You have to operate within the compounds of the law and provide flexibility to allow the voters to get to the ballot box. So, in our situation we give people the opportunity to vote using an absentee ballot but we are one of 16 states that require a vote o voter to requen absentee ballot. We are not to vote by mail we simply send them out to everybody and i would like to talk about why i dont advocate that kind of opportunity for fraud. When somebody requests an absentee ballot you know that there is a loud person on the other end to send it to end it worked wonderfully for us. I had the best primary in the United States in fact i was asked to testify because of the house success during the primaries we implemented to then prepare for the general election. In particular, let me give you a quick example of how it can be a problem. I dont want to take this as an attack on the Postal Service because we have hard workers that have a great system in place. 96 of the time by the statistics, it is delivered on time as scheduled to the delayed address but what it means in an Election Year it is 4 of the time that it could be an issue so if you have a paper application for an absentee ballot, 4 may not arrive at the office on time. Then 4 of those may not arrive on time. You can see how this complicates or multiplies the effect of inaccuracies, opportunity for human error or opportunities for fraud to occur and purposely throwing away a ballot and that sort of thing. What weve got here, 500 absentee applications were set aside by a trainee undergoing the training process and then he left for various reasons after people were complaining we did an investigation. It wasnt nefarious. There was nothing going on but it was a complication when you use voting by mail they do enter the process and cause problems so that is enough for the introductory to what is happening and i would be glad to answer any followup questions. I just want to say the 4 figure that you are talking about, the Inspector General of the Postal Service released a report and in it they said that the standard for ontime delivery which includes absentee ballots was 76 , not 100 but 96 which means at least 4 of the ballots may not get delivered on time and i think that same report said the worst delivery times in the seven states they only achieved that 84 of the time which means Something Like 16 of the ballots might not be delivered on time. But if i could ask, if you would turn your cameras on, secretary warner talked about some potential problems in some states with inaccurate Voter Registration left and i know that the public and its Legal Foundation has done a lot of work on that issue and just recently youve released a report on that. Can you talk about that issue and some of the problems you are seeing in the states when it comes to the mailing ballot . Thank you for doing this important event each year. Its important to defend the constitution. In contrast, secretary warner was talking about the system they have working there. A great example to the contrary is nevada and one of the things we looked at very carefully is the rush to the automatic mail ballots and the primary where the data shows things did not go very well. Take clark county, 1. 3 million were automatically mailed. 230,000 roughly bounced back as undeliverable. 310,000 came back out of 1. 3 million, and 7,000 of those were rejected as having some sort of problem. Those people lost their vote and probably dont even know about it, and therefore they were disenfranchised. If they had gone in person, those votes would have counted. Now you mentioned the Research Study we did. A number of years ago pugh did a Research Study where they looked at the voter roll around the country and found millions and millions were bad. I think they said there were 2 million. We replicated that study where we got them up against commercial data and other private data thats out there to see who is alive and whos dead, who is duplicated and so forth. In nevada for example, and im focused on nevada because that is the state that rushed to vote by mail, they have thousands of people and properly registered at commercial addresses which you are not supposed to be in nevada. If you go to the website, you will see a video we did last week going to many of these addresses, visiting, knocking on the door, asking for the voter who invariably is not there because they dont live in an abandoned mine or vacant lot or Auto Repair Shop or they dont live in a casino or they dont live in a liquor store. If you go to this video, you will see when you have 30 on one hand and vote by mail automatically on the other, it equals a disaster. You cannot do it that way. That is what nevada and new jersey is doing by the way. And low and behold i want to close on one last thing that involves language. I think its important to reiterate something that i said to another audience just recently. When people care about these issues they are often called vote suppressors and my message then and now is do not be afraid of these labels because they are to try to get you on interested in the issue. I would suggest the vast majority participating care about this issue and want to see something done to protect the integrity of the elections. That doesnt make them a racist or a vote suppressor so people have to ignore the smears and not be afraid of them because we have a lot of work to do as it relates to election integrity. Now marc, i want to bring you in. As you said earlier, you were terrific and did a report into the vote harvesting. The way that has been carried on in places like texas and florida to the extent you had individuals going in and basically coercing, i think coercing and pressuring voters to vote in a particular way or actually filling out the ballot for them. Talk a little bit about some of the investigations that you all have done and particularly how it relates to this push for the mailin ballots that we see now in this election. Theres obviously been a lot of complications. Theres been a lot of stuff particularly on the outdated voter rolls and the problems the states have had in keeping them uptodate and a lot of it is building on the work that jacob has done and a lot of it is building on work done by other conservative nonprofits because this information is out there and frankly its kind of shocking. California, as we know, as of the last year or so exceeded 100 meaning they had more Voter Registration on files and people that live in the states. Thats how bad the voter files have been. And obviously the transition for all of the reasons we illustrated in the county, imagine whats going on in one county in nevada but spread that across the country and you start to see that this is a really, really big problem. Its interesting because this isnt necessarily like a nefarious thing in some ways. In the case of california, i think it is they have resisted legal attempts to cause them to comply with federal law to keep the rule clean but by and large a lot of it is the fact we dont spend a lot of money in the infrastructure in the country. Its kind of an afterthought in the states. Maybe matt warner can speak to that but we see a lot of the same problems with Voter Registration and things like that in red states and red counties and so a lot of it i think is to make people aware of the problem. Unfortunately, as again hes already pointed out a little bit this has become so politicized and these are like fundamental Good Government issues we should all agree on and yet any time you raise the specter of the problems, you immediately get smeared. I think that is a huge problem. I do think that we kind of turned a corner this year in the sense that there had been such a strong push gradually happening over time and the fact that its about all i once forced people to confront a lot of particular issues. One is theres an incredibly high rate of ballot rejections when it comes to the mailin ballot. New jersey did them all by mail and there was Something Like i think just under a 10 ballot rejection rate across the state. Thats astounding. And in one particular case in new jersey, i can say the politics and investigations were instrumental in making it a National News story that exposed the fraud in paterson new jersey where the states indicted a sitting member of the city council for the major voter fraud efforts involving all of the absentee ballots. So there are so many issues out there. I am both appalled and not surprised most of my colleagues dont seem to see these issues for what they are which is a genuine threat and not necessarily an issue that needs to be politicized in any way, shape or form and their basic matters following the law, proper civic governments and restoring peoples confidence in the process because you know, say what you want about whatever competitive advantage you might gain with some partisan cat fight over suppressing the votes, the overall confidence in the electoral system has been seriously undermined this year and i think that there are very specific reasons for that that the media are not covering and are not addressing. Go ahead, go ahead. I would like to validate and verify what i heard from both christian and marc. Beginning with christians remarks, its interesting the figures in nevada i dont want to people to think the 1. 3 million and then the 230,000 inaccuracies thats almost identical to what we have here in West Virginia, 1. 2 million registered voter and when we send out the applications for the ballot, 230,000 came back with the same figure he cited from nevada so that may be an indication across the United States. That is one sixth to one fifth of all registered voters. They may be inaccurate and im telling you ive taken 195,000 names off the roles as ive indicated now is about 200,000 im expecting to take off. Think about what would have happened here if we had a vote by mail system where you send them out to everybody, 1. 2 million would have gone out and we had 450,000 people who participated. That means there would have been more out there sitting in peoples mailboxes unused than people that participated. Think of those opportunities for the fraud and irregularity to occur. It just isnt a good idea and that is why i will never advocate for the voting in person to the vote by mail system. It is the Gold Standard and its the most secure. You have a place for the issues to be addressed. When you are sitting at home you can vote however you want. In one county we had 1,017 over votes so the house of delegates race and then somebody votes for three. Thathe happened 1,017 times. They are now invalid. The votes they thought were not counted. Thats why we want people voting in person if at all possible and weve gone to Great Lengths to get the ppe and training the poll workers to make sure that the health and safety of the voters are secure in West Virginia. Everyone will be required to wear masks when they go to vote in person but that is what im encouraging people to do is vote in person and only if you have a legitimate covid19 concern then we are making it as easy as possible for people to vote by absentee. The thing marc mentioned is the more than, more people than there were voters, more registered than voters. We still have that in two counties in West Virginia and im working as hard as i can to clean up the registration list. When i came and there were four counties after the 2018 we got it is a seven year process to get somebody removed. Im only into one term, let me get into the second and we will get the other two counties. To trust the system when you have more registered voters than you do people you cant, so thats why we and its the threat of lawsuits that really concern the clerks and thats why they came to me to run for office and run on the platform of cleaning up the Voter Registration lists. So sometimes you do have to threaten those lawsuits were actually follow through on them when you have those terrible situations where it is clear people are not following federal law that require the list maintenance and that is what my predecessor didnt do for eight years and thats why its important to have these organizations that are the watchdogs to make sure that the integrity of the elections are held. You mentioned lawsuits and i want to go to that topic with all three of you because one of the other things you said in answer to the first question, you talk about operating within the law. And within the law, states including West Virginia have put in certain safety and security protocols for absentee ballots in order to try to cut down on the opportunity for fraud and other problems. Many states for example have witnessed signature requirements, states require you to fill out an absentee ballot form that you then sign so you again have some kind of authentication. If my understanding of whats been going on across the country as thereve been all of these lawsuits filed, mostly by progressive organizations on the left side, trying to not only force everyone to vote by mail but at the same time, getting rid of and avoiding outofstate laws like that like saying you shouldnt have to apply a written signature requirement. In alabama saying the state shouldnt be able to apply its voter id requirement. So im wondering have you seen that in West Virginia, and im sure other secretaries have seen that in other states, tomac. We have, and was mentioned earlier. Ive been attacked in various newspapers and so forth with letters implementing the identification law we have a very weak identification law but at least we have it. Any number like 17 or 18, everything from a hunting license like the bill to all kinds of things you can use. Its not a photo id so it is a week voter identification call or requirement. But the people in West Virginia, we are a conservative state by nature. They want the integrity of the process. Most dont even have the idea of it, driver drivers license, wh, to show that they are who they are. So to the culture of the state some may want the kind of history that you have to have a notarization and that sort of thing. I dont question those states. I know that we in West Virginia have had a checkered past with regards to going back to the election of john kennedy and the democratic primary in 1960 that occurred right here in West Virginia and after that, Hubert Humphrey was out of the race. People were proud of that for decades and that is the legacy that i grew up under knowing that that had happened in West Virginia people were proud of it and that is the culture that im trying to change or overcome here in West Virginia, introducing and keeping the list strong and to ensure the voter identification is in place. Those sort of tactics or techniques that are needed. Talk about these lawsuits because i think that you all are anticipating some of them, filing briefs and other things and to basically avoid the security protocols that states have in place when it comes to absentee or mailin ballots. Lets reset this for a second. The groups filing these lawsuits like the part about democracy, the brennan center, the league of women voters, lets think about it for a minute. A democratically elected legislature lets say in virginia, democratically elected legislature, every one of those seats in the house and Senate Passed a law that said you have to have an absentee ballot signature if you are going to do that and they did that to protect the voter and its system. That law then went to the democratically elected governor of virginia who signed the law making it represent the will of the people. In comes the league of women voters and they decided the democratically enacted provisions of the state election law they just dont like it so what do they do they file a lawsuit in the Western District in front of George Norman kane, u. S. District court judge, the commonwealth of virginia that champion of defending the statutes capitulates and raises a white flag. I was in on one of these Conference Calls because the Foundation Filed a brief in the case. And i heard something ive never heard before. The judge asked the commonwealth of virginia do you intend to file a responsive pleading. Anybody whod gone to law school knows you always file a responsive pleading. Its gotten so bad the judge has to ask the question whether or not you even intend to file the response to pleading. So this is going on all around the country, this capitulation thats happening in North Carolina, its happening in michigan, pennsylvania. Anywhere you have radicals that occupy the Attorney Generals Office is like the attorney general of pennsylvania, North Carolina, michigan, you have these radicals in the offices that are not doing what they learned in law school which is to defend the state statutes. So, real quick, im also on the u. S. Commission on civil rights. President trump appointed me in august and we had a report to come out thats going to be drafted by speaking of radical, some of the folks at the Commission Regarding how important it is to move to the vote by mail. I voted against it. I was the deciding vote that never got released because vote by mail disenfranchises people. Thats a fact. We know it disenfranchised 7,000 people in the nevada primary and it disenfranchised people who got rejected with over votes in West Virginia. We know vote by mail has a 5 failure rate because the post office. So the best system we can have is centralized vote in person Gold Standard like secretary warner said, and you can fix mistakes in the polling places. You cant fix them in the kitchen after you lick the envelope. I was going to build on what the previous speakers said in terms of this year in particular because of the covid thing at the beginning of that everyone thought that this was finally their chance to move everything to vote by mail so they tried to not let a crisis go to waste, and the result has been a torrent of litigation, and a lot of it is strictly coordinated by the Democratic Party. Theres no question about it. And in particular, its been touched on a little bit, but the collusion between democrats and certain state legislators and the Democratic Party nationally filing these lawsuits its really something to behold and alarming. Christian adams mentioned North Carolina. What happened there was shocking. Remember we are two years out from a republican congressional race that had to invalidate the results and hold a special election because an aid to working on the campaign for the republican was caught ballot harvesting and they had a lot of laws against that. Lots of democrats pretended to be outraged by this. The result of this lawsuit that was filed in North Carolina where the democratic attorney general turned around and just like the world over is essentially and erased recently passed bipartisan election laws at the behest of capitulating the democratic lawsuit. The result is now two years later it is legal in North Carolina effectively. So, its kind of shocking how quickly this is moving and how its moving in a sort of brazen and undemocratic fashion at the behest of which i dont think will be known yet. Similarly, some radical things are happening and i dont think that the American People are frankly aware of but they might be in a few weeks and it will be interesting to see what happens. Pennsylvania is one of the most contested battleground states. The Supreme Court just ruled that, completely overruled the wellestablished state law that says the ballots that are going to be counted have to be in by y that they would count them and extra three days after the election and what is particularly outrageous about this isnt that they are compley overrode the statute in the law because they acknowledge it exists and they did so using the flimsiest statement that dont speak directly to it. They also ruled three days after that you can accept three days after without postmarks so no one can prove they were sent in before the election. So if trump wins the state and pennsylvania by 8,000 votes and all of a sudden un postmarked mail ballots start showing up the day after, those are going to have to be counted, never mind that we just had to fairly significant indictments for voter fraud in philadelphia earlier this year including a former congressman, so this is a very serious concern and i dont think people are aware of the radicalism that is taking place and number two, this could explode in our face is in a couple of weeks if whats being done to liberalize the law suddenly looks like they are being used to manipulate the vote and that may very well be the case. Let me unpack that just a little bit. Before this primary we would have led to the absentee ballots i mentioned earlier during the primary, we had 224,000 absentee ballots. To the 10,000 provisional ballots in the state. What that means now somebody else gets to decide whether your vote counts, and depending on the county, the politics, the makeup of the petitions, they get to decide whether to count the votes so you are back to that situation just discussed. If it is close, then the county commissioners republican or democrat, however it is, may decide if we count those provisional ballots because it is predominantly one Political Party over the other and the rest of the state may abide by the law [inaudible] none of us want them dependent on a county commission deciding whether your vote counts were not so that is another concern in the vote by mail process. I should mention in fact that that is a risk with the states applying different standards on what they consider to be an acceptable ballot when it comes to the absentee ballot which would bring up potential violations of what the Supreme Court said in the bush v gore decision in 2000 which is you cant have different rules in different parts of the state of what counts as a ballot. Secretary warner, let me ask you because this feeds into another question that i had which is you went from 7,00 7,000 to over 200 absentee ballots. I know that the state of new york, when they had their primary on june 203rd, they also, officials encouraged everyone to vote by mail, and they had an almost exponential increase in absentee ballots and Election Officials obviously were not prepared to handle it because it then took them six weeks to count the ballots. The turnout in the primary generally is lower than we have in the general election. So, i guess my question is is there a possibility if the election is closed that it could be weeks before we know what the outcomes are if the new york example is repeated in other states that are overwhelmed by this huge increase in absentee ballots, and it takes them weeks to process and try to count them. The answer is absolutely yes. It is going to be in those states that tried to shift to a vote by mail system when they were not prepared for it, either the personnel, the equipment. Here in West Virginia we will not have that issue. We have a flexibility to begin the process of the county, the processing of the absentee ballots during the early voting for october 201st to october 301st. So, any of the ballots and right now we have about 60,000 people already sending their absentee ballots back in so starting next wednesday, october 201st, the county clerks can start checking the registration to make sure people are registered and checking the signatures. They can open up the envelopes and get the ballot prepared, not counted but prepared and stacked and ready to go by precinct so on Election Night they can run through the house and we can actually have the results sooner during the primaries than we typically do because too many people voted absentee and they were already at the courthouse ready to be counted and we didnt have to wait for them to be counted and harry and carried back in. So i think that we are in great shape here but not in the states that are sending out ballots and allowing them to come in after the election to be counted and that sort of thing. Yes we are going to have problems and that goes to the integrity of the process and whether people trust the outcomes. That is what President Trump has been railing about as we all need to be watching for these situations. Ive taken every precaution i can ahead of time to notify the people in West Virginia that plan right now if we are going to vote absentee, voted and get it back in the mail. Weve gotten that message out and have no problem and im not anticipating problems, but one we are a small state and two, we request people to request the absentee ballot and we are allowing flexibility and in the situation perhaps they were not allowed to start the process ahead of time. When you wait until even canvassing before you start the counting of the votes, a lot of times opportunities for nefarious opportunities can occur as was mentioned earlier about philadelphia. We will have problems on Election Night and in the coming weeks. All we can do is count on the people to have their eyes and ears open and reported here to set up an Antifraud Task force with the West Virginia fbi coordinating every week to make sure everybody is in place so people know who to call should a situation arise. Thats what we are doing here. Going back to litigation, do you foresee this problem after the november election, again going back to new york, and this is something that both of you have mentioned and that is the very high rejection rate of absentee ballots and in new york after theyve taken six weeks to count the ballot, they then had litigation filed contested. The rejection of the absentee ballots and im wondering if you proceed also as a problem in multiple states where we have litigation over those rejections and then big fights over whether they didnt comply with state law should be counted or not. Lets reset this. What you are referring to is the state law whether it requires to send in the mail or absentee ballot. Once again, the legislatures and governors agreed on in advance. What you are referring to is a hostility on the left and they want to and they will to answer your question be ready to File Lawsuits to say hey, you shouldnt worry about those rules. They dont matter. Count the ballot and you will probably have mobs with signs, because thats their favorite way to get the policy advanced besides in the courtroom. As to say count all the ballots. Forget about those defective errors that violates state law that we all agreed on was the law until a few months ago that are still on the books. Forget about all those rules. Just count the ballots. Thats the kind of litigation that i think you are going to see in an effort in the closed races to muscle through the defective ballots and not comply with the law. In pieces like philadelphia and some of the judges in detroit, it wouldnt surprise me in the slightest that the judges say count all the ballots. Heres the most dangerous moment. When you start running these ballots through the tabulators, you cant take the vote out anymore. Once they are blended in, they are in and that is the sort of lawlessness you and i have been warning about for ten years in this space that the left is perfectly content with lawlessness if it gets them power. Do you have any additional insights to that issue . Going back to what he was saying about the infrastructure and getting ready, this is a huge issue. Over and over again when i started reporting on this and you talk to people who were trying to, quote on quote, stay on Voting Rights and all these things, they kept citing examples of im from oregon actually, and oregon has been doing this for 20 years. Obviously there are still problems with anytime you have an election thats vote by mail, but just because oregon has been successfully doing vote by mail elections for 20 years doesnt mean overnight you can transform your state into a vote by mail state. In the case of oregon for instance, they generally do a better job cleaning up than most other states which isnt to say they still dont have problems in that regard, because they do, but they generally do a better job of givin keeping them uptoe than most states because when you do vote by mail you basically have no choice otherwise its a mess all the time. They have hard and fast rules about when you have to be registered by. I think if you are not registered to vote by now as of a day or two ago you dont vote in november. A lot of people would find that appalling if that were spread across other states. And just in general theyve had 20 years of building up the infrastructure to support vote by mail. The idea places like new york or new jersey was going to turn on a dying man to conduct all what did they think was going to happen. If people were not so focused again on simply the desired outcome instead of being focused on the process we wouldnt be dealing with a lot of these problems, and thats what is sort of fascinating and terrifying ive reported on this in the last 18 months or so pretty extensively is just how much the window in the debate has shifted. The entire New York Times story is about how everyone acknowledges its more susceptible to fraud. Its an accepted fact because it is true and like nowadays if they were to write an article saying the same thing, the reporter would probably be shoved out the window. So, similarly when it comes to vote to fraud fraud, there was e 15 or 20 years ago amazingly enough it was by an investigator of the wall street journal talking about the enclaves and other places which is a real thing that happened so they are particularly in immigrant communities in the country so these are things we use to be able to talk about and address and now if we try to address them, you are a horrible person who doesnt want anyone with a different skin tone to be able to vote and i, again, think we need to dial this back and get focused on the civic process and general fairness instead of being sucked into these debates that are so politicized and bitter but unfortunately, i dont know her way out of it at this point in time. Its frustrating at the moment to point out obvious facts about election and security. I dont think it needs to be the case at all. I would like to put an on that point the necessity of following the rule of law. It was decided by 167 votes, very narrow when. There were 10,000 provisional ballots across the state in one county alone, there were 800 of those provisional ballots and the populist thing to do that makes a great soundbite is to say lets count them all. People intended to sign them so contrary to the state law they say they shouldnt have counted yet the county commission decided to go ahead and count those votes. The loser didnt challenge and would have the legal fees to pay for the recount and all that sort of thing, but in the general election, lets say if it was a republican, you Better Believe there would have been challenges to the county commission counting the votes when they shouldnt have the state law. We shouldnt have to get into that situation. The watchdog groups apply pressure on the commissions and have all of the officials abide by state law and only count to those that are properly cast in a timely fashion and a proper way so i want to emphasize the point following the rule of law otherwise you just dont have faith in them and thats what causes riots in the streets. I agree with all that although i have to mention since you talked about oregon, just two quick things. Folks whove heard me talk, it wasnt that many years ago that an assistant professor at one of the state universities there had her students do a survey in just one county in oregon and 5 of the people they surveyed admitted somebody else filled out their ballot for them. And 2. 5 admitted somebody else had signed their ballot for them. While that sounds like a small number, if that held true for the rest of the state, that was tens of thousands of ballots. The professor said that she actually thought it was quite a bit more because she was amazed so many people admitted something that a legal happenedl happened with their absentee ballot. So that illustrates i think one of the problems with people voting at home where theres no officials supervising whats going on. I dont want to throw my friends and family under the bus, but what you just said, there are anecdotal stories to that effect to people i know over the course of 20 years. You will get extra ballots and people will be tempted. Frankly in some respects people shouldnt be put in that position. You should get the three extra ballots at your house or place of residence and be put in the position you can be tested to do that. You cant do that when you vote in person. And an obvious thing i think people just understand. Again, we should be able to acknowledge there might be a place voting by mail is necessary and in certain circumstances, maybe theres going to be a crazy year pandemic or you might want to even allow for the mailin ballots in limited circumstances, but we need to be able to say quite clearly that voting by mail introduces a million more problems into the process than voting in person. It isnt controversial, it is the truth. Weve got a question. Let me go to some questions. I want to start with you, secretary warner, why are there more prosecutions for Election Fraud, the Heritage Foundation may change the database theres only a sampling of cases. Weve got almost 1300 cases but i know personally of many other potential cases Law Enforcement officials just were not interested in investigating and prosecuting and i wonder if the secretary of state have you had a problem with it because ive heard complaints from other secretaries of state telling me even when they have uncovered clear evidence of fraud whether its local prosecutors or some cases state ags they havent been willing to do anything about it. Have you run into that problem . Its a myriad of issues and everything from time and resources and manpower to go to the investigation and once you do the investigation you handed over to a prosecutor and sometimes in some of these counties it is run by families and Party Control and so forth and the prosecutor might be part of that tightknit group and even if the prosecutor isnt, the judge might be and if you get it into court and prove the case, then the sentence is extremely light and it only has to have been a couple of times and then people just lose interest in pursuing spending all the resources, time and effort to pursue it to get a slap on the wrist and weve had that in several cases so we take every vote seriously. Every voter seriously and every fraudulent vote disenfranchises or negates legitimate votes so we are getting after it and thats why they put the task force in place that it is extremely difficult to move to a successful prosecution and that is why we are so pleased you may be aware in fact the president mentioned it at the debate, a situation where a mail carrier changed the applications on some of the absentee ballots. The task force went to work immediately within three days or a handful of days. We added that into our database not long ago. Question, you i know have uncovered many, many potential cases of fraud. How difficult have you found it to get prosecutors interested in doing anything about it . Its difficult and there are three reasons. They are inexperienced in the area. A county prosecutor who does patty larson doesnt want to take on a case. Thats the first thing. By the way the Justice Department needs to focus on training their people in the next four years how to do this. Second, fear. Marc, im very impressed by your desired that we all get along in this area. Unfortunately, theres hundreds of millions of dollars, and you know this, we had a full New York Times fullpage ad run by the people for the american way with you and my picture on it that now hangs in my office because im so proud of it. Thats why i say dont be afraid of this stuff. Theres fear among prosecutors that they will be smeared as vote suppressors. Third reason, thats the bureaucrats inside of the Justice Department and Elections Crimes Branch of the Public Integrity section. I said the name of the person on fox news so many times. I want to say it here and the fbi, there are fbi agents from the Previous Administration who were still in the mindset that we dont prosecute voter fraud because dont forget, there were no prosecutions of the fraud during the entire Obama Administration out of the Justice Department and now theres only been a couple, the Western District of texas, u. S. Attorney in North Carolina, the case in West Virginia, the Eastern District of pennsylvania and thats it. In milwaukee we know theres voter fraud. They are dragging their feet and in the Southern District of florida we know there is fraud they are dragging their feet. I could go on and on with the particular federal districts and that is a problem that needs to be fixed in the administration. In the stories youve done again, going back to that great series you did on vote harvesting, have you ever been contacted by any Law Enforcement officials saying please give us the names of the folks you uncovered doing this so we can investigate and prosecute . Heavens no. Part of the problem is though as journalists ourselves, you know, how many journalists out there are interested in investigating voter fraud. I can pretty much count the number on one hand. The kind of news organizations that actually have the resources to go out and do voter fraud, 20 years ago the wall street journal was doing pieces on this, but the news side was different than the editorial page. They wouldnt touch it with a 1. It is a significant problem and that basically its become a giant [inaudible] people go out of their way to make it institutionally painful for anyone either as a journalist or within Law Enforcement or the legal system to go out and investigate and or prosecute these crimes and then when no one is doing it they turn around and say theres no voter fraud. I mean, if we know exactly whats going on in a lot of the communities around the country, we are not that far removed from stuffing ballot boxes in the country. It really is part of our dna unfortunately. I think things have gotten better in terms of getting less overt, but we still regularly see the prosecution on a small level and given what weve seen with the institutional incentives, there are far more out there. Its troubling and alarming, and im trying to do the right thing by focusing on the process, but just so we are clear, i do share a cynicism here about this process and the difficulty of getting people involved because it is nakedly political and about engineering a specific result. I think that he hit the nail on the head with the fact because it is so difficult to prosecute, they turned out against. They always put the word massive in there as if thats the important piece of this. We had a situation in Harpers Ferry where it was a handful of votes not counted, it went to the Supreme Court and when the votes were counted it changed the outcome of the election and the whole nature of the politics in Harpers Ferry, so every vote, and in fact the mayors daughter voted twice in that election to try to change the result the other direction. So, youve got to take these things seriously. The whole Election Fraud piece of this is so difficult to get to a conviction. My frustration in the 2018 election, we had a situation in one district where i talked about the john kennedy election being bald back in 1960. Theres still problems in that area of the state with voter intimidation and suppression going on. At a precinct we sent our investigator, he was chased off so i called the fbi, couldnt even get somebody to answer the phone and the fbi later explained they dont work on election day and they dont want to be at the polling locations and its not a hit on the fbi. I understand the policies and procedures for them, but my question as a state election official, if the own local authorities may be involved in the Voter Suppression tactics themselves, then who am i supposed to call. I needed a Police Official to go into that and we lost the opportunity to pursue that because there wasnt anybody immediately responsive. The number of investigators we have around the state we were putting radios in the hands and there are situations they cant connect with each other by cell phones because the service, so we had to arm people with twoway radios and that sort of thing. And then our approach is to try to stop it before it happens, but thput the information out we Antifraud Task force. I still dont have a good federal agency to go to that would be responsive as it is happening and then we are back to the situation once it occurs or doesnt, youve lost that opportunity and now have a less than real reflection of the intent of the two people because folks got to vote that shouldnt have or people that were not allowed because of the intimidation, and its a real frustration. Well, im afraid on that very frustrating note, we are going to have to end this discussion because our time is up. I want to thank all three of you, not only for being here today, but for the great work that youve done in all of this. I encourage everybody out there to go vote in this election, no matter who you are going to vote for as a candidate. Do your best if you can to vote in person if you are able to do that, because that is the best way of guaranteeing your vote will count. Thanks so much for be election, including delayed counting of ballots. The this runs an hour. Im Aaron David Miller seni
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