The Daily Signal - J. Christian Adams on Mail-In, Absentee Voting in 2020 Election

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

Mail-in voting has sharply increased due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Pew Research Center reported in the 2016 general election, 24.9 percent of votes were absentee or mail-in and in the 2018 general election, 27.4 percent of votes were absentee or mail-in. But during the 2020 primaries, 50.3 percent of votes cast were absentee or mail-in.  Is election security at stake? What are some of the documented security vulnerabilities and problems associated with mail-in or absentee ballots? J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, joins the podcast to discuss.  We also cover these stories: Three Republican senators are calling on the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about censorship and possible election interference.  The Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to vote on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation on Oct. 22. Citing his son Barron's COVID experience, President Donald Trump said children should be back at school.  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 Friday, October 16th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Daldudis. Is election security at stake? That's the question paramount on so many people's minds as absentee and mail-in voting has skyrocketed for the 2020 presidential election. Jay Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, joins me on the podcast to discuss. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-stimbing. our rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. Three Republican senators are calling on the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about censorship and possible election interference. On Thursday, Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Josh Hawley said they were going to pursue

filing a subpoena of the social media companies over what appears to be the suppression of the New York Post exclusive report which links Vice President Joe Biden to his son Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine. The New York Post story explains that emails were discovered on an old laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that reveal that Hunter Biden set up a meeting between his father, who was vice president at the time, and a senior official from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm. Twitter blocked the story from being shared and even briefly locked. the New York Posts out of their Twitter account. The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on Tuesday to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Cruz expressed his frustration with the media platform saying,

this is election interference and we're 19 days out from an election. It has no precedent in the history of democracy. The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to know what the hell is going on. The Senate Judiciary Committee is poised to vote on Judge Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation on October 22nd at 1 p.m. According to Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Democrats objected to the setting of the vote, but Graham said via Fox News that the vote would happen on the 22nd. We have a panel from the American Bar Association, Graham said. We have an eight-person panel, 4-4, for against, chosen by the minority and majority. I will do whatever my colleagues want in terms of motions of being heard.

I hate it for the panel, but I will let you decide what we do today. We're going to vote on the judge on October the 22nd. Speaking to a crowd in Iowa on Wednesday night, President Trump said children should be back at school. The president explained that his own son, Baron Trump, who is 14, had the virus and recovered quickly. And if you look at what's happening with these lockdowns to children, get the children back to school. Like, I'll give you an example, the children, 99.9%. Barron Trump, you know, he had the corona-19, the China virus. It's got 21 different names.

I could go over it, but to me, corona means Italy. China is China, and it came from China, so he had the China virus, right? And he had it for such a short period of time. I don't even think he knew he had it because they're young and their immune systems are strong and they fight it off 99.9%. And Barron is beautiful and he's free. Free. First Lady Melania Trump revealed in a statement Wednesday that Barron tested positive for the virus shortly after she and the president tested positive. But Barron exhibited no symptoms and has now tested negative. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Jay Christian Adams, President and General Counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation on election fraud.

This is Virginia Allen, host of the Daily Signal podcast. I don't know about you, but YouTube is certainly one of my guilty pleasures. I really enjoy watching short videos on a variety of topics, so I'm always looking for videos that are actually educational and beneficial to me in some way. And the Daily Signal YouTube channel never disappoints. There is so much binge-worthy content from policy and news explainers to documentaries. If you're not driving, go ahead and pull out your phone and subscribe to the Daily Signal YouTube channel so you can be in the know on the issues you care about most. You can also search for the channel by going to YouTube.com slash Daily Signal. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Jay Christian Adams, who is president and general counsel

of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Christian, it's great to have you with us today on the Daily Signal podcast. Thank you for having me. Well, you recently participated in an event for the Heritage Foundation called Is Election Security at stake, trading ballot boxes for mailboxes? So let's start off with that. Is election security at stake Christian at the November 3rd presidential election that is just weeks away? Well, of course it is because so much of it is now being cranked into the mail system, the United States Postal Service. You know those guys.

They're the ones who deliver you your neighbor's mail all the time. And what we have done is put the election into the hands of the Postal Service, which by their own Inspector General report, only has a success goal, a goal of 95%, which is 5% failure. And in reality, the Postal Service fails a lot more often than just 5%. So it's a very, very, very bad idea. Well, mail-in voting has really increased in large part due to coronavirus. And the Pew Research Center actually had a report come out on Tuesday that just really illustrated how much it's increased. And so in the 2016 general election, it was 24.9% of votes were absentee mail-in.

In the 2018 general election, it was 27.4% of votes were absentee or mail-in. And in the 2020 primaries, that jumped to 50.3% of votes being cast as absentee or mail-in. So what is your perspective on how this increase in absentee and mailing voting has been such a sharp rise? Well, first of all, it's obviously coronavirus, but it's also tragic because when you go to vote by mail, when you move toward mailing in your ballot, that means more votes are not going to be counted. They're going to be lost. They're going to be rejected by election officials for failure to comply with the law. And so when you have mail ballots, that means more people lose their right to vote. When you go to vote in person, it doesn't work that way.

You show up at the poll, you walk in, you cast your ballot, you feed it into the machine. It gets tabulated immediately. It doesn't, you can fix any defects. If you accidentally fill in an oval the wrong way, they'll give you another ballot. If you mail in a ballot, and we heard at the Heritage event that Secretary Mac Warner of West Virginia talked about all the people who lost their votes because they messed up filling in the ovals, and they put it in the envelope and mailed it. So the safest way to have your vote counted is to vote in person.

The most likely way to lose your vote is to send it in the mail. Well, let's talk about this a little bit more before we get into some of the concerns, with mail and her absentee voting. Let's just talk for another little bit about why absentee voting as opposed to voting in person, why there are so many concerns about this practice and switching over, especially as some states are doing so kind of at a last minute versus states like Oregon who have been doing this for quite a while and do have more of a process down. Well, think of all the people involved, right?

If you want to cast your ballot in person, it goes like this. They hand you the ballot, you fill it out, you feed it into the machine. There's no person involved. It is counted immediately. Now let's do mail. If you request an absentee ballot, you call or you send in your form, that form has to go in by mail. So there's postmen, there's trucks, there's sorters, there's machines, there's more postmen, there's more trucks, there's more sorters, more machines. just to send in your request.

So they get your request for an absentee ballot, and the election officials take your ballot and send it to you your house. So once again, there's postmen, there's trucks, there's sorters, and there's machines. There's more postmen handling your ballot. And, you know, in a lot of places, the ballots are being mailed to places you used to live instead of where you actually live. And then you fill out the ballot and what happens next?

There's postmen, there's sorters, there's trucks, there's machines, there's more people, more people touching your ballot. Look at the contrast between those two stories, between you walking and putting your ballot into the counter at a polling place in person versus the dozens of people who are touching your ballot, if not more than dozens, and more than dozens of vehicles and machines that are touching your ballot before it ever gets back to be counted. That's the difference between vote by mail and voting. in person. Well, Christian, can you walk us through some of the documented security, vulnerabilities, and problems that are associated with mail and our absentee ballots? Well, look, look at Nevada.

Nevada is a great example of this. This is a real story. This is not speculation. Nevada decided very quickly in the spring to instantly convert to a vote by male state. They did this by edict. It wasn't a law. It was an edict by officials there. So they said, okay, we're going to mail out to everybody, ballots, because we're now vote by mail. And they mailed out in Clark County alone, which by the way is Las Vegas, Clark County alone sent out 1.3 million ballots. Nobody requested them. They just mailed them out. 230,000 of them came back as bad addresses. So that's 233,000 bounced. Now, a lot of them didn't bounce, and they just laid on the floor in apartment complex lobbies. And there's photos in the Las Vegas paper of this, where anybody could have picked them up.

Well, then, out of $1.3 million, $310,000 did come back that were voted. $3,000 out of $1.3 million. And of those $310,000, 7,000 people lost their right to vote because their ballot was canceled for problems. I'll think about that. That's like the crowd at a Washington Wizards game. Okay, now I know this seat's 17,000, but the Wizards don't get so many people. The point is that's a lot of people. Seven thousand people in just one county in Las Vegas lost the right to vote because of mail balloting, canceling it out. If those 7,000 people were in the precinct voting in person, they could have fixed the problem. They would have had their vote counted. There's so many vulnerabilities in vote by mail. Well, on that note, Christian, are there any other reports of voter fraud or even tampering with ballots that you'd like to highlight for people who are listening? Well, there's so many. I mean, every day you read a new one about ballots found in a warehouse.

Don't forget Patterson, New Jersey. Patterson, New Jersey, had a mail election this year that was so corrupted by fraud, it was so corrupted by people taking ballots out of mailboxes and voting them for other people, there was an activist named Yaya Mendez who pled guilty to committing election crimes in Patterson. It was so bad they had to do the election over again that they had to have a whole new election because vote by mail invited such chaos and criminality that it was a disaster because of what happened in Patterson. Patterson cannot be repeated on a national scale. This is a dangerous destabilizing rush to vote by mail when you have people who are committing crimes

and you have regular normal Americans who want to believe in the system and are losing faith in it because of this chaos. Well, as the election, as you've talked about, is just weeks away. What do you foresee happening, Christian, if there is voter fraud or widespread voter fraud in this presidential election? Well, first of all, we won't even know about whether there's voter. fraud in the short term. Because this is a sort of thing that only emerges after the election. The Yaya Mendez taking ballots out of boxes in Patterson, New Jersey, wasn't something we knew about on election day. It only comes out later. That's the nature of voter fraud. And so what I'm afraid of happening is the results getting certified before the full extent of the chaos is understood.

And that's not how it's supposed to work. The more we vote in person, the less chaos there will be. Well, what should voters be on the lookout for when they're in pulling places or in drop off locations for mail-in ballots? What would you caution people to look for in these instances where fraud might be happening? Well, look, folks who don't monitor this area as part of their profession really are in a tough situation. The best thing they can do right now is to volunteer to be an election official. A lot of counties still need help, and they need help in person voting to have election officials. I mean, look, if you see people being forced to vote, which in some parts of the country is not as uncommon as it seems. I did a case when I was at the Justice Department in Knoxville, Mississippi, where huge amounts of mechanicalized assistance was being imposed on people.

If you see something like that, report that to election officials. Something that you've talked about, Christian, is a lot of the rhetoric that we hear today when people talk about election integrity and how that can be misrepresented. Can you talk a little bit about that and what people should focus on when that is brought up versus how it becomes controversial needlessly? Right. There is a $100 million industry devoted to smearing people who believe in election integrity, and they call them names like vote suppressor, vote suppression guru. racist, all of this stuff. My message is, do not be afraid of this. These are the tactics of thugs who want to have you whimper like sheep and not look at the problems in the system. And I think people are finally getting way past being afraid of being called racist and vote suppressors, because that's not what this is about. This is about following the law. This is about having a system that

impairs criminals' ability to elect our politicians. And that's not vote suppression. That's not racism. That's good government. That's what America stands for is a system of rules in place ahead of time that were passed by Democratic legislature, signed by governors, that govern the election, and we're about following the rules. Now, I know in some corners in America today, that's not so cool, that the rules are meant to be laughed at, disregarded, smeared, and dispensed with. And that's why I tell people, don't be afraid of being called a vote suppressor because it's just a smear by thugs to call you that to stop having you pay attention to these issues. Well, because of the huge drastic increase in absentee voting in this election, a lot of people

have been talking about, I know you have been one of them about how we may not know the results of the presidential election until potentially weeks later. So can you walk through what might happen and what things might look like and how this election, because of the huge increase in mail-in voting, might be different from all past presidential elections? Well, this is one of the things Secretary McWarner talked about during the Heritage event, and that is that it's good for places to start processing absentee ballots now to get that work out of the way. So it's not lingering for weeks. after the polls close on election day. But unfortunately, what you're going to see is normally an

election polling place will tabulate their votes in the machines, report them to a central authority, and that's how we get election results. But in this new crazy world that has been thrust upon us by advocates of vote by mail, that means lack of certainty. That means delay. That means chaos. where we spend the next couple of weeks under state laws going through these mountains of paper ballots, opening up the envelopes, pulling out the ballots, trying to decide whether everything's been done correctly, and whether the vote should count. And then once we decide whether the vote should count, processing those ballots into the tabulators, and that's something that will occur in many cases after election day in many states and will linger and linger and linger right up to the moment

of certification. So what happens if, for example, President Trump is ahead in Pennsylvania and is ahead for many days and the Pennsylvania election officials are dragging their feet in certifying the results. And there is a very radical Secretary of State in Pennsylvania who is really on the far fringes of this area. And what's to prevent her from saying, well, I just haven't certified the results. I haven't appointed commissioners to be electors for the electoral college. And what are you going to do about it?

I mean, that's the worst fear is the lawlessness that has become so popular in some corners of American political life bleeds over into the unwillingness to certify the election. Well, Christian, thank you so much for unpacking this issue for us on the daily Signal podcast. It's been great having you. Thanks for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcast and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all on Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million

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