The Daily Signal - INTERVIEW | Hans von Spakovsky on If Election Results Are Trustworthy

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Following the midterm elections, voters want to know that their vote was counted and that the election was secure.   Concern over election security exists among Republicans and Democrats alike, but are the fears founded?  "I think we can trust many, if not most, of our elections, but there are elections where either people cheat or significant errors are made by election officials that question the result," says Hans von Spakovsky, co-author of “Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote," in an interview recorded ahead of Election Day. Von Spakovsky, who is also the manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the frequency of voter fraud and the states with the best and worst election security laws. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) 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 DailySitnell podcast for Wednesday, November 9th. I'm Virginia Allen. Following the election, voters want to know their vote was counted and the election was secure. Hans von Spakovsky is the author of the book, Our Broken Elections, How the Left, Change the Way You Vote. He's also the manager of the election law reform initiative and senior legal fellow here at the Heritage Foundation. And he joins me on the show today to talk about election security and the states. that are best and worse when it comes to election laws. Stay tuned for our conversation after this.

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. Subscribe to Heritage Explains wherever you listen to podcasts. We are joined today by Hans Von Bakowski, the manager of the election law reform initiative and a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Hans is also the author of the book, Our Broken Elections, How the Left Change the Way You Vote. Hans, welcome back to the show. Well, thanks for having me, even though I think we were all up pretty darn lately. everyone's a little tired. Everyone's a little tired. But, you know, Hans, after elections, I think on both sides of the aisle, what we've seen over the years, is, of course, voters raise concerns about the security, about the integrity of elections and the results. You write and research on this extensively. You run the Heritage Foundation's voter fraud database.

How often does voter fraud actually happen? Well, we don't know the answer. to that, we can get a read on it by the proven cases of fraud that have occurred. That's what our database is full of. And we're constantly adding new cases to it. Some of the cases are just isolated individuals taking advantage. I mean, we just added two cases where two people were convicted of voting in the names of their deceased mothers. On the other hand, so that's just one person, you know, trying to forth the system. Right.

On the other hand, we get cases where there's an organized effort to do this. We recently added convictions of two individuals down in a small town in Louisiana, the chief of police and a member of the city council. Why? Well, because they had put together this elaborate effort to bribe voters into voting for them. So it's just kind of a mix. What we do know is it happens often enough that we need to be concerned about it. And when is it going to matter the most in close elections?

Yeah, yeah. Well, and you may have essentially just answered my second question because I was going to ask you, is there a common way or a most common way that voter fraud takes place? But it sounds like people get pretty creative. They're very creative. And again, if you look at our database, you'll find every kind of fraud you can imagine in there. bribery like the cases we just talked about, absentee ballot fraud, impersonation fraud, registration fraud. And when people wonder, well, registration fraud, what's that and how could that affect an election? This past summer, a judge overturned a city council race in Compton, California. The margin of victory was one vote. And it turns out that half a dozen individuals registered to vote in Compton who don't actually live in. Compton. So that's clear registration fraud and it defected the outcome of the election.

Wow. What are the states that have the best policies in place to prevent voter fraud to have secure elections? What are our model states in America? Well, no state is perfect. But the way people, again, can easily figure this out is if they go to the heritage.org website, they'll find a new project we launched called the Election Integrity Scorecard. And we have rated every single state in the country based on their election laws related to integrity and 47 different criteria we came up with. As an example, you get a nice set of points if you have a voter ID law. You're rated negatively if you don't, like California and New York.

The best states in the country tend to be, many of them are in the southeast. Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Texas, because legislators there have put in the effort to actually improve their election laws. So they have done things like put in an ID law, put in better provisions for cleaning up voter registration rolls. Tennessee just went up in our rating system. because they recently passed a law saying that election officials could start accessing commercial databases like credit agencies to check the accuracy of their voter registration lists. Wow. And what about the worst states? Well, the worst states tend to be most of the many blue states. California is bad. New York. The worst state in the country is Hawaii. Nevada, unfortunately, is also up there. And it's because they don't make a good effort to clean up their voter rolls.

They do nothing to verify that people who are registering are actually citizens, and they don't require an ID, all of which makes fraud easy to commit there and hard to detect. And when you say they're not like making an effort to clean up voter rolls, that means that maybe the absentee ballots are being mailed to homes where an individual has passed away or someone can come in and say, I am this person and that person, you know, no longer lives in the state, that sort of thing? Yes, that's exactly right. Okay. So as we look back through history, have there been that many elections that we know of that have actually have been swayed by voter fraud and it's been proven? Yes.

Unfortunately true. And again, if both go through our database, our election fraud database, and keep in mind, our election fraud database is not a historical account of the entire U.S. history of elections. Sure. I mean, it's basically cases from the last 10 to 20 years. And there are numerous cases in there where elections have been overturned. You know, I mentioned the Compton City Council race. It was just overturned this past summer.

Remember, four years ago, we had actually a congressional race. Ninth congressional district in North Carolina overturned, a new election held after the state board of elections conducted a very intensive investigation and discovered systematic absentee ballot fraud that affected the outcome of the election. So, look, elections have been overturned, not just at local levels, but even, for example, congressional races too. Of course, we've just had an election and many, many more elections, of course, to take place in America's future.

The beauty of living in America is that we have a voice as the American people. people. We get to cast our ballots for the individuals who we think represent our values most, who will represent our nation best. When, you know, we're looking back at elections, you know, can we trust the results of elections? And when do you think our times when we need to call things into question, are there certain signs to look for? Look, I think we can trust many, if not most of our elections, but there are elections where either people cheat or significant errors are made by election officials that question the results. In the absentee ballot fraud area, for example, one indication that fraud may have occurred,

and this is the way these kind of cases have been discovered in the past is, look, if you're voting in a jurisdiction where in past elections, the average number of people using an absentee ballot has been about 10%. If all of a sudden, in an election, that jumps to 30 or 40 percent, well, yeah, maybe there's some reason why all of a sudden people started using those ballots, but on the other hand, maybe there isn't. Another indication of that is, look, if on election day, one particular candidate gets 60% of the votes and the losing candidates gets 40%. But when you count up the absentee ballots, it turns out the winning candidate got 90% of the votes. Come on.

That, again, should raise a suspicion because why would there be a huge differential between the absentee ballots cast for a candidate and the ballots cast on election day? Yeah. So what are maybe three or four of the best practices to keep elections fair, safe, and secure? First of all, every state ought to have a voter ID requirement that applies to both in-person and absentee ballots. Every state that's done this has put in a provision providing a free ID to anyone doesn't already have one. That's one of the most basic things. The second big thing that states need to do is a better job of maintaining the accuracy of their voter rolls. And that means, for example, regularly checking to take people off who have died, regularly checking to take people off who have moved out of state.

And the absentee balloting process needs to be well managed because it's the only kind of ballot voted outside the supervision of election officials and outside. the observation of poll watchers. So while we need absentee ballots for people who are disabled to make it to a polling place or perhaps or out of town, although these days that's a little bit harder to claim when we have early voting for such lengthy periods, the use of absentee ballots should be minimized and we should only allow that for people who really can't make it to a polling place to vote. And those absentee ballots, for example, no state.

ought to allow what I call vote trafficking. Yeah, you should be able to mail your ballot bag. You ought to be able to personally deliver it to election officials, a member of your family too, but allowing third party strangers like candidates and campaign activists, political guns for hire to go to people's homes and pick up their absentee ballots and potentially pressure and coerce them to vote a particular way or maybe change that ballot. That is a very very very. very unwise policy, and yet about half the states allow that. Wow. I want to encourage all of our listeners to check out your work at heritage.org to look up

the voter fraud database, the election scorecard. Hans, you stay busy. There's a lot going on. Well, particularly in an election year. Absolutely. But thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate you joining the show right after such a crazy time and such a wild election. Sure.

Thanks for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal Podcast. If you haven't had a chance already, be sure to check out our evening show right here in your podcast feed, where we bring you the top news of the day. And also make sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast wherever you get your podcasts and help us reach even more listeners by taking a moment to leave a five-star reading and review. It's so great to hear all of your feedback. Thank you all again for listening. Have a great day and we'll be back with you at 5 p.m. for our top news edition.

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