Can you kinda trace the development of your, your nonprofit? What were the key moments along the way, and what has kept you interested all these years?

When I started, I thought it was something I might do for an election cycle or two, and now it's ended up being my whole career.

And I think that the reason why I have stuck with it for this long is because there's always a new challenge.

There's always something new to try, and there's just amazing people who work in the election community.

I mean, I get to work in partnership with all kinds of other folks.

That definitely helps.

And then, you know, I also find, I mean, when you work in politics, the longer you stick with your position, the more institutional knowledge you have, the more contacts you have.

But can you explain what is different about California that is good that leads to slow counting? What isn't? Like, what reforms maybe could be helpful? Why is it that California is so much slower, besides size, which is also there, but why is California so slow to tabulate?

history of sex hormones, which is great, it's groundbreaking, it's wonderful.

Other work, she coined this term that the pill had sort of enabled contraceptive research and development to transition from a one-size-fits-all model of contraceptive development where the idea was we were going to develop the pill and it was going to be so great that everyone in the world could use it and there wouldn't be a need for contraceptive choice because we've got the one thing, it's solved, contraception forever.

That did not happen, obviously.

And so Altune's theory holds, after the pill had sort of failed on an international scale, rather, contraceptive R&D in the 1980s particularly, but also a little bit before then, shifted to creating a sort of cafeteria approach to contraceptive choice, where you have a range of different options, pills, IUDs, implants, for a range of different circumstances, and people would choose as if from a cafeteria of the variety of options.

This is the overarching kind of historical theory, and it underpins, I think, really the sort of chief paradigm of contraceptive choice we have in place today, which anyone will be familiar with who's been for a contraceptive consultation in the UK recently, but really any Western country.

And thanks to the influence of the WHO and the UN, I imagine elsewhere, although I can't give personal details.

personal experience of that but where you'll be given a choice of contraceptives and there'll be a real stress on the sort of typical use effectiveness of certain different types of contraceptives this is it's called a tiered effectiveness model but you'll have seen posters of it I'm sure where you have the most effective contraceptives at the top which are IUDs and implants that have a their perfect use effectiveness rate is the same as their typical use effectiveness rate because they don't rely on any user input once they're put in the phrase is set it and forget it Once they're put in, they're going to be working and you don't have to worry about them except in the obscenely, obscenely rare, less than 0.1% cases where they might fail.

Why do you think people are reaching for that language? And even though you might not necessarily be able to say why, what is the kind of effect of reaching back to those languages to make sense of our own modern or improved or elevated and accessible contraception today?

And I wonder, you know, there are allegations of fraud, but like, is there evidence of that?

No, and that's one of the ironies about California's long count.

There's this misconception that because it's taking longer, something nefarious must be happening.

And the reality is that it's taking longer because we are being careful.

We are being accurate.

We are being secure.

We are conducting post-election audits.

I mean, what are some other solutions that you found in the report?

Can you explain for our viewers again how the mail-in ballots are counted in California and how that can change who is out in front?

front?Yeah, we have, uh, 80% of our voters in the state casting vote by mail ballots, and only 20% voting in person.

And those vote by mail ballots do take a long time to process.

We check all the signatures, we make sure nobody's voting twice, and there's a lot of work involved simply in opening the envelopes and extracting the ballots, as your reporter showed in LA.

So they take a long time, and, you know, we, what we find is the trends are that Republican voters tend to vote early by mail and show up in person, and Democratic voters tend to cast their vote by mail ballots closer to election day or even on election day, especially this election because we had such a crowded gubernatorial primary and so many Democratic candidates running that many voters were urged to wait to cast their ballot until the very last minute.

So when you have millions of voters turning in their ballots on election day, two drop boxes, two voting sites, it creates what we call a pig in the python effect, where the counties cannot process those ballots until after election day, and that's what's going on right now.

And as they get processed, they do trend to favor Democratic candidates because that's the demographics of how our voters are voting.

I mean, come on.