Restoring Voter Integrity – With Arizona Representative Mark Finchem – On the front lines for restoring voter integrity in Arizona is Representative Mark Finchem. Join us for an update on the forensic audit going on in the State, and to hear what measures are trying to be taken to prevent fraud in the future!

Air Date: 08/02/2021

Guest: Representative Mark Finchem

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

Listen:

Download: Click Here

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.

 

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders Live, we are talking about the hot topics of the day, everything from policy to family issues to what’s going on at your church, theology, most importantly, perhaps, what’s happening in the White House and the State House, wherever you live. And that’s why our topics vary so greatly because we’re covering things on the ground in your community. It might be something that happened at your local school board, it could be something in your state legislature, and it could be something that’s happening in Washington DC, at the Congress or at the White House. You know, I say most importantly when I say that, that’s not right. That’s not accurate.

No, no, no, what’s happening in the White House is not as important as what’s happening in your house and in my house. That’s where the rubber really meets the road. That’s the original the closest and most local and smallest unit of government is ourselves. What are we doing to govern ourselves better? What are we doing to apply God’s Word to our lives to make sure that we’re using the instruction manual he gave us to be the best father and husband and wife and mother and employee or employer that we can be? His instruction manual, God’s Word has all the answers for how to do that. So how are we doing on applying it there in our own homes, at our own places of work, at our own schools, and then what’s happening at the State House and in Washington, DC at the White House? So let me get that order correct before we dive into our program today.

I’m Rick Green, by the way, former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach, and normally here with America’s premier historian David Barton, and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. And today, though, we’re going to jump right into our interview with Mark Finchem. He’s a state rep out in Arizona that’s on the front lines of restoring voter integrity, and has some exciting news for us today, not only with regard to the forensic audit there in Arizona, but more importantly, long term what are we doing to secure the elections? What is the answer to once again having faith in our elections? And he’s got some exciting news to share about a ballot system that can help to do that, and all the different states that are looking into adopting this system: so looking forward to having him when we come back from the break.

Before we go to the break, I want to encourage you to visit several of our websites today, wallbuilderslive.com, of course, is our main radio site, that may be where you’re listening to the program. Or perhaps you’re listening in on one of our stations or across the nation, thank you so much to all of our partners that at Bott Radio, at American Family Association, all the local stations that air WallBuilders Live. Thank you to all of those partners for helping us to get this truth out there into the culture.

In this canceled culture world, we need truth and it’s hard to find. So WallBuilders Live is a fantastic source of that. And we enjoy bringing that to you. But it wouldn’t happen without all those partners out there. And speaking of partners, you as a donor to WallBuilders Live, that’s the most important donation that happens and the most important partner because we’re a listener supported program. So without you making those donations, we’re not able to reach all of the people that we do around the nation, and frankly, around the world. So thank you for doing that. And you can do that at wallbuilderslive.com, just click on the donate button, you can do one time or monthly. To all of you out there that have started doing monthly, thank you so much. It does help us plan and be able to reach more people. So we really do appreciate it. Wallbuilderslive.com, that’s our radio site.

And then wallbuilders.com is our main site. That’s where you can get all kinds of tools for educating yourself, your family, your kids, people in your church. I mean, that’s where you can get the Biblical Citizenship in Modern America DVDs, you can get David and Tim’s new book “The American Story”, and we can’t even keep it in print, that has become an absolute must for any Christian in America that wants to know the true history of our nation and wants to be able to defend the American story that’s so under attack right now in this canceled culture out there. You need that book, “The American Story”, you can get it at wallbuilders.com.

And in the last website I’ll give out before we head to break is biblicalcitizens.com. That’s where you can sign up and stream the Biblical Citizenship in Modern America program in your living room at your home. You know, you can do it at your church, but you can host other people. It’s an eight week course. It’s growing like crazy. Also at that website biblicalcitizens.com, you can click on the link to join us on Monday nights. We have a live class that takes place every Monday night, and we take your questions and get to have commentary and we have a special guest typically in addition to watching those power packed videos. So check that out at biblicalcitizens.com. We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Mark Finchem is with a state rep from Arizona. You’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders called The American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that’s just not known or not told today.

And we would say very providentially in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 project that say America is evil, and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things, like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not out the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we’re against everything that America was built on, and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There’s so many things attacking America.

Well, is America worth defending? What is the true story of America? We actually have written and told that story starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln, we tell the story of America not as the story of a perfect nation of a perfect people. But the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation. It’s a story you want to check out wallbuilders.com, The American Story.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Representative Mark Finchem, back with us from the great state of Arizona.  Mark, always good to have you, brother. Thanks for coming on.

Mark:

Thanks for having me, Rick, it’s always a pleasure to be with you. 

Rick:

You are on the front lines big time on this voter integrity, of course, also running for Secretary of State there, which we desperately need. And I did not realize that you guys were solving the tech problem to be able to have safe and secure, accurate, verifiable, transparent, all of those things, elections. So you all aren’t just doing a forensic audit there, you all have put in place a system that other states can model. I just had to get you back on to talk about that.

Mark:

Well, we’re working at putting it in place. So the thing that I sent you earlier is basically it’s called the Ballot Integrity Project. And I’ve been working on that with a few legislators and county recorder and a couple of elections officials who are interested along with the company, frankly, in Dallas, Texas, “authentics”. Of course, in this day and age where you try to stand out, it’s misspelled A-U-T-H-E-N-T-I-X.

But they very graciously took one of our ballots from Cochise County. So we wanted to have a ballot that we knew was currently in use. And keep in mind, a lot of this has to do with low hanging fruit. I mean, when you see you’ve had a flat tire, you just change the tire. You don’t have to have a study. You don’t have to have a committee. You don’t have to, you know, well, let’s see, if the roadway. Yeah.

So what we did is we knew from a number of sources that I don’t want to give up quick yet that there was a potential for counterfeit ballots in the system. And I guess the way that manifests itself is we had some very honest green card holders who reached out and said, hey, I’m not on the voter roll, so I’m not really sure why I’ve received a ballot. And we were able to confirm through the Cochise county recorders’ office that no ballot had ever been set.

So there’s a gaping hole in security. And we thought, okay, if that’s the case, how can you distinguish a piece of paper that’s a legitimate ballot from a piece of paper that’s not? And we engaged in pretty robust conversation with the folks at authentics. And I said, hey, but keep in mind, these folks do tax stamps for booze and liquor and cigarettes and legal documents for governments around the world. So they know what they’re doing. And they said, we’re going to throw the kitchen sink in this thing and see what you think. So they did, it starts off with it’s a UV light sensitive watermark that is in the background of the ballot itself. When you’re looking at it, you think you’re just looking at a white sheet of paper, but you hit that with a black light, and it lights up like a Christmas tree.

Rick:

So it’s a watermark that you can’t see?

Mark:  

Yeah. And I mean, there’s done in the lower left hand corner and this is a concept piece. Lower left hand corner is a translucent piece of mylar that’s actually built into the paper and built into the watermark. So there’s components in the mylar that correspond with the watermark in the paper. I mean, it’s ingenious, the thing is just every single legislator around the country that has seen this, and we showed it now to 24 different states. Wisconsin is now actually looking at this, immediately people’s jaws drop and it’s like this is the coolest thing ever…

Rick:

And then this would be a ballot that is used at the polling place or mailed out, either way, it’s got that security measure?

Mark:

Yeah. So one of the security measures of this is that you have the company that supplies the paper, let’s just say that it’s Authentics supplies that paper to the ballot printer, which many states use runback and there’s a couple of other companies out there, but you have a defined universe of documents. You know exactly how many sheets of paper have been put into the system.

So that means that you now have established an audit trail where you’re able to account for every single legitimate ballot, and if you can’t, some of these got a signature on there that were they accepted responsibility, and that deals with a chain of custody. So we now have something that you can truly do an audit on. Because as it is right now, we have print on demand, we have four or five different kinds of papers that are being used. Literally it’s the Wild West out there when they go to print ballots.

The other security measure that I think is just it’s another ingenious moment by the people at Authentics is in the upper right hand corner, there’s a very small QR code, that if the constituent wants to read that QR code on their phone when they vote, this goes for mail-in, this goes for wherever they might be voting, if they want to read that QR code, it serves up a unique number assigned to that sheet of paper that after the voting is done.

They can go out and the whole back end still is under construction, but there’s a graphic user interface that they can put that number into, and the third party will be able to protect the voters anonymity so that nobody can identify their IP address and their computer, and they’ll be able to go out and ping that on, let’s say a blockchain or a public ledger of some kind that is actually stored the voters ballot image. So they’ll be able to verify that not only was my ballots submitted, but it’s also been recorded as the way I cast it.

A lot of this has to do with reassuring voters, that their ballot has been counted as cast. Now one of the things that we would like to see in the process is that once you read the watermark, you verify it’s there, you do a high resolution image, you assign that number that’s on the QR code to the ballot. And by the way, government doesn’t know who this is.

Rick:

Yeah, that was going to be my next question. Because I know people are going to say I don’t want them to know how I voted.

Mark:

We protect the voters’ anonymity, because the only person who knows who that code belongs to is the voter.

Rick:

Because they got it in the booth whenever they were?

Mark:

Because they got in the booth, and then they pushed it through or they did whatever they did. Now with mail-in balloting, you know, the Left is already tried to, they have an initiative here in Arizona to prohibit the use of this paper. It took them all of about five days after we signed to say, oh, we can’t have this, you’ll know who the voters voting for. Well, if that’s true, that means that with the current system which is even worse, they already know who the voter is voting for, because you have a person who opens the envelope with somebody’s signature and their name on it and they pull the ballot out.

Rick:

That’s right. That’s right.

Mark:

Okay. So why not pull it out so that you can’t see it, put it in for an image review, just make sure you get the watermark, takes a high resolution scan, assigns the numbers of the scan and pushes it out to the blockchain? I would personally like to see it go out to a public ledger before it’s counted. Because in doing that, it’s a bit like an auction for a pig, everybody’s looking at that pig, make sure that there’s no blemish, there’s no broken legs, there’s no disease. Everybody’s inspecting that thing while they’re bidding on it.

So that’s one of the features that is negotiable. But at some point, folks want to know that their ballot is out there. Now…

Rick:

Yeah, it’s almost a secondary benefit. The first main reason for having this is to know that only ballots yet were sent to actual voters are being used, that we’re not getting any fake ballots or additional ballots or any of that. And that the person that it was sent to, now yeah, whereas the second step guarantee that the person that was, well, I guess you can’t guarantee that that person sent it back, but you can guarantee that they don’t get to send another one.

Mark:

Well, that’s right. But you raise an interesting question. If it’s mail-in voting, how do you know that the Postal Service actually returned it back to you? And I’m not impugning postal service. There may be a few bad actors, but certainly the Postal Service is what we rely on. But what if it doesn’t make its way back to the County Recorder or the county elections official? You won’t be able to find the number that you took a QR code picture of, you know the number, you put it in the mail, in four or five days later, they still don’t have it. A week later, they don’t have it. Two weeks later, they don’t have it. You then can contact county say hey, where’s my ballot? I sent it to you. Here’s the number from it. Now you start getting into an investigation of either interruptive mail or whatever.

But I think the thing is really exciting about this is that if we have all of those ballots as high resolution image curated by precinct, not just my county or by legislative district or congressional district, I mean, there’s all kinds of different ways you can slice and dice the data, if we have curated by precinct, you now have, for example, in my precinct, we have 673 Republican voters. I guarantee you, there’s going to be 673 sets of eyeballs looking at those, every single one of those counting all of those ballots and all of those down ballot races. So you have a force multiplier across the entire nation of people who have an interest in the outcome of an election, they’re counting those numbers.

Now, keep in mind, we would prevent the ability for a fake ballot to get into the system, we would prevent a voter from voting more than once, we would identify the ballot separate from the voter, so we’re protecting voter anonymity. And we would have that public document out there for people to see. Now, you know, voting should be in private, but counting should never be. And I think that this proposal resolves a lot of that.

Now, in Arizona, we were able to get part of the law that’s necessary to make this a functional reality. We have allocated enough money for 60 million ballots, which should be more than enough for the next four elections. The next piece of that is that the legislature is going to have to make this mandatory. And we still have to a little bit of work to do probably with Authentics, or with some machine manufacturer that will be able to provide us an end-to-end system where you put the ballot in one end, it looks for watermark, it scans, it creates an image, assigns a number, communicates it out to the blockchain and then puts it into a bin for hand tabulation.

There are many of us here in Arizona who we’ve had with this whole electronic….

Rick:

Yeah, man, I want to hand count, baby. Yes.

Mark:

Yeah. So I’m not necessarily opposed to electronic tabulation, but it should not be the primary means…

Rick:

Or at least have a backup, like even if they want to give an electronic report election night, you know, but if it’s close at all, you can go put your hands on those actual ballots.

Mark:

Well, you raise an interesting point. If you’re doing that, if you’re scanning the image, and you’re running the image through a rapid counter, you can have a preliminary count, but the one that counts didn’t mean to be redundant here, but the one that really counts is the hand tabulation. Now, does that mean there’s going to be an additional expense? Yeah. But I think with the very painful happenings that this country has been through for the last seven months, everywhere I go, at least two-thirds, if not more of the people in the room are saying enough of the electronic tabulation stuff already. We’re willing to pay the money to do hand tabulation.

You know, you have paid volunteers that come in. And that’s one of the things by the way, that I’m very encouraged to see the behavior of the people in the Maricopa County audit, the official audit that’s being done by the Senate, not the fake audit that was done by the county. You have Republicans and Democrats came together. Half of the people that were on that floor engaged in the audit, are Democrats. Half of them are Republicans. There’s some libertarians. There’s some Greens that are sprinkled in there. These are people that were dedicated to the fraud-free election and tripled transparency, not to the outcome.

And that really makes me think, brother, that there’s hope for this country, because you got people who are willing to set aside the outcome for an acceptable, high quality examination of what happened. That’s huge.

Rick:

Yeah, that’s huge. And that’s why so many other states have come in and observe what you all are doing and saying we want to do the same thing so that we keep this straight. You mentioned the two different recounts. One, the counties doing a one the Senate’s doing, remind us the difference.

Mark:

Okay, so what Maricopa County did was nothing more than a logic and function test, kind of like testing your television set with your remote control. It turned on to change channels, it worked. Well for that, maybe so. But what’s troubling is they claimed that they had done a forensic audit, when in reality they didn’t have or at least they claim that they didn’t have the two-factor authentication dongle, they claimed that they didn’t have the highest level administrative passwords for these machines. I mean, they claim that on the record.

So if that’s the case, you’re telling us in the Senate chairman and judiciary called us out, he said, well, okay, that means that a private entity who’s already on the record saying we’ve seen to it the President Trump won’t win had a higher level of computer access to the tabulation equipment than election officials that were elected to supervise the audit. That can never happen again. In fact, in my view, that is sufficient reason to decertify the election, because we still don’t have the passwords, we still don’t have the access we need, when I say we, I’m talking about the Senate, they still don’t have the access that they need to have to make certain that the election wasn’t tampered with at the highest level.

Now, the fact that they refuse to give this up, they refuse to give access, I think that that speaks volumes about what they are probably trying to obfuscate or maybe just outright hide. But we now we’re at a point where, in fact, we started a campaign here about a week ago: you tell us that there’s no fraud in this election, #proveit. The balance of power now or the need for the state to prove its case, the burden of proof has gone from the States proving that there was discrepancies to now it’s tipped where the counties need to prove that there weren’t, just because we found enough to say, look, we have probable cause here. And in some cases, I think it’s clear and convincing. I think it was clear and convincing back on November 30th, but there were people that disagreed with me.

So when we talk about the burden of proof, it is now on the county’s to prove that they don’t have fraud. And the #proveit thing. If people want to, go to votefinchem.com, they can click on “store” and they can get a shirt. It’s just a simple red shirt that says #proveit. It’s amazing to me the number of people who have purchased a shirt. And they now want to take a selfie of that and send it to their legislators and say, okay, you claimed that it’s not there, show me the evidence. We’re putting a little bit of pressure on people on that.

Rick:

Now give us an update on timeline too, when will all the findings be reported and all that?

Mark:

Don’t know. First opportunity is I guess the best way to answer that…

Rick:

I think originally it was going to be mid-August, I think, so not like we’re behind. Yeah.

Mark:

I’m a whole lot more forgiving on speed than I am on accuracy with this audit. Because at the end of the day, if we’re going to make policy moves to tighten up our election system, I know I and the vast majority of my colleagues want to make sure, because this has got a bill attached to it that the taxpayers are going to have pay for, I want to make sure that we’re doing something that’s meaningful that we are able to get a handle on an issue that we’ve been able to identify through the audit, or something that is such obvious low hanging fruit, for example, the Ballot Integrity Project that we’re able to move the needle on improving safe and secure election. I hate that term, because it’s the assumption in the American way of life, that our elections will be safe and secure. I want to restore that confidence in people’s minds so that they know that their ballot’s going to count.

Rick:

I don’t think we can keep the republic if we don’t. I mean, it’s just the sheer chaos and I mean, people are just going to start ignoring the law, because that was passed by those folks that didn’t win the election, I mean both sides will claim that. I mean, it’s just total chaos if we can’t do exactly what you’re working towards.

Mark:

I think it is also very important that everybody hearing the show really needs to understand of the three legs of the election, one being fraud-free elections, two, transparency; I think the most important leg is making sure that we never surrender our right to scrutinize an election. The election belongs to the people. It doesn’t belong to bureaucrats. It doesn’t belong to elected politicians. It belongs to the people in their individual franchise. They have a right to question the outcome of an election and to scrutinize the evidence that people promote that well, this is what proves it.

So back to if you say there’s no fraud, #proveit.

Rick:

Prove it. Yeah. Alright. Good stuff, Mark, God bless you, man. Thanks for coming on, and keep us posted.

Mark:

I will. Thank you very much, brother.

Rick:

That was Mark Finchem, state rep in Arizona, also running for Secretary of State this year. Of course, we had him on earlier in the year to talk about why he had decided to run for Secretary of State, our friend Jody Hice, a congressman in Georgia running for Secretary of State there. These are typically not sought after positions. Most people don’t even know they’re there. Look, we need good people in those offices. We learned that last year in a big, big way. So we’re thankful Mark’s running for that office and Jody in Georgia as well.

Everything that we’ve been talking about is exactly in the right direction. We’ve got to bring confidence back to our elections. And thankfully, we’ve got some good people like Mark on the front lines working hard to make that happen. You can be a part of the solution as well. If you go to wallbuilderslive.com, you can take this program and other radio programs and share them with your friends and family. Send them out there, folks. Get people educated. You be the catalyst. You be the force multiplier to help get other people informed in your circles and then take the big step. It’s an easy step. I say big step, but it’s an easy step, to start hosting classes in your living room or at your church, start doing one of our Constitution classes. It’s entertaining. It’s educational. It gives you action steps, things you can do in your community, in your area to help restore our constitutional republic.

And I’m telling you the Biblical Citizenship in Modern America class, that thing is taking off all over the country. We have over 1,100 classes going already. In 2021, we’ve put a couple 100,000 people through our various constitution classes over the years. But this one is exploding and it’s because it’s just it’s really giving people hope and answers. So get that biblical citizenship course. You can do that today at biblicalcitizens.com, biblicalcitizens.com and you be the catalyst. Thanks so much for listening today to WallBuilders Live.