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Those of you here in the audience and people who are joining us virtually. With the election less than three weeks away, it is important to remember it is essential to preserving our democratic republic that we have secure elections in which every citizen who is eligible to vote is to cast a ballot. We want a process in which when it is over everyone agrees, even the candidates who lost and their supporters that we had a fair and honest election. How do we do that . That is the question today. It begs the question, are comprehensive election audits a way to achieve that goal . In depth audits of elections are almost nonexistent yet indepth financial and accounting audits are standard practice. Heritage has published a new study explaining this issue available online. It is called best practices and standards for election audits. I encourage you to read it or download it. Today we have three experts with us to discuss this very important question. The honorable senator paul that in court is a graduate of texas a m and the president and ceo of a Tax Consulting company. He has been in the texas senate since 2014 representing district seven which encompasses most of west Harris County and parts of montgomery county. He chairs the Senate Committee uncle government, serves on the criminal justice and state Affairs Committees and has won numerous rewards numerous awards for his work as a legislator including the legislative legacy award. Before he moved to texas to the texas legislature, senator betancourt was the tax assessor collector for Harris County. Im sure that was a popular position which includes most of houston for 10 years. In texas that is the county official responsible for Voter Registration and it was only popular because i was for a tax cut at the time. He was very busy cleaning up the Voter Registration of dead voters and felons ineligible to vote as well as finding aliens who were illegally registered to vote. Since he. Has not only run for election, he has administered elections which gives him a lot of insight and experience on how to improve the process. We welcome you to heritage. Apparently have a motto. It is what gets measured gets fixed. Absolutely. He was the primary author of the texas senate audit bill as one of the first audits of the texas reform bill titled sb one. Next to paul is chad. Chad is texas is one of the only states to have passed a law requiring audits of a set number of counties after every election. The bill senator betancourt offered in the senate. He is the director of the division run by john scott. He is in the midst of creating the standards and practices texas will follow in conducting the audits. He is a senior fellow for Election Integrity at the texas Public Policy foundation. He has been in private practice but also was a federal prosecutor in louisiana and an assistant attorney general in the office of the Texas Attorney general. He received his law degree with honors from the university of texas in engineering degree from the university of missouri. My colleague Hans Von Spakovsky works in the center for legal and judicial studies. He has three decades of experience and it elections both as a lawyer and elections official. He served on the election commission. For two years was the council for assistant attorney general and has served on county election boards in georgia and virginia responsible for administering elections in the two largest counties in both states. He is the author of numerous books, articles and studies on numerous issues and is a graduate of m. I. T. And the Vanderbilt School of law. The format for today is each of my colleagues will give a short opening statement, presentation. Well go left or right and we will have a moderated discussion. We will open up the floor to your questions. Over to you. My interest in audits started when i was a tax assessor collector and you wonder how we were involved. In the past we collected what was an abomination which was the poll tax. In texas the voter registrars and the county clerks were the folks in ministering the election. I got into office and followed a person that had an in office 51 years. He had gone to work for the tax office one roosevelt was in office. The office was very antiquated. We looked at the voter roll list. We found there were 50,000 deceased and fln registrations on a list of less than 2 million. What we did was by sending out confirmation nodes, we got back confirmations from family members the person had voted in the 1990s but had died in 1964. Somebody was incarcerated in huntsville which is our main state prison. I went to the da with his handlebar mustache and he said that man is not voting in houston. He was correct. It was somebody else voting for him. There were 500 of those. In the 2000 president ial election if you remember, what was the margin of victory in florida . 537 votes. You might have been there. Harris county by itself could have determined the fate of the National Election because we had let people the voter will go completely fellow. What gets measured gets fixed. Clean that up. That started my focus on voting oral integrity. If the voting role has integrity, the election outcome is less likely to be contested. I did presentations appear presentations up here. I thought that photo id was a way to solve a lot of problems if we could check a citizenship list because most people dont know we dont have one in the united states. It gets past a lot of arguments. When i get elected to the senate, this has always been an interest of mine to look at what is happening with the voter rules and we had a unique problem in Harris County that in october of 2020 the early vote totals did not match. As a former election administrator, you could see the numbers. It was off by over 10,000. I started asking questions. The secretary of state started asking questions. The newly appointed county clerk did not have to answer and did not. One night they changed the results. Still did not match. On the floor of the senate i used a complaint letter that is pretty factual. From a lawyer talking about how we knew there were 884 more votes on the county then the county voter roster. We had more votes than names. That was not just Harris County. He went around the state and there were 1300 extra votes that did not make the voter role in williamson county. In wichita county, there is a singlefamily residence that had 579 people registered and 179 voted. Im not sure where the other 400 were. It became apparent as part of sb one we needed to have citizenship checks and audit capability which is what has launched the Forensic Audit division. Im not talking just a limited purpose audit. You have to get into the details. Of the more humorous details in my bill was if there are more votes in precinct and there are registered voters you have a problem. We had more than a dozen of those precincts. What it all means is simply this. If you have an audit capability you can find out what went wrong. In the swirl of the froth of national politics, asking questions can get you labeled an election denier but you should be able to ask questions and get answers. When i was a were just dry had to ask every question that came to me. I would say why is this registration here . We need to get back to being able to do that. The beginning of the Forensic Audit division is just the start because i think we need to expand to not just random audits but when there are clear issues in the field, you should be able to ask and election administrator what is the truth, what are the facts, get an answer. If youre not satisfied, make sure you have not missed an obvious detail. Give it to the secretary of state or whatever the chief elections officer is in any state. The opportunity to say we are going to order an audit. You are right. In the Business Community audits are ubiquitous. You live off them. It is not just the fact they are accepted. It is an absolute must. I am absolutely committed and i know the texas senate is. It has passed an upgraded version of the audit bill choice. I cannot speak for all my colleagues but i believe the Lieutenant Governor also supports it. I think we will have a good chance to have even further work done in texas. It is simple. What gets measured gets fixed. When you find a problem, fix it or tell the public about it. Get caught up in election denier debate. Fix the problem. Move on. Tell the public the truth about their election process. Chad, you are in the catbird seat. You are the guy. Tell us about this experience. Be careful when you testify in front of senator bettencourt. He may create a job for you. It is a very interesting challenge to start Something Like this from scratch. The day i got there, there were not pens in my office. I did not have a piece of paper to write on. Not to mention a list of what im supposed to be doing. I think we spent two or three months getting our arms around senators told us to audit. What does that mean . What can we look at meaningfully where we can help the process and make sure the processes get better and problems are getting fixed . What is interesting about that this texas as you guys have heard a big state. We have 254 counties. We have 254 ways of doing things. I think that is a strength because loven county is not the same as Harris County with 2 million voters. Those are different. They have got to do things differently. What record is everyone going to have . It gets different between what Harris County has or what loven county has. We tried to get our arms around what are they required to keep and what are the folks doing also in the counties records wise that we can audit . Step one in any of these audits has to be, how many people showed up to vote and how many ballots do i have . Step one. It sounds really simple but it is not. We dont in the old days you walked in to the precinct. There was usually a book with names in it. There is hans. Here is your ballot. That was it. Now we have provisional voting. Countywide voting. We have early voting. Countywide voting in texas means i have no precinct. But i can vote anywhere. That valid is accredited back to my precinct so now i have got to chase this ballot around the county to figure out where it is supposed to be credited. It can be done but it is a challenge from a recordkeeping standpoint. One of the other things we got attuned to quickly is how do we look at machines and satisfy folks please machines are going to safeguard and procedures to ensure they are not hacked . If you have not heard, people think our machines are hacked. We are looking at machines, the sampling of machines used in the election and we are building out timelines for them. We bought the machine. We tested the machine. We took it to the warehouse. We programmed the machine. We senate to the location. It stayed in the location. Day one it had zero votes. So on and so forth. It gets down to at the end of the lection we have a great process in texas. A partial manual count where we test on the machines after the election. We say here are the ballots. Lets count a sample of them and make sure the numbers match. We are going to lay that stuff out so the public can no your is where it is. Can know here is where it is. In some cases they are missing a record in the middle. That is not good. What happened there . Our county gets better the more scrutiny we put on them. The fact we are saying you might get audited. That makes people keep the records a little better because they know someone is looking at their work. Lots of challenges. It is important work. I think it is hopefully driving some of the numbers we have seen. Where we dont have faith in our election my goal is to make it where we have more faith. Very interesting shared during the q a i want to pick up another aspect of your new job which is the legal requirements of the state and federal level. I think that would be important for people to think through. I wanted to thank my fellow panelists for coming all the way from texas. Heritage published a paper not too long ago on coming up with standards for auditing elections. What you will need to understand is cully mentioned is audits are ubiquitous in the business world. Because of that there are generally accepted auditing standards and generally accepted Accounting Practices that have been put together by all of the associations, individuals who engage in these kind of auditing. Those set out the standards auditors have to meet to make sure they are objective, experience, know what they are doing but then also the accounting principles are what they look at when they examine a company a charity and Business Activities and finances. There is nothing like that in the election area. Almost no one has been conducting election audits which is a real failure in the election area. Ever since the 2020 election there has been a lot of discussion about audits. They are referred to in all different ways. We use the term Forensic Audits but there does not seem to be any agreement on what exactly that means. Conducting a hand recount is not an audit. I have heard it referred to as that. What we are talking about is not the kind of limited audits that have been done. Audits where they look at the equipment used to make sure it was functioning properly. There are process audits where they look at procedures administrators use to make sure they were following procedures and handling voters. There are legal compliant audits where they are making sure Election Officials comply with all applicable state and federal laws. Those are all piecemeal audits. What needs to be done are comprehensive in depth audits that look at what was going on before the election, during the election and after the election. If you do a hand recount of a particular election, lets say the margin of victory was a thousand votes. Doing a hand recount, you may recount and a margin of victory was a thousand votes. The ballots were properly counted by the machines but simply doing a recount does not tell you whether the ballots cast in that election were valid. If as our Election Fraud database shows, there were 1001 people who voted in the election who dont actually live in the state of texas, they actually live in oklahoma but they got falsely registered to vote, youre not going to turn that up with a simple recount. What you should have done and need to do is a comprehensive audit of the Voter Registration list and whether Election Officials prior to the election were taking all the steps necessary to make sure it is an accurate list. They were verifying the person who registered legally resides in the jurisdiction where they are voting. Whether they are a citizen. Whether they are not a felon whose ability to vote has been taken away. It is a series of things like that. How often have they checked and did they do this before the election . Do they compare the promotion with the Social Security administrations master index to find individuals who have died before the election . Everyone thinks that is not a problem. We just added two Election Fraud cases to our database of individuals who cast ballots in the names of their deceased mothers. That is the kind of thing you have to look at. I have heard some Election Officials who think this is not a good idea and it should not happen and i think they are just wrong. Because what we are trying to do in this situation is make sure the entire system was working properly. As senator bettencourt says, find problems so we can fix them. What has got to happen is states have gone to start developing the standards and principles. If you look at our paper, we have 18 different areas we think audits ought to look at through the entire election process. I will give you a quick example of how i think this not only can fix problems but can inspire Greater Public confidence in the election and that is something we all want to achieve. In 2021 there was an audit done in New Hampshire. There were some claims the vote count had not been properly done. So they did an indepth audit. They had counted the ballot should they found there was a 499 vote discrepancy. Between the hand recount and the machine total. The audit uncovered this is a jurisdiction where you fill out paper ballots like so many folks do. They have a computer scanner to count it. What they discovered was Election Officials were using a folding machine. When someone requested an absentee ballot, they had a machine that for the ballot so i could go into an envelope and be mailed to the voter. The machine was folding the absentee ballot not in between peoples candidates names like it was supposed to but it was creating the fold in the middle of the candidates name so when the voter sent back the completed ballot the computer scanner was misreading the ballot. In instances where the fold line had gone through the candidates name, it would read it as a vote. That would often lead to over votes which would avoid the ballot. The 499 vote discrepancy did not change the outcome of that particular election but the point of that audit was they discovered the problem and could fix it and make sure it did not happen in future election where it might have made the difference in the election. The opposition ic from some folks is totally misguided. I will tell you if the shareholders of General Motors were told that General Motors and corporate officials think financial audits are not needed, everyone should just trust they never do anything wrong, they would be an uprising and that is the way i think the public should look at this issue. In addition to sec and other investigations. Before i pepper you guys with questions, how can folks find our voter fraud database . If you go to the website of the heritage foundation, it is easily available on the first page. It is a great webpage. It is proved in cases of fraud. These are not allegations. These are folks who have been found guilty in a court of law or a judge has ordered a new election. We are up to almost 1400 cases and a following another hot 100 prosecutions going on. It is important about the margin to victory especially the state races around the country. 499 votes may not have made a difference in New Hampshire but Harris County which is the size of the 26th largest date of the u. S. , we had state reps two years ago one by 114. There was a guy who won by seven votes. After a recount he won by five. That is why they called him landslide mike. When you get problems and you dont take care of them, eventually you can change the difference. Especially these district races from coasttocoast. You had compared Harris County to a much smaller county in terms of population. What is your viewpoint regarding whether there should be National Auditing standard developed or a county by county or state by state . I think national would be really hard simply because of the many ways we vote in this country. Oregon is all mailin ballots. Universal mail out the ballots and they come back in. That is a totally different system from what we have in texas where you have to apply for a mailin ballot. You have to have a reason for a mailin ballot. We mostly vote in person. You need to recognize we are federal. Different states need different standards. In texas it is hard to say because the counties are not the same. With my next round of audits that will start after the election, we have used glynn county and we have Harris County which is a large county and we have a border county which is much different. I like that the Election Administrators in texas can come up with policies and procedures that are counties being we are so diverse. I dont want to mess that up by mandating things from the state that there are certain minimums you have got to keep. We can set the minimums. Hopefully we set it in a way where everyone does not raise to the minimum and not do the extra. Let me add some topdown guidelines to this discussion because i think you can do some guidelines which if you look at gap, that is how it started. Incorrectly reported of daily results, that is what Harris County did. That started a letter that was sent and received from a Forensic Audit group. Electronic poll books providing incorrect incomplete information. Lack of chain of custody documentation for live ballots. This is so big in this letter he sent out it affects probably at least 100 40,000 votes cast out of Harris County because there were 14 mobile ballot boxes the chain of custody broke down on completely. That is a ute problem. A huge problem. Poll workers not qualifying voters adequately. Simple red flags. Which does exist outside of voter irregularities. If you have more votes in precincts than those registered, you have a problem. Do you agree with chads answer . Should there be national or local . I agree there ought to be national minimums. But those all have to be customized according to the state because we are the most decentralized election system of any western democracies at our elections are run by the states. Rules are different in every state so they have to be customized. There are generally accepted auditing that govern the auditor that say you have to exercise independent judgment. They have to be experienced. That i think we could come up with. What are the standards used for auditing ought to meet . When it comes to looking at the actual election process, the registering of voters, the tabulation, it is going to have to be customized. That brings up a point you made in your paper. Who does it and how often . I want to bring the three of you in to that because you make the fox in the hen house observation. You cant have people conducting it audit themselves because it will not lend credibility or confidence to the motors that the people registered running the elections are the one auditing themselves. Share your thoughts on who should do the auditing and how often. From a policymaker perspective, we started with the concept of it would be better to have a professional cohort do the audit which in this case is the secretary of state Forensic Audit division. You have to have some professional acumen to know what you are looking yet. If you hired a thirdparty accounting firm, they dont understand the laws and whether they are violating federal or state code. We decided it would be better to start that division and he has four people with extensive experience. Im happy to be one of the few acts of administrators that made into a legislative position. So that background is unusual but it is also unusual to have experienced people doing these audits. We first started this discussion come one of the first questions was, is this an arizona style or specific way of doing things . It is different because the important thing is you have got to get the core function of audit. Not be the people actually doing the work i have done the same type of work. Because otherwise you dont get people to recognize the obvious. If you dont know what needs to be fixed or with the measurement is, you cant do it. You can layer in the federal law apiece. I think senator bettencourt hit on something really important. It was important to me to get on staff some former elections administrators in texas and former Elections Officials that had been in counties doing the stuff. I will tell you it is easy to get some of this data and get the wrong idea really quickly. It has been so important to have that core where i can say have you seen this in your county before . Fine. That has been so important to us. Some standards on who we need on our teams is super important and i think i want to go back to something senator betancourt said when he had a piece of paper out whenever biggest problems for Election Integrity and what we are seeing is a lot of our a lot of our Election Administrators are back in 2016 mindset before we got the scrutiny on elections and we have deadlines built into the code. You have to have this posted on the internet by 7 00 or 8 00 and you see they get we will post the data online. That is bad data. You posted online and what do we know . If it is online, it is online forever and it is wrong. We see this a lot where we have that data out there and the real data i will get eventually but the bad data is out there. I think Election Administrators have been chastised enough either grassroots deservedly and they are realizing we cannot put this out. We have got to get it right. That has been a big thing without the audits the grassroots has shown us. I agree with all that. If you are conducting an audit in alias smith county, you can have have people auditing themselves you cannot have people auditing themselves. They have to have election experience. The big problem in this area right now is not a problem in the business area is because audits in the business area have been done for so long and are so standard, its there is a huge group of experienced auditors who can be hired by companies and organizations to do their audit and there is nothing like that. If states start requiring the kind of audits we are talking about, that industry is quickly going to establish itself. All of these Election Officials, experienced people around the country as they start to retire or leave what they are doing, if there is a business opportunity, they are going to start these auditing firms which means hopefully state offices will eventually have a group of folks in the private field who they can pull in on their teams to help them with these audits but who have the kind of experience they want as Election Officials. If senator betancourt ever leaves the senate, he would be the perfect guy for doing these kind of audits. You made a good point about the legal. He had to release a letter this week you probably cant talk about but i will. It is to tell the largest county in texas effectively follow the law. You have got to keep these records for 22 months. That has been part of federal and state law for quite some time. It is kind of settled law. They did not keep it. The previous election administrator would not have his people talk to the state audit. The important part of that discussion was they could not replicate the software that read these 14 missing mobile ballot boxes two years later. This is a big warning shot that says do it again. It is backed up by sending additional Election Administrators and people embedded with the attorney general. The problem we are in right now as there are so many questions about voting, some people arent sure if you have to dre, electronic only. Direct recording equipment. Most places have a hybrid where you have a paper ballot and a direct recorder. That is what we use in texas. That is why the hand count is not really an audit. Even then you have to have the ability to say i followed these electronic boards effectively from in the pool to central count. There is no break in the chain of custody because what Harris County did was 14 of these mmbs , mobile ballot boxes that have my estimation 140,000 votes on it. Then there is no chain of custody documentation. Im not sure theyre the same serial numbers that started at the polling place that made it to the central count. This means it is not best practices. It has to be fixed. It was a very good step to say dont do it. That is what the letter start out saying. There is a lot of recalcitrant responses. The same county got selected randomly for another audit. They filed a suit saying the randomness is obviously set up. They went to state court. So now we know they had a terrible chain of custody problem in 2020, i call on them to withdraw their suit. There is no reason to have a lawsuit when you cant even operate under state and federal code and you are saying i am being unfairly treated by a random audit. It is time for everybody to put their cards on the table and get it fixed. Let me start with you on a different question. Two more before i open it to the audience. Years ago when you were writing about the common sense idea people should have an idea when they vote, the critics were saying that it is a vote suppressor, it is racist and is going to drive down the number of people who have access and will not. The opposite has happened. We have seen that people come out in droves now. When you wrote this paper, what has been the major criticisms and what is your response to that in terms of whether this will make people not want to vote or decrease peoples confidence in the vote once it has been audited . There have been some critics saying audits are going to somehow increase the lack of confidence polling shows voters have on elections. I think the opposite is true. If you do an audit and comes out totally clean, what could be better than for the confidence of the public in that area of the election . If it comes out and points out problems like what happened in windham, New Hampshire, the audit showed it did not affect the election but second it showed the public they had found a problem and they fixed it. So get rid of that folding machine or make them folding machine work right. Right. People not to the next election that is not going to be a problem. I think it is going to increase confidence in the election process. One thing we did not really answer was your question about how often and when they should be done. How many counties is texas . 254. There are a lot of counties a lot of states that have very large numbers of counties. There is no way you can audit every single county after every election. You just cant do it. What i think states have to come up with is a system i think texas did, you have to audit a certain number of counties randomly chosen after every election and the best thing i think is to come up with a system. Figure out what is practical. How many counties can you audit after an election and come up with a system to ensure that every county in the state is audited at least once every three years, five years whatever from a practical standpoint you can get it done. In texas, that would be difficult. This is a fulcrum position you have to take as a policymaker. We started off with urban counties having a much higher ratio than rural or suburban. That is important because you look for where the votes are and you try to allocate your resources. With all of this, you have to recognize the obvious that you do want to have those audits done and the difference in the legislative filing is besides these random audits based upon merit a request, that has been not only at the local level but the secretary of state level that if there is an issue not being responded to like why are there 579 registered voters of one house in Wichita Falls . If you cant get an answer it is time to do an audit of that precinct. That is how you spread the resources around. Let me pick up on a comment made a few minutes ago. As a businessman, i am used to my company being audited every year. I count on a clean audit because it gives confidence to the shareholders. Every business person watching this is like obviously. But voting is by definition a political act. Not in a pejorative term but it is a political act. An expression of your Political Rights to choose who is going to represent you. How do we depoliticize audits . For example, i sure there are people watching is who are going to say this is a republican state. These are republicans who are trying to audit and kick democrats out or people who should be allowed to vote vote and similarly if there was an audit in chicago of votes, some republicans, others would say we cannot trust that because this is the fox guarding the hen house. How do we convince both sides they are wrong and move it to the point where Business People look at their audit as this is part of the business of being in the business and here the business of voting and increase the confidence of everyone around the country the vote is the vote and it was done right . It is clear the republican side is demanding audits. People back in 2016, who thought the election was stolen, the democrats 2000. 2016 you see a big bump. One poll i saw said 70 of all americans in 2015 thought the election lacked honesty and that is a staggering number, bipartisan. I think the pendulum needs to swing and both sides need to go through losses and then i think everyone will come around. It needs to be done. Whether you are left, right, center, whatever, you want a fair process. At this point, when you win, you always have to be, that was a perfect election, that was great. When you lose, maybe it was not perfect. I think it will take a little bit before we get everybody on board. Do you hire democrats in your office . I dont care. I have no idea what the political persuasion of any of my employees is. When people come to me and talk about what we do, they always say, how many votes are you finding . Votes, votes, votes. We are looking at ballots. I am talking about reconciliation between how many people showed up. I am talking about ballots. From an auditing perspective, all about ballots. I assume you will try to be as transparent as you can putting things out for the public to see. The messed up pulling machine you find in one county or something . We will have the background. It will probably be too much background in layers. The other day i looked at how much data i have a from the county i am auditing now. It is over. 5 terabytes, closer to six hundred gigabytes. So, the amount of data, part of my job will be, how do i get the key documents out there for everyone to look at without gumming up the system with extra . Focus on depoliticize a. I just did this interview this morning in and ht was the same question. Everybody has to understand this is some, but an audit isnt sunshine, it is transparency. If you see it, you can believe it. He is sending elections personnel into Harris County. We have had election inspectors in every major urban county, whether republican or democrat controlled, for as long as i remember. I did that job in the 1990s. Because everything is an affront if you are being audited, it is an affront. Importantly, it is away for good come practices to be propagated to other places and mistakes to be corrected for future elections. We have to get out of the situation where we are now in politics where you cannot ask a question. Right now, the froth is so high you cannot ask questions about election procedure without somebody taking offense from the left or right. The bottom line is, questions are good. Answers are better. Results are what matters. That is what audits are. It will be a real reprogramming of the body electric. The real problem is this everything moves at instantaneous lightspeed now and it is more easy to criticize that it is to agree. We have to change this in elections. My challenge is to do that with the audit bill presentation i am making. I have had people come up to me and say, i am i agree except i am not your political party. How about just agreeing with the concept . It will take a lot of effort to get past. I dont over time, but over time when this takes root and you start institutionalizing best practices, will you share those with any state that asks . Number two, will you uncover things that cut both ways politically . Over time that will drive up confidence on both sides, hopefully. The data is what the data is. It will cut both ways, cheating and mistakes are not partisan. They happen both ways. They are human. We have examples in the voter fraud a database of republicans cheating, democrats cheating, independents cheating, all convictions in a court of law around the country. Let me turn to you with the depoliticization question and then we will turn to audience questions. I think the key to that is, the reason we published the paper at the heritage foundation. You have this is a totally untested area. It has not been done. You develop professional standards, professional principles, that i think it is hard to disagree with on some partisan basis. You put together the professional staff to enforce and follow the standards and principles. When you are doing that, it is hard for somebody to claim you are somehow acting one thing in this paper and one thing we talked about here, voter id was extremely controversial. When i came here in 2006 to testify, the House Committee filled up like that because it was a flashpoint. Now everybody know that photo id does not stop turnout. There is no case in the u. S. Where a state that has adopted it has had problems with turnout. In fact, we are expecting a record turnout of approximately 10 million people. That is astonishing, great news. It means democracy is healthy, whether the democracy itself realizes it. Because it is a political act, people get a choice. This audit situation is the same. In the future it will be commonplace. Everyone will agree with it. It will take time to get there. Any final words before i turn it over to the audience . I have seen we have gotten into a process. We had four. We will have four more. Talking to elections administrators, there is reticence at first, but once we talk, this is my chance as an election administrator to show i am doing things right. I may make mistakes and if i have made a mistake, i will own it, but the audit is an opportunity to show that, i am doing a pretty good job. I can tell by commissioners and voters that in this county, you can respond to the results of the election. You have a web suit website. How can people get there . On the secretary of states website there is a little link. Under elections. And people over time will find all sorts of stuff . Yes. It is pretty sparse now, but we are getting there. This is your chance to ask any of the three experts questions. My only request, and demand, is you actually asked questions. We have a judge and prosecutor. I am in trouble. Help me. Bring a judge eight microphone so people online can your questions. You have been very nice saying this happens on both sides. From watching Television Last election i got the idea it wants it was heavy on one side, not both sides equal. This symmetry, is that the case, or are you just saying that to be political and get it through the process . Im not sure which of us said that, exactly. The fact is, he has prosecutions documented of multiple parties and people make stupid mistakes and do stuff like this in every state in the union. The question is, what do you do about it . I am trying to make it clear in my audit bill that i started before the election of 2020 asking questions in october when the vote totals did not match. It what was not because of president trumps election, because he won texas and it did not matter. There was already a problem. We will recognize it. Somebody thought it was a mistake when i first got elected. I went to the Commissioners Court and said, i want an audit. Because, i came from business. People sent, you are crazy. That is always a bad thing, and audit. It turned out to be a great roadmap to modernize an office that was stuck in the 19th century. Then we became the first county to have online tax payment, online vehicle registration, etc. Right now i am stuck in a problem in Harris County, there were republicans like me that used to be in charge of elections and now there are not. But we cannot ask questions without it being almost a National News story that this is a denier. I am trying to say, eventually, both sides will agree this is right. But the vote on the audit bills was 100 partisan. We actually lost one republican because they thought it was an unfunded mandate. But, recognize the obvious about this metric. A question here in the front. Thank you. Excellent panel on an incredibly important topic. Your paper touches on the fact there are lots of different kinds and forms of audits. One codified recently was a risk limiting audit. Lots of states deploy this either in full or as a Pilot Program. Are they sufficient in the election context to resolve the issues you are talking about. Do you need to do more, are there limits to risk limiting audits, no pun intended . This question requires you to tell people what that is at first, then explain your answer. A risk limiting audit is a specific type of audit that are triggered by statistics and how deep you go into the audit is a function of how close the race is. I think they are a good tool. We have them in texas. We have a Pilot Program in six counties. Then, 2026, i think that rises. We will be doing that. It is a different tool. It is closer to a recount then what i am doing, which is a more comprehensive dive into the records. I think it is a useful tool. I think we will see in a couple months with our Pilot Program how good it is. We have three minutes left. Quick answer, quick answer. The forensic a risk limiting audit, if they tell you the votes are being properly counted in one of the precincts, but it does not tell you whether the votes were cast by individuals eligible to vote, for example. One question in the front. Here. Hello. Let me talk about enforcement of little. It is one thing to have transparency in sunlight. Lets take the example of the anonymous county you had to write a letter to. Lets say that that recount trend continues and you have commissioners not willing to abide by the procedures you are sitting or who are routinely audited and found wanting. You are in the secretary of states office, not the ags office. But, what Enforcement Mechanisms exist to overcome either recalcitrance or continual failure . I think shame does a lot. We have that. But, i will maybe let him preview the next session on tools. That is why you have to be able to take things either to a civil or criminal penalty. In the bill we will come back with there will be several penalties for violation of the law as the terms set by secretary of state. There is also criminal prosecution in texas, county by county decisions right now. The question will be whether or not to have that in either an alternate or surrounding counties or statewide, etc. But you are right. One of the important points is some people are not willing to respond and some people are not able to respond. You can fix some of this. But if they are unwilling to respond you have to either find them, and this was in my bill, or, have more enhanced ability to do more prosecution. I hate to say that, but there is no reason for, as an election administrator, in my experience, youll either follow state and federal law or not. It simple. If you made a mistake, fix it, get it done, and move on. That is what we need to see more of. We should not be afraid. Yes, if you are violating the law you will have consequences. We already passed one bill that if you dont clean up the voter role, senate bill 1113, the secretary of state can withhold your money on voter will clean up. So, thats because, we are trying to enforce business best practices to clean up the voter role. One quick thing on this. I agree with that. Another thing i think you should look at that we talk about in the paper is, there has to be an enforcement mechanism so elected officials in a particular county will cooperate with auditors and provide data and information, documents, whatever. If they dont do that, you have to have either an administrative fine system or possible termination or suspension of employment. They have to cooperate. This has been a fascinating discussion. Join me in thanking our panelists. We are adjourned. Span is your unfiltered government funded by these Television Companies and board including mediacom. The world changed in an instant and mediacom was ready. Internet traffic soared and we never slowed it down. Schools and businesses when virtual and we powered a new reality. As mediacom we are built to keep you ahead. Mediacom supports cspan as a public service, along with these other Television Providers giving you a frontrow seat to democracy. Tonight on q a, writer and filmmaker william doyle, author of titan of the senate talks about the life and career of the longestserving republican senator in history, orrin hatch of utah who served from 19 and died in april 2022. Mr. Doyle insists that based on his legislative achievements, orrin hatch was the greatest senator of modern times. Senator gordon smith, who worked with orrin hatch a great deal, is a fellow mormon. He told me he thought that the secret to orrin hatchs effectiveness, passing all of these laws, with the liberals and democrats and conservatives and republicans, the secret was orrin hatch saw everybody as a child of god coming from his deep religious faith, and he saw the nobility in his open ends. Opponents. He saw his opponents as noble. William doyle tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan skewing day. Listen to q a and all of our podcasts on our free cspan now app. More from campaign 2022 tonight starting with the california governors race. At 9 00 p. M. Eastern, a debate between credit governor gavin newsom and his republican challenger brian donnelly. Watch it on cspan. At 10 00, in Washington State democratic senator patty murray is up against republican challenger tiffany smiley. We will show you the debate hosted at Gonzaga University in spokane, washington. Watch both these online at cspan. Org or with cspan now, our free video app. Cspans washington journal, every day we take your calls live on the air on the news of the day and discussed policy issues that impact you. Monday morning, amy walter, publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report talks about campaign 2022 and key races to watch and craig whitlock, Investigative Reporter for the Washington Post into his investigation of retired u. S. Military personnel taking jobs with foreign governments. Watch washington journal live at 7 00 eastern monday morning on cspan or cspan now our free mobile app. Join the discussions with phone calls, facebook comments, text messages, and tweets. National security advisor Jake Sullivan talked about the biden Administrations National security strategy. The discussion was held by the center for a new American Security out of georgetown university, the walsh school of Foreign Service. It is just over one hour. Afternoon. Welcome to georgetown welcome to the school of Foreign Service and welcome to our historic hall. We are honored to be hosting the center for

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