The Daily Signal - Deroy Murdock Reveals Troubling State of Our Elections

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

Election integrity is essential to a functioning country. Americans deserve to know that their elections are being conducted fairly and that their votes count. Unfortunately, many have reason to think... our elections aren’t secure. Deroy Murdock, a Fox News contributor and senior fellow at the Atlas Network, says he sees election integrity and voter fraud as issues that will determine the continued existence of America as we know it. “We can’t even tolerate the appearance of vote fraud, because even the mere appearance of vote fraud causes people to lose confidence in our leadership and in our system,” says Murdock, whose columns appear regularly in The Daily Signal. “And pretty soon, our constitutional republic starts to dissolve.” Murdock joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the issue of clean and honest elections, and how we can make them more secure. We also cover these stories: Following a ruling by a federal judge in Florida, the Biden administration ends its extended mandate requiring masks on public transportation such as planes and trains. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asks President Biden to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Florida rejects 54 math textbooks over concerns that they contain critical race theory as well as other “prohibited topics.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:06 This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, April 20th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. Election integrity is essential to a functioning country. And Americans deserve to know that their elections are being conducted fairly and that their votes count. Unfortunately, many feel as if our elections are not secure. DeRoy Murdoch, a Fox News contributor and senior fellow at the Atlas Network, joins the show today to discuss the issue and how we can make our elections more secure. But before we get to Doug's conversation with DeRoy Mordock, let's see.
Starting point is 00:00:36 hit our top news stories of the day. Following a ruling by a federal judge out of Florida, the Biden administration's mandate requiring masks on public transportation is now over. Here to discuss how this happened and what it means is Heritage Foundation policy analyst David Ditch. David, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. All right. So this is very exciting news, but what did the judge rule exactly? What does it mean? She ruled that the Centers for Disease Control Prevention does not have the authority under statute to, in conjunction with the TSA, mandate that all these different transportation systems coast to coast and border to border impose mask mandates on all passengers. Does this mean that long-term mask mandates across the country are probably going to go away?
Starting point is 00:01:39 Do we see this having slight resistance? What do we see from this ruling? It's unclear whether the Biden administration is going to fight the state. this ruling tooth and nail, you know, appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court. My guess is that they won't or if they do, they won't go whole hog. Because what you see in all these different places, whether it's airlines, whether it's airports, whether it's even the local transit agency here in Washington, D.C. Given the choice, all these major aspects of the transportation industry are choosing not to impose mask mandates.
Starting point is 00:02:17 They're saying to individuals, if you want to mask, if you think that you're vulnerable, you can choose to mask. And if you don't, you don't need to mask. As a final question, do we see these mask mandates coming back? We know Philadelphia just reinstituted their indoor mask mandate. Do we see masks mandates coming back if there's a possible surge? I believe this is going to turn from being a federal issue to being a state and local issue. I absolutely believe that a variety of jurisdictions governed by people who are frankly paranoid about COVID will be imposing mask mandates for whatever arbitrary and capricious reason that they see fit. Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate your time.
Starting point is 00:03:04 Thank you. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked President Joe Biden to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. This could put further pressure on Russia's economy following. its invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration has not said whether it will apply the label to Russia, but appears to be looking into it. The State Department defines a state sponsor of terrorism as a country that repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism. In other words, a country that supports non-state actors outside its borders to commit acts of terrorism against civilians. Alexander Modell is a professor of political science at Rutgers University and the author of 10 books on the history of Russia and Ukraine.
Starting point is 00:03:51 He tells CNBC that Russia's actions so far would not qualify it as a state sponsor of terror because it is the Russian military carrying out the acts. Russia is not sponsoring terrorism. The state itself is committing it. But Modal notes that Russia's previous actions of poisoning dissidents outside of Russia could qualify as grounds to label Russia as state sponsor of terrorism. Right now, only four countries bear that label, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, and Iran. Since most sanctions that come with the designation of state sponsor of terrorism already have been applied to Russia, Modal says the primary value of labeling Russia as such could be to serve as a potential bargaining chip in future negotiations. Florida has rejected 54 math books over concerns that they contain critical race theory as well as other prohibited topics.
Starting point is 00:04:48 On Friday, the Florida Department of Education announced that it had rejected 54 of 132 math textbooks it reviewed, with the lion's share intended for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. NBC News reported that 28 of the 54 books were rejected specifically because they discussed prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT. The other rejected books failed to meet Florida's benchmarks for excellent student thinking, or best standards. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said in a written statement that it seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the
Starting point is 00:05:29 foundation of Common Core and indoctrinated in concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Doroy Murdoch as we discuss election integrity. At the Heritage Foundation, we believe that every single policy issue discussed in D.C. tells a story. So we want to tell it well. On the Heritage Explains podcast, co-host Tim Decher and Michelle Cordero, take one policy issue a week, mix in a creative blend of clips, narration, and hard-hitting interviews to equip you on crucial issues in under 20 minutes. So get your story straight.
Starting point is 00:06:09 Subscribe to Heritage Explains wherever you listen to podcasts. My guest today is Deroi Murdoch, a Fox News contributor and senior fellow at the Atlas Network. Dorei, welcome to the show. Doug, great to be with you. I want to talk to you about election. Election Integrity. You gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation about some of the wild intricacies of how election integrity has kind of fallen by the wayside in America these days. Where do you see that as being the biggest problem? Well, it's a big problem in a lot of states where people are not doing what they need to do in order to make sure that our elections are clean, honest, reliable. I think a lot of this, unfortunately, came out of the COVID emergency. And people on the left said, well, you know, we can't have people. going to the polls because they might get sick or they might get people sick, so let's have mass mail-in ballots so people can stay at home.
Starting point is 00:06:58 And we can't expect them to turn their votes over at the election board. So we're going to have ballot harvesting so people can, we'll go pick up their ballots for them. And we'll have drop boxes. They can drop their ballots in these unsupervised boxes, maybe three in the morning so they won't get COVID. This whole left, as Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago said, never let a great crisis go to waste. And boy, they didn't. and they weaponized this disease to change the way we vote. And unfortunately now, a lot of that stuff still sticks.
Starting point is 00:07:27 There has been an effort by some states to roll back some of this nonsense. A lot of us fear that there's going to be what we call the midterm variant. Right about Labor Day, there'll be another variant of COVID. And they'll say, oh, my God, we've got to lock the thing down. And they'll say, well, we've got to do the mass mail-in ballots, go through all the nonsense we did in 2020 that tainted that election, I think, truly fatally. But I hope that we will get over this nonsense, get COVID behind us, and get the COVID-related very negative changes in our voting system behind us in the history books
Starting point is 00:07:54 and go back to what we should be doing, which is as much as possible, vote in person. You're going to vote in absentee. It's because you're actually sick or you're out of town, not because you feel like it. And we're going to have the ballots come in, unless you're in the military or something like that. All the ballots have got to be in election night, not two weeks after or two and a half weeks, just drifting in whenever they want to. And we really need to go back to the concept of Election Day where you get up on Election Day, get off your bark of lounger, put on some clothes, and go down and vote with your neighbors and decide who's going to be your mayor, who's going to be your governor, who's your congressman, who's your senator, who's the President of the United States.
Starting point is 00:08:26 Rather than what we've got now, which is you stay home, you vote in a bathroom or maybe with a towel around your waist. It's just another casual activity. It's not that important. Who cares? And I think the whole quality of our democracy suffers when people think voting is just, you know, something you do, you know, waiting for dinner to be served rather than something that you take seriously. And you and your neighbors go and decide who is going to lead this. constitutional Republican bars. DeRoy, there was a lot to unpack there.
Starting point is 00:08:51 I want to start with some of those policies that you mentioned. It sounds like these are policies that have been intentionally created to make voter fraud or election irregularities easier to propagate. Is that accurate that it's intentional? I think so. Now, some people will say, well, these people really meant well and they just were trying to keep people from getting infected. I think that's maybe the innocent explanation.
Starting point is 00:09:14 My sense is that there are people who want to be able to make life as easy to cheat and keep the system kind of loosey-goosey and unfocused and not buttoned up, and that makes it a lot easier to cheat, a lot easier to steal elections, and I think that there are people to do that. I also think even if they are honest people, then they mean well, that this sort of thing, just at a bare minimum, creates the perception of vote fraud. And even if there is no actual vote fraud, but people think, oh, boy, that looks fishy,
Starting point is 00:09:41 then you look at the person who benefits from it, the person I was elected, and you think, oh, that's not really the President of the States. That's not really my center. That's not my governor or whatever it is. And I don't think we can tolerate vote fraud. We can't even tolerate the appearance of vote fraud because even the mere appearance of vote fraud causes people to lose confidence in our leadership and in our system. And pretty soon our Constitutional Republic starts to dissolve. The secondary angle to that was this idea that voting has become something you do while you've gotten out of the shower.
Starting point is 00:10:12 Like, oh, shoot, I forgot to vote. I'll just fill out my ballot really quickly. How does that idea that voting has become a more casual activity affect the voting process? I think what it does is people just take it less seriously. If you know you're going to go on election day, not like three weeks, four election day or early voting or all this other nonsense, but you're going to go on election day and you and you're going to go somewhere, whether it's the fire station or the elementary school or the church basement, wherever you go and you vote, I think you take it more seriously if you're going to go out there. and physically go present yourself and vote. And I think you're probably going to research more. I think you're going to look at the ballot propositions more.
Starting point is 00:10:50 Think more carefully about the candidates who are aiming to represent you. And versus if you're just sitting around in the easy chair with your feet up on the ottoman thinking, oh, well, I read the sports page and I'm about to watch some exciting drama on Netflix. So I've got 10 minutes before the thing starts. So let me see him fill out my ballot real quick. I don't think it's really a way we ought to be operating as a people. There's also another big problem with this business of what the Democrats and the left really have done. They like to say, oh, the Republicans are beating up our democracy.
Starting point is 00:11:22 Look, there's nothing more central democracy than the secret ballot. Going into the polls, you close the curtain behind you, and it's only you in the ballot. Your boss isn't there. Your husband's not there. Your wife's not there. Your boyfriend, girlfriend, kids, grandkids, nobody's there but you. And you pick the person or the people you want to represent you. and you vote yes, no, and whatever the ballot measures are.
Starting point is 00:11:43 When you vote at home, you're sitting there, and you could have your husband or wife or somebody saying, well, if you know, if you owe for that person, I'm going to clock you over the head with a skillet. Or grandpa, you know, if you don't vote the way we want, we're just not going to give you any penicillin for a couple days. Let's see how you feel. You don't need to be putting people in that situation. Hillary Clinton said that the reason she lost in 2016 is a lot of pro-Trump husbands pressure their wives not to vote for her. And a lot of people left. I think it's probably more paranoia, but I bet you there may be some examples of some
Starting point is 00:12:12 husbands said, honey, you vote for Hillary, you're in big trouble. And there are probably some people who said, honey, you vote for Trump, you're in trouble. Right. You don't want that situation. You don't need that. And maybe it's not, I'm going to knock you over the head with a pipe. Right. It might just be, you know, I don't want to be grumbled at and have somebody make faces
Starting point is 00:12:30 at me for the next four years. So I'm not going to vote the way I would otherwise or what have you. People shouldn't be operating on that kind of pressure. People shouldn't be voting at home with that kind of nonsense going on. I know somebody who had accompanied a voting party in California. They had everyone from the office come in and sit around the conference table and fill out their absentee ballots. This person is married to somebody who's not an American citizen. She's a citizen of a country overseas.
Starting point is 00:12:57 And they handed her a ballot. And she actually thought, well, gee, I could fill this out and vote in this election. And to her credit, she said, no, I'm not an American citizen. I'm not going to vote. But she had every opportunity right there with a ballot that I think had been an absolute ballot that somebody found. It was just sitting around because it was mailed to somebody. That person moved away or died. And that person's ballot was there and said, hey, you want to join in too?
Starting point is 00:13:17 And if she wanted to, she could have filled out that ballot and sent it in. And she would have voted in the last election in 2020, even though she is not an American citizen. This is absurd. This is horrible. This needs to stop. And this business of just sending out ballots as if they were confetti, having them land in land. And next in people's mailboxes because they're not there. They've moved away, so the post office drops them off.
Starting point is 00:13:40 And the people either pick them up or they pull them out of the trash. You know, if they're good citizens, they mail them back or they tear them in half so they can't be used. But I no doubt people picked them up. So, oh, good, I can vote two or three times for president now. And especially with things like drop boxes, you don't have to go and hand this into a poll worker at the polls. Put on the drop box at 4 in the morning. And nobody's any of the wiser. There's a movie coming out by Danish D'Souza called 2000 Mules.
Starting point is 00:14:03 I believe it premieres May 2nd, not necessarily. Staken. And it's about this exact problem, which apparently they have security footage of folks who are going up to these unsupervised drop boxes and dropping and not, you know, one or two ballots, you know, mom's ballot, grandpa's ballot. But no, fistful, fistful of ballots being stuffed into these drop boxes. And these people are driving around and going to drop box A, drop box B, drop box C, and just stuffing in just handfuls of ballots. And they were able to use both the security footage and also a cell phone tracking data to follow these people. people around. And I've not seen the movie yet, but I'm looking forward to it. And what I sense is, it shows a very, very elaborate conspiracy to stuff the ballot box on behalf of the left. And if the
Starting point is 00:14:45 numbers, look, I think if you could move around 44, 45,000 votes in just the right states, it goes from a Trump victory to a Biden victory. And it's entirely plausible that those people stuffed the ballot box and got Joe Biden into the White House that way. To play devil's advocate for a second, let's assume that that did happen and that we are seeing this massive amount of voter fraud, are there not prevention measures when the ballots are counted to say, oh, well, this person isn't a citizen, so their ballot shouldn't count, or this person's dead, that shouldn't count. Is there any form of prevention to make sure that doesn't happen? Well, it's limited. Some of that stuff might be able to be caught, but when you put in, I've actually seen in Colorado a couple of years ago, and they moved to all-male ballots, the signature check.
Starting point is 00:15:26 I think people have the idea in their heads that people are taking the ballot with a signature and comparing it to the ballot that's, you know, vote rolls and getting a magnifying glass out and a measuring tape. No, these things fly through very quickly. Have you ever seen the machines that the post office uses to cancel stamps and you see the letters just flying through at top speed? Okay, it's like that. So it's not graphologist A and graphologist B looking at its signature on the ballot and the signature that's on the vote rolls.
Starting point is 00:15:53 It's not like that. These ballots are going by like this. And on election night, they're going by like so. And good luck catching anything like that. Right. To make matters even worse, in some states, the way these systems work, they will look at a signature and they compare, I suppose, the size of the curves and the loops and the angles, and they'll say, okay, well, the ballot, the signature on the ballot, absentee ballot is, you know, 85% similar to the one that's on the records. They actually lowered in some states, lowered the similarity required in order for the ballot to be accepted from, you know, 90% similar to 80% similar down to 70 or 60. and they were lowering the similarity level to make it easier for a signature that didn't match to be accepted.
Starting point is 00:16:36 Again, why would you do that unless you're trying to make it easy for people to cheat? Now, as another sort of common refrain we hear amongst the left, they say maybe there's voter fraud, but it's not widespread, right? These aren't widespread voter fraud incidents that are happening. It's isolated incidents. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, there's this notion that, well, there's no widespread vote fraud. Okay, number one, how much is acceptable, okay? 10,000 fraudulent ballots.
Starting point is 00:17:00 Is that widespread enough? So we have a problem? 100,000 ballots, a million, 10 million. Please give me a number where you can say, yeah, the vote fraud is widespread, so it's a problem. They never give given any indication of what their tolerance for widespreadness is if you use that term. The second is that you don't need widespread vote fraud. If you're particularly talking about presidential election, you don't have to have fraud from Malibu to Montauk and from Seattle all the way down to Key West. You basically need fraud in a handful of cities in Atlanta, in Las Vegas, Madison, Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh.
Starting point is 00:17:36 And if you can, and probably Detroit, if you can have fraud in just those places, what you do is you pump up the vote for the cheating candidate, unfortunately, usually Democrat. And as those numbers go up, you end up winning not just that city, you win that whole state because there are enough numbers there. So you win the state, electoral college being winner take all. And if you just have the fraud in those places, you get enough electoral college votes so you win the election. So there's no reason to have, you know, here's our Washington state fraud program and here's our New Mexico fraud. You just need it in those four, five, six swing states. And if you can swing those cities or sometimes just those precincts with big enough numbers, you end up winning the whole state, all the electoral votes. And once you get 270, you get the Oval Office.
Starting point is 00:18:17 You mentioned during your speech at the Heritage Foundation, Georgia. as an example of how this could possibly play out. Would you be able to go in depth about how that might have worked? Absolutely. Well, I refer to a very good book called Our Broken Elections, written by John Fund of National Review, and also Hans von Spikovsky, your colleague here at the Heritage Foundation. They wrote an excellent book, which deals with both the 2020 election,
Starting point is 00:18:44 specifically and of electoral election fraud, vote fraud more broadly. I think into the history of vote fraud going back into the 20th century, maybe even the 19th century, if I remember correctly. But they have a specific chapter where they get into the whole mess in Georgia. And you do remember how small the margin of victory was for Joe Biden, 11,769 votes, just under 12,000 votes. And they list this incredible series in that chapter of things that went really quite sideways in Georgia. And just keep that number just under 12,000 in mind.
Starting point is 00:19:15 And here are the things that took place, among others. 13 unregistered people voted with absentee ballots. 92 people cast absentee ballots before they even requested them. How's that possible? 217 people voted via absentee ballots that were applied for, issued, and received all on the same day. Wow, that's a really high level of public service, isn't it? 2,423 people voted who were not on Georgia's voter rolls, so they should have voted all. 2,560 felons cast ballots before their voting rights were restored.
Starting point is 00:19:42 They shouldn't have voted either. 2,664 absentee ballots are sent out before the first day that they could be distributed legally. That should not have happened. This should not have happened. 10,315 dead people voted on election day, and among them 8,718 were registered as dead before their ballots were accepted. So those ballots should not have gone out in the first place. And then 305,701 individuals applied for absentee ballots after the 180 day pre-election deadline. Now, if you add all that up, we're talking 323,985 fraudulent votes, almost 324,000 fraudulent votes, just among those examples.
Starting point is 00:20:20 Now, do you think it's possible Joe Biden was able to extract 11,769 ballots among those, which was his margin of victory in Georgia? I think that's entirely possible, and I think that's actually what happened. So we're saying that it's not just a matter of, oh, this is a local election happening. It could be that standard. It could be a presidential election. Absolutely correct, which is part of the problem is you might say, well, look, this is just local who cares. People of Georgia are going to do whatever they do. Well, you know, it can come down to those people in Georgia being the decisive factor in the election.
Starting point is 00:20:51 We certainly saw in the year 2000 in the Bush versus Gore situation, the entire presidency came down to 500, I think the numbers, 537 votes in the state of Florida. Now, if 538 votes had gone the other way, Al Gore would have been President of States. I'm sure it would be a very different country than we have today. Some people might say for the better, some people might say for the worse. But it would have been very, very different because of the situation that one state, that one state, The state of Florida was a tail that wagged the entire dog in the United States of America. So that's why we have to have zero tolerance for vote fraud. It's not cute.
Starting point is 00:21:24 It's not funny. There's nothing good about it. And certainly when you're dealing with presidential elections, a little bit of vote fraud in one state can go a long way and it can go all the way to the White House. When conservatives and Republicans push legislation that might help with voter fraud, such as, for example, voter ID, were often accused of being racist or attempting to push down on people's ability to vote. What are your thoughts on that rhetoric? I think what's really racist is the policy and the arguments on people on the left, a lot of Democrats who say, well, you know, we just can't expect black people to have voter ID. What a racist, bigoted, disgusting anti-black thing to say.
Starting point is 00:22:04 I walk around all day long and I see black folks driving cars. Are those people all drive around on that licenses? I get on planes, I see black people. Are they not allowed to get on planes that voter ID? When I go to the airport and hop on a plane and I travel a lot, Nobody ever says, oh, you're black. You don't have a show voter ID. I got to show voter ID just like every other white person or person of Hispanic background or Asian background getting in the plane.
Starting point is 00:22:24 So the idea that somehow black people are just too confused or stupid or disorganized to be able to expect them to be able to show voter ID at the polls. I think it's a deeply bigoted and racist and disgusting notion. And you hear it out of the mouths of Democrats and the left, you don't hear it out of the mouths of Republicans in the right. So this is more of a democratic problem? In that sense, absolutely. And the people on the left and Democrats, oh, we speak out for black people. We're black people's best friend. Oh, really?
Starting point is 00:22:50 Well, if that's true, I don't think we're that stupid that we can't get our hands on a voter ID. And by the way, it's funny how we're expected these days to get your COVID vaccine and show your proof of vaccination. Usually when you show your proof vaccination, you have to show an ID card as well. So the same Joe Biden, who says it's Jim Crow 2.0 and the equivalent of Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, the head of the Confederacy, to expect black people to show ID at the polls, is the same Joe Biden. who's expecting us all to get our vaccines and show our vaccine cards when we have to go into restaurants or do anything else. And so that's okay then with COVID. That's fine. But if you expect it at the polls, then you're just like George Wallace and the segregationist during the Jim Crow era. I mean, the level of inconsistency and hypocrisy and total lack of self-awareness on the part of these people is truly breathtaking.
Starting point is 00:23:36 Now, we've gotten this sort of acknowledgement that voter fraud and election integrity are issues that we need to care about. I mentioned a couple of solutions at the very top of this interview about what can be done about it. But what do you think would be some effective solutions we could put into place today that would affect, you know, elections going forward? Well, again, I think voter ID is probably the easiest and most popular, I should say. There's a poll by CBS News in July of last year. And 80% of blacks and 80% of Hispanics favor voter ID. Among whites, the support is 81%. And what is that extra 1%?
Starting point is 00:24:12 racism, clearly. But look, this is very popular, and activists on the left don't like it, but everybody thinks voter ID is perfectly fair. So just are you the person you say you are? There's nothing inappropriate about that. So that'd be an easy thing to do. Secondly, voter rolls need to be cleaned up. There are voter rolls that have dead people on them, names of people who've moved away. They've left the state or moved elsewhere from, you know, one block one location, you know, west side of town, east side of town, whatever it might be. And that needs to be cleaned up. That's required under the so-called motor voter law and also the Help America Vote Act. Both those laws require you to clean up your vote rolls. That should be done often. There has been pushed back by
Starting point is 00:24:53 Department of Justice under Obama. Attorney General Eric Holder actually sued the state of Florida when they tried to clean up their voter rolls and take 51,000 dead people off the voter rolls. And again, the motor voter law and the Help America Vote Act, both federal laws require that to be done. And then Governor Rick Scott tried to do this. The Attorney General Eric Holder under Obama came in to stop him. Why would you want to do that unless you want to have a loosey-goosey situation, which people can take advantage and do things they shouldn't? I think I would put an end to mass mail-in ballots.
Starting point is 00:25:26 If you are sick or you're going to be out of town or you are paralyzed or you have some inability to get to the polls, that's one thing. Fine, we'll get you an absentee ballot. But the idea that we're just going to send these mass tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of ballots around, even when people don't ask for them, there's no need for that. That just creates all sorts of problems. I think related to that is this whole business of ballot trafficking or ballot harvesting. We should put an end to that.
Starting point is 00:25:54 If you are infirm and you can't make it to the polls and you want your grandson or your uncle or your next-door neighbor to take your ballot in fine. And when it's accepted, we should know the voter's name, the name of the person dropping it off, that person's show ID, and it should only be your close relatives of your name. if you're shut in, something like that. This business has had people come in with just, you know, handfuls of ballots and dropping them off. Okay, here are 100 ballots, here are 300 ballots? Here, 500 ballots.
Starting point is 00:26:21 We know who these people are. Are they honest people who picked up the ballots and dropped them off? Or do they sift through them and say, oh, I don't like that guy. There goes that ballot. I don't like this person. Oh, okay, it's not sealed shut. Let me fill in those extra bubbles for those people who I want to see elected and then drop. You have no way of knowing what's going on here.
Starting point is 00:26:37 Again, if it's corrupt, it needs to stop. If it's not corrupt, but it looks funny, it creates the perception of fraud, and that's not healthy either. So I'd start with those things, and they're more specific reforms, but at a minimum voter ID, clean up the vote rolls, put an end-to-mass mailing ballots. And I also think we need to get back to election day rather than election month or election quarter. In 2016, you had people voting in North Carolina two weeks before the very first Hillary Clinton, Donald J. Trump presidential debate. I think that's sick and I think that's un-American. We ought to go back to Election Day where people vote after you've seen the debates, watch the ads, read the articles, and you can go to the polls with a full clear head of all the pros and cons
Starting point is 00:27:20 about the people who are on the ballot and then you make a decision accordingly. As we wrap up here, as I think we've seen in polling data and as you just discuss a little bit here, if Americans don't trust their voting results, if they don't trust the results of their elections that has pretty dire consequences for the country, do you think, the fact that Americans are starting to question the result of their elections, they are not confident that their votes are counting, means that we'll start to see this type of legislation get passed. Well, with any luck, we will see this sort of legislation passed so people actually can have
Starting point is 00:27:50 confidence in the polls. I think one of the reasons that the two Senate elections in January went the way they did is you had some Republicans to figure, well, it's a rigged system, and Stacey Abrams rigged it, and Secretary of State Raffensberger and Governor Brian Kemp went along. and so my ballot's not going to be counted, so I won't bother casting it. And you actually had some people running around saying that sort of thing, which other was completely irresponsible. And so I think that actually reduced GOP turnout. They figured, you know, why waste my time voting if my ballot's not going to be cast?
Starting point is 00:28:20 Again, that's not good for the system. People think that sort of thing. So I think we do have to get back to a system where people can have faith in the system itself, and they might say, well, look, I'm glad my candidate won or I'm sorry, my candidate lost, but at least we both losers and winners can say, all right, it was a faithful. fair process. It was not a rig system. It was a decent, just, clean and honest system. And we all can walk away, some happier than others, but all of us satisfied that the system itself was okay. Out of the gore there now. And if we have another election like we had in 2020, it's going to be
Starting point is 00:28:51 even worse. And confidence in the American Constitution Republic will continue to dissolve even further. That was Doroy Murdoch, a Fox News contributor and senior fellow at the Atlas Network. Deroy, very much appreciate your time. Great to be with you. Thank you very much. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. If you have not done so already, please take a moment to leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen. And please be sure to spread the word to other listeners. Thanks again for listening, and we're back with you all tomorrow.
Starting point is 00:29:27 The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Bluey and Kay Trinkley. Producers are Virginia Allen and Doug Blair. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geiney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.

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