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Political scientist Samuel L. Popkin, author of The Candidate: What it Takes to Win—and Hold—the White House, has studied candidates who have lost presidential elections in order to find out who wins and why. People tend to think that a campaign story is about good triumphing over evil, or vice versa, he said. But if you narrate instead how an election could have gone the other way, and where a campaign could have succeeded, you can learn something new. Popkin believes that Romney is losing the current election, owing to missteps like having lurched too far to the right in the primary season in order to neutralize candidates who weren’t viable anyway.

How an election is run is just as important as the foibles of a candidate. According to campaign finance expert Richard L. Hasen, author of The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, the “Election Administrator’s Prayer” is, “Lord, let this election not be close.” Close elections cause controversy. We have not, he said, solved any of the problems of Florida in 2000—except for fixing the voting machines. The primary challenge is that America still has partisans in charge of elections. The way things stand now, our system is “a powder keg, and social media makes things worse,” said Hasen. He hopes this election doesn’t come down to counting votes in Ohio or Florida; if we have another Florida 2000, he believes that protests might move from Twitter onto the streets. And even if this year’s race ultimately isn’t tight, we’ve had a number of close statewide elections in the past decade—and could have another close national election in 2016 or 2020.

Mathews asked Hasen if he thinks money is driving our election dysfunction.

Although money is a real problem in politics, Hasen thinks the root of dysfunction in our voting process is firmly rooted in partisanship. Every other mature democracy, he said, has national elections administered by nonpartisan officials. But in America, election reform has only happened along party lines—and Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on anything, voting included.

However, said Popkin, “The parties are often wrong about particular laws, and whether they will help or hurt them.” Republicans opposed “motor voter” legislation to register voters who are renewing or applying for a driver’s license—but they benefited from these laws because of demographics. (In more Democratic cities, people don’t drive; in the South, they drive more.)

Turning to the subject of campaign finance, Mathews noted that donations to presidential campaigns by the rich and wealthy alike have increased, thanks to the Internet and the Super PACs. Mathews asked the candidates if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Would they be more inclined to take Wallis Simpson’s view that you can never be too rich or too thin, or Biggie Smalls’s belief that more money equals more problems?

Popkin said that campaign fundraising has become “an arms race”; no one wants to stop until the other side stops. The money won’t get out of politics until candidates are prevented from spending all of their own money on their campaigns, he said.

Hasen doesn’t think the amount of money is the problem. “The problem is where the money comes from and what the cause is,” he said. He’s less worried about donations to presidential races, where a couple million dollars won’t win a donor any favors. But in Congressional races, just one donor can make a big difference. “The smaller the race, the more skew that’s going to come from the money,” he said.

Popkin agreed that no one can buy a revocation of Roe v. Wade or the end of the Clean Air Act—but little regulations can swing millions. Richard Nixon’s campaign, for instance, got support from a carpet manufacturer in exchange for not raising the percentage of wool that was needed to label a carpet “wool.”

Returning to the current election, Mathews asked Popkin how the candidates are doing when it comes to discussing money; President Obama has bungled the conversation about debt, and Romney has bungled the conversation about his work at Bain.

Popkin said that Obama should have spent more time talking about jobs and about how long it takes to recover from a financial crisis. And Romney could have spun his work at Bain into a qualification for office—knowledge of how the government and big business can work together—rather than a liability.

Turning to Hasen, Mathews asked where the holes are in our voting system. How do you steal an election?

Hasen said that the amount of voter fraud in America is low; it’s a dumb and complicated way to steal an election. You’re better off being the person who counts the votes—or committing absentee ballot fraud. Rather than implementing voter identification laws, the best way to combat fraud would be to eliminate voting by mail, he said.

So with all these risks and the immense cost of a national election, is the presidency just a bad idea?

The president is a fantasy, said Popkin. The president thinks he’ll get into office, effect change, and fulfill his campaign promises. But it’s not that easy. The president is surrounded by adversarial legislators, for one thing. And in reality, “you get there and you find out, you’re a senator with 17 votes who can push a red button.”

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But in a world where traditional media is under fire, and the way we get information is in a period of rapid transition, what does vigilance mean? Zócalo editor Joe Mathews, a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University, opened a Zócalo/Cal Humanities “Searching for Democracy” event at the San Diego Museum of Art by directing this question to Bernardo Ruiz, the director of Reportero, a new documentary about the Tijuana newsweekly Zeta.

Ruiz said that vigilance, in his work, is about depth. Ruiz made Reportero because he felt that so much U.S. news coverage about the drug war seemed to lack context, background, or history. “It felt like rubbernecking, body-count journalism,” he said. With over two years to spend telling his story, he could get a strong feel for the place and for the institution that is Zeta in order to tell a deeper narrative.

Mathews asked if, given the pressure on reporters around the world and the danger facing Zeta reporters in particular, we are expecting too much of professional journalists.

Ruiz said that the reporters he profiled see themselves as regional reporters just doing their piece. But they don’t think Americans are asking enough of U.S. reporters covering the drug war. For the media here, Ruiz said, drugs seem to disappear when they enter the U.S. He said that Zeta reporters would want to know who’s focusing on the drugs here in the U.S., who’s following the money, and who’s telling the big story and the smaller ones.

But, asked Mathews, turning to Carrie Lozano, an investigative journalist and collaborative reporting expert, do existing American media have the resources to get at these tough stories?

Lozano, who works for the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley, said that her boss Lowell Bergman (an investigative reporter on whom Al Pacino’s character in The Insider was based) “says investigative reporting is not nonprofit, it’s anti-profit.” No organization, said Lozano, has ever had the resources to spend the two years it takes to put together an investigative story. But while it’s true that local watchdog media is hurting, she doesn’t think we’re losing vigilance; instead, it’s changing form, with media like documentary filmmaking stepping into a void.

Mathews, a veteran of a number of newsrooms, asked Lozano to explain how collaborative journalism works. “Playing well with others was not a strength of the people I worked with,” he said.

Lozano said that traditional newsroom culture is extremely competitive, but collaboration is a necessity both because of money and because of an increasingly fractured audience. As to cantankerous reporters? “I think in the news industry we need to put a lot more effort into teaching teamwork in the way that other businesses do, and into teaching leadership,” she said.

Scott Lewis, the CEO of nonprofit news organization Voice of San Diego, said that collaboration is vital at a small institution like his. He said that his organization’s goal is to find the stories they can cover best and to accentuate and push out the stories by others who are covering other subjects best. He said that working with radio and television allows all the different media to work together to get stories out.

Mathews asked Lewis if he felt Voice of San Diego was in a position to fill a void being left by The San Diego Union-Tribune, which has been embroiled in controversy over its new owner’s push to abandon impartiality and support his own specific agenda.

Lewis answered that his institution—which he said had a budget of a little more than a million dollars a year—isn’t necessarily in that position. But as a society, we already know how to fund big cultural institutions—like museums, theater companies, and universities—publicly. He thinks we can figure out how to do the same with newspapers. The trouble, for now, is that people don’t miss investigative journalism when it’s not around. As he explained, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Mathews asked if perhaps citizens can help fill these gaps, with the rise of social media and technology like smartphones. “Journalists have always used the crowd,” said Lewis. “They put out a story knowing full well that the responses are more valuable than the story they put out, in order to see what the truth is.” So while this is a continuation of a longer tradition, Lewis believes that the pressures on journalists and the transitions are also forcing journalists to focus more on the educational aspect of reporting—educating readers so they can understand the full story better.

Lozano pointed to the success of The Guardian in the U.K., which is “less squeamish” than American journalism organizations when it comes to engaging citizens and has worked with citizens on a large scale on to help go through public documents.

People and foundations are also getting more comfortable with the idea that newspapers are a public service, and nonprofits have an easier time pleading to a community for support than does the commercial media.

“Can you be doing journalism within government?” asked Mathews.

Lozano, who worked in government during the Clinton administration, said no. But Lewis said that there is a place for certain reporting within organizations, be it the government or NFL.com, for instance, which publishes analysis and opinions. “Perhaps we can drop the complaint that we’re not covering good news and let them cover their own good news,” he said—which also frees up resources for hyper-vigilance.

Ruiz said that he believes if people are up front about where their support is coming from—and most commercial organizations have never been up front—there’s room for a lot of different institutions, including NGOs, to provide news.

Mathews asked the panelists if partnerships with universities might be a key part of the future. Partnerships with universities can work, said Lewis, whose organization has collaborated with Claremont McKenna College. But “it’s very important that both partners realize they can’t do what the other partner can.”

Journalistic ethics are also in flux in the moment. Lewis said that journalists have always talked about rules and ethics among themselves—but they’ve rarely bothered to explain them to the public. New organizations, on the other hand, have to talk constantly about why they should be trusted.

In the question-and-answer session, an audience member asked what journalism will look like in 2020. “The new reality is probably pretty much constant evolution,” said Lewis. We have no way of knowing what 2020 will look like, but the changes won’t be all bad, or all good: “We’re going to watch it get better and worse.”

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