Hello and welcome to Retrieving the Social Sciences, a production of the Center for Social Science Scholarship. I'm your host, Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science here at UMBC. On today's show, as always, we'll be hearing from UMBC faculty, students, visiting, speakers and community partners about the social science research they've been performing in recent times, qualitative, quantitative, applied, empirical, normative, on retrieving the social sciences, we bring the best of UMBC social science community to you.
Confession time. I am an occasional fan of college football, mostly the pageantry surrounding the game itself, with tailgating and grilling and a party atmosphere raining on Saturdays at many of the nation's top universities. At UNC, my alma mater, you could often catch me sitting on the long aluminum bleachers of Kenan Stadium watching UNC lose to its ACC rivals at the time, this included the University of Maryland. Alas, UMBC has no football team, which means that on Saturdays in the fall, I still find myself cheering once again for the team in powder blue, and this past week, my fandom led me to an especially damaging round of social identity driven anguish. You see, UNC lost a game by allowing their opponents to score 70 points. For those of you listening carefully, you'll recall I mentioned this was a college football game, not a basketball game, and to add insult to injury, the team we lost to wasn't even a power conference school. Our brutal loss came at the hands of James Madison University located just down the road in Virginia. As it turns out, this is the highest number of points that James Madison has scored against the delegation from North Carolina since 1787 at the Constitutional Convention, James Madison the foremost proponent of federalism, or a strong, centralized federal government, was opposed by anti Federalists from North Carolina and other state delegations. Our Constitution makes concessions to the states. For example, we can look to the 10th Amendment, but when all the points are tallied, the Constitution was really a huge win for Madison and for the Federalist vision of our time tested Republic, but despite Madison's unstoppable offense at the convention, some aspects of our nation's governance are very much left to the states. Perhaps the most salient example is election law, which is administered at the state level, with some guardrails from the Federal Election Commission or FEC. Today, I have the pleasure of bringing you a rebroadcast of this year's Constitution Day lecture at UMBC. This lecture was delivered by Maryland state administrator of elections, Jared DeMarinis. Mr. DeMarinis has served in this capacity as the top elections official in our entire state since 2023 and brings a distinguished record of service and election observation and administration to this position. In his remarks, Mr. DeMarinis explains how Maryland elections work and what the biggest threats to a successful election might be in the present time. Let's jump in and hear about the work of our state's top elections official in ensuring the safety, integrity and fairness of Maryland's elections.
Jared DeMarinis was unanimously appointed as the state's administrator of elections last September by the bipartisan state board of elections. Previously, he served 18 years as the director of candidacy and campaign finance. In that position, he took a proactive approach to Election Administration and campaign finance, making Maryland a model state for the use of new technology by campaigns, campaign disclosure and enforcement, if if you've been receiving text messages from your preferred candidate of choice recently asking you to text the small dollar donation jared's work in Maryland made Maryland the first state to allow those kinds of donations. Obviously, that has become a lot more common in the intervening years. Mr. DeMarinis has served as an international election observer in Estonia, North Macedonia and Armenia. He's been published in the New York Times. He's written a book on the history of the Electoral College in Maryland, a subject very near and dear to my heart, and he's presented at national conferences on important election issues, including deep fakes, regulating online campaign ads and the enforcement of campaign finance laws. Jared DeMarinis has a law degree from Rutgers School of Law Newark and a bachelor's degree from Villanova University, and we are extremely excited to hear from him today. So Jared DeMarinis take it away.
Well, just want to say thank you. Thank you for inviting me to this forum and on the 25th anniversary as well. So I feel very fortunate to be a part of. It and to do it on Constitution Day and vote national voter registration day. These are two things that I, I like a lot, just, you know, so it's just, it's great that they're together for this, this lecture series here. Just, you know, wanted to introduce myself here. Yeah, I am the state administrator of elections, you know, the state board of elections, basically, is the one that's in charge of putting on elections throughout Maryland, we are fortunate that it is a centralized state, so wherever you are in the state of Maryland, you're using the same voting equipment, the same rules apply. There is no changes between counties. So if you go to other states, because every voter registration deadlines requirements are all different in the 50 states for our presidential election. So while the general election is universal across the United States, the actual conduct, machines, voting methods are all different throughout it, but in Maryland, we're a top we're a centralized state, and which is, I think the better of the models here, because it creates consistency and it gives uniformity for its citizens. We set the policy, and then we work with the 24 local boards of elections in implementing that policy. They then help us right now, recruit all the election judges that we are, we're looking for and and train them for for us on the use of the equipment here. So we're we're less than 49 days left in this election here. I actually have it. It's 48 days, 19 hours, 52 minutes and seconds. I have that on my clock, my perpetual countdown clock, to election day. But Don't kid yourself that you think that Election Day is the be all, end all. In fact, if you know, if you're a college student and you want to get a mail in ballot, most likely, if you have already signed up for it, you will be getting your mail in ballot starting the 23rd so election day, for me, really starts this on Friday, because on Friday the 20th, we're going to send out web delivered ballots to our military and overseas voters and to our domestic Marylanders, and then they're going to also start beginning out the mail ballots to them as well. So voting is going to take place in Maryland at the end of this month. And you know, you'll probably start seeing drop boxes of throughout the counties and in convenient locations, because we're we're deploying them right now as well. So that's kind of the overall arching stuff here. But I can also talk to you about the Electoral College and everything else, because I wrote a book about it. And then we'll get into the question and answers. Before we get into that, I just want to give a little plug for any of the historians out there. You know how you have the New Jersey Plan was, you know, the creation of the Senate, and then the Virginia Plan was the creation of the House of Representatives, because they were, like bigger and everything else, and then you had the Connecticut Compromise and everything else. Well, no one really talks about how the electoral college came about. I started to do some research about it. And in fact, there was a convention before the convention, the Constitutional Convention that created our great democracy, and it was in Annapolis. And they were, you know, here during an election time, Annapolis, the city of Annapolis, elected its mayor and council via Electoral College method, and the Maryland State Senate was always, for a long period of time, was elected as through electoral college. They were here, the founding fathers witnessing those elections, and in the Federalist Papers, it's almost like an afterthought, because they were like, well, how are we going to elect this president here? We don't want them tied too much to Congress, because if Congress elected him, then he would always be beholden to them. So they divide this like but they didn't want to give it to directly to the masses, because then popular vote and the lack of communication you would have, you know, they would almost they were fearing like a demigod because of what was going on in France. So they didn't want mob rule or anything like that. So they decided to have this like, well, this, this the system where the state legislatures would then select electors and have this like, you know, kind of like the electors would then be more of, like, this educated class and everything else. And in one of the the paper. Dollars. Alexander Hamilton kind of wrote, well, it's been working in Maryland for for X amount of years beforehand, they seem to have no problems with it. And so that's how kind of the electoral college came about. Was they seeing it and witnessing it in Maryland and in funny, I kind of like make it like because of Maryland is such the small state for for Colonial purposes, there it was kind of like the Maryland plan. And one last little tidbit, and I'll open it up to everything. Maryland is one of, I think, five states that has voted in every presidential election. New York didn't ratify the Constitution in time, and all the southern states then were barred from participating in this. So, like, you think about it, you're like, well, there was 13 Jared, right? Like, but then all of a sudden, you had a couple of things there. So, and I've gone to archives and looked at all the the minutes, because now I'm in charge of organizing the electoral college mission and bringing them in. And we do it at the state house, if you have some, if you ever are free one December. I think December 17, now is the new date, because of all the changes, if you want to come down and witness 10 people vote for the upcoming presidential election. They're the ones that are casting the vote. And you get to see the documents that we have to sign, the certificate of vote that we had to send to Congress, which was one of the things that the January 6 was trying to destroy, was those certificates of vote. So it's a, it's quite a as a historian, as a person who loves elections, it's just kind of really cool to have it on this date here as well. So, but I'm happy to kind of talk about elections on national voter registration day as well, and everything that is upcoming for our challenges here.
Well, thank you so much for that. So what we really envision for the rest of the time that we have together is a conversation. I've got three of UMBC finest students who are going to be asking a lot of the questions. So I'm very, very happy to have Khadijat Lawal, Mack Watkins and Oyinlola Oluka here helping me out. And so we're going to go through some of their questions, and then we, if we have time, at the end, we'll do some Q and A from the audience.
So my question for you, I'm sure, as you may have seen last week, Taylor Swift encouraged people to register to vote by posting on Instagram and provided a link to vote.org how many people usually register to vote in Maryland in mid September, and are we seeing a different pattern this year?
So we we are seeing after the debate, more people did register than a normal day. But you know whether it's Taylor Swift the debate my social media outreach, which is fantastic, check it out when there was a little bit of a bump. But you know what the biggest thing is, is the use of social media, and when meta starts doing their voter registration kickoffs, like, you know how people are always like, I'm registered. Are you registered? We start seeing a lot more uptick with that, because it's much more personal. And so, you know, that's why we've kind of, there has been this national voter registration day, which, you know, there's been a lot of, I would say there'll be an uptick from this. September is voter registration month, so we've been kind of doing more outreach there. And you had on Sunday was democracy day, so you had a lot of pieces there. So I think that September now is getting a little bit more play. And I think historically, my background is also in campaigns. After Labor Day, people start more shifting towards the the upcoming election. And when I was there, like, when you had just election day, it was like, the October surprise. And people then really were like, waiting until October to kind of like, get the big hits or anything like that. But, like I said, you know, we are, we're going to start voting in the state of Maryland, basically by this weekend. And you know, there's been, I would say, a couple seminal elections in our lifetime. 16 for, for disinformation, but 20 was more for how do you conduct an election? You know remotely, but it gave a lot of people more of the idea of a different method, which was mail in voting. And 22 and 24 are like the new data points. And I think we're, we're seeing a shift in the. Electorate and how their voting methods are going. What they prefer. Maryland has a very robust mail in ballot program that you know as a state that is not officially a mail in ballot state, we are one of the bigger ones here, because of a permanent mail in ballot list that we have in the primary election, 40% of the people that voted basically voted by mail. And you know, I think now, what you're seeing now is campaigns activity, voter registration drives. Everything now is shifting more towards September, and because getting your ballot early, making your choices. All that is you know, you have more people that are voting by mail and having live ballots in their hands and can make decisions and cast that ballot. So long answer there. It's like yes, but it has, it started to shift a lot into September.
Thank you so much for your responses. My question pertains to how much time does your office spend responding to citizens concerns that are based on misinformation about how elections are conducted?
That's a great question, and I think that's our biggest fear right now, which is misinformation. So election administration in the past, was more passive, right? Like it was, it was there, but not seen, right? Like they would give out information about voter registration deadlines. Here's some forms, you know, and count the ballots, right? But it was the campaigns, it was the participants out there that was really driving information and reaching out to voters. Disinformation now has not just attacked the campaigns, but has attacked the fiber in which the our democracy is based upon. It has attacked the integrity of my office. It is attacked the the certification process. It is attacked election results. All this now is basically making it so that you can't govern because, you know, as a person who's gone overseas to see an election here, right, when you don't accept the results, then everything that that government tries to do in the opposition's mind is viewed as illegitimate, and they have a difficult time passing laws, or that those laws don't apply to me because of everything else. So it all comes back down to the Foundation, which is the election and ensuring that the electoral process is, you know, I would say, accepted, and right now, with disinformation, it is it is attacked that. And one of the things that we've done, or I've done, is been very proactive in this, by making more outreach, being more transparent, you know, being open about the process, making sure that they understand, that everything is verified that there's election security about it. The other aspect is, working with the General Assembly, we've, we've created a portal on our website here, because listen. The other thing about this information and social media is the the micro targeting. It is fantastic. I mean, the amount that I can target any one of you with a specific message to to infiltrate and hit you constantly is amazing, but at the same time, it's not like I'm going to see that message, right? So your messages are different than my message. So you're getting completely you might get this information, whereas I'm not. Whereas in the past, you know, when they would do it on, say, a mailer that was sent to it, you know, people would always get it, give it to me. TV commercials, it hits a wide swath of an audience. Radio ads, these are things that you can kind of see and be pushed over there. So what now I'm kind of asking for with this portal, is you're in this fight just as much as I am to help protect our democracy. Is that if you see something that is wrong, report it to us, so that we then can correct the record, because we'll go after the social media platform or, you know, to post something, to correct it, to make sure that you get the right information, or if it goes all the way up to voter suppression tactics, to work with law enforcement to make sure that that is prosecuted. Because, you know, this information is not just necessarily to sow distrust in the process, but it is also to basically disenfranchise voters, because at one point there, that's the ultimate goal, and it's just taking on some new forms, but it has been a part of our our legacy for a long time, about trying to disenfranchise individuals.
You know, I think I'm going to jump in and ask a. Quick follow up, you mentioned being an election observer abroad, and I know that for a lot of emerging democracies, the model is to have the national government run elections and not regional governments. And you know, a lot of times new democracies will set up that national election agency, as, you know, a really big independent organization, and so in the same way that we, you know, think that the US Supreme Court should kind of sort of be left alone and not be, you know, held to political standards and have, you know, life tenure, that you know, that that kind of approach is given towards election agencies. Do you see any value in trying to move to that kind of a model in the United States, or are we just have we just too much experience running elections at the state and local level for that to be a helpful consideration?
So the one thing about elections and any ethics laws that you'll see, it usually takes, like, a scandal or a huge event. And, you know, even just the way we voted has always taken some sort of problem, right? Like we didn't, like, before mckinley's was elected, we didn't have what is considered the Australian ballot, and it was in secrecy of the ballot, because they were going around and, you know, having this gang of five and like, vote buying and all this other stuff. And it took that type of a scandal to be like, No, we need secrecy of the ballot. It took 2000 a good Bush v Gore to get Hava implemented nationally, to create the Election Assistance Commission. And I think since 2000 you've seen the the Election Assistance Commission take on a bigger role. Right? Their funding has been getting more secure. They have expanded what they are now doing for states. And I think, yes, you know, it helps. But I think, right, it starts with the states, kind of centralizing, like, like a Maryland model first, because then it's, we would just be dealing with 50 of us, and then we can move up to the next level. We've, we've tried to do that a little bit amongst the states with like Eric, which is electronic registration information center where we just want to exchange our voter registration databases with each other to see about potential double voters. You know, voter registration cleaning up our roles and that has taken on a political tone right now that is, I would say, detrimental to the organization, but it is one of those things that I think, yes, there might be a push, but it's not going to be without a major kind of upheaval or scandal that that's going to push it that way. Otherwise it's going to be, everyone's going to be like we, we win on this. This is back to my old campaign hats and everything else. When you talk to elected officials, we win with these rules. I know these rules. Why would I change these rules? Right? I still win, you know, right?
Yeah, the devil, you know, is better than the devil you don't. And for those of you who are surprised that in the old days, you didn't get to cast a secret ballot, there's a great Maryland sort of take on this. Edgar Allan Poe was found dead the day after election day, because in those days, the political parties would get you drunk as reward for you turning out on election day. And my man partied a little bit too hard on election night. And yeah, that's, that's how we left this world. So on that morbid note, let's get back to the student questions. Khadija, you got another question for us.
My next question was, how did the covid pandemic affect the administration of the 2020 election? What lessons did you learn from the pandemic about making voting easier that we can apply in the future.
So yes, 2020, was definitely a seminal election because it forced, I think, election administration to look at newer methods to to engage with the the electorate, and it opened up, I think the electorate's eyes on mail and voting. So prior to 2020, mail in voting was, you know, was basically referred to as absentee voting, right? And was about five to 6% of the the turnout, with 95% being divided between Election Day and early voting. And so one of the things now is that after 2020, was everyone receiving the ballot in the state of Maryland here, right, and seeing the convenience of that of mail in voting, and it is taken hold. And I think that now we're trying to. Figure out whether this is a post covid phenomenon that's going to dip, or if it's going to maintain this current level. I think it's going to maintain the current level because of the permanent mail in ballot list and people signing up for it and wanting to keep voting that way, which is why we have drop boxes and throughout the counties and the city, for for convenience sake, the lessons learned was, I think more people you know with with voting mail, there could be mistakes, and you're not with the Election Judge right then and there to kind of like, hey, like, ask a quick question. So the general assembly we worked with is about curing mail in ballots, so if you forget to sign the oath, you know it doesn't necessarily just just automatically disenfranchise you. And so we would then call them up and call them and say, hey, you need to sign the oath, and we use new technologies like texting to for them to sign back and deliver it back to us so we can count the ballots. I think the other things too is the Reliance now on the mail system. And we've we've noticed, you know, there's always an issue, because that's something that I don't control, the US Postal Service as much as I would like to, but it's something that we have to then look at and how to mitigate as many of those variables as possible. So one of the things is we use the technology that I can track the ballot from basically when my vendor sends it out to you, or when the local board send it out to you, because we have, I think it's intelligent barcoding and stuff. So I can find it where it's in the stream to your mailbox, and then if you put it back into and use one of our envelopes and put it back into the mail. I can follow back right to the local boards of election to do that. If you do it in the drop box, it goes right in to also alleviate a lot of, I think, concerns and angst around mail in voting is we have a, I would say, another program to keep the voter informed. So if you know we're going to send you emails or text messages saying the ballot is on the way, so now you're looking for it in the mailbox, right? So you're not like worried, like, is it coming? Is it not coming? Right? We've we're proactively telling you that. Then once we've received it, we're going to tell you that we received it within 48 hours, because we're going to check it in and then send another text or an email to you saying your ballot has been received. It's you know, so now you can say, okay, good, it's there. And then finally, the last one there is going to be when it gets canvassed, which means put through the scanning machine and actually counted. Now, depending on when you actually vote mail, we allow mail to be counted early before election day, so that when Election Day occurs, we understand that people still want to know winners or losers when the polls actually physically close. So we try to count as many as as possible. But in Maryland, we're a very progressive state with the mail ballots, so that if it's postmarked by election day, we will count it if we receive it within the next 10 days after Election Day. So we we count after Election Day. And so it's not you know, one of those things that, you know, oh, the election is over. No, we still count every ballot to make sure. So, you know, don't, don't ever think that election is over or not to vote, because that's the biggest takeaway. But that's kind of, I think, from 2020, and covid, the shift that has occurred.
So my next question for you is, to what extent do cybersecurity threats affect your plans for administering elections?
I think that goes back to the disinformation portion of things here, right? So 16 was another major election, because I think prior to 16, we Americans always thought we were invulnerable, like it was kind of like, almost like this idea that nothing attacked us, you know, almost like, you know, the rest of the world has election interference, but no one has ever interfered with us. 16 bursts that bubble in a major way. And you know, Maryland was actually a targeted state by Russian interference in that election. The threat is now perpetually there, right? We have more bad foreign actors than ever before, and we also have domestic actors, bad actors. As well in this process here. So you know, one of the things after 16 was that they made elections a critical infrastructure, which then freed up more money, but also more federal agencies to help us be aware of threats. So for cyber security, we deal with CISA, which is a part of the alphabet of the federal government that I think it's like cyber I forgot security agency. I forgot what The I stands for, but they're very much our partners in this fight. You know, we make sure that everything is, you know, tested. You know, we have a lot of security measures in place to combat disinformation and making sure that everything is secure. One of the things about this is, again, we're an open and transparent agency, but at the same time, we have to be vigilant about cyber attacks as well as physical attacks on us as well. And you know other agencies that deal with those threats, you know the DOD, and you know the DOJ like they're very much, very tight and organized, and we can't operate like that, because if we were that closed, it would have an impact on the voting process, you know. So it's a delicate balance between being open and transparent and inviting the public in and at the same time making sure that everything is safe and secure. So yeah, that's kind of where we're at, but we're it is constantly being monitored and going forward with it, and the cyber security threats to us are taking on new forms. I'm not sure if you saw, but there are other people right now that are getting texting scams in there that are, you know, being playing on people's fears that they're not registered to vote, saying urgent you're not registered according to public roles. And then it's kind of like a very short URL there, but it looks like a government one there. It's not it, you know, we had to put out press statements on that front there to make sure that people are not clicking on those links and to report that information to us.
On a little bit more positive note, recently, chief election officers in Kentucky and Michigan have organized competitions to design the I voted stickers that is handed out on election day. Is it possible for something like that to start occurring in Maryland?
Yes, definitely, I like that. I like more civic participation and more ideas about it. I'll have one for the 26 election, and we can, we can go through it and take a look at it and see what we have for that. I always like to see how people do those I voted stickers and what wins and how people view voting as well. So it's always great, but, yeah, I definitely like that idea, and will be interested in kind of doing something for 2026
Maybe we can start with Chip the retriever. I mean, who act like who can say no to voting to that face? So Jared, you mentioned earlier that, you know, on the list of important elections, one of them was, was 2000 because afterwards, Congress enacted the help American Vote Act, which appropriated a lot of money from the federal government to the states to help sort of streamline and improve their election technologies. I know that Maryland is more of a centralized state, so, you know, you probably didn't have to deal with the municipality by municipality variation in election technology. But How important was that law in, you know, making your job a little bit easier in subsequent elections.
I think by just getting the machines, updating the machines, you know, you go from those old lever machines that were constantly breaking down, and then those punch cards and the hanging chads, all those kinds of equipment. So this is funny. One of the things that I enjoy going to is like actually looking at and talking to election officials across the world when there is a pot of money to divvy up, right, in the past, it's always like, Okay, where do you want to go with this money here? Right? There would be schools. You would fire police, you know, you go down public, you know, sanitation, health, right listed five. You know, elections gets lower and lower for, like, everything there for money. And you know, back in those days, like when they would ask, like, we need to update our voting equipment, they would be like, ah. Not really you, you can, you can use that same equipment one more time, or something like that, until, like, you had, like, an absolute failure. That's when they kind of, like upgraded. And I think 2000 kind of showed the entire nation at the time, holy cow, like this is how we've been voting. We need to, like, upgrade this entire system here, and then, I think, with that, and then with the EAC perpetually doing more testing, and, you know, having better equipment, that's when people are now looking at it and going, Yes, we have the paper ballots. You know, with the scanners, the ovals, like all that stuff is, you know, with redundancies, making sure that, yes, we can, we can trust the scanners. But if you want to have a recount, we actually have the physical paper underneath it to make sure that everyone knows what's going on, and then we audit those results afterwards. So I think, yes, you know, it took a little bit of time, but, like, that's where it was, like, it kind of moved us up and said, like, election, you know, organization is actually, like, important to us and the democracy here, and not just, you know, getting the bottom of a basement, you know, room that you need to have storage.
Well, thanks for that, and you talked about Jared working with the General Assembly. In what ways does your office have to respond to both the State Judiciary but also the US Supreme Court on issues from rules in the state constitution about how to conduct referenda to campaign finance rulings from the US Supreme Court. What? What are those interactions like?
So I think one when we do with the General Assembly, we always help give guidance on like laws, on how it would impact right like or the administration of that law, regardless of the sponsor with the courts, you know, one of the things is you always have to like the Supreme Court. And this was back to my old job, which was campaign finance. Was McCutcheon, right? And Citizens United. So Citizens United opened up the floodgates for a lot of you know, corporate contributions, independent expenditures. And McCutchen then got rid of the cumulative aggregate limits for contributions, because Maryland had on on the books that you couldn't give more than, I think, $24,000 in the aggregate to all candidates, and mccutch kind of said that was unconstitutional. So when we get those opinions, we have to then issue guidances immediately and say, like this, now this law is unconstitutional and unenforceable. It's on the books, but you know it's we're not going to enforce it because of this court decision here, and with those decisions are, of course, candidate rights, you know, making sure that they have access to the ballot working. You know, you can't have it too restrictive to bar them, making sure that petitions with the State Judiciary and the state supreme court now, they have a lot of opinions on what constitutes a signature verification of petition efforts. You have to, you know, read those cases there, because that's almost like how to help interpret the law, right? So you have the law, and then you have the opinion, and then you, you work together with your attorney general, and you kind of come up with a policy and say, this is now the new standard on how we're going to implement this and administer this law. And so you, you use all those those tools there, and that's why it's, I think Maryland's good model here, because once we kind of come up with the policy at the state level, that's when we then give it out to all the locals to help administer it.
Great. Dr, stoken, I know you had a question, yeah.
Well, thank you. This has really been fascinating. You know, thinking about all the students that we have here today, I imagine some of them might be interested in sort of going into, you know, maybe political office or serving in an administrative capacity. Could you talk about steps that might help them, and thinking about going into an office like yours, and any skills that you know they should develop along the way.
Sure, I love that, because I mean, basically, if you have, if you're interested in politics, one of the things now is you're at the best time of your life. You know you have no real responsibilities. You. And you can go and enjoy this. I've done campaigns. They were fantastic. I would recommend, you know, finding one. And, you know, joining a campaign, you you you get to see and all parts of your state or other states that you've had to work on. If you join a presidential campaign, you get to travel state to state. You kind of It's a unique job that I would say that information, it really teaches you one crisis management and meeting deadlines, because there is no tomorrow after election day, you know, you you November, 5 comes and it goes you, and you will have a winner and a loser. It's not like, if you like, well, I'll get to that tomorrow. Nope. You know, information is needed. Like, to the chief of staff, to the campaign manager, like that second, because they're going to be in front of a TV camera that's too late, if it's five minutes after the fact. And the the other thing too, is like, well, maybe I don't want to do a campaign, then you can become an election judge and get to see a little bit of the work that we go on here, our recruitment of election judges. I always want to get more younger people to become election judges. You know, we're upping the pay. It was, I worked with the General Assembly on that one there to get it up to $250 for a day and $50 for training. Some counties can go up. This is the floor, not the ceiling. And if you become a returning judge, we then have $100 bonus on top of that as well. But, you know, I think one of the things is that you have to have a passion or a love, because it's not something that it's for the faint of heart. Uh, elections are getting stronger and stronger here, and you have to enjoy, you know, I'm not going to sugarcoat this. There are long hours sometimes, and then there are a couple of times where you have, like, downtime here, but you really feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. You have to have a kind of a general knowledge of, you know, understanding of the systems, and a little bit of a legal background, just to kind of, because you're constantly dealing with laws. And, you know, I came through a poli sci, social science, you know, collegiate background, and then went on to a law school. And then, kind of, at the time when I was at law school, was when Bush v Gore was being argued there. But you get to see, you know, all the issues that are coming on there, and you deal with a lot of people, large swaths of individuals. Maryland is unique in a sense that everyone has to physically file their certificate of candidacy in person. So at my office, we get the governor coming in to come in and file to like the random person that you know that wants to run first State Senate and first house of delegates or Congress, and you meet a whole bunch of great people there. But it is a, it's a, it's a very much of a family atmosphere, and you have fun, but it's a lot of work, but you do sense of accomplishment, and you get to see it, you know, on TV and everything else. Like, it's not, it's not another job where you're making widgets and you're like, oh, whatever your product is going to is being talked about in everywhere. And I find that to be personally satisfying and cool.
So we're almost out of time, and there are a lot of great questions submitted in the chat, but I think we might end with this one. The question talks about differences in voter registration across like generations as Maryland has sort of expanded the number of ways that voters can cast their ballots. Are you able to see where those different options are being taken advantage of whether it's different geographic regions the state different minority communities or different age groups? Do we have a sense as to, you know, what groups of people living in, what parts of the state are gravitating towards, what ways of participating in elections?
So we don't do racial that's more for the academics, because we don't have any of that information. I always love to see those types of reports from the academics, so I look forward to seeing if you guys would do that report on that. One of the things is, I'm starting to try to break down on the age, on seeing the participation levels with mail in voting. Because it is now increasing its its presence here. And I was trying to figure out why our data points. So I have to throw out 2020 and anything before 2020 is just, you know, old and 2020 was with covid, and that's not a good data point here. So you're really dealing with 22 and 24 so this is kind of like the first part here. The one thing that I haven't really seen is been a crazy uptick in participation from younger voters. Historically, you've always been one of the worst voting groups out there. That's just being honest. So please one register and two vote. It start turning the tide there, whereas seniors are historically one of the best voting groups out there, and which is why you start hearing why politicians, your their their messages to certain groups rather than others, but I wanted to start to see how mail in voting, and the popularity of it and the convenience of it is going to affect it. And I'm starting to look at some of the the age breakdowns of it as well. But I can't really It's too, too early to really make generalizations on that front there,
I want to thank our speaker, Jared de Marinus, thank you for making time in a busy season of a busy election year, and on A particularly important day of national voter registration day applause.
Now it's time for campus connections, the part of the broadcast where we connect today's featured content to other work happening at UMBC, our production assistant gene is on the case again, this time to tell us more about the work happening at UMBC surrounding the 2024 election. Jean,
Hi, Dr Anson, for today's Campus Connection, we'll be talking about the Center for Democracy and civic life's cast your whole vote initiative. If you didn't know, the Center for Democracy and Civic Life is a really amazing Center at UMBC that facilitates civic learning and democratic engagement on campus for the 2024 election. The Center has been mobilizing people to vote and getting more students on campus involved with this year's election on their website, you can find their cast your whole vote page, which has all the resources you may need for this upcoming election, including voter registration, important dates and deadlines, voting education resources and UMBC events, programs and resources. Additionally, their my UMBC page consistently posts updates on events hosted by the center to help answer any questions you may have about voting and help you get engaged with this year's election. So be sure to check them out and get registered to vote. And that's it for today's Campus Connection. Back to you, Dr Anson.
Thanks so much for listening today. I hope you gained as much of an appreciation as I did for all the hard work that our state election officials do to ensure that our elections are great expressions of the constitutional vision of government by and for the people. Until next time, find a plan to vote and as always, keep questioning, Retrieving. The Social Sciences is a production of the UMBC Center for Social Science Scholarship. Our acting director is Dr Eric stoken, and our undergraduate production assistant is Jin Kim. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Djuan Moreland of the UMBC class of 2024 find out more about CS3@socialscience.umbc.edu and make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, where you can find full video recordings of recent CS3 sponsored events until next time, keep questioning foreign.
