American Thought Leaders - Key Vulnerabilities in US Elections: Hans von Spakovsky

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

Hans von Spakovsky is a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is also the head of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. He has been looking at election integrity issues for years.In this episode, he breaks down what he sees as key vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system, from ballot harvesting to outdated voter rolls to lack of citizen verification processes.“The biggest problem across the country is that we have an honor system for registering, so states are not doing anything to verify that you actually are a U.S. citizen,” he says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The biggest problem across the country is that we have an honor system for registering. So states are not doing anything to verify that you actually are a U.S. citizen. Virginia, for example, recently started checking its voter registration rolls by checking other state databases like DMV, driver's license records, and they discovered that there were individuals who, when they went to get their driver's license, produced documentation showing they were not U.S. citizens, but they were also on the voter registration list.

Hans von Spakowski is a former member of the Federal Election Commission and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He's also the head of the think tank's election law reform initiative. Half the states allow third party strangers to come to your house and offer to pick up and deliver your absentee ballot. That's a mistake. There are a lot of absentee ballot fraud cases.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Hans von Spakowsky, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me. Since the 2020 election, there's been a lot of attempts at bolstering election integrity across a number of states. I want to get a sense from you of how that's gone. What I would tell people is that overall we are in better shape in the 24 election than we were in 2020. And the reason for that is that one of the only really good things to come out of the 2020 election was it finally made a lot of state

legislators realize that there were vulnerabilities in the system. I mean, I've been talking about this for years, but the attitude of a lot of state legislators was, well, I got elected, so there must not be a problem. But so there were a lot of reform packages proposed and passed right after the 2020 election. Georgia, you know, became famous for its huge reform package, you know, to the point where the All-Stars game announced it was leaving. But they passed some terrific reforms and multiple other states did also. So some states have not improved things. California and New York probably being, you know, big examples of that. But a majority of the states actually have made things better. I mean, the ones that are most interesting perhaps are the swing states.

Correct. Right. So maybe could we go through them? Sure. Well, as you know, Georgia was a big bone of contention after the last election. They passed a big reform package. probably one of the most useful and best things they did was, everyone knows we've now really increased the amount of absentee ballot use in this country. In the 2020 election, it was 43% of the electorate. That was a 20% increase over the prior election. It's huge. So Georgia passed a law that extended its voter ID requirement. It had a good one for in-person voting, but didn't apply to absentee ballots. So they've extended that to absentee ballots. Texas did something similar. Another very common reform that about two dozen states passed, including most of the battleground states, was a ban on private funding. Zuckbucks. That was funneled almost exclusively to where? Big urban cities, big urban democratic strongholds like Philadelphia. I don't think any political party, I don't care whether it's

Republicans or Democrats, should be able to use government offices to give them an advantage. And so two-thirds of the states pretty much have banned also private funding, which I think is a good thing. If I recall, right, this was basically, you know, money to bolster the activity of existing operations? Is that, or may create new offices for the- Well, yes, but the liberal group that was putting the money in was putting all kinds of conditions on it. In fact, I think it was Green Bay, Wisconsin, after the election, through a series of

Freedom of Information Act requests, all these internal communications came out in which the clerk, who was supposed to be running elections, she actually resigned prior to the election because she said that this liberal group that had given them all this money had put one of their activists into her office who basically had taken over the election process and was running elections. And it was clearly intended to do one thing, not help everybody vote, but to help one particular political party. I see. Well, you mentioned the voter ID, you know, update on voter ID requirements. This is for the benefit of our Canadian viewers,

especially where in Canada, voter ID is a requirement. And it seems odd to many people, perhaps outside of the U.S., that this is such an issue of contention. Could you just kind of flesh that out a little bit? Yeah, and it shouldn't be. In fact, the EU, European Union, sends observers to all our elections. And whenever I brief them prior to an election, they're always astounded at the fact that every state in the United States does not require an ID. Like I said, two of the biggest states, New York and California, you don't need an ID to vote. You know, there's been this whole claim of voter suppression. If you require an ID, people aren't going to be able to vote. We've had voter ID laws now in place in a number of states for a decade and a half.

And all of the turnout data shows that all of those claims are completely untrue. I see. So you've tested this empirically. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's numerous studies that have looked at states with ID laws in place, like Georgia, comparing them to states with no ID, like California and New York. And all the studies conclude that requiring an ID does not prevent anyone from voting. In fact, if you look at places like Georgia that has a requirement for a government-issued

photo ID, they in many elections have had a higher turnout than either New York or California, which have no ID. Isn't there a new law in California that expressly prevents the use of, so is that real? It is. What happened was one of the towns, one of the cities in California said we really want to require an ID when people vote. So they passed a city ordinance that said if you voted in this particular town you had to show an ID. The legislature immediately passed a state law forbidding any and all jurisdictions in

California from requiring an ID to vote and Governor Newsom immediately signed it. That is actually an example of the leadership of a political party being out of touch with its constituency. Whether you need an ID to vote is a matter of state law. Probably about two-thirds of the states have some form of an ID requirement. You know this, John. Americans disagree on many issues. There's deep divide. On one thing they don't disagree, and that's voter ID. The latest polling I've seen on this shows that 81 percent of Americans think that's a common sense requirement, one that states should have. And that's a majority of people.

It doesn't matter whether they're Democrats or Republicans or independents. It doesn't matter whether they're black or white or Asian or Hispanic. They all think this is a good idea. North Carolina finally got an I.D. law in place after a huge, long fight over it. Pennsylvania is a little bit better. No, they don't have an I.D. law, but Pennsylvania actually was one of the states that banned private funding of election offices, which is a good thing. Ohio has made a number of improvements. Wisconsin's a little bit better.

One of the few states that's gone backwards in terms of battleground states, unfortunately, is Michigan. Michigan passed a law. They actually had a voter ID law in place, and they passed a law gutting it and getting rid of it in large measure. And when you're talking about better or worse, you're talking about purely in terms of voter ID or overall? Overall. Okay. And what are your measures here that you're...

Well, in fact, the Heritage Foundation where I work, we launched an integrity, basically scorecard, an election integrity scorecard in December of 2021. And we grade every state based on 50 different criteria. So it's everything from whether or not you require an ID to vote for both in-person absentee bounty, but also what do you do to clean up your voter rolls, make sure they stay accurate. How do you put measures in place to take people off who have died or, for example, have moved out of state? That's a key measurement of a state. As you know, that's been a matter of controversy just lately because a number of states have actually taken aliens, non-citizens, off the voter rolls.

And they're now being sued by the Biden-Harris Justice Department for taking aliens off the voter rolls. Well, yeah, so maybe explain to me that situation, because it might not be clear how they got on the voter rolls in the first place and just what this whole process looks like. When you register to vote, there's a question on the form you fill out asking you whether or not you are a U.S. citizen. And unfortunately, states aren't really verifying that.

So if you are a non-citizen but you say, yes, I am a citizen, you'll get registered to vote. So it could just be by mistake. It could be by mistake, but it could also be intentional. Sure. The result of that is that Virginia, for example, recently started checking its voter registration rolls by checking other state databases like DMV, driver's license records. And they discovered that there were individuals who, when they went to get their driver's license, produced documentation showing they were not U.S. citizens, but they were also on the voter registration list. And so Virginia took about 6,300 aliens off the rolls. Texas found about 6,500 aliens on the rolls. And, you know, I'm sure people look at that and say, well,

okay, that's maybe a small number. They're both big states, but take Virginia, right? In Virginia, they took 6,300 aliens off the rolls. In the last 15, 16 years, Virginia has had two statewide attorney general races decided by less than 1,000 votes. So it could make a difference in a close election. And what is the reality about non-citizen voting? There's a ton of chatter about this. And I just, how do you understand it? How does Heritage understand this? JOHN MCDONOUGH, Look, the biggest problem across the country

is that we have an honor system for registering. So states are not doing anything to verify that you actually are a U.S. citizen. And there's an unfortunate political party divide on this, which there shouldn't be. As you know, there was a bill proposed in Congress, the SAVE Act, which would require states to get proof of citizenship when people register to vote. Republicans even tried attaching it to the continuing resolution to keep the government running. Unfortunately, that came down to a party-line vote with one side in favor of this and the other side saying, no, we don't want to verify citizenship. Again, I actually think that's an area where the leadership of that particular political party,

if they talk to their constituents, they would find that it doesn't matter whether people are Democrats or Republicans, they do not want non-citizens voting in our elections. Well, and there's another dimension to this, come to think of it, because when it comes to the census, right, of course census counts everybody that's in the country, but as I understand, congressional redistricting happens based on not the number of citizens, but the overall number of people that have been counted in each place.

So what is the impact of that on voting? Yeah, that is a real problem. Apportionment happens every 10 years after the census, based on the total population of each state. The Census Bureau determines how many members of the U.S. House each state has. And because it's based on total population, if a state has a very large population of aliens, whether they're here legally or illegally, they're going to get more representatives in the U.S. House. The effect of that, California has the largest population of noncitizens in the U.S. apportionment was based on citizen population, which is what I think it should be, California would probably lose anywhere between four and six congressional seats. Illinois would probably lose a congressional seat. New York would probably lose a congressional seat. Texas potentially would lose a congressional seat. I think the inclusion of non-citizens is frankly unfair to U.S. citizens in the voting process. Something that was in the last election, in places where ballot harvesting is legal,

that methodology was used a lot more, if I understand correctly, in 2020 than in previous years. I'm curious how that's being applied today, has been changes in laws, and maybe just even remind us what it is. Unfortunately, and that's a problem, unfortunately about half the states allow third-party strangers to come to your house and offer to pick up and deliver your absentee ballot.

That's a mistake. Look, in states that don't allow it, one side likes to call it vote harvesting because that sounds beneficial. I call it what it is, which is vote trafficking. Look, if you need to vote by an absentee ballot, you have plenty of ways that you can get that ballot back. You can drop it off yourself in every state. A member of your family can drop it off with election officials, and you can mail it.

But in about half the states, like I said, they allow any third-party stranger to pick it up. So that means that people working for campaigns, party activists, folks who have a stake in the outcome of the election can get something very valuable, a valuable commodity, your ballot. And if you look at the election fraud database that we maintain at the Heritage Foundation, you'll find there are a lot of absentee ballot fraud cases, and in particular cases in which when those kind of political consultants and others get a hold of people's ballots, you can't trust that they're going to deliver them. You can't trust that they may not open your ballot, and if you voted for the wrong person, toss it out or perhaps change it. We've got cases like that sprinkled throughout our

database, and it's just not a good idea to allow that to happen. So that is a problem in many states, including in places like California. There has been also some chatter about overseas voting not having as stringent ID requirements. Is there a reality to that? Yeah, there's a federal law that governs that. It's called, the acronym is UACAVA. You know how

people love acronyms in Washington. It's the Uniformed Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, and it guarantees the right of Americans who are abroad, outside the U.S., and military members and their families to vote by absentee ballots in U.S. elections. Yeah, it guarantees the right to vote, but one of the issues that has come up is that several states, including Michigan, are allowing individuals to vote who are overseas, who never lived in their states. And the Yul Kaba Law doesn't require that. What it says is, for example, if you're a member of the military and you lived in Michigan, then you join the military and the military transfers you, let's say, to a base in Michigan, and then you join the military, and the military transfers you, let's say, to a base in Germany, you have a right to vote in Michigan elections because that's the last place you lived. But Michigan has now said, well, even if you've never lived in Michigan, you can vote

there. Because you're a family member? I'm assuming what it may be is we do have American expatriates who live abroad. If they have a son or a daughter who's born abroad, they're a U.S. citizen. But if they've never lived in the U.S. at all. The RNC who has filed this lawsuit is saying that they don't have a right to claim residence in a particular state, particularly, for example, in Michigan, where the Constitution says to vote in the state, you have to be a resident. So you've described tightening up around voter ID requirements in many states. What are, at the moment, the existing vulnerabilities that come to mind, like the most significant ones?

Well, a lot of it depends on the state. The biggest vulnerability we have are absentee mail-in ballots. They've become such a huge part of the election. Look, I don't have a problem with people voting absentee if they really need to. You know, someone who's so physically disabled that they can't make it to the polls. But even that issue of absentee ballots, the need for it has lessened over the years. Why? Because we now have early voting in almost all of the states. And if you live in Virginia, Virginia has the earliest voting of any state in the country.

Starts 45 days before election day. There aren't too many people who are going to be out of the state that entire time and couldn't vote early in person. The other big problem with absentee balloting that concerns me is a lot of states have changed their laws, unfortunately, to say that rather than the absentee ballot having to be in the hands of election officials by the end of election day, oh, no, no, no. We'll keep counting ballots that come in for days after the election, five days, 10 days.

And that opens up potential manipulation of the voting process. Also, um. PETER BAKER LASCARISON, JR.: You mean people voting after the fact or what? JOHN MCDONOUGH, JR.: Yeah, voting and trying to vote after the fact. But also, do you really want to trust the U.S. mail

to deliver your ballot? You know, what I always ask people is, if you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket? No, of course not. Everybody says no. They would show up in person. Voting is the same way, particularly when you consider that just a month ago, the two leading organizations

of election officials in the country, bipartisan organizations, sent a joint letter to the U.S. Postal Service complaining about the mishandling of mail during the primary season this year. And what they complained about were delays in the delivery of absentee ballots, misdirected absentee ballots, and problems that caused absentee ballots, a certain percentage, to arrive too late to be counted. And in fact, that came on top of a report by the Postal Service's own inspector general, which also looked at the handling of absentee ballots during the primary season. And they had a lot of criticisms of the Postal Service and its mishandling of that mail. And with absentee ballots, you're arguing that it introduces uncertainty into the system that isn't necessary. Is that right?

Yeah, and it's riskier because it subjects voters, for example, to potential pressure and coercion. A staffer for a candidate can't go inside a polling place and try to pressure the person who's sitting there with a ballot into voting a particular way. But they can do that by knocking on the door of a voter and saying, oh, have you voted your ballot yet? Can I help you vote your ballot? Can I help you fill it out? That's the kind of thing that can happen in people's homes, and there are cases like that,

particularly we've seen cases like that down in Texas, of individuals who are paid by the campaigns to go to voters' homes to try to pressure and coerce them to vote a particular way. For folks who think this can't make a difference, in 2018 in North Carolina, the State Board of Elections overturned a congressional election because of widespread absentee ballot fraud that included and was basically organized by staffers for one of the candidates going to people's homes to collect their absentee ballots and pressuring them to vote a particular way, and if they didn't, actually opening up their ballots and changing the vote.

Wow, first of all. And how does one discover this sort of? See, unfortunately, often it's by accident. If you're good at this, if you know how to cheat and you're good at it and you have laws that are very loose in a particular state, you can do this and you can get away with it. There was a case in Troy, New York, about a decade ago, again involving absentee ballot fraud. And in that case, these individuals, as part of a conspiracy, were requesting and obtaining absentee ballots in the names of voters without the voters knowing about it.

And they picked on one particular neighborhood. It was a neighborhood more, you know, poorer than other neighborhoods in Troy, New York. And one of the consultants, political consultants who was convicted, was interviewed by the police. And they asked him, well, why did you target this one particular neighborhood? And what he said was, well, we thought they were least likely to vote and least likely to complain if they discovered a problem. Oh, wow. That's dark. It is. Yeah.

You know, whenever I'm talking about elections, I can't help think about Taiwan, which is a relatively new democracy. And they have this very, very meticulous—it's a smaller country, to be fair. Everyone has to go to their region where they're registered as a resident. They have to vote there. And it all happens on the same day. And then there's this amazing— this is the part that I love, this amazing public vote counting process where basically it's almost like a spectator sport. And I guess they're very proud of it because they're such a new democracy of doing this.

It makes me think of this one day idea. What do you think about the idea of having a voting day, let's say, be a public holiday? That's been something that's been proposed. Well, a lot of people think that if you do that, it'll somehow increase turnout. I don't think it's going to do that. If you look at other countries that have done that, made it a national holiday, it doesn't increase turnout. And again, I would go back to the fact that right now, it's very easy to vote. I mean, it's the easiest to vote we've ever had in our entire history, particularly because so many states

have early voting prior to the election. I think that that's actually problematic, early voting. Yeah, if you want to have early voting a week before the election, maybe two weeks even, I don't have a problem with that. But having people vote for two months before Election Day when, for example, in a presidential election, we haven't even had the debates yet. Or if something happens, you know, the week before Election Day that could change your mind, it's too late because you've already voted. I don't think that's a good idea. There's no take-backs. There's no take-back.

And in particular, it's a really bad idea during the primary season. And the reason for that is if you look at prior elections in 2020, for example, remember there were a lot of candidates running, not just Joe Biden. And yet right before Super Tuesday, when what, more than a dozen states were having their primaries, two of the Democratic candidates dropped out of the race.

Well, by that time, hundreds of thousands of people had already cast their ballots for those two candidates, which I think included Senator Klobuchar. So they had wasted their vote because they had voted early for people who were no longer the race. And I think that's a problem. In an immediate sense, as we finish up, what do you see as the key areas of further voter integrity reform?

Well, one thing is preventing Congress from passing any kind of huge bill like they tried to do a couple years ago that would have nationalized the election process, taken it over from the states. One of the bills that had been proposed in the U.S. House would have done things like ban voter ID laws across the country. Plus, the danger of having the federal government in complete control of the election rules is the party in power, whoever it is, might change the rules in a way that they think will ensure that they stay in power.

And that can't happen when you have individual states putting in the rules for running their elections. So that should not happen. On the other hand, states need to continue to improve their ability to clean up their voter registration lists. They need to start verifying to make sure people are U.S. citizens. and they need to be sure that they not only have an ID law in place, but that it extends to both in-person and absentee balloting. When people want to vote, they are able to vote. And the Census Bureau actually does surveys after U.S. elections.

And one of the things they do is they ask people who didn't vote, why didn't you vote? And the number of people who say they didn't vote because of some kind of problem, you know, administrative problem, is a tiny percentage. The vast majority of people who didn't vote say they didn't vote not because of any administrative reasons but because they weren't interested in politics they didn't like the candidates they didn't think it would make any difference in

their everyday lives so that's why people don't vote it's not because of some kind of barrier that's contained in laws and regulations that keep them from voting a final thought as we finish, Hans? You know, integrity in the election process is something that should be a bipartisan concern. It unfortunately has kind of delved away from that in recent years. And I would go back and tell people, you know, the last time there was a great bipartisan report in which both Republicans and Democrats participated was chaired by, of all people, Jimmy Carter, you know, former Democratic president who just recently turned

100. And if folks want to see some good recommendations, they should take a look at that report. It was released in 2005. It was Jimmy Carter and James Baker, former Republican Secretary of State. And back then, it was bipartisan. People agreed on things like voter ID. It's unfortunate that since then there has developed such a political partisan divide on this issue. Well, Hans von Spakowsky, such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thanks for having me. Thank you all for joining Hans von Spakowsky and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.