Not making a reference to any political ideology, is hans spakovsky. Im sure hans doesnt really need much of a introduction to this group. Hans is with heritage foundation, and he is one of the countrys recognized, most well recognized authorities on voter fraud and election law. And seated next to hans is don palmer, who is also one of the countrys leading in these areas, and don is a former member of the elections board of the commonwealth of virginia, and he served formally as the Florida Department director of elections during the 2008 and 2010 election cycles and also served in the Justice Department in the civil rights division. He is also a veteran of the United States navy, and i should also remark that hans is a former member of the federal Election Commission and also joining us shortly will be commissioner lee goodman, who is also currently on the federal Election Commission and a former chairman. He will be speaking about election law. So, without further adieu, im going to turn it over and i guess well get started with hans. Thank you. I was asked to talk a little bit about voter fraud and the Voter Fraud Commission. I think he gave the responsibility of that to Vice President pence. We have not heard a lot about it yet. I think they are still in the midst of organizing it. Okay. I think they are still in the midst of organizing it, and so we dont really have a lot of detail as to whos going to be on it, but i think what i thought i would do today is talk about some of the things they ought to be doing. Now, let me first tell you that about a year and a half ago i got really tired of seeing these stories in the Washington Post, new york times, and elsewhere how theres no voter fraud in the United States, so we started a database at the heritage foundation. Now, i dont have a big staff. In fact, i dont have a staff really at all. We do have interns, so if any of you have college kids or law school students, you should make sure they apply for the internship program, but we do have interns, so what we started doing is we didnt have the resources to go backwards in time and research voter fraud from the start of the country, but we began putting cases into our voter fraud database as we ran across them. And, of course, the problem there is they dont all get reported. The major newspapers certainly dont like to report on them. Often its just local small town newspapers that will report on a case when they know about it, and even there many times they dont do it. We also put in a very substantiative rule. We didnt want anyone being able to say, oh, you claim voter fraud occurred in this particular case, but you dont have any real proof of it, so we said were not going to put any stories in there where somebody claims they saw something happened that shouldnt have at a polling place. The only thing were putting into our database are cases in which someone has been convicted in a court of law of committing fraud. Or cases in which a judge has ordered a new election because of irregularities and fraud in the election. This week we added another 20 cases and were up to 492 cases, 773 convictions, because often there are multiple defendants. And this is a i brought a visual aid. This is a printout of our database, and each descriptions only a short paragraph, so theres a lot of stuff in here, and it goes all across the country in almost every state. Ill tell you two of them we just put in this week. A guy in colorado who pleaded guilty to voting twice for a deceased father, once in the 2013 general election and then again in 2016. And another case we just added, which for those of you who are familiar with the way absentee ballot fraud is sometimes committed in this country and have seen the cases where Campaign Workers go into particularly urban and poor neighborhoods, when they know that absentee ballots are arriving in the mail and then go up and either tell the people that are getting them how they need to vote or take the ballots from them and fill them out themselves. We just added a case from texas where a man who is a postman pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge. He admitted to taking 1,000 from a paid Campaign Worker in exchange for a list of the names and addresses of mailin absentee ballot recipients on his postal route. So i think you all can imagine what was being done with those addresses. How big is this problem . We, of course, dont know, because there is no systemic effort to look at this. We have an honor system pretty much throughout the country when it comes to registration and voting. So even when fraud occurs, its very hard to detect, and its usually by accident. I have to tell you, i think the 492 cases in here are just the tip of the iceberg. And ill give you an example of what i mean and something that this Voter Fraud Commission needs to look at. There are a number of states in the country that are part of something that was set up by kansas and missouri some years ago called the interstate cross check program. And the states in this program once a year, kansas gets all of their statewide Voter Registration lists and they compare them. And each state gets back a report on all the people in that particular state who also just happen to be registered in other states. Now, i have in front of me the 2016 report, and i thought i would tell you that, for example, virginia, which is where i live, right across the river, in 2016 it turned out they had 284,618 people registered in other states. North carolina had almost half a million voters registered in other states. Illinois also had about half a million. Georgia had more than half a million. Now, many of these may be inadvertent errors, you know, people who have moved to another state, didnt bother to tell the old state where they used to live that they have changed states, have changed residence, have changed votes, and nothing may happen to this. On the other hand, some of these people may be, like pasco parker, a man who we recently added into our voter fraud database. We put him in North Carolina, although he actually could have been listed because our database is broken down by state, so you look up the state and can find out the fraud cases there. We put him in North Carolina, although we could have put him in North Carolina, florida, and tennessee. The reason being, he was registered to vote in all three states, and in the 2012 federal election, he mailed an absentee ballot to florida and North Carolina and voted in person in tennessee. Now, the important point in this particular case, and this is important to this entire issue, is the fact that his triplicate voting wasnt discovered by Election Officials in North Carolina, tennessee, or florida. It was discovered by a Citizens Group in North Carolina called the voter integrity project that started going through these lists trying to find the people who had registered and potentially voted in more than one state. And if the Citizens Group all volunteered hadnt done this, this guy would have gotten away with it and nothing would have been done about it. Because the point is, is that many states while they are getting this data, they dont often get the resources needed to actually start checking the voter histories on these individuals and finding out whether are they breaking the law and are they getting away with it, like you all may recall just a few years ago, the Democratic Congressional candidate in maryland, i think her name was, what, wendy rosen, who was running in the Democratic Congressional primary and Opposition Research was done on her, when they discovered she had registered and voted in the same election several of the same elections in both maryland and florida. Now, she was forced out of the race, she pleaded guilty to election fraud, shes one of the cases in our database, but again the point there is, that would never have been discovered except that she ran for office and Opposition Research was done on her. The Election Officials didnt discover it. And this is something that needs to be looked into by this Voter Fraud Commission. Now, i will tell you that the opponents of election integrity, and there are many of them, are so concerned over this that recently the governor remember how many hundreds of thousands of people i told you in virginia are also registered in other states. Recently the Virginia Legislature actually passed a very good bill, senate bill 1581, it would have required the department of elections in virginia to provide general registrars with the resources to investigate and check out these double registrants. That was vetoed by Governor Terry mcauliffe. Now, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to veto a bill that is simply the resource to check out possible double registration, double voting, unless you ought to ensure that fraud can be committed and that you can be it can be gotten away with. Now, let me give you another example of the kind of cases that are out there thats nothing being done about. Prior to the last election, the Public InterestLegal Foundation ended up they ended up having to sue to get it, but ended up getting records on just eight counties in virginia, just eight counties. They discovered that over 1,000 registered voters in virginia had been taken off the polls because it turned out they were not u. S. Citizens. Many of them had voted in prior elections. These were found by accident. Now, your immediate question would be, well, were any of these files turned over to Law Enforcement for investigation, since as you probably know, its a felony under both virginia law and federal law for a noncitizen to be registered to vote. Even though they had a right to do them. Now, since that time, and they havent written a report about it yet, they have gotten records from other counties in the state and they have found even more noncitizens who registered and voted in prior elections in the state. Now, some may say, okay, well, you found 1,000 in eight counties. I can tell you there are hundreds, if not thousands of more in other counties across the state. Is that significant . Well, i would remind you that within the little more than the last decade weve had two statewide a. G. Races decided in virginia, one by less than 1,000 votes, another by only 300 votes. So it is very possible that individuals who are ineligible to vote may have voted in that election. And right now there is hardly anything to deter noncitizens from registering and voting. Their chances of getting caught are very minimal, and every state that has tried to do something about this, there are four states, kansas, arizona, georgia, alabama, who have tried to do something about this by putting in provisions that require you to provide proof of citizenship when you register to vote had ended up in enormous battles in court because the league of women voters, demos and other groups, many funded by george soros, do not want anything that would improve the security and integrity of the American Election process. And so these efforts have been stymied. The other thing that the commission needs to look at, and i will end with this, again, that just hasnt been done. The resuources have not been usd is this. For example, you all probably know that in every Federal District court in the country there is a u. S. Attorneys office, right . 94 u. S. Attorneys offices. And there have been a number of reports, theres at least one gao study out there that took a look at people called for federal jury duty in Federal District courts. Now, where do the District Court clerks get their lists of people for jury duty . They get them from Voter Registration lists in the local area. And in every single district, people are excused from federal jury duty because they swear under oath they are not a United States citizen. Now, has any of that information ever been forwarded by the u. S. Attorneys office or the Federal District courts back to the Election Officials to let them know that a person that they got from the election list is not a u. S. Citizen . Why, no. And do you think that any u. S. Attorneys offices in any of the 94 districts have ever actually asked for the voting and registration files on each of these individuals so they can investigate it and see if theres a possible prosecution for violation of the federal law . Why, no, that has never happened. That is something that the Justice Department ought to be doing right now. Is going through those records in every single District Across the country to investigate those cases. Some of them may be mistakes, but others of them we know are not mistakes. I have sitting on my desk in my office three decisions from the 7th Circuit Court of appeals. Each one of them about a noncitizen who as soon as they got to the country wept and got a drivers license, got registered to vote, and then voted in an election. And you know why they got caught . Wasnt Election Officials that caught them. It was because they went and try to get a change of status with the ins, and i will end by telling you those are also records that need to be combed through. Again, its never been done, at the department of Homeland Security. I have had i have sources inside dhs who have told me that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of files inside the Homeland Security of individuals who applied for citizenship and who when it came to, i think its question 12 on the application for naturalization, theres actually a question there that asks a noncitizen, have you ever registered or voted in a election, and youd be surprised how many people truthfully answer, yes, i have. But what do you think has been done with any of those files . Absolutely zero. So, thats the kind of thing this Voter Fraud Commission needs to look into. I hope they do it, and i hope well, i have to say, i hope theres not a lot more voter fraud discovered, but unfortunately, i think that if they actually do that, and if the doj and dhs actually start doing the kinds of things that they should be doing like ive described, the next time i come to you im going to have to probably bring a cart to carry all the volumes of this database. Thanks. [ applause ] good afternoon. My name is don palmer. I thank you for having me. I wanted to take a little different approach to the Voter Fraud Commission and also talk about that from a perspective of someone who served as a chief election official, state election official in two states, and this is really an opportunity. I might go to my last point, my last point was going to be, and ill go first with this, is on the voter fraud issue, the democrats on the left continue to move the goal posts. It isnt that theres zero fraud or small fraud, its now its do we have, you know, is there an epidemic of fraud . The fact of the matter is, just one or two people interns in an office have collected this over a couple of years, and i would encourage you as lawyers in each state to become aware of what those convictions are, because my experience as a lawyer in a state and ive worked at the department of justice, is you may have access to indictments, grand jury that descriptions that have been released. You may have access to more information, and sometimes quality is better than quantity, because its difficult to record and report these things. Something like this is very valuable, and ive found that actually having indictments and those sort of things in whats happening in your state is very valuable when you talk to folks in your state about that issue. Now, the first thing i want to talk about, one of the major points i wanted to say, is the Voter Fraud Commission has an opportunity to really do a review and audit of the 2016 election. As an election official, we all hope that things are run perfectly, but we all know theres, you know, irregularities across the country. Theres processes that dont work at times, and so we want to see what happened, were voters impacted, what did our failings show and how can we improve that . Theres nothing to hide. What are our weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the system, and sometimes we have to look in the mirror and look at what the data shows to show that we need to take steps to reform how we verify the registration process, how we create a voting process that ensures theres one vote for each person. Now, some of the specific issues, some of which hans pointed out that are very key across the country is the Vice President and the president specifically noted that there are people that are registered and sometimes voting on different states across the country, and that is a problem that has been around for almost a decade now, if not more. It continues, and part of the problem is, is that states are not adequately communicating with each other, so hans mentioned ivrc. Theres other organizations that do comparisons, but not all states are participating, and for exa