year program.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

A four-year program.

JONATHAN LYKES:

And it would make our country better. If you
give everybody a free education in the country and offer it and make
it a part of our culture —

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Really —

JONATHAN LYKES:

— make it a part of our society to go
–

ADAORA UDOJI:

But what if he —

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

He’s got a great point. Wait, he’s got a
great point. And there is an example of what he is talking about. You
know what it is, right?

ADAORA UDOJI:

No, I don’t.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

The G.I. Bill.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Oh.

JONATHAN LYKES:

Yes.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Going back from World War II, it had one of
the biggest impacts —

[BOTH AT ONCE]

ADAORA UDOJI:

But it wasn’t mandatory, though.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

It wasn’t mandatory, but it was —
offered free education to every veteran and transformed the United
States educationally. That’s an interesting point.

ADAORA UDOJI:

But what about those people who don’t
necessarily want to go to college? Perhaps you have some sort of
trade. Maybe you’re an artist or you’re a hair stylist or you’re a
mechanic, so you go to some sort of trade school, but you don’t
necessarily spend four years in a college studying things that will
never matter to you in your life.

JONATHAN LYKES:

The trade might be important, but I think
one good thing about college, especially one specific school is
Columbia in New York, they have a core group of classes that they
require all their students to take. And no matter what, I think that
core helps you educationally.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Shaw High School student senior, Jonathan
Lykes from Cleveland, who hopes to attend the University of Chicago
next fall.

ADAORA UDOJI:

Okay, this year there is an actual redesign
that we are going to be able to witness.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Hmm!

ADAORA UDOJI:

They’re calling it Tsunami Tuesday. There
are a record number of states holding primaries or caucuses on the
very same day, and we are talking about February 5th, 2008.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Mary Ann Giordano is a deputy editor for
politics at The New York Times. It’s the first time that we’ve
had a primary, a kind of super-duper primary, where more than 20
states are polling on the same day.

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

That’s right. It’s almost a mini-election,
and more than half the delegates will be selected on that day.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

As close to a national primary as we’ve ever
gotten.

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

That’s right.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

How do you think that affects the campaign
leading into February 5th? How do you think it’s already affected
Iowa and New Hampshire?

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

Each of the candidates have handled it a
little bit differently. I think that Rudy Giuliani went into this
race with a national strategy heading into that super-duper Tuesday
and also putting Florida’s primary, which is a little earlier, high
up on his calendar and his goal.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

So he redesigned his campaign based on this
February 5th.

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

I think that’s so. And I don’t know if he’s
having some regrets about that, because it seems, though, that for
all of the redesign, Iowa and New Hampshire are still incredibly
important in this election.

And the candidates are all realizing that,
perhaps because the calendar is so compressed that they need to show
well in those states going into any of the remaining primaries.

ADAORA UDOJI:

But doesn’t that speak to, then, the fact
that Iowa and New Hampshire become ever more national stages in a way
that they never had to, because there was a much longer process by
which the state-by-state vote was taking place?

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

I think that’s absolutely so. I mean, and
the irony of all this moving up the calendar is that they’ve become
more important, because if you go either way, I think, for the
candidates, they can do really well in those two states, and then
that is what sticks in the minds of the voters in the other states -
South Carolina, Florida, Michigan - that follow. Or they can very
quickly discount that because they’re already voting again and they
already know who they’re going for.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

I guess the real question for any candidate
is on February 6th, the day after this super-duper primary -

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

Mm-hmm —

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- what does it mean to have said, I won that
day? You would have had to have done well in which states to say, I
won?

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

California is a huge player in that day. I
think, though, that there’s a very good chance that the candidates
could come out of that day with the vote very split. And we may not
even know.

Some people think we’ll know more on the
Democratic side but that the Republicans who are in disarray going
into the caucuses may still be in disarray when we come out of
February 5th.

The conventional wisdom would have it that
no matter what happens in Ohio and New Hampshire that whoever has the
big money will then go on to the big states and be able to really
make a mark.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

You sort of misspoke there. You said Ohio
and New Hampshire are more important going in.

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

I’m sorry.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well no, it’s fine. We’ve been talking about
what if Ohio went first the whole —

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

See, I knew that. [LAUGHS]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

We’ve having an impact! We are having an
impact —

MARY ANN GIODANO:

Yeah, I knew that. [LAUGHS]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

— on the deputy on a deputy editor of
The New York Times.

[LAUGHTER]

We’ve started a groundswell. We’ve been
thinking about this for the, for the last couple of weeks.

ADAORA UDOJI:

For weeks.

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

I would think a primary in Ohio would be one
of the most interesting and maybe national-changing events, you know.
I really think that’s a great idea.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

We may get it. Mary Ann Giordano, thank you.

MARY ANN GIORDANO:

Thank you.

MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

So that, that — that, that the GOP,
they’ll have a candidate after February 5^th?

ADAORI UDOJI:

No, I don’t think so.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Democrats?

ADAORI UDOJI:
Yes, I think so.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:
[LAUGHS] All
the safe money.

ADAORI UDOJI:

All the safe money.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Adaori Udoji taking the safe money.

ADAORI UDOJI:

[LAUGHS] I’m goin’ with the
crowsd on this one.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Yeah, kind of frightening [??]

ADAORI UDOJI:

I’m going with the crowds. [LAUGHING]

As we mentioned, we have been reaching out
to America for your election redesigns. And the response has been
enormous.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:
Great.

ADAORI UDOJI:

There are far more ideas than we could ever
fit in this tiny radio program. So we’ve posted a whole bunch
of them on our website, Billiondollarpresident.org. There you can
hear designer Michael Bierut make the case for Election Day being a
holiday —

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:
With
tailgating.

ADAORI UDOJI:

— with tailgating and barbecues, and
actor Sam Waterston of Law and Order fame tell us about his
election redesign.

Also, check out the video of America’s
watercooler — on the road.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:
And the fiction
writers at Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop at the University of
Iowa, run by Ethan Canin had some insane, wonderful ideas from
fiction writers about redesigning the election. You can see those.

And, you know, good luck to all those people
in Iowa. I mean, they’re the ones that are starting it for us.

ADAORI UDOJI:

Good luck to them. And we must give our
special thanks this hour to ideastream, WCPN in Cleveland for being
such gracious hosts while we were there. I’m Adaora Udoji.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And I’m John Hockenberry. Happy
holidays, and happy voting, America.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]

ANNOUNCER:
Your Billion Dollar
President, from WNYC and PRI, produced in association with the BBC
World Service, WGBH and the New York Times.

[END OF BROADCAST]

*****