And that was a huge benefit. I do want to ask about a couple other voting issues that have come up, Amy. In particular, ballot boxes being set on fire. Like, what is happening with that? Where have we seen ballots being burned? And how much would we be worried about this?

Okay, so we've seen ballots being burned and we've seen fake images of ballots being burned. That confuses things. Yeah, there was a deep fake and it was in suburban Philadelphia, if I'm not mistaken, Erin, correct me if I'm wrong, where a video was circulated on social media showing a bunch of ballots being burned, and it wasn't actually accurate. And I think CISA, the federal cybersecurity agency, came out and said this is fake, and it came from Russia. But ballots were actually burned or damaged in Washington state and Oregon. And I actually was on the phone with some officials from those two states. I think it was yesterday. Time is kind of a circle right now. But who told me so much interesting things about ballot boxes. They use these ballot boxes because those are both vote-by states, right? Universal, everybody gets a ballot. The vast majority of voters vote by mail. They use these ballot boxes that they actually requisitioned in, I think, in Oregon because they needed these incredibly secure ballot boxes that are half-inch thick metal. And there's two models. One weighs 600 pounds and one weighs a thousand pounds. They're either bolted or cemented to the ground. They tested them with a dump truck to see if it could be moved and it couldn't. And- I would have loved

to watch that test happen. I know, me too. Someone just like speeding a dump truck at a ballot box. I know, me too.

And the newer ones have anti-incendiary devices inside them so that if a bad actor comes around, as did happen in these two places, and puts an incendiary device through the slot, there's counterterrorism inside there that puts it out. The other thing is that they're designed- Wow. It's so high tech. I know. The other thing that I learned is that they are designed to not have oxygen inside of them. Like, obviously, oxygen gets in when you open the slot, but somehow it closes really fast and it's sealed. that's also part of the anti-incendiary technology is to deprive any would-be fire from oxygen that it needs to grow. So- Wait, so did any ballots actually get- Yes. Burned or damaged? Yes. But in one case, it was like three and they were still able to identify the voters and contact them and give them an opportunity to vote again. In the other case, it was close to 500 ballots, which is obviously a lot, but they are also going through those ballots and trying to identify the voters and contact them. So it's kind of amazing actually that they were able to kind of swoop in and kind of, you know, remediate the situation pretty quickly. Aaron, do you have thoughts on why this is happening? I

mean, we don't know what the motivation is here. There was reporting that the incendiary devices in one of these cases had the words Free Gaza on them. That doesn't necessarily mean that this person is a supporter of the Palestinian cause. Sometimes people do things like that as a head fake. I think it's worth noting that before this happened, like mere days before this happened, there was a report from Wired magazine about the Department of Homeland Security basically warning about this exact thing, about ballot boxes being targeted. I think their reasoning was that this could be election deniers who are trying to, you know, sow chaos and, you know, target these ballot boxes, which have been the subject of so many conspiracy theories about voter fraud. And the other thing I think is important here is that, you know, it seems like a limited number of ballots were actually impacted. And a lot of these people whose ballots were damaged have had the opportunity to actually vote and have their votes counted. But think about the message that this sends to other people who would use those ballot drop boxes. Are you going to trust that you're going to put your ballot in that drop box, you know, thinking that it could be targeted like this, that has an impact not just on faith in our elections, but also in people's voting habits. And so I think it's a pretty kind of scary moment in our politics that this has happened.

I agree with that, but I want to make one additional point and say the turnout and the use of the drop boxes around the country where they are used, because they're not legal in all states, has been so robust that one of the things that these election officials said from those two Pacific Northwest states, as well as others around the country, is that they believe that the turnout and the activity that they're seeing and the resiliency of the people of Western North Carolina and so on is a sign that people do trust our elections. And that's like an actual pillar of election security is public faith in the election, right? Like that's actually its own important thing. And so I completely agree with Aaron that there is an enormous effort underway by predominantly Trump allies to undermine our faith and also not just Trump allies, but our foreign adversaries. Foreign actors, yes. Russia, Iran, and China. But it's not working is the takeaway of election officials, which I think is an important point to make. Yeah, and a very hopeful point. Yay, American democracy.