All Episodes
Previous Next
March 29, 2022 - Epoch Times
17:26
Lawmakers Setup "Election Police Unit" to Investigate and Prosecute Fraud Cases; $3.7M Budget
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is your daily Facts Matter update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times.
And today, I'd like to start by wishing you all a very happy St.
Patrick's Day.
Although, you might be asking yourself why I'm not wearing any green.
And the answer to that is quite simple.
Because I'm in front of a green screen, well, any piece of green clothing that I would have on me would just disappear into the background.
And by the way, if you want more behind-the-scenes shots like that one, as well as behind-the-scenes research, as well as very, very spicy memes, I usually post all that over on Instagram, and you can follow me at Epic Times Roman.
I'll keep posting there until they kick me off.
And now, let's begin today's discussion by talking about election integrity.
And to start with, over in Florida, the state legislature has just approved a new bill which would tighten up election security by, among several other things, making the possession of more than two voter ballots a felony charge in the third degree.
Specifically, the new bill, which is officially called SB 524, it passed both chambers of the state legislature with a very strong majority.
It passed the state senate by a vote of 24 to 14, and it passed the state house by a vote of 76 to 41.
And as I mentioned just a moment ago, this new law, it will make it a felony for anyone in the state to possess more than two ballots.
Here's specifically what this new law says in relevant part.
Quote, Now it's worth mentioning that previously, before Now it's worth mentioning that previously, before this new bill passed the state legislature, possessing more than two ballots within the state of Florida was a misdemeanor.
However, with this new, more serious classification, what it means in practice is that possession of over two ballots can now be punishable by a fine of up to $50,000, as well as five years in prison.
However, as I mentioned earlier, this was not the only election integrity measure within this new piece of legislation.
And so, besides this provision against owning more than two ballots, this new bill also imposes stricter voter ID requirements in order to vote by mail.
It will outlaw the use of private funds for election-related expenses.
And so, for instance, under this new law, you won't have a situation where Mark Zuckerberg can donate $500 million in order to help out with the elections in Florida.
The new bill will also outlaw the use of unmanned drop boxes within the state of Florida.
It also establishes a new timeline for election supervisors to clean up the voter rolls and get rid of ineligible voters.
And then lastly, the bill establishes something that's called the Office of Election Crimes and Security.
And this office is actually the first of its kind in the entire nation.
It's essentially a police force within the state of Florida, which is dedicated specifically to investigating election-related criminal activity.
Here's in fact how this bill describes this new election crimes unit.
Quote, The Office of Election Crimes and Security is created within the Department of State.
The purpose of the office is to aid the Secretary of State in completion of his or her duties by receiving and reviewing notices and reports generated by government officials or any other person regarding alleged occurrences of election law violations or election irregularities in the state, as well as by initiating independent inquiries and conducting preliminary investigations as well as by initiating independent inquiries and conducting preliminary investigations into allegations of election law violations or election irregularities in the
Meaning that this new office can not only initiate their own investigations of their own accord, but also anyone throughout the entire state of Florida, they can come to this elections unit and report any type of election misconduct and they can investigate that as well.
And once created, this office will be the largest of its kind in the entire nation.
In fact, when Ron DeSantis first announced this initiative back in November, he laid out a plan to hire 25 law enforcement officers as well as investigators in order to staff this new election crimes unit.
Alright, there was something I forgot to mention during the in-studio filming of that segment, which is that once the Office of Election Crimes and Security is actually set up, at least initially, it will be staffed with 15 investigators who are going to be tasked with doing preliminary investigations into election fraud.
And then secondly, the bill calls on Governor Ron DeSantis To appoint 10 law enforcement officers who will sit underneath the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to actually probe election crimes.
And so, at least initially, there will be a staff of 15 investigators as well as 10 cops for a total combined personnel of 25 in order to both investigate as well as to prosecute election-related crimes.
And their combined effort will have a budget, at least initially, of $3.7 million.
And then furthermore, it looks like other states are going to be emulating what Florida is doing, although we'll talk more about that back in the studio.
However, as you can imagine, this new bill, and especially this provision which establishes this election-related police force, it has both supporters as well as detractors.
For instance, Ms.
Debbie Mayfield, who is the Florida Senate Majority Leader, she said this regarding the new bill.
Florida leads the nation in election integrity because we have taken a proactive approach to address and anticipating any election issues.
To ensure Florida remains a national model for free and fair elections, we established a clear framework to investigate elections violations, improved voter roll maintenance, continued our commitment to secure vote-by-mail ballots, and increased and expanded penalties for those who illegally interfere in our elections.
On the flip side, however, the political director of Florida's ACLU chapter, he had, well, you can say a different take on this particular bill, saying that after it passed the legislature, quote,"...it would create an elections police force that can only be described as a solution in search of a problem.
The handful of cases of intentional misconduct that have been prosecuted in the past year demonstrate that the existing system works." Creating this additional police force to chase non-existent elections issues is an unnecessary expense that will burden Florida's taxpayers and intimidate voters.
We have real needs in Florida to address, and this is not one of them.
Regardless, though, this new bill is now on its way to Governor Ron DeSantis' desk to be signed into law, which it looks like he is poised to do, given the fact that he himself was pushing this proposal to be adopted into the legislative agenda back in November.
And so this bill will likely become law within the next week or so.
However, what's interesting here is that although Florida has created the first-ever state-level agency to investigate election crimes, other states are looking to emulate what they've done.
For instance, there is a bill that's currently working its way through the statehouse over in the state of Arizona.
That bill for your reference is called SB 1027, and it would, very similar to Florida, establish a Bureau of Elections within the governor's office, which would be a new agency that could both investigate as well as prosecute election-related crimes.
And then also, within the state of Georgia, one of their frontrunners for governor, Mr.
David Perdue, he recently touted a plan that's again very similar to the one in Florida, which would establish a quote, election law enforcement division within Georgia that will be charged with enforcing election laws, investigating election crimes and fraud, and arresting those who commit these offenses.
And so we'll just have to wait and see how this new elections crimes unit establishes itself within Florida and then whether it will be actually emulated by other states throughout the entire nation.
And the reason that all this is so important is that, for one, we of course have the midterm elections coming up very soon.
But also, after what happened in the year 2020, there have been really two trains of thought regarding elections that have been playing themselves out in the country.
And so, on the one hand, you have states that have, over the past two years, tightened up their election security by enforcing things like voter ID laws and eliminating drop boxes.
Those states, typically Republican-controlled states, they have largely stated that election security is their main concern and so their actions work to make the ballot box as secure as possible.
On the flip side, however, you have Democrat-controlled areas that have gone in the exact opposite direction, and they have worked to make voting as easy as possible, because according to their statements, they wish to have as many people participate in the democratic process as humanly possible.
And so, you have states like California, which have made mail-in voting permanent, and you have even cities like New York, which now allow almost everyone, including even non-citizens, to vote in the New York City elections.
These are the two competing schools of thought regarding elections, and frankly, how this debate plays itself out will very obviously have reverberations for the future of this country, at least in terms of who's leading it.
If you'd like to read more about either this new elections unit or about the rest of the election integrity bill that just passed the Florida legislature, I'll throw all that into the description box below this video for you to check out, and all I ask in return is that you take a super quick second to vote with your finger and smash, smash, smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm.
That's right.
Our sponsor for today's episode is a phenomenal organization that not only advocates for conservative values, but also provides awesome membership benefits to over 2 million people across the entire country.
I am, of course, talking about AMAC, or the Association for Mature American Citizens.
Now, they are quite literally one of the fastest-growing conservative organizations in all of America, especially for those aged 50 and up.
Although, frankly, you don't have to be over the age of 50 to join.
You can be any age.
And if you do join AMAC, you will get phenomenal benefits, such as money-saving benefits, access to cutting-edge news, and in fact, they will actually send you a bi-monthly magazine directly to your mailbox, which is quite honestly awesome.
I love AMAC's magazine.
However, besides all the money-saving benefits, a lot of people said that they joined AMAC because of the fact that they fight on Capitol Hill For conservative values.
Here's in fact what they wrote.
As a socialist storm is brewing, if you care about the future of America, like the two million members of AMAC, then you should join as well.
And you can do so over at amac.us forward slash facts matter.
That's amac.us forward slash facts matter.
Go on there, join the organization.
It doesn't cost that much.
However, the membership benefits are great and the cause is even greater.
Again, that's amac.us forward slash facts matter.
And now let's head back to the studio.
Let's switch gears just a little bit.
As you're likely aware, critical race theory and other subversive ideologies are being pushed more and more within the American classroom.
However, there is a children's book series which aims to counteract this movement by instead spreading American traditional values.
And so, while I was down in Florida about a week ago, I took the unique opportunity to sit down and speak with Bethany Mandel, who is both the editor as well as a board member for Heroes of Liberty, and we discussed not only the dangers of pushing woke ideologies within children's books, But also on the flip side, the great benefits of using traditional American stories to teach children positive values.
Take a listen.
So I am the editor of Heroes of Liberty.
It's a new children's book series.
We just came out in November.
And every month we're releasing a new book for children between the ages of like 7 and 12 about people that they should become familiar with, like Thomas Sowell, Ronald Reagan, Amy Coney Barrett.
Those were our first three books.
And then every month after that, we are releasing a new book.
So our January book, or if maybe it was February, was John Wayne.
And then March will be Alexander Hamilton.
And coming up will be Margaret Thatcher, Rush Limbaugh, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur.
The gang's all here.
Why do you think it's important?
Why are you working on this?
Why do you think that children should know these stories?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think that children learn best through storytelling and through forming relationships with individual characters instead of sort of an overarching story like this was what happened during the First World War or the Second World War.
But when they form an attachment to Winston Churchill and they come to understand Winston and form that bond with him, it's much easier to sort of understand the history of the entire events that he was participating in because they have that attachment.
And so we decided, you know, kids learn best through stories and they don't like to be preached to.
They don't like to be We just want to tell good stories with amazing illustrations.
And so we decided to pour a lot of money into the illustrations so that kids could learn these stories and really be captivated.
So while our audience is between 7 and 12, I have a 4-year-old who loves the illustrations.
And my 2-year-old loves John Wayne because she loves the pictures.
Actually, that's one of the things I noticed right away as soon as I was flipping through the book I told you yesterday as soon as I saw it, which is that the illustrations are so traditional, whereas a lot of the newer modern children's books, it's pretty much modern art inside of the triangular noses.
It is essentially an aspect of modern art.
Can you explain why you think it's so important to have that sort of more traditional art in the books?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think that modern children's literature in so many different ways, and you totally pinpointed it with the art, but also with the subject matter.
A lot of it is very woke.
A lot of it's very politicized.
It's adults telling children what they should like.
And I'm a mom of five.
I'm a connoisseur of children's books by nature.
I homeschool my five children.
Kids are drawn to good art that looks realistic.
And so our Amy Coney Barrett book is It has a soft feel because it's sort of about her motherhood, and so we decided to go with watercolor instead of this sort of cartoon sketches were a little bit more of the Thomas Sowell feel.
But we wanted art that would draw the kids in that felt reminiscent of the stories that we were telling.
So what has the reception been?
Because I can imagine that the children's books are getting more and more, not only more and more woke, but there's more and more realization with the general population that they are getting more woke, right?
You have all these titles.
Yeah, Anti-Racist Baby, Call Me Max, a book for kindergarten children about a transgender child named Max.
If you walk into a Barnes& Noble and just look at the children's bookshelves, even if you don't have children, you'll be shocked to see what you see.
There were 27 biographies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the shelves.
Not a single biography of Amy Coney Barrett, which is why we decided to do that.
But the people that they choose to highlight, like there's a million Kamala Harris biographies as well.
The people that they choose to highlight, but also the stories that they're choosing to tell all have a very political bend.
And so before we started Heroes of Liberty, we decided, like us as a family, we're only buying used books that were written before like 1970 or so.
And that's for a reason.
All of the homeschool curriculums that we follow, they use classic books, Aesop's Fables.
The list really goes on.
Because when you sacrifice...
Your storytelling for a political narrative, you're sacrificing some of the quality.
And so, you know, they're just not good books that are written nowadays.
And so we decided we want to tell good stories without the agenda.
And that's what we've done.
It almost seems like what you were saying, when you're looking for books, you're looking for books written before a certain date.
Yeah.
Because they have a certain level of standard of moral values.
But...
You're taking those same ideas, same values, and you're just bringing it to a modern concept.
Like Amy Coney Barrett, of course, was not, you know, I mean, maybe she was alive in the 1970s, but she wasn't who she was.
That's fascinating.
But you also have a petition, you said, going on right now.
Can you talk a bit about that?
Yeah, yeah.
So it's stopwokebooks.com.
And we have a petition that we're trying to gather as many signatures of concerned Americans as possible.
Scholastic Press is a billion-dollar juggernaut, and they have unprecedented access to our children's schools via book fairs, via the school library, via just classroom libraries as well.
And again, you would be shocked at the sort of material that you'd see.
And one of the videos that we have on that website, stopwokebooks.com, is a video of me just reading a page.
Out of a book that was written for kids eight and over.
It's called George by Alex Geno.
And the American Library Association has a list of banned books.
And it's books that parents sort of object to.
And ten years ago, those books...
The top of that book list was Captain Underpants because it had sort of potty humor, which my kids read it.
I don't love it, but it is what it is.
In the last 10 years, there's been a real shift in the content that they're pushing on kids.
It's not just silly potty humor that we saw in 2013.
Now we're seeing George as the top of that list, and it's there for a reason.
Parents are objecting to that book for a reason.
It's because It promotes transgender ideology.
It promotes the idea that children should go to their parents and request hormones and surgeries and puberty blockers.
And the American Library Association is also woke.
And so they're putting it on their banned books list.
But parents are objecting to it for a reason.
And the entire industry seems to think that we're all book burners.
And we're not.
But we should have a say over what our children are exposed to.
And so that's sort of what we're trying to do with the Scholastic Campaign.
to make parents aware of what is in children's books and hopefully get them out of school districts.
Now, that was now the full interview.
If you'd like to watch that interview in its entirety, you can do so over on Epic TV, which is our awesome no censorship video platform.
I'll throw a link to it.
It'll be down in the description box below.
And also, if you want to check out some of the Heroes of Liberty books for yourself, I'll throw a link in the description box below for a place where you can check them out for yourself and order them to your own house so you can teach your children those American traditional values.
Now, lastly, I'd like to mention something that I mentioned yesterday, which is that Facts Matter is now available as a podcast.
And so if you listen to podcasts on Apple, Google, or Spotify, you can find our episodes on there as well.
And frankly, it's going pretty well.
I checked just this morning, and we were already number 51 in the news category here in America on Apple Podcasts.
Now that's pretty good because we were only something like 243 about a week ago, and we've only been on that platform for only a month.
So we're getting better and better, and we're now above even big names like Tim Pool, Morning Joe, and Sean Hannity.
However, being number 51 is still, frankly, a rookie number.
And so if you listen to podcasts, consider checking out Facts Matter on Apple, Google, and Spotify, maybe even leaving us a review, and let's see if we can crack the top 10 by the end of this month.
I think it's possible.
I'll throw all the links to the different podcast platforms that we're on.
They'll all be in the description box below.
And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epoch Times.
▲
Export Selection