719: Trust Me I’m a Doctor
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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 before the president got coronavirus, which is sending everything now into some new and unforeseen reality, there were certain things about the election that had settled into predictable rhythms, right? The president would talk about rioters in the streets, a lot in order, Joe Biden would talk about Donald Trump's character and the way he's done his job. And when it came to the actual process of voting, and the mail-in ballots that are going to be used by record numbers of people this year, the talking points lined up like this. The president said that mail-in ballots were going to be a disaster. Joe Biden said they were a perfectly good way to vote. The experts said the evidence backed up Biden, then the president would again insist that they are a disaster. Biden would again say no, the experts would again back him up. The president again would call them a disaster around and around and around in a circle that never ended, a very tedious circle. But we can remove ourselves from that circle, right, from a little perspective. Good evening, Donovan, a comment. For a few weeks now, one of our producers, Ben Calhoun, has been calling around to the people who actually handle these ballots that everybody has been yelling about. These people touch them with their hands, they stack them in stacks. Ben? Yeah, so the person you're hearing, this is Wendy Smith. This is the person who's responsible for running the election and dealing with mail-in ballots and all that, in a small town in my home state, which is Wisconsin. She's in Nicomas, which is way up north. And I called Wendy because I was wondering how this bizarre year was going for clerks like her. I had seen Wendy in a newspaper story. She had tattoos on both arms and this T-shirt that said, "Why should only one hour be happy?" And it said that she rode motorcycles and I just kind of thought I wanted to talk to her. And I originally reached out to her, she was busy sending out absentee ballots to people who'd requested them. You don't mind if I like work and talk at the same time, do you? No, no, I actually imagine that you have a lot to do right now. Yeah, I came into 29 absentee ballots in and I've got to stack more that have to go. Oh, wait, so how many total are you looking at compared to like a normal year? Oh my gosh. My last presidential, I had a hundred absentee voters two years ago. Total. I've already almost tripled for this election what I did four years ago. Triple. So that's like 300 voters out of maybe a thousand that she's responsible for. Wow. And she's getting more requests every week. I've talked to Wendy a couple times now, actually. And both times she has worked the entire time that we've been talking. You can hear her keyboard and her printer going in the background like the whole time. As I've been talking, you have printing off all my absentee ballot requests because I
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