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Webinar rewind: Preparing for potential election crises

Webinar rewind: Preparing for potential election crisesplay icon
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The Fulcrum
By The FulcrumJun 10, 2020
The Fulcrum
The Fulcrum staff.
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A pandemic. Battles over millions of mailed-in ballots. The Supreme Court deciding an Electoral College dispute. The accelerated undoing of democratic norms. Dozens of legal battles over election administration and voting rights. Each would be enough to create unprecedented challenges to an election. But all are present this year, positioning Election Day 2020 and the days after to face challenges rarely as intense before. As Nov. 3 approaches, voters, government officials, candidates and the media may become overwhelmed by the many storylines, the shifting landscape and the potential outcomes. Preparation needs to start now.

The Fulcrum convened an expert panel to discuss these issues and more on June 9. Editor-in-Chief David Hawkings moderated the webinar, which also included:

  • Bryan Monroe, associate professor of practice at Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication. Before joining Temple, Bryan was editor of CNNPolitics and Washington opinion editor for CNN; president of the National Association of Black Journalists; and editor-in-chief of Ebony & Jet magazines.
  • Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center. Trevor is a past chairman of the Federal Election Commission and was general counsel to John McCain's 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

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Does either party actually want to win the Senate race in Texas?

US Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) speaks during an "Oversight and Government Reform" hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 12, 2025. (Alex Wroblewski/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)

(Alex Wroblewski/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)

Does either party actually want to win the Senate race in Texas?

One of the worst features of the election primary system in our polarized “Red vs. Blue” time is the tendency of primary voters to flock to the candidate they most want to “destroy” the other party, not the candidate best positioned to do so.

Let’s say a zombie is scratching at your door. You’ve got a shotgun, a handgun and your favorite frying pan. The shotgun has the greatest chance of success, the handgun — if one is careful and skilled — has a solid chance of working, and the frying pan? It probably won’t dispatch the threat but, come on, how cool would it be to take out a zombie with a frying pan? So, you go with that.

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artificial intelligence

Rather than blame AI for young Americans struggling to find work, we need to build: build new educational institutions, new retraining and upskilling programs, and, most importantly, new firms.

Surasak Suwanmake/Getty Images

Blame AI or Build With AI? Only One Approach Creates Jobs

We’re failing young Americans. Many of them are struggling to find work. Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds topped 10.5% in August. Even among those who do find a job, many of them are settling for lower-paying roles. More than 50% of college grads are underemployed. To make matters worse, the path forward to a more stable, lucrative career is seemingly up in the air. High school grads in their twenties find jobs at nearly the same rate as those with four-year degrees.

We have two options: blame or build. The first involves blaming AI, as if this new technology is entirely to blame for the current economic malaise facing Gen Z. This course of action involves slowing or even stopping AI adoption. For example, there’s so-called robot taxes. The thinking goes that by placing financial penalties on firms that lean into AI, there will be more roles left to Gen Z and workers in general. Then there’s the idea of banning or limiting the use of AI in hiring and firing decisions. Applicants who have struggled to find work suggest that increased use of AI may be partially at fault. Others have called for providing workers with a greater say in whether and to what extent their firm uses AI. This may help firms find ways to integrate AI in a way that augments workers rather than replace them.

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Our Doomsday Machine

Two sides stand rigidly opposed, divided by a chasm of hardened positions and non-relationship.

AI generated illustration

Our Doomsday Machine

Political polarization is only one symptom of the national disease that afflicts us. From obesity to heart disease to chronic stress, we live with the consequences of the failure to relate to each other authentically, even to perceive and understand what an authentic encounter might be. Can we see the organic causes of the physiological ailments as arising from a single organ system – the organ of relationship?

Without actual evidence of a relationship between the physiological ailments and the failure of personal encounter, this writer (myself in 2012) is lunging, like a fencer with his sword, to puncture a delusion. He wants to interrupt a conversation running in the background like an almost-silent electric motor, asking us to notice the hum, to question it. He wants to open to our inspection the matter of what it is to credit evidence. For believing—especially with the coming of artificial intelligence, which can manufacture apparently flawless pictures of the real, and with the seething of the mob crying havoc online and then out in the streets—even believing in evidence may not ground us in truth.

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