US election issues vocabulary

We can’t predict what will  happen in this year’s US election. 

But there are some issues and  topics we expect to hear about. 

So in this video we’re looking  at some controversial issues,  

so you have the English vocabulary  you need to join in the discussions. 

Normally with our videos, we shoot a video like  this in one day. We might go back another day and  

pick up lines. But basically it’s done in one  day. How long have we been working on this one? 

This is the fifth shoot. This  is the fifth time we’ve stood in  

front of these cameras to tell you the story. And every time we do, something else happens. 

In our last video we looked at lots of basic  vocabulary for talking about the election. 

And in this one we’re going to go deeper. If you find we’re saying words you don’t know,  

you might want to go back and check out our last  video. I’ll put a link in the description below. 

One of the questions people are discussing here  is how secure and accurate the voting system is. 

And some of the questions are about  mail-in ballots and absentee ballots. 

They’re ways we can vote without  physically going to the polling station. 

So I got my official mail-in ballot in the mail  yesterday. And today I’m going to open it up and  

vote. There’s a lot of controversy about these. One of the phrases you need to start learning  

is naked ballot. Now if somebody is naked  it means they’re not wearing clothes,  

but a naked ballot is … Well, here’s the ballot and  

here’s the secure envelope you’re supposed to put  it in. And if you don’t put it in this envelope,  

and you send it in to the county election  board without it, this is a naked ballot. 

And it doesn’t count. In Pennsylvania,  your vote will not be counted. Erm … But  

you’ve also got different envelopes there. So in addition to the one that I have to  

put the ballot in before I send it back,  there’s another envelope here and this one  

says voter’s declaration, and it’s got  a space for my signature over here.  

And I have to sign it in the same way as the  county election board’s book has my signature. 

Now the other thing that has to happen  Jay is we have to turn the camera’s  

off. Because you have to do this in secret. I will. I just want to point out that we put the  

one envelope inside the other  one before we mail it back. 

In the 2016 election in the US, about  a fifth of the votes were sent by mail. 

This year’s different because so many people will  be voting by mail. And there are some people who  

say mail-in ballots are subject to fraud. Fraud is the crime where you pretend to be  

someone or something you’re not in order to cheat. And some people think mail in ballots will be a  

way for lots of people to cheat the voting system. For example, by applying for  

mail-in ballots using false names. What other instances of voter fraud are there? 

Well, many years ago the joke was that dead  people were voting in Chicago, for example.  

People would go to the cemetery, write down  names, and then go vote. But that rarely  

happens any more in American politics. So that would be an example of voter  

impersonation. But you could also have  examples of bribery or paying people to vote. 

Well, that’s not necessarily illegal. Here  in Philadelphia we have something called  

street money. People in the political process  called committee men or committee persons  

are given money by campaigns to give to people  to get them to vote for their candidates.  

It’s called street money or walking around money  and it’s quite common here in Philadelphia. 

Now President Trump claims that the mail in  ballot system is rigged. A rigged system is  

an unfair system. It’s been set up in a way  that’s dishonest to get a particular result. 

I should point out that there is no evidence  of massive fraud in mail-in balloting, which  

has been going on for decades in some states. Yes. So other people argue mail in ballots have  

been used for years and fraud has been very rare. There are other issues with mail-in ballots too.  

Sometimes they get rejected  because voters forget to sign them. 

Or they arrive late. There have been changes  at the Unites States Postal Service recently  

that have resulted in delays in the  mail, letters and packages arriving late. 

And mail-in votes can take longer to count,  so we’ll have to wait longer for the election  

results. Mmmm. 

My guess is it will be several weeks before  they have a really good idea of who has won  

the presidential election, which is going to  be hard for Americans. They’re used to getting  

their numbers the night of the election itself. So on election night, one of the candidates might  

say, ‘I’ve won’, before all the votes are counted. And then the other candidate will conTEST it. 

Notice this verb. ConTEST. The stress is on the  last syllable. You probably know the noun - a  

CONtest. That’s like a competition, but conTEST  is a verb and it means to challenge results. 

We’re expecting a lot of court  cases contesting election results. 

President Trump has said that he will accept  the results of a free and fair election,  

but he’s also said that if he loses, it  will be because the election is rigged. 

And that’s raised concerns about  the peaceful transfer of power. 

That’s a key phrase. You’ll also hear  the peaceful transition of power. 

It is fundamental to democracy. It’s been  a tradition in the United States since our  

first president, George Washington. When his  term of office came to an end, he stepped down  

and passed the power on to the next president. So some Americans are concerned about that.  

And the other question here is who decides who the  president should be. Since 1787 the citizens have  

decided by voting. But this time Trump may contest  the results and ask the courts to decide instead. 

The Supreme Court. And we had some  sad news about that last week. 

So sadly Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was  a liberal justice, that is left wing,  

passed away at the age of 87, after  years of battling pancreatic cancer. 

She was a strong champion for women’s  rights. And now the president can  

nominate or name her replacement. But it’s another controversial issue.  

If the results of the election are contested, the  Supreme Court might have to decide the winner. 

OK, back to the vote. We talked about  security with mail-in ballots, but  

is security an issue when you vote in-person too? Not really, but in some places the voting  

equipment is old, so we might hear about  some malfunctioning voting machines. 

Malfunctioning means failing to work correctly. In the past, ballots were always pieces of paper,  

weren’t they? When did they go electronic? Well, not everybody has gone electronic.  

There are still pieces of paper used around the  United States and they are the safest kinds of  

ballots to cast because no one can hack into  the machines that we use to change your vote. 

Erm. Is there way that you have of being able  to check what the machine has registered. 

The electronic machines, the answer is no.  The poll workers will press a button and the  

electronic machines will print out a record  of every ballot, so that the numbers that  

the machine tallies on its computer matches  what’s on the paper record. But it doesn’t  

really guarantee that what you voted for  is what’s recorded on that piece of paper. 

Ooooo. So there could be questions  about vote tallies being wrong. A tally  

is a written record of the number of votes. Tally is also a verb. If numbers tally it  

means they match exactly, and we can also  say tally up, that means to add up the total. 

Are you just being a bit  skeptical unnecessarily there? 

No, I don’t think so. The United States  intelligence services have determined that foreign  

powers have hacked into the electoral systems of  several states, and into some of the machines. 

So hacking is a concern. And another is  suppressing the vote. If you suppress something,  

you try to bring it down or stop it. So voter suppression is where you try  

to stop a group of people from voting. Yeah, it usually targets black voters,  

native American voters, students. 

Hispanic voters as well. Sometimes, yes. 

And the way they do that takes  different forms but one example might be  

closing a lot of polling stations in a city so  people have to travel far to get there or wait  

in line at a polling station for hours to vote. Yes, and it could take the form of voter  

confusion. So this would be when you give  people the wrong date or time for the election,  

or you send them to the wrong place to vote. In some states there’s a practice called  

purging the rolls. What happens there is, if  you haven’t voted in a couple of elections,  

they’ll remove your name from the list of  registered voters and not tell you about it. 

Yes. There’s voter suppression, but  there’s also voter intimidation.  

Intimidation is when you frighten someone or  threaten them to make them do what you want. 

And that would be illegal. Well it happened in  Jacksonville Florida a couple of years ago where  

people, mostly black people, were going to vote.  And police would stop them as their vehicles would  

approach the polling place. Maybe they had a tail  light that was broken or a headlight that wasn’t  

working. But this was a matter of intimidation.  Some black people would see other black people  

being pulled over and decide not to vote. But it’s not just the police that can be  

intimidating. Yes, in fact some right  wing groups want to form an army of  

poll watchers to ensure election security. So I think there are a lot of people who are  

concerned that we’re going to see vigilantes at  the polls. Vigilantes are groups of people who  

act together to take on duties that the police  normally perform, because they think the police  

are not performing them. And many people think … Well, in many cases vigilantes in America  

are armed. Oh yes, of course. 

OK, something different. A big  thing that happened this week  

is President Trump tested positive for the corona  virus. Fortunately he seems to be doing fine. 

He says he’s feeling great -  better than he did 20 years ago  

and also we shouldn’t be afraid of COVID-19. Hmmm. Something it has brought up again  

in discussions though is the  issue of wearing masks or not.  

Trump has never been a strong  supporter of wearing masks. 

Mask wearing has become a political  issue in the US and we’re wondering,  

are there other countries where people object  to wearing masks? Tell us in the comments. 

Now another thing that happened since our last  camera session was the debate between President  

Trump and former Vice President Biden. I found it hard to understand. There was  

so much interrupting and talking at the same  time that I couldn’t hear the candidates. 

Opinion polls show that Americans agree with you.  Republicans and Democrats agree that it was bad. 

I heard a funny description on CNN.  One of the reporters there said, 

‘It was a hot mess inside a  dumpster fire inside a train wreck’. 

You’ve got 3 great idioms here. A hot  mess. A dumpster fire. And a train wreck. 

If something’s dirty or untidy then it’s a  mess and a hot mess is a chaotic situation. 

And the other two mean much the same. We use them  to describe chaos, situations where there’s no  

order and everything’s confused. But obviously  we just use them one at a time normally. 

Most people who watched the debate  thought it was unpresidential. Mmm.  

Unpresidential is an interesting adjective. 

There’s the adjective presidential and that just  means to do with the office of the president.  

So this is a presidential seal, and  these are presidential candidates. 

Candidates in the presidential election. But Americans use the word  

unpresidential too and that’s a bit different. It basically means not behaving as a president  

should. So behaving with formality and  courtesy and seriousness, those things  

would be presidential behaviour. And if you  don’t behave like that, it’s unpresidential. 

Following the debate, opinion polls showed  a significant jump in support for Joe Biden. 

We still have about 3 weeks to go but the polls  indicate this could be a landslide election. 

That’s when one party gets many more votes  than another. They win by a landslide. 

And if an election is very  close we might say it’s tight. 

It could be a narrow victory or a narrow defeat. OK, I’m British,  

and in my view there are some crazy things that  happen in British politics and American politics.  

And one of the craziest things that happens  is that the person who wins the popular vote  

does not become President necessarily. That’s because of the electoral college. 

They’re a group of people who come  together to elect the President and  

we call the group the electoral college. When you vote, you are actually not voting  

for the individual whose name is on the  ballot like Joe Biden or Donald Trump.  

You are voting for electors. OK, now this is only true of the  

presidential and vice presidential  election. In other elections, it’s the  

popular vote, isn’t it? That’s correct.  

Notice the phrase the popular vote. It means  the choice of the majority of people who vote.  

Sometimes it’s different from the winning vote. And two times in the last five elections,  

the person who has won the popular  vote has actually lost the election. 

So who are the electors and how many are there? Well the electors are the people who will vote for  

the candidate you voted for. Hopefully. Well each  state has two electors plus a number determined by  

the size of the state’s population. Now who are  they is interesting. They are people who have  

promised to vote for the candidate you voted  for, and in some states, like Pennsylvania, we  

elect them in the primary elections. So Democrats  vote for democratic electors and Republicans vote  

for republican electors. OK, so basically  

it’s the parties that are choosing these  people. And what kind of people are they? 

They’re people from all walks of life. They  could be politicians. They can be doctors and  

lawyers and teachers and bus drivers. They can  be anybody who has applied to the political party  

to be a candidate for election. OK. And do they always vote for the candidate  

that won the popular vote? They’re supposed to. 

There have been cases where they haven’t. This is a really interesting problem.  

30 states have passed laws that say electors must  vote for the candidate the people have voted for.  

Those laws are valid in states that have them. 

But the thing is, there are another  twenty states that don’t have laws. 

Well, not only that but there’s a difference  between the way electors vote in different states. 

Oh yes. Maine and Nebraska  have a proportional system. 

So if Donald Trump wins half of the popular vote  and Joe Biden wins half of the popular vote,  

then half of the electors will vote for Trump  and half of the electors will vote for Biden. 

Yes. But in most states it’s not like that.  Even if you just win a state by one vote,  

you get all the electoral votes. That’s right.  

We call it ‘winner takes all’ system. We have a similar system in the UK but we  

call it a 'first past the post' system. I haven’t heard that here. 

It’s very similar to winner takes all. We’ve  had politicians who lost the popular vote  

but won the election too. So here's how it can happen.  

Let’s imagine a country with four states, and  two political parties. If these are the votes  

then which party wins? Well with a proportional  system, it’s the blue party because they got  

246 votes and the red party only got 154. But if it’s a first past the post system  

or a winner takes all system, the red  party wins because they won three states. 

So some people argue that the electoral college is  a very good system because of its federal nature.  

It gives two votes automatically to each state.  And it doesn’t matter how big you are or how small  

you are. You’ll still get those two votes. And  then you get extra votes for the number of people.  

So if you’re voting in a small state like  Rhode Island, your voting power is actually  

much stronger than if you’re voting in a  state that’s very populous like California. 

But there are lots of people  who argue against it as well. 

They say it’s unfair because the winner of the  popular vote doesn’t always win the election.  

And they say it’s unfair because it  makes the candidates pay too much  

attention to some states and ignore others. Candidates will only have to focus on the swing  

states, the purple states, And they can forget  about the other states because they don’t matter. 

So on election night and in the weeks after, when  the votes come in, you’re going to hear about  

which state has voted for which person. Each candidate wants 270 electoral votes.  

That’s the goal! There are 538 votes in total, so when  

someone gets 270 they’ve won the presidency. And then the election is over. 

I think Americans are going to  be very relieved when it’s over. 

But three years from now  it’ll start all over again. 

OK, this video is all over now too. It’s been a long one. 

We’ll do something different next time. So make sure you subscribe to our channel. 

And I just want to say, we’ve been  working on our website, where you can see  

all of our videos and get the transcripts too. So check it out and tell your friends about it. 

Bye everyone. Bye-bye.