March 29, 2022 - Epoch Times
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| This is your Daily Facts Matter Update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times. | |
| And now, since the midterms are coming up so soon, they are quite literally right around the corner, let's focus today's discussion on the integrity of America's elections. | |
| And to that end, let's start over in Indiana, where the governor has just signed into law a new piece of election integrity legislation. | |
| And this new law, which is officially known as House Bill 1116, it will require that all counties in the state must have a trail of paper ballots, meaning that they must have a paper backup for all of their electronic voting machines. | |
| Specifically, the new bill requires that all Indiana counties which use electronic voting machines, which is pretty much all of them, they must install what the bill refers to as a voter-verifiable paper audit trail And the reason this matters is because up until now, over half of Indiana's counties used voting machines that were manufactured by a company called MicroVote. | |
| And these particular machines, they don't leave a paper record for how the votes were actually cast. | |
| And so while this might seem environmentally friendly and it might save some trees, it makes it very difficult for either election workers or anyone else in the state to conduct either an audit following an election or to recant the votes in the event of a very close race or a potential legal challenge. | |
| And so, up until this month, there was a strange situation over in Indiana, one in which officials knew about this problem, but they appeared to be just kicking the can down the road. | |
| That's because before this new bill was signed into law earlier this month, there was another law in the books in the state of Indiana, which stipulated that all counties had until December of 2029 to either replace their microvote machines or to outfit them with external printers, meaning that they had seven more years to take some form of action. | |
| However, with the passage of this new bill, that again was just signed into law earlier this month, that time frame was shortened to two years, meaning that by July 1st of 2024, these printers must be installed in all microvote machines. | |
| Which won't cover the midterm elections, of course, but it will be fully in effect by the time of the 2024 presidential race. | |
| Although there's something else worth mentioning regarding these printers, which just for your reference are officially known as VVPATs, which stands for Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails. | |
| And the way that these VPAT printers work is that they attach themselves to a voting machine and record the votes on a roll of thermal paper, which actually stays inside of the machine. | |
| And for your reference, the thermal paper that they use is similar to register tape, sort of like what you get in the receipt when you go to the grocery store. | |
| And so the way that this process works is that a voter would go to an election machine, choose their candidates on the screen, and then their selections are printed on the thermal paper, which the voter then has to verify by looking through a piece of glass on the side of the voting machine. | |
| They can't actually interact with the paper themselves. | |
| And if what's written on the paper matches what they selected on the screen, well, then they can cast their ballots. | |
| However, there are still two very big problems with this particular method. | |
| One is that, let's say, the selected candidate on the screen is different from the one that's printed out. | |
| There was some kind of discrepancy. | |
| Then you would have to redo that part of the process. | |
| However, since the paper ballots remain inside of the machine without coming out, Well, then you have multiple ballots, and that might create a logistical nightmare in case of an audit. | |
| And that would actually be compounded by the fact that thermal paper would be very, very difficult to use during any kind of an election audit in general because it's very thin, waxy, and it's relatively easy to smudge. | |
| And so along that line, during a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee in Indiana, The president of an organization called Indiana Vote by Mail, which is actually advocating for universal mail-in voting, she testified in opposition to these printers, saying that the entire voting rights community opposes the VPAT printers, and then she added this, Let's just go back to the basics, and go to hand-marked paper ballots. | |
| It makes the most sense. | |
| It's the cheapest thing to do, and it's the thing that's going to make our elections in Indiana trusted by voters and restore confidence. | |
| And frankly, she's not alone. | |
| That's because Mr. | |
| Kurt Nisley, who is an Indiana state congressman, he's a Republican, he also called for a return to paper ballots. | |
| Here's specifically what he said in a recent statement. | |
| There are definitely people who are thinking that elections could work just as well with just plain paper. | |
| There's lots of issues with machines you don't have in paper, and the biggest thing is trust in the system. | |
| And by the way, I thought it was rather ironic that that particular congressman, he actually owns a computer repair company himself, but he said that after thinking it through, he realized that the expense as well as the issues involved with voting by machines just does not justify the convenience. | |
| And to that end, he actually brought forth an amendment to the House floor in Indiana, which would scrap the use of voting machines altogether throughout the entire state and return to the use of paper ballots. | |
| However, that amendment was actually defeated, and then later that new bill regarding the voting printers was eventually adopted and then later signed into law. | |
| And after that new bill was passed, here's what Holly Sullivan, who is Indiana's Secretary of State, she's also a Republican, here's what she said regarding the new law. | |
| It also allows me and the Secretary of State's office to better partner with our county election administrators to do post-election recounts, if needed, as well as post-election audits. | |
| Electronic voting machines with paper backups are the perfect blend, And also, something that I did not mention earlier is that the same law which is now requiring printers, meaning House Bill 1116, it also stipulates that voters in Indiana will now have to provide a driver's license number, a state ID number, or at least the last four digits of their social security number when they submit an online request for an absentee ballot. | |
| If you'd like to read this new law in its entirety, as well as an analysis of how these voting machine printers actually function in the real world, well, I'll throw the link to several articles into the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And all I ask in return is that you vote manually with your finger and you smash both that like button as well as that subscribe button so that, for one, this video will be shared out to ever more people, but then secondly, you can get honest news coverage delivered directly into your news feed every single weekday, well, as long as YouTube does not kick us off. | |
| And now, since we're on the topic of election and election integrity, especially with the midterms coming up so soon, let's discuss the efforts by the Democrats at the federal level to actually nationalize our election system. | |
| Sorry. | |
| What's this? | |
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| And now Roman in the studio. | |
| Back to you. | |
| Now, a few days ago, when I was doing research on HR1, also known as the For the People Act, which is the national law that the Democrats are trying to push through Congress right now in order to nationalize our elections, well, during that research, I came across this video, which shows a congressman named Barry Loudermilk explaining why he's opposing this piece of legislation. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Thank you, Mr. | |
| Speaker. | |
| I rise today, obviously, in strong opposition to this latest attempt by my colleagues on the other side to enact the federal takeover of elections and continue their tactics that they have used consistently in this Congress and last Congress to hide the intent of what they're doing. | |
| Make no mistake, this legislation is an attempt to circumvent state legislature's constitutional authority to set election laws. | |
| Laws like the one recently passed in Georgia that maximizes voter access and protects the integrity of every legal ballot. | |
| One size fits all government has never worked in a diverse and free society like we have here in the United States of America. | |
| One size fits all is synonymous with dictatorial regimes, socialist societies, and communist countries. | |
| Governments that keep control over the people by stripping the authority from the hands of local officials that were elected by the people to represent them. | |
| And so, in order to pick his brain just a little bit further, I took the opportunity just two days ago to sit down with Congressman Loudermilk while I was down in Florida, and we discussed the dangers of nationalizing America's elections. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| So the first issue I wanted to discuss with you is this move by the Democrats to federalize the national elections. | |
| Can you give your opinion on that? | |
| Well, first of all, it's unconstitutional, okay? | |
| The Constitution is very clear when it comes to election law, that that is reserved for the state legislators. | |
| Election integrity was one of the top concerns of our founders, and that's why it was written in the way it is, is that the Constitution uses the term like manner and place and time of election is to be set by the state legislature. | |
| The idea is each state is unique. | |
| You look at different states, California versus Georgia or versus Alaska, which has a lot of remote areas. | |
| If the federal government sets a law, it's a one-size-fits-all. | |
| It's not going to fit into that arena. | |
| The other aspect of it is the states created the federal government, not the other way. | |
| When you look at the Constitution, the 10th Amendment of the Constitution says the powers that aren't given to the federal government are reserved to the state. | |
| And then to the people. | |
| That's a reverse process of how our nation was created. | |
| The people have rights and powers, rights given by God, and the power to protect those rights. | |
| Then they combined those rights to create the state governments, and then the state governments combined and said, we'll give some of this power to create a federal government. | |
| So the elections, even federal elections, are left to the states. | |
| What happened in the last election, even in Georgia, is changes were made to election law that were not made by the legislative bodies. | |
| Such as Georgia, the sending out of applications for absentee ballots to every registered voter. | |
| That was not provided for by law. | |
| So the legislature did not make that change. | |
| The Secretary of State did by himself. | |
| Also, the placement of ballot boxes. | |
| There was never a place for ballot boxes. | |
| That change was never made by the legislature. | |
| That was just something in response to COVID that the Secretary of State did. | |
| Now we're seeing that those ballot boxes may have had a problem of election integrity, of ballot harvesting. | |
| Just today, a report has come out that the Elections Board is extending subpoena power to the Secretary of State to look into ballot harvesting. | |
| The problem is, yes, you can find fraud. | |
| It's hard to find in elections, but you're never going to find it until way after an election is certified and done. | |
| And so I think Georgia has taken a huge step in the right direction on election integrity. | |
| With the election law the Senate passed and Governor Kemp has signed. | |
| So we've taken a broad step forward. | |
| We need to keep looking at it. | |
| What is it that else we need to do to protect the ballots? | |
| Georgia has a history. | |
| Of having election issues, but it's county by county. | |
| Look at Fulton County. | |
| Every election, Fulton County has problems. | |
| So when you hear people on the left say, well, we shouldn't question this election at all. | |
| Well, they have questioned every election, you know, prior to this one, especially certain counties, even in the 2020 election primary. | |
| The mainstream media was already complaining about Fulton County and that there was voter suppression going on, but then we get into the general election, which their side won, well then everything was fine. | |
| Everything wasn't fine. | |
| We do need to continue to be vigilant, And cleaning up our voter rolls. | |
| We need to make sure that people aren't registered, that no longer live in the state, that have passed away. | |
| There's an old joke that just how many people from the cemetery are actually voting. | |
| That's an old joke in Georgia because it goes back. | |
| There's history to that. | |
| And so the Supreme Court has already ruled that States not only can but should be purging their voter rolls, but we still see the left complaining about it is that it's somehow suppressing voter rights if you remove someone who has passed away from a voter roll. | |
| So these are the types of things that we have to be consistent doing and that inevitably will lead us back to people feeling that there is integrity in our life. | |
| Let me ask you this. | |
| You earlier discussed the Election Integrity Act, which was passed last year in Georgia. | |
| Right now, there's a new election bill that recently passed the Georgia House. | |
| Now it's making its way to the Senate. | |
| It's poised to likely pass there as well. | |
| Within that bill, I'll just mention a few things. | |
| One thing is that it restricts private funds to be used to administer the election. | |
| Sort of like how Mark Zuckerberg paid the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which then distributed money overwhelmingly to Democratic areas. | |
| So I have a question regarding that. | |
| So Georgia appears to be tackling that issue, and a few other states are as well. | |
| However, you then have states like California and other Democrat-controlled states, which are not tackling that issue, but instead actually allowing it to flourish, or at least to proliferate. | |
| Without the federalization of elections or without some kind of uniform rule, how can, within a national election, you have a situation where that's allowed in some states and it's not allowed in other states, it seems not fair and it seems like it'll erode people's trust in the election system. | |
| Well, it could, except for when you look at the federal elections. | |
| And again, this is a sticky area because there's some other things some of my colleagues, good conservatives, are proposing that I think is a slippery slope if we go down, like mandating voter ID at the federal level. | |
| Well, when you do that, you're breaching that constitutional divide that separates the federal government from state government. | |
| And if we, as Congress, pass a law, That says every state has to have some type of voter ID system based on a government document. | |
| One, very well could be thrown out in the courts, especially with a conservative, constitutional-leaning Supreme Court. | |
| Secondly, if it was to stand, that opens the Pandora's box for everything else that we don't like when the tide shifts Possibly again in the future for a federal takeover of elections. | |
| So we have to be very careful in that area. | |
| When you look at it from a federal election standpoint, take California for instance, they take Zucker Bucks. | |
| Well that is a Democrat-run state already. | |
| So it's probably not going to affect that, except for in some congressional districts, from a presidential election, it's not going to have that big of an effect because If you get 200,000 more Democrat votes, all of those delegates are going for the Democrat anyhow, right? | |
| And that's not justifying spending. | |
| I think we do need to look at the federal level for businesses putting money into elections, period. | |
| We can do it from looking at the business side, not the election side. | |
| So there are some things that we have to look at. | |
| Several things we're looking at already when it comes to big tech, looking at antitrust laws of how we may be able to stop the censorship that they're doing. | |
| So you can be innovative, but we also have to be very conscientious of the Constitution. | |
| We always follow the rule of law on the conservative side. | |
| The Constitution isn't something that you just utilize when it's convenient to you. | |
| You can't just claim something's unconstitutional when somebody is doing something that you don't like, but you then can't violate it just because it allows you to do something you do like. | |
| And so we have to be consistent on that. | |
| Yeah, it's true. | |
| I was just thinking about it, how it seems like within the realm of federalization, you can say, well, that would be a good case for it where you can restrict Zuckerbucks across the nation, but you can never assume it'll always be used well like that. | |
| It'll actually, like you described, likely be used for more bad than good in the long term. | |
| But you mentioned something that was very interesting. | |
| You mentioned the big tech censorship. | |
| So recently, of course, the Hunter Biden laptop was, you know, It's finally claimed to be real by the DOJ and the New York Times, which is something we obviously knew for a very long time. | |
| But the media covered it up, right, as well as big tech. | |
| They censored that story, especially during the election cycle. | |
| Now, there was a post-election survey that was done by the Media Research Center, which said that if Joe Biden voters specifically in seven battleground states, they were asked, did you know about the laptop? | |
| And if they said no, they were told about the laptop. | |
| And they said, would you have changed your vote? | |
| And about 9.4 of them 9.4% of them said that they would have changed their vote if they knew about the Hunter laptop story, which is well more than enough to actually change the election, the result of the election. | |
| What do you make of that moving forward, the ability of big tech as well as big media to effectively sway our elections in this way? | |
| Right, and this is what's interesting is even now as some of the mainstream media coming out and going, whoops, yeah, sorry, it was true. | |
| We're just finding out. | |
| I don't believe that. | |
| I believe they knew it was true then. | |
| They knew that it would have an effect on the election, so they suppressed it. | |
| It even goes beyond the suppression of it when it becomes big tech. | |
| Big tech was actively deleting people's accounts who shared that story. | |
| I believe it was the New York Post who actually broke the story. | |
| And if I remember, it was either Facebook or Twitter. | |
| Totally killed it. | |
| Would not allow that to be shared. | |
| This is the same type of censorship that you're seeing happen in Russia right now with Vladimir Putin, who is trying to purge any negative news reporting about what he's doing in Ukraine. | |
| So, when we look at our media here that starts criticizing Russia for what they're doing is exactly the same thing that they were doing and are still doing. | |
| Now, I think the media exposure may mitigate some of this of what's going on, but this is one area that Congress does have to take action. | |
| Big tech is claiming that they're just a technology platform. | |
| Well, if you're a technology platform, you cannot censor, right? | |
| But then they'll claim, well, they're actually journalists. | |
| Well, if you're a journalist, you can't censor. | |
| You can take a literary license, but if you're going to censor, you cannot hide behind the same protections Now, if you'd like to learn more about H.R.1, we here at the Epoch Times, we actually published a phenomenal point-by-point breakdown of all the different provisions inside of it, meaning how it would actually change our election systems. | |
| And I'll throw a link to it. | |
| It'll be down in the description box below this video. | |
| You can check it out and you can see how H.R.1 would actually affect every single state. | |
| And lastly, we recently published a new movie over on Epoch TV called Amerageddon. | |
| Which is a story of how a globalist terrorist organization, which is aligned with the United Nations, worked to disable the U.S.'s power grid and institute martial law. | |
| Here's a trailer. | |
| The reason I'm here today is to encourage the U.S. Congress to take action to protect our country from its most imminent threat. | |
| Electricity would cease, the internet would go down, and the banking system. | |
| The smokescreen of national security, used by government at every level. | |
| A strong America is the only thing standing in the way. | |
| The country only needs a little chaos. | |
| We have a fog that has descended on our entire nation. | |
| Hello, Mr. | |
| President. | |
| Now is the time. | |
| You had to give the president power to arrest any American by simply accusing them of terrorism. | |
| I'm just so afraid of the world that you're going to have to grow up. | |
| This is the time, man, woman, young or old, when folks run and hide. | |
| Or they pull up their bootstraps. | |
| If you'd like to check out that movie, I'll throw a link to Epic TV. It'll be down in the description box below this video for you to check out. | |
| And by the way, besides that movie, there are a ton of other great movies on there as well. | |
| So it's a fantastic way to keep entertained with both you and your family, but also a great way to support the journalism as well. | |
| Again, that link will be down in the description box below. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times. |
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