Background Briefing

Simon Shuster / Philip Stark / Jacob Ware

Zelensky’s “Victory Plan” And His Remark That “We Are Closer To Peace Than We Think”

We begin with Ukraine’s President Zelensky at the UN Security Council today ahead of meetings with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who just yesterday blamed the U.S. for the war in Ukraine and in his recent debate with Harris, twice refused to say whether he wants Ukraine to win. We discuss Zelensky’s remark that “we are closer to peace than we think” and his “victory plan” with Simon Shuster, a reporter for Time Magazine based in New York City, by way of Moscow, Kyiv, and Berlin. He has previously covered Russia and the former Soviet Union for Reuters, The Associated Press, The Moscow Times, and Foreign Policy; he is the author of The Showman: Inside the Invasion that Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump Can Can Steal the Election, Since He Has the Software For the Voting Machines in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Colorado

Then we examine the possibility of Trump stealing the election by electronically rigging the votes, since Republicans already have the software for the election machines in Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan. Joining us is Philip Stark, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics at University of California Berkeley. He has developed methods for auditing elections now in law in more than fifteen U.S. states and has consulted for major corporations and for the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, among many others. He has also testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Census and the State of California Senate Committee on Elections and serves on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

An Expert on Terrorism on How Election Violence is Already Underway

Then finally, we speak with an expert on domestic terrorism, Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. Together with Bruce Hoffman, he is the author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America. Ware is a professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a class on domestic terrorism, as well as at DeSales University. We discuss his article at Lawfare, “Election Violence is Already in Full Swing.”