The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Fred Lucas on Why 'Voter Suppression' Is a Myth

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

When Georgia and other states began passing new election laws, the political left called it voter suppression. But is voter suppression actually taking place in America? Do safeguards such as voter ID requirements discourage voting?  In his new book “The Myth of Voter Suppression: The Left's Assault on Clean Elections,” Fred Lucas dives into the way the Left has used the narrative of voter suppression to further its political agenda.  Lucas, chief news correspondent for The Daily Signal and chief news correspondent and manager of its Investigative Reporting Project, joins the show to discuss what he learned as he dug into who is funding the "voter suppression" narrative and the effects that new voting laws have had on voter turnout. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, September 15th. I'm Virginia Allen. When states like Georgia began passing new election integrity laws, the political left called it voter suppression. But is voter suppression actually taking place in America? In his new book, The Myth of Voter Suppression, The Left's assault on clean elections, Fred Lucas dives into the ways the left has used the narrative of voter suppression to further its own political agenda. Fred joins me on the show today to discuss what he learned as he investigated who is funding the voter suppression narrative and the effects new voting laws have on voter turnout. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. Conservatives have been on defense for too long. Now is not the time for excuses or apologies or any of the other nonsense in which our officials in Washington seem to specialize.

It's time for conservatives to go on offense. We have solutions to get our country back on track. On the Kevin Roberts Show, I have honest conversations with bold leaders who are championing the comeback of America. Join us. Find the Kevin Roberts Show wherever you get your podcasts. It's my pleasure to welcome a familiar voice to the show today. Fred Lucas is an investigative journalist here at The Daily Signal. He's a veteran White House correspondent and author of several books, including his latest book,

the myth of voter suppression, the left's assault on clean elections. Fred, thanks for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me on. So Fred, let's start with a little bit of history, kind of paint the picture behind this book for us, if you will. So take us back to 2020 and 2021, just for a moment. Biden had just been elected and some Americans, they were concerned about the outcome of that election. And some states began to enact laws that they said would would make it harder to cheat. elections and easier to vote. And then we started hearing complaints that these voting laws were actually voter suppression. And what states were enacting on new laws at that time? And how did those voting laws differ from what their previous laws had been? What was the scene? Well, yeah, you had in 2021, almost about 20 states or so enacted some sort of election integrity laws. Most did have Republican governors, Republican legislatures. This led to a lot of partisan fire bombs by the president, by also Stacey Abrams, who coined the phrase Jim Crow 2.0.

And then you had Joe Biden following that up with, well, this is not Jim Crow 2.0, it's Jim Eagle, which was sort of, I guess, eagles are bigger than crows. so but yeah and from there they they call this voter suppression. Now I do want to make one important point and that is that voter suppression is sort of a it's a talking point. It's a focus group term. And it made to remind people of like some really horrible things that had happened in this country in the past. But the Voting Rights Act, which has been a. of 1965, which has been a smashing success and expanding the number of people who can vote,

that is something that outlaws vote denial of voter intimidation and vote dilution, which is being done at some kind of institutionalized level. Voter suppression is not in the U.S. Code anywhere. So voter suppression is a way for mostly people on the left, various interest groups and politicians to lump in some sort of illegal activity with legal activity as a way of saying you're restricting voting. And in most cases, or nearly every case, that's not what's happening. What you saw in 2021 is the laws primarily did three things.

They required voter ID for absentee voting. Around 35 states have some kind of voter ID laws. These states added it to absentee voting for mail-in-balloting. That's important because we're seeing a point where mail-in balloting is going to outpace in-person voting. And the other is it put real restrictions on ballot harvesting. Now, ballot harvesting, that's the practice of allowing political operatives to collect and distribute mass quantities of mail-in ballots. And the third is that it requires a more accurate voter list. And that means you're taking off dead people from the voter rolls.

You're taking off people who have moved to another state and so forth to make sure that, you know, potential rosters don't take those names and try to vote. So given that background and kind of what you've just described that these laws that were going to affect and States like Georgia, Texas were doing, what exactly were people concerned about who are talking about voter suppression? When we heard those mainly on the political left who were saying, know that there is voter suppression happening, what were they pointing to? Somehow they were pointing to.

It sort of goes, you could actually go back to 2006, 2008, when after the, you know, The book talks a lot about the Carter-Baker Commission Report, which is Jimmy Carter, James Baker. It was a bipartisan commission report after the 2000 presidential race. They released their findings in 2005, made a whole bunch of recommendations about how to make elections more secure. Got a lot of bipartisan hoopla, but then Republican legislatures, state legislatures around the country, started implementing those recommendations, and then it became partisan. One of the big ones was voter ID, and I had bipartisan support at one point almost two decades ago, which is hard to believe now. But numerous red states and purple states implemented that.

As I said, about 35 states have that. And all sorts of dire predictions were made. People throughout the Jim Crow term at that point that this was going to lead to voter suppression. almost down to a T, every state with voter ID laws going back to 2006, a lot implementing in 2011. Voter turnout increased in those states. Really? Interesting. Yeah. And importantly, I want to say about these laws that were passed in 2021, we can't make a final judgment on the impact yet.

However, we did have a primary season in 2022. And as my book, the myth of voter suppression points out, in the 2022 primaries, the best comparison you can make is to the 2018 primary. That's an off-year midterm. And in Georgia, which was the most maligned state, that's the one that Joe Biden called Jim Eagle, that Stacey Abrams called Jim Crow 2.0. in Georgia, voter turnout for the primary increased 168% from what it was in the 2018 primary. In Texas, it was about 400,000 votes as well from four years earlier. Arizona actually had a record turnout for their midterm primaries, or for the any primary, actually, in Arizona. In Iowa, it was a 123 percent.

So those were among the most maligned states out there. And pretty much altogether had a huge turnout for these states that were supposedly suppressing the vote. So if they were trying to suppress the vote, they were doing a really lousy job of it. Fascinating. We are talking with Fred Lucas, the author of the brand new book, The Myth of Voter Suppression, The Left's Assault on Clean Elections. And Fred, you've mentioned a couple times President Biden's remarks about Jim Crow being Jim Eagle. That was in 2021. Let's go ahead and roll those remarks just for a second.

And so I'm convinced that we'll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. I mean, this is gigantic what they're trying to do. So as we've talked about, there was this whole whole narrative that really, blossomed and bloomed from the left of Jim Crow 2.0 is what these voting regulations are. But you point out in the book that when Biden was a senator, he really fought hard against voter fraud. So why has that fight not continued into his time in the White House, do you think? Yeah, there was actually a time.

And I brought up the Carter-Baker Commission report. But while he was, when Jimmy Carter was president and Joe Biden was a senator, there was talk about having automatic voter registration. And this is something that Joe Biden, Senator Joe Biden, stood up in 1979 and said, this is a bad idea. I've talked to federal prosecutors. I think that this opens things wide open for fraud. This was Joe Biden who was challenging a president of his own party at the time.

A little bit later in the 1980s, Senator Joe Biden teamed up with a junior senator named Mitch McConnell. And they passed the Anti-Corruption Act to making voter fraud a federal crime. It wasn't really until around 2014 when Joe Biden was the vice president. And he started speaking out against voter ID laws. So this metamorphosis happened when he was vice president with Obama. The Obama administration's Justice Department brought lawsuits against a lot of the states that had voter ID laws in place. They lost pretty much all of those. There were a few setbacks here and there for states.

But as I mentioned, the federal government under Democratic administrations could not really bring a case or examples in court of how this suppressed the vote. And so we now have Joe Biden as president making this case that, as we saw even in the Philadelphia speech. in front of the Independence Hall that he made this claim that Republicans or mega-Republicans don't want votes to be counted and want to curtail voting rights. Again, they're doing a really bad job if that's what they're trying to do because we've seen increased voter turnout from these 2021 laws. Well, and we can't have this conversation and not talk about early voting mail-in ballots is there's strong opinions, obviously, on both sides of the aisle.

on this issue. And Democrats specifically have raised concerns that these new voting laws that they restrict early voting, that people won't have time to get their balance in or that the elderly, you know, who can't travel to polling places, you know, they'll be put in difficult situations where they can't vote. What's your response to that? And also, what are, in your research, what are the concerns that you have about widespread mail-and- ballots? Or do you have concerns on that? Well, I do because widespread, as I said, it's on pace to outnumber, and it did outnumber in the 2020 election, certainly, the in-person voting. That was a special circumstance because we had the pandemic that year. But we have this problem with ballot harvesting, and that is where you have political operatives, as I mentioned, they can distribute large number of

ballots to collect them and bring them back. That's just calling for corruption. We have HR1. That was a legislation that was defeated. It was dubbed for the People Act. That bill actually would expand ballot harvesting, and it would ban voter ID laws. And in the book, I say, I point out that this whole charge of Jim Crow 2.0 is ridiculous,

based on facts. But I say that HR1 and some other bills like it that Democrats have pushed is very much like Tamini Hall 2.0. Explain that. What is Tamini Hall 2.0? Right. Tamini Hall, and I'm using sort of an inclusive term for a lot of the old school political machines, but Tamini Hall was this New York political machine started by Aaron Burr, but it

lasted well into the 20th century. century before it collapsed. But it was a very corrupt machine. It did things, though, such as had immigration mills. It would like sign up people as citizens and very loose, loosey-goosey rules back in those days. They would sign up immigrants to instantly become citizens to vote in those days. You can almost see some of that happening now with open borders.

they would also push for prisoners to be able to vote or releasing prisoners to be able to vote. They had the famous boss tweet said that it's really the number of votes doesn't make the difference. It's who counts the votes, something that Joseph Stalin would repeat later on. But boss tweet actually, who ran Tammy Hall actually said that first. And so this is something that. Democrats almost seems like HR1 was almost saying the quite part out loud, which is it would primarily, it would get rid of voter ID laws. It would throw the doors open for ballot harvesting. And on top of that, it would have same-day voter registration, which would be a nightmare for election clerks because they would have no way to verify these registrants if you had no ID.

and if you had mountains of ballots coming in from people, who knows who, were these ballot harvesters. Well, it's fascinating to see the people that are engaging on this. We've seen Vice President Kamala Harris has weighed in, and she's gone so far to say, you know, we need to pass voter kind of voter rights legislation at the federal. level and she's gone so far as to say, you know, let's do away with the filibuster in order to get that done, correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just recently she's made that statement.

And I think the big problem, Democrats have keep in a sort of well in a way, keep saying voting rights legislation. And it's really not. I mean, people have voting rights. People do not have any trouble in this country, either voting or registering to vote. and what we've seen Democrats push for with HR1, HR4, and these other laws, is simply basically getting read of any basic election security laws. And these laws have huge public support from every demographic.

I know Democrats have largely played the race court with these, but voter ID general has like something 80%. support. And we talk about polarized how polarized the country is. Very few things have 80% support. It just makes sense to people. And coming back to even the ballot harvesting that I keep talking about, we had one of the biggest ballot harvesting scandals happened in 2018 out of North Carolina. And it was a Republican congressional candidate who basically cheated to win, that his election was invalidated after an investigation. One might think that that would, the Democrats would be on board with election integrity measures to make sure these

things happen. That hasn't been the case, but this shouldn't be a partisan issue. Yeah, it shouldn't be. You're absolutely right. Now, we talk about in journalism that when you're looking into a situation, when you're looking into a movement like this real push, around the idea of a voter suppression, you have to follow the money. You have to look where is funding coming from because someone has to pay for it. I know that you looked into this

in your research for the book. What did you find, Fred? Yeah, there is a whole full chapter, and I actually call it the bankrolling, the voter suppression hysteria, industrial complex. But, yeah, it looks into a lot of the money came from the Arabella advisors, that whole network that they've set up these groups. One of the, some of our front groups in some cases, but one of the biggest groups that has

pushed this, and it's a pretty well-established think tank out of New York, the Brennan Center for Justice, and it has like continuously fed this narrative that voter suppression is a systemic problem in America and that any type of restriction out there would be a huge problem, voter ID, whatever. And also we've got fair fight action based out of Georgia, but it's a national group. It has been pushing this heavily. And these groups are funded heavily by Arabella, big tech companies. More recently we've had this group called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence that it has set up.

It's a 501C3, and they're basically supplementing staff at election offices to sort of coach people on what they think are best practices. But if you look at the donors behind it, it's largely big tech, also largely a lot of liberal donors that. So you can guess what kind of best practices that they're going to be pushing at these local election offices. We have an election coming up midterms. What is the rhetoric that you think we're going to hear from both sides, from the left and the right as the election is approaching? And then what do you expect to hear in the days that follow? Well, I think it's been said that democracy relies on. the consent of the loser, usually. And we have seen that, obviously, obviously, not a problem on both sides.

But President Biden has already said some of this legislation that he didn't get through, that there's a direct correlation with whether the 22 elections will be legitimate based on not passing HR1 or HR4. I think Democrats might be setting things up for that. He made the reference again that the votes won't be counted at that Pennsylvania speech, claiming to defend democracy. I think the problem is that the kind of rhetoric undermines democracy when you undermine the faith in elections. But we have seen sort of 2016 Hillary Clinton. repeatedly. She did concede the race, so I will give her that. But she did repeatedly say that the race was stolen from her. Then after 2020, President Trump made the same claim. He didn't concede. But yeah, I mean, it's just that's a problem. And it looks like we're going to continue seeing that type of thing. Fred, before we let you go, share a little bit about President Joe Biden's executive order on this issue.

Okay, yeah. Well, even though the Democrats did not get what they wanted through HR1, President Biden signed an executive order in March of 2021, not long after he came into office, that called for an all-of-government approach to increasing voter participation and voter terms. So what we've seen here is that there's not been a lot of transparency on this. They haven't said what these agencies are going to be doing. They did come back with some information saying that agencies would be working with nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations. Now, we don't know who those are. And that's what a lot of watchdog groups have tried to find out and they've not had success.

not had success. Now, one of the groups that wrote this was basically it's a liberal think tank called Demos, operates out of New York. But they put out a policy briefing making six recommendations about what Biden can do through executive action on election reform. And he's essentially done this. And their biggest takeaway was they wanted federal agencies to be voter registration agencies. and that's when he's moved towards.

We have, we had the daily signal, we did get some information through a FOIA from HUD, in which they have made public housing authorities, voter registration agencies. But that's something, and there's still a vast array of agencies out there, though. Fred, for those who want to dive deeper into this subject, tell us when the book is out and how we can get it. Yeah, the book is out this week. You can get it on The Myth of Voter Suppression. You can get that on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you like to buy books. Excellent.

Fred Lucas, the author of The Myth of Voter Suppression, The Left's Assault on Clean Elections. Fred, thanks for your time. Yeah, thanks for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. And if you have not done so already, please be sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Iheart Radio, wherever you like to listen. And be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and be encouraging others to subscribe. Thank you all again for listening.

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