No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump’s “dead voters” claim backfires on his own campaign

Episode Date: December 27, 2020

Trump’s claims of dead people voting backfires on his own campaign. Brian interviews Brittany Kaiser, the whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, which is the firm that used Facebook to steal data on millions of Americans and then used it to help Trump win in 2016.Written by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CAhttps://www.briantylercohen.com/podcast/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we're going to talk about an actual instance of voter fraud and how it backbired on the Trump campaign. In my interview with Brittany Kaiser, the whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, which is the firm that used Facebook to steal data from millions of Americans and then used it to help Trump win in 2016. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Okay, I got to apologize. The name of this podcast is No Lie, and I have to stand by that, so I have to admit that I

screwed up. I've been going on for weeks about how Trump. was wrong, there was no fraud, and it turns out that we now do have at least one instance of fraud that a dead person voted. In Pennsylvania, a man is admitted to casting a ballot for his deceased mother in the November election. Oh, and I should mention, the ballot was cast for Donald Trump because, of course. This story is just fascinating. So right after the November election, the Trump campaign compiled a list of seven dead Americans in battleground states who had purportedly had ballots cast in their names, and they promoted this list all over social media,

Twitter, Facebook, their website everywhere. That was, of course, picked up by right-wing media, including Tucker Carlson. And I've spoken about this on my podcast before, about Tucker's A-plus reporting about a man named James Blaylock, who allegedly voted even though he'd already passed away. Mr. Blaylock was a mailman for 33 years until he passed away in 2006. 14 years later, according to state records, he was still mailing. things. James Blaylock cast a ballot in last week's election. Only to find out that James Blaylock didn't vote, his 94-year-old widowed wife did, using her married name, Mrs. James

Blaylock, forcing Tucker to issue a retraction. We've got some good news tonight and an apology. One of the people who voted in last week's election isn't dead. James Blaylock is still dead. We told you about him, but it was his wife who voted. She voted as Mrs. James Blaylock. It's old-fashioned, and we missed it. So aside from that example, of the seven instances of supposed fraud cases that the Trump campaign cited, three were immediately debunked. But in one of the remaining cases in Pennsylvania, it turns out the man named Bruce Bartman illegally voted in place of his deceased mother, along with submitting his own ballot.

He also registered his mother-in-law, but he wasn't accused of voting for her. But when he was asked initially about what happened in an interview with the New York Times in November, he lied and said he never even saw a mail-in ballot for his mother. he said, quote, oh, no, no, I haven't gotten anything. Occasionally, I would get some junk mail for her, but not in several years. And then he added that he didn't even hear about Trump's allegations because he doesn't even use social media. And yet, then, when asked whether he knew why a vote for his mother would have been recorded despite her passing away, he said the state's Democratic governor, Tom Wolfe, quote,

doesn't know anything or what's going on in the city of Philadelphia or the surrounding counties in the middle part of the state. some of the stuff that has gone on in Philadelphia is just atrocious. Yeah, totally sounds like someone who hasn't been listening to the Trump campaign and who doesn't spend much time on the internet. The craziest part is that this is a guy who is perpetuating word for word the fraud claims being introduced by the Trump campaign, even though he himself is literally guilty of doing exactly what he's pretending to condemn. Like, I don't know whether it's cognitive dissonance

or if they're just so intent on manifesting Trump's fever dreams that they're willing to go to prison for him, but one day after the next, we get more and more proof that the only people committing the crimes that Republicans accused Democrats of are Republicans. And look, I know that people can look at this and say, well, regardless of who the fraud benefited, this is still evidence of fraud.

And that's true. This is a single instance of fraud. And there will be individual smatterings of fraud across the country because there will always be people who break the law. just like there are people who break the law in every aspect of life. But that doesn't mean you throw out the whole system. That doesn't mean you eliminate mail-in voting because a few bad actors did something illegal. Just like someone speeding doesn't mean you abolish cars.

You don't eliminate stores because someone shoplifted. It means you try to find those people and hold them to account and continue enacting protections to keep these instances to a minimum. Which, by the way, is exactly what happened. The guy in question here was caught. This was literally the system working as it should. And consider, too, that there are definitely measures taken to ensure the dead people don't vote. Like, first of all, there's signature verification, and it's pretty hard to correctly copy the signature of someone who died.

And beyond that, states also keep their registration records up to date by joining the Electronic Registration Information Center, which is a national organization that sends reports to member states showing when voters have moved within their state or out of state when they have died and flagging when they might have duplicate registrations. And look, these detection methods aside, I don't want to get mired in this too much because in actuality, the data shows a negligible number of fraudulent cases of voting. So any claims of fraud aren't actually backed up by any evidence, which is all that really matters. But beyond that, this is ultimately what the right wants. The right wants to dictate the terms of the conversation and for that conversation to be centered around this idea that there's widespread fraud and for Democrats to be on the

defensive about it. In actuality, that's not how it works. If you have evidence of widespread fraud, prove it. If you can't prove it, which is the case here, then you're not presenting legitimate claims. You're running a disinformation campaign, which, again, is the case here. So let me say, yet again, for the umpteenth and hopefully final time, that there was no widespread fraud in this election. And individual instances of fraud that were caught are actually evidence that the system as it stands is working, not that it's broken. Next step is my interview with Brittany Kaiser.

So we have the whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, which is the data firm that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016, and data rights activist, Brittany Kaiser. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Thank you, Brian, for having me. So first off, could you briefly explain what Cambridge Analytica did and your involvement? So Cambridge Analytica was a startup big data company that went about purchasing and licensing the personally identifiable information and, connecting datasets of people all around the world in order to make predictions about their behavior and then run influence campaigns to change their actions, not just in elections,

also for commercial advertising and actually in the beginning for military purposes. So what the company was doing was advising governments, militaries, political parties, and companies around the world on how they could make data-driven, strategies to either obtain more customers, more supporters, more loyal citizens, whatever it happened to be. And unfortunately, because they were operating in a gray space, and I would say a largely unregulated data industry that is still true today, it meant that if you didn't have moral or ethical guidelines that you were adhering to, then you could do, well, nearly

anything technically under the law, although they still manage to cut corners legally as well, which is why I eventually came out as a whistleblower to change that and make sure we actually have a regulated landscape to protect people. So what was your involvement? Like when, walk me through a little bit about when you joined the company? Yeah. So when I joined the company, I was a Ph.D. student in my 10th year of Human Rights Law School and finishing up my project on preventive diplomacy, which what that means is how do you use executive power in government, so ambassadors, heads of state, heads of United Nations departments in order to prevent atrocities, prevent war from happening. And it turned out my entire doctoral

thesis ended up being about data science. So I was trying to figure out how I could learn enough about data science outside of my law school. And I joined Cambridge Analytica as a director of business development running around the world, meeting people that either wanted to be president or prime minister or wanted to stay there because they had already been elected, meeting with big companies, governments, militaries that wanted to use data-driven strategies. And so I worked with a team of expert data scientists to figure out what you could use data for, how to run data science programs. And of course, their, I suppose, secret sauce, which was behavioral influence. How do you predict people's behavior in a way that you could actually intervene and affect the actions that

they take? So I guess, you know, the obvious question is before going to Cambridge, Adelaika, you worked with human rights organizations, with Amnesty International, with the Obama campaign. How do you go from that to the data firm aligned with Steve Bannon that worked with Ted Cruz and ultimately helped elect Donald Trump? Yeah, I mean, as I said, I joined the company in order to learn how to do better campaigning for the organizations that I was aligned with. In fact, my CEO would laugh all the time and say, hey, help me close a contract in this country. And then you can create your own Cambridge Analytica and win all of the campaigns that you want to win for the rest of your life, which I suppose, you know, could make me sound naive or, you know, eternally optimistic,

which is the way that I usually see the world. And so being at a company where eventually a lot of the clientele was not the type of people that I would ever vote for or support or be involved with was debilitating to my mental health, I would say. And, you know, something that drove me eventually to become a whistleblower because I, while hoping that most people would use technology in a responsible way, I saw that that was incredibly untrue, especially in a landscape where, as I said, you were technically allowed to do almost anything that you wanted. And unfortunately, I saw that happen in such an abusive manner that I had to decide to risk everything in order to try to stop that from happening again.

it's obviously like being around these people and being immersed in that world that has to have some some impact on you right so like did your political affiliation change while you're there like what what is your political affiliation now i'm just curious about that yeah absolutely i'm now quite a staunch independent um because unfortunately working as a political consultant You see a lot of the ways that politics operates, not just in the United States, but around the world and how corrupt that is. So I'm really interested in working outside of the party system on issues that I believe in as opposed to specifically aligning with a set of values that are pushed on to people. So I was a staunch Democrat for most of my life. And this past election, I actually voted for independence, libertarians, Democrats, and even my first Republicans,

who are mostly blockchain enthusiasts that I want to see in Congress because I care about the emerging technology and privacy and data protection. So Cambridge Analytica had marketed itself as having 5,000 data points on every American, but in reality you weren't focused on 300 million Americans. You were focused on what you called the persuadables. So can you explain what those are and how many you targeted? Absolutely. So the concept of persuadables are people who more easily will change a decision that they were predicted to make.

You know, you could call those swing voters in commercial advertising. They're called switchers. And you can tell through data science, especially through behavioral data sets of how often people click on things, how many times they need to see an advertisement in order to, you know, give their email or opt in to take an action. if they are the type of person that can be persuaded to change their mind. And so if you own enough data about people and if you have enough money to run these types of wide-scale experiments, it is really possible for you to tell to a high degree of accuracy who these people are.

And so it depends what issue or what candidate or what product you happen to be selling or advocating for, but usually that's around like, you know, 30% of the population, right in the middle, not people who are stuck on a certain candidate or party or not brand loyalists, so to say, and those individuals are the people that are going to receive, unfortunately, the bombardment of both political and commercial advertising, because those are the people where all of their behaviors thus far have shown that if you talk to them often enough and you spend enough time and money on them, that they will consider your opinion or your product or whatever it happens to be. And in 2016, that was basically people in Wisconsin, Michigan,

Florida, and Pennsylvania, I think you, I think that you targeted most heavily. Well, actually, one of the interesting things about the Trump campaign was that the Trump campaign considered 16 different states swing states where Hillary Clinton's campaign only concentrated on nine. That's because through advanced data science, it was shown that if you targeted a specific number, small number of people in different precincts, that there were 16 different states that were possible to turn red instead of blue. And that was down to a very specific number, as you remember, in 2016, there were some states that were won by, you know, 11,000 votes.

Right. And that was something that was practiced, I suppose, on Ted Cruz in the primaries and then was proven on Trump's campaign in the general. So let's move ahead to 2020. Was the fact that Cambridge Analytica no longer exist now why Trump's 2020 campaign was unable to replicate, or one of the reasons why Trump's 2020 campaign was unable to replicate as 2016 win? I don't think so. Unfortunately, instead of one Cambridge Analytica, there's now hundreds of Cambridge Analytica's.

A lot of companies not just in the United States, but around the world saw that that type of advanced predictive analytics was incredibly useful. And also a lot of the people that ran Trump 2016 were still running Trump 2020, the same Cambridge Analytica team of Matt Oskowski and crew that originally were working for Cambridge. Now we're just working directly for the Trump campaign or through Brad Pascal's company or their own political consultancy. So it really wasn't that. In my opinion, it was that it had been proven time and time and again that the the president had committed, I would say, nearly ceaseless violations on the American people. And therefore, it wasn't just a problem that he had broken laws and social norms in order to win in 2016.

But the continual disinformation campaigns levied on both the American people and the world at large, as well as a complete lack of interest in morals, ethics, or truth and reality is what eventually, eroded his ability to continue to serve as president of the United States. So you had mentioned that there's, that there's, you know, dozens of other companies that sprouted up in the wake of Cambridge Analytica. Are those companies limited because they're not able to, they basically don't have free reign to scrape without permission the data points for, for people on Facebook and then thousands of their friends, basically? Did that limit them? Or are they not really, you know, is that just one small obstacle and they can

still, they still have carte blanche. It's still the wild west of the internet, basically. Yeah, I mean, I would say it's still pretty much the wild west in the United States. At least in Europe, they've passed the general data protection regulation. So GDPR has meant that it's more difficult to do those types of kind of underhanded or dirty tactics in Europe. But in the United States, we still have no federal data protection or privacy legislation. So most of what Cambridge Analytica did, new companies can still do that exact same thing unfortunately the only thing that they can't do is have direct API access to everyone's personal data in Facebook but Facebook's tools are sophisticated enough that you can use their targeting system without taking the raw data I would say the individual data points out of Facebook and modeling them yourself and said you can use their tools to target very specific groups for specific purposes and what I think is is really important to note is that there are some advancements that have made certain things

more difficult. For instance, in 2016, was the first time where you really saw national campaigns of disinformation and fake news and voter suppression campaigns that were data-driven. So we do have laws against slander and libel. We have laws against incitement of violence and racial hatred. we have laws against voter suppression, but unfortunately in 2016, none of those laws were enforced on social media platforms. Now in 2020, we've made some small steps, at least kind of the data protection and privacy advocacy community. I wouldn't say it's because the platforms decided to grow a moral backbone, but they've been forced in order to have some new steps, such as flagging inappropriate content, which a lot of people,

that don't understand the right to free speech call censorship, but, you know, the right to free speech is not an unchecked right. My right to free speech ends where your human rights begin. And so therefore, there's a difference between censorship and enforcement of the law, actually. And that applies to a lot of different subjects also, by the way. Even the late Justice Scalia even said about the Second Amendment that the rights in the Second Amendment are not unlimited. So I think people confuse, you know, are certain freedoms with having unlimited freedoms. Correct. Okay.

So quick question. Is it fair to say that the campaigns that Cambridge Analytica used against Hillary Clinton were smear campaigns or disinformation campaigns? Absolutely. Not all of it. But I would say I have so much evidence of different campaigns that not are just smear campaigns, because smear campaigns could be considered legal, but are blatant, slander, libel, and voter suppression. tactics. The evidence I have alone just from me is enough for me to say that Donald Trump was, used illegal tactics in order to be elected in 2016 and shouldn't have been president

in the first place. With our weak enforcement mechanism right now, I mean, because we're seeing, you know, it's not just, if you thought Fox News was bad, well, now we have OAN, now we have Newsmax, you know, so it's, it doesn't seem like it's getting better. It doesn't seem like it's being enforce better. So what's to stop right-wing media from seeing that a smear campaign worked in 2016 and just pumping out literal fake news to manipulate people in 2022, 2024, 24, 26? How do you police this kind of thing? How do you come back to a place where reality is even accepted online? Right. That's just an easy question. I would say it's kind of on two different levels. One is obviously when we're thinking about Section 230 and how publishers are actually

regulated. We need to have stronger enforcement on that, number one, because there are now TV news networks that are willing to put out blatant fake news and disinformation that upon even the weakest of fact checking is proven false. So that actually needs to be legislated against. And I think what is probably going to help is to have criminal liability attached to that as opposed to just civil liability and fines. That's something that I couldn't be a stronger supporter of, not just in terms of, you know, fake news and disinformation by publishers, but also in terms of data protection violations. Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill last April called the Corporate Executive Accountability Act, which is that if you are to violate through

negligence, data protection laws, which is in a lot of the same body of work as fake news and disinformation, that the executives of that company would be criminally liable. So I think if the owners or heads of these companies thought that they could serve jail time for these types of violations, then we would see a lot less of it. And so I'm a big fan of that, number one, but also our FEC needs more teeth. We need a new FEC commissioner that's going to go in there and actually make our federal election commission laws legally enforceable because right now they're sitting with a pile of complaints all the way back to 2014, 2015, 2016, and nothing has been done about it. They haven't been properly investigated, let alone any charges being levied. So I do want to real quick move over

to the Russian hack that we've been hearing about. Can you, speak to the idea that if we know about this hack, that it's worse than we could imagine? And what does that entail, basically? What does that entail? All of us having a come to Jesus moment about the fact that we need actual technologists running our government, number one. It also entails the reality that we're faced with that we probably need to fully rebuild our government's back-end technology infrastructure. I think the GSA is going to have a huge problem on their hands for the next couple years. It's going to create a need for a much bigger cybersecurity task force within the government, kind of like we had the president fire, everyone

that could have possibly helped prevent the widespread nature of the pandemic. He did the same thing on the cybersecurity side, you know, the president doesn't even use a computer. So that shouldn't be surprising that he didn't care or place any importance on cybersecurity. So I'm really excited. I figured he could just put Jared Kushner in there and he'll figure everything out, you know? Right. This is the problem that we're faced with. We need actual experts working in our government.

And I am so excited that we have, you know, around a month left until we can actually put professionals back into running our country. Yeah. Well, knowing what you know about data, how could the Russians use the information that they have access to now, you know, from the American people against us? In any way that they'd like to, which is probably the biggest disaster. I mean, one of the biggest things that I continually have to say over the past many years is that, you know, nobody needed to secretly give the Russians access to data. The personal data of everyone in America is easily purchasable or even obtainable on the dark web for free by anybody in the world, whether it be a foreign government, a hacker group or just someone that's doing it for fun, because we have no laws or widespread enterprise level technology that is protecting people in America. Legislative, regulatory, and technology all are completely dysfunctional in this country. And so we really need to spend a massive amount of time in investment, which this Russian hack has now guaranteed, at least we will have, hopefully, over the coming years to make sure that we are less vulnerable. But, you know, the entire Mueller investigation was centered around whether or not the Trump campaign or Cambridge Analytica was working with Russia, which, you know, I still believe is possible for the Trump campaign.

and I can't say things about people that I don't know or meetings I wasn't at. I do know for a fact that anyone in Russia could have already obtained enough data in order to do significant damage at any time to the American populace. And even with just a couple hundred thousand dollars, we're able to sow seeds of disinformation in the 2016 election that was shown to over what, 157 million Americans, with a couple hundred thousand dollars. that's now that they have access to all of our data, including our state secrets, including our

nuclear programs, we need to really take technology and cybersecurity seriously or the entire safety or future of our country is at risk. And do we have anybody in government right now championing this or in Congress more specifically? I would say in Congress, the biggest champion would be Senator Mark Warner, who I'm a huge fan of. He does amazing work. The legislation that he puts forward is incredibly technical and therefore will be enforceable once we get it through. Unfortunately, we haven't had that much movement over the past few years on federal data

legislation. But I do believe that after we have new people in Congress in January, that we're going to get a lot further. The development has really been happening in the states, states like Wyoming, California. There's a lot of moves happening in New York. I'm involved in all of those initiatives. And I have a lot of hope. I especially hope that we'll see someone like Andrew Yang appointed as CTO of America

who can really start to take people's data rights seriously and would be one of the right people to come in with a background in technology or real understanding of what needs to be done and help build back up the expertise that we should have had over the past four years. So that's a good segue into the Own Your Data Foundation. So can you speak on that? Absolutely. So my Own Your Data Foundation is our 501C3 charity where we believe in the democratization of digital literacy education. And what I mean by that is we believe every single person around the world should have access to the knowledge of not just how to protect themselves online, but how to lead a successful digital life, especially since in 2020, we've all been thrown accidentally into having to lead our entire lives on our devices. When nobody was ready, for that. I mean, we're, we're producing exponentially more data every single day. And most people

don't even know basic privacy protocols. So what we do is we teach, especially this year, parents and teachers and kids, how to protect themselves online, but we're also doing government training, professional training, high school, college, even early childhood, because now a lot of tiny children are being given their own device a lot more early than they ever should be by their out of need. And that necessity has really pushed forward the requirement for more people to have this digital literacy education. So trying to get it into as many schools around the world as possible. We're partnered with the World Economic Forum, OECD, UNICEF. We teach an I-TRIBLE League global standard that is already in tens of countries around the world. We're trying to make sure that

as many Americans, especially people in vulnerable populations are getting access to this, we're starting teaching, for instance, in indigenous schools on reservations and in schools that can't really afford to buy these types of programs and implement them at a school-wide level. So I think this is as important for government officials as it is for kids. And unfortunately, kids probably already know more about how technology works than a lot of government officials. And that's where we're at right now. Yeah. All right. Well, Brittany, happy holidays. Thank you so much for taking the time and we really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much, Brian. And if anyone listening to this wants to get more involved in any of these initiatives, please reach out to me

at info at own your data.com foundation. My website is own your data.com foundation, and you can follow me on social media at own your data or at own your data now, depending on which platform you prefer to use. So thank you guys for caring about these issues. And thank you again, Brian, for having me. Thanks again to Brittany Kaiser. And before I sign off, I just have one more thing. And that is that while the Trump era is over, for now and hopefully forever, I hope you stay involved and engaged in 2021. Because the Republican Party of 2020 didn't just happen in a vacuum.

It was the result of years of complacency on the left. We can't just start paying attention only when there's a megalomaniacal narcissist committing crimes against humanity and dismantling every tenet of our democracy in office. We can't just start paying attention when the whole thing is on fire. We spent so much time and energy getting involved this year. We filled the streets in the biggest demonstrations in the history of this country. We came out to vote in the biggest numbers in the history of this country. So let's use that enthusiasm for once to be on the offense, to do some good,

to get the virus under control and expand access to health care and enact a livable wage and make sure the rich pay their fair share and decriminalize marijuana and reform our criminal justice system and finally take action against climate change. it'd be a shame if all that attention and marching and tweeting was wasted on Donald Trump and not on actually making this country a better place. So don't give him the satisfaction of being the only thing we'll mobilize in response to. Let's keep it going and finish what we all started. So please, stay involved and make sure we actually get to do some good.

I hope everyone had a happy and healthy Christmas and Hanukkah and whatever else you celebrate. Happy New Year and I'll talk to you next week. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen, produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, interviews captured and edited for YouTube and Facebook by Nicholas Nicotera, and recorded in Los Angeles, California. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in your preferred podcast app. Feel free to leave a five-star rating and a review, and check out Brian Tyler Cohen.com for links to all of my other channels.