The 2026 midterms are still months away, but a new tool shows where the trouble is most likely to erupt. Samantha Tarazi, co-founder and CEO of the nonpartisan Voting Rights Lab (VRL), joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to walk through VRL's new Election Risk Heat Map, which scores every state and county in the country on "Election Risk Index" measured from 1 to 100.
This episode examines what the map actually measures, assesses whether its risk factors are appropriate, and considers some of the difficult communications challenges in the space, including: How can we inform people about real threats to election administration without scaring them away from the ballot box? In light of President Trump’s recent primetime address on "election integrity," we explore whether the threats he described are real, the role he may play in the broader risk environment, and where 2026 sits on the danger scale.
About our Guest:
Samantha Tarazi is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization founded in 2017 that tracks and works to strengthen voting laws across all fifty states. As founder and former chief operating officer, she built VRL's signature Election Policy Tracker—now a tool used daily by journalists, lawmakers, and advocates to monitor voting legislation in real time nationwide—and led the organization's move into grassroots advocacy and cross-partisan democratic engagement. Her newest project is the 2026 Election Risk Heat Map, which VRL released this month.
Before VRL, Tarazi was the inaugural chief engagement officer at Everytown for Gun Safety, where she helped grow Moms Demand Action from a small online group into a national volunteer network of more than 55,000 leaders. She's been described as a "serial social-impact entrepreneur and seasoned community organizer," with expertise spanning election administration, voter participation, mis- and disinformation, and the role of social media and AI in elections. She also serves with the National Task Force on Election Crises.
Voiceover: You're listening to Terms of Engagement, a weekly show from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, featuring ASH Center director Archon Fung and senior practice fellow in American democracy, Stephen Richer. Now let's get to the show.
Archon Fung: Hey, welcome to Terms of Engagement, everyone. My name's Archon Fung. I am a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer: And I'm Stephen Richer. I'm the former elected Maricopa County recorder from Phoenix, Arizona, and I am now a fellow at the Ash Center.
Archon Fung: And we're recording this show live. So if you have comments, questions, thoughts, pushbacks, cheering folks on, please type them into the chat. And I feel really empowered because now I can respond in the chat. I figured out how to do that. For the last two three seasons I haven't been properly hooked up.
Stephen Richer: I still don't know how to, so I just occasionally make sort of snide remarks responding to it. No, most of the time I make appreciative of remarks and we try to integrate your question into the conversation, but you'll have to teach me how to do that.
Archon Fung: Will do.
Stephen Richer: All right. And as always, Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves, not on behalf of the Ash Center, not on behalf of the Harvard Kennedy School, and not on behalf of Harvard University.
Archon Fung: Good, good. And we encounter all kinds of views on this show. Please keep it civil. The purpose is to learn. Stephen, I actually just am about to publish a paper on when incivility is justified, but I think it's only justified when other people have been uncivil to you first. So we know that's not going to happen on the show.
Stephen Richer: Well, that's appropriate to bring up because today is actually election day in Arizona, and there was some time when I encountered some incivility in this context previously and occasionally at least I mumbled some less than perfectly pleasant civil responses.
Archon Fung: There you go. There you go. All right. So today's topic is one that we revisit from time to time, which is the integrity and risk to our election apparatus, and these days we're focusing on the midterm elections coming up in November 2026. A little bit of a news hook. There was much anticipated speech by Donald Trump last Thursday. He spoke for I think about 25 minutes. Stephen, did you see this speech and did it meet your expectations? What did you take away?
Stephen Richer: So there was a lot of speculation as to what the content was going to be swirling in the days before. A lot of people thought he was going to go after Georgia's elections in particular. A lot of people thought he was going to re-litigate the 2020 election. And while it had some sort of glancing remarks about the 2020 election, it was really more about, I would say, international interference in US elections was probably the headline with a particular focus on China. And I mean, it was a little bit critical of US elections. It was a lot critical, but maybe not by President Trump's standards, but it was even more critical of the intelligence community and the national security community, and so that did surprise me.
Archon Fung: Yeah, interesting. So we did a little reception. The national conference for the National Association of State Election Directors is in Boston this week and we did a little reception for them this weekend. And I heard from a couple, some Republicans, some on the Democratic side, that it was much anticipated, caused a lot of anxiety in the run-up, but once at least a couple of people I talked to actually saw it, they were relieved that it wasn't more alarmist. And this is kind of both sides of the aisle, at least from the election director direction.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. Senator Moreno from Ohio said that it was going to be the most consequential speech from the Oval Office since the Cuban Missile Crisis speech, and I think it's probably not going to hit that mark.
Archon Fung: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's probably safe to say. So our subject for today is we're really diving into the weeds of it today and hopefully talking about a tool that a lot of people watching the live stream or listening to the podcast can use and learn from, which is a tool from the Voting Rights Lab called the Election Risk Heat Map. And Stephen, why don't you introduce the creator of that tool?
Stephen Richer: And so here to discuss this neat new tool, which is making a splash in the democracy and elections community is in fact the CEO of the Voting Rights Lab, Sam Tarazi. And Sam, in addition to being the co-founder and CEO of the Voting Rights Lab, has a impressive history in public action and in public advocacy. She spent time at Greenpeace, she spent a significant time at the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and she's somebody I've come to know in the elections community who is a regular contributor to a lot of the conversations about election security and about voting rights. And I just learned this today, but she has a connection to Arizona in that she is a graduate of Northern Arizona University, which is where we have trees in Arizona. It's all desert. That's where we have trees. So welcome, Sam.
Samantha Tarazi: Hey, guys. It's great to be with you.
Archon Fung: Yeah, thanks for coming on.
Samantha Tarazi: Mm-hmm.
Stephen Richer: So tell us about the tool and how'd you decide you wanted to make this tool?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. The story behind our election risk heat map, you might think that it starts with election deniers, but actually it really starts with the map and the math on the map. So we combed through the last few election cycles and we looked at every instance where an attempt to overturn a legitimate election results actually gained traction, and the first thing that mattered was how close the race was. So when races were decided by a few hundred votes instead of thousands, losing candidates were much more likely to gain traction with their claims, and that was really the first of three factors that we found showing up together over and over and over again.
Stephen Richer: Okay. So we're putting up the map now. And so this generally speaking, the darker shade you are, the more likely you're going to have election risk. Is that right?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, I would say it's an aggregation of risk factors and the darker purple color is more risk factors, and the lighter yellowish color or the fewer risk factors. So the second major factor that we mapped here are vulnerabilities and state laws. So how our elections work is made up of thousands of individual policies that look different from state to state and from county to county and even sometimes city to city. So some states, they have a really tight process for how elections are certified, others haven't defined as much. Some states allow a single person to challenge tens of thousands of voter registrations. Some states don't allow for pre-processing of mail ballots, which slows down the counting. So those gaps where they exist, there's 12 factors in all that we rated for the map, they're essentially an invitation to someone who's trying to manipulate election results. So that's the second factor.
Archon Fung: Interesting. And so Arizona looks like it's in a fair amount of trouble. South Texas. So Texas is interesting and Georgia is interesting because there's a lot of gray, which I guess is not very much in trouble, but then there are particular districts that are in a lot of trouble, and so is that mostly about the closeness of the election
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. Yeah, so what we did is we started with every county that has a competitive US House race, and then we layered in competitive senate, governor, Secretary of State, AG and state legislative races plus intelligence on the ground, and that identified 733 counties in 2026 where there are particularly competitive races. We scored those vulnerabilities that I mentioned. And then the third factor is really about bad actors. So candidates or officials or both who are either election deniers with a track record of buckling under external pressure or indulging in conspiracy theories or putting partisan interests above those of the voters. And so when you layer all three of those together, that's what you get on the heat map. But I will say there's other data like where there is active pressure from the federal government, where there's election-related litigation in a state, how long counties took to count their ballots in 2024, the presence of organized anti-democracy groups and a number of other factors are all layered in to show you what you see there.
Stephen Richer: So before we plum into the particular data points and how you chose those, what is the end measurement? You say this is an election risk map. Risk of what? Risk of violence at voting locations, risk of people not being able to vote, risk of ballots not being tabulated accurately, risk of people challenging the results? Which endpoint risk are we talking about?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, it's a combination of everything that you've identified. Ultimately, the end goal that we are working towards is risk of overturning legitimate election results, but the pathway that can be taken toward that end looks very different considering different factors in different states. So it's nearly impossible to say this is exactly the path how it might happen, and that's why we wanted to overlay different risk factors so that practitioners, academics, and journalists and others could really parse through that and understand in which direction is the risk coming from.
Archon Fung: That's interesting. So one of the things you're trying to do is, I guess, operate at a little bit more general level than many, many people who are trying to sketch out particular scenarios in which an election could be overturned. You're saying, "Oh, there's a lot of ways to get there, but here's what the terrain looks like."?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. And part of it is because there is so much noise. There is so much going on right now with our elections that is very difficult to move out of a posture of trying to sort through noise and find signal, and the intention really here is to support the democracy field to get into a planning posture and a preparation posture. So part of that comes from really knowing where that greatest risk is actually going to be.
Stephen Richer: Okay. And do we have a slide of the factors? I think we have a slide of the factors.
Archon Fung: Yeah, we have a slide of the factors, which is super interesting.
Stephen Richer: Okay. And you said the first three are sort of the groundwork three, but these are all the different things that factor into the score, correct?
Samantha Tarazi: Yep. Yep.
Stephen Richer: Okay. So how does one go about creating this? Did you have a committee of election professionals or just things that your team has flagged as maybe contributing it or that you've seen bubbling up online?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, this was a huge collaborative effort with a lot of democracy groups across the sector. So electoral competitiveness, we are referencing Sabato's crystal ball and Cook's report. Those are obviously publicly available, but then we also partnered with Oath to get state legislative competitive race data because that's not something that's otherwise available. And then in order to identify the state and local actors, we actually conducted OPO style research into more than a thousand candidates that are running for election in these counties and close to 2,500 election officials who oversee elections in those districts. So that is literally person to person looking through their public record, their public statements, their public communications, their meeting minutes to identify who are election deniers or who are people who are not quite election deniers, but they show warning signs to us that they might, for example, believe in a voting machine conspiracy, which is kind of like a signal that we should probably be paying attention.
Stephen Richer: So a lot of these I appreciate and I think that they go underappreciated just how much electoral competitiveness can factor in. I think also the time that it takes to announce the winners is also very material in stoking some disagreement and disbelief. But some of these are, well, what you might see as election risk, I see as election security. What you might call that guy who's questioning whether or not the ballots should be tabulated by machine, I see as an asset to the system. So how did you handle those more inherently political assessments?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah.
Archon Fung: And also just to add onto that, a bunch of both advocates and election officials defend practices on here, like vote by mail or... Especially vote by mail, but some of the others as well. Or some people don't think long count is such a problem because you could get more votes in after election postmarked by election day, but received after, and that creates more opportunity to vote, but those things show up on your scale as negatives and risk factors.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. So it's because... I'm glad you bring up vote by mail. It's a good example that we can kind of parse through here. So this is about the proportion of vote by mail usage in a district, and as you both know, vote by mail has been a particularly popular target of the president and his allies. And so this is not actually saying that vote by mail is good or bad from a usage or a voter experience perspective. It's simply saying more voters use vote by mail in this place. That could come under scrutiny from someone who is trying to say that something went wrong. Or for example, the amount of time it takes for a jurisdiction to count their vote by mail ballots is a really strong indication of how likely conspiracy theories and other disinformation about the counting is likely to prop up.
So again, it's not saying that election results should be in or counted by day one or by day three, or that is good or bad. It's simply saying that if it takes a long time, that is often when the disinformation takes hold. We saw that in California recently, of course. Now I will tell you, I do believe it's better to count ballots faster. There is vulnerability in taking a long time to count ballots, and so that is one of the things that we actually think lawmakers should be doing, which is to speed up the counting of ballots.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. And we need to give a shout-out to some of our friends, Thad, Kauser, Lauren Prather, who have done some research on what a prolonged process for knowing the victors can do to election confidence. Now, there's a lot you can do to offset that Thad and Lauren would say, but that's certainly something that academia has identified. So turning to the why. Why'd you do this? Was it just to scare Arizonans or was there some sort of greater purpose?
Archon Fung: Michiganders.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. Because we felt like it was really important for the broader democracy sector to have all of this information at its fingertips. So I would not say to you that just because a certain county has a really high score guarantees there is going to be a problem, but it means that practitioners can actually get into those risk factors and understand where those vulnerabilities might exist so that we can build plans to reinforce the election administrators who are just trying to do their jobs or to improve public communication efforts when disinformation arises. So that's really the use case behind it is giving everyone what they need to prepare for those instances.
Archon Fung: And so is it mostly about the resource allocation of democracy defense groups like, okay, you're doing better focusing your energy on these districts. Is that the kind of intended usage of the heat map primarily?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of it has to do with resource allocation. If you are figuring out where you're going to invest in more pre-bunking to inoculate against disinformation or invest extra support for election administrators, it can be a tool for that. It doesn't mean that people shouldn't be investing in other places. It just means that this is where it's most likely to see some of that contentious, particularly post-election sort of drag out fight play out.
Stephen Richer: Okay. So if someone does to see this and you could get this in front of anyone such that they would... Let's see, the ultimate goal here, have a free, fair, accurate, lawful, safe 2026 midterm election that is broadly believed by the American public. If we accept that as the goal, who would you most want to give your heat map to? It's on their desk.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. Couple of key users that we built this for. One is democracy practitioners so that they can figure out where some of the greatest risks are to election administration and particularly be in a position to stand up for the election officials who might come under pressure or scrutiny. The second would be for election officials themselves so that they can see the criteria and the factors that are circulating or surrounding them that might affect their ability to do their jobs. And then another key one is lawmakers. So a lot of these key vulnerabilities in election law, they are not going to change before November this year, but it is absolutely something that they need to change in the long run. This includes things like transparent testing of their machines, or clear articulation of how the certification process works, or a very clear remedy on what happens if someone refuses to certify are different risk factors that exist in some states and not others, and I think that's something that lawmakers should be taking into account as we move into next year.
Archon Fung: That's great. And Throughhiker in the chat says, "Would love to take a close look at Michigan and Arizona," which is a great idea. And the heat map tool... For some reason, I can't post URLs into the chat, but the heat map tool, people should go to it, votingrightslab.org. You can search for particular states and particular other jurisdictions, localities and counties, and then drill into the particular factor. So I'm looking at Arizona and I can't broadcast my screen unfortunately, but some of the things that light up are anti-democracy threat infrastructure, which I think are the organizations that are some of Stephen's best friends, state policy assessment, which is high vulnerability and state litigation environment, which I think means that there's been a lot of lawsuits against election officials and election results, trying to overturn results there. And then Michigan has slightly different factors, which is interesting.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. Yeah, both Arizona and Michigan have very, very competitive races. So that is an underlying factor that underpins all of this. And then various election officials in different offices that I think is important to know and also running for office. So those are the things that consistently both states have in common and one of the reasons you'll see them very lit up.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. I find that a little bit ironic that one of the factors that democracy theorists consider for healthy democracy is competition.
Archon Fung: It's high up on the list. No doubt.
Stephen Richer: That people really do have a legitimate option and that you can change your government if you want to. And then of course, competition is working against a safe election process in this circumstance at least. Yeah, just a little bit ironic. I'm drilling down into some of these jurisdictions and looking at all this. How long did something like this take?
Samantha Tarazi: It was a year in the making. The most detailed, real tedious piece of it is the individual research into election deniers because that's almost 3,500 individuals that we had to vet and conduct research into. And then the state policy vulnerabilities is just something as an organization that we've had deep expertise in and on our radar for a long time. So that was pretty much prepared and ready to go, but it took about a year to complete and build.
Archon Fung: Yeah. So Greg asked, "What is a voter denier?" I think maybe election denier is the question, but just what was your categorization there? I don't think we're going to re-litigate in the next 10 minutes here all of the different dimensions of that, but just definitionally, how did you do it?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. Well, in the heat map, you can go through the methodology section and see the very specific definition that we created, but if I were explaining it to my mom, I would say an election denier is someone who's either attempted to, by action interfere in an election result, or by their statements actually called into question the legitimacy of otherwise legitimate elections, typically for the purposes of partisan gain. And then like I mentioned earlier, there's another category here, which is people that aren't strictly an election denier, they've never denied the results of a legitimate election, but they might have shared some conspiracy theories or been a spreader of election disinformation themselves that doesn't quite make them an election denier, but it's something that we feel like we need to watch. And for those folks, we've given them what we call a warning sign label.
Stephen Richer: Interesting. So you faced a similar dilemma to what we faced when I was in the election office, which is communicating about some of these challenges, communicating about potential threats, being honest about the deluge of ugly emails that election administrators were receiving over the last six years, but at the same time saying, "No, it's going to be okay. Your votes are going to be counted accurately. By the way, you should come be a temporary election worker." So how did you communicate this striking the balance between there is cause for concern, but this doesn't mean you should drop out of the system or not show up to vote?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, I appreciate the question a lot. I think that it's really important that we parse out the audiences that we're talking about. So I think the people who really need the heat maps, civil society groups, election officials, journalists, academics, they need the unvarnished picture because they're the ones building plans and responding in real time. But I think the general public is a different question and there's some real tension there about what should a communication strategy be with the general public? On one side, you have conventional wisdom backed up by research that says that talking about threats demobilizes people. And I do believe that that is true. But on the other side of this conversation, you have lessons from other backsliding democracies across the globe that tell us it's really important to set expectations with the public so that if or when something goes wrong, they know how to interpret it. They know when to feel okay about something and when to stand up.
And so I actually think both things can be true at once. I don't think it's a good idea to run through a list of our darkest scenarios with a public audience. It will probably only intimidate them, and maybe even worse, it will likely be perceived as driven by partisanship. It's very hard to get past people's sort of partisan filters. I think it's really important that we are more precise. So this isn't about forecasting danger or the worst case, it's really about priming people for the playbook that we expect, that we need them to be a part of. So if a losing candidate claims fraud with no evidence or a county tries to delay certifying real results, we need people to recognize that as a self-interested move to grab power, and we help them see that clearly by talking about the system of checks and balances that exist.
We need to acknowledge that candidates can actually challenge results, but they need to have proof and they need to follow the law, and we need to give voters the tools and understanding they need to verify claims and know that the process is working because it actually doesn't work to tell people to just trust elections. You need to give them space to have questions and lead them to understanding how to verify what they're hearing. That's where I think the sweet spot is between scaring people versus preparing them.
Stephen Richer: And how's it been so far?
Samantha Tarazi: I actually am very optimistic about a lot of interventions, a lot of communication strategies that election officials, that other community leaders can take to instill that confidence in a way that people feel heard, but of course there's a lot of ugly stuff on the internet.
Stephen Richer: Yeah.
Archon Fung: A lot of my people in my world and our world that we talk to all the time voice the concern, like the more you talk about these election risks, maybe you should just not talk about it so much because people aren't going to want to vote, it's a real downer, people get scared. I don't know. My view has just always been say what's on your mind and talk about it in as much detail and realism as you can, and then people can make up their own minds about it. It bugs me to try to nudge people for the sake of democracy with gross things or gross as in high level, don't talk about election vulnerability because too many people are going to get scared. And so I really appreciate the way that you're doing it, which is talking in a great amount of detail about what the risks are.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. I think we are in a different time than we were a decade ago, and so a lot of our sort of truths that we used to hold to be sacred, we have to really interrogate. People didn't need to know how elections used to work. Now I don't think that's true. Yeah.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. What do you say to somebody who says, "Maps like these are contributing to this sense of unease that is really without basis because at the end of the day, 2020 was certified, '22 was certified, '24 was certified. Yes, we've invested in some new technologies. We've invested in more security, but nobody's actually gotten... No election worker has been kneecapped or anything like that and the ballots have been tabulated."
Samantha Tarazi: Totally. Yeah, I think in every one of those cycles when someone tried to sort of blow up a legitimate result, the system did hold, and that track record is a reason why I have a lot of hope. Certifiers eventually did their job either under public pressure or a court forced them to, or the state had a clear process to remove someone who wouldn't. Now those guardrails don't exist in every other place, and also there's one thing that is fundamentally different heading into November this year, and what is different now is that the president is in power with loyalists installed at every level. I think we really have to understand that having election deniers actively spinning their conspiracies within the administration is just an X factor that we haven't dealt with before.
And we also are seeing that there's more election deniers inside the system at the local level. I do want to put that in perspective though. So 106 counties out of the 77... Sorry, excuse me. Out of the 733 that are in the index, so it's 15% have an outright election denier inside their local election authority. So this is their board of elections or their county-
Archon Fung: Wait, what was that percentage again?
Samantha Tarazi: 15% of the counties in our index have an election denier inside their local election authority. So 15%, I don't know. Does that seem like a lot or not that much?
Archon Fung: That seems like a lot to me. I mean, not compared to general population survey, probably 30% of Americans thought that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Stephen Richer: And obviously acting on it is a different thing from subscribing to some of those beliefs, and a lot of these are multi-member boards, I would say as well, and so it's a little bit of sort of an indulgence without an outlet.
Archon Fung: On this very point, I think your index, I think the strongest part, I don't know, giggy-wise mathematically is that it's a relative index. You can say that these counties are more at risk than these other counties because it's likely to be a competitive election, whereas these are solid R, solid D, so we're not really at risk there. So it's comparative, but it's much harder to say... To answer Stephen's question, are we above the waterline or below the waterline in some sort of absolute risk terms? You can say more at risk or less at risk, but is it very great risk or very low risk? That's a very hard thing to answer. And I think we've been struggling with that on many episodes for sure.
Stephen Richer: But it's a great tool for the allocation of resources question, because even if you think you should shift everything to a more pleasant shade and that there's not any real danger in the midterm elections, you can still see that, for instance, maybe Michigan rates higher than Utah for a number of reasons. And so if you were to, I guess, allocate resources within this community or be mindful or prompting state legislators to revisit certain things like why does Utah not register on this? And some of them may be in their control, some of them may not be in their control. Utah, I suspect just because it's overwhelmingly Republican in part that it hasn't had as much of a brouhaha in the post-election context.
Archon Fung: You talked about a set of national level factors, which I think it's difficult for the county and state level index to take account of, which is DOJ investigating Fulton County or Maricopa and taking the machines or ICE deployments. So how do you think about those... Are those just out of scope for your project? I mean, it would be hard to deny that we need to think about those things, or it's just too hard because-
Stephen Richer: The President gave a speech on Thursday night.
Archon Fung: Right.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. Yeah, so DOJ interference and meddling in a jurisdiction is part of the risk factor. Now how that could manifest, of course, is a total wildcard. There are DOJ lawsuits to obtain access to sensitive voter data, there's threats to election officials, there's all kinds of threats around withholding funding. There are 287 (g) agreements between the county law enforcement and ICE. There are a lot of ways that the federal government could show up and meddle. I do think it's incredibly important to remember that a lot of the times they don't have a direct lever to pull, so a lot of it is noise. That doesn't mean it should be ignored, but really fundamentally the local jurisdictions, they run the elections, they oversee the polling locations, they are in charge of the ballot materials. They need to be able to do their jobs and defend themselves against some sort of interference and also have the communications infrastructure to reach voters if and when some sort of federal meddling happens. But yeah, that's part of the risk is that it's an unknown
Stephen Richer: Right. Okay, Sam, so agree or disagree with this. I have a hypothesis that the pressure is going to shift a little bit this midterm election from the traditional battleground states, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and towards specific battleground districts that may or may not reside within a battleground state because the ultimate prize in play for this midterm election is going to be control of the United States House, and so therefore a congressional district in California might come wildly into play. Do you agree with that or not, and how is that reflected do you think in the map?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, I do agree with that, Stephen, and I think that was a huge driver behind the map because a lot of the democracy sector focus and attention and conversation is over-indexed in presidential battleground states. And that is in part because those are the purpley places where lots of key decisions are being made, but also the control of Congress is going to be the biggest hottest thing that people are looking at this year and that it could absolutely come down to a California or a Texas or any number of states that we wouldn't consider to be a presidential battleground. And in fact, I do want to say about states like that, Nebraska, Iowa, others, the thing that worries me is that the infrastructure hasn't really been tested. The election officials there who do a great job haven't had to deal with outsized political pressure to bend the rules before or the civil society infrastructure hasn't really prepared itself or been through the ringer yet. So I think that's going to be something to really pay attention to.
Archon Fung: Those are a couple of great points. I mean, what makes a battleground state a battleground state is the electoral college and several close states being able to swing that in a presidential election. So it's a function of the institutions. It's not even a function of closeness necessarily. And then what you're saying is, yeah, but a whole bunch of different forces that have a zero to do with the electoral college are determining where the hotspots are now, and then those hotspots just haven't had the opportunity since Bush v. Gore to develop a whole bunch of muscles of being stress-tested.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, absolutely.
Archon Fung: Yeah, that's a great point.
Stephen Richer: The colloquial everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.
Archon Fung: Yes. Mike Tyson. My favorite philosophy.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. Although may it not be literal.
Samantha Tarazi: But I will say even though you see more traditional battleground states are really, really, really dark in the heat map, part of the purpose of the heat map is really catalyze the conversation about what about these other places? They don't need to score 90 out of 100 to have really important risk to think about, and I think that's actually one of the greatest outcomes thus far from this project is the conversations that it has catalyzed both in those states, but then also throughout the sort of civil society infrastructure.
Archon Fung: Have you gotten to the level of conversation about the index and responses, not just about allocating more resources to the high risk areas, but it's what kind of resources? So if it's places where the laws have a lot of gaps, you probably want a lot of election law lawyers in those places, and where it's election denial, anti-democratic kind of infrastructure, you probably want more civil society groups on the election integrity side to counterbalance those. And then I don't know what you do about the officials at local and higher levels who are themselves election... Maybe you want a free press or other people to watchdog and call that out, but it's different kinds of responses to different risk factors. It's not all the same response. It's not all election protection.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, that's totally right. And that's why it's been really important to have this conversation with different capacities, with different organizations that play different roles like that.
Stephen Richer: Okay. Adding all this up, Archon, cue the pepper scale.
Archon Fung: Okay. So on several episodes, we've used the hot pepper scale for what the probability of election crisis and some sort of real break in the midterm elections is, and one is very low, like the poblano pepper, five is the Carolina Reaper super high. For most of my political life, it's been a solid one, maybe less than one. I'd say Bush v. Gore in 2000 was maybe a two. Well, let's do... Before we ask Sam, has your level... Stephen, you were about a three before. Are you still three-ish?
Stephen Richer: Yeah, I think I stay at a three. That seems like it describes my personality and my politics these days. I'm open to seeing it, but not unduly concerned, I think.
Archon Fung: Yeah. I'm edging up mid-threes to four, but mostly for federal reasons. The president has continued to be very, very invested in the SAVE Act and investigations are continuing. That federal level pressure just has not let up. He hasn't kind of moved on, and so that creates some anxiety.
Stephen Richer: Also pushing back against that, primary season has been very successful so far.
Archon Fung: Yeah, true. No problems.
Stephen Richer: Appreciate that... Well, I would say maybe the exception of California, which went as it was supposed to go administratively, but was not well received on the internets in many quarters, and so that-
Archon Fung: Because of the count timing and because of-
Stephen Richer: The count timing and the way it unfolded. I think that the way the mayoral race unfolded and Pratt falling into third place didn't help the conversation. And there's explanations for that, but they're not immediately clear.
Archon Fung: That's fair. But your underlying point, the primaries have been good by and large from an electoral perspective.
Stephen Richer: Yeah.
Archon Fung: Sam, what do you think?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah-
Arhon Fung: Carolina Reaper or poblano?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah, I'm appreciating that three is not neutral and... Yeah.
Archon Fung: It is not.
Samantha Tarazi: I too am a three, and I'll tell you... I mean, we've all seen the headlines. We know it's coming out of the White House, we have to take it seriously, but I just don't think that's how this plays out. I don't think the administration is pulling off one big federal takeover. The real action's happening in the state, in the counties, and that is our greatest structural defense also is that our elections are distributed by design. They're run by the states through thousands of local jurisdictions. You can't nationalize that, you can't cancel that, you can't rewrite it. And so that's why I think what feels like a five alarm fire right now is actually noise, and a lot of it is it has that purpose or at least that function of distracting us. And so that's really the point of the heat map is that most places will have secure and safe elections. And it's a pretty small number of counties that carry the real risk. And when you can see that, you can start to build.
Archon Fung: It's interesting. I've been thinking about in the 2020 election, one of the pre-bunking efforts was the Red Mirage idea because a bunch of votes would come in later and they would have a different partisan distribution than the early votes, and a lot of journalists I think were educated and took that on board and were able to tell that story in a way. And there's so much noise right now. There's 20 different things that are worth pre-bunking and we don't know what the analog is going to be for '26. But maybe it's what you said is you've got to pay attention to the local jurisdictions in all of these places and that's where the action is. And it's just super tempting if you're a journalist or a reader to focus on this national level kind of big stories and disturbances, but maybe we should think about that as noise and focus on what's going on at the county level.
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. I mean, what is it? You got to take it seriously, but not literally. You can't ignore it, but we are much better served by focusing on what we can do something about. That's kind of why.
Stephen Richer: Okay. Given that we've gotten to one now, we usually have a few hundred listeners who listen live and then more people listen after. Many of them are like Archon, they're democracy goody too-shoers
Archon Fung: I own that.
Stephen Richer: Yeah, they really care about this stuff, and so what would you say to somebody who's not an election administrator, not a state legislator, but really cares about the vibrancy of American democracy and the functionality of American elections? They see this map, what's the action item?
Samantha Tarazi: Yeah. I would say in whatever capacity or function or organization you bring to bear, I think you really need to think about showing up for election officials who are doing their job and doing it well and hopefully before the pressure hits, not after. I think one of the big lessons that we all need to know and internalize from 2020 is how much election officials only heard from one side after that election and how much damage that resulted in. We also need to say thank you to them. And then I would also say for more everyday people, you really, really should... I don't know, the best thing that I think you can do for yourself is see it for yourself, become a poll worker and understand how the system works is something that I would recommend to almost anybody who has questions about how the system works or wants to effectively communicate to their sphere of influence about it, get that firsthand experience and then share it out.
Stephen Richer: Good. Well, thank you very much. We really appreciate Sam coming on today. Again, Sam is the co-founder and CEO of the Voting Rights Lab. That's votingrightslab.org. You can see the map, which they have recently released on the website. You can click through the different counties that they've studied. You can see the methodology behind the different factors. And, if nothing else, it's a fun way to think about elections and the different factors that might be just even factoring into just why CNN or somebody pays particular attention to certain jurisdictions, even if you don't think that this is going to end in the apocalypse. And for those of you who do think that this is going to end in the apocalypse, you now have a good idea of where it might start.
Archon Fung: And you know what to do about it. Support your local election official. There you go.
Samantha Tarazi: Awesome. Thank you, guys, for having me.
Archon Fung: Thank you, Sam, for coming on and thanks so much more for all of your painstaking work, you and your colleagues and putting together the map with all of the data and the research and the tool. It's a real public service for people trying to understand where our democracy is and where we might be going. So thank you very much.
Samantha Tarazi: Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks for the conversation.
Stephen Richer: All right. Okay, we will be back same time next week, 12:15 PM Eastern Time. Thanks as always to Colette, Courtney, Ralph, Evelyn for their help with the production of this, and thanks to you all for watching live and thanks if you watched later. Let us know as always if you have any questions.
Archon Fung: Yeah. Questions, guest ideas, topics that are on your mind and we'll try to get to it. Thank you very much. See you next week everyone.
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