And if you want to get back in power, you might want to start representing your people.
So we're going to have some more time.
We're going to speak with Secretary of Rashminsberger, but I want to let you know again that we want your questions.
So keep thinking about them.
And just to remind those online that you can either email jhanlee, j-a-e-h-u-n.lee-le-e-e atai.org, or you can use the hashtag AIElections on X or Twitter.
So let me come back to, we were talking about technology earlier, and you mentioned audits.
And people talk a lot about audits, and I think it's one way in which you might give people security that the machinery worked, that the count had gone right, that you double-checked things, essentially.
Talk a little bit about the auditing process, what you do now, and what you would like to see in terms of auditing to give people the sense that those votes that they filled out, that they scanned, that somehow we know that they have a sort of second check on them that they're going in as cast.
So we are doing an audit right now.
The counties do a lot of the work.
We'll do a statewide audit of looking at the ballot images.
All those ballots that were scanned, we have those ballot images.
So we're going to run that through and check all 5.3 million ballots, all the races, with an organization called Enhanced Voting.
That verifies that the machines did not flip the votes because we're reading the human readable text and the QR codes were accurate.
But also it'll verify the results.
But we also had 20 die.
It was a 10-sided die.
We rolled it 20 times and picked out different numbers.
And we all picked out those numbers and then we just ran them through a computerized modeling system.
It's a random audit to find out what batches you're pulling out.
And so depending on how many voters you had, how many ballots you had in each county, we determined how many ballots you would pull.
But we did a 95% risk-limiting.
So it's a risk-limiting audit.
And so that's undergoing right now.
And we will be done, I think, end of today, first thing in the morning, all 159 counties.
But that will then verify.
You said that Bob and Mary ran for this race.
Bob got 55.
Mary got 45.
Well, now we're going to do the audit.
And if it comes in at 54.9 versus 55.0, you'll know we're right on the numbers.
If all of a sudden there's something that doesn't work, and that's what happened when the county started saying some information, there's actually a few counties that they were catching their mistakes.
Oh, we had some test ballots that got in here because their numbers weren't lining up.
Then we pulled them out.
So that's the other advantage.
It cleans up your data before you even begin the audit process.
So we'll have that done and we'll be reporting that to everyone in America.
Here's what the results were.
And this one, the one race we are doing, the statewide is the presidential race.
We know the delta is 125,000 that President Trump won the state by, but we have Have to do our due diligence to come back to all the voters, both sides of the aisle, everyone, to say here's what it was.
So basically, you have the first the machines are scanning and counting the ballots.
You also then have these ballot images.
The machines take a picture, and so you can see, oh, there it is.
But you also still have the paper ballots.
So if people are worried, there are paper ballots.
And then the auditing allows you to compare some of these things to a certain number of, depending on the race, a certain number just to make sure that that is a good matchup.
And that's what we audit.
We audit the paper ballot, not an image.
We actually then are auditing the actual your physical ballot is pulled out of the stack and you have to get a certain number from this many from this precinct in different precincts and then you're just adding it up and putting them in two sides and you're doing a hand count on that also.
So Mr. Secretary, post-election, one of the themes that's coming out in the transition period is efficiencies in government.
And so, you know, there's a federal government agencies are involved in elections.
There are also federal funds that occasionally the Congress appropriates to states.
How should Congress, with the new Congress and the new president elect, how should the Congress and the President approach federal funding of elections for the states to assist?
We actually manage without any federal funding.
I believe constitutionally the states should be able to manage.
But if the federal government wants to have a grant program, I would probably use what I used in business, carrots and sticks.
And so you set the broad parameters, and one of those would be photo ID.
Another one would be part of a multi-state organization.
Because if it costs some money, well, we'll give you everyone gets a grant for that.
And you make sure that it really covers the smaller states where it really is a problem.
California, you would probably like a flat fee, whatever it is, but make sure that the states that said they couldn't afford it, that they get $500,000 or a million dollars, whatever that number needs to be, so it defrays that so they can really join that organization.
I think that would be really helpful for the states.
California has just a bigger budget because they have a lot more people.
So I don't think we need to ramp it up.
I don't think it needs to be a flat fee, flat grant, just to help defray that cost.
Carrot and sticks.
Carrots and sticks.
Okay.
And you expressed you might use federal funding if it came in the right way.
But what do you say about private funding?
We had some private funding, especially in the 2020 election.
There's some controversy about it.
Georgia, where are you on private funding?
I oppose.
I just don't believe that private organizations should be weighing in.
Even if they have the most pure of intentions, it doesn't lend itself to voter trust.
And we have to be honest where we are right now: that although President Trump got a big electoral vote, popular vote win, you know, we're still, you know, someone's not getting over 60%.
See, they're still close.
So there's a subsizable folks that there's not a lot of trust on both sides of the aisle.
And so we really have to work on making sure we have processes in place that no matter what the results are, you may not like them, but you say that was fair.
We have good refs and they're just calling balls and strikes.
So one of the big issues from my perspective, just monitoring the election on Election Day, were the bomb hoaxes, both in Georgia and I believe Arizona, the multiple bomb hoaxes.
You called out the Russians for that.
There was some question about where did that information come from.
I think I should suspect.
But what happened with that?
And have you received any other information on that?
Yes.
We knew pretty early on on the bottom of the sheet, the email, it had Cyrillic lettering, which implied came from someone from Russia or one of their other folks for that same alphabet.
We tagged the Russians with it, and we were talking to the feds, and they were a little slow than us to get that out there.
But we established it was a hoax, you know, bomb threat.
So we keep on voting, and about all but four or five precincts did.
And then about one or two o'clock in the afternoon, the FBI came out and said it was Russia-based.
So we also had a DDoS attack a few weeks earlier on Monday, October 13th, 14th, I think it was.
420,000 hits that we got, and that also came from the Russians.
And that was identified with our federal partners.
We notified it, so we just put in an interface that said, you know, I am not a robot, I am a human.
And it went down real quick.
But they've been very active right now.
Is it concerning, maybe my memory's just going, but the fact that these bomb hoaxes can disrupt an election?
I mean, it may close down the polling place for an hour or so while they see if there's actually a threat, and then they may have to extend the time of the polling place.
I just don't recall being that sort of an intervention of election or disruption of election.
What are your thoughts?
We had over 30 bomb threats.
I think it turned out to be over 50 actually just in Fulton County, but we had 60, 70 statewide.
And what we told, we identified it, and so we put it out very quickly.
And law enforcement, the county sheriffs, police departments are saying we can keep on voting.
A few of the precincts, when the police officer came, well, what do you want us to do?
Well, they said, well, can you bring in the dogs to sweep the area?
So that's why we had like a 20-minute, 30-minute, and up to one was a 50-minute wait.
So those precincts just stayed open later.
Fortunately, it wasn't 60 different precincts because our whole goal was to get those results uploaded really quick because that builds that voter confidence that we've been so hard to try and reestablish.
And just one more along those lines.
Georgia was hit as well as North Carolina and Florida by hurricanes and caused some damage.
And I'd like to hear a little bit about how Georgia recovered in the election sense from this.
We had talked to North Carolina and Florida on our podcast recently.
But let's think about less notice, something happening on election day like these bomb threats or, God forbid, something more real.
How does the Secretary of State's office prepare for, think about what's in the law that allows sort of dealing with real on-the-ground emergencies if it really came to that?
Unfortunately, well, it's just a fact, but we've always, the hurricanes never hit the weekend before.
So Governor Kemp, when he was finishing up as Secretary of State in 2018, he had a hurricane that had come through, and so he had to deal with that.
2022, we had a tornado that came through South Georgia down near the Savannah area.
So we had a mobile voting location.
It's a trailer, had two voting machines in it, and so we set that up down there so that precinct could get back up and run.
This case, we had about 50 counties that were hit hard.
The hurricane came through on a Friday.
By Saturday, we were actually already talking to GEMA, which is the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, which is our state agency.
Governor Kemp, you know, basically fully empowered Chris Stallings, the head of GEMA, give them whatever they need.
And so we were calling the counties, reaching out to them, started to do Zoom calls, who's got power, just kind of doing an assessment.
We sent out a checklist before the hurricane, said, don't fill it out now.
Tell us what happened afterwards.
And so they were filling out all the things that they had so we could identify very clearly which precincts would have to be moved.
We had about four in total that had to be moved.
We got our power back up.
We had mobile generators.
We had Starlink.
We had every single aspect that we could so we could actually get ready to go.
I visited about 11 counties with Governor Kemp, and here we are, and they had internet, and there's a county sheriff's department.
There's a lady behind the counter.
I said, Oh, that's that's the election director, and I forget which county it was.
And I went over and shook her hand.
And the reason she was there is that she had 11 people that she had to get on the voter list because their applications had just come in, and there's internet there, so she was working at the job.
So that's the American spirit.
And so you really should feel good about being an American because we have a great country, we have great people, and they're hard working.
They're making sure we have free, fair, and fast elections.
Well, the point of the elections is to hear from the people, and now we're going to hear from the people.
You've been preparing your questions, so if you could raise your hand, wait for the mic to come to you, and then ask, identify yourself and ask your question.
So I think we're going to go right here, but the mic is coming to you right behind you.
Hi, my name is Jack.
I'm a research associate here at AEI.
My question for you is admittedly from my own home state.
I was curious if you had any thoughts on the Pennsylvania recount and the Senate race.
I know that's sort of the obvious question.
I think election denialism needs to stop.
People need to do their job.
It's as simple as that.
If we don't do our job, follow the law, follow the Constitution, we won't have a country.
This country was built on the rule of law.
It needs to stop.
Okay, we're going to look to our left.
I'm sorry.
Oh, okay.
We got here, and then we also are going to go online.
Obviously with the election being out of the way now, that's over.
But I was wondering what other things you're looking for in your department to increase voter efficiency for the next maybe primary election that you have.
There's probably a few tweaks.
What we had is some of the counties at the last moment said we're going to open up our offices on Saturday.
They made that announcement on Friday to accept absentee ballots.
And I don't like last-minute changes.
Gwinnett County did it also, but they announced it back in July.
Plenty of time for everyone to understand.
Oh, they're going to be open.
So the people that needed to know that were Republican Party observers, Democrat, Independent observers, and our investigators.
All of a sudden, this happens on Friday.
So we, the Republican Party observers, Democrat, and Independent, and our investigators, you know, we're assuming that they're all in town and we're going to have them available.
We got them all covered that happened in Fulton County.
But I think that needs to be set in law when you can do that and whenever that period is, but back it up 30, 45, or 60 days, but a certain period of time.
And so I'll be working with the General Assembly on that.
We also had when we were introduced SB 202 that we wanted to do away with out-of-precinct voting on Election Day.
And the reason we wanted to make sure everyone had to vote in precinct is we found one of the candidates.
I'll get it.
One of the candidates was saying, go vote anywhere.
It doesn't matter.
But all that matters is, you know, voting for her at the top of the ticket.
And when you think about it, that means you'd be disenfranchised for all the other ones if you shot at the wrong location.
And we had in the bill that we wanted to have no out-of-precinct voting on Election Day.
The General Assembly changed and said up to 5 p.m.
Well, as soon as we had a couple precincts in Fulton that were open late because of the bomb threats, some of the people were saying, oh, that means everyone can go vote at these four precincts.
No, it doesn't mean that.
But if we don't have any out-of-precinct voting, we won't have that issue.
And then all of a sudden you have some crafty lawyer from this side, you know, with other crafty lawyers on the other side going to before a judge at two minutes before midnight.
So I'm just trying to clear it up so everyone knows what the rules are beforehand.
We want to know that touchdowns are worth six points, field goals worth three.
We don't change the rules once we start the game.
And to follow up on that, if I could, you're looking ahead and maybe the next election, next year or two.
What would you like to see, even after you're no longer Secretary of State, five or ten years down the road?
What's the big thing you'd like to see in voting that will be different in five or ten years that you don't see today?
We're not ready for internet voting, so I'm not going to go there.
That's 2030 or whenever someone like Elon Musk and all these other really smart people can figure out how to make that secure so you feel comfortable about your ballot.
I think we want to probably look at the Yuakawa overseas military ballots because we have that window by federal law that we have to accept those up to Friday.
Voters say, why is that?
Well, they're overseas, but some of the states already are using a form of electronic return their ballot.
And so I think that's something we might want to look at.
So then we say end of election is 7 p.m., that's our time, 7 p.m. on Tuesday.
I think that Indiana is 6 p.m., whatever it is, all ballots have to be in at a certain point.
I don't believe that any ballots, absentee or any other ballots, should be coming in after, but we have to make sure for our overseas military ballots that we somehow have a process so they can have those in there.
That would be a big lift for them, and I think it'd be good for everyone.
Great.
So, and Jay Hun, should we then, using that as a lead-in, go to our friends on the internet that are asking questions?
I'm losing Jay Han here.
Yes, so we have a question about kind of addressed earlier, but how can Congress balance its interests in ensuring fair, secure, and quick elections while also kind of respecting the federalism issue?
I think that what Georgia has shown is you can have really strong turnout.
We had 5.3 million people show up out of 7.2 million active voters.
And so if you divide that out, it's over 70%.
That's our highest turnout ever.
And so we've shown everything that we've done with SB 202 costs an all-star game because Stacey Abrams came down to Georgia, came back to Georgia, and she said it's going to be Jim Crow 2.0.
They're coming back, right?
The All-Star Games coming up.
They're coming back next year.
But let's not forget history.
We have had record turnout 2020, 2022 for a gubernatorial, and 2024 here for a presidential.
So we've shown that photo ID works.
It does not decrease turnout, gives voters confidence, adds security.
I think that's really important.
So everything that we've done in our model is something that really everyone could embrace.
I know that Utah, which is a Republican state, is a mail-in state.
So I think you have to give states that, I'm not a fan of that, but I understand it works in some of the Western states.
But I think that really what works the best, though, making sure you have a clean voter list.
If you don't clean up your voter list and you start mailing out a hot ballot that hasn't been requested and it's going to someone's address, and yet over four years, what percentage of the voters have already moved?
If it's 11% a year, what is that percentage over four years?
I'm sure someone here is pretty good with math and they can figure that one out.
Then that really leads to voters not trusting what is going on.
And that is very dangerous in a pluralistic democratic society like we have right now.
We want everyone to feel confident about the process.
So just to follow up, you mentioned the multi-state organization that shares some data.
This is really related to the National Voter Registration Act.
You know, post-election, there's been complaints on the left and the right pre-election on the effectiveness of the NBRA after 30-some years.
Is there an opportunity for the Congress to modify that?
How would they work together on that?
I think if you're part of an organization that is updating your voter list objectively, not subjectively, then I think you should be able to update your voter list up until the same period of time when you have to put people on the list.
So if you have to put people on the list 30 days before an election, you should be able to also remove those voters if you got that information objectively through an organization like Eric because they don't live in Georgia anymore.
They actually have moved to Kansas.
And so I think those are, you know, that's just wherever we can deal with objective criteria, it's tough to argue with facts.
But as soon as you and I get subjective about something, then it's your opinion, my opinion.
So we deal with the facts.
I think that would help.
So we really need to codify it based on objective criteria.
So just following up, so the NBRA was 30-some years ago where everything was by mail.
And now it's 2024, about to be 2025.
How can technology improve the NBRA?
Have you thought about that?
And what can we do as election professionals to improve that list maintenance process?
Because it seems to me like we're stuck back in the 1990s and it's 2025.
I think electronic records, also I think that all the driver records are updated on a national basis.
And I think that needs to be part of what we're doing.
People update their driver's license where they're supposed to, but the percentage that don't is very, very small.
And so I think that's a good thing because when you go for your power bill or whatever you want to do, they're going to look, merchants want to see that it's a local address that you have there.
So it gets updated.
And I think that probably needs to be incorporated into that.
Okay.
Okay, we're going to go back.
We'll go here in the front.
Mark Lerner, I was wondering what was going through your mind when President Trump asked you to find those additional votes.
And how did that conversation happen to be taped?
Well, when President Trump called me four years ago, I already had done all the checking.
So we pretty much knew that those were the results.
We could quibble over numbers.
Was it two dead people, four dead people, or was it 10 dead people?
But it wasn't thousands of dead people.
We knew there was no underage voters because we have their day-month year.
So it's really just knowing your data.
And that's why it's really important to have systems in place that you can really drill down and get answers for everything.
Because a lot of times people could say whatever they want to out on the internet, but then you have to be able to back it up with data.
And that's why we also did an audit.
We had 5 million ballots back in 2020, and we actually hand-counted all 5 million ballots, reading off who did they vote for president.
Donald J. Trump, Joseph R. Biden, or the Libertarian.
I forget that name.
But they didn't get too many.
But we then could just verify what the results were.
And as we went through the audit process, we found a couple of counties had some issues.
One of them actually was Floyd County.
It had issues in 2020.
They were actually the county that reported the results the fastest this year.
They've done a 180.
I also, we didn't really talk about that.
One of the things we put into state law is I wanted to make sure that we had authority, and we now have it through the state election board to hold counties accountable.
Counties run the elections, but they can't just say, well, we're going to do whatever we want.
We don't like this law.
No, we have an accountability review board.
So if you mess up an election, you come before the state election board.
You probably have a consent agreement that you'll sign to settle.
Otherwise, you're going to have a half a million dollars of fines because they add up quick.
And then all of a sudden, you have experts that are going in there monitoring your next election and then also coming alongside you to see how are you doing these processes so you can improve your process.
And so we had done all that monitoring of everything and we had just checked so we knew that's where we were.
And what was the conversation to me?
I was at home with my wife, Tricia, this right the day after the holiday and I guess he was up in the White House with a whole bunch of people in his office and having they're just trying to figure out where they stood and where we were in Georgia and I just wanted to let them know that I checked out everything and hopefully history shows that I was respectful.
I think one of the things I would say, even if you don't agree with people politically on the other side of the aisle I served in the House, we were always respectful to each other and I think there's something that's been lost and I think something that we need to reclaim, that we can disagree about policies, but let's just do it, you know, and don't go to war over every little battle.
Okay, we'll go over here in the middle.
Thank you.
Hi.
I think a common argument against doing required photo ID is that maybe it's too expensive or people don't have time, and saying that a photo ID is discriminatory in a way.
So I guess what's your response to that, and do you think Georgia or any other states should do more to make it easier to attain a government ID?
Number one, we all have the same amount of hours each week and if you can find the time, I bet you, your friends can too.
Number two, in Georgia, when we passed photo ID, we also added about seven other forms of identification, so it could be middle right military ID.
But if you don't have any of those other identifications, the state of Georgia will supply one to you for free of charge and so you can use as an identification card.
Okay, we'll go over here.
Mike is coming here.
Hi, Carrie Levine from VOTE BEAT.
Thanks for doing this.
I was interested in when you talk about the need to improve the cleaning of voting lists and for all the states to share information more effectively.
I'm wondering if you can talk about the role that online voter registration plays in letting states effectively manage their list.
There's still eight states that don't have it, and so I'm interested in that including, I think, Texas is the largest.
We have online voter registration, and It really makes it easy to register to vote.
We verify who they are when they go on and also when they want to change.
If they move to one other part of the state, they can update their voter list.
We think that's really important.
It just allows you to have a cleaner list.
We also just added a way that you can actually deactivate your registration when you move out of state.
When we moved to Virginia 40 some odd years ago down to Georgia, I never thought about getting back to Virginia.
So I don't know how many years I stayed on the list up here, but it's just really helpful if people have that opportunity.
In fact, you could even let the realtors know about that.
So when you do a real estate closing, they can say, hey, did you know you can do this?
It's voluntary, but we followed the same protocols and security measures that about five or seven other states also have.
We think that's really just helpful that you have a clean, updated list.
Dodd, did you take the Secretary off the list when you were running collections in Virginia?
Minute one.
Minute one.
More serious follow-up, we mentioned online registration.
You also have a form of automatic registration, and that can mean different things in different states.
Do you want to give a quick sense of what you do that gets people on more efficiently or automatically?
With so-called motor voter, you have a choice.
You can be opt-in or opt-out.
So opt-in means, yes, please register me.
I've been wanting to vote ever since I've turned 18.
Or I just moved to Georgia.
Yes, I want to be able to vote.
Or opt-out means, please do not register me.
I don't want to be registered.
And so we are an opt-out state.
So when I got elected, I'm a conservative Republican.
I talked to our general counsel, Ryan Germany, and I said, we're a Republican state, aren't we?
He says, yeah.
He says, well, why do we do opt-out?
We should be opt-in.
He says, oh, yeah, Brad.
So then he explained to me, and what's really interesting, he said, Brad, the advantage of opt-out is that we'll have more people register to vote.
And when they do that, 99% of our people registered Department of Driver Services and do a robust citizenship verification, making sure they're American citizens.
They'll make sure that they're not felons under sentence.
They'll just verify that they meet all the qualifications of being elector.
They do a lot of the heavy lifting for us of a clean list.
But also because it's opt-out, we have more people on the list.
What they'll do is people update their driver's license.
So when they move from Clark County to Oconee County, then they're going to go ahead and change their driver's license number, and we'll find out about for voter records.
So our list is going to be cleaner that way.
Oh, I see why you did that.
And so I got the understanding of why that is.
Now, you have a choice, but actually in Georgia, we've been opt-out, you know, probably since day one, and it's worked well for us.
But when I understand from that perspective, then I see why it makes sense because I like to be able to know that when people move to another part of the state, that we'll find out about it.
We have a cleaner list.
Okay.
Hi, Secretary Rappensberger.
You need to identify yourself.
I'm Leslie Reynolds from the National Association of Secretaries of State.
And we got into a bit of a feisty discussion with the U.S. Postal Service before the election about them sort of working to address some of the concerns that we had, working harder to do that.
And I know that Georgia is one of the states where they had a facility that was new because it was consolidated.
And I wondered how the U.S. Postal Service ended up performing as far as you're concerned in Georgia.
I'm going to be asking the other states too, but I thought since you're here, I'll ask you now.
The National Association of Secretaries of State wrote a letter to the Postmaster General and received a response, I think in 24 hours.
Maybe 48, but it was quick, with a full commitment.
And by and large, we did see a noticeable improvement for the fall election.
But that is one of my concerns really about being a mail-in state.
If you don't have dependable mail service and you have a system that needs dependable mail service, then you really have built a system to fail.
And you really want to build a system that your election management professionals can be successful in each of the counties and that voters feel good about it.
And so it may be something, if they don't fix the mail, I just think that more and more people are going to say, we need to have just more early voting like Georgia and other states do.
So we have opportunities to vote.
And then you'll have that 5% that want to just vote by mail, just because they've been a mess for several years now, and it's about time they get fixed.
Perhaps that's on that list of the Doge team.
Okay, we'll go over here.
Hi, I'm Daniel Shelcross from Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
And so I think the worst thing to see during voting time is to see a long line when you're on your lunch break.
And so something that really piqued my interest was that you saw an average time of three minutes, I think, while waiting to go vote.
And so I'm just curious if you can expound upon just how you were able to do that.
Well, we put it into state law, but we also worked with the counties.
We looked at how many people do you have in your precinct?
How many machines do you have?
How many voters can you, what's your throughput per hour per machine?
And so then we gave them a grade.
Green light, you're good.
Yellow light, depends how many people show up at what time.
And then a red light, this won't work.
And so they could help bust their precincts in half, add additional equipment.
So we worked with on the data analytics on that, just so they could get the right size precincts.
That is on election day.
On early voting, we have 17 days of it.
We can't really control it because that's the problem with the vote center.
Everyone decides that they're going to vote in that precinct because that's where all the people work.
They then load it up at lunchtime and it will be long.
But on election day, we know who's already voted so we can have, we're prepared for the people that are left to vote.
And we make sure we build in a factor of safety of two at least so that even when we hit a peak at 10, 12, and 5 to the close of polls, that we can still manage it.
Because that's when we see it ramp up and then it comes back down and then ramps up.
We track it county by county and then we hold the counties accountable.
And they've done a great job.
And this may also be an argument why you might want to elect an engineer to be running your elections.
Because you understand the processes.
You go up to MIT.
There's a formula on the wall, Little's Law, which deals with all the ways in which we manage lines.
But the way in which you could think about this, I think, is something.
It's high school math, trust me.
It's really throughput per hour.
How many hours do you have?
What's the number?
They'll divide it out.
It's real easy.
Okay, well, time for one last question right here on the front.
Well, Mike is coming here.
Hi, how do you do, Mr. Secretary?
I'm Shetl Hansen.
I'm a journalist from Norway.
You talked a lot about voter trust.
Do you believe there's a lot of cheating out there?
Not in Georgia.
But by and large, no.
But when you can't quantify something, it's really important that you do everything you can to squeeze out any inaccuracies.
In fact, at lunchtime I was talking to a couple folks about where we have some really close races.
When you can have races where it's decided by less than 50 people, it may not be the presidential, but it could be a county commissioner, a state rep, state senator.
I believe that the judges' race in North Carolina is under 50.
It's 22?
It was 21 last time I checked.
So, out of 5 million voters.
So when we did our citizenship verification, we found 20 non-citizens that were on the voter rolls.
We took them off.
It's a violation of state law, so we sent their names to local DAs for prosecution.
But what if that race right there would have been actually 15?
It's a statewide race for a judge, and those 20 people were on there.
But also, what if you had two dead people?
What if you had double voting because you weren't a member of ERIC and you had four double voters from, they voted in one state and voted in your state.
All of a sudden, and so that's why when you get to be very competitive, you have to be really, really accurate on what it is.
And that's what Florida faced back in the year 2000.
400, 450 votes total out of a state with at the time, what, 20 million people?
That was extremely close.
And so that's why it's really just to make sure that you squeeze out everything as accurate as possible.
We know that people are moving up to the day of elections.
We know that people pass away up to the day of elections, things like that.
But you have to just get it as accurate as possible and not say, well, that's good enough.
Because the voters have to be able to trust it at the end of the day.
Trust is what holds society together.
Well, it is people like Secretary Brad Raffensberger who run our elections, who make our democracy work.
And he's, of course, come to the end of an election cycle, and he's had a couple of controversial election cycles beforehand.
So we'd like to thank you for your service to the country and for being here today.
Well, thank you.
Thank you.
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