The Texan Podcast - 88th Session Kickoff: Election Reform Panel

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Get a FREE “Fake News Stops Here” mug when you buy an annual subscription to The Texan: https://go.thetexan.news/mug-fake-news-stops-here-2022/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=weekly_roundup This panel was about election reform policies in Texas. Our senior reporter, Hayden Sparks, moderated the discussion between State Sen. Bob Hall and Rep. Briscoe Cain. Enjoy this content? Be sure to subscribe for similar podcasts and The Texan’s Weekly Roundup — a podcast released every Friday that brings you the latest news in Texas politics.

Howdy, folks. Senior Editor Mackenzie DeLulo here. Welcome to a special edition of the Texans podcast, where we play back a panel discussion with lawmakers that we hosted at our 88th session kickoff event on January 24th. This panel was about election reform policies specifically here in Texas. Our senior reporter, Hayden Sparks, moderated the discussion between State Senator Bob Hall and Representative Briscoe Kaine. We hope you enjoy listening to this conversation, and be sure to subscribe at thetexan.news to always be the first to have an insider's look at Texas politics and policymaking. Welcome back, everyone, to our election integrity panel. Thank you for being here today. We have with us here today State Representative Briscoe

Kane, a Republican from Deer Park, and Senator Bob Hall, a Republican from Edgewood. Regretfully, we could not be joined today by Senator Paul Betancourt and Representative Ellen Troxclare. We had hoped that they would be here, but they are feeling under the weather, so unfortunately they can't be here with us. But we are going to get right to our topic for today. First, I would like to ask you about your philosophical approach toward election reform and election issues by posing this question.

In a constitutional republic, should lawmakers err on the side of increasing participation and accessibility at the ballot box or preventing fraud and other misconduct in elections? And once again, the question is, in a constitutional republic, should lawmakers err on the side of increasing participation and accessibility at the ballot box or preventing fraud and other misconduct in elections? And Senator Hall, we'll begin with you.

Are you asking which should be more important between the two? Yes, sir. I don't think you can separate the two. They go together. I mean, for one thing, voting is one of the most precious liberties that we have. It is at the heart of our constitutional republic. Our concept of our government was created as of the people, by the people, and for the people.

That means it's formed, monitored, and controlled by the people themselves. So voting is one of the most important responsibilities our people have. And so it is our responsibility, our government's responsibility, to make sure we have a system that is accurate, that is transparent, and that there is accountability. So that the confidence out there in the people is when they vote, their vote counts. That's what I see the government's responsibility is. And that's the problem we have with our current system. There is no accountability.

There is no transparency. And the accuracy of it is unknown. The current system that we have, there are only three things that we know about it. We know who the candidates were, we know that some number of people showed up to vote, and when it was over, the government told us who won. That's all we really know. There is not a person elected in office today with the current system we have that could go into a court of law and prove that their election was the will of the people. And that has to change. We have a system that is too complex, in which we have given up security for convenience and it is non-transparent.

There are 254 variations of how, what we do it in the voting process in each of the counties and that has to change. We have to have more commonality and we have to have simplification. My gosh, we have moved from a very simple process of paper ballots and integrated complex technology of computers with it without recognizing there's a significant difference between them, or recognizing the lack of security that is inherent in a computer that can be programmed and monitored remotely. And we've ignored that. We need to simplify it. We are overcomplicated by having three election processes. Early voting, mail-in ballots, and election day.

Three separate parts of code, very comprehensive. They conflict with each other. And therefore, we have in the past seen a lot of waivers written. We only need to have two systems. Mail-in ballots and in-person voting. And in-person voting needs to be a single event that lasts some number of days, anywhere from one to ten days, pick the number, but no gap between early voting and election day. There's no purpose for the gap, there's no reason to separate them. We have one set of rules. If we do that, that will give us the

opportunity to further simplify our election by going to hand-marked paper ballots instead of relying on a computer. Imagine we're using a $3,500 computer right now to make a little mark on a piece of paper that we all learned how to do in the third grade with a crayon. We can do it now with a 10-cent ballpoint pen and eliminate the computer. Make it on secure paper and have it read by a simple, non-programmable tabulator at the precinct. That means that we deploy that machine on the first day of early voting or any time during early voting, but the first day it's there, you run what's called a zero tape. You make sure there are no votes in the machine.

And then when the polls close on election day, you run a tally tape, results tape. Two judges sign it. Two witnesses sign it. And you post it on the wall of the precinct. These were the votes that were cast for each of the candidates at this precinct. You send that memory card, which is a write-once memory card. It can only read any one ballot one time. And the ballot that's in there is on coated paper and it is numbered on the back, sequentially numbered for each precinct

and signed. And so when that goes to the county and they tabulate it, the whole thing, one thing we don't do right now today in most any county is to confirm that what the county came up with a total number is actually the same number that came from the precinct. So before the county is allowed to send it to the state, it has to have an independent verification that the precinct voting number has not changed. And then when we send, the county sends it on up to the state level, the state assembles all the county votes together before they can publish the finals for the state. They go back to the counties with an independent verification that the number they're using for each precinct from each county is the same as

what was at the precinct. So even if there's some messing with the vote along the way, we have anchored it on day one in the precinct, and we keep checking against that anchor as it goes forward. So when it's finally published, there's a high degree of confidence that that number is the will of the people. That's the overview. I want to talk more about some of the election reform legislation in a little bit. I do want to get Representative Cain's take on this philosophical divide that we saw last session, but is there a time when the legislature needs to choose between erring on the side of increasing security at the ballot box and running the risk that people might not participate, can those concerns be equally weight as Senator Hall is saying that's a difficult question of course it recently I was we're about to start doing a reading group for the law by Frederick Bastiat and I think maybe

like chapter 10 or so he's actually discussing the American principle and the balancing of the right to vote with other interests. And of course, then it was on the ownership of property and other things. But this idea that you should have some kind of buy-in and on the preventing ballot fraud. And our own constitution, state constitution, of course,

empowers the legislature to do certain things to prevent fraud and to protect the purity of the ballot box is the word used. FYI, that's not a racist term. Please understand that this is a 300 year old term dealing with the creation of glass ballot boxes so that you could see that they weren't stuffed before you went to vote. But that principle still remains today that I think we're we're authorized and, you know, by the sovereign people of Texas in drafting that Constitution to put those interests of preventing fraud and ensuring that the boxes aren't stuffed, which today we see that differently. But these are kind of the funny business that Senator Hall was discussing. And so where that balance is, I think that's one of our difficult questions right now,

especially with kind of federal law. Absent us, we'll probably get into the policy discussion of separating our elections. FYI, there's a hint, we should discuss it to avoid running into those federal law things. But yeah, I don't know where the balancing line is, but I think we should be more bold on the fraud prevention stuff. I think people tell us there's a line, and I don't think that line's always true, that we can push a little harder to ensure that every vote counts. And in discussing voter, you know, I think this creates voter apathy as well, on the belief that our votes are secured, the belief that your vote counts.

I'm cautious to ever see a point where the government is really just using propaganda to tell people everything's fine when it really isn't fine. And so there's actually a balance there on when our duties are to tell people that it's great and at what level are we satisfied. Like, I'm not sure we can ever make it perfect. When we're discussing making sure the votes were done, it's like as best as we think we can. I don't know how close we can get to perfect

because there's still a human element. Well, Representative Kane, Senator Hall highlighted some of the possible policy proposals in this 88th legislative session, but as the person who was at the helm of election integrity talks in 2021 during the regular session, did the election integrity protection act of 2021 accomplish the policy objectives that you hoped for, or is there still work to do? Yeah, there's a lot of work left to do. Sadly, this is our, you this is our problem with us meeting as often as we do.

And sometimes we think these things will work and we do it. You want to go into the details of what I thought would work and didn't work? Absolutely. A lot of our issues are with the enforcement of our laws. So we can create these laws if no one's following them. There's a problem. And one thing we were seeing is we'd written things for you to be able to bring a challenge or something and the courts would always say, you know, not enough time or something. And so in SB 1,

which was in House Bill 6, and SB 7, we crafted things that, you know, created accelerated dockets, right? Within certain time of an election, that election lawsuit took precedent over everything except for death penalty cases, meaning it was supposed to be expedited. And I would see cases where courts were only really recognizing this purpose. And so for me right now is this frustration, like how do we get the courts that when we say as long as it's filed by this time you're going to get a hearing and this thing's going to be

resolved because today my real concern is about enforcement again and you see that on everything else you see it on social issues right we can make these crimes but the DA's aren't enforcing it what do we do and so I'm still kind of back the drawing board on how do we get the courts to I guess follow the laws that the legislature board on how do we get the courts to I guess follow the laws that the legislature wrote and how do we get real-time enforcement. I think Bettencourt's not here he'd be talking about his election marshals but I think there's you know still more to be done on civil enforcement allowing for people to stand up for their rights when the government is not willing to enforce those policies. Senator Hall you touched on this a little bit, and Representative Kane referenced

it as well, but you've filed a bill that would create a boundary, so to speak, between state and federal elections. Can you expand on that proposal a little bit? Yeah, what we're looking at is the federal government's talking about changing some of the rules in it and kind of look at it like we did Second Amendment. You know, this is Texas. We have Texas gun laws here because we recognize and believe in our Second Amendment. We believe in the amendment that allows us free elections. And so what we're looking at doing is separating federal elections from state elections,

only legally. They would still take place at the same time, but the rules under which we would vote were state, everything but the federal offices, would be Texas law. The federal government was coming up with some harebrained scheme that they've been talking about, and I have no idea what they're going to come up with next. But whatever they would come up with,

whether it has to be with the idea of ranked voting or absurd things like that. We may have to do that at the federal level, but we don't have to do that at the state level. And so the purpose of separating is make sure that we control our elections to make sure that they are fair and be the result of the will of the people and not have the federal government drive it. We'll do it like we did with the amendment or the change we made that says that no federal gun law that exceeds the Texas law can be enforced by law enforcement in Texas. We just do the same thing with the elections. Maintain our sovereignty.

That's one way to do it. By the way, Representative Mike Schofield from the Katy area in Harris County really kind of brought this, at least to my attention, that this problem and how to avoid, because the HR1 was moving during the regular session last time, and there was a lot of discussion of it, and so thus we were trying to get ahead of it and fix problems all at the same time thinking the federal government was about to kind of undo everything we were doing. But

if you vote, I think today, here's an example of it, if you have a city or a school board election on the same ballot you go and vote, you'll actually see those. That's a separate election. And you would almost not even notice it it there's a way to do it where we just but absent us going to paper I don't know how it would look if we want in hand marked but on the on the machine you would never even realize that you were voting in two different lectures they're actually just separated in the background and so you you'd have to follow you know federal elections

because that's in the US Constitution but at that point going forward we could could easily follow the rest to be state and different rules apply. So it can absolutely be done. And I think it is a must that it be done, that we get away from federal court opinions on election matters and to stop having, you know, our freedom and our rights, you know, subject to, you know, the whims of federal courts. And so, yeah, we have to separate the elections. We have revisited last session, and I want to talk about a specific provision of the Election Integrity Protection Act concerning illegal voting. The legislature downgraded the penalty for some types of illegal voting from a felony to a misdemeanor do you think that's something that needs to be restored back to a felony representative

Kane yeah well so the Republican Party of Texas and their legislative priorities that is listed as number one is restoring the the criminal penalties it may not be popular but I'm going to say it anyways because it's what I do is I'm afraid that we've put a lot the grassroots have put a lot of energy into that one thing and that there's way more important things that we should address and allow me to explain in counties with DAs that aren't going to prosecute whether it's a felony or misdemeanor makes no difference I am supportive of raising, but I just want you to understand. Criminals, I'm not sure, are questioning themselves whether or not to commit a crime, whether or not it's a state jail felony or a Class A misdemeanor either. So I'm not sure there's actual true deterrent. It makes us feel good, but I'm not sure there's actual deterrent.

And so while it's something that should be done, we put a lot of energy into focusing on that. And sometimes there's other things going on that he's going to talk about that are more important to securing our elections and actually go to the heart of stopping fraud versus whether or not an increased criminal penalty is going to stop a bad guy who's already a career criminal from committing more crimes. I've also heard stories from some judges, this is not related to elections but certain crimes and I see some folks in the audience that may know better than me that are that are hesitant on prosecuting things because in their own opinion it's too high of a crime. Now that they shouldn't be doing that that's not their role but we see it

occurring and so I'd rather see more civil things to go after it because of course that person can take a plea deal or there's all kinds of things that could go wrong with that crime or a DA not enforcing it for us to ensure that things are being enforced. And so we'll probably talk about that more on allowing on civil causes of action. These are things that's why the heartbeat bill was so revolutionary is to bypass those DAs. And so yeah, we should increase the criminal penalties, but I'm not expecting that to be the cure. So if we increase it, I don't think we're going to stop the fraud tomorrow or something.

I'd love to see some numbers on it. Like, before it got decreased, did that crime change? Or did more people start committing the crime because it became a Class A misdemeanor or something? I'd really love to know if it actually is working. It's an important policy, and grassroots, we've heard you, it's going to be done. But I just hope that does it make sense where I'm going that there's way more important things we should be doing? It's an interesting point that someone who's considering voting illegally is not necessarily contemplating

well, it was a felony last year, it's a misdemeanor this year, okay, I'm going to go ahead and do it. That is an interesting point, but Senator Hall, I do want to give you the chance to weigh in on this as well. I think it's right that you can make an argument on both sides of it. We definitely have to have penalties. I'm okay with stiffer penalties because right now I don't think we have near enough that there are a lot of things to be done.

And there's no penalty for doing it. And it's wrong. And it changes the outcome of the election. So I think we need to – that's the accountability part. When I talk about we have little to no accountability, you've got to have accountability in there. And I agree that the person who's intent on committing most crimes, they don't really worry too much about what that would be. But I think this is an area where if it's the difference between getting your hand slapped in a misdemeanor or finding themselves behind bars for some period of time, may not stop it all, but I think it will deter a good many of it. So I'm okay with it.

I'm supportive of raising it. I just want people to know that that may not be the cure-all or the answer, that there's still some of the solutions. And it's one thing both chambers of governor are wanting to see is rogue DAs not enforcing law. How do we get rid of them? And so our goal should be on enforcement and allowing this real-time enforcement of when issues happen that you can get into court or where somebody can do something about it because the elections are are happening as people should by now know and if we don't solve the problem for the election there's really little we can do about it representative Kane you are in a county that makes a lot of headlines, and I want to address Harris County particularly, because the elections in Harris County have been the subject of court orders, lawsuits, controversy, because of accessibility issues, late ballots, and accusations of politically

motivated decision-making. In fact, I believe in Harris County, the county officials there were the only officials not to have turned in the election results two days after the election to the Secretary of State. What can be done, if anything, from your perspective at the legislature to address the fair and impartial administration of elections in large urban counties? I really wish Senator Betancourt was here to discuss this because this is his area. He's very, very passionate. He could also fill the rest of our time with his passion on it. But he's right. Some form of takeover, getting rid of the election administrator, quasi-preclearance, or just us,

almost them having to get permission before they use the restroom and looking to us every step of the way to get it done may be the only solution. Or force them to go back to an elected official, whether it's through the tax assessor, somebody that's accountable to the people. I've always struggled with the idea of an election administrator. It just never really made any sense. I mean, that a clerk, your county folks could just hire somebody to do that office.

I don't know why it's separate or where this idea came from. But we should probably limit you know, limit it and any new counties want to do it. I think the people in those counties should maybe be really hesitant about adopting an EA. There are EAs in counties that have done a great job and it's not a blue county problem. Jefferson County's people have, they did great, right? They had a 2% ballot rejection rate. It was lower than most of other averages and so it points to there's definitely some issues in Harris County obviously I think Senator Hall is going to tell you there's other ways to get around it which is you know

by really simplifying and recodifying our code to stop those things and so I realize there's a multiple angle approach we should take them all but I do expect either something targeting large counties or Harris County only to take those over since they seem to be the repeat offenders. Now for some kind of behind the scenes thing I'll tell you something I heard recently is that after the debacle in Harris County some Republicans went to some others and said you'll cause this yourselves right like so the Democrat Party is hoping we'll stop bringing attention to these these screw-ups that give the legislature an excuse and they're like you brought this on yourselves like all you

had to do to stop us from coming back in here and having this discussion was to not screw it up and y'all made it even worse right they uh a total disaster so they can't be trusted and i'm concerned about voter turnout among republicans in harris county if we don't get it turned right that you know a lot of people in this room that might be from it are concerned with whether their votes count. I mean, my own precinct, where my wife is a precinct chair, they ran out of paper, but there you go. They even told people to go home.

So the machines went down. They already issued them their number, right? So they're already checked in. And then without canceling that, they told people to go vote somewhere else. And by the way, they can't at that point they've already technically voted it's outrageous stuff and so it has to be done yes harris county has to be punished and i think made an example of so others thinking they can get away with it will stop so when you say harris county needs to be

punished is are there things that need to be done retroactively as well to address things that have happened in the past? I mean, I hear y'all saying yes. I don't know if we can retroactively go back and fix things. Those are great ideas. Well, and that's why I asked, because I was curious if this was something that you had in mind in terms of what happened in 2022 or prior elections elections but there are there are there are crimes that were committed i mean there are criminal actions that occurred in harris county and you know there's times uh those such limitations have not told and so i hope we can uh you know get some prosecution get some people fired but again an example needs to be set this

is kind of one of those things where I do think rational actors will see what happened to Harris County and decide that they should play by the rules. Senator Hall, I want to invite you to weigh in. Oh, let's not forget. God tells us the heart of man is basically evil. And we can't remove the human out of the process. And we can't legislate morality or integrity.

That will always be there. But what we have to do is make the opportunities for fraud and the opportunities for error as transparent as possible and have accountability. That's the way to solve the problem. Going back to try to do anything about what's happened in the past, we just need to use Harris County, Dallas County, and a couple others as the poster child for why we have to simplify our elections, why we have to bring transparency to it. We have to have them set up so that we have confidence in the accuracy because we could see what was happening.

And there's accountability every step of the way. And simplifying it, and it goes back to answer the question you started out originally. I don't think making our elections more secure necessarily equates to reducing the number of people voting. I think it actually goes in the opposite direction, because I think the complexity and the results that people see, the rumblings in the background about fraud, the rumblings in the background about the errors and inaccuracy is a major deterrent to people showing up to vote. They said, my vote doesn't count. Why should I bother? Well, I think that's what we have to overcome.

I think we get more people out to vote by saying this is a simple process. There's transparency. You can see from where you went to vote that your votes in that precinct actually carried forward until they came out of the Secretary of State's office a week or two later as a final result. There's consistency. So your vote counted. I think if we can show people that, we will get more people coming out to vote. And so I think what we're doing will actually increase voting participation is what we need

because a pathetic 30% today is not the way we should be running this country. Representative Kane, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals decided in 2021 that it is unconstitutional under the state constitution for the attorney general to prosecute election crimes on his own. allowing him to appoint prosecutors in adjacent counties or allowing other avenues of prosecution that don't involve him convening the grand jury and doing it himself. How important is it that the Attorney General have the authority to prosecute crimes under the election code or can it be left to local prosecutors? Fun question. Absolutely it's important, but I think we've got to recognize the political realities that you're not going to be amending the Constitution, that there's not 100 votes in the House to undo that or change it. And because of that, we've got

to look at alternative means. In working on the legislation last session, Senator Hughes was on board and so were the AGs. We were pushing for more civil cause of action. And our purpose then wasn't because we thought the Court of Criminal Appeals was going to do what it was going to do. We were concerned, well, what if the AG is a different party and the locals aren't enforcing law? Or what if the local DA is not enforcing it or the AG gets defunded or doesn't have the finances or the manpower to do it. And so by looking at other means to enforce our laws, at least my favorites, through civil

causes of action or empowering you to do something about it. So with that in mind, then this comes out and a few of us get on calls just shaking our heads like, man, we kind of tried to warn them. We didn't know this was going to happen, but we were concerned. What if in the future the attorney general doesn't have the manpower, gets defunded, or is a socialist who doesn't want to enforce things? And so with that kind of that reality on the game field, I think we've got to be looking at ways to do it differently. Certainly in Article 5, Section 21 of the Texas Constitution allows for the legislature to create district attorney districts and to assign kind of the jurisdiction to them. And so I believe those are being explored. Of course, I've talked about, you know, allowing neighboring DAs.

I'm not sure whether that's constitutionally perfect, but something has to be done to get around it. There's also bills filed on the subject. There will be more on unseating DAs that aren't enforcing laws or whether we define what type of laws those are or punishments or penalties. There's got to be teeth in that. I also don't know why we don't look at maybe creating specialty courts or something. There's got to be teeth in that. I also don't know why we don't look at maybe creating specialty courts or something. We have specialty courts on a lot of other topics in Texas.

Harris County has a domestic violence court. We've got one that's purely on asbestos and asbestos thalema. That's all they do. They've become a subject matter expert. I think that's maybe something worth looking at to ensure that these judges know it. In some counties, that judge has been there for 12 years and they've never, ever seen an election case.

They don't know what to do with it. And so the more streamlined to the process and the more options of enforcement. So not putting all our eggs in one basket with crimes, but multiple ways to ensure compliance is how I like to look at it. Senator Hall. We definitely have to have a solution to the current situation. The Supreme Court put us in a real box because we know we have DAs that aren't going to prosecute, particularly on elections. There have been a number of solutions.

Representative Kane talked about a couple of them. I think we need to look at that. The idea of having two adjacent county DAs agree and then have the authority to ask the AG to help them in doing something in the adjacent county is a possibility. There are a number of combinations like that.

I think we work through the session. I do believe that we will have something along that line that would allow one or two to get together or maybe just an adjacent county and get assistance or bring their rangers in or something of that nature. We definitely have to fill the gap. We'll get a great deal of opposition. Our county DAs love their autonomy. It makes them like a little king or queen for the county because nobody gets prosecuted there unless they do it.

And we have to be careful that if we do something like that, we don't set up an unintended consequence where a DA looks at all everything and says, I don't see anything there to prosecute. And somebody next to them says, says well I really think they should and you end up with a prosecution should have never happened because the DA that said they weren't going to prosecute made a realistic assessment because it's like every legislation everything we pass every bill will have an unintended consequence so while we're trying to solve one problem we have to be diligent to think about the consequences, the unintended consequences. If we did this, how could this be abused or used?

Or would we really want to have this law on the books if Texas was being ruled by a liberal Democrat? Democrat and that will blow cold water on a lot of what sound like good ideas to solve a problem that the solution will turn out eventually possibly worse than the problem we're trying to solve. Yeah in other words the the question for for liberty minded legislators is often what would we what would we think about this power being in the hands of our political opponents and if the answer is I wouldn't like that, then you probably should avoid it because we recognize that times change and parties change and egos change and someone being mad at you, right? We're looking at just look what the FBI is doing to conservatives right now

because it's been weaponized. And so, yeah, we do have to be cautious on it. But I would say a more than one approach, meaning not to put our eggs in one basket again. So whether it's neighboring DAs or not, I think we should look at multiple avenues as backup plans in case something happens. As a lesson learned, look at the integrity unit that was in Travis County. That was a mitigated disaster for conservatives. Senator Hall, I do also want

to ask about the implementation of the Election Integrity Protection Act. And we've talked a lot about big city DAs and the fallout from the law. But when it was proposed, many people said that it was going to be a voter suppression bill and that it could even have racist motivations to it. You said in your answer earlier that securing elections increases participation. What are you hearing from your constituents about the implementation of this law? I have not had a negative conversation with anyone, Republican or Democrat, and I've talked to both about this approach to making sure that they're— because this approach—who can argue with adding transparency? Why would you not want that?

Why would you not want accountability? Why would you want to that? Why would you not want accountability? Why would you want to have a known accuracy? I'm not talking about trying to shut our polls early or placement of where the polls are or the things that they said, you know, no voting on Sunday morning and things like that that were viewed as voter suppression. This is transparency. This is openness. This is simplicity simplicity this is something that i mean there i've been careful to try to every piece of it to structure it so and i looked at it how would this suppress the votes and the only thing i came up with was

reducing the the voting period from what we would have today with early voting election day about 14 days i'm saying we can do that in 10 days that and that would be just an opinion on it because we looked at it we said we can just we extend the hours on a daily basis and we can deliver the same number of available voting hours as we could with the longer period so each piece of it we looked at is could this be interpreted? It will be. I'm sure for those that just don't understand it and just don't want to make a change, those that think, you know, we've got control of the system now, we'll get a lot of opposition from the people inside of Harris County, inside of Dallas County, inside of Bexar County, and the

other big counties where you have people say, hey, I'm in control of this thing and I can make it work the way I want it to work. I don't want any change so they will accuse us of of it being voter suppression and they will attack it on that budget but anybody that's objective and has a even a modicum of honesty and integrity in them won't find anything like that in there they'll see that this this is truly a system that opens it up, that gives a great deal of confidence that their vote will count. Yeah, the only thing I saw, at least, and of course I'm in Harris County so I heard about it, is the election administrators or, you know, clerks, etc., just not doing it right. It wasn't SB1, it was that they were doing it wrong with the ballot rejections and the matching

of numbers. No other large counties were having these problems that have a similar population, right, and maybe a similar demographic of Spanish speakers or people that they're trying to say this only hurt. When we look at the other counties, there was no problem

like that, and so, again, it was really on the implementation of it, and I think that's why Senator Hall has so many great ideas on kind of standardizing and saying here's this step process so that you can't screw it up because they always come to us but by the way there's a lot of ambiguity and gaps and it's unclear and so that's why we really almost need a recodification at some point which takes a lot longer than a single session to do. And I'd love to see maybe even a committee put together to begin doing that so we can clear all

this up and they can stop having excuses for their malfeasance. But it wasn't for that to blame. And I think we've seen data showing that after each session, especially in recent years, when the legislature has done that, it's increased turnout. I think the cleanup of the code will actually be a little simpler than what we thought because when I said to the Ledge Council that that was a pushback I got, oh, this is a lot of code here, I said, no, no, just treat the in-person voting as it were a very long election day. Just treat it like you did. We'll make it an election day that lasts for 10 days instead of one day.

And they said, oh, oh yeah we can do that yeah and by the way i don't see how the feds can complain about that because hr1 was a 10 day without a gap either like they literally they wanted the same thing fyi and so it'd be really funny for them the hypocrisy for them to complain that we're actually closing a gap that they themselves maybe even recognize. Go figure, FYI. Where it suits them, Democrats also oppose election fraud. It just depends where they're located. Well, speaking of the federal government, do you believe, and this is our final question, and I want to look forward to 2024,

do you believe that the Election Integrity Protection Act will be enough? And I know we've talked about other reforms that need to be implemented, but do you think that law will be enough to quiet concerns about fraud in 2024? Or in 2025, are we going to be in the same position needing another large-scale election reform bill? Senator Hall. When you say, do you talk about the bill we passed in 21 or the one I'm talking about passing? The one we passed in 21. No, no. We made great changes, but it did not go far enough. That's why I have this bill.

No, I think the changes we made were not ones that would eliminate the problems we're having with confusion, the problems we're having by election administrators running their own election, or by the machines that are involved. As long as we have the machines intimately involved in our election process the way we have it, we will continue to have error and fraud to the level that we will never have any confidence in the outcome of the election. We have got to reduce the machines to nothing more than a dumb optical scanner at the precinct level. That's the most we need. Anything. The current system we have, we made great changes. It was a good bill for doing

what it did, but it didn't go far enough to get the machines out of the system. Representative Koehn. Excuse me, and one more, and we still have the gap. It didn't take, the gap is one of the biggest contributors to the question of what happens to those memory cards for three days between the time the polls close and the report on election day. And as long as we have the gap there and the machines, we can have no confidence, zero confidence in the accuracy of our elections. Period. Bob, you're right, of course. But whether we get all of those things done, we can want to do things. If we had magic wands, we would do it.

I think we shoot for them and try to. I think we've got to stop compromising and arguing against ourselves and our positions and start big and go for it and not think of, well, what can we get? What's permitted? What are we able to do with the current makeup of it? I think that kind of thinking is antithetical to the conservative movement, that we need to shoot for the stars. Thanks, thanks.

But I think we'll constantly be coming back because, again, we end up seeing things and realizing there's another hole or some loophole that we've got to close. And so, no, I don't think we're going to... The answer of what we do last session is going to tell us whether 2025 is perfect or this session.

I think we're going to constantly be reforming it and we need to be ready to do that. And people need to be willing to because what's going to happen is the politicians in the in the pink dome are going to say well we already did that and we really didn't there's always going to be more left to do there's emerging technologies the criminals are really smart and they come up with other ways to get around our ballot harvesting rules and we've we've got to come up with ways to you know really stop that and so I don't think it was the answer. And I think whatever we do, if we had the magic wand to do it now, whether that would

not mean there were any problems in the future, because they're going to come up with ways to cheat the system. And so I think it's going to require us to remain vigilant to ensure that all your votes are counted. Well, thank you each for being here. I'm sure we could continue to talk about election integrity well into the evening. We have an excellent lineup of panels for the rest of the day. And then, of course, we have the conversation with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick as well. So please stick around. Representative Kane, Senator Hall, thank you both so much for being here with us today.

Thank you all so much for listening. If you've been enjoying our podcast, it would be awesome if you would review us on iTunes. And if there's a guest you'd love to hear on our show, give us a shout on Twitter. Tweet at The Texan News. We're so proud to have you standing with us as we seek to provide real journalism in an age of disinformation. We're paid for exclusively by readers like you. So it's important we all do our part to support the Texan by subscribing and telling your friends about us. God bless you and God bless Texas.