The Daily Signal - New Book Explains ‘How the Left Changed the Way You Vote’

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

The 2020 election was unprecedented, what with the COVID-19 pandemic and controversy over expanded early and mail-in voting.  “There were more lawsuits filed last year before the election trying to change the laws and the rules governing the election process than in any year in our entire history,” Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow and election expert at The Heritage Foundation.  The political left used the pandemic to try to undo requirements for voter ID and for witness signatures on absentee ballots, von Spakovsky, who oversees Heritage's Election Law Reform Initiative. (The Daily Signal is Heritage's multimedia news organization.) The question now is: How do we ensure clean and honest elections across America? In his new book with former Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, “Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote,” von Spakovsky addresses the election issues of 2020 and provides solutions with which lawmakers can prevent voter fraud.  Von Spakovsky joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his new book and why Americans should support safeguarding our elections through measure such as voter ID.  We also cover these stories:  Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin is poised to be the next governor of Virginia. Democrat and former New York City Police Captain Eric Adams wins the city’s mayoral election, beating out Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. A proposal to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety fails. 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 Wednesday, November 3rd. I'm Doug Blair. And I'm Virginia Allen. Over the past year, election integrity has become a fiercely debated issue. Controversy over the 2020 election has highlighted the importance of free and fair elections. Heritage Foundation election expert and senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky joins the show today to discuss his new book, Our Broken Elections, How the Lawsons, How the Lawsons. left changed the way you vote. Hans explains the issue in our voting system and what lawmakers need to do to ensure the integrity of all future elections. But before we get to Virginia's

conversation with Hans, let's hit the top news stories of the day. We are recording close to midnight and Republican candidate Glenn Yonkin is poised to be the next governor of Virginia. Yonkin faced off against Democrat Terry McCullough, who previously served as Virginia's governor from 2014 to 2018. Yonkin's likely victory is a significant upset for Democrats in Virginia and even across the country. Virginia has been trending blue for some time. In 2017, Democrat gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam beat Republican candidate Ed Gillespie by 9%. In 2020, Joe Biden, soundly defeated Donald Trump in Virginia, earning 10% more of the vote. But Yonkin's likely victory shows Virginia is not the soundly blue state some believed it to be. The strongest support for Yon

came from western and central Virginia, with the state's urban areas like Northern Virginia and Richmond, largely backing McCullough. Many are pointing to Yonkin's strong stance on education and parental rights as the central reason for his support. The Heritage Foundation's Vice President of Government Relations, Tommy Binion, said in a statement that there was a stark contrast between the candidates on many issues, but perhaps none more important than education. At a time when the left wants to give more control to government bureaucrats and school boards, conservatives made a winning argument that parents should be in charge of their children's education.

Democrat and former New York City Police Captain Eric Adams has won the city's mayoral election, beating out Republican candidate Curtis Lewe. Here's part of Mayor-elect Adams' acceptance speech via NBC New York. So brothers and sisters and the people of our city, they have spoken. And tonight, New York has chosen one of you, one of our home. I am you. I am you. after years of praying and hoping and struggling and rotting where I headed to City Hall. Adams ran on a more moderate platform than his progressive opposition in the primary,

pledging to crack down on violent crime while defying calls from his left to defund the police as many activists pushed during the summer. Adams' Republican opponent Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels and anti-crime patrol. Adams replaces outgoing Democrat mayor Bill de Blasio, who was unable to run again due to a law limiting mayors to two terms. The governor's race in New Jersey was too close to call as of midnight. Currently, with 65% of votes counted, Democrat governor Phil Murphy has 51.2% of the vote, and Republican candidate Jack Chittarelli has 48% of the vote. The Garden State has one million more registered Democratic.

than Republicans, which has given Murphy an advantage in the state. New Jersey's high taxes was a central issue during the election, but Murphy argued during his campaign that the people of New Jersey were afforded better resources because of the high taxes. The Democrat said the high taxes mean the best public schools in America. It means among the best health care systems in America. It means a location second to none that we need to invest aggressive. in. Chittarelli campaigned on lowering property taxes, launching parent councils to advise local schools and supporting law enforcement. A proposal to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety has failed. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the proposal

57 to 43 percent per Fox 9 Minneapolis. The proposal would have altered the Minneapolis City charter by removing a requirement that the city have a police department, as well as a minimum funding requirement. The ballot proposal came on the heels of mass abolish and defund the police protests, following the killing of black man George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, last year. In a statement to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, one voter, Linda Ramson said, I think we need to do some changes, maybe make some reforms, but I do not believe in abolishing it without having something in place. And they've had a year to come up with something other than nebulous, oh, we're going to do this or that. I haven't been swayed.

On the eve of the Virginia election, the Daily Signal attended a Parents Matter rally in Louding County packed full of invigorated families and parents. They tell us why they voted for Glenn Yonkin because he will fight for families, for education, and for parents' rights. Here's what they had to say. I'm supporting Yonkin and I'm supporting Loudoun County, Virginia, okay, schools, students, parents. I've been here for 20-some years. I raised my children here. And even though my children are grown, I care. Bring a whole new look to curriculum and he really wants to have teaching parents work together as a team. And I really like that. You know, I think parents are the first educators and I think teachers need to work very close to the parents.

And I'm excited about that. I'm out here to support Glenn Yonkin and fight to take back our schools, our government, and our country. We're here because he is going to be there for our children. He's going to be a voice for our children. And as parents in Virginia, that's what we need. I like what he had to say. Like what he had to say about the schools. Like we had to say about business, taxes, all the stuff that's really important, not this divisive crap that's been going on lately.

I'm Hispanic descent from Belize, but raised in America. and I absolutely love America, so that's why I'm here. And my family, they're born here in America, but I fell in love with America because of the opportunity it is for everybody, for the world. So that's why I'm here. Obama even said like a week ago that this is a fake, phony culture war. He's accusing schools of brainwashing our kids. What do you think about that?

Yeah, that's nonsense. Look at the good people here. Back in June, there was a dozen of us at the Latinos for Lunkin meeting. Now there's thousands in loudest. County which has been that went hard for Biden so I don't think this is something that's just made up. I think that everything that we're seeing going on right now is it's real. I mean everything that people have concerns about are valid and I think that we just need to do a better job of listening to each other and actually having a conversation instead of labeling each other as

terrorists or labeling each other as racists. I think that we need to actually learn how to have civil discourse again. I think parents have an important role to play. I think the school board has lost its way, and certainly Loudoun County, but probably through large parts of Virginia. Instead of focusing on what's most important for the kids, they seem to even more focused on some other kind of social agenda. I still can't get my mind around. So I think what happens is most parents ignore this kind of thing, these school boards, elections and stuff, until they've had enough. And for Terry McCullough to pretend that this is some made-up thing is delusional. Right?

This has been going, this started back even when the, during the COVID lockdowns, the people. Parents weren't happy with the way the school board was performing. This is just, it just peaked recently with, you know, Terry's comments. Parents are really fed up with not being heard and just being told what their kids are going to be doing in school and not being given the option. And I think people are done with it. I think parents have every place to say what goes on to the classroom. And the Democrats have showed that they are willing to cover stuff up so that parents will not have a voice. And I think it's disgusting.

It's despicable. And it's time for parents and everybody else to wake up. and support, you know, freedom in our schools. So you're a Loudoun Parent. What do you think of all this craziness going on in Loudoun County Public Schools? I think it's really pathetic. It's really poor, really pathetic, and really sad. I moved here to raise my children because they had good schools.

And you know what? The world knows all about Loudoun County. It's a shame. It's disgraceful. It's a shame. And you know what? It's going to stop. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Swikovsky,

as we discuss his new book, Our Broken Elections, How the Left Change the Way You Vote. The Heritage Foundation has a new website to combat critical race theory. CRT, as it's known, makes race the centerpiece of all aspects of American life. It categorizes individuals into groups of oppressors and victims. The idea is infiltrating everything from our politics and education. to the workplace and even our military. Heritage has pulled together the resources that you need to identify CRT in your community

and the ways to fight it. We also have a legislation tracker so you can see what's happening in your state. Visit heritage.org slash CRT to learn more. I am so pleased to welcome back to the podcast, Heritage Foundation election expert and senior legal fellow Hans von Spikovsky, Hans. Welcome back.

Well, thanks for having me. You have just written a book. Congratulations. Excited to talk about it today. Elections are, you're very familiar with elections. You run our voter fraud database here at the Heritage Foundation. You have been in the weeds of election integrity for years. So your new book is Our Broken Elections, How the Left Change the Way You Vote. Hans, did you write this book in response to the 2020 election?

Well, my co-author, John Fond, and I, you know, we first wrote a book on elections and election fraud back in 2012. And we realized we needed an update, but we also needed to cover last year's election. Because last year's election really, in many ways, was kind of unprecedented in American history. I mean, for example, you know, there were more lawsuits filed last year before the election trying to change the laws and the rules governing the election process. than in any year in our entire history. And that's why we came up with that title, how the left changed the way you vote, because almost all these lawsuits were filed by organizations

on the left side of the political aisle. And they were trying to do things. They were trying to use COVID as an excuse and justification for doing things like getting rid of state voter ID laws. They filed lawsuits saying, oh, well, because of COVID, if you're a state that requires a, witness signature on an absentee ballot, you should not be able to enforce that.

I mean, it was just one thing after another like that. And we really wanted to cover it because while they use COVID as an excuse, these are changes they've been trying to make for a long time. And almost all of them are bad changes that endanger the security and integrity of the election process. So did those changes that were made for the 2020 election, did they affect the outcome of the election? In other words, was there a vote?

voter fraud? Well, there certainly was fraud. What we don't know is the extent of it, and we certainly don't know if it really affected the outcome of the election. And the reason we don't know is that, as folks will recall, look, there were a lot of lawsuits filed after the election. We had lawsuits filed in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and other states. And in those lawsuits, a lot of claims were made, a lot of witnesses, everyone from voters to others saying that they saw, certain things happening. There shouldn't have been happening. But none of those cases ever got to the point where that evidence was actually examined.

You know, judges use procedural reasons to dismiss almost all the lawsuits, you know, often saying that the people bringing them didn't have standing to bring the lawsuit. So we never got to the point where a judge, for example, in Georgia, held a full hearing, examined the evidence. I mean, it could be that the judge would have said, well, these claims aren't credible. On the other hand, he might have said they were credible. But we won't know because all these claims basically were never fully investigated, and we never held hearings that fully looked at them either. And you, in fact, have a whole chapter in the book, Chapter 10, dedicated to Georgia. What exactly happened?

That's right. Because, I mean, Georgia, the results are surprised. a lot of people. You know, Georgia has for a long time been a very red state, yet Joe Biden won by only about 10,000 votes. And it seemed very, I mean, yes, it's certainly possible that that happened, but there were also a lot of claims being made by witnesses and others about, for example, people from out of state coming in to vote. I mean, we just don't know. And again, the lawsuits that were filed were basically dismissed often by local judges on procedural grounds. without ever getting in and actually investigating the claims that have been made.

Are there any other states that, apart from Georgia, that you really looked at and examined in the book or that you personally have concerns over after the 2020 election? Well, look, one thing that wasn't available when we were writing the book were the results of the audit in Arizona. And what's interesting about that, and this tells you, you know, we actually have a whole chapter on talking about the media. and how the mainstream media covers election issues and how they refuse to talk about or investigate issues like election fraud. And you kind of saw that with the Arizona audit. The report comes out, and the media focuses on just one little part of the report.

This was a multi-volume report. And yet almost immediately the press said, oh, well, the hand recount of ballots in Arizona matched the machine recount from last November. So that's it. There's no more to say here. Well, all that meant was that the ballot counting machines were working properly. That doesn't tell you whether the ballots that were cast were cast, for example, by eligible voters. The best example I can use of this is if I pay somebody $1,000 and 500 of the bills are counterfeit money,

if the person recounts it, it's still going to come up to $1,000, but it's not going to tell you whether the votes were valid. And if you look at the rest of the audit, they raise all kinds of issues. I mean, one of the most obvious ones is they list, I think, over 5,000 individual voters who they say may have been registered in more than one county and voted twice. What should have happened with that audit, rather it being the end of the story, it should have been the beginning of the story.

Yeah. And what ought to be happening is election officials in Arizona and law enforcement ought to be investigating those possible problems. They should be pulling the files, for example, of every single registered voter that they say might have been registered twice to investigate it and see, is that true? And why aren't they? Well, election officials in Maricopa County basically resisted and did everything they could to fight this audit. And they apparently don't want to do anything further. I don't know why. I suspect it's because they don't want to be embarrassed if it turns out that the findings are correct

because that would show that they did a very sloppy job of running the election, and they haven't done a very good job of maintaining the accuracy of their voter registration role. So when we think about elections and how they can be done well, what's changed? I mean, you kind of encompass this concept in the title of the book, how the left changed the way you vote. So to me that says maybe we used to have a pretty good system. Things have shifted and changed. What has changed?

What do we need to get back to? What do we need to remove? What are the core issues here? Well, you know, we have a whole chapter in the book about the changes that folks on the liberal left have been pushing for years that they want to put in. You know, things like same-day voter registration, automatic voter registration, all of which are very problematic because they can cause all kinds of problems. What we wrote in our final chapter was actually our list of recommended solutions.

And these are all remedies that we think state legislatures ought to put in. Not the federal government. Federal government needs to stay out of running elections. But state governments need to put in. Probably the most obvious one is, which is just common sense, is you ought to have to show an ID when you vote. whether it's in person or through the absentee balloting process. Some states have already got that.

Georgia and Texas, for example, voters have had no problems, you know, meeting that requirement. States need to do a better job of cleaning up their voter lists. In other words, they need to do a better job of taking people off who have died or people who have moved away. And they need to get into a situation where they can compare their voter lists with those of other states to find individuals who potentially are registered in more than one state and are illegally voting in more than one state. Folks who think that doesn't affect elections, one of the incidents we talk about in the book is just not that long ago, 2012, a Democratic congressional candidate in Maryland, she won the primary, she was going to be in the general election,

until someone discovered that she was registered to vote in both Maryland and Florida and had voted in both states in multiple elections. Wow. She pled guilty to voter fraud. She was forced out of the race, but she'd gotten away with this for years without getting caught by election officials in either Maryland or Florida. And that tells you part of the problems that we have. Yeah.

Well, and you mentioned states like Texas and Georgia, the voting laws that they have. They require you to show an ID. But we have heard this narrative from the left as these states have passed voter integrity laws. We've heard that these are racist laws, that they're trying to discriminate against folks. What is the reality of these voter integrity laws laws? That is just completely false. And we know that's completely false because we now have the experience of years of election. to prove that it's false. Take Georgia voter ID. That law was first effective in the 2008 election.

That's a long time ago. And that means that we have more than a decade's worth of turnout data to show, well, what happened after the ID law was in place. Instead of the turnout, for example, of black Georgians going down, as was claimed in this false voter suppression meme, they had record increases in turnout after the ID law went in place. And in fact, Georgia with what the left likes to call a strict voter ID law, has had record voter registration and record turnout in their elections since their ID law went in place. Look, not only that, but the American people don't agree with that. If you look at the polling on this, the polling is remarkably consistent.

Americans overwhelmingly say, well, of course, you should show an ID to vote. And that's a majority of Republicans, Democrats, independents, and a majority of white voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters, black voters. To the average person, they say, well, yeah, this is common sense. I have to show an ID all the time every day. It's only these elites in the media and elsewhere that say, oh, this is problematic. And I had to say this, but that displays what I think is a remarkably patronized. racetrically racist attitude towards Americans who happen to be minorities.

Because what they're saying is, well, minorities just can't cope with, for example, getting a free ID to vote. Which is, like I said, I can't think of anything more patronizingly racist than that. And I have a lot more faith in the American people than these elitists do. What's the driving force behind that narrative? Why are there claims when the data doesn't show that something as simple as showing an ID drives down voter turnout? I think there's actually two things going on. One, the groups that are making these claims, and it's all these so-called civil rights organizations

like the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, I think it helps them raise money because they scare voters into thinking there's this big movement out there to suppress their votes. It helps them raise money. I think there are, unfortunately, political consultants who pushed this idea because if an ID law was in place

might make it tougher for them to actually cheat in elections. And again, anybody who doubts that, there's a political consultant in Pennsylvania right now under federal indictment because he was bribing election officials in Philadelphia to submit fraudulent ballots in multiple elections for multiple candidates. And, you know, one of the ways they did it was submitting fraudulent ballots for voters who were on the registration list but didn't show up at their polling place. Wow. How many states did move ahead, even despite lots of controversy, did move ahead with implementing more secure election,

election, election, look, one of the good things that came out of last year's election. was that I think a lot of state legislators finally realize, you know, we really need to fix some of these problems. And I mean, the Heritage Foundation, we've been talking about this for a number of years. So they finally acted. Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, and a number of other states. Actually, their state legislatures, when they met at the beginning of this year, passed some good reforms. Everything from extended, like Georgia, for example, they extended their voter ID law from in-person voting to absentee validing. Texas did a similar thing.

Texas also strengthened the law protecting the right of poll watchers to be in any location where voting or vote counting is going on to try to avoid. Remember what happened last year when poll observers were thrown out in places like Detroit? and Philadelphia for no reason. And you have to wonder, you know, what were election officials trying to hide? Why were they throwing these observers out? Texas has strengthened its law to prevent that from happening. And a number of states, including those,

have now banned private grants being given to election officials and election offices. That was actually a big factor last year's election. We have all chapter about this. Remember, Mark Zuckerberg, the multi-multi-billionaire, gave hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to election officials, which brought up all kinds of ethics problems and conflicts of interest. No local election official should be receiving private money from any group.

I don't care which side of the political aisle they're on. Well, and these don't sound like controversial issues. This sound like things that whether you're on the left or the right, we should all be able to get behind. You would think so. You would think so. And, you know, it's really odd. If you go back 20 years, election integrity used to be a bipartisan issue. Everyone pretty much agreed on it.

But for some reason, it has really divided during that time so that now it almost seems like a partisan issue. It shouldn't be, but that's what's happened. Yeah. Well, I live in the state of Virginia. We just had an election there on Tuesday. There's a few other elections happening in different states across the country and in different cities. Can we trust Hans the outcome of that election or any other election moving forward? Yeah, I don't want people to get the wrong idea.

Everyone should go out and vote. Don't stay home because you don't trust the election process. We have a pretty good election process. We do have problems that need to be fixed. And yeah, occasionally, particularly in races where the margin is pretty small, fraud can make a difference. Look, it was just three years ago, 2018, that we had a congressional race overturned in North Carolina because of absentee ballot fraud. Now, that didn't happen in all the other congressional races across the country, but it did happen in that one race, and that's

why we need to fix it. I think as long as people comply with the laws, particularly election officials, you know, we can probably pretty much trust the outcome of the elections that we're having in places like Virginia, but that doesn't mean that improvements can't be made. And what are those improvements? What are the solutions that we need to pursue in order to really weed out any form of voter fraud? Well, for example, in Virginia, Virginia used to have a good voter ID law, and it got rid of it. We had another problem in that election. Virginia actually has a good rule. saying that when you request an absentee ballot on the form you fill out, in addition to your name and your registered address, you're supposed to put the last four digits of your Social Security number. That's one of the only ways you can really ensure that it's a voter requesting the form and not somebody else who just has their name and address. And yet there was a lawsuit filed in Virginia about a week or so before the election because the county registrar in Fairfax County, which is the largest county in the state.

was alleged to have told all the people working for him, don't bother complying with that provision of Virginia law. If a voter doesn't put in, or whoever sent in the absolute ballot, they don't put in the last four digits of their social security number, doesn't matter. Set him an absentee ballot anyway. Election officials don't have the ability to simply say we're not going to abide by a state law. And that's something that needs to be stopped in every state across the country. I don't care whether it's a blue state or a red state. And are we seeing positive movement among lawmakers to implement some of these changes and reforms and make our elections more secure? Yes.

In fact, the Heritage Foundation, I should mention, in February this year, actually put out a paper that had a list of recommended best practices for states all over the country. Many of those same recommendations are in our book. and many states have been apparently following those recommendations have been putting them in. Excellent. Well, the book is Our Broken Elections, How the Left Changed, the Way You Vote. It's out. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, pick up a copy. Hans.

Thank you so much for your time. Sure. 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 Podcast, Spotify, and My Heart Radio. Please be sure to leave us a review with a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.

Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko, sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com.