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April 15, 2023 - Epoch Times
17:58
630 People Referred to Police for Election Fraud; New Bill to Reform Election Data Analytics
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It used to be that secretaries of state were very little-known positions.
It used to be the case that most people here in America couldn't even name their secretary of state.
However, after what took place in the year 2020, many people across the country, both on the left and the right, have woken up to the fact that secretaries of state, in their official capacity to administer elections, are actually incredibly important positions.
They determine how a state's election is run, and as we've learned in recent years, they also often decide which laws to follow and which laws to ignore.
For instance, during the pandemic, the secretaries of state in multiple different states allowed for ballot drop boxes as well as mail-in voting provisions that were actually directly at odds with what was written in the law, such as the case over in Wisconsin.
However, since that election, since the election of 2020, the different states across this nation have moved in one of two directions.
They've either gone the route of California, allowing for universal mail-in voting and explicitly not requiring photo ID, or they have gone the route of Georgia by tightening up who can vote, when they can vote, limiting the use of draw boxes, and explicitly outlawing the practice of sending out mass absentee ballot request forms to everyone.
Now, the state of Ohio has taken a similar approach to that of Georgia.
According to the current Ohio Secretary of State, Mr.
Frank LaRose, they have not only implemented new legal provisions that make it easy to vote, hard to cheat, but also his office has referred over 630 people to law enforcement because their investigators have found that those individuals were likely engaged in some form of voter fraud.
And wouldn't you know it, while I was down in Washington, D.C., I actually had the opportunity to sit down and speak with the Ohio Secretary of State regarding how to keep elections safe, his opinion on what took place over in Arizona, as well as what common people like you and me throughout the entirety of the country can actually do to help make the elections in our local area safe and secure.
And so smash that like button, smash that subscribe button, and take a listen.
So Ohio has a long history of doing elections the right way.
Under Republican leadership, we've passed important legislation to really make it both easy to vote and hard to cheat.
I've continued that, and certainly 2020 put us to the test.
I was just talking with some friends.
We were sued a lot in 2020 by left-leaning groups that were really trying to put their thumb on the scale and change the rules at the last minute.
One of the things that we decided is we're not going to settle these lawsuits.
We're going to fight them.
Settling a lawsuit days before an election is a bad idea for two reasons.
One, you shouldn't make election law at the courthouse.
That happens at the statehouse.
If you give the ACLU 30% of what they're asking for, they're just going to come back next year and get another 30.
It's like paying the hostage taker's ransom.
One of the things that we do in Ohio is we maintain accurate voter rolls.
We work hard to remove deceased voters from the voter rolls.
In fact, we do that on a monthly basis.
It was a bill that I passed in the State Senate that created that process.
We remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.
The good news is it very seldom happens, but every year we find 100, 150 non-citizens that for whatever reason have become registered to vote, and we remove them from the voter rolls.
We enforce our laws.
I've referred over 630 individuals for law enforcement action because we believe that they're conducting voter fraud in the state of Ohio.
The good news is out of 8 million registered voters, 630 is a small number.
I think the last thing that we need to talk about is really doing the logistical work to prepare ahead of time.
I was just talking with Abe who ran for Attorney General in Arizona.
One of the biggest problems they had in Arizona with the mess that they had was lack of prior preparation.
As an Army Green Beret, when we plan for a mission, when we do our mission prep, it's not like some Hollywood montage where you're just grabbing guns and going to get the bad guys.
It's hours at the dry erase board, thinking of everything that can go wrong, mitigating against that, making sure that you have all of your materials in place.
Well, we took the same approach to elections and made sure that machines are tested before the election, that we had adequate poll workers and enough materials.
And so Election Day runs smoothly in Ohio because of all of that work.
Let me ask you, you mentioned a few bills and laws that are on the books that say, for instance, you need to clean the voter rolls regularly.
A lot of states have laws in the books that the Secretary of State chooses to not follow or to sometimes disregard entirely.
Great examples of what happened in Wisconsin in the year 2020.
California regularly does not clean their voter rolls.
That's why oftentimes they need to get sued.
If you're a citizen in those other states and you're seeing the Secretary of State kind of function in this way, disregarding certain laws that they might not agree with, what can the individual person do to force the Secretary of State or the election department to actually comply?
A couple things.
First of all, it's a patriotic duty to call out when elected officials are not doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, the hypocrisy on the left is when Republicans do that, they call us election deniers.
When Democrats do that, like, for example, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, They don't get tarred with that same brush.
It's important to call it out.
Get involved in Secretary of State races.
It's a down-ticket race.
Most states elect.
Some states appoint their Secretary of State.
But get involved in that race because it really does make a difference and hold that Secretary of State accountable.
Really, the shadiest things that have happened in recent years about elections have not been some cloak-and-dagger, secretive conspiracy.
They've been things that happened in...
Full public view, really, the Democrats aren't ashamed of it.
They're proud of their activist lawsuits and really their crisis opportunism in Secretary of State's offices.
So call that out because it's happening in full public view.
These lawsuits, you've got to fight them, not settle them.
Final thing is, sign up to be a poll worker.
Every state needs tens of thousands of poll workers.
In Ohio, it takes 40,000 individuals to run Election Day.
It's a long day, and these are volunteers.
They get paid for their work, but they volunteer to do this task.
They're there when the sun comes up, and they're there until well after the sun goes down in the evening.
Sign up to be a poll worker in Ohio.
VoteOhio.gov is the website, but check your local jurisdiction if you live in another state, and sign up to be an Election Day poll worker.
It's a real way to make a difference, and make sure your elections are being run by the letter of the law.
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Let me ask you, from your perspective as being the Secretary of State, I have a fairly large swing state.
You were likely, I imagine, paying attention to what was happening in Arizona during the previous midterm election cycle.
Two questions.
One is, if you were in that scenario where you're the Secretary of State, so technically you're in charge of the elections in that state, do you think it was appropriate to not see the conflict of interest and resign from at least running your own election, basically, as the situation happened there?
So the system that we have in most states has an elected secretary of state.
That's a partisan elected office.
And that person is responsible for running the elections.
That person is elected because they earned the trust of the voters.
And so that doesn't mean that you need to necessarily step down from the position simply because you're on the ballot.
But it does mean you need to be smart about it.
I'll give you an example.
I had a primary opponent last year.
We won.
I had a general election opponent.
We won that.
And in anything related to those races, questions of candidate eligibility or policies specific to my race, not broadly across the spectrum, I would recuse myself from those and have a senior member of my staff that made those decisions.
If nothing else, it removes that kind of question.
And that's the smart thing to do.
And that's what chief elections officers in state should do when they're on the ballot.
But it is your job to run the elections.
The voters put you there for a reason, and they expect that you're going to be a candidate, especially in a state like Ohio with term limits.
They expect that you'll be a candidate for something else eventually.
You can do both and do them well, but it's important to recuse yourself from specific decisions that relate to the administration of an election where you're on the ballot.
Before the cameras began rolling, you mentioned that in Ohio right now you're working on a data transparency bill relative to elections.
Can you sort of break down what the problem is that the bill is trying to solve and how it would solve it?
This is something that we're proud of, and it's the first in the nation.
It's called Senate Bill 71 in Ohio, and we wrote it working with the experts at the America First Policy Institute.
Again, if we can get this done in Ohio, I think it should sweep the nation and they should do it in every state.
It shouldn't be controversial.
It's about transparency, data analytics.
It's making sure that there's nothing to hide in the way elections run.
But imagine this scenario.
Imagine you're putting some money aside for retirement.
You want to invest your hard-earned money.
When you look at the balance sheet of different companies, you know that they follow generally accepted accounting principles, standard charts of accounts.
You know that you can look at the financials of two different companies and get an apples-to-apples comparison.
That's because in the financial world, they're very serious about that.
That same level of care has not been applied to elections.
It was in the 1960 Civil Rights Act that it was a requirement that election officials would keep all of the documents for 22 months.
A couple things happened, though.
That's an analog-era law being applied in a digital era.
In many cases, those databases get overwritten on a daily basis, and they're gone.
So if you asked your county who were all the registered voters on election day, they may not be able to tell you that because it's an electronic database that's constantly overwritten.
Here's the other thing.
Standard definitions don't apply from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Simple questions like what is a voted ballot?
Does an absentee ballot count?
Does a provisional ballot count?
How about if somebody turns in a blank ballot, which happens sometimes when a voter gets to the polls and isn't excited about any of the candidates.
So is that counted as a voted ballot?
How about registered voters?
What constitutes a registered voter?
Somebody could be in confirmation status, inactive status, and so if they're not defined You can't do that post-election audit in a way that's really going to expose where there are problems.
And my belief is that in most places, I know in Ohio, elections are run cleanly and smoothly.
If you have full transparency, then you can prove that to people and you can show them.
Nothing to hide here at the Board of Elections.
Everything is an open book.
But if there is a problem, the data bill that we're working on, the data integrity bill, will make that obvious.
It'll stick out like a sore thumb.
Again, just like looking at the balance sheet of a company, you should be able to look at the balance sheet of your board of elections.
So, last question.
Yeah.
In regards, so earlier you said, easy to vote, hard to cheat.
I think that would sum up, I think, what most Americans would want their elections to be like.
When the argument is made against voter ID, probably most people...
I think that it's a little bit odd because whenever you go anywhere, you pick up a movie ticket that you pre-ordered and show me your ID, no problem.
It's never a racist issue until it gets to the topic of voting.
And the argument there is always that, well, when you look at the percentages, even though most people have IDs, disproportionately more black people don't have IDs.
So when you have a situation like voter ID laws, I mean, that argument could make sense because it would disproportionately affect this group.
What would your response be to someone who's making the argument that voter ID laws are racist?
First of all, it's a silly argument, and it's an insulting argument.
It's saying that because of your skin color or your ethnicity that you're less capable of maintaining proper government ID. In states like Ohio, what we passed is a voter ID bill That doesn't leave anybody out, right?
We've learned from other states.
We knew that the left would challenge this, and so we passed a bill that includes free IDs for anybody that can't get one.
So you can go into any Bureau of Motor Vehicle office in Ohio in a couple weeks when the law takes effect and get a free ID. If you're part of a small religious group that doesn't want to be photographed, like, for example, we've got a large Amish population in Ohio, there's a religious exemption where you can sign an affidavit.
But for the other, you know, 99.9% of Ohioans, they realize that showing a photo ID is not an undue burden.
It doesn't have any kind of race-based impact on people.
But what it does do is makes your elections more secure and makes people confident the elections are being run honestly.
That really is our job.
And, by the way, that bill that we passed in Ohio is being challenged in court.
We are fighting it aggressively.
A shady partisan lawyer named Mark Elias has come after us in Ohio.
And not only is he fighting us in court, but then he's going on MSNBC and spewing lies like this is some sort of a race thing.
He's using it to raise money for himself and to promote himself.
That's really what lies at the heart of that agenda on the left.
We're going to fight that because, by the way, 75% of Ohioans agree that you should show an ID when you go to vote.
It's a common sense thing.
And by the way, we still have absentee voting if you want to do that.
We have early voting.
We make it truly easy to vote and hard to cheat.
That's something we're proud of.
Ohioans want that.
Here's another statistic.
There was a poll done just a few years ago, and the question, with a large sample size, nearly 1,000 likely voters from both parties, were asked, is it easy to vote in Ohio?
92% of Republicans said it's easy to vote in Ohio.
Even 88% of Democrats said it's easy to vote in Ohio.
So this tired old line that the left is trying to sell about voter suppression, even their own people don't agree with it.
And again, that's something that Ohioans can be proud of and show up confidently to vote on Election Day.
What you mentioned is interesting because if your provision says you have to show an ID, but if you don't have an ID, the provision allows for you to go to the DMV without any cost and get an ID from the government.
Absolutely.
But what's their argument at that point?
Their argument is it's hard to get to a BMV, even though there are hundreds and hundreds of them around the state.
Or their argument is that people may not know that.
Well, one of the reasons why we're engaging with the press in Ohio and making sure to get information out there is so Ohioans know if they come to vote in local elections this year, and we hope they do, there's a primary this spring, there's a general this fall, we want people to know that if you don't have an ID for whatever reason, you can go and get one for free.
We want to see high turnout.
This idea that Republicans are interested in suppressing the vote is utter nonsense, and it's been proven false over and over again.
We had record turnout in 2016.
Record turnout in 2018, 2020, 2022.
And so if my objective as a Republican who serves as Secretary of State is to suppress the vote, I must be terrible at that.
Of course that's not my objective.
We don't want to suppress the vote.
We do want to make it honest.
States like Georgia that have passed mandatory photo ID laws have seen an increase in voter participation because when people are confident that their elections are honest, they're much more likely to show up.
And that's why this hypocrisy from people like President Biden calling Georgia's bill Jim Crow 2.0 And now, lastly, I'd like to quickly mention that over on Epic TV, just this morning, we published an awesome documentary called Altered Humans, How Biotech is Changing Who We Are.
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Here's a trailer.
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We'll see you next time.
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And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times.
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