Jessica Huseman

And all of it is happening under an administration that has tried to take control of elections away from states and away from local governments where they are supposed to be under the laws of the United States.

With me now is Jessica Huseman, editorial director of VoteBeat.

Jessica, thanks for being here.

Thanks so much.

I think that we may see some isolated events at, as you said in your intro, pretty democratic leaning urban areas.

But I think most people will not see the type of chaos that we fear may happen in a worst case scenario.

All right, Jessica Huseman, Editorial Director at VoteBeat.

Thanks for being here.

Pleasure to have you.

Joining us via the Zoom are Derek L. Bowens, Durham County's Director of Elections, Jessica Huseman, Editorial Director at VoteBeat, a nonprofit newsroom focusing on elections as well as voting.

She joins us from Dallas, Derek on the line from Durham, and Michael Bitzer, Professor of Politics and History at And he's the director of the Center for North Carolina Politics and Public Service at Catawba College.

Thank you all for joining us virtually.

And it's because of the lack of knowledge, the lack of awareness about how different states run their elections in very

different ways.

And Jessica Huseman, just a reminder, we have decentralized elections in this country, which is a wonderful thing, as Professor Bitzer notes there.

But from your seat, what are you tracking, thinking about in terms of major areas of potential concern, administration of elections this fall?

They really have to hit everything.

Well, to bolster what you were saying there, I had Jessica Huseman on the show last week from VoteBeat, and she was basically like, Texans don't vote.

We're bad at voting here.

And also, we make it really hard to vote.

Hey, uh, we've got a great episode coming up here.

Jessica Huseman is gonna join us.

She's the editorial director at votemeat.org. We're gonna have a wonderful conversation with her about election security, election integrity, and what the threats actually are versus what sometimes people perceive them to be.

It's gonna be a great conversation.

In a BBC News report on October eleventh, uh, Kate Whynall looks at Prime Minister Andy Burnham's statement that after taking office, he was given a very clear answer that Russia had interfered in the twenty sixteen Brexit referendum.

But the key takeaway of, of this and a couple of other pieces our, our readers will find in the newsletter this week, uh, this will actually be very familiar to our listeners, that Russia may have tried to interfere, but trying to influence an election or referendum and actually changing the outcome are two very different things.

And speaking of elections, let's go right now to our conversation with Jessica Huseman.

[upbeat music] And joining us now is Jessica Huseman.

All right, let's bring in the roundtable to talk about the politics of this.

Jessica Huseman is here, the editorial director at votebeat.org. Gabby Berenbaum, Washington correspondent for the Texas Tribune, and our friend, as always, Abby Livingston, contributor at Puck News.

Jessica, I wanna start with you and all these polls we're seeing.

They're only a snapshot in time, of course, but I, I, I'm always concerned, I know pollsters are too, that the rural Republican vote is under-counted.

It's a must-listen, if I do say so myself.

In the hot seat this week, Jessica Huseman, the editorial director of Votebeat, and Greg Bluestein, chief political reporter over at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Greg, Jessica, I am so happy to have you on the show.

Welcome.

Thank you.

[upbeat music] Greg Bluestein is the chief political reporter at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Jessica Huseman is the editorial director at Votebeat.

And that's our show.