724: Personal Recount
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, so here's the weird thing to happen at your temp job. A chunk of the country decides that you personally are trying to steal the election from the President of the United States. This actually happened to a guy. He's in this video that's been circulating online, retweeted by Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., viewed over five million times of him. He's this worker in the Georgia vote counting operation, and video you see him at a desk in short sleeves, people do either jobs all around him. He picks up one piece of paper after another, puts him in a stack, and then something happens. He flinches and he slams out a piece of paper kind of angrily, or that's what looks in the video. The sound on the video is somebody narrating who's not identified. This dude has a fit about something, flips off a ballot, and then crumbles it up. That's more or less true. The guy gives a finger to something, and then does crumple up some piece of paper and then drops it to the side. The narrator and so many commenters online for the video assume this is a Trump ballot, and this fits the mold of all the things the President has been saying about the election being stolen. That's not voter fraud, I don't know what is. Fortunately for us at our program, this incident happened at Fulton County in Atlanta where W.A.B.E. reporter Johnny Kaufman has been admitted in the election's operation for months. He was able to track down the guy in the video. His name is Lawrence Sloane. He's one of the dozens of people who are hired during the busy time around elections to help out. Has he done it before? No, this is his first time working in the election. Yeah, I mean, as soon as they called me about the opportunity, I was like, "Oh, sweet. I get paid. I got to help democracy. That's the most American thing. That's going to be awesome." Lawrence explained to me that the machine he's sitting at in the video, it's an envelope opener, or the election workers, they call it a cutter. So Fulton County had about 150,000 mail-in ballots come in, so they're running nonstop. And Lawrence is one of the fastest people on the machines. He can tell just by the sound whether they're working correctly or not. I know when there's going to be an error. You'll hear, "That's the letter landing in the dropping. That's where it cuts along the side." If you don't hear it in work, you don't hear sync, you got no cut on both sides, all right? Lawrence told me that people put all kinds of stuff in the envelopes, like weird stuff that they're not supposed to put in there. Like what? Oh, like me notes about Trump.
Transcription truncated.