Ensuring Election Integrity And Preventing Voter Fraud 101: Tune in today and tomorrow as we share a two-part series from the Profamily Legislators Conference. Hans Von Spakovsky is our special guest and will be diving into voter fraud tactics and how we can prevent them in the future.

Air Date: 01/03/2019

Guest: Hans Von Spakovsky

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith And The Culture

 

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders Live where we talk about today’s hottest topics on policy and faith in the culture, always from a Biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective.

David Barton is America’s premier historian and normally with us here in studio. Today, he is not; because, we are taking you to David. We’re taking you out to the ProFamily Legislators”€™ Conference.

Once a year we bring in state reps and senators from across the country. We give them a chance to interact, hear from great speakers, exchange ideas. It is a great, great program, the ProFamily Legislators”€™ Conference; be sure and share it with your state rep or state senator.

We’re going to take you out to the conference that happened a few weeks back; and, one of the speakers actually addressed a subject that we covered briefly here on the radio program two weeks ago with regard to ballot harvesting and all the other things that really threaten the way that our elections actually take place. So, Hans von Spakovsky was there actually speaking on this subject; he’s from the Heritage Foundation. Last week we had a Heritage-Foundation speaker from the ProFamily Legislators”€™ Conference sharing; that was David Azerrad.

We were talking about libertarianism versus conservatism. So, if you miss those, be sure to go to WallBuildersLive.com today and get them there in the archives section.

But, this week, we wanted to share with you, today and tomorrow, these two programs which will be Hans’s entire presentation there at the ProFamily Legislators”€™ Conference. But, we’re going to jump in right now. We’ll get as much of it in today as we can, and we’ll pick up and get the conclusion tomorrow.

We’ll take you out to the ProFamily Legislators”€™ Conference right now. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live!

Meet Hans von Spakovsky

Allright, Hans, you probably don’t remember this; but, the first time I had you on WallBuilders Live, I tried four times to say your name and I blew it every time, and then I started cracking up. You didn’t laugh. I was wondering if on the other end of the phone you were laughing or not; but, I’m going to get it right here: Hans von Spakovsky.

How’d I do? Allright, good. Hans is another one of our frequent guest on WallBuilders Live from the Heritage Foundation. And, he is going to be talking about election=ballot security, all those things like How do we make sure we actually have elections we can count on?

But, his official title is the manager of election law reform initiative, and he’s a senior legal fellow for the Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. And, by the way, if you don’t have Ed Meese”€™s commentary on the Constitution, you need to get it from Heritage Foundation. I have it at my desk and use it frequently.

Thanks for being with us. Please welcome Hans von Spakovsky.

Hans:

Allright, I know from that name you’re saying, “€œThat guy’s not from around here.”€ That’s right.

I was actually born and raised in Alabama. So, I will see if I can talk fast like the prior speakers; but, that’s kind of against the way I was raised in Alabama. Now, I was asked to talk about something that if you read the editorial pages of the Washington Post, the  New York Times, or listen MSNBC will tell you doesn’t exist, which is voter fraud.

Well, let me give you a quick quote from a 2008 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Indiana passed one of the first laws state laws in the country that required one to show a government-issued photo ID when you go to the polls. For the two people in the state that don’t have an ID already, they provide a free ID. That case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

They were sued by twice the usual number of suspects including the ACLU and others claiming that this was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld the law; it wasn’t a 5- 4 decision by those terrible conservatives.

Voter Fraud Affect Elections

In fact, the majority opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the liberal stalwarts of the Supreme Court. He’s since retired. How liberal is he?

Well, he recently was talking about how we need to get rid of the Second Amendment in our Constitution. But, he wrote the majority opinion, and he said this. We’re talk about voter fraud.

“€œExamples of such fraud have been documented throughout this nation’s history by respected historians and journalists. And, not only is the risk of voter fraud real, but it could affect the outcome of a close election.”€

Norm Coleman, Al Franken, Mark Elias

All you”€™ve got to do is look at the election we just had to see how many close elections we have all the time in this country. I”€™ll give you a quick example of one very close election that affected every single person in this room. Do you all recall in 2008, Norm Coleman was the incumbent Republican senator in Minnesota?

On election day, he was declared the winner by about 700 votes out of 2.9 million cast. However, Al Franken, the losing candidate got a lawyer, a guy named Mark Elias. Have you heard that name recently? That’s who they’ve hired in Florida.

After eight months of litigation, Al Franken was declared the winner by a little under 300 votes. Why did that affect every one of you in this room? Well, because Al Franken was the 60th vote that passed Obamacare.

Moment From America”€™s History

This is David Barton with another moment from America’s history. Often today it seems that the federal government has become too intrusive in the local matters. And, federal micro-management has now unfortunately become the norm in education, law enforcement, religious expressions, and even on what is and is not moral.

Strikingly, the Founding Fathers had intended that the federal government never intrude into any of these issues. As Thomas Jefferson explained, “€œTaking from the states the moral rule of their citizens and subordinating it to the federal government would break up the foundations of the Union. I believe the states can best govern our home concerns and the federal government our foreign ones.”€

According to Thomas Jefferson, the original plan was for the federal government to direct foreign affairs but for the states and local communities the domestic and the moral ones. For more information on God’s hand in American history contact WallBuilders at 1-800-8-REBUILD.

1200 Felons Help Secure Obamacare

Hans:

There were all kinds of issues in that race. I wrote about in the book that John Fund and I wrote; but, I’ll just tell you this. We know that–remember, margin of less than 300 votes.

After the election, a conservative grassroots group in Minnesota went and got a hold of the voter-registration list and the state-corrections-department list. They found 1200 felons who had voted illegally in that election, four times the margin of victory. So, there’s some fraud that, like I said, affected everyone in this room.

By the way, the Liberals through the ACLU, were really surprised that Justice John Paul Stevens upheld this voter-ID law, voted with the Conservatives to do it. They’d forgotten that before he became a justice, he was a professional, practicing lawyer in the city of Chicago. So, the claims that the ACLU is making that there’s no voter fraud in the country actually did not did not fly with him.

So, let me tell you that we’ve got all kinds of vulnerabilities and problems in our voter registration and election process; because, for decades now, we’ve basically had an honor system. We don’t notice these problems because many elections are are won by a big enough margin that doesn’t make a difference. It’s when elections are close that those vulnerabilities come up and we see them.

 

The Pew Foundation”€™s Shocking Study

In 2012, the Pew Foundation, which as you all know is not exactly a conservative organization, did a study. Liberals have been trying to deny this study exists ever since.  What they found in looking at Americans”€™ voter-registration system was that there were 2.8 million people registered in more than one state, 1.8 million people who are dead who are still registered, and 24 million voter registrations with significant problems. Now, what does that mean? Well, I”€™ll tell you about another study that I’m sure you all have never heard about, because because the media has kind of ignored it. But, in Florida, there is a non-profit organization, a great organization, called the Government Accountability Institute; it’s run by a guy named Peter Schweizer.

Does that sounds familiar? Peter Schweizer wrote a book called Clinton Cash, a big New York Times best seller. Here’s what what his organization did.

They went and they managed to get the voter-registration lists from 21 states. Now, these are mostly smaller states and represented only about 17 percent of the registered voters in the country. Then they hired a big, data software firm to supplement the voter- registration information.

So, for example, in states that don’t require a social security number, they got the full social security numbers of these registered voters, based on their names and their birth dates and where they live. Then they did a comparison. They were comparing by first name, last name, birth date, and full social security number, which means that getting false positives is just about nil.

Estimated 45,000 Voting Illegally in More than One State

Well, what did they find in the 2016 election when Donald Trump won? In those 21 states, they found 8500 people who voted illegally in more than one state. Twenty-two hundred of those illegal voters who voted in more than one state were in the state of Florida.

 

Twenty-two hundred votes, that’s four times the margin of victory of George Bush in 2000. Now, they said that–oh, by the way, I don’t know if it says something about people who are married; but, 200 couples voted together illegally in more than one state. They said that if, based on the algorithm they were using, that if you extended this to all 50 states, their estimate was there were probably at least 45,000 individuals who voted in more than one state illegally in the 2016 election.

By the way, they found 15,000 voters registered at UPS stores, post offices, basketball courts, parks, gas stations, vacant lots, warehouses and office buildings. Now, how many of those are legitimate voters? I don’t know; but, if somebody is registered at a vacant lot, that’s a problem.

Presidential Commission on Election Integrity

In 2014–so, how big of a problem is  this? We don”€™t know. The President, as you all know, last year appointed a presidential commission on election integrity; I was actually appointed to be a member of it.

It was dissolved after only having two meetings for two reasons. Every left-wing organization you can imagine filed a lawsuit to keep this commission from working, doing its work. There were a dozen federal lawsuits filed, making all kinds of nutty claims about it to keep it from working.

And, about 40 percent of the states, more than a third, said, “€œWe’re not giving you any information.”€ We had asked for state voter-registration lists and state voter histories, so we could do things like what the Government Accountability Institute did: compare different states and find out how many people are voting in different states. About a third of the states said, “€œWe’re not giving you this information; you have to sue us if you want it; because, you’re going to use this to suppress votes, which I don’t get.”€

Listen; if what the left says is correct and there’s no voter fraud, why would they be against us researching this and trying to find out what the extent of the problem is? Which tells you a lot about what was going on with that. But, because the commission couldn’t get it to work on it,  it couldn’t get the data it needed, and the staff were spending all their time trying to answer these dozen lawsuits, the President  dissolved the commission, unfortunately.

So, how big is the problem? Look. We don’t know.

This Precarious Moment Book

David:

This is David Barton. I want to let about a brand new book we have called This Precarious Moment: Six Urgent Steps That Will Save You, Your family, and Our Country. Jim Garlow and I have co-authored this book and we take six issues that are hot in the culture right now.

Issues that we’re dealing with, issues such as immigration, race relations, our relationship with Israel, the rising generation Millennials, and the absence of the church in the culture wars, and where American heritage is, our godly heritage. We look at all six of those issues right now that are under attack and we give you both Biblical and historical perspective on those issues that provide solutions on what each of us can do right now to make a difference.

These are all problems that are solvable if we’ll get involved. So you can grab the book This Precarious Moment and find out what you can do to make a difference. This Precarious Moment is available at WallBuilders.com.

6.4 Percent of Noncitizens in the U. S. voted in the 2008 election

Hans:

Let me tell you about a study that was done in 2014. It gives you an idea of the potential problem.

Three professors from Old Dominion University and George Mason University in Virginia where I live, took a look at this election survey that’s done by a number of universities. And they survey literally tens of thousands of voters after elections. Based on that and answers to that survey question, they estimated that 6.4 percent of the noncitizens who are in the United States voted in the 2008 election, 6.4 percent. Was that significant

Well, if 6.4 percent of the noncitizens who are in North Carolina voted in that election, then that may have thrown the state to Barack Obama who won North Carolina by only 14,000 votes. They also pointed out that if 6.4 percent of the noncitizens in Minnesota voted, that would have thrown the vote to Al Franken.

Oh, by the way, their study was a was relentlessly attacked, and I think those professors have become pariahs in the academic community, which as you know, is very liberal. We started a database at Heritage about three years ago, because I was tired of getting calls from reporters saying, “€œThere is no voter fraud in the country. Why do you keep talking about it?”€

More than 1200 Voter-Fraud Cases Around the Country

So, we started collecting stories about voter fraud convictions from around the country. This is really difficult to do; because, there’s no central database. A lot of times these cases aren’t even reported.

Sometimes they’re reported in local newspapers. It’s a lot of trouble to get this. But, we are already up to 1200 cases, and we’re really conservative.

We don’t put in any cases where people claim they think something happened. We only put in cases where somebody has been convicted in a court of law in a criminal prosecution for committing fraud in an election, or a judge has ordered a new election because of fraud. So, we’re up to 1200 cases from all around the country.

We’re working on 30 more that we’re about to put in. And, about two weeks ago we sent an inquiry to the attorney general of Texas saying, “€œCan you send us whatever information you have on election-fraud cases in Texas?”€ He sent us a list of 427 election-fraud offenses they’ve prosecuted since 2004.

Just two weeks ago in Texas, they charged and criminally indicted four Texans for what they call “€œa vote-harvesting scheme.”€ What these women were doing was forging the signatures on absentee ballot forms for voters, sending them in to election officials, and then when the ballots came in, they either fill out the ballots themselves and force the voter to sign it, or they just filled it out forged the signature again and sent it in.

For arrests, dozens of felony counts; and, guess who paid for the funds that paid for these four ladies? The former executive director of the Tarrant County Democratic Party.

19 Noncitizens Indicted in North Carolina & Buying Votes

By the way, also just a month ago, 19 noncitizens were indicted in North Carolina by the U.S. Attorney. That’s the first indictments like that in 10 years; because, the Obama administration had no interest in prosecuting election fraud. Nineteen noncitizens were registering and voting illegally in multiple elections.

Just last week three folks were indicted in Hoboken, New Jersey, particularly a guy who was a local powerbroker, run for city council mayor, for paying voters for their vote. The going rate was fifty dollars. Obviously, the guy is well-off.

I can cite you cases like this all over the country, all cases that could make a difference in a close election. I don”€™t want to go through all this, because there’s so much of it. But, I’ll give you one more example of this.

I’m on the board of a great conservative organization called the Public Interest Legal Foundation. If you guys watch Fox news, you’ve probably seen our General Counsel on there; his name”€™s J. Christian Adams.

A couple of years ago, he went to every county in the state of Virginia where I lived. And, we said, “€œWe would like to see the voter registration forms,”€ which you are entitled to under federal law, “€œof every person who contacted your office and said, “€˜Oops, I’m a noncitizen; you need to take me off the voter rolls.”€™”€ Okay?

So, this isn’t election officials discovering that a noncitizen–but, these are noncitizens who contacted and said, “€œYou need to take me off.”€ You know what it usually is, it’s usually legal noncitizen who’s decided to apply for citizenship and it’s trying to clean up their record. We got information on 5500 noncitizens in Virginia who had asked to be taken off the voter rolls; but, not before they cast 7500 ballots in various elections.

Now, in the last dozen years in Virginia, we’ve had two statewide attorney general’s races decided by less than 1000 votes, one by less than 300 votes.

Newport News, Virginia

Last year–we have off year elections. Last year, control of the House of Delegates of the state legislature came down to one district, the 94th district, which is Newport News, Virginia. Because, the Democrat and Republican tied.

And, you know how they pick the winner? They put their names in to a crystal bowl and picked one out. Fortunately, the Republican won; so, the Republicans still control the House of Delegates.

But, Newport News, which is the 94th district, well, that’s one of the districts we got information on. Newport News had removed 200 noncitizens from the roll. So, how many more are still on there, we don’t know.

How important is this to Liberals?

Bring A Speaker To Your Area

Tim:

Hey, this is Tim Barton with WallBuilders.  And as you’ve had the opportunity to listen to WallBuilders Live, you’ve probably heard a wealth of information about our nation, about our spiritual heritage, about the religious liberties, and about all the things that make America exceptional.

And you might be thinking, “€œAs incredible as this information is, I wish there was a way that I could get one of the WallBuilders guys to come to my area and share with my group.”€

Whether it be a church, whether it be a Christian school, or public school, or some political event, or activity, if you’re interested in having a WallBuilders speaker come to your area, you can get on our website at www.WallBuilders.com and there’s a tab for scheduling. If you”€™ll click on that tab, you’ll notice there’s a list of information from speakers bio’s, to events that are already going on. And there’s a section where you can request an event, to bring this information about who we are, where we came from, our religious liberties, and freedoms. Go to the WallBuilders website and Bring a speaker to your area.

A Common-Sense Law

Hans:

A couple of years ago, the Republican legislature in Virginia passed a very common-sense law, and this is one I’m going to recommend to all of you as state legislators. They passed a law that said, “€œWhen an individual is called for jury duty in the state courts of Virginia–.”€ Now, how many have you been called for jury duty?

Okay, in every state, you get a form in the mail; and, you have to answer a series of questions. The one question that’s on there that in every state is Are you a United States citizen?

Because, if you’re not a citizen, you can’t serve on a jury. And, in every state, your answer to these questions, under oath, under penalty of perjury if you lie. So, what the state law would have required is that every individual who is excused from jury duty because they said, “€œI’m not a U.S. citizen;”€ and, by the way, where did they get the jury list? From the voter registration list.

The jury–the courts would have to notify local election officials that this individual was excused for being a noncitizen. Why? So, the election officials can take him off the rolls.

Terry McAuliffe who was the governor of the state; you know, the former head of the DNC, big Clinton crony. He vetoed that bill. Now, there is no rational, public-policy reason for vetoing a bill like that unless you want  noncitizens to be able to register, to vote, and to get away with it.

By the way, you know the 5500 noncitizens we found on the Virginia rolls? Do you think that a single county-election official in the state of Virginia, after taking those individuals off the rolls, do you think any of them sent that person’s file to either the county district attorney or the U.S. Justice Department for investigation and prosecution?It’s a felony under Virginia law for noncitizens to register to vote; it’s a felony under federal law to register and vote.

Another Potential 5500 Cases of Voter Fraud

Not a single one of those files were sent to local prosecutors. So, I’m proud we’ve got 1200. We found twelve hundred voter fraud cases. But, hey, there is another potential 5500 cases will never get into our database; because, they’re not being investigated and prosecuted.

The 8500 Americans who who were found to have illegally voted in more than one state in 2016 by the Government Accountability Institute, that study has been out for a while. Do you think a single state contacted the Government Accountability Institute and said, “€œPlease send us the names of the registered voters from our state who you found also voted in another state?”€ Not a single state has contacted them for that information.

Rick:

We are out of time for today. We’re going to interrupt Hans von Spakovsky”€™s presentation at the Profamily Legislators”€™ conference for now. We will get the conclusion tomorrow.

I really encouraged to get online tomorrow and get tomorrow’s program and today’s, both parts in this series; and, send them out to your friends and family. Share with them what they can be doing to help ensure in the election integrity of our system; it’s vitally, vitally important.

We sure appreciate you listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live!