This month's Q&A “House Call” with Jonathan Stein covers the very real and critical issue of voter fraud. Here are the 19 things to look out for to protect your campaign.
Chuck: Hello, this is Chuck Muth, founder of CampaignDoctor.com and my special guest for this month’s house call is Jonathan Stein. Jonathan’s an attorney who’s been studying voter fraud for over a decade, who’s been published in the Washington Times, Newsmax and FrontPage Magazine. Jonathan, welcome.
Jonathan: Thanks Chuck. How are you?
Chuck: I’m doing terrific. Hey, I know we want to talk about 19 examples of vote fraud that you’ve identified that grassroots activists should be on the lookout for in this upcoming election. But before we get to that, I know you’ve also recently written about voter suppression, which is a little bit different from voter fraud. Tell us a little bit about what you found as far as what voter suppression is and how that manifests itself and people should be worried of.
Jonathan: Well, let me start out by saying that the most important thing for everyone to do is go vote. No matter what you see, no matter what you hear, no matter what the weather is, go to the polling place that you’ve always gone to and vote. And this dovetails with the issue of voter suppression because what happens sometimes is someone will get a robocall or a mailer or may see a flyer in their district with misinformation. In other words, wrong poll time closings, announcing a change of district. If there’s a real question about that, I suggest you call, or anybody call, their Board of Elections and verify. But unless you have any other reason to doubt, just go to the polling place that you always know.
On the issue of voter suppression, it could be as small as something like that, that we just discussed like a flyer or a mailer or a call, but it could also be on a larger scale like we saw in Florida in 2000 where some would call unscrupulous networks called races in states set in multiple voting zones which resulted in voter suppression because people thought the election was over and actually had left the polling places. That resulted, especially in the Florida Panhandle, in the suppression or loss of a lot of Bush/Cheney votes. That was a very Bush/Cheney heavy area and led to all the chaos in Florida.
But let’s go ahead and move on to the 19 points.
Chuck: Okay, let’s start with the first one you’ve identified—voter intimidation. That’s a little bit different from voter suppression. Explain what voter intimidation is.
Jonathan: Okay, intimidation is something affirmative that prevents you or discourages you from going to the polls. The best example I could think of is the one that everyone knows, which is in 2008 in Pennsylvania, I believe it was Philadelphia, where the New Black Panther Party had people stationed at polling places in paramilitary uniforms with nightsticks. That might give people pause before going to vote. That’s the clearest example that there is, but there are other examples of intimidation.
For example, around the country, Republican poll watchers were suddenly booted from the polling places and no one could **** keep track of what was going on inside. All of these are different forms of intimidation and the best think you can do, just like we say with crime, is, in general, if you see something, say something. And this year is actually going to be a lot easier because Winning our Future, which is a super-pack is coming out with a new application—it’s actually the first time this has been done for iPhone and Android—where you can actually report voter fraud as it happens on your smartphone.
Chuck: Oh, okay. And that, before we move on, if you want more information on that, how do you find…I’ve not heard of that before. I’m not really a tech guy as everybody who’s listening to these interviews knows, so tell the folks who are listening just a little bit more about that who probably understand this better than I do.
Jonathan: Well, it hasn’t been released yet but there will be information soon and you can go to WinningOurFuture.com and the product is called Vote Stand and there will soon be a website called VoteStand.com that will release information about the application and also, I believe it’s going to have some of this information about voter fraud, what it is and what to look for.
Chuck: Okay, VoteStand.com, got it.
Jonathan: Right. Vote Stand [inaudible] .com.
Chuck: Okay, let’s move on; #2. What was that?
Jonathan: Oh, it’s VoteStand, one word, dot-com. Will be the website. It hasn’t come up yet. I expect it up within the next—I hear—within the next few days.
Chuck: Okay, so the second thing is vote buying. Tell us about that.
Jonathan: The most famous example is in 2000, the Al Gore Campaign. There were multiple reports of people on the street giving, say, homeless people cigarettes or cash in exchange for coming with them to the polling place. So anytime you see someone being paid or given something in exchange for coming to the polling place, that’s what I would call vote buying. And it’s quite common in same day registration states, which allow people to actually go in and register on the same day. So anyone could walk in and vote and it leads to all sorts of absurdities like turnout numbers that are over 100%, which is also an indicator of fraud in and of itself. The last time we saw that was during the recall election, the Scott Walker election, in Wisconsin back in June of this year.
Chuck: Okay, we’ve talked about voter suppression and voter intimidation; #3, you’ve identified voter coercion. Explain that to us.
Jonathan: That’s when someone is literally dragged to the polls and again, the last example, the most recent example was **** Wisconsin where there were community organized groups that literally went around door to door and physically dragged people, according to eyewitness reports, to voting places to vote. And that was a major concern and issue during the recall election. So if you see someone who looks like they’re being dragged against their will that would be an example of voter coercion. It’s actual, physical manhandling, if you will.
Chuck: Okay. But simply showing up at someone’s home and saying, “Hey, we know you’ve been identified as a voter for our candidate but you haven’t voted yet, come on, we’ve got a car waiting for you;” I mean, that’s coercion but that doesn’t cross the line I’m assuming.
Jonathan: Actually, that’s part of a standard get out to vote effort. In other words, to go knock on doors. You may have a registration with people who are on your list and remind them to go vote. That’s perfectly legal and there’s nothing wrong there. It crosses the line when there’s basically assault or battery type behavior where there’s a physical coercion.
Chuck: Okay, similarly, #4 you have here, bussing—getting people in vans and taking them to the polls is a traditional get out to vote effort but how and when do you cross the line in the voter fraud with bussing.
Jonathan: It crosses the line, well, there are two examples in which it crosses the line that come to mind. The first example is, and again, we have to go back to Wisconsin where there was actually someone had called into a radio show and they were on a bus that was organized in Michigan and stuffed with Michigan voters and the bus drove people into Wisconsin to vote illegally. In other words, these are Michigan residents being bussed into Wisconsin to cast votes against Scott Walker. So anytime there is an organized or disorganized effort to bus people in from out of state who are not supposed to be voting in the second state, that’s an example of illegal bussing.
The second most common type of bussing that is illegal is when people report that they’ve seen the same van or the same bus at multiple polling places with the same people voting multiple times. Obviously any time anyone votes more than once, it’s illegal. So if you recognize that, that is absolutely illegal and is definitely something that you should report.
Chuck: Number five you list is—and I find this one particularly interesting—the mystery man. What does that mean?
Jonathan: Mystery man. That’s my own title. It’s when you live—this mostly happens in small border-towns. The last example I could think of was in New Hampshire during the primaries. It’s a situation where everyone knows everyone and someone that nobody knows shows up, votes and all of the sudden drives back over the state line. They’re not supposed to be there, everyone there knows that this person shouldn’t be there. That’s the mystery man, the person that’s out of place.
And also, there’s another example of that which is the example called “hide and seek voters” is the official name for this scheme. It’s been going on for years where someone shows up usually at a polling place where they’re not recognized but it could also happen anywhere at any point and place, and someone in the polling place, a regular voter, will notice that there’s a hot exchange going on between a potential voter and someone working the voting booth.
And basically what the exchange is that the fraudulent voter will identify themselves, the poll worker will look down the roll and say, “Oh, you’re not on here,” and you may hear the fraudulent voter say, “Oh, well check under this name.” And it’s sort of like going into a restaurant where you don’t have a reservation and you kind of take a look at the reservation list and just pick one and go in under someone else’s reservation. It’s the same concept.
So you have two examples; you have the mystery man in the border-town situations, or the small town situations, and the hide and seek voter in these other situations.
Chuck: Got it. Number six on your list is, I think what people would immediately think of when they hear voter fraud and that’s ballot tampering or ballot theft. Explain how that happens and how to protect against that sort of voter fraud.
Jonathan: Well, this would be, for example, you have a report of someone leaving a polling place and throwing what looks like a bag of ballots into the backseat of a car—this happened in Florida in 2000—and the bags not sealed. Or a modern example would be someone continuously feeding, I guess Scantron ballots into a machine and when there’s nobody handing it to them. There are other types of scenarios like that—abandoned voting machines; if there’s an unguarded ballot box; suspicious people who don’t look like they’re voting officials handling ballots—anything like that is ballot tampering.
You’ll find that these later on, after the polls have closed and there’s nothing you can do about it, polling places will usually report missing ballots or in the case where they’ve ginned up more votes than there should be, you may get a report where turnout exceeds registration. But unfortunately, after the fact, there’s really nothing you can do about it. So if you see something like that, mysterious handling of the ballots or ballot boxes during the election, that’s the time to report it.
Chuck: Now, I remember this next one, #7—erroneous judicial intervention—when it happened in St. Louis. Remind everyone exactly what happened there and then was that just a one-time case or is this something that you’ve noticed has happened around the country in different jurisdictions?
Jonathan: Oh no, it happens in multiple jurisdictions but that’s the most famous case. It was the Jesse Jackson Robocall Case where it actually involved an affidavit from a dead voter. What happened is in St. Louis, the Gore Campaign determined that; well this is, again, sort of ex-post after the fact that we know what happened. At the time, it was only allegations but now we know it’s factual. They determined that that Missouri was going to be close, so they went to a judge and with an affidavit of a person saying that they were turned away, there was some intimidation.
The first judge actually didn’t want to grant them any release so the case was tossed at their option to another judge who never sat on a voter—who usually dealt with juvenile cases, never dealt with voting cases before. The judge granted an injunction and the result of that injunction was that the polling place was held open until 10:00, which was past the time of normal balloting. And immediately, robocalls from Jesse Jackson started going out and telling people that extended voting hours had been, I guess, permitted at this particular polling place, and of course, they were targeting calls. They were basically using an illegal affidavit to keep polling places open and then had robocalls also from Gore and Jesse Jackson ready to go, targeting voters and getting them to the polling place during illegal voting hours. And the rub there was that the initial affidavit from the person that the judge had relied on to keep the polls open had been dead for years. And this is again, discovered after the fact.
So this is what happens, and it’s not limited to St. Louis. It’s very common in large cities, in the swing states where certain parties think that voting might be close so they’ll go to a judge with a pre-filled out affidavit. They’re more careful now to make sure that the person is alive but they’ll go to a judge who’s receptive and hold these polling places open and then use a fraudulent, or you may say extended, get out to vote operation to get people in during these illegal voting times.
Chuck: Wow, so you’re saying dead people aren’t supposed to vote? Who would have guessed?
Jonathan: Oh, I know. I mean, in Chicago, the dead regularly vote. I think all you have to show is a ghost.
Chuck: Well, if you look at the voting results of Chicago, I guess that would explain a lot. Okay, moving on to #8—over-votes. That seems like a contradiction in terms. What is an over-vote?
Jonathan: An over-vote is when you have a higher voter turnout than the number of persons registered, so a turnout over 100%. Some districts—some voting polling places—release numbers throughout the day and again, going back to Wisconsin, which is a same day registration state, during the recall, polling places during the day were regularly reporting voting in excess of registered voters and when questioned, the election officials thought this was a great thing. Their claim was that people were registering same day in tremendous numbers and that’s why they were over 100%. But you can rest assured that on a normal basis, if you see polling places or districts reporting over 100%, that there is an illegal over-vote going on there and it’s usually a red flag to send people—it should be a red flag to anyone. You should contact your Board of Elections or Attorney General and really, people should be sent in to check that out. That’s a major red flag waving in your face.
Chuck: Okay, #9 you list is multiple votes. How is that different from over-votes?
Jonathan: Multiple votes are illegal; it’s when someone votes more than once and this has been going on forever. The classic example is you’re driving and you pass two polling places and maybe you’ve voted previously and seen someone who’s now voting in a second or third polling place. So it’s when you see someone voting more than once. That’s illegal, period and should be reported.
Chuck: Number ten, illegal voters.
Jonathan: This is a big problem, especially because of the motor voter law which requires that a voting application be attached to request for IDs issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles in the states. There are some examples where you may not be here legally but you apply for say a non-driver’s ID and a lot of them, hey, you see a voting registration form and you fill it out, you get the card in the mail telling you to go vote and of course, that’s the oops scenario. And there are other scenarios where a group like ACORN, for example, will go and put in a bunch of fraudulent registrations and bring illegal voters; in other words, people who are not supposed to be out here in the country illegally to the polls. This was a big problem in the election between Loretta Sanchez and Bob Dornan where the difference between the two candidates was about 4000 votes and surveys and audits after the fact showed that indeed, there had been a lot of illegal voting, possibly enough to have changed the outcome of that election. Bob Dornan is no longer in office.
So there are communities where it’s not really so secretive—such a big secret as to who is there legally and not. So if you see someone you know is not a legal citizen, report it. It’s as simple as that. And that goes right to the 11th point, which is the HAVA violators—Help America Vote Act violators. And again, these different departments within a state getting out, attaching voter registration forms to other forms and then getting the hands, people who shouldn’t be voting. They register, they get a card in the mail. People in the community know that these people shouldn’t be voting. That’s illegal, that should be reported.
Chuck: Okay. So the HAVA violators, that was #11; #12, excess provisional ballot request.
Jonathan: Yes. Most polling places, if you’re not registered to vote or if they can’t find your name on the registration list and you insist that you are registered will allow you to cast what’s called the provisional ballot which ends up getting counted, generally, if it’s close. Again, during the day, during the Election Day, some precincts have a report that they’ll put out and it’ll show how many votes total have been cast, how many of those are provisional. So if you see an unusual percentage of provisional ballots or usually there may be a line to tap provisional ballots. If it’s a very, very large line of people showing up to cast a provisional ballot, that’s a red flag. That should be reported so that the authorities can go in and check it out.
Chuck: Number 13, you list raffles. Raffles sound like something fun.
Jonathan: Yes.
Chuck: What possibly could you have against a raffle?
Jonathan: Well, you could have something against a raffle when it facilitates voter fraud and this example goes to, I believe, 2004 where Tom Daschle was running in South Dakota to retain his senate seat, which we know we lost. One of his schemes was that they would hold a raffle on or around Indian reservations and these people who were Daschle people would go to the reservations and would be giving away televisions, things of that sort. If you went to vote, they would give you a ticket to enter into the raffle. It’s similar to vote buying but it’s not as direct. But obviously if you see something along those lines, that should be reported.
Chuck: That sounds like it’s cheaper. So you only have to give away one prize instead of giving everybody a prize.
Jonathan: Exactly. Exactly. Only one person’s vote is being bought but everyone is entering in the raffle to get that benefit.
Chuck: Now I know you noted that with those raffle problems with the Daschle race also came #14, which wasn’t just in that race, but happens frequently, is illegal escorts and aides coming with you to vote. Why is that a problem?
Jonathan: Well, it’s a problem because there are people who will represent themselves as being election officials who are there to help you vote. So in the case of the raffles, these people may be employed to go and bring people in to participate in the raffle. In Florida, there will be old people or disabled people who these people will go out and find and it’s not really voter coercion but they’ll represent themselves as officials. They’ll take them to the polls. They’ll be allowed to go into the polling place with them and “help them cast their vote.”
So you got people going into say Miami-Dade polling places with elderly folks and making sure “that they voted for,” say, John Kerry or Al Gore.
Chuck: Similarly, I guess, there are folks who bring someone with them as translators. I guess they don’t speak English and they bring someone in to help translate their ballot. Is that an acceptable practice or is that a red flag that people should be worried about?
Jonathan: That’s a red flag to be worried about because these days the ballots are printed in multiple languages and still were the instructions and there are official people in the polling place that you can go to if you don’t speak English that will help you vote. So if you see someone—and these people are normally not outside the voting place—so if you see someone outside the voting place posing as a translator or an interpreter, it’s more than likely that it’s a fraud and that’s a red flag, that should be reported.
Chuck: On a subject a little bit separate from what you’re talking about—before we get back to the list—I’ve been told that you are not allowed to photograph inside a voting booth. Is that something that’s true across the country or is that something that maybe is just for some reason they have here in Nevada where I vote?
Jonathan: Well normally that’s—I mean, in New York where I vote, it’s true. I believe it’s true around the country.
Chuck: What are they afraid of? Why can’t you pull out your iPhone and take a photograph of what you’re doing inside a voting booth? What are they afraid of?
Jonathan: See, that’s very interesting because there was recently a case—I can’t remember what quarter it was in—that said that there is no right to a secret ballot. Back in the old days when you voted, you voted out in public just the way the electors and the Electoral College vote. You walked up to the person, you said who you were voting for, they marked it down, they turned it in. This whole notion of secret ballots came later on in our history and I would assume that one of the reasons why you wouldn’t want people taking pictures is because you know that there’s some sort of fraud going on inside the ballot. That’s a very good point that you bring up. So it is important and perhaps laws will start to change but there is no right anywhere in the Constitution, anywhere in federal law to a secret ballot. That’s a misnomer, that’s a myth.
Chuck: Yeah, I just figure if it’s my ballot and I want to take a picture of my ballot, why would that be a problem in secret ballots, but that’s another discussion for another day. Let’s get back to the list. Number 15, we’ve already touched on this—dead voters.
Jonathan: Yes.
Chuck: How do you stop dead people from voting?
Jonathan: Right and here the problem is that the voter list isn’t clean and different people from different schemes, like we’ve already talked about, can take advantage of it. You might have someone go in there and checking the—going to the registration, “Oh, it might be under this name, it might be under that name.” They may know who’s already dead in the district. They may go in knowing that because you can go online and most of the registration databases are public record. So you could look down the voter registration and compare that to the death records for the past X number of years and know who is dead. So there’s nothing stopping me, especially with no voter ID, from claiming that I’m someone who died five years ago, God forbid, and voting under their name. This is why we need voter registration, by the way—very important—because the person at the poll, unless you’re in a small community where everyone knows everyone, may have not; well probably have no clue that you’re not John Smith or John Jones or whoever the dead person is.
Big problem—famous in Chicago and it’s something that is a very, very good argument for voter ID but again, if you are in a polling place and you hear someone claiming that they’re someone who you know is dead, red flag, report it. That’s a no-brainer.
Chuck: When it comes to voter fraud, # 16 is perhaps the cliché on this topic—stuffing the ballot box. Does that really happen and how?
Jonathan: Oh, well in former times someone would just take the ballot box out of the voting place and pop a bunch of ballots in there that had been pre-filled out, literally stuffing the ballot box. It still happens today where even though we have electronic voting, there’s usually some paper record kept of the votes, whether it’s your Scantron sheet or whatnot and you will see, people do report from time to time that these ballot boxes are taken out of voting places mysteriously and some people have seen people in the back of say your polling places at school, at the back of the school doing mysterious things to the ballot boxes.
Currently though, the electronic ballots are recorded in what’s called a “black box.” So if you see someone taking a black box out of a voting place, you know mysteriously that’s also a red flag. You should call your local election officials or report it in some other way. That’s definitely something that should be looked out for.
Chuck: Which I assume the black box is picked up by a black helicopter.
Jonathan: Anytime a ballot box or one of these electronic voting tally machines breaks down, beware because that is how—anytime these things can be removed from the polling place where there are election monitors, that’s a problem and that’s fertile ground for fraud. It should always be reported. I mean, it may not be fraud. I mean, it could be legitimate breakdown but anytime there’s a breakdown, anytime something leaves the supervision and custody of a polling place, it’s questionable and should be reported.
Chuck: Let me ask you about that followup on that. I understand if you’re in the voting booth and your voting machine breaks down, you should report it. But what are the rules regarding activists from the party or campaigns being in polling locations so that they know whether or not any of the booths at the polling location break down and can report it? Just in general, what are your rights as far as monitoring inside? Not campaigning inside the polling location, but just monitoring.
Jonathan: Okay, anybody can volunteer for this. What they have, the parties are allowed a certain number of election monitors in every district that I know of, where you can go to your local party and they will register you—they’ll **** you and then register you as a poll watcher, in which case you are stationed inside the polling place and it is your job to look out for things like that. In the case where someone were, say an individual machine breaks down, to take note of that. If a black box that is the actual recording machine where their Scantron ballots breakdown, the poll monitors are supposed to be watching that activity. And like I said earlier, sometimes we’ve had reports where these poll watchers, especially Republican poll watchers in heavily Democratic districts, are mysteriously booted from the polling place and no one could report on what’s going on inside the polling place. So if you’re in a situation where you hear or you see monitors being booted, report it—big red flag.
Chuck: Got it. Number 18, voting outside polling places. How does that happen?
Jonathan: Now the most significant case of this was in Miami in 2000. I think the laws in Florida have changed since then but there are other jurisdictions that I think still have this law where it’s enabled to help people vote who can’t necessarily make it to the polling place, but it’s not really absentee voting, per se; in other words, where you’re registered for a ballot ahead of time, although it can be done in that way. And what it is is a witness will bring an actual ballot to a person in say a nursing home; will have that person fill out the ballot. It’ll be sealed and returned to the polling place.
The people who do this are supposed to be registered with the state. There should be a state ID but of course, not everybody knows that. So you have people going to say nursing homes or places where people who are disabled are and taking their votes, letting them vote on their paper ballot, and then telling them subsequently that, “Oh, we’ll seal it and bring it to the polling place,” or, “We’ll seal it and put it in the mail.” And what happens is they’ll look to see if the person there is people who voted for their candidate and the votes that they don’t like mysteriously disappear in the ballot box known as the “garbage” or discarded in other ways so that they only bring back votes for their candidate. Which leads to the problem of the vote brokers which is basically a similar deal and it happens in early voting states or in-person early voting for disabled where again, these people go out, are contacted by whatever group and they’re not officially, I guess you can call them witnesses from the state, and they’ll go and bring ballots to people, let them vote, promise to mail a return and toss the votes that they don’t like.
Chuck: Okay, so I want to be clear on this because this is something that I wasn’t aware of. These are people who are actually bringing paper ballots to individuals. This isn’t where an individual has requested an absentee ballot and then the individuals are showing up at the nursing home and helping them fill out the ballot that has been requested. You’re saying these people are somehow able to take blank paper ballots to someone’s home or office and have it filled out and say, “Hey, I’ll drop it off for you?”
Jonathan: Yeah and again, I know [inaudible]…
Chuck: Even if someone hasn’t requested an absentee ballot?
Jonathan: Right, but there are other districts that allow that sort of voting, so that’s definitely a problem.
Chuck: Yeah, that is a problem. Okay, last one, #19.
Jonathan: And I think that people should really check their voting laws and people should really take advantage of—the Board of Elections in the various states have very comprehensive **** with the voting laws. People should pay more attention to what the laws actually are and if they see laws in books like that, or even same day registration, they should really be lobbying their officials to get rid of that because they’re really just fraud enablers. Now people who are against that will actually cry racist for example or they’ll say that you’re trying to suppress voting or that you’re not in favor of voting, expanding the franchise. That’s all code for voter fraud. Especially in states that have valid initiatives—people should really consider initiatives to change these laws.
Chuck: Okay, last one, #19; you list here houses of registration.
Jonathan: Big problem in Ohio in 2008. You had people go in and buy or rent apartments or houses and people from out of state would come in person, use that address and file a registration with the county. So what you have is people registered in multiple states.
So if you’re in a neighborhood and all of the sudden you see people; a neighborhood where everyone knows everyone and all of the sudden you see strangers showing up at a house that you’ve never seen before, you might really be seeing something along the lines of this scheme going on and there is a big problem with people who are registered in multiple states. There’s a group out there, an organization, called Truth to Vote and what they found was a lot of senior citizens in New York, as we all know, retire partially to Florida. So they’ll spend part of their time in New York and part of their time in Florida. What ends up happening is they’ll apply for their Florida driver’s license and along with that application comes a voting registration. So we find that there’s a lot of people double registered in say New York and Florida or New York and New Jersey.
There is a cross date database that they’re building now but it only encompasses very few states to cross-check this sort of thing, but it’s happening. Luckily there are groups like Truth to Vote that are actually looking at the individual state databases and comparing them and they actually have challenged a lot of their registrations. Recently there was a case done in Florida where they challenged these registrations and actually sued the state to clean its voting records. The Department of Justice tried to block that for whatever reason—I would leave you to draw your own conclusions. In the end, the group won and the voter rolls were cleaned.
So I don’t know how much you could do about that on Election Day but if you’re chummy with someone who lives in both states and they’re bragging to you about how they already voted in Florida or how they already voted in New York, report them. It’s illegal; it should not be going on.
Chuck: Okay. This has been extremely helpful Jonathan. I want to thank you but before you go, if you would, just talk in closing here about photo ID. I know they’re requiring people to present a photo ID before being allowed to vote is extremely controversial. People who push for photo ID are accused of trying to suppress minority votes and that sort of thing and as we’re recording this call, just recently within the past week I think it was, the state of Pennsylvania’s courts overturned a photo ID law. So if you would, just to wrap up, tell us a little bit about what you think of photo ID and what its future is in this country on a state to state basis.
Jonathan: Well clearly based on the conversation we just had and the description of these voter fraud schemes, I would say voter ID is essential and it should be noted that a lot of the people challenging voter ID on the ground that it’s racist or denies certain people the franchise are using the report—I don’t have it in front of me—but are using reports that are actually funded by George Soros—these are George Soros funded groups and they’re creating these, I guess, fraudulent scenarios and these fraudulent reports of racism.
It’s ridiculous because I mean, you have to show ID if you want to buy ****. If you want to get a beer you have to show an ID. If you want to buy cigarettes you have to show an ID. I mean, if you want to buy Sudafed you have to show an ID. But the arguments against voter ID are absolutely ridiculous. And then the other claim that they **** make and they’re commonly made in the media is that voter fraud doesn’t happen, it’s a chimera, B.S. If you go to—there’s a site called RottenAcorn.com; and this is pointed out to me recently—there’s a map and it deals with only the group called ACORN and it shows you how many prosecutions there have been and it’s a very voluminous **** since I think 1998 of ACORN employees committing both registration fraud and same day voter fraud. It’s absolutely outrageous.
And another thing is that recently, a Democrat running for the House in, I think it was Maryland, was discovered to have been registered in multiple states. So she actually ended up dropping out of the race. So that really called to the question if a very high profile person like this out in the public eye can almost get away with voter fraud herself, how many people, private citizens, under the radar are getting away with this? Now, if we had voter ID, obviously it would cut down—and especially if we had the cross-referencing databases—it would cut down on a lot of this behavior.
So there’s really no good argument about voter ID. All the studies that are cited are basically garbage; they’re ginned up by muckrakers like Soros and should be ignored. I really hope that Winning our Futures Vote to Stand project, that allows people to document these occurrences of voter ID, help make the cases in the future for voter ID because in the past, a lot of the evidence and reporting has just been anecdotal. But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so the more of this we can show and expose, I think the stronger the argument for voter ID becomes, even enough to defeat these phony studies that are floating around out there, that are being promoted and used to fight voter ID laws.
And unfortunately the Justice Department is playing along, for whatever reason—draw your own conclusions—and challenging voter ID laws using these phony studies in numerous states, especially states in the south that under the old reconstruction laws have to have their changes to their laws pre-approved by the Department of Justice. And they are just abusing the heck out of it.
Chuck: Jonathan, this is a very serious and important subject and it’s been terrific. Thank you so much for joining us today and helping enlighten people of all the different ways that our elections can be polluted. This is Chuck Muth, thank you for joining us for this months House Call. Jonathan Stein, again, thank you for being with us.
Jonathan: You’re welcome Chuck, take care.
Transcribed by: www.iDictate.com