- The main story of the video is about the 2020 election and a voting PSA that was praised.
- The video highlights Trump's campaign to undermine the election process and his refusal to accept the results if he loses.
- The Republican party has a history of trying to depress turnouts in elections.
- Trump has encouraged his supporters to monitor polling places, potentially leading to voter harassment.
- In-person voting may be difficult due to the pandemic, with fewer poll workers and closed polling sites.
- Trump and his allies have been discrediting mail-in voting, despite studies showing it is not fraudulent.
- Trump has mischaracterized incidents of alleged ballot fraud to support his claims.

- The video highlights that fears of mail-in ballot fraud have been exaggerated and that the system is designed to prevent people from voting twice.
- The main concern with mail-in ballots is the potential for technical errors, such as missing signatures or missed deadlines, which can lead to ballot rejection.
- The video emphasizes the importance of carefully following instructions when filling out and submitting mail-in ballots.
- Signatures can change over time, making it important to replicate the signature on file to ensure the ballot is valid.
- The video warns about the potential for a "blue shift" scenario, where initial in-person votes favor Trump, but mail-in ballots favor Biden, leading to a delay in determining the final election result.
- It is advised to adjust expectations and view the election process as an "election month" rather than just election night.
- The video highlights potential vulnerabilities in the election process that could be exploited by the Trump campaign, such as seeking to invalidate early votes or limiting drop-off locations for absentee ballots.
- Individuals are encouraged to make a voting plan, whether it be voting in person or by mail, and to do so as early as possible to alleviate pressure on the system.
- It is recommended to track your ballot to ensure it is received and counted.
- Overall, the video emphasizes the need for individuals to be proactive in their voting plans and to ensure that friends and family are also prepared.

- It is important for everyone to have a voting plan and to ensure that their friends and family also have one
- Simply expecting the system to fix itself and for the current leader to suddenly become a good loser is a bad idea

- The video discusses the 2020 election and the importance of voting.
- It highlights Trump's attempts to undermine the election process and his refusal to accept the results.
- The Republican party has a history of trying to suppress voter turnout.
- Trump has encouraged his supporters to monitor polling places, potentially leading to voter harassment.
- In-person voting may be challenging due to the pandemic, with fewer poll workers and closed polling sites.
- Trump and his allies have discredited mail-in voting, despite evidence showing it is not fraudulent.
- The video emphasizes the importance of following instructions when filling out and submitting mail-in ballots.
- Potential vulnerabilities in the election process are highlighted, such as invalidating early votes or limiting drop-off locations for absentee ballots.
- Individuals are encouraged to make a voting plan, track their ballot, and ensure friends and family are prepared.
- It is advised to view the election process as an "election month" rather than just election night.

Weeks out from the 2020 presidential election, John Oliver takes a look at various efforts to destabilize the vote, how to ensure your ballot is properly counted, and why we may need to prepare not just for an election night, but for an election month.

Connect with Last Week Tonight online... 

Subscribe to the Last Week Tonight YouTube channel for more almost news as it almost happens: www.youtube.com/lastweektonight 

Find Last Week Tonight on Facebook like your mom would: www.facebook.com/lastweektonight 

Follow us on Twitter for news about jokes and jokes about news: www.twitter.com/lastweektonight 

Visit our official site for all that other stuff at once: www.hbo.com/lastweektonight

Our main story tonight concerns the 2020 election.

Among other things, the inspiration for the single best voting PSA the world has ever seen.

Can't make it rain if you locked up on some bullshit.

Well then vote for the sheriffs and county officials that feel the same way you do.

But you talking about, oh they gonna pick who they gonna pitch out.

Ferguson just elected their first Black mayor.

For information on how and where to vote, as well as resources to find out who's running where you live, go to GetYourBootyToThePoll.com.

Get your booty to the poll, get your booty to the poll.

They hit prosecutors, cash bail, sheriffs, and the importance of down ballot races.

All subjects we've talked about before on this show, but they did it in less time and more entertainingly, while also providing a much better get out the vote message than anyone currently working for Joe Biden.

And even though Trump is currently in the hospital with coronavirus and everything is up in the air right now, we're taping this show on Saturday, so who knows what things are like whenever you're watching this.

We do need to talk about this election because it's happening right now.

More than 3000000 votes have already been cast, and yet, Trump and his supporters have engaged in a deliberate campaign to undermine the process.

For months now, Trump has been questioning whether he will even leave.

In general, not talking about November, are you a good loser?

I think mail-in voting is gonna rig the election.

Are you suggesting that you might not accept the results of the election?

And by that, of course, he means he has to see if he wins.

Because if he doesn't, he'll refuse to accept the results.

Deep down, you know there is no scenario in which Trump loses, but decides the process was legit, and then shows up to Biden's house with a congratulatory ice cream cake.

And look, given the frequency with which 1 party has been trying to destabilize this election.

We thought tonight it might be a good idea to take a look at the ways they've tried to do that, and even more importantly, how we can help prevent that from happening.

And first, let's acknowledge there is nothing new in Republicans attempting to depress turnouts.

They've done it for years, sometimes with a veneer of fighting voter fraud and tactics like strict voter ID laws and aggressive purchase of voter rolls.

But sometimes, they've just said it out loud.

Elections are not won by a majority of people.

They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.

As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Now, that man is Paul Weyrich, a founding father of modern conservatism and the co-founder of right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority.

Although, I'm not sure you can really keep calling it a moral majority when the philosophy of 1 of your founders is immorally suppress the majority of voters.

But the fact is that this year, the Trump campaign is turbocharging efforts to mess with the vote.

For starts, the president has repeatedly instructed his supporters to go to polling places and monitor for incidents of fraud.

You know, you have a Democrat governor, you have all these Democrats watching that stuff.

Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.

Because he's not describing official poll watchers there, people whose role is to monitor elections so everyone is treated fairly.

He's essentially giving his supporters, the green light, to walk into polling places and start playing fucking ballot, Batman.

And it's not like we haven't had problems with aggressive poll watching in the past.

In 1981, the year after Weirich spoke, the RNC formed a fake National Ballot Security Task Force and hired armed off-duty policemen to patrol largely black and Hispanic precincts in New Jersey, where they prominently displayed revolvers and armbands with the task force's name.

And just as a general rule, revolvers and armbands at a polling site is never a great look, considering that the literal definition of an actual Nazi is someone with guns and armbands who threatens the safety of the polls.

That incident caused such an outcry, the Democrats sued, and the RNC entered into a consent decree, pledging to stop such behavior in the future, which is great.

Unfortunately, a judge lifted that consent decree in 2018, because If there's 1 thing Republicans have done over the last few years, it's regain a nation's trust.

And the thing is, even if Trump supporters don't show up to harass voters, there are plenty of other reasons in-person voting could be tricky this year.

Thanks to the pandemic, many poll workers are choosing to stay at home.

And many polling sites may be closed, which could cause real problems, especially for Latino and Black voters who already face substantially longer wait times than white voters.

We've already seen the impact of fewer polling places in this year's primaries, Because watch this Georgia voter show you how long his line was.

7 hours, 45 minutes, and 13 seconds it took for me to vote in Fulton County, Georgia.

As soon as I saw the line, I had to stop watching on my phone.

I spent the first couple hours listening to a new Run the Jewels album.

And then I ended up listening to the entire discography.

And then I started watching season 8 of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

And somebody was like, hey, y'all remember we came to vote yesterday, right?

Can you imagine watching 5 hours of streaming video on your phone while standing in line to vote?

What if each video was less than 10 minutes at a time with commercials?

How about if you could watch the show vertically or horizontally?

Okay, sorry, Quibi, I guess it's official.

I hate to break this to you, 2000000000 dollars in, but you know what?

You know, like the 1 about flipping houses where grisly murders took place.

After all, HBO Max still exists, and they charge $14.99.

And when you take all of this together, the long lines, the possibility of harassment, and the looming threat of the pandemic, It's frankly no wonder that around 40 percent of Americans say they'll be voting by mail this year.

But that has actually opened up a whole new front in Republicans' war on Democratic votes.

And to understand why, it helps to understand 1 key statistic.

The majority of Trump supporters say they'll vote in person on election day, while the majority of Biden supporters say they'll vote by mail.

So it's clearly very much in Trump's interest to try and discredit voting by mail, claiming it's rife with frauds, despite the fact, as studies and court cases have repeatedly shown, it isn't.

And it's not just Trump claiming they're illegitimate.

Even Bill Barr, his attorney general, has joined in saying shit like this.

When governments, state governments, start adopting these practices like mail-in ballots that open the floodgates of potential fraud, then people's confidence in the outcome of the election is gonna be undermined.

And that could take the country to a very dark place if we lose confidence in the outcomes of our elections.

Yeah, but you're the 1 undermining our confidence.

And as for the notion that this could take the country to a dark place, I don't know if you've noticed, but everything within driving distance of Disneyland is covered in smoke.

There's a global pandemic that just infected the president, and you're on television in stupid Woody Allen glasses, calling the legitimacy of our democracy into question.

We're in that very dark place already, Billiam.

Trump himself has gone out of his way to claim that all manner of ballot fraud is already taking place.

He even rattled off examples during Tuesday's debate.

They're sending millions of ballots all over the country.

There's fraud, they found them in creeks, They found some with the name Trump, just happened to have the name Trump just the other day in a waste paper basket.

This is going to be a fraud like you've never seen.

Okay, I know that sounds like a lot, but as you've probably already guessed, that was a 12-course tasting menu of horseshit.

Because he is wildly misrepresenting every single 1 of those cases.

First, on the ballots in the creek example.

He seems to be referring to reports of a few absentee ballots in Wisconsin being found in trays of mail that were found in a ditch.

But, you should know, the trays were full of all sorts of mail, and state election officials later clarified that they actually did not include any Wisconsin ballots whatsoever.

As for the waste paper basket example, that was an incident where a temp worker who'd only worked at the county election office for 3 days, mistakenly discarded 9 ballots.

And when his bosses realized what he'd done, they immediately reported it to law enforcement at the local, state, and federal level.

And just spare a quick thought for that temp there.

Because imagine if some stupid mistake you made at work ended up being held up as evidence of a left-wing conspiracy against the president.

Just imagine buying the wrong K-Cups for the break room, and next thing you know, Tucker Carlson is on TV screaming about how the radical left is decaffeinating the suburbs.

And finally, as for those thousand extra ballots he mentioned, That was a fuck-up where some voters in Fairfax County, Virginia, were sent 2 mail-in ballots by mistake.

Which sounds bad, but the key thing to understand there is that because ballots are matched to individual voters, the system is designed to prevent people voting twice.

You may have 2 ballots, but you can only cast 1.

And look, mistakes are going to happen in an election with over 100 million ballots.

And when they do, we should move fast to correct them.

But none of those examples that Trump cited, all of which have lit up right-wing media, appear to be part of any scheme to steal votes.

And if they are, the scheme seems to be horribly coordinated, totally nonsensical, and extremely dumb.

So the fact is that fears over mail-in ballot fraud have been wildly overblown.

And to the extent there is any danger with them, it's actually a far more mundane 1.

And that's that you could end up having your ballot rejected for technical reasons.

In the 2020 primaries, more than 550,000 ballots were rejected in 30 states.

Due to missing signatures, missed deadlines, or signatures that could not be verified.

Over half a million ballots were rejected in the primaries.

That's practically an entire Wyoming disappearing into thin air.

Unless, of course, it's the actual Wyoming disappearing, in which case, it really might be for the best.

It's a semi-arid sandbox filled with fluffy cows and nothing.

The most famous part of Wyoming is the state trying to swallow itself up.

And the second most famous part is it's splitting itself out again.

It's clear that even you don't like you, Wyoming, and it's getting hard for the rest of us to watch.

And to be fair to voters, ballots can be tricky.

Some states have secrecy envelopes, which you don't sign, which you then have to put inside a declaration envelope, which you do.

It can be confusing, so do make sure that you read the instructions carefully.

And it's also surprisingly important to think about the signature that you're using, because they match them against the 1 that they have on record for you, either from when you registered to vote or the 1 you have on file at the DMV.

And replicating your own signature can be more difficult than you might expect, as this handwriting expert explains.

Borsini says no 2 signatures are identical and vary over time.

Hand size and age and illness, medication, the writing position they were in, were they depressed?

All those kind of factors come into play.

Look at these actual signatures from former President Richard Nixon over a six-year period.

The truth is, our signatures change over time, and sometimes they change over the course of a single day, because let's be honest here, we all have at least 2 signatures.

The real 1 and your coffee shop signature, which is usually just a line and depending on your mood, a couple of loop-de-loops.

Look, you're getting a muffin, what are you gonna do?

And in theory, some states are supposed to let you know if your ballot was disqualified, but in practice, that doesn't always happen.

Just watch 1 California man learn that it happened to him in 2018.

Tattoo artist Johnny Trevino loves to create.

That's why Trevino says it came as a shock when we showed him that the way he draws his signature actually caused his ballot to be rejected during the last major election in 2018.

Yes, because I'm a tattoo artist, and sometimes I write it beautiful, and sometimes I just sign it quick.

Although I will say, sometimes I'll write it beautiful, and sometimes I just sign it quick is 1 of the last things you want to hear from someone giving you a tattoo.

It's right up there with, you know, I'm more of a hands-free artist.

But look, let's say that none of what I've talked about so far turned out to be a problem.

Everyone behaves themselves at polling places, the lines aren't too long, and nobody fucks up their mail-in ballots.

There is still 1 more potential wrinkle in this election, and it happens after you voted.

Because mail-in ballots in particular can take a long time to count, which does make sense.

Before the count can begin, a series of procedures need to be followed, like making sure the vote count from a particular precinct matches up with the actual number of ballots received.

The city of Grand Rapids has issued some 35,000 absentee ballots.

Just the simple process of opening that many envelopes, it takes a long time.

35,000 is a shit ton of envelopes, and opening them is gonna take a long fucking time, which, by the way, should probably be the official tagline of every single award show.

The Oscars, there are a shit ton of envelopes to open, so it's gonna take a long fucking time.

And making it worse, in some key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they're not even allowed to begin processing mail-in ballots until election day itself.

Which brings us to something very important, because there is a natural vulnerability here that the Trump campaign may be able to exploit if we're not extremely careful.

Remember, he may receive a larger proportion of in-person votes, and those will get counted faster, leading to a potential problem.

Election experts say 1 possible election scenario is what is known as the blue shift, with Trump ahead on election night, and Biden pulling in front after election night through mail-in ballots.

There is no such thing as election night results.

They're only partial results, and they always have been partial results.

Many votes are counted after election night.

And this year, the discrepancy in how people vote could lead to a so-called blue shift, which I know sounds like a euphemism for a Smurf's bowel movement, but it actually refers to the idea that since more Biden supporters are voting by mail, Democrats could initially be behind, then pull ahead once all the mail ballots are counted.

And the concern is that In that early stage, the Trump campaign could declare victory and claim any additional ballots are fraudulent.

He himself has tweeted that we must know election results on the night of the election, not days, months, or even years later.

But here's the thing, we don't need to know on the night at all.

Projecting winners on election night can be a bit like summarizing get out when you've only seen the beginning.

Oh, it's about a young man who meets his girlfriend's parents for the first time, which is obviously nerve-wracking.

But luckily, her parents seem like a couple of real sweeties, so everything's cool.

Yeah, that is how it starts, but maybe you should stop talking until you know the whole story.

And in an election with so many mail-in votes, it may take significantly longer to get the final results than it has in the past.

And the swing could be even more pronounced.

That is why election officials are so anxious to reset our expectations.

The expectation is election night, like most election nights, around midnight, 01:00, we know who the president is going to be.

And in 2020, that is simply not gonna be the case.

The expectation should be that we will probably not know the President of the United States until mid to late November.

If this election is close, we may not know for a while.

So it might actually help to stop thinking of it as election night and more as an election month.

Which is a lot like when someone says it's their birthday month, in that the very concept makes every decent American want to vomit.

And this is going to take an adjustment on everybody's part, from individual voters to TV networks that are accustomed to going all out and selling election night as an event to social media networks that could become cesspools of misinformation.

So, there are a lot of places where Republicans might be able to put their thumb on the scale of this election.

And if you think any of this is me being paranoid, you should know it's already started.

In Wisconsin, Republican legislators threatened to sue elections officials for holding an early voting event where 10,000 people cast ballots, suggesting they might seek to have all those votes invalidated.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Their governor has insisted that drop-off locations for absentee ballots be limited to just 1 per county, whether it's Loving County, which has just 169 residents, or Harris County, which has more than 4000000.

Although I guess that does track with Texas' famous slogan, don't mess with Texas, unless you're directing them to a single voting nexus, even while some of them could be dangerously infectious.

That slogan honestly never made sense to me until just now.

What can we do to help the system run smoother?

Well, luckily, there are steps you can take.

First, as an individual, make a plan to vote.

You can find information for your state at canivote.org.

If you want to do it in person, on election day, that's great, although we don't want everyone doing that, because remember, with your polling places open this year, that could lead to a run-the-jewels-listing party that nobody wants.

So, if your schedule is flexible enough, and if you live in a state where you can vote early, you should do that, especially to make the lines shorter on election day for those who don't have that luxury.

Now, if you want to vote by mail, that's great too, but we should be trying to flatten the voting curve to take the pressure off the system.

So, request your ballot as early as possible, read all the instructions, and send it back or drop it off as soon as you've filled it in.

Oh, and also, do be careful with your signature unless you want some local news reporter to show up 2 years from now and tell you that your vote didn't count and throw your skills as a tattoo artist into significant doubt.

And by the way, if you are still worried about mailing your ballot in, it is worth knowing 46 states have some sort of ballot tracking so you can be sure it was received and counted.

And you should absolutely use that resource if you can.

The really important thing to remember is, this election is already very different from all those before it.

So we all need to be on top of not only our own voting plans, but making sure our friends and family are on top of theirs as well.

Because I have to say, if your plan is to just sit back and expect the system to magically work itself out, and that this man will have a three-quarter life crisis and suddenly turn into a good loser, I'm sorry to tell you, that is simply a...

See all LastWeekTonight transcripts on Youtube

Election 2020: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)