UCLA School of Law

President Trump has also repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of the election itself, something experts fear could be used as a pretext for interference in close races.

For insight and analysis, we're joined tonight by two guests, Rick Hasen is a professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.

And Juliette Kayyem is a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, currently at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Thank you both for being with us.

President Trump has also repeatedly cast doubt on the integrity of the election itself, something experts fear could be used as a pretext for interference in close races.

For insight and analysis, we're joined tonight by two guests, Rick Hasen is a professor of law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.

And Juliette Kayyem is a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, currently at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Thank you both for being with us.

unless perhaps there was an illegal use of money that was raised for some other purpose.

There was an argument made by Rick Hasen, who's a professor at UCLA Law School and an expert in election law, that any kind of prosecution for running a campaign based on the subjective motivation for running would violate the First Amendment.

I tend to agree with that to a point, although there could be collateral violations.

So I'm not against investigations, although I would have more confidence if it were a Justice Department and virtually any other administration, Republican or Democratic, that was doing the investigation because the degree to which Todd Blanch has had the Justice Department do the sort of political bidding of President Trump makes me sort of doubt uh have less confidence and the civil suit that they filed is really quite quite uh thin um but you know i think that i don't disagree with fresno you that it's possible there could be a crime here somewhere

are.

Andrew Flores, a distinguished visiting scholar at UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, has used federal data to document that transgender people experience higher rates of crime criminalization than cisgender people.

Without questions that identify transgender respondents, researchers lose a way to measure that disparity.

They lose that and so much more.

Also, Trump's efforts to interfere with voting And with the certification of the results, have not been successful, at least at this point.

We'll speak with Rick Hansen of the UCLA Law School.

He says we're doing well on election protection.

He says the courts have been strong, the blue states have been a bulwark, and most important, early voting has been big.

Rick is director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA Law School and editor of the Election Law blog.

But first, today's political update.

For that, we turn to Alan Minsky.

But even if Trump succeeded in messing with the Alaska certification, the Democrats would still have 51 seats, at least according to Nate Silver's analysis of the polls, the fundamentals, the experts, and the other factors.

You will see this in UCSF Medical School, September 22nd, 2026.

UCLA School of Law, October 1st, 2026.

And then OSU College of Medicine, October 21st.

Basically, I think that there's the way that I have read these findings is that they have focused on graduate institutions because there is, I think, more consistency in terms of the use of a single standardized test.

But when it comes to voting lines, the Justice Department, its docket got shrunk to a tiny fraction of what it was this time last year.

Rick Hasen, Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA Law and Director of its Safeguarding Democracy Project, examines the impact of these developments on effective representation of the American people.

The real impact is going to come in 2028 and much more likely in 2032 because the U.S. census will be done in 2030.

We do a census counting every person every year.