The MeidasTouch Podcast - Let’s Talk Voting Bills with Gabriel Sterling and Marc Elias

Episode Date: April 2, 2021

Georgia Elections Official Gabriel Sterling and Democracy Docket Founder and Voting Rights Attorney Marc Elias join the pod to discuss the various voting bills being proposed — and passed — throughout the country, including Georgia's S.B. 202, the For The People Act and more. This is the definitive podcast on voting rights and we encourage you to listen to both guests with an open mind and form your own opinions. Let us where you stand on the issues by tweeting @MeidasTouch! Thank you for making The MeidasTouch Podcast one of the top podcasts in North America! Please consider rating us 5 stars in the Apple Podcasts app and share this episode with a friend. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario welcome to the Midas touch podcast Ben my cell is joined by my younger brothers Brett and Jordy what's up brothers what's up guy what a show big episode today are you ready I don't think they're ready I don't think they're ready for What a show. Big, big show. Today. Are you ready? I don't think they're ready. I don't think they're ready for it.

You ready, Jordan? You ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. Here's who we have today. First up, hailing from the state of Georgia, the chief operating officer reporting directly to the Georgia Secretary of State. We have Gabrielle Sterling.

The funny thing about this wrestling style announcement is we are conducting two of the most calm, civil, respectful interviews on the planet. If you are looking for punches to be thrown, if you're looking for any sort of, you know, aggressive aggression here. Don't ruin the hype, Brett. Sorry, in the right corner, Gabriel Starling. But Ben, but Ben, Ben, Ben. You're going to ruin the flow of these intros, both of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Back up for a second and explain why, you know, we're having Gabriel on the show today.

How it originated from his photos to us quote tweeting. We posted our view that SB 202, the Georgia voting bill, is a voter suppression bill. Gabriel Sterling went into our replies and basically said that we were full of shit. And so the whole day as Gabriel started posting photos, it was a weekend. So he was posting barbecue photos, which I think that's what he does on the weekends. I just started calling him out and saying, you better come on the Midas Touch podcast. Before that, there were people who were saying he should come on the podcast and have a discussion.

And it was vital to me that we hear from him and have a very detailed discussion. Those who know me and who listen to the show and know my background know that I have a litigation background. I've been a lawyer for about 11 years, and I wanted to have a very diligent and detailed conversation with him, but to have a very fair conversation, which isn't really heard that much. But I wanted to be able to push back on the certain points that I think that when you see an interview like Gabriel's on CNN or others, as you're standing in front of the TV, you're like, but just ask him that question. Just ask him that. And so I wanted to have the opportunity to ask him that. And look, we're going to play that interview for you in a bit. We've already

conducted that interview prior to this intro. And I think you'll find that it to be a very fair interview, a very tough interview, and you can draw the conclusions for yourself. And if you want me to do the next intro now, I'm happy to do the next intro. Let's do it in the left corner. And now in the other corner. You know him for defeating Trump over 100 times in federal litigations. Only losing once in Pennsylvania. That did not matter at all and affected zero votes. But crushing Trump over 100 times.

Lawsuit after lawsuit. The defender of democratic elections, Mark Elias. Are you ready for debate? You know, after, you know, as I say, are you ready for debate? We're going to get a cease and desist letter

tomorrow from the, are you ready to run? Yeah, from the WWE. Because apparently everybody sends legal letters to us now. And we'll get into all these legal threats and intimidation with all the people trying to silence us. We'll get into the news in the next podcast. But this is a very special Midas Touch podcast where we really want to discuss with you the issues of voter suppression, the threat to voting rights. And we want to just get you all the information that you could have unfiltered so you can make your own decisions. So here's how this episode is going to go. First segment, you're going to hear from Gabriel Sterling,

the Georgia election official. We're going to go to break. Then after that, you will hear from Mark Elias of Democracy Docket, as Ben said, who's been fighting these voter suppression cases, who's been taking on the Trump administration all around the country and winning more than 100 times. And that will be the show. And we look forward to your feedback and you staying in this fight with us to preserve voting rights and protect our democracy at all costs. So without further ado, guys, let's take a listen to our interview with Gabriel Sterling. We are joined by Gabriel Sterling, Georgia election implementation manager, chief

operating officer in the Georgia Secretary of State. Gabriel, welcome to the Midas Touch podcast. And thank you for joining us today. Well, of course. I mean, y'all call me on Twitter. I couldn't say no, you know. We gave you the challenge, but I have to tell you, Gabriel, a lot of people, when we give them the challenge, they don't take us up on the offer. They back down. And we really do want to get a lot of voices out here because I think what you did particularly, though, was bipartisan in the sense that you stood up against an individual, Donald Trump, who was just telling lies about your state. Despite the fact that you are a Republican, you just said, look, I want to call a spade a spade.

That's a lie. We feel strongly about our beliefs that Midas touched. But I always do want to get down to the truth and have conversations with not just people in my echo chamber. So I really do appreciate you coming on this podcast. The fact that you approach it that way is important because there are so many people that you get into your Facebook and Twitter algorithm and you only listen to people you want to listen to. And we've seen there's Republicans who never deal with Democrats and Democrats who never deal with Republicans. It's easy to dehumanize and attack people you never actually deal with. So in COVID time, it's gotten worse because we're even further apart from each other. And we have a lot of people too, who are our supporters. They call themselves the

Midas Mighty in the community that we've built, who are big fans of yours. And when they saw you tweeting in support of SB 202, they were confused. They had viewed this bill primarily as a voter suppression bill. I had viewed it in my readings as having very problematic areas that seem to be premised on the big lie, but I really want to get down to it. So what you and I agreed, just to kind of put on the record, is we're going to release an unedited portion. We may edit out me saying ums or ahs. You probably don't say that as much as I do, but we want to keep it the integrity of it. Now I'm going to do it the rest of the time.

And we're not going to edit any of that out. And we've agreed, which I think, you know, people who have interviews shouldn't have to agree to because all conversations in this area should be civil. But you and I both agreed conversation is going to be civil. There's not going to be yelling. So if our podcast listeners want to hear that, there are other podcasts and shows out there that do that. And that's not what we do here.

So without further ado, let's get into SB 202. Let me say real quick, the way you characterized me, me tweeting and supporting 202. What I was really doing was saying 202 is not a voter suppression bill. I would not have written 202 the way it is written. Let me be clear on that. There are things I would have done in it. There's things that I personally would have done. And I'm in this weird sort of space because I work for somebody who likes some more things in this thing than maybe I would necessarily, but I will try to delineate between my views

and what the bill does, what people say the bill does. So again, I'm trying to do this in an educational way, but also don't think that I'm sitting there hugging SB202's neck going, this is fantastic in all parts and parcels. I don't think that. You're trying to soften up my audience a little bit

before we get into it. I'll accept it. But at its core, though, without getting into it, we should get into the sections. So do you believe that there are any elements whatsoever in SB 202 that have designs for voter suppression? Any? Have designed for voter suppression? No. I mean, some of the things, and here's the situation you have, and let's just go into the one that I think is probably the most easily claimed is making an extra barrier that didn't exist before, which is the regulation of the drop boxes. You got to remember when we put drop boxes in, and that was really by Secretary Raffensperger's direction with the state election board. We did it under the emergency COVID rules, which allowed us to do that, and the CDC guidance to try to lower the amount of people interacting with each other. So there was never a legal way to do it before in Georgia until this bill passed.

And personally, I would have said the whole point of drop box is to have it outside so they can go drop off ballots 24 hours a day. We had them under video surveillance. There was ways to do that better than putting them inside the room. But they didn't exist before. If they had done nothing, if they passed no law at all, all the drop boxes would have gone away, period, across the board. This one now made it mandated for every county to at least have one. So there was 38 counties that had none last time, which was ridiculous. I mean, just so y'all know, our office worked with the CARES money that we got and provided grants to counties to put these out there because we thought it was an important thing to do. But allowing for them at all begins the process. I think they're over-regulated in this bill, personally, but I don't think it really undermines the ability over that month-long period to find a

way to get a ballot in. So that's why I say I don't think it's a voter suppression thing. It's more of a, it's not a real hurdle. You can still mail it. You can still drop it off at the office. You can still drop it in their mail. There's just any number of ways to do it. So that kind of thing is there. So let me take that one just for example, Gabriel. Why wouldn't they do though, if there was not an aim or a design at voter suppression, why wouldn't they do, though, if there was not an aim or a design at voter suppression? Why wouldn't they just do exactly what existed in the last election, which is have it there for 24 hours? It's under government surveillance. They understand that particularly people in the black and brown communities are working during the day. And it may be very inconvenient for them to wait on lines and do it during working

hours. So why not just say, look, we want to encourage people to vote at all hours. This is completely safe. Let's keep the drop boxes open 24 hours a day. Why not do that? Because there is a strong feeling amongst the people who were elected in the state of Georgia that the security with the cameras wasn't good enough. But that's false though, right? But that's a false view. Here's the one thing I will say. There's two ways they could have done it. They could have done what they did, which is a human being has to be there with it, or they could have say, we have to, which would be expensive doing a live stream kind of thing, and then hold on to the tape

for 30 days. I mean, we had people who were very creative in what they did. They got like a deer cam up. This is Georgia after all. A deer cam, for those who don't know, is when an animal walks in front of the camera, it turns on. So they use those and there's like a hundred bucks, but you'd have to go remove the card from it. The reality of election administration is it's boring and you have to get deep into the weeds of it. Like you said, I would have preferred to do that, but this doesn't really get in the way of that, but it does provide for a swath of people who were lied to. I'm not arguing that point. A sense of security is there for that. But again, if they'd done nothing, all of these would have gone away altogether. And there was a big move to eliminate them altogether. So I guess

my perspective is there was a move in the state Senate, that original bill was just to get rid of drop boxes 100% across the board, which I thought was a terrible idea. And this was sort of the compromise they came to, to allow them to exist, which I think over time, the reality is they're there, counties are investing in them. The use of them will be expanded. I mean, that's what's going to happen, but it's still compared to 2019, this is an expansion of a way to vote. So when you say concerns though, that people had regarding the security of drop boxes, though, you understand as the person who oversaw it, that those concerns were completely unfounded in the 2020s. Or at least overblown. We did have a couple of people who put them in, who put in ballots after they're supposed to be cut off. But I mean, it wasn't the reason we know that is because people make claims that there was hundreds and thousands being dropped off.

And the specific one I remember was in Clayton County, which is just out to the land where our airport is and we held the video cameras went to go back and look at all these hours of tape and we had one person go put one in at 702 and we cut off at seven o'clock on election day and for election administration i would have actually preferred we keep the boxes where they were but we stopped taking ballots on that friday before because it was a real difficult thing, especially for the smaller counties, which what everybody needs to understand is we have 159 counties in the state. Some are very resourced, like Fulton County, where Atlanta is, is very rich. They spent $40 million on this election this time. We also have counties that are very small,

that have county elections directors that are 24 hour a week workers. So the counties kind of get away with not paying them benefits. And they're having to do a week workers. So the county's kind of getting away with not paying them benefits and they're having to do all this stuff. So when you start mandating a lot of stuff, like you have to have two people to empty these things and do this kind of stuff, they don't have staff. They don't have money. These are very poor counties. So we have to take that into account. This one size fits all thing is very difficult. So I just want to, I understand though, under the new bill though, for example, let's use Fulton County, which you just mentioned. The drop boxes, there were 38 drop boxes in the November election. Under the new law, there's now going to be eight.

Is that your understanding? I think it's 10 because it's either 10 or 9. It actually depends what the census says, too. But you would concede that the amount of drop boxes in Fulton County will be going down significantly as a result of this new law? I will concede that there will be fewer drop boxes, yes, and they will be put in places that are not as convenient. However, a slight bit of inconvenience does not voter suppression make, at least from my point of view. I mean, it's inconvenient to go vote on Election Day. I mean, it's just there's always going to be things in life that does this.

And we have early voting that's we've been expanded through all this, which the other thing you have to realize for most Georgians until COVID hit, we were a 95% in-person voting state. And when you talk to people in California and Washington, Oregon, like why do you go to a hundred percent male? There is a cultural thing, especially in our black and brown communities that we fought for the right to do this for very long. There's a ritualization to it in large parts of those communities where families will go out together and they like voting in person. So I anticipate a lot of this stuff by the drop boxes will be not moot, but it will fall further back because I expect we'll drop back to not 5% like

we used to have, but probably 10, 12, 14% because that's the national inclination for most of our voters, black and white alike is to vote in person either in the early vote period, which is three weeks, or the election day. What about the hours of drop boxes? Is it accurate in my reading that the drop boxes before could be open 24 hours a day if the county so chose? Now that would be subject just to business hours themselves, like nine to five? It would be the hours of the early voting locations. So whatever those are, and I know they're defined in the bill. And frankly, I just can't remember what they are right now off the top of my head. I apologize. I think they're nine to five, but there is an

option to go seven to seven if a county board makes a specific. But in any event, would you concede though that people in black and brown communities, though, work later hours and to have the only times that you could go to a Dropbox being during working hours, would that make it more difficult for someone who works? Well, it depends because you're saying they work later hours, usually later shifts, which means they have parts of the morning to them. I mean, I don't this is one of the things that I find frustrating. We have these discussions. People generally find ways to get things done when they need to get things done, especially when we have weeks and weeks of time to do it. That's why I think some of these are more inconvenience than suppressive. But that's going to be a semantical question, I guess, and it goes to a court to decide on some of those things. And you're a civil rights attorney and you know how these things can go. But I think that, again, the intent on this thing is to provide.

Let's go back to the preamble of this of the bill. In 2018, we had people claiming that they were cheated out of an election who still have it conceded because they were being suppressed. In 2020, we have people who still have it conceded, claiming they were cheated by fraud. So we have people on the far left and the far right who don't trust the overall outcomes of the system. And you're focusing on a few parts of the bill that are potentially suppressive, but let's focus on some other things in there, like the line issue, which we fought for a bill last year that was incorporated into this bill that basically says, if you have 2,000 people at polling location, and you have a line at any time during the day of an hour or more, the next election, you have to add more equipment or split that polling location apart.

And that's one of the things we thought was important to give that sense of support and comfort to the people who thought the lines are too long because there were counties that do a bad job. And we got to realize it's counties that make those decisions of where polling locations are, where the personnel goes, do the personnel training and allocate equipment. Other than one specific thing in the law right now on the equipment side says you have to have one BMD for 250 active voters in your polling location. So this law will help to get rid of lines. Now, the other reality is in January and November, we had no lines in large part because, I'll pat myself on the back. Fine.

I, Gabriel Stroud, looked at every single allocation of resources, of machinery, and every single polling location in the state ran through the MIT line management tool and told counties, I gave them this color-coded thing. It was green. You're good to go. You're fine. Yellow, you need to be examined. It's red. This is not going to work.

You're going to have lines. I set the limit at 20 minutes. So we didn't have lines realized in november we had a few like in north georgia and in coweta county which are big republican areas because they were so focused on voting in person on those days because the president said don't trust absentee voting which is of course stupid and probably costing the election um so there's lots of parts of this bill of your focus we start on drop boxes but and yes but i didn't start on Dropboxes. You were the one.

I said that's the most probably problematic one that people can look at and say, yes, that is where they have limited things. And I'm not arguing with you. That's not the way I would have written it, but I don't think it is Jim Crow 2.0. And you got to remember that people were calling it that bought that website address,

you know, months before we passed anything. And talk to me about the water provision. Water provision is the worst optics of all of them. I get it. So what does it do for the people listening out there? Well, this is the main thing for years in nearly every state in the union. When you have a polling location, there's a distance of a line. They say you can't campaign anymore outside of that line. And in Georgia, it's been 150 feet, it's 125 feet for back and forth for the last, I think, 40 or 50 years. So what happened

is when there were lines in places, we had situations, so this is mainly the June time, because that's when we did have lines because, you know, COVID and everything else and collapsing precincts and polling locations. People were getting around that provision by going and giving water. Now, if you're an election director or a poll manager, you have no idea what those people are talking about until you walk right up to them and say, hey, what are you talking about? And that's kind of makes everybody feel awkward. And sheriffs are the other people who get called in to deal with these things. So there needs to be a bright line to say, look, you can give away your water and your food, just you have to do it outside the 150 foot barrier.

And that's the main thing that that's about, because that's about not doing electioneering, which everybody pretty much agrees on. It's been upheld by the Supreme Court a few times, I believe. But I know that nearly every state in the union has that particular provision. And then I know I've been blasted because I said, well, New York has had this provision on the books about no water, food, meat, tobacco. I thought it was very specific. They said meat and tobacco back from the Tammany Hall, Andrew Jackson time of anything more than a dollar. We had people bringing food trucks in. If you ever eat in a food truck, you can't buy anything for less than a dollar. I mean, so people were trying to use this as a way to encourage turnout, which is a nice thing on one front, but we've literally been citing people for years. If you had your

I voted sticker, you used to be able to go to Chick-fil-A and like, you know, get a discount. We said, you can't, that's against the law. You can't do that. We had a state Senator try to raffle off a Turkey, but that's against the law. You can't do that. So this is about making it clean and easy to enforce for people. This is not about having people faint in line or pregnant ladies, you know, all that kind of stuff. I mean, the ability to make it do a lot of hyperbole around this, I get, but it's really done to make it easy to enforce and make it easier for the poll managers to manage their actual polling location. So that's the rationale behind it. And so here's, I guess, the question that I have though, because Georgia already had, I think, as you mentioned, the law

in place in the Georgia code, which was 21-2-414, which is the 150 feet rule, which says that if you can't be within 150 feet of the outer edge of a building where a polling place is established or within 20 feet of any voter standing in line, handing out campaign material, signed banners, literature in any way attempting to memorize. It's not that good. I can see your eyes. I concede that I have the Georgia Code and I don't memorize the Georgia Code or the Code of every state. But there was already a law in the place. And to the best of your knowledge, how many individuals were prosecuted under this specific code in the 20. And to the best of your knowledge, how many individuals were prosecuted under this specific code in the 20 and 2021 election? Here's the fun part. We don't prosecute

people this way. The way it's done is you have to have a citation brought to the state election board. We have investigators, then there are investigators. And then you have, you know, they have to bring it to the SCB. The SCB has to then vote on it. And then they can do one of several things. They can do a letter of instruction. They can dismiss. They can give to the local DA or they can send the attorney general. I honestly don't know how many are under investigation for this right now. I know we have lots of complaints of it. But then finding the actual individual human who did it is a problem sometimes because they're not sitting there giving you your ID. Hey, I'm this person. I did this. You're normally just trying to keep them at bay.

And that's where that comes from. And one of. You're normally just trying to keep them at bay. And that's where that comes from. And one of the specific issues we had was sheriffs got called in and there were people who were wearing. They weren't wearing specific political things. It'd be the equivalent of somebody wearing a MAGA hat. It doesn't say vote for Trump, but it's obviously sending a message or a BLM shirt that doesn't say vote for Warnock, but it's sending a specific message. And this is where we got into sort of this gray area. How do we enforce this? What do we do to make sure that we're not violating not just the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law?

And it basically came down to we had to do a bright line that says you just can't basically interact with anybody, even if you're giving out food and water inside that range. And I think most people would think that kind of makes sense. And the good part is, like I said, in November and January, we didn't have any lines. Now, one of the issues where we did have lines was in the early voting because people chose to go on the early voting day on the first day. It's kind of like when there's a big sale, you don't go on the first day of the sale, you're going to stand in line. So you kind of know that's going to happen. But if there's a line that long, it's way past 150 feet. So you can still do stuff for those people there. And the other good things we have now for lines on those early voting days, at least in Gwinnett, Fulton, DeKalb, and Cobb, which are

four biggest counties, they have apps and websites where it says, oh, it's three hours now, I'll come back later, because you have, at this point in those counties, I guarantee they will have 19 full days of early voting. So that's one of the good things about this, but I'm sure you have other questions, Ben. With respect though, to the handing out water under the new statute, is that criminalized? That's criminalized to be in 150 feet for, but again, it would still be an SCB violation with a likely it's not going to be. Now they could, if you kept on doing it after the guys said, stop doing that, then you might have a problem.

And I'm sure what we're going to have is we're going to have people who are going to go do it for the sole sake and purpose of getting arrested and making a show of it and getting on Twitter. I know that's going to happen, which is why, again, I don't think I would have necessarily written it this way. So but that's probably going to happen because it's bad optics and it's going to get people the great things are shown. Look, they're arresting people because they're helping people in line. Now, my hope is we don't have lines and that video won't exist. So that's because this office will continue to work with counties to make sure they have enough equipment, enough personnel in place. And one of the big issues we've had with some of these large counties is they don't have enough early voting locations, but we have no ability to make them do that. That's another gigantic

misunderstanding about how elections work, at least in Georgia and in most states. Counties run them. We can give them direction. We set up rules they're supposed to follow, but we can't make them do things. And that's one of the other problems we have. We're held accountable for everything they do. Like Georgia's closed 214 polling locations. No, Georgia hasn't closed any. Counties have, and it's mainly large Democrat-run counties like Fulton and DeKalb that have closed them, or smaller Democrat- run counties that are simply poor. They're trying to consolidate places, but they all have the same impact. When you count them up, it looks terrible.

Shifting gears quickly to the absentee voting. I understand that under the new law, the period of the absentee voting is truncated. It shortens the duration of the absentee voting period. Under the new law, and just if I'm wrong or right, let me know here, absentee ballots are allowed to be sent out to voters 29 days before an election, which is down from 49 days before an election. And voters are allowed to request an absentee ballot a maximum of 78 days before the election, down from 180 days. And the applications have to be received by election officials no later than 11 days before the election, a reduction from the previous deadline of four days before the election.

Those are the notes that we've taken from the bill. And that's about approximately right now. That was literally, this is what I can speak most directly about because that's a hundred percent election administration side of this thing. The 45 days we've researched it, it was sort of lined up with the UOCAVA deadlines, but most states have a 29 days when they issue them out. And you talk to most absentee ballot companies that do this, most of them, they have a T-minus 29 to do these things, especially in a state like Georgia with runoffs and stuff. But it makes a voting window occur, essentially, where you can early vote, you can absentee vote. It's all kind of in the same timeframe, just about. The 180 days is just, you have no idea what the ballots are going to be. No one can do anything with it. It's just

kind of hanging out there. So that was sort of a needlessly And election administration wise, having this giant 180 day window out there is difficult to manage inside our voter registration systems, the way they're built right now. So shortening those down made a lot of administrative sense. This was stuff we were talking about doing starting from the June primary. When we come back, we were going to pass a cleanup bill no matter what, because we were going to learn a lot because we launched a new system this year. And then through COVID, we learned a lot about absentee ballots and how they all work because historically, like I said, there were 5%. They were kind of an afterthought to most people. So moving that back to 29 for sending them out and sending them to 78, this gave county administrators less stuff to manage, essentially.

I guess one of the questions I have there, though, is, you know, you have Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, you know, he referred to the state's existing system, that you're mentioning all of these problems, you know, that that existed. And you're comparing Georgia to other states. You overload them with 2 million people requesting things when historically it was 200,000. That was sort of what, that's when it becomes an issue of trying to manage it at the county level. Go ahead. But also comparing Georgia to other states. But Mr. Raffensperger, and I believe yourself had stated that in these elections, the most recent elections, Georgia of all states was the gold standard in the United States and all states of election integrity and of efficiency in elections. Isn't that the case? I hate the word gold standard. And we were, we managed, we say we did it. It was great.

Internally, we pulled it off. I mean, it was, we were about to break our elections directors and their staffs and their poll workers because they were put to the ringer with all the stuff we had to do. And that's the reality we're trying to deal with now is they did it. And I love all of them. They went through COVID. They went through being the center of the storm. And even, I'll let y'all know this, even before COVID hit, there's something called Gavrio, which is the Georgia Association of Voting and Election Registrars.

Gavrio is an organization. It's a terrible acronym. And they had a big convention in January, and we brought in people from D.C. to basically scare the hell out of them because we knew, in 2018, we said that was a really close election. 2020, we're launching a new voting system. It's going to be a tight election. You know, everybody thinks Trump's going to win Georgia. And we were having our conversations internally, like, well, the worst thing that could happen is Trump loses by a little bit.

And we have two Senate runoffs like, oh, that'll never happen. But we told these of these elections directors that, look, you need to be prepared for like you're going to be the center of the political universe. You're going to have national media here. You're not going to know how to deal with it. And their staff, they got through it. We have a lot of people who have resigned. They can't take it anymore. It was all too much. So we're trying to find how do we make the job for those county elections officials easier to do their jobs, knowing we're going to have expanded absentee ballot usage compared to historical versus what happened in COVID.

And talking about those county officials, though, do you know someone named Elise Olenek? Alice. Alice. Yeah. Well, she's going to county. Yeah. Yeah. So Alice olenek alice is it alice yeah yeah well she's going to county yeah yeah so alice in the history of mankind it'll be the first thing in a section two case i know but go ahead correct so alice guinette though who is one of these local county officials who you talked about who you warned about there's a difference she's a county board of registrars,

elections directors, or we were doing that. So she's appointed by the Republican Party. So go ahead. I'll accept that she's appointed by the Republican Party. And she said 2020 was a terrible election cycle for the Republican Party. She said, I'm like a dog with a bone. I will not let them end this session, the General Assembly session, without changing some of these laws. They don't have to change all of them, but they have to change the major parts so that we at least have a shot at winning. I mean, when Republicans make comments like that, and then there are issues that you take issue with the bill that you just listed, isn't it fair to anybody else out there looking to say, look, they just changed some of these provisions to what they said they were going to do,

what Alice said she was going to do? What Alice wanted to do, she was also one who made a claim that there were more ballots than there were votes. And then she withdrew that. I mean, she's a hyper-partisan. And I get that. And like I said, it would be the front and center of a section two case. However, she's not in a position to actually do any of that. She's not a legislator. And again, making those statements makes it harder for me to come on here and tell y'all, this is not a voter suppression bill. I get it. It's terrible. I mean, when she said that, I went like this. I said, oh my God, just don't say things like that. I mean, thank you, whatever, but don't. But I mean, that's the idiotic part.

And one of my big problems with a lot of people have these discussions, especially when the president was saying don't use absentee. And the Republican Party of Georgia, they dropped the ball. They didn't do a ballot chase program. Their ballot curing program was weak compared to the Democratic Party. They didn't have one really and the democrats were prepared for this they built an entire system on this and then covet hit and they were ready to go and i told from my point of view as i was a republican political consultant before i did all this okay voting these are all just tools they're all hammers and screwdrivers use them don't use them and thinking you can change change the outcome by changing some of these rules is dumb.

Go and try to win more votes and spend your time and energy on that. So because I don't think at the end of the day, and I think the bigger part of this is if they did more, which, again, this bill doesn't do that much. I mean, you got to remember what they were talking about doing, which was eliminating no excuse absentee, cutting, eliminating Sunday voting, cutting back on the days of early voting. And if you all saw me on CNN, I said two months ago, cooler heads are going to prevail. You're going to have a bill that does some election administration stuff and probably cuts back on things that will allow other stuff. And on the whole, will expand voting access, which is what, in my opinion, this bill does on the whole. So we won't talk about Alice, but let's talk about what the General Assembly said, because I'll accept that maybe Alice went out on a limb and she said things and she has a history of saying things that she should. But this is what the General Assembly says in the preamble. They said,

following the 2018 and 2020 elections, there's a significant lack of confidence in the Georgia election systems. And one of the instances cited is many electors were concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud. And voter suppression, I think it's the rest of that. I can't remember. I'll concede that in addition to voter fraud, it does say voter suppression. But there was in 2018. I mean, I think the difference is, is that the Democrats didn't ask for this bill, though. I mean, this bill right here is not trying to cure any of the issues that Democrats are claiming.

There's no Democrats who support this bill. Well, and to be fair, Democrats complained about lines. There's a specific thing here I just discussed earlier to address line issues. Another thing that Democrats, Republicans agreed on was county election officials needed to have outside of general elections that one for 250 for the BNB usage flexibility in those things. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in here that if it hadn't been a voting bill a year before, a year after this election has happened, Democrats would have supported. But in fact, there's stuff in here from State Senator Jen Jordan, who's a Democrat, to allow for a better absentee ballot processing. So the final bill, we could have said, we're going to pay you $5 to vote. Democrats would have voted against it

because it was a Republican bill. But limiting absentee voting, though, and limiting Dropbox locations, though. It doesn't limit absentee voting, Ben. Let's go back. Reducing the period of absentee voting, which we just discussed how it reduces. How does that limit it? If it reduced it to like two days where it's unmanageable, that's one thing. But having a month of absentee voting is not an unmanageable thing. But why do it if it was previously the gold standard?

I literally just went over this about five minutes ago. I think it's easier for counties than we have one window to work in. I think that was exactly what I said. And this is one of the case. Our office was did in part work on that thing and say, this is a thing we should do for election administration purposes to lower that time down because it's easier to manage. And then cutting off one of the thing I forgot to mention when you talked about the 11 days out, the reason for that, and it's about the same as Florida, which everybody uses as the gold standard. I hate calling it the gold standard because that's always going to change.

Florida has this in large part because what we discovered in Georgia, if you requested your ballot prior to 10 days before the election or further out, 90% plus, I think 92% of those ballots were voted. If you requested it 10 days days before the election or further out, 92% or 90% plus, I think 92% of those ballots were voted. If you've requested 10 days or towards the election or less, only 52% of those were voted. So this is about protecting those people's franchise too. And if you get to that late point, then you have an entire week of early voting still available to you if you didn't get your request in in time. Because one of the issues we ran into was people requesting it really late and the post office being the post office, or they were kind of waiting for it to come in.

It just didn't get there in time. And they ended up not doing any voting at all. So this is about a franchise being able to protecting that and giving a manageable time for them to go vote. And let's talk about just a few other things in the bill. And I appreciate we're going through this in detail. I think this is an exercise that is going to be important. Gabriel's like, when the hell am I getting out of here? I bet it's soon, Gabriel. No, no, this is fine. This is, listen, I'm here to try to answer questions because when I don't, I'm a Southerner, all right? I'm born in Georgia. I'm tired of people saying that anything we do is based on a racist application of the law. I mean, it gets tiresome over time, okay? So yeah. But do you understand where it comes from? Because

the South has a significant racist history of having slaves and that wasn't too long ago. Us riots were in Boston. The LA riots were in LA. So that's not just the South. That's, there's racism that's existed across the United States. Not going to argue that point too hard, but because my governor has a Southern accent, they claim he's more racist than other people have done things like this. So I don't believe in those kind of things. So that's why I get frustrated. But I want to come on your show and be as honest and open as I can about this stuff and explain. This is not a racist voter suppression bill. This is a bill that's a legislation stuff.

It does a lot of things I wouldn't do. I would not have taken my boss off the chairmanship of the state election board. That was pure political power play because they were pissed about how he handled the election. One hundred percent. So are there any particular counties that you believe right now are particularly problematic and who are not efficient? There's part of the bill is Fulton. Fulton. The biggest one is Fulton, because we've got headlines going back to 1993 where they continually do things. I mean, they did a lot better this election cycle because we rode their ass and we put a state election board monitor on

and they're with them and they still mishandled things internally. Now, granted, they're a large county. They're going to have a different kind of set of issues to deal with, but they consistently do things poorly. And it's just, it's a function of size. It's a function of managerial skill. And, but they're one of the ones.

Another one that's past election cycle was Floyd County. And then there was Spalding County was the other one where we have some issues and Floyd and Spalding are Republican counties, but they're much smaller than Fulton, obviously. When we talk about the ban on mobile voting in this bill, why was there a ban on mobile voting? Now, I know the ban mobile voting was think, only used in Fulton County in the last election. But why ban that if the, you know, if people would say the effort is, let's make voting easier, have mobile voting booths. I'll put this into the way it's been explained to me, because this is not something that I was really utterly familiar with. Essentially, there is a concern that it could be used in an unfair manner where you could send the mobile voting into, as an example, only Republican areas or only Democrat areas and not making it fair.

And no one knew a way to do a rule on that. So they said cut it out altogether other than for emergency purposes, which is what the original mobile voting rule was about. They basically read it and said, well, it doesn't say we can't do this. But the intent of the legislature before was voting locations are buildings and places that people know where they are and stuff. And that was where that came from. Again, not one I would have really thought too much about, honestly, for me personally. But again, that was the rationale behind it. It was something that couldn't be regulated and used in a fair kind of way, potentially. Let's talk about the new ID requirement under this bill for absentee voting. Before there was a signature matching system when you would vote by absentee, you wouldn't need to

attach a driver's license or a state ID license. It was the signature match process. Don't say attach because there's nothing about attaching any image of that. So let's make sure your people understand that. And so I don't characterize under the new bill, it's been changed though, but it requires identification in the form of a license, in the form of a state ID card or some other number, not the actual license or an image of the license. It's just the number on that. And in Georgia, one of the reasons we can

do that is we've had automatic voter registration in Georgia since October of 2016, which is why we have, we are at 90% plus of our eligible voters are registered to vote. That's one of the big things. And that was initiated under Governor Kemp, actually, when he was Secretary of State. And because of that, we've expanded our voter rolls a lot. And in our voter registration system, 97 percent of all registered voters have a driver's license attached to them right now. Say that's that one more time. The last one that you just said of the over seven million, 97 percent have their driver's license or state ID number attached to their voter file. So that's how we can use this as a really good, unique identifier. We used it in our absentee ballot portal. And that's how I identified people that we built out for the COVID response. Last year, the Democrats, the Democrat Party of Georgia,

the Democratic Campaign Committee sued Georgia to do what? Get rid of signature match. And now they're coming back saying, you can't get rid of signature match. And now they're coming back saying you can't get rid of signature match. That's terrible. I don't think they're saying they love signature match. I think what they're saying is signature match is better than the existing than the change, which would require the voter ID, you know, but I'm not I'm not sure they're saying they love signature match. They're now defending it, saying you need to keep it so we can take her as a love or just like, I don't know. I guess the better of two, I guess the better, the better of two evils there. But I have that idea already. Okay. So that's 97%. So I'm all about big time solutions. And this is

97% of people have that. So the other 3%, you can use any of the HAVA ideas defined in the federal law, which can include even a utility bill. So that's really not that much of a barrier to get into this. And we've had voter ID to vote in person for nearly two decades. And there's not a single study that shows that suppresses anybody's vote so far. And it's been upheld by the Supreme Court because it doesn't suppress anybody's vote. So making the same level of identification available across every single voting type seems to be a fairness issue, but it also takes away the subjectivity of signature match. I mean, think about this if you're a county election director. You're getting a part-time employee in for $10 or $15 an hour.

You've got to train them. We had special training done with the GBI for those elections directors to what to look for for signature match, okay? Look for the swoops here. Look at the beginning. Look at the end versus look at this number. Is this number the same as this number? Yes. That person is the, is the person supposed to get the, supposed to get the ballot. It's a lot easier to manage and it doesn't provide any real hurdle to the 97% of voters. And then for the ballot itself, this is for the request side. The good part about the request side is you can do it electronically. So you can take a picture of your application with

whatever your state ID is that's not attached to that. So you can use like your college ID, if it's the University of Georgia or something like that, that's allowed. Or utility bill, if you don't have any kind of ID with your picture on this government issued. So you can send that in with that electronically, which is what a lot of people did. And that was one of the things the Democrats did a very good job on their ballot cures. They would take the ballot cure form, put the ID on it, take a picture of it and send that in. And that was still allowed. So technology allows for us to be used that way. On the absentee ballot itself, when it comes back in, we have the last four digits and the date of birth of ninety.9% of all the voters in the state. So when it gets down to that point, and let's say the high end, 25% of people will want to do this,

you're down to like less than 2,000 human beings who would have to do something different versus the 5 million that voted this past time. So we're really talking about a teeny tiny sliver. We're not talking about making hurdles for anybody, but everybody has to identify who they are in some way, shape or form. And this is a very easy, clean way to do it. And it exists because we have automatic voter registration, which we're the only state that has automatic voter registration, online voter registration, three weeks of early voting, two mandated Saturdays in the United States. We're the only ones that has that much voting access.

Were there any instances, though, in the other election that you identified of somebody using an absentee ballot and impersonating somebody else? Yes, so far, at least two dead people we know about. Then we have some other signature things we're investigating. If you were offered a cure and you didn't cure it, we're investigating was about 2,500 of those where they potentially could be that. Now And I'm not saying all 20 are, there's probably be a handful quite honestly at the end of the day, but yes, there were some people on the signature match side who did do that. And, and were they Democrats or Republicans or who did they vote for?

There's no way to know because you separate the ballot from that signature at that point. So you're not going to, you can't tie them back together. Now I do think that I don't want to say that cause I'm, I'm now I'm going into do think that, I don't want to say that because now I'm going into the rumor area. I don't want to say that. I want to say something factual. I'm not sure what the demography of this is. My best guess is Democrats do it, Republicans do it, and sometimes they're doing it because, oh, I think they think, oh, my sister's out of town, they would vote this way. It's not some kind of giant conspiracy of people out there doing thousands of these at a time. But taking away the subjectivity of signature match provides more confidence to more people, I think, on top of this.

And I was in favor of this even before all this. So there's got to be a better way than signature match because it is wildly subjective. where it says that any Georgian can have an unlimited number of challenges against the registration and voting rights of other fellow citizens. First off, do you know the provision I'm talking about? And what does that even mean? Well, there's two things about this. That is already the law. And you're already allowed unlimited challenges. And there's under state law, and it has been for decades there's two different ways you can challenge a voter on the voter rolls one is you challenge their ability to legally be on the roll itself which is like i know that ben doesn't live at 135

you know briar lane so i'm going to go to the county say look i know ben doesn't live there and they would challenge you to take you to a hearing at the board of elections you get notified and you have to prove potentially that you live there if they thought there was enough evidence from that person challenging you what we had this past time was outside state groups and some in state groups challenged thousands of people based solely on the national change of address okay so the second way and this is to remove them from roles. Now, if you challenge somebody to remove the roles, federal law, there's a blackout period.

You cannot do any removal from the roles or cancellation of voters within 90 days of a federal election. So in Georgia, that's essentially means in any even numbered year, we can't do remove anybody. Because take 2020. The original schedule for the presidential preference was in March. Then we had the May. What would have been in the May election was moved to June. And then we had the June runoff, which was in August.

And then at that point, you're 90 days out from the federal election for the presidency. And then you had the January 5th. So there was an entire year, any 90-day window, you couldn't have done any of that. However, there's a secondary challenge that says, I can challenge the right of this individual to cast a legal vote in this election because they don't meet all of the requirements of residency. They're still on the rolls, but they cannot cast a legally done ballot. That's been on the law, that's been in the books for years. So why they put this provision in there, I don't know, because there is no limit on them right now, because that's why we have one or two voters challenging thousands of these people at a time. It seemed like overkill to a degree. debate out there about the removal of the powers of the Secretary of State and transferring that

to somebody who's appointed by the General Assembly. Let me first ask you, I mean, do you believe that the Secretary of State was not, it's a loaded question considering you work for the Secretary of State, but, you know, do you believe the Secretary of State? I mean, is there anything in your mind that justified stripping any of the powers away from the secretary of state based on how the secretary of state conducted themselves in the prior election and runoffs? No. And now having that power shift to who the General Assembly will appoint an individual who they claim to be nonpartisan. Is that the basic statement? They hadn't changed the rest of the state election board at that point still. That would give the General Assembly essentially three appointments and the Democratic Party one appointment and the Republican Party one appointment for a total of five altogether. I think one of our first and early debates on Twitter was you referred to this board

as a nonpartisan board. Is that a bipartisan board? There's one right on there. Okay. But that's a little misleading when you call it a bipartisan board when it's four Republicans and one Democrat. I mean, that's like we're having a very bipartisan discussion now with me, Brett Jordy and yourself, which is, but if we were to set there quiet as mice, I mean, put it this way, if I were to have a vote with them of who's right, they would vote for me on this one. And you would lose the vote three to one every time. I don't know about three to one. They might put it on you in a heartbeat and you never know.

So using this example, the meme and my brothers versus you, if this was the composition of every vote that would be taken, I believe I would win every vote. So when we refer to this board, the secretary is a Republican. It will probably be a point. I mean, here's my reality. If you look at the rules around that, Ben, I don't know what human being who knows anything about elections fits that bill of not been involved in an election, not paid for an election, not given money. I mean, it's a unicorn just about who can fit that role, I think. But here's my thing, which is actually a compliment of you and the Secretary of State is the Secretary of State, though,

exercised in a bipartisan fashion, a principled position in the face of Donald Trump. The General Assembly wants to remove him particularly. Like, it's not a matter of the Secretary of State in general. They want to remove, you know, no offense to you. They want you and him to get the hell out of their way so they can do what they want to do. I mean, don't you see that that's what they really are trying to do here is target him? They're of the president's do what they want to do. A lot of the stuff that people were claiming on Twitter, that they can throw out election results and change certifications,

the secretary of state still is the individual with the power to certify or not certify elections. That did not change through this. The thing that people are focusing on, part of this came from something that we wanted and asked for. Because like I said before, we have this responsibility for county actions. We have no authority to do anything to them in any real way. You can cite them to the SCB. You can find them.

And it's kind of like what happened in Fulton County in June. They had a complete meltdown. Now that's not a hundred percent their fault. A lot of that was COVID driven. And we came to them with like, we could have fined them like a million dollars. We said, we don't want to do that. That's just changing taxpayer money from one bucket to another bucket. And it's not going to change the behavior of your elections department. So we put in a state election board monitor to work with them there.

What we want to be able to do is what we asked for originally was this. We can, we want to be able to fire the elections board or the elections director, mainly elections directors, and let those boards or those county commissions hire somebody. What they've done here, I think, is a little bit different. And let's put in that interim person, but only after a lot of due process goes through. And it's going to take weeks and months at a time if you understand how government generally works. And then even then, the county can appeal to superior court to not have it done. So it's not like in the timeframe of a week

where it takes a certified election, which we also cut that time back, which I think was an important change too, to where it's two full weeks before the state does it. If you're doing it for the county, you've got to do it within days. And there's just no physical way to do the performance evaluation.

And that performance evaluation is going to be done by an SOS employee and two county elections directors. There's not a way to do what people are worried about Trump trying to do this last time based on this rule. But you understand that this rule is specifically targeted at your boss because he stood up to Donald Trump. You understand that, though, right? No, I absolutely have said that. I've said it on Twitter. I've said it on CNN. One hundred percent. This is political retribution. No question. It's a pound of flesh for a bunch of the Republican voters out there who think they were cheated by Brad Raffensperger. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind. One hundred percent. I totally agree with that characterization of it. But not just political retribution, though. Political retribution for standing up,

for you standing up, for Raffensperger standing up to the biggest lie and the biggest threat to our democracy in the history pretty much of the United States. You understand that, right? Oh, no. Listen, let me say again, I have repeatedly said I agree with this. You're preaching to the choir. We agree with those things. You understand that if the Georgia Assembly is making these changes to penalize a human being yourself, the Secretary of State for preserving democracy, that people like us and people out there would go, wait a minute, maybe you have some designs here to overthrow democracy. I'm not arguing. It looks terrible. And you're worried, well, if they're

doing this, what's the final outcome? That's a logical thing to ask that question. My point is the logical outcome some people have jumped to on Twitter, because that's like, you know, the fountainhead of all logic is Twitter. And, you know, it kind of reminds me of, I don't know how old y'all are. I know that Brett and Jordy are a lot younger. I'm 35, 30, and 27. You never watched the old Hanna-Barbera

Super Friends cartoon from Saturday mornings. I'm 50, so my Saturday mornings were always cartoons. And they had this thing that I started referring to as I got older,

Super Friends logic. When you're six, it made perfect sense that the Joker escaped to 10,000 years in the future because the book had 10,000 pages Batman was looking at. It made perfect sense when you were six. When you're 12, you're like, that doesn't make any sense at all. So I call it super friends logic. So Twitter is the central focus of super friends logic, you know, where you can see one thing and you think, I know it's going to go that way. So I'm going to find a way to rationalize it that way. There's not a way under this bill, the law, the way it's written. And we have to probably get the

rules around this. There's no time to change the certification and throw out votes and do all that's just not reality. Now I get, it can be a scary thing to look at at if you don't understand that. That's why I've been so explicit going, it will take weeks and months to do this. And certifications go faster than that. And I don't see a superior court saying, yes, go ahead and just throw all that stuff out. It just doesn't make, that doesn't ring true to me. Although I get where the fear can come from in a highly partisan situation when people on both sides seeing it that way. Yes, I will admit that the same way I have fear and trepidation over the terrible nature of H.R. One and what it's supposed to do. Did you ever think, though, in the and we'll have you come on for the H.R.

One discussion next time, because I think we've had a good one. But did you ever think, though, did you ever believe that you would see the president of the United States encouraging and aiding and abetting individuals to climb the Capitol building and try to kill American politicians? Like, could you ever conceive of that happening growing up in civics class? I mean, I worked on Capitol Hill and that's like hallowed ground to me and i was vibratingly pissed off i mean if you go back to my facebook page that day i'm like this is an insurrection any of you sons of bitches who are voting to overturn the election or supporting the insurrection and you know one of those individuals jody heist has announced against secretary raphinsberger to run for that spot for secretary of state.

And he was one of the ones who was leading the charge. And I think he got pissed off because I called him irresponsible because he tweeted out some flat out disinformation. And again, that was one that set a little closer to me because I ran the campaign for the first Republican to win the 10th congressional district back in 1994. And my exact words were, I knew that man well, he would never have acted as irresponsibly as you're acting. And so, no, it would never have occurred to me in a million years that that would possibly ever happen. And when I saw the impeachment that Trump's people and Trump, the original rally was supposed to be January 23rd or something or something around there.

And they moved it back from that to January 6th. That was a big tell that this was coordinated to a degree from my point of view. You think Trump should have been impeached? Morally, probably my underlying issue with that was doing that at that time inflamed things more, it do it later you know i don't i don't agree with the argument that he's not in office you can't impeach him because there's too many historical precedents where people are out of office they get peached anyway

so you think he should be criminally charged for what he did i'm not a lawyer man you're the lawyer what do you think i mean look at the end of the day, yes, is what I think. OK, I don't know. The answer is yes. I think one of the issues is there was an incredible national trauma we all experienced. And people like you, people like the General Assembly of your state punishing, which is the only way to be described as punishing somebody like the Secretary of State, demoting him for standing up to democracy. whether we're Democrats or just human beings watching it saying, okay, look, there's going to be due process. Trust us. There's going to be a whole court system. It's actually not going to happen this way. And I just, I'm telling you, it's going to take weeks for the process to happen. Like we just saw fascism almost conquer America. And so that's just why I don't think it's Twitter. I mean, I don't think it's Twitter.

I think it's us seeing what we saw in January. Deep hyperbole at that point. I don't think fashion is going to take over America just because they took over the building for an hour or two. It was terrible. I'm not arguing that point. But I also said it was an insurrection that day. I said it was a dark day. But I also said this is going to show the resilience of our systems coming out of this.

So that was one of the things that made me feel better about it. One of my big underlying concerns about this is both the far left and the far right. I know we get the whataboutism and, you know, both sides and all that kind of crap. They're undermining the law. Are you about to drop Antifa? No, I'm not going to do that crap. Listen, I consider myself to be a realistic idealist still, and maybe I'm a unicorn. It never occurred to Secretary Rapsberger and I to do anything else other than follow the law.

It just didn't occur to us. And that's kind of what Republicans were always sort of law and order, you know, stand up kind of good government guys. That was kind of our when I came up, that's what it was. It was not this bomb throwing all government is bad. I mean, I grew up I also worked in a city council where you had to actually, you know, get things done and then be held accountable to the people who you actually have to see at public to the grocery store. You know, when your kids go to go to church and school together and that kind of stuff. So this was the level of vitriol and hell craziness is not something that sits well with me. People say, how can you still be Republican? I was like, well, because I've been one for essentially 41 years. I worked on my first campaign 35 years ago.

I'm not going to be run out by people who are looney tunes or bat crap crazy. I mean, the same way I'm sure there's Democrats that are going, are looney tunes or bat crap crazy. I mean, the same way, I'm sure there's Democrats that are going, wow, AOC is bat crap crazy, but I'm like, you know, Joe Manchin. So I'm not going to be run out of my party by that. Cause if I am, what are we leaving behind? What am I leaving behind? Cause I still, there's a lot of things that I care about that are important to me that are, that this is the vehicle to do it. We're not Europe. You know, we don't have 27 parties where you can find this exactly fits me perfectly. These are my people. I can go here and get my

four seats in the parliament and fight for my stuff. We have two, we have a bifurcated system. You got a center right and a center left party, and they kind of do this thing back and forth. So, you know, and the way the structure of our thing being first across the line in every state, and then the way the presidential thing is set up, we're going to have two parties. And I'm going to fight for the sanctity and sanity of my party, which means I'm going to argue against things that I do that I think are crazy and stupid. And I'm going to also argue against things that Democrats do, I think are crazy and stupid. But we used to have sort of a joint thing of going, we want everybody to be able to live the American dream, get the job they want, have their kids be educated, have people be safe, have the streets be paved.

And now it seems like we're not, we're even arguing over some of those things, which is insanity to me, but we're now getting into deeper stuff. I apologize for going. No, look, I think it's a perfect way to conclude our conversation. I think that the conversation we have shows that while we have disagreements, we can talk about the issues. I think those listening to the podcast can judge for themselves. After you're off, we'll take a vote, a secret vote

here amongst the brothers of who won this debate on a bipartisan basis. We have a bipartisan commission here. We're going to assemble a bipartisan commission after you leave and we'll determine if I won or you won. But in all seriousness, Gabrielle Sterling, thank you so much for joining the Midas Touch podcast. Thank you for sitting here for approximately an hour going through every question, indiligence. Thank you for responding. We look forward to talking with you more. We look forward to talking with you more we look forward to more of your posts about uh pig bellies and bacon and barbecues on twitter i'm educating you all about this stuff i guess so

thank you so much we can have a bipartisan consensus on bacon. All right. Well, when I, when I'm in, when I'm in Georgia, we'll, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll have a barbecue together and you can educate me. I'll educate you. And then I'll give you the results of our secret ballot that we're going to take. Thank you so much, Gabe. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. Appreciate Welcome back to the Midas Touch podcast. We are honored to have Mark Elias on the show. Mark Elias, as you know, is an attorney who specializes in election law, voting rights, and redistricting. He is the founder of Democracy Docket. Mark, thank you so much for joining us

on the Midas Touch podcast. Thanks for having me. Mark, you're going to really like this. So before you join, this is a two-part episode. So the first part of the episode, we spent about an hour with Gabriel Sterling talking about the Georgia SB202. My condolences. And Gabriel says, look, Sterling talking about the Georgia SB 202. I can.

And, and, and, and, and Gabriel says, look, there may be parts of this bill that are inconvenient to voters, but I think I'm, I'm saying what Gabriel says,

but I think that inconvenience is not voter suppression. Mark is SB 202. Is that a voter suppression bill? Yes, it is a voter suppression bill Mark, is SB 202, is that a voter suppression bill? Yes, it is a voter suppression bill. I mean, the question I think I would ask back is, why are you passing laws to inconvenience voters? I mean, set aside for a moment that I think it's much more than an inconvenience, but let's just take that at face value. The governor of the state said recently, admitted really recently, that this is not an anti-voter fraud bill. Okay. So let's take off the table that. Okay. I don't think it's an anti, I actually agree with Kemp. I actually don't think this addresses fraud either.

So it's not aimed at fraud and it aims or inconveniences voters. So why are you inconveniencing voters? We asked him that. And I think his response was there were certain areas of the bill that he said he didn't agree with. I would have written it a different way. I had other views about it, but, you know, this is definitely not doing any voter suppression. In fact, he says that this makes voting more efficient. It opens up absentee voting. Is he telling us the truth there or is that inaccurate again? Look, he can't have it both ways, right? So you can't both acknowledge that it inconveniences voters and say it's not a voter suppression bill.

The fact is that inconveniencing voters is what voter suppression is, right? When you make voting harder for people, fewer people are going to vote. It's very easy for people like me and people like you, and probably in good faith, people like him to think, well, I'll vote anyway. I'll vote anyway. But you know what? For someone who is working two jobs and doesn't get time off, the difference between convenient and inconvenient is the difference between voting and not voting. The difference for an African-American voter between being able to wait on a 10-minute line or wait on a 60-minute line may be the difference between voting and not voting. The difference between having a bottle of water in the heat may be the difference between staying in line

and leaving and not voting. So to say that it's inconvenience under misses the point, which is that it is the very fact that it is inconvenient that is going to cause the poor, the young and minority voters to vote less because they are less able to weather that inconvenience as part of their daily lives. And we're seeing bills like SB 202 that's not unique to Georgia. Why are we seeing these bills, Mark, across the country being implemented like SB 202, which is making both voting more inconvenient and suppressing the vote, which I agree with you are intertwined concepts for the reasons you just stated. Yeah. I mean, you know, under, under his rationale,

a poll tax is just an inconvenience. You know, I mean, like suppressive laws are not just things that are absolute bars to voting. Suppressive laws are things that make voting harder. So why are we seeing this? We're seeing this for two reasons. We're seeing this, number one, because Republicans are trying to delay inevitable demographic shift in the composition of the electorate. So it is no surprise that Georgia elected its first Black senator ever, that it voted for that African-American voting strength was both at a all-time high, but also were able to elect their candidate of choice, both in that Senate race and the other Senate race and for a president. And that immediately thereafter, we see this. So one reason for this is Republicans

fearing the changed demographic of the electorate and rather than competing for their votes, trying to cling to a, trying to fight that demographic change. The other is that they are terrified of their voters having lied to those voters now for months and months on end. They are now terrified to tell those voters the truth. You know, they allowed themselves to lie to voters in the run up to the 2020 election about vote by mail. They allowed themselves to continue to support Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election of all, which was that they could somehow stop the electoral electoral college vote from being certified in the Capitol. And that led to an insurrection and death. And now those same cowardly legislators around the country are unable to tell those voters the truth, which is that there is no fraud. There is no need to restore

integrity in election. Donald Trump simply lost the election because more voters voted for Joe Biden. And so instead, they are catering to that lie by continuing to suggest that somehow the election laws were insufficient. And that's a really dangerous thing for democracy. Which bills and which provisions that you're seeing around the country are kind of the most concerning we should all be looking at and what steps can be taken to combat those? Yeah, great question. So one of the messages that I think is really important to deliver is it's not just Georgia. So Georgia is a bad law and it's a law we're suing to block. But before there was Georgia, there was Iowa. Iowa passed a very suppressive voting law weeks before Georgia.

We're also suing them that curtailed early voting, curtailed, made it harder to register, criminalized activity by election officials if they help voters too much. Also cut the number of days of early vote. And just because I suppose they could, they shortened Election Day. Like literally they chopped an hour off of Election Day. So obviously that's a law I'm worried about. I'm focused very much on Arizona, where right now the legislature is considering a series of voting laws that would both purge voters and also make it harder to vote by mail. Texas already has some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country, and they are introducing and considering laws that would make things significantly worse. Florida, a state that actually had made progress in their voting laws, looks like they may take a step back. Montana is a state where, you know, no evidence of fraud, no evidence of regularity. The legislature there looks like it may restrict same-day registration on election day or election day registration. So it's a New Hampshire targeting student voting.

So that's probably the ones that right now as I sit here, I'm most focused on. But honestly, the list grows literally every day. Are you concerned, though, with the current composition of the Supreme Court and based on certain rulings that they've had recently, that the audience there is not going to be receptive to challenges to these voter suppression laws and that they may allow these voter suppression laws to stand once they reach the Supreme Court stage? Yes, but I don't let that paralyze me. You know, I mean, the fact is the courts are what the courts are. Right. So, you know, let me say a few things about that to elaborate, though. One is that the Supreme Court

doesn't take all that many cases. Right. So like, you know, we need to keep this in perspective. The Supreme Court hears, you know, 70, 80 cases a year out of thousands and thousands. But you could broaden the question and say, do you worry about the lower courts? And the answer is yes. So it's not just the Supreme Court. But look, the job of the courts are to protect fundamental rights. And the most fundamental of all rights is the right to vote. It is the right that the U.S. Supreme Court said in the 1960s is the right

that from which all other rights derive. Ultimately, if the political branches fail voters, if the political branches suppress the votes of black, brown, and young voters. It is the job of the courts to step in. And so I'm not unrealistic. I'm not here to say, you know, the courts are the perfect solution. They're not, but they are there. It is their job to do the right thing. And so we're going to press our cases there just as we did in 2019 and 2020. We did better in 2019 and 2020 in court than people thought we would, than frankly, I thought we would. And, you know, we're going to keep pressing it, but no, it's not, you know, I worry about it every day. As you mentioned before, a lot of these laws seem to disproportionately affect minority voters. And I've seen many people, including us,

including Stacey Abrams, have called these bills Jim Crow 2.0, which is a term that Sterling, when we spoke to him, took great issue with. Do you agree with that characterization of these voter suppression laws? Yes, I do. And in what ways? Just how they're targeted and disproportionately affect these communities? Yeah. I mean, the fact is, you know, let's look at the Georgia bill that they are, that he is defending. It has new burdensome requirements for absentee voting. Now, Kemp said, this is not an anti-fraud. This is not about fraud. So when you saw increased voter participation by mail, and in you saw increased voter participation by mail, and in particular, increased voter participation

by young voters and black voters by mail in Georgia, why do you make it more burdensome? You may not like calling it Jim Crow 2.0. You may not like the term voter suppression, but why did you do that? When you restrict the number of ballot drop boxes. So one of the things that is frustrating to me about the way the media sometimes reports on voting restriction bills is people look at the point A to point B effects of voting laws. So you say, okay,

there are burdensome idea requirements for absentee voting. That is going to be suppressive. And the answer is yes, that is. Yeah. But you know what else it's going to do? It's going to make more people vote in person, right? Because some number of people are not going to be able to meet that, are not going to be comfortable voting by mail. So they'll vote in person.

Right. When you restrict drop boxes, what's going to happen? Well, more people are going to vote in person, right? Because some number of people are now not going to trust their ballot in the mail. When you prohibit the state from distributing unsolicited absentee ballot applications, right? When you don't send applications out, what's going to happen? More people are going to vote in person, right? So now when you look at the data of Georgia, we sued Georgia over long lines in the primary in 2020. And what they found is that if you were in a 90% black precinct, a precinct where 90% or more of the voters were black, the average wait time was 51 minutes. Do you know what it was for white voters? Six. Wow. Okay. So now you've taken

these provisions, which in and of themselves are burdensome to use the term that I guess he used. And you have, and they don't just have the direct effect. They, they've now just pushed more people to vote in person. And we know that there is already a huge racial disparity in the lines of in-person voting. So that's going to increase that disparity. And then what did they do? No water and food on lines. So it's not just no water and food on lines in a vacuum. It's not just restricting drop boxes in a vacuum. It is the context by which these all work together to effectuate this. Now, the last thing I'd say about his objection is that I assume what he would say in response to that. He doesn't like Jim Crow 2.0 because it connotes intentionality. Okay. And here's what I'd say. In 2013, the North Carolina, understandably not Georgia, North Carolina Republicans passed a voting law that they too said was just a collection of things that, you know, was not intentionality. The fourth circuit found that that law after discovery and after some testimony and email of the state legislators came out, it turns out that the Fourth Circuit said that that law was passed, quote, with surgical precision. That's their terms. Surgical precision aimed at black voters.

In fact, what it turned out is that they had scored the effect of each provision on black voters. And they chose the ones that would inconvenience black voters the most while inconveniencing white voters the least. Now, that's North Carolina. That's not Georgia. And I want to be clear. I'm not saying that I have that evidence in Georgia. I'm not saying that it exists in Georgia.

But what I can tell you is that, you know, there is recent history to suggest that state legislators understand the dynamic nature of these provisions. Right. And so, you know, count me skeptical. And one of the things they use, I think, protecturally is and we we heard this was we need to increase the efficiencies. There are some counties that are not as effective. You know, there are some counties that are not living up to its obligations to create efficient election systems. And then, you know, when I asked him, I said, well, which county are you referring to? Is there a specific county? He's like Fulton, you know, and, you know, and it's obvious that Fulton, where there's a large degree of black and brown voters, you know, is the you know, is the target.

And the idea of even removing election officials, which the bill permits in certain counties that are, quote unquote, inefficient, is another way of saying, how do we seize control over Fulton to preclude where Biden got most of his votes from. Yeah, I mean, obviously. And again, my question to him is one of the things the bill does is it restricts private donations to counties to administer elections. How are you possibly going to make counties more efficient by starving them of money? How do you make counties more efficient by taking away drop boxes? How do you make counties more efficient by limiting their ability boxes? How do you make counties more efficient by limiting their ability to send out absentee ballot applications proactively? Like how do any of these provisions we've just talked about, how do any of them make Fulton County or any other county in the state more efficient? They don't. They burden these counties.

They are trying to make voting harder and they're not trying to make these counties have the tools to make voting more accessible. And believe me, there is no one who is going to say Mark Elias is an apologist for Fulton County or any other county. I sue counties. I've sued counties in Georgia. I've sued Democratic secretaries of state. I've sued Democratic counties because I'm pro voter and I don't accept the excuse of counties and states when they say they can't do better. But this bill is not about helping counties do better. This bill is about hurting voters and robbing counties of the tools and the resources they need to do better. No doubt about it. You know, one of the things we got

into with him was the idea of these bipartisan boards. And then we said, okay, well, what's the makeup of these bipartisan boards that you're saying? He goes, four Republicans, one Democrat. And we're like, well, our joke was, okay, at the end of our debate right now, we're going to hold a vote. It's going to be the three of us brothers and you, and we'll decide who won the debate by our bipartisan board. And we'll see where the results land. Where do you think we're going to the debate by our bipartisan board and we'll see where the results land. Where do you think we're going to end up with that bipartisan board?

And so there's a lot of skepticism. There's a lot of information out there. And we just want to kind of clarify it with you. And you're the foremost expert on this. And I think, by the way, can I just praise you for that? Not for saying I'm the foremost expert, but that's a place where language matters, right? If you tell the non-attentive public, and I'm not saying your listeners are not attentive. They're obviously listening to podcasts about politics, but most

people who are not digging into the details, they hear the term a bipartisan board. And what does it conjure up in their mind? Right. It conjures up in their mind. It's three, three, or it's two, two or four exactly so good for you in in in calling that out because like that's just like that's like nonsense we're like we're like who's who's gonna win this debate here okay it's gonna be the three of us and you will decide who won the debate do you think that is fair yes or no we're gonna call it bipartisan and we're gonna call it bipartisan because you're involved that was that was the whole concept it'll be we'll call it bipartisan we'll call it nonpartisan. But at the end of the day, it's going to be the Republicans who are going to pick them.

And we're going to say that they're that they're nonpartisan and that they're bipartisan. have allowed Trump's attempts to overthrow the election to succeed or give him more likelihood for those claims of a fraudulent election to overturn the results to succeed in 2020? I think it would not have succeeded in the end because I think the courts actually were, the courts were standing up in that instance for the election results. But not every election is going to be 2020 where the candidate wins by 7 million votes. There are four states. It's not down to one single state. The state is not a few hundred votes.

So I always tell people elections are a matter of inches, not yards. And so it's a bad question to ask, you know, do I think that the composition of the election board matters in a 50,000 or 100,000 vote race? Probably not. You know, like I don't go that far. But boy, I just dealt with an election in Iowa with six votes. I've dealt with elections that are a few hundred votes, you know, and so we need to keep in mind that in those cases where you're talking about inches, not yards, who is, you know, who is the boss of the county matters, you know, in Florida in 2000, I'm sorry, in Florida in 2018, Andrew Gillum lost by four tenths of a percent and Bill Nelson, the U.S. senator, lost by one tenth of a percent.

So a Senate seat went Republican and a governor's mansion went Republican or stayed Republican. And in that in a race like that, does the who controls the county counting process and the processing matter? You know, yeah, a lot more than than it will. So I always think I think looking at 2020 is a bad example, because honestly, it wasn't that close of an election. HR1, the For the People Act, praised by the left as like a savior of democracy, as the solution, as the antidote to these voter suppression laws vilified on the right. What's the truth about HR1? What are the provisions? What do our listeners need to know about it? And why do we need to fight for it? So H.R. 1 is a common sense bill that we need to pass. You know, I wish it was not the case that we needed to pass it. And a few years ago, I would not have said we needed it. The fact is that for a long time, there was a rocky but steady path towards passing voter-centric legislation in states.

And that tide has now turned hard the other way. So we need H.R. 1 because it sets minimum guide rails for states as to what voting rights need to be protected in their states. It's sad that we need H.R. 1, but at this point it is vital to our ongoing democracy. I am worried that without HR one and the voting provisions in it, we will continue to see a severe erosion of democracy that is targeted at black, brown, and young voters. And we will cease to have really anything approaching consent of the governed. I think your listeners can look up and try to find an instance where I have spoken out publicly in favor or against any piece of legislation. It's not something I normally engage myself in. But in this instance, I've made an exception because it is so important for democracy. Which provisions do you think are the kind of most common sense and most important that is kind of from the

right side, from the GOP side, that they're attacks that are like, why wouldn't you be for this if you weren't trying to suppress elections? Like, are there some that just stand out as like, come on, this is just so obvious? Yeah. I mean, you know, I would say that requiring that states not reject. I mean, this is actually this actually ties to Georgia. So I'll give you a really good example. So lots of states had were rejecting vote by mail ballots and absentee ballots using really arbitrary sort of junk science signature matching standards. Like they were just like willy-nilly throwing out ballots and it was disproportionately impacting in a real way Black and Latinx voters and young voters. The data was

really clear. So HR1 puts in place some pretty simple things like no one's ballot should be thrown out unless election officials of both parties examine the signature. Right. Like, you know, like there should be training and uniform standards for that. And revolutionary voters need to be told that their ballot may not count. Now, that may seem like a simple thing. And in fact, it was so not controversial that when I sued Georgia over this, Georgia settled with me because Georgia was like, well, yeah, we probably do need

uniform standards and we probably do need to notify voters that were tossing out their ballots. The Republican secretary of state settled the lawsuit with me. Donald Trump attacked that. In fact, on the infamous phone call, he is attacking the signature matching court settlement. The Republicans have vilified this.

H.R. 1 codifies that. But why would why wouldn't you want voters to know that their ballot isn't going to be counted because some untrained election official thought two signatures didn't match. Right. Shifting gears a little bit slightly here. So it's obvious that these anti-democracy news stations, the Fox News, the OANs, the Newsmax, they help spread and propagate the big lie. They've been sued. It came out this week that Fox News is being sued by Dominion for like one point six billion dollars for defamation. Now they go and they argue in court. Oh, no, no serious person believes what we're saying. And it's taking it as news. You know, we're an entertainment network. Well, Sidney Powell, who I think you're familiar with, also has a lawsuit against her sort of, you know, along the same lines.

Hey, you've defamed us. You spread the big lie. You don't have any proof of this. Are these lawsuits going to go anywhere? Are these people going to be held accountable in your opinion? Yeah, look, I think that these defamation lawsuits have probably done more good than anything else in shutting down the propagation of disinformation. You know, there was all this focus on disinformation campaigns and how to combat it and, you know, don't repeat the lie and the role of social media and all that. Hats off to the lawyers for these voting companies, because I think, you know, I think that they've had a real impact and I do think they're going to win. I mean, I think that they I think

that they are going to win in their lawsuits. And I think that what is scary for the defendants is that oftentimes in a defamation lawsuit, you worry about two things. You worry that you're going to lose on the merits, and then you worry about damages. And in a normal case, you say, okay, maybe we lose on the merits, but really how much is it going to cost us? Like how much did they, how much, how much were the brothers really harmed by me saying bad things about them? Like, what was it worth that, you know, people who didn't like them already didn't like them. People who liked them already liked them.

Maybe they got some additional publicity for their podcasts. So what was the harm? The difference here is these, these voting companies actually can show that they suffered real harm in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars because their voting equipment has to be purchased by Democratic and Republican election officials. So I think it's a really, really significant set of lawsuits that are going to have wide ranging consequences before it's all done. And what does it say, like a person like Sidney Powell, who then goes on to argue the Tucker Carlson Fox News defense that no serious person can take her serious? Look, because I think that, again, she's got to either be able to prove that what she said was

not defamatory, which I think it was. I think her lawyers, from what they filed, I think they think it was, or that that didn't cause damages. So the way, one way you get out from a defamatory statement is you say, look, it was, no one could take, think I was serious. I'll give you an example. So if I right now said on your podcast that you are the worst, most corrupt podcasters I've ever spoken to. If you suit for defamation, one of the things that I'd say in defense is like, look, this was hyperbole. Like, no one really thinks I meant literally that you're the worst, right?

They just think like, you know, or if I called you a crook, like no one thinks I'm actually saying you're a crook. It's just, it's hyperbole. So her defense is like, no one could think that what I was saying was actually true. They understand it. It's just kind of like, you know, the kind of hyperbole that goes on in politics. And I don't think that's going to succeed, but that's, I think all she's got left to argue. I had one quick question going back to just the, the HR1 piece of it, the idea of prohibiting states from requiring ID for mail-in voting. There are a lot of people who say, or a lot of people who are just curious out

there when the GOP says, well, look, everybody has IDs or should have an ID. That's not a big issue. Just attach it, just write it. What do you have to hide? Just do it. Why is that an issue? And what's the argument from this bill's perspective and your perspective as a litigator in this area? Yeah. So look, the absentee ballot ID laws are particularly pernicious and they are much, much more pernicious than in-person ID laws. I'm not a huge fan of in-person ID laws, but if you look at the litigation I bring, it doesn't tend to emphasize, except in the most egregious instances, those laws. The reason why that's different with absentee voting or mail-in voting is that you're not actually sending, you're not actually showing someone your ID.

You're actually having to make a copy of it and send it in. So number one, it means you need to make a copy of it and send it in. So number one, it means you need to have a copy machine and a printer, right? You need to be able to physically do that. And most of your audience don't have home printers and copy machines. Like that is a, that is not a ubiquitous piece of technology for people. And so that is problem number one. Problem number two is that, and there's a fair amount of social science on this, that people are less interested in producing a physical copy of personal identifying information than they are showing it, right? So it's one thing to show

someone your driver's license. It is another thing to send a physical copy because of risks of identity theft and the like. And since these IDs are now all going to be copied in envelopes that are going to be marked, so like literally it will be marked as an absentee ballot because that election mail is already marked. By including, if people trying to do harm know that in each and every one of them there is a copy of a driver's license, the risk of identity theft becomes a really, really significant one. And now how might you combat that? Oh, I don't know. You might use Dropboxes. But guess what? But guess what?

They limited Dropboxes, right? Like one of the ways you might say, look, we're going to solve the, that is, we're not going to make people put their IDs in an envelope that goes in a mailbox that someone can take out of your driveway. We're going to put them in secure drop boxes, but lo and behold, they did that. So again, it's another example of where these provisions are reinforcing of one another. Just what about the, to the argument that Gabriel makes is look, in this Georgia bill, we took out the requirement that you actually have to do a photocopy and we just make you write the actual number of the ID. Does that change anything more? No, because first of all, again, same thing. People are not going to want to give, put their, their driver's license number in a piece of mail that can be. So even if it's not a physical copy, people are not going to

want to do that. Number one. Number two is you're going to have a not insignificant number of people who transpose numbers, who don't get the digits right, you know, who misread where on your driver's license the number is. You know, I'm looking for, I'm not going to hold it up to the camera because I don't know whether you're, but like I look at mine and there's like, there's a number. Right. And then further down, there are places where there are, there are other numbers. Then at the very, very bottom on the Virginia driver's license under my signature is another number, which I actually have no idea what that number is attempting to be, but it could arguably, you could look at my driver's

license and there are at least three places on a Virginia driver's license that I could argue would be the number that I would put down. And they are all different numbers. Right. No doubt about the potential for confusion there. Mark, I want you to have a chance to brag a little bit here. So we were watching you give us the continuous count of your legal battles against Trump. What's your record at this point against the Trump campaign and all the election lawsuits? So we can count two ways. In 2019 and 2020, I was involved in 173 lawsuits. We won 118 of them, I think, in the post-election period. So starting November, just looking at the Trump lawsuits starting post-November, there were 65 post-election

lawsuits. Donald Trump won one of them, and we won all the others. Wow. The one he won, and by the way, the one that he won, like I disagreed with him, with them on the law, but they, the question was how long in Pennsylvania does a voter who needs to cure a absentee ballot have? Do they have six days after the election or nine days after the election? So we've, the state said it was nine. Trump sued to say it was six. We defended the nine. The court said it was six. I'm not really sure how many, if anyone, cured their ballot days seven, eight,

and nine in a presidential election. So it didn't involve a material number of votes it's like a a one with an asterisk yeah i mean i mean it's kind of a weird win right it's like i know what attorney i would want to have on my side i'll just grow growing up growing up the brothers and i were really competitive and anytime one of us would win we'd play a song our listeners know what we play we are the champions by queen would you play a song after every know what we play. We are the champions by Queen. Would you play a song after every win or would you do something after every win? I would tweet. It's a good way to do it. Mark, where could our listeners follow Democracy Docket? How could they support the movement? It was the number one question that we got when we last had a Zoom

meeting. We do regular Zoom meetings with our followers and our donors a lot. And the one thing that they said was, how could we support voting rights and fight against voter suppression? I said, it's not really our thing. I said, follow Mark Elias. Anything Mark Elias says, do. How could they follow you? If you want to follow Democracy Docket, you can follow it on Twitter, on Instagram, on YouTube at democracy docket. You can go to the website, democracy docket.com, sign up for our newsletter. There's a place to support the website and its activities there. But really the biggest thing people can do is to speak out, you know, tell your family,

your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues, your customers, your listeners that that voting rights matters and voter suppression is not OK, because what you guys are doing by by speaking out in the town square and saying this is not OK, you know, is is the most important thing people can do. Some people like you are going to have a big microphone. Some people are going to have a really small microphone, but it's important that everybody does it. There you have it, Mark Elias. Thank you for coming on the Midas Touch podcast. Hope to speak with you soon. Thank you very much. We'll be right back after this. Welcome back to the Midas Touch podcast.

Two incredible conversations. I felt that those were both very candid, very honest, very revealing conversations. I hope that you all learned a ton. I know we did. We have very strong views about protecting democracy, about protecting voting rights. Ben, I mean, killer job. Yeah, man. Ben, masterclass right there in litigation. That was awesome. We let Ben use his litigation skills to debrief Gabriel Sterling on this voter suppression bill, what we consider to be a voter suppression bill and still do. Ben, how was that being in the trenches there? Oh, look, I think he's a very smart guy. He's very personable. And I do think that he cares about people. And I just have to give him a ton of credit for one coming on this podcast,

even doing a little research on me, would know that it was not going to be an easy interview. And I don't want to, on this podcast, it's not for me to really tell people how my view comes out, but I think that we hit essentially every issue of the bill and you heard his response and you heard the areas that I was concerned about. And I think that it's for you to form your opinions and I'd love to hear what you think. And you can at me and at Midas Touch on Twitter, on socials and our emails and let us know what you think and where you stand on the law. But I thank him for coming. I obviously

want to thank Mark Elias for coming on the show as well. Obviously, philosophically and politically, we agree more with Mark. That's not something that we hide, but it's always incredible to speak with him, to hear his views and to hear him articulate his positions on these issues. And I think it's an important format for us to have at Midas Touch and for anyone in the political space to have. I mean, there are people who speak to their echo chambers, but here to have these well-researched, deep, truthful conversations is something that I don't think truly exists out there on any other podcast ever, period, which I think is why I'm so happy to be able to bring this type of content to you every week. And I'd like to have more people like Gabriel Sterling on so we can talk through those issues and those formats, even if they are difficult, you know, interviews to have sometimes.

And let me just say this to you out there. If you're going to be that one listener who emails us and is very offended that we had Gabriel on the podcast, let me just say this to you. Fuck you. I thought Jordy was winding up to say something like really, like really thought out. On that note, you have listened to an incredible episode of the Midas Touch podcast. We love you to all the Midas community.

Thank you for our support out there. Thank you for defending democracy each and every day. We appreciate you. Shout out to the Midas Friday!