Registration policy. This is about one hour. Elections are under attack from so many different arenas, russian meddling from 2016 and that has expanded with china and iran and other foreign actors. A lot of the misinformation coming out right now is coming from sources in addition to russia. It can be from canada to campaigns and social media, facebook, twitter, there is a lot of misinformation out there. It moves toward the problems with voting by mail. The mail seems to have been a National Story now as to whether you can trust the mail or not. That is what covid19 has brought to the fore. We need to provide those options and should never put someones health at risk to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Thats where many people have turned to the mail including West Virginia and within balance of law, thats one of the key points, you have to stay within your state law. The elections are run by the states and by the counties. While people may hear of something thats happening in another state that may be working in the vote by mail system, they have to take that into context that in those beens, perhaps they have working on that for 15 years. They have been working on the voter list maintenance and getting the proper machinery in place to be able to count the votes and drop boxes on those sort of things. Just because something sounds good another state, may not apply legally within your state like in West Virginia where you cant just jump into a vote by mail system, you have to operate within the confines of the law and still provide flexibility to allow voters to get to the ballot box. Situation, we gave people the opportunity to vote using an absentee ballot. We were one of 16 states that require a voter to request an absentee ballot. We are not a no excuse or vote by mail where you send ballots to everybody. I dont advocate that because of vast opportunities for fraud. When somebody requests an absentee ballot, you know there is a live person on the other and then you have an accurate address to send in the ballot to and it works wonderfully for us. We perhaps had the best primary across the united states. I was asked to testify because of the success West Virginia had during our primary, the best practices we implemented to prepare for a general election. With the mail in particular, let me give you a quick example of how the mail can be a problem. Anont want to take this as attack on the postal system, they have great workers and a great system in place. 95 of the time, mail is delivered on time schedule to the right address. What that means an Election Year is thats 4 of the time that there could be an issue. If you have a paper application for an absentee ballot, 4 of those may not arrive at the Clerks Office on time as scheduled. When the clerk males the ballot out to the individual, 4 of those may not arrive on time. When the individual voter sends the ballot back to the clerk, 4 of those may not arrive on time. You can see how this complicates or multiplies the effect of inaccuracies, opportunities for human error or perhaps opportunities for fraud to occur like purposely throwing away a ballot. What we found in West Virginia and in one specific situation, 500 absentee applications were set aside by a trainee who is undergoing the training process and then he left for various reasons and they werent identified for another two weeks. Iswasnt nefarious, there nothing wrong going on but it was a complication that when you use voting by mail, these things enter into the process and can cause problems. An introductory to whats happening in West Virginia and i would be glad to answer any followup questions. The just want to say that 4 figure you are talking about is the Inspector General of the Postal Service releasing a report last november on the 2018 election and they said their standard for ontime delivery of alexion mail, which includes absentee ballots, was 96 percent, not 100 . Oft means at least 4 alexion mail ballots may not get delivered in time. Said there aret worse delivery times in several states and they only achieved about 84 of the time. That means Something Like 16 of ballots might not be delivered in time. If i can bring in christian adams, if you will turn your cameras on, secretary warner talked about the potential problems and some states with inaccurate Voter Registration lists. I know that the Public Interest Legal Foundation has done a lot of work on that issue. I think you all just recently released a report on that. Can you talk about that issue and some of the problems you are seeing in states when it comes to mailin ballot thing . For doing this important event every year. Its critically important to defend the constitution. In contrast, secretary warner was talking about, in West Virginia, this system they have working there. A great example to the contrary is nevada. One of the things we looked at carefully was the rush to automatic mail ballots in the primary where the data showed things did not go very well. Take clark co. , one point 3 million ballots were automatically mailed. Roughly bounced back as undeliverable which means there is bad voter rolls, bad addresses, people are dead. Back out of 1. 3 million. 7000 of those were rejected as defective, having some sort of problem. Those people lost their vote and probably dont even know about it that their vote wasnt counted. Therefore, they were disenfranchised. If they had gone in person, the 7000 votes would have counted. You mentioned our Research Study. A number of years ago, pew did a Research Study where they look at the voter rolls around the country and found roughly millions and millions were bad. I think they said there were 2 million dead people in the voter rolls. We replicated that study the Public Interest Legal Foundation where we got the voter rolls amalgamated them and normalize them and put them up against commercial data. There was other private data thats out there that you can see whos alive and whos dead and whos duplicated and so forth. Example, thats the state that rushed to vote by mail, they have thousands of people improperly registered at commercial addresses which are not supposed to be in nevada. If you go to our website, you will see a video we did last week going to many of these addresses, visiting and knocking on the door, asking for the voter who invariably is not there because they dont live in an abandoned mine or they dont live in a vacant lot or they dont live in an Auto Repair Shop or they dont live in a casino or they dont live in a liquor store. If you go to the video, you will see what the state of the voter rolls are in the battle. When you have dirty voter rolls on one hand and you have vote by mail automatically on the other, it equals a disaster. You cannot do it that way. Thats what nevada is doing and thats what new jersey is doing. Lo and behold, other places as well. I want to close on one last thing it involves language. I think its important to reiterate something i said to another audience recently. When people care about these issues, when people do work in the states, they are called vote suppressors, nasty names and so forth. My message then and now is do not be afraid of these labels because they are smears to try to get. You uninterested of people participating in this webinar online care about this issue and want to see something done to protect the integrity of the election. That doesnt make them a racist or a boat suppressor. Or a vote suppressor. People have to not be afraid of the smears because we have a lot of work to do in this country as it relates to election integrity. Thanks, christian. Hemingway, real clear investigations did a terrific report, an investigation into vote harvesting. Has been carried on like in texas and florida to the extent where you had individuals going in and basically coercing and pressuring voters to vote a particular way or actually filling out their ballots for them. Talk a little about some of the investigations you all have done and particular how it relates to this push for mailin ballot thing we see now in the selection. Been a lot of complications related to mailin ballot thing. Weve done a lot of stuff on outdated voter rolls and the problems that states have had and in keeping those voter rolls up to date. A lot of it is building on the that has been done. A lot has been building on work done by conservative nonprofits. This information is out there. Its kind of shocking. California as of last year or so had a Voter Registration rate exceeding 100 . That means they had more Voter Registrations on file then people who live on the state. Bad voter files have been. As we transition to mailin ballots for the reasons there were just illustrated, imagine what was going on in one county in nevada but spread that across the country. You start to see this is a really big problem. Necessarily even a nefarious thing in some ways. California, they have transparently resisted legal attempts to cause them to comply with federal law, that require the keep their voter rolls clean. I am large, a lot of this is simply the fact that we dont spend a lot of money investing in a rental an election infrastructure in this country. Its an afterthought in many states. I think thats the place in a lot of cases because we see the same problems with Voter Registrations in red states and red counties. I think a lot of it is simply making people aware of the problem. Unfortunately, as has been hinted at, this has become so politicized. This is fundamental Good Government issues we should all agree on and yet, any time you raise the specter of these problems come immediately get smeared. Think its a huge problem but i think we turned a corner this year with covid in the sense that there has been such a strong push for mail in balloting gradually happening over time and the fact that it happened all at once force people to confront some particular issues. When issue is that there is incredibly high rate of ballot rejections when it comes to mailin ballots. Like 30ey did something elections in may all by mail and there was Something Like under a 10 ballot rejection rate across the state. In one particular case in new realtime investigations were instrumental in making it a National News story. Democratic ag indicted a sitting member of paterson, new jerseys major voter fraud efforts involving absentee ballots. There is so many issues out there. I am both appalled and surprised, unfortunately, that most of my colleagues dont seem to see these issues for what they are which is a genuine threat to free and Fair Elections and not necessarily issues that need to be politicized. They are basic matters of following the law, proper civic governance and restoring peoples confidence in the process. Say what you want about whatever competitive advantage you might gain with a partisan catfight over suppressing votes, the overall confidence in our electoral system has been seriously undermined this year. Specifichere are very reasons for that that the media are not covering and are not aware of. Thank you. Secretary warner . I want to validate what i heard from both of them. Its interesting that the figures that were cited for nevada, i dont want to think i dont want people to think that nevada is an aberration. Its almost identical to what we have in West Virginia, 1. 2 andion registered voters when we sent out these applications for the ballots, 230,000 of those came back, the exact figure he cited from nevada. Thatmay be an indication thats about 1 5 of all registered voters who may be inaccurate. Manyis after i had taken names off the roles. Off 200,000take after the selection. Thats when we can take it off. Get out what wouldve happened in West Virginia if we had a vote by mail system where you sent ballots out to everybody, 1. 2 million ballots would have gone out, four hundred 50,000 people who participated, that means there would be more ballots sitting in peoples mailboxes unused than there were people who actually participated. Think of the opportunities for fraud and regularities and irregularities and its simply not a good idea and thats why i will not advocate for getting away from voting in person. Voting in person as the Gold Standard and is the most secure and you are adding voting precincts where questions can be answered. When you sit at home, you can vote however you want on a paper ballot. In one county in West Virginia, we had over 1000 over votes. Sometimes they voted for three for a candidate and those votes are now invalidated. Those votes were not counted and thats why we want people voting in person if possible thats why we have gone to Great Lengths to get the ppe entering the coworker train the poll workers to make sure the health and safety of the voters are secure in West Virginia. They are being required to wear masks when they vote in person but thats what i encourage people to do is vote in person and only if you have a legitimate covid19 concern. Then we make it as easy as possible for people to vote by absentee. Mentioned there were more people registered then there was actual voters. We still have that in two counties in West Virginia. I am working hard to clean up the Voter Registration list. Its a seven year process to get somebody removed and i am only think of the full message sent to the people . Can they trust the system when you have more ballots than people . You cannot. Its the threat of lawsuits that really concerns the clerks and thats why they came to me to run for office and run on the platform of cleaning up the Voter Registration list. Sometimes, you have to threaten the lawsuits or followthrough when you had those terrible situations where people are no following federal law and thats what my predecessor did not do for eight years and thats why its important to have these organizations that are the watchdogs to make sure the integrity of the Elections Come through. You mentioned lawsuits and i want to go to that topic with all three of you. One of the other things you said in answer to the first question was you talked about operating within the law. At leaste law states in West Virginia, they have put in certain safety and security protocols for absentee ballots. In order to cut down on the opportunity for fraud and other problems. Many states have witness signature requirements. Fill outquire you to to p ballot form that you then sign so you can have some kind of authentication. My understanding of whats been going on across the countrys there have been all these lawsuits filed, mostly by progressive organizations. They are trying to not only force everyone to vote by mail but at the same time, getting state lawsvoiding like that, like saying you shouldnt have to apply with a signature requirement, he lawsuit in alabama saying the state should not be able to apply a voter id requirement. Have you seen that in West Virginia . Im sure other secretaries have seen that in many other states. We have and it was mentioned about labels and boating suppression. Attacked in various newspapers about letters to the editor and opeds and so forth that by implementing a Voter Registration law, i would say we have a week voter identification law but at least we have it. 18 different licenses, all kinds of Different Things you can use but its not a photo id. Its a week voter identification law or requirement. The people in West Virginia, we are a conservative state by nature and they expect it and what the integrity of the process. Not one person has complained legitimately about having to produce. That theythe idea come in with their car registration or drivers license, they want to show who they are. You have to stand up to the culture of the state, because of the history, you have to have a notarization to present a ballot. I dont question any of those states. In West Virginia, we have had a checkered past with regards to Election Fraud going back to the election of john kennedy and the democratic primary in 1960 that occurred here in West Virginia and after that Hubert Humphrey was out of the race. And thatolen from him was the legacy i grew up under, knowing that has happened here in West Virginia and people were out of it and thats a culture that im trying to overcome in West Virginia the introducing and keeping the voter lists ensure the voter identification is in place. Aree sort of techniques needed to ensure the integrity of the election. Christian, talk about the lawsuits. Think you are participating in some of them and filing briefs and an attempt to void the security protocol the states have in place when it comes to absentee or mailin ballots. Groups filing these lawsuits, lets think about it. A democratically elected Legislature Like in virginia, a democratically elected legislature, everyone of those seats in the house and the senate have a law that says you have to have an absentee ballot signature if youre going to do that and they did that to protect the voter and protect the system. That law went to the democratically elected governor of virginia who signed the law come making it represent the will of the people. Incomes the league of women thers and they have decided democratically enacted provisions of the state election law, they just dont like it. They file a lawsuit in the Western District of virginia in ,ront of judge norman k. Moon the champion of defending the statutes capitulates and raises the white flag. I was in on one of these Conference Calls because the Legal Foundation filed a brief in the case. I heard something i never heard before. Judge moon asked the commonwealth of virginia, do you intend to file a response of pleading . Anybody who has gone to law school knows you always file a responsive pleading. Its gotten so bad the federal judge has to ask the question whether or not you even intend to file a response. This is going on all around. This situation is happening in North Carolina and michigan and north pennsylvania. Anywhere where you have reticles that occupy the attorney where youice have radicals that occupy the attorney generals office, they are not doing what they learned in law school which is jewish which is to defend state statutes. I am also on the u. S. Commission civic rights. Some of the folks of the commission we spoke to about voting about vote by mail. I voted against it. Vote by mail disenfranchises people, thats a fact. We know it disenfranchised 7000 people in the nevada primary. It disenfranchised people who got rejected with over votes in West Virginia. We know that vote by mail has a 5 failure rate because of the post office. The best system we can have is centralized vote in person which is the Gold Standard. Mistakes in the pulley places, you cannot fix them in the kitchen after you seal the envelope. I was going to build on what the two previous speakers said in terms of this year in particular, i think of the covid thing at the beginning of that and everyone thought this was finally their chance to move everything to vote by mail. They try to not let a crisis go to waste. The result has been a torrent of litigation and a lot of this is being directed at me by the Democratic Party. Particular, the collusion between democrats and certain state legislatures and the Democratic Party nationally who is filing these lawsuits is really something to behold and is alarming. You mentioned North Carolina in passing but what happened there was shocking. We are two years out from a republican congressional race where they had to invalidate the results and hold a special election because an aide to working on the campaign for the republicans was caught ballot harvesting and north carolyn has 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 on the state and the governor turned around and rolled over essentially. They erased recently passed election laws at the behest of capitulating this democratic lawsuit and the result is that two years later, ballot harvesting is legal effectively in North Carolina. Its kind of shocking how quickly this is moving and how this is moving in a brazen and idemocratic fashion which dont think is known yet. Some radical things are happening i dont think the American People are aware of but they might be in a few weeks and it will be interesting to see what happens. Mostylvania is one of the contested battleground states. The Supreme Court just ruled, completely overruled wellestablished state law that says all mailin ballots that will be counted have to be in by 8 p. M. On Election Night. Mailsaid they would care ballots an extra three days after the election. Whats outrageous about this is not just that they completely overrode an explicit statute in the law that they acknowledge exist and did so using the flimsiest statements in the state constitution that dont speak to it, they also ruled that not only do you have to accept these ballots three days after the election but you can accept an absentee mailin ballot three days after the elections without postmarks. No one can prove that they were sent in before the election. If trump wins the state, wins pennsylvania, he wanted by 40,000 votes last time, by 8000 votes and all of a sudden, unpostmark mail ballots in pennsylvania start showing up the day after the election, those will have to be counted. Never mind that we just had to fairly significant indictments for voter fraud in philadelphia earlier this year including one involving a former congressman. Concerna very serious and i dont think people are aware of the radicalism that has taken place this year. Facesould explode in our and a couple of weeks here on Election Night if whats being done to liberalize these laws areenly looks like they being used to manipulate the vote. That may very well be the case. Let me unpack that a little bit with West Virginia. Primary in a typical election, we would have less than 7000 absentee ballots. During our primary, we had 224,000 absentee ballots. You can see if youd increase. Lesscause us to go for than 1000 provisional ballots throughout the state to 10,000 provisional ballots throughout the state. A provisional ballot can appear for a number of reasons like someone didnt post market correctly. Now somebody else gets to decide if your vote counts. Depending on the county, the politics, the makeup of the county commission, they get to decide whether to count those votes. Youre back to the situation that mark just discussed is that in a close election, the county commissioners whether hes republican or democrat, we will cap the provisional ballots because its one Political Party over the other and the rest of the state law says we will not count them if the postmark didnt allow didnt arrive on time. None of us want the integrity of the elections dependent on the politically elected county commission and they deciding whether your vote counts or not. Mention that that is a real risk of counties in different states applying different standards on what they will consider to be an acceptable ballot particular when it comes to absentee ballots which would bring us potential violations of what the Supreme Court said in the bush v gore decision which is you cannot have different rules in different parts of the state is what counts in a ballot. Warner, this feeds to fromer question, you went 7000 absentee ballots to over 200,000 absentee ballots. I know the state of new york, when they had their primary june 23, they also come officials there had encouraged everyone to vote by mail. They had an almost exponential increase in absentee ballots and Election Officials obviously werent prepared to handle it because it then took them six weeks to count the ballots. The turnout in primaries is generally lower than we have in the general election. I guess my question is, is there a real possibility the election is close that it could be weeks before we know what the outcomes are if the new york example is repeated in other states that Election Officials are overwhelmed by a 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 a problem especially in those battleground states, in the states that have tried to shift to a vote by mail system when they werent prepared for it. They need the personnel and the equipment. In West Virginia, we will not have that issue. We have flexibility to begin the process of the counting and the processing of absentee ballots during the early voting. Starts octoberg 21. We have about 60,000 people who already sent their absentee ballots back into starting next wednesday, the county clerks can start checking the registration to make sure they are registered and checking the signatures and can open up the outer in blokes and get the ballots prepared, not counted but prepared and stacked and ready to go by precinct on Election Night on november 3, they can go through the highspeed captures with tabulators and we can we can have a religion result sooner during the primary than we typically did because many people voted absentee because they were ready to be counted. I think we are in great shape here but not in those states that are sending out ballots and are allowing the ballots to come in after the election and be counted. Yes, we will have problems and that goes to the integrity of the process and whether people trust the outcomes. I thinks that i think thats what President Trump is a been ranting about is that we have to watch for these situations. I have taken every precaution i can ahead of time to notify people in West Virginia to plan now if youre going to vote absentee. Voted and get it back in the mail as soon as possible. We had no problems during the primary and i dont anticipate problems but we are a small state and we are in front of this allowing flexibility in a new york type situation, perhaps they were not allowed to start the process ahead of time. To count the votes, a lot of times, an opportunity for various activities can occur. Were going to have problems on Election Night and the coming weeks and all we can do is count on people to have their eyes and ears open. We set up an Antifraud Task wece with the u. S. Attorney, are coordinating every week on that to make sure everybody is in place so people know who to call should a situation arise. Thats what were doing in West Virginia to prepare for this election. Going back to thisation, do you foresee problem after the november election . York, this isnew something that you and mark have mentioned. There is a high rejection rate of absentee ballots. In new york, after they had taken six weeks to count the ballots, they then had litigation filed contesting the rejection of those absentee ballots. Im wondering whether you perceive that is a potential problem in multiple states where we have litigation over those rejections and big fights over whether ballots that didnt comply with state law should be counted or not . What you are referring to our state laws as to what it requires to send a male or absentee ballot, things the legislatures and governors agreed on in advance of the election. What you are referring to is this hostility on the left to those laws. Will bet to and they ready to File Lawsuits and say you shouldnt worry about those rules. Those rules dont matter. Cap the ballot and you will probably have mobs of signs because thats their favorite way to get their policy advanced besides the courtroom. They will say count all the ballots and forget about the effective errors that violate state law. They are still on the books, forget about the rules, just count the ballots. Thats the kind of litigation that i think you will see in an effort to muscle through defective ballots that do not comply with the law and in places like philadelphia and some the judges in detroit, it would not surprise me in the slightest that these judges say count all the ballots. Here is the most dangerous moment, when you start running these ballots through the tabulators you cannot take those votes out anymore. Once they are blended in, they are in. Thats the sort of lawlessness you and i have been warning about for 10 years that the left is perfectly content with lawlessness if it gets them power. Do you have any additional insight into that particular issue . Going back to what mac was just saying, about the infrastructure and getting ready, this is a huge issue. Thisi started reporting on and you talk to people who were trying to expand Voting Rights in all of these things, they kept citing examples im from oregon and they have been doing all mail and elections for 20 years. There are still problems anytime you have an election which is vote by mail but just because oregon has been successfully doing vote by mail elections for 20 years doesnt mean you can overnight transform your state into a vote by mail state. In the case of oregon, they generally do a much better job of cleaning up the voter rolls than most other states. Thats not to stay theys desk thats not to say they still dont have problems but they do much better job of job of keepir rolls uptodate than most states because when you are doing vote by mail, you basically have no choice otherwise it is a complete mess all the time. They have very fast rules about when you have to be registered. If you are not registered to vote by now in oregon, you do not vote in november. A lot of people would find that appalling if that were spread across other states. In general they have had 20 years of building up the infrastructure to support vote by mail. New york or new jersey would turn on a dime and convert all vote by mail elections, what did they think was going to happen . What happened with the Congressional Election dragging on for six weeks, the summer was the most predictable thing in the world. The same with corruption in paterson, new jersey. Who knew . These are very much avoidable problems. I think if people were not so focused on simply trying to produce a desired outcome instead of being properly focused on fairness of process, we would not be dealing with a lot of these problems. That is what is fascinating and terrifying to me as i have reported on this over the last 18 months or so extensively is just how much the wind on the debate has shifted. You read New York Times story from 10 years ago and there are stories about how everyone acknowledges that ballots are much more susceptible to fraud and irregularity. This is just an accepted fact because it is true. Now days of the New York Times writes an article, the reporter would be shoved out of the window by his own colleagues. Votearly when it comes to fraud, there was a great article about 20 years ago, it was altered by glen simpson back when he was in an an investigative reporter. Ethnic enclaves from around the country, it was a real thing that happened. There are definitely vote brokers in immigrant communities in this country. These are things we used to be able to talk about and address and now if we try and address them, you are a horrible horrible person who does not want anyone with a different skin tone to be able to vote and i think we need to really dial just back and get focused on civics and process and general fairness instead of being sucked soo these debates that are politicized and bitter. Unfortunately i do not know a way out of that. It is frustrating that you point out obvious facts about election insecurity you are smeared as racist. I dont think that needs to be the case at all. Secretary woerner . I would like to put an exclamation point on following the rule of law. During the primary we had a race thatstatewide was decided by 167 votes. 10,000 provisional ballots across the state. In one county alone, there were 800. The populist thing to do for a county commissioner is to say, lets count them all. Andnow people intended to they put them in the polestar frick post office. Those votes in the number of cases should not have counted yet the county commission decided to count those votes. Challenge thenot election, he would have to do the legal fees and pay for the recount. He in the general election, did not challenge. Lets say that have been a republican. You Better Believe there would have been challenges to the commission counting those votes when they should not have. Et should not have to g into that situation. To abidetchdog group by state law and only count those votes that are properly cast in a timely action. I just wanted to emphasize the point of following the rule of elections,se, these you just did not have the faith in them and that is what causes rioting in the streets. I have to mention since you talked about oregon, just two things. Folks have heard about this before. It was not that many years ago that an assistant professor at one of the state universities had her students do a survey of just one county in oregon and 5 of the people they surveyed admitted that somebody else had filled out their ballot for the. 2. 5 percent admitted that somebody else had signed their ballot for them. While that sounds ok small number, like a small that was tens of thousands of ballots and the professor said she actually thought it was quite a bit more because she was amazed that so many people admitted that something that illegal had happened with their absentee ballot. That illustrates one of the problems with people voting at home where there is no Election Officials supervising what is going on. Throwt want to flow any of my friends and family under the bus, but what you just have lots of anecdotal stories to that effect from people i know over the course of 20 years. You move, youre going to get extra ballots, people are going to be tempted. Some people should not be put in that position. You should not get three extra ballots at your house or place of residence and be put in the position where you can be tended to do that. You cannot do that when you vote in person tempted to do that. I think people just understand. Again, we should just be able to acknowledge that there might be a place where voting by mail is necessary and in certain circumstances maybe there is going to be a pandemic or you might want to allow for mailing oting under certain circumstances. We need to understand that voting by mail introduces a million more problems than voting in person. This is not controversial, this is the truth. We actually have a question. Questions from somebody watching this. I want to start with you, secretary. Why arent there more prosecutions for Election Fraud . The Heritage Foundation maintains a daytoday sampling of cases, not a comprehensive list. We have almost 1400 proven cases. But i know personally of many other potential cases that Law Enforcement officials just were not interested in investigating and prosecuting. Im wondering as secretary of state in West Virginia, have you had a problem with that because i have heard complaints with other secretaries telling me that even when they have uncovered clear evidence of Election Fraud when they sent it ,o either local prosecutors they have not been willing to do anything about it. Have you run into that problem . We have and it is a. Of issues. Everything from time and resources and manpower to do the investigation and once you do the investigation, when you hand that over to a prosecutor, in some of these counties, it is run by families and tightknit Party Control and so forth and that prosecutor might actually be part of that tightknit group. Even if the prosecutor is not, the judge might be. Even if you get it into court and prove the case, the sentence is extremely light and it only has to happen a couple of times, then people lose interest in spending those resources, time and effort to pursue it to get a slap on the wrist. We have had that in several cases in West Virginia. We take every vote seriously, every voter seriously and every disenfranchises or negates a legitimate vote. We are getting after this which is why we put the antifraud in place but it is difficult to move to a successful prosecution. That is why i was so pleased, the president mentioned it in the debate, a West Virginia situation where a mail carrier changed the applications for absentee ballots. The task force went to work immediately within three days, they had a confession from him. We did get it to the u. S. Attorney. The u. S. Attorney did prosecute it and got the conviction. We are pleased with that. That that isssage more the exception. Too many other times we have had issues with double voting and it is difficult for a prosecutor to theify in their eyes to do investigation and pursue the prosecution. You are exactly right. I think we need to strengthen election laws and increase the sentencing when you do move to successful prosecution. Im aware of that conviction. We added that to our database. Manyi know, have uncovered potential cases of fraud and how difficult have you found it to get prosecutors interested in doing anything about it . It is very difficult and there are three reasons. One, they are inexperienced. A county prosecutor does do why and petty larceny, he does not want to take on a voter fraud case. The office needs to focus on training people in the next four years. Secondly, fear. Mark, im impressed by your desire that we get along in this area. Unfortunately there is hundreds of millions of dollars. We have a New York Times fullpage ad for the people from american way with our picture on it on a sunday which hangs in my office because i am so proud of it. Do not be afraid of that stuff. There is fear among prosecutors that they will be smeared as vote suppressors. The third reason, that is the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats inside the Justice Department and the Election Crimes Branch of the Public Integrity section. I said to name the person on fox news so many times, i will not say it here. They are fbi agent who are from the Previous Administration who are still in the mindset that we do not prosecute voter fraud. Do not forget, there were no prosecutions of voter product voter product voter fraud. There have only been a couple. There has been the Western District of texas, North Carolina, West Virginia. The Eastern District of pennsylvania, and thats it. In milwaukee, we know there is voter fraud and the fbi is dragging their feet. In the Southern District of for there is voter fraud and the fbi is dragging their feet. I could go on with the district and that is a problem that needs to be fixed. The stories that you have that done, going back to series you did on vote harvesting, have you ever been contacted by any Law Enforcement officials saying, please send us the names of the folks you uncovered doing this so we can investigate and prosecute . Heavens, no. Part of the problem is as journalists ourselves, how many journals out there are actually interested in investigating voter fraud . I can count the number on one hand. The kind of News Organization that would actually have the resources to go out and do voter fraud, 20 years ago the wall street journal was doing pieces on this. Side was different than the editorial page and would not touch this with a 10 foot poem. 10 foot pole. Problem. Significant people go out of their way to make it institutionally painful for anyone either as a journalist or within Law Enforcement or within the legal investigate out and crimesprosecute these and when no one is doing that, they turned around and saying there is no voter fraud. If we know exactly what is going on in these communities around , we are not that far removed from actual gangs stuffing ballot boxes in this country. Dnaeally is part of our unfortunately. I think things have gotten better in terms of being less overt. We still see voter fraud prosecutions on a small level. You have to know that there is far more out there. Troubling and alarming. I am trying to do the right thing by focusing on the process but just so we are clear, i do share adams cynicism about this process and the difficulty of getting people involved because it is nakedly political and nakedly about engineering a specific election result. I think mark hit the nail on the head with the fact that they use, because it is so difficult to prosecute but then they turned out against us and say there is no evidence of massive voter fraud. They always put that word massive in there as if that is the important piece of this. We had a situation in Harpers Ferry where just a handful of votes were not counted improperly, it went to the Supreme Court and when those votes were counted, it changed the outcome of the election and the whole nature of politics in Harpers Ferry. The mayors daughter voted twice in that election to try to change the result the other direction. Youve got to take these things seriously. Pieceole Election Fraud of this is so difficult to get frustrationion, my in the 2018 election we had a , they are still problems in that area of the state. We have voter intimidation and suppression going on. We sent our investigator, he was chased off so i called the fbi. I could not get somebody to answer the phone and the fbi explained that they dont work on election day, they dont want to be upholding locations to be accused of voter intimidation. I understand their policies and procedures for that, but my question as an election official, if the local authorities may be involved in the Voter Suppression tactics themselves, who am i supposed to call . Ordered an outofstate policen outofstate official to go into that and we lost the opportunity to pursue that because there was not anybody. We have increased the number of investigators we have around the state. We have situations where they can connect to each other by cell phone because we have had to armor people with twoway radios. Our approach is to stop it before it happens. Put the information out on the front end with the Antifraud Task force telling people that are investigators are armed with radios and can report these things. I still do not have a good federal agency to go to that would be responsive on election day as it is happening and then we are back to the situation. Once the voting occurs or does not occur, you have lost the opportunity and you now have a less than real reflection of the intent of the people because folks got to vote that should not have or people are not allowed to vote because of intimidation. It is a real frustration. 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 you have done in all of this. I encourage everybody out there, go vote in this election no matter who you are going to vote for as a candidate. And do your best if you can to vote in person if you are able because that is the best way to guarantee that your vote will count. Thank you so much for being with us today. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] us later this afternoon for comments from joe biden. He will talk about healthcare in michigan outside of detroit. You can see that live at 3 45 eastern here on cspan. Later, more from campaign 2020 with President Trump. He is traveling to georgia for a rally in macon. You can see that live at 7 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan and online at cspan. Org or listen live with the free cspan radio app. The contenders about the men who ran for the presidency that lost changed political history. Tonight the arizona senator who paved the way for younger conservatives, barry goldwater, the contenders. Tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan3. We are weeks away from election day. Ofember 3 when control congress and who occupies the white house next year will be decided. 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