SmartElections.US

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.

Whenever you are watching this, whether it's live or later on the replay, I'm just so excited that you're here and that we're going to have this time together.

It's going to be a really, really fascinating program.

So we are going to be featuring a book.

The book is called Deliver the Vote.

It is an amazing book by a Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian named Tracy Campbell, and I think

probably the best thing is for you to see my copy. It is a well-worn copy.

There is really almost not a single page that doesn't have tons of notes and highlights on it.

When I read this book, it was a seminal moment for me.

I think that's what I have to say.

It was like the sea parted and I saw things that I had never seen before because what I came to understand was that all of the questions and concerns that I had about our elections were real.

And the reason why I knew they were real was because Dr. Campbell had documented them in meticulous detail year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

There has been fraud, irregularities, and huge power struggles involved in U.S. elections.

We're not taught this in school.

What we're taught in school is that U.S. elections are perfect, that we know how to do elections, and that that's like apple pie and fireworks, U.S. elections, U.S. democracy.

And so it's really important for us to...

I'm getting a notice that we're not broadcasting on X, so for those who are trying to watch on X, I'm just really sorry. Maybe next time.

We're on YouTube and we're on Facebook.

I'm just checking in the comments.

I see a few people here, so if you're watching, you could go ahead and just put something in the comments saying, hi, I'm here, and we know that you're hearing us.

That's always really helpful.

What I was talking about is Dr. Campbell's book, Deliver the Vote, and about the way that it really changed my world.

Because I understood that there was a reason why I felt the way I felt.

There was a reason why I had these concerns.

They were real. And it's really a courageous book.

And that's one of the things that I say in my interview with Dr. Campbell is just how courageous it is that he was willing to talk about these things.

Not just talk about them, but write about them.

And that's a really big deal.

And so we're going to be going through the book, different parts of it.

It's like a 300-page book. So if you count the index, it's even longer. It's like 450 pages with the index. So we're not going to read the whole thing. But we have selections that I think will really give you the depth and breadth of fraud in U.S. elections, how ugly, how violent, how corrupt.

and how it went all the way to the top. And that's what you're gonna hear today. And we're also having a fundraiser because in order to bring you this information and not just bring you the information, but also take it to the level of advocacy, right? We're not just trying to inform you. There's so many people out there, pundits, journalists,

And what they're doing is really important and really meaningful, and they are informing you. But we are an organization that is actually taking it a step further. I was a journalist for years, for decades actually. I spent about 20 years doing election security journalism. I did my first piece on a voting machine being hacked in 2007. And then I started Smart Elections, co-founded it in 2019.

And during that time, I did investigations that got millions of views, telling people, informing people about the voting machines, the problems with them, how they could be hacked, how really risky our entire apparatus is. And yet I felt that it wasn't enough. I was informing people, but there were really no changes taking place. And so what I came to understand...

Okay, maybe that's better audio for you now. What I came to understand is that we have to do more than just inform each other. We have to come together and take action. And that's why we founded Smart Elections is so that we could actually take action on the things that we have learned and are learning about. And so one of our key programs here is a program called Count the Vote. And Count the Vote

is our nonpartisan election verification program and we have this all over the country now we have observers signed up in 47 states almost a thousand observers at this point and our goal is none nothing shorter than to transform u.s elections and the reason why i say that is because if we are really going to have a culture of honest transparent elections instead of the type of corrupt

corrupt elections that we've had in the past, then we really do have to envision a new future, a new way forward. And what that really involves is observation, because we have to get in there and learn and understand exactly how our elections in our own counties, our elections that we, not just the big elections, not just the presidential election that we think about in the swing states,

the little elections and big elections that are happening in our counties, in our localities, in our jurisdictions, that is really where we have to have the impact because all of those little elections together make the big election. The US election is not one big election. The US election is really a whole series of elections in about 10,000 jurisdictions.

And so Count the Vote is a program that really seeks to transform those elections one by one by one in those individual jurisdictions. And what we really hope today is that you will make a tax deductible donation.

because that's how we're going to do this with your help. We are going to be able to do the observation and we're going to be able to follow up and make reports to the public about what we found. And also if need be, we do go to court if we feel that there are issues that need to be followed up. We're actually in court in two different election cases right now in New York City. So please do go to smartelections.us and click on donate and make that donation. I can also put this link

in the actual chat. That's the link where you can actually go. And I'll put that in the comments. And I see some folks here that I know. I really appreciate you being here. Hey, Dale, Joseph Illich, and some other folks that we know. Thank you all so much for being here. It's awesome to have you here. Thank you so much.

So what we're going to do now is introduce Dr. Tracy Campbell. He is the author of Deliver the Vote. He is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian, and we spoke with him. This is a prerecorded interview. Throughout the program, you're going to see some

interviews that are live and some interviews that are pre-recorded just because we had so many different people. We have people from all over the country. It's really exciting from across the political spectrum. We have some celebrities, Triumph the Unsullied Comic Dog and Dennis O'Hare, a Tony

award-winning actor is going to be with us uh live actually as well as a pre-recorded segment um so some of it is pre-recorded some of it is live some of it has the closed captions on it some of it does not so if a lot of it would be helpful probably because this language can be a little dense so if we if the captions aren't there for that in particular interview please do turn your closed captions on we totally recommend that you turn your closed captions on

It will help you absorb the information. And then also we're going to have some fun. We're going to give away a book. We're going to give away one copy of Deliver the Vote now, and we're going to give away one copy at the end. And so we'll start those giveaways after we do this interview with Dr. Tracy Campbell. You're just joining us. Welcome. We are delighted now to introduce a very special guest.

Dr. Tracy Campbell. Dr. Campbell is the author of our featured book for this event, Deliver the Vote. Professor Campbell specializes in 20th century United States political and social history. He has written five books, including Short of the Glory, The Fall and Redemption of Edward F. Pritchard, Jr., which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He was the recipient of a Stanton Foundation grant for his course, The History of Misinformation.

The New York Historical Society named him American Historian Laureate. He has been a guest on NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon and was featured on the PBS show History with David Rubenstein. Professor Campbell teaches a variety of courses in recent US history. The University of Kentucky Libraries awarded him the Medallion for Intellectual Achievement in 2022.

He is currently writing a book about America in the late 1940s, which will be published by Polity in 2027. Dr. Campbell is not just brilliant, he's courageous. He took a topic that no one wanted to discuss, election fraud, and meticulously documented its presence in our culture. And because of that, we're especially honored that Tracy is here to support Votapalooza.

Votapalooza is the online fundraiser for Smart Elections and our program to monitor and protect the upcoming midterms with our election verification program called Count the Vote. About Deliver the Vote, Deliver the Vote was first published in 2005, but Professor Campbell's masterpiece is more relevant now than ever.

We're honored that he can join us as we bring to life this brilliant historical chronicle of the wildly creative and astonishingly frequent history of fraud in US elections. I'd like to read from the book jacket and then Dr. Campbell will read from his remarkable introduction. This is from the book jacket. In the first comprehensive history of election fraud in America,

Tracy Campbell reveals how our political culture has been diminished and eroded by centuries long corruption in local, state, and national elections. If elections are the lifeblood of our democracy, then the United States of America is a sorely ailing body politic. Deliver the Vote is an intensive examination of the corrupt underbelly of American politics, a groundbreaking book that casts a provocative new light on how electoral power is often won in America.

Drawing on records of hundreds of elections from the pre-colonial era through the 2004 election, Tracy Campbell reveals how a persistent culture of corruption has long thrived in American elections. Deliver the Vote reveals how fraud has been a persistent and corrosive presence in American history that has not been confined to one party, a single location, or a specific time period.

Through primary sources, Campbell also explores how Americans throughout history have felt about the fact that their vote has often not been fairly recorded or counted. Dr. Campbell, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me, Lula. In 1887, Edgar Levy was a New York City poll official who was horrified by the brazen manner in which votes were routinely bought and stolen.

Before the polls even opened in Levy's precinct, long lines of illegal colonizers were waiting to cast their votes, votes that had already been purchased, often by the very officials whom Levy worked alongside. Ward healers distributed $5 bills to arriving voters with, quote, no effort at concealment. Yet what Levy saw on Election Day was not limited to New York City or even to his generation. Buying votes, stuffing or destroying ballots,

moving polling places, transposing results, importing illegal voters from other towns or states, suppressing, disfranchising, and sometimes killing voters comprises a long-sorted tradition in American political culture. In retrospect, it would be innocent to assume differently. Unfortunately, one of those innocent people was me.

Even after writing a book on a new dealer who had been convicted of stuffing ballot boxes, I still assumed that Boss Tweed had been the first to take the bike from the corrupt apple in the Garden of Eden, only to discover that the corruption was there long before Tweed or the rise of Tammany Hall. What had begun as a small book on recent fraud quickly grew. My research took me back much farther than I ever expected, back to the early days of the Republic.

Indeed, I found so much fraud involving hundreds of local, state, and national elections that I was soon staggered under the weight of this evidence. And by that time, I had come to know something about American politics that most people were not prepared to accept as an ongoing reality, namely that the process itself was deeply corrupted and had been so for over 200 years.

When election fraud had surfaced, even in presidential contests, people would get outraged for a short time, but then it would soon pass away. Partisans on the losing end might warn of dire consequences, but calm was quickly restored and the indignant cries that a crime was going unpunished were silenced. Consequently, what we know as historical memory is not the outrage, but the passing away.

Not the flaw at the heart of the political culture, but that the flaw would be quickly corrected. The end result is that when things occur, scholars and pundits of American elections generally conclude that we are not to worry about these episodes since they are not enough to change any but perhaps a few contests. Plus, there was probably enough fraud on both sides in any given race to equal itself out.

As the defense goes, any fraud that may have existed in bygone city machines or corrupt rural fiefdoms had long ago been eradicated. Despite all the changes in the mechanics of voting and the apparent safeguards, how has fraud, flagrant and subtle, persisted? The answer I suggest is a deeply embedded culture within American politics that considers cheating just fully justifiable.

Those contributing to this culture, which I will call the culture of corruption, have not been limited to cigar chomping party bosses. Precinct captains, poll officials, police officers were involved, as well as teachers, lawyers, clergy. What makes this culture so enduring is that the participants did not perceive their deeds to be assaults on the democratic process.

Rather, they internalized the powerful rationale that considered cheating part of the game that one has to practice in order to counteract one's equally corrupt competitors. Over the course of time, as the political and economic stakes increased, so did the corruption. In all, the history of election fraud has demonstrated an unwelcome civics lesson. Election fraud is a crime that usually pays.

These elections demonstrate how the results we study with such precision are often fashion. Some cases are remarkable for their sheer audacity, others for their naked brutality. Not all elections, of course, are characterized by fraud, and not all politicians or insiders practice the art. In fact, many reformers have spent a good part of their careers exposing the layers of electoral corruption in local, state, and national elections.

Unfortunately, their attempts to purify the ballot have not been altogether successful. Contemporary reformers need to know the challenges and outcomes of these earlier episodes in order to understand the complexities of our current predicament. This is a book about the very roots of democracy. We know much about strategies and candidates. We know about polling data and campaign finance.

yet the realities of Election Day itself remain shadowy. This book is my attempt to bring into the light the process whereby political power is conceived. It also seeks to reconcile the modern challenges facing an increasingly demoralized electorate. As such, it recognizes the dual nature of the democratic tradition best expressed by Reinhold Niebuhr, quote,

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but his inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. Thank you so much for that. I think it's just incredible to actually hear you speak those words that you really obviously thought about and were so heartfelt when you wrote the book. It's weird reading stuff from 21 years ago, but

I feel like it's still in my head. It doesn't go away. And it's amazing. And I still think, man, I ought to change a sentence here. We need to fix that. That's funny because when I read it, each word seems so meticulously crafted and they flow together so carefully. So I don't see how you could possibly improve it. But I think to me also, it's just that it's so relevant.

it just seems like you wrote it last year does it not does it not seem tremendously relevant to you well that's what i mean i think i would love to january 6th in the middle of that but obviously you know i wrote a book about 1942 and somebody on amazon said you know i read your book and i didn't learn a damn thing about covid and it was like i'm sorry i can't make it that relevant even as events

kind of a curve, but I did the best I could. But it's almost as though you were prescient, as though with all of the research that you did, with all of the focus on how corruption is just kind of an ingrained part of our political life, it's as though January 6th was inevitable, as though you predicted it, I think, from all of your research. That's what depresses me about it, yeah. I wish we could have said we have not had January 6th in our context, but

Fortunately, we do. Well, I think there's other parts of the introduction that are very relevant. I'd love even to have you read that line one more time where you say how it's so important for current reformers to be aware of this. Would you just read that line one more time? I'm on forums all the time with people who are struggling with how they feel about the elections. They're tired. They're overwhelmed. They're checking out.

And I think the one thing that helps me so much go on, because I've been working on this for 20 years now, this one issue, and in some way it seems so intractable, but what really helps me is exactly what you're saying there, is that this is part of the history, and we have to really look at it in context in order to understand what can we do, what can be done, what are our next steps. We have to see the whole picture.

Yeah, I think we have this notion that back then things were so much better. Now they've gone to hell. Right, right. And it helps to know that, no, they weren't. And so that's, I feel sometimes like I'm at, you know, Thanksgiving dinner and I'm letting everyone know, you know, Uncle Joe really wasn't all that great. You know, he went out to the car to, you know, to be out there for five minutes to drink, not to, you know, talk to the neighbors. So it was,

right always thanks for what you do and thanks for having me um let me know how i can help i'm going to be on the road here soon but this really is a terrific thing thank you uh it's a pleasure to have you here and we're so tremendously grateful to you for all of your work and for being here today to share this event with us thank you so much and uh good luck with the next project and you too thank you okay

So that was Dr. Tracy Campbell. He is the author of Deliver the Vote. And I'm not the author of Deliver the Vote. We'll just take that one down. I'm Lulu Freistadt. I'm the co-founder and executive director of Smart Elections. And I'm here to say to you to please support our work today. You heard me talk about our program, Count the Vote. That's our election verification program to help protect and monitor the midterm elections.

And if you do wanna help us out today, I'm gonna ask you to go to smartelections.us and make a tax deductible donation. And now we're gonna hear some different types of frauds that are in the book. And it's a kind of a fun segment with a friend of mine.

It is my pleasure to introduce our next guest, Joel Ben-Lew. He's a wonderful actor that I have known for years. We studied together at Northwestern University, and we also performed together at the Courthouse Theatre Company, where we used to live in a really small little cabin of like six actors. I remember Jay slept on a tent on the front lawn, and we put on plays every weekend. It was super fun. Plus, there was a

There was a canine friend too, Dillinger was there, don't forget to- Oh my God, Dillinger used to sit in the audience while we were rehearsing and he would watch me on stage like this. He didn't watch anybody else, just- That dog was my biggest fan, right?

So Joel, he's a wonderful actor, and he's done all sorts of fun projects. He can be seen in the independent film Thumb, which is going to be in theaters soon, and he's also directing now. He's directing a workshop of Stephen O'Rourke's new play. Stephen is a writer that we've also known for years, and the play is called What Fools? It's about a high school theater teacher putting on a production of Midsummer Night's Dream, but having to navigate the school's political environment.

And when will we be able to see that? Do you have a date at all? We've got a workshop coming up in August and I will let you know when it is. That's cool. In New York City? Yep.

Big Apple. Okay. So what Joel and I are going to do, I think to kind of kick off this section is we're going to read lists of types of election fraud, intimidation tactics that have happened throughout the last 300 years or so that are all documented in Deliver the Vote. And there's so many different techniques. We cannot possibly bring them all to you today. We would be here for probably, I don't know, the whole month.

And we won't try to act them out either. That would take even longer. We're not acting out people being dragged violently from the polls or killed, but we are going to just read this list and I think you will find it so informative and we'll probably have a little fun with it too. So here we go. This is methods of fraud.

In Deliver the Vote, Dr. Tracy Campbell documents the following techniques to influence U.S. election results. And note that this is not a complete list even of all the methods of fraud that he documents in the book. Starting with... Number one, repeat voting, as in eight men registered 161 times in one day. Stealing the ballot box, classic technique, just take it.

a sliding door on the ballot box that's a great one it like slides out under the bottom so you can just take ballots out and put ballots in but you know it looks like it's totally sealed a pistols revolvers brick bats do you know what brick bats are

Is it a brick or is it a bat? Is it a is it a topping or a brick and you attach it to a bat and then you have a weapon and it was used, unfortunately, to beat up people who were trying to vote, who were members of the opposite party? Violence, basically. Using a cannon to intimidate voters, inventing towns to create more votes, closing polls.

And moving poll locations. I think those are classics. Digging a fresh grave next to the polling location. Armed thugs murdering people who tried to vote. This is a good one. Dunking Irish voters in tubs of bloody water and unfortunately even killing them to keep them from voting. Apparently that only works with Irish voters. Riots.

Telegraphing the Bible to prevent results from coming through that you don't want. So you telegraph just as much text as possible, like the entire Bible or segments of the Bible to keep the telegraph lines tied up so that your opponents couldn't get their votes in. We're actually going to have Triumph the Insult Dog later reading that section. Not including the candidate's name on the ballot. Classic. Candidates winning who were not on the ballot.

Threatening to fire people. Withholding land. Arresting voters. Poll taxes. Registering people illegally. Repeaters, that's just voting over and over and over again. Police intimidating challengers. Seizing the registration books and completing them in private. Drugging an opponent to steal their registration lists.

And this is kind of a quote from Dr. Campbell. The key to neutralizing the Republican vote, and obviously this was a Democratic technique, was in keeping large numbers of African-American voters away on election day. And that's when, you know, that was when the Democrats ran the South and it was a very, very racist party. And so they would basically win by preventing African-Americans from voting.

Offering $2 to not register. Paying to switch votes. Bribes worth $4 million in today's currency. That's the Rutherford B. Hayes election. Insufficient supply of ballots. Telling a voter they had already voted. Taking the ballot box at gunpoint. Pulling a pistol on an election worker and demanding his election books.

take the books to another location and proceed to stuff the ballot boxes boxes with hundreds of that person's own votes chain ballot chain ballot is fascinating and we're going to read about this one later chain ballot is so fascinating you basically the person goes into the polling location and they get a ballot but they don't cast the ballot

they just bring a blank piece of paper with them and they put a blank piece of paper in the ballot box and they take the actual ballot out with them. Now they stand outside and sell that ballot over and over again all day and the way they do it, they take the ballot and they fill it out with the candidate of their choice and somebody comes who wants to sell their vote and then they give that person the filled out ballot with the candidate they want. That person goes in, casts that ballot

and then takes the blank ballot that they got and brings it back out to the person who's doing the chain ballot selling outside. So that person continually gets a fresh blank ballot, fills it out and sells it and then pays the person $10 all day long. So you can just do this hundreds and hundreds of times. It's called chain voting. Very labor intensive. Very effective. It was classic in Kentucky apparently. Okay, your turn.

Buying votes for an average of $8 a vote. At that time, you'll see the price goes up. Planting contraband guns on opponents and having them arrested. Fictitious registration cards. Floaters. Those are like repeaters. They're people who paid $8 to vote like 10 times approximately. One gentleman testified he voted 22 times.

Declaring open war on black voters, killing dozens, wounding hundreds. We're going to have more about that later. The discrimination against black voters has been horrific. Number of certified ballots exceeded the number of people registered to vote. Forged signatures. Broken seals on the ballot box. Vicious dogs to frighten reformers away.

Vote buying, price now gone up in 1996 to $20 per vote in Dodge County, Georgia. Vote buying in 1987, $200 a vote in Kentucky. Must have been a tighter race. 1981 to 1990, dead residents voting in Illinois. Absentee ballot fraud. Tampering with the voting machines. Vote hauling in Kentucky. Murder the candidate in Kentucky.

Getting a court order to keep the polls open late when there really is no line or no emergency done by Democrats. Ballot harvesting in Florida. This was, the quote is, rampant fraud characterized the absentee voting. Electronic vote manipulation suspected. So that's our partial list. That's only a partial list. That's a partial list of the...

election fraud techniques that are documented in Deliver the Vote. And Joel and I were just discussing why we're raising funds and what it's going to go for. So we do have five paid staff members now on Smart Elections. That includes a nonprofit management coordinator and election technology specialist, our director of volunteer engagement, and also a graphic designer, as well as myself, the executive director.

And all of that does take funding and then, in addition to that, we have two court cases that are proceeding forward there's the court case that people may be familiar with this past June 2026 New York primary where we found. Really massive irregularities, including election seals that were thrown in the garbage and copies of ballots that were mixed in with ballots and.

More ballots counted than voters who had registered. Added all to the list, right? Added all to the list. Yeah, all things I think were pretty much in that list, but we are pursuing that case. We did not get a new election that we requested from the judge, but we've filed an appeal. And in addition to that, we have another case still pending from 2024, the June primary in New York City, where we found quite a few irregularities and all of these things take funds as well as our big count the vote program.

which is training observers in six different parts of the election, six different modules of training that we have now, including voter rolls, observing the actual testing of the voting machines in person,

and early voting, mail-in voting, audits, and capturing screenshots of election results as they come in on election night. So those are all things that we train people to observe now. And all of that, again, takes funding. We estimate that it takes about $50 to train and support each election observer. And we're trying to train thousands of people all over the country. And we want to be ready in November. We want to be

there in the polling places and at the audits to protect the election. And I'm sure if you're here today, you believe that that's important. So if I donated $50, do I get a designated trainee that I can follow on social media?

No. No, you could. Honestly, you could. We could have our observers sponsored by individual people. So if you want your own individual observer that you want to sponsor, I'm sure we can arrange that. The observers are wonderful people and they're very...

involved in their local elections. And that's really the point. The point is to get people connected. Once you start getting involved, you go and you observe, say, the logic and accuracy testing, the testing of your voting machines, your election official, if they're friendly, will say to you, oh, my God, no one has ever come and observed the voting machine testing. We're so glad you're here. We're so glad you're interested. And that'll be a sign to you that your election officials are running transparent,

and trustworthy elections when they're welcoming and they're open. On the other hand, if you go and you find that they say, oh, well, actually, even though it was scheduled today, we did it yesterday, or they're just not

welcoming and it's very hard to see what's going on and it's not transparent, you'll start to understand that possibly there are things there that need to be further investigated. So the observation process is so important, getting to know your election officials in every single community. We really want people to be involved all over the country. We have observers signed up now in 47 states and we have close to a thousand observers.

And we really hope to be closely monitoring the House and Senate races that are going to really decide who's in power for the next two years. So those are really important. And I'm sure it matters to you. If you're watching this, I know you care. So please do donate. And it is tax-deductible. That's great to know that just even $50 is going to make a difference.

Absolutely. And then if you actually have more, you can always donate more. If you want to donate $500, that would pay for an hour of an attorney's time. And we are going to need attorneys in the midterms. So any amount helps. And smartelections.us is where you're going to donate. There's a button there that you click on. It's super easy, won't take you long.

And thanks again to Joel for being here with us. Well, Lulu, I just want to thank you for everything that you're doing. And coming up, we're going to be doing actual readings from the book. So Joel, thank you so much for being here to kick us off. We really appreciate it. Totally. My pleasure. Great to see you, Lulu. Okay. Thanks so much.

Okay, that was my longtime friend and actor Joel Van Loo. So I hope you enjoyed that. And now we're going to have a quiz and we're going to give away our first copy of Deliver the Vote. As I said, it will not be this copy. This is my treasured copy. But we have purchased four copies of Deliver the Vote. And they might have been like the last four copies on the market. So if you're trying to get it, you need to be here to get it from us.

And these are gonna be signed. We have talked to Dr. Campbell and he will personally autograph it for you. So we're gonna give away one now. We're gonna give away one at the end of the program, which is around a little bit before seven o'clock or sometime between 6.30 and seven probably. And then we're gonna auction off two copies

And keep in mind that the copies that you get are going to be used copies. These are not new copies. The book is out of print. There have been times actually where it has gone for $600 on Amazon. The copies can be kind of rare and hard to get sometimes. So this is a big, like,

kind of a big deal that we're giving away and auctioning off these copies of Deliver the Vote. And I have to say, the book is a goldmine of information. And it's just fascinating to read. I've read

I think almost every word of it. There may be a few sections that I still have to dig into. So the way that we're going to do this, I think, is we're going to have a quiz. And also the QR code on the screen will take you directly to our donate page. And you can also find it at smartelections.us and click on donate, whichever one is easier for you. It is tax deductible. So are we ready for our quiz?

And also there was somebody who put a really good comment in the chat. They encourage people to do a thumbs up, like a like. So I love that. Make sure to press like on the video so the algorithm can pick it up. We know how the algo controls so much. And he said, I also posted this on my next door to try to bring in locals. I love that. And we're going to have information for you about how you can sign up to actually participate in Count the Vote. That's also on our website at smartelections.us. You can sign up to be a poll watcher there.

It's really, really, I think it's honestly a profound experience to learn more about your elections.

do our quiz and anybody can participate in this so these are going to be our first questions what how it's going to work is i'm going to have a quiz question up and then we're going to look in the comments and see who gets it some of them are harder than others there's just three questions and then if we get somebody who actually answers all three they'll win the book if somebody only answers two but no one else does better than that they could get the book

If we only get somebody who could answer one question, I don't think you could win the book. We're going to have to do another quiz later. So here we go. And this is our quiz question number one. What year does Deliver the Vote start covering election fraud? And shouldn't be too hard. I'm looking in the comments to see if anybody's getting this. What year does Deliver the Vote start

covering fraud. Anybody? I'm going to give you a clue now. It's actually on the front of the book. So you could actually scroll back in the YouTube feed and find the cover of the book. I've held it up multiple times. Anybody know? Yes, we got it there. Okay. We got an answer from Lori Gallagher. Not surprising. Lori's a sharp one and she's going to be with us later on. So she got that one. 1742. Way to go, Lori.

Lori's in the lead now. And Simone got it. I'm sorry, Simone, but Lori beat you. Okay. Allison got it. But okay. Lori got it first. Lori's got one point here. I'm going to just make a record of this. So Lori's at one. I'm counting these votes by hand in case you hadn't noticed. So, okay. That was from memory. Go, Lori. Okay. Next up, question number two.

What is chain voting? And this is like a, you know, you have to give us a sentence or something. Shouldn't be hard, we just described it. So hopefully if you were watching the last segment, you'll know what chain voting is, or sometimes it's called chain ballot. Anybody gonna get this one? This is a giveaway quiz that we're having for Deliver the Vote, A History of Election Fraud, An American Political Tradition, 1742 to 2004 is when he stopped writing the book. Although it was a,

It's so relevant even now. It's crazy. And we talked about that in our interview with him. Selling blank ballots to be able to let people vote again and again. That is correct. Okay, now we're at one and one. And then, so that is from Allison. And she's at one.

I'm gonna have to make the final question harder. I was gonna make the last question easy, but I'm gonna have to make a harder question because I know if this is between Allison and Lori, these folks are experts. Here we had another answer. Chain voting refers to an unlawful voting scheme in which a completed ballot is passed or reused. More or less, like basically you take a blank ballot out of the polling place and you bring it outside and then you fill it out how you want it and then you,

somebody um takes that blank ballot that's been pre-filled out so they're not really voting their choices they're voting your choices they go in they cast that ballot they bring you back a blank ballot if you're the one selling and you give them anywhere from ten to two hundred dollars uh so that's what chain voting is really interesting and we're gonna actually have jan bendor who is the um

an election expert from Michigan who founded or has been a longtime participant in the Michigan election reform Alliance. And she's actually going to talk about chain voting later on too. It's a fascinating. Okay. So I got to get a harder question here. I was going to give you an easy one at the end, but I'm, I'm reconsidering and I'm going to make this question a little bit harder and okay.

I don't want to give our Texas competitors an advantage. Okay, I'm going to ask this one. Who knows what a hash test is for logic and accuracy testing? And we'll put this up. So this is kind of a hard one. Probably mostly our experts are going to get this. But this is for the book. Add this one. Okay, this is our question number three.

What is a hash test for logic and accuracy testing? And go in our comments and see who's going to get this one. Hash is an, nope, going to have to do better than that. I'm sure that's just a typo. But a hash, let's see, is like a digital fingerprint that allows you to see who has changed the code. Okay, first up.

Allison got it. Okay, I can't think of a better person to win an autographed copy of Deliver the Vote than Allison Green, who's going to be with us shortly and who's done tremendous work, especially researching voter rolls. So way to go. Congratulations, Allison. Nicely done. Everybody give her a round of applause. I'm sure we have like some sort of

we have some sort of like buzzers and things in here but i'm not quite um i'm not quite here let's try this one hey we got applause way to go way to go um okay so that's our first quiz and like i said so we're going to have an auction and we'll go ahead and just start the auction now and with

the auction will need to get your um contact information but obviously we'll get that when you make the donation so the next book we actually have a hardback deliver the vote and i'm going to go ahead and start that off so um we're let's see the this is what we're gonna do we are starting

the auction for the hardback autographed copy of Deliver the Vote. And oh, that's where, it's up in the comments. Okay, so we're going to take down the answer. We got the answer to our third question. And oh, it looks like Cheryl Fonseca had it too. It generates, this is great. Yeah, we have a well-informed audience. So Cheryl Fonseca says, when you install an app,

It generates a unique ID in the register, a string of numbers. And if someone replaces that app code with a new install, the number changes. So it's a way to verify that the code hasn't been changed. And it's supposed to be done on all of the voting machines. And that's one of the things that

our Count the Vote program is doing. We are teaching people how to go and attend and observe their logic and accuracy testing all over the country. Honestly, don't think anybody's ever done it before to actually get people out there observing. Most of the time when our observers go, people say, God, nobody's ever been here to observe this before. And we're finding out also that sometimes the tests

are either not taking place just before an election, like the one that I tried to observe in June here from New York City. They had done the test in February, which is not a frustrating choice, too many months left there. And then other times we're finding that the tests are being done by a third party vendor, no information about it, or not open to the public, things like that. So again, this is incredibly important information.

And that is one of the things that we are finding out by sending our observers out to observe these tests. And that's literally what your funding is going for, to support them in their work. Each observer requires a tremendous amount of support. We have to train them and then talk them through their first time and answer questions and follow up with paperwork. There's a tremendous amount involved in this process and all of it takes funding.

So the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to start the auction. And here's how we're going to do it. So we're currently going to be auctioning off. This is an auction for an autographed copy of Deliver the Vote. And what you're going to do if you want to make a bid on this, we are going to start the bids at $50.

So it's $50 bid, and this will be running for a while, maybe for about two hours. So it's about 1.48 now. And if you want to bid on this, so this is an auction for an autographed copy of Deliver the Vote. What you're going to do is you're going to put into the comments, you'll just write bid and whatever your bid is. So if your starting bid is $50, then you're going to write basically bid,

50 like that and you're going to put that in the comments and we'll try to keep an eye on that and um we'll see how high we get it's for a good cause if you get the book it's not tax deductible that's the only thing that i have to tell you when you get stuff then your donation is not tax deductible um and we are going to move forward now we're going to hear some really interesting information about the

kind of the fraud at the beginning of the Republic. And it's just so fascinating that really this has gone on for so long. So here we go. Perhaps no elections in colonial America had more import than those that ratified state constitutions. In ratifying the basic structure of state government and the role of slavery or religion within the states, such elections would have profound implications.

These referenda displayed the paradox of a people striving to break off colonial tyranny, but willing to use less than democratic means to enact a new political structure. In Massachusetts, the state's constitution of 1780, the world's oldest functioning constitution and written by John Adams, was submitted to the people of Massachusetts for the required two-thirds majority.

In 1916, the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morrison examined those ballots and found that, quote, the two-thirds majority was manufactured, end quote, by the convention. In carefully perusing the returns on two selected amendments, Morrison found votes affirming the amendments of 8,885 to 6,225 and 6,338 to 5,221.

far short of the required two-thirds majority, yet both passed nonetheless. The First Amendment needed 10,124 votes to pass and only received 8,885. The Second Amendment needed 7,745 and only received 6,338.

Morrison concluded, quote, the convention deliberately juggled the returns in order to make it appear, end quote, that the two-thirds majority had been reached. He asked, quote, whether the Constitution of Massachusetts, now in force almost 137 years, was ever legally ratified, unquote.

Outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Simmering political divisions arose between those siding with the revolutionaries, Whigs, and those remaining loyal to the king, Tories. Later, similar divisions would arise between those who supported a strong central government, Federalists, and those who wanted to allow more power to the states, Anti-Federalists.

As these divisions grew more acute, the disputes often carried over to local elections. With the rise of local political clubs in New York City, its elections quickly became more heated, violent, and corrupt. And an investigation of some municipal elections uncovered that even children had voted.

Now, not all New Yorkers tolerated this state of affairs. These reformers understood that fair elections were fundamental to some larger democratic impulses growing throughout the colonies. In some states, the degree to which the election fraud was on the minds of the revolutionary generation was visible shortly after declaring independence. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776

set punishments for bribery at the polls and the next year the north carolina state assembly passed a statute prohibiting bribery ballot box stuffing and multiple voting by 1784 new hampshire made conviction of bribery at the polls a disqualification for holding office

So I think it's important to just clarify that although they were passing all of these laws to outlaw election fraud, what Dr. Campbell makes clear over and over and over again in the book is that the laws are unsuccessful. What the laws indicate is that there's concern and that the fraud exists. But what is clear from the reality is that the fraud continued. And so we're going to move into our next segment now, and this is on voter rolls.

And so I want to do a little clip. I think we'll do a little clip here and show you kind of what our training is to teach people about voter rolls. And then we're going to have two really pioneers who are working on this issue and trying to make progress on what a mess the voter rolls are across the country.

and we're delighted to have them. So we'll have them on in just a moment. So this, I believe that I can show you a clip of some of the training that we've been doing to try to help educate people about the voter rolls.

Ghost voters are people who appear like they might be legitimate, but they are either a stolen identity, like a dead person voting, or they may actually be a fraudulent voter record that has crept into the voter rolls. But once they're on the rolls, they can cast a real ballot and that changes the numbers. What we're actually doing is we're reviewing voter records. I kind of almost think of it as a ghost voter hunting.

it's something that everybody can start to do right now you don't have to wait until the election everybody can start to work locally or if you have a particular area that you're concerned about you can easily go there it's important to

Think of it as both state level and county level information. You're trying to determine how many voters there are eligible to vote in your current election or upcoming election. Sometimes what I do is I go backwards. So like right now I might look at the 2024 election to say how many eligible voters there were or a special election that just took place.

You're going to really rely on your county and state information sources as well. You always want to try and get it directly from the source. We're not actually going to

assume that the county level records are the same as the state is saying that's one of the things we want to verify i have a question you talked about how this is all going to be on the website but sometimes the voter records are on the website and sometimes you're going to have to do a public records request for them state to state right

Not quite. Sometimes they're on the website, but even if they are on the website, we still want to do a FOIA request. And that's what we're going to get into. But sometimes they're not on the website at all. No, no, no. I agree with that. So that's what you're trying to do is your starting point is to see what you have, right? No matter what I encourage us all to be.

Learning how to do a FOIA. And we're going to help you with that research. So we're going to be helping you with the FOIA and FOIL. I just called it public records request because it gets so complicated. Okay. And that was a teaching session that we had from our next guest, Alison Green.

and she has been kind enough to collaborate with us and to teach us some of the techniques that she's using um and so i'm really pleased to bring her and another guest uh kim hermance on so let's see if we can get everybody on here uh here's allison and uh

hello lulu i think that my sound is actually off though i cannot hear you i'm so sorry about that hold on i'm trying to fix this okay let's see if we can uh get kim on there's kim okay hi lulu

Hi, great to have you here. Really appreciate it. I can hear you and I think you can hear me. So I guess we're doing good with that. Okay, fantastic. And I just want to say a real, I just want to extend so much appreciation to both of these women, to Alison Green and to Kim.

They've both really been generous with Smart Elections, sharing their information, their knowledge, their research, and we appreciate them both. They're real experts in their field. They're doing wonderful, wonderful work. I encourage you to explore their work. They have their websites there on the stage, of course, contribute and support their work as well as ours. One of the things that Smart Elections is all about is collaboration, and that's why our logo is a heart.

is because we really believe that we have to build these bridges together. For way too long, there's been a lot of partisan divide and finger pointing, you know, oh, the Democrats are cheating, oh, the Republicans are cheating. Our general takeaway, especially from Deliver the Vote, everybody's cheating.

And maybe not every part of every community. I think what I have found is that there are people in each community who are really sincerely interested in honest elections and are working hard for that. And there are also people in most of the election communities who are interested in getting ahead, however it takes, if it means like, you know, jabbing a few elbows or if it means really doing things that are more illegal.

So you really see the spectrum. And so what we try to do is seek out those people who are really interested in honest elections and try to build those bridges and collaborate. And I have to say, I think we're a rare group. There's not many people doing that. So another great reason to support us and the people that we're collaborating with. So we're going to read.

From a particular a couple of compilation of a few different sections from deliver the vote these sections are on voter rolls on registering and violence how violent it did become and I think i'm sorry you'll have to remind me allison you start right.

Yes, and now I can hear you. I hope you can hear me. This is, again, from Deliver the Vote. Allison Green will give you just a little bit about her background. She's an investigative journalist, researcher, and founder of Grassroots Speak and the It's Up to Us movement. You see her website there. It's up to us.

dot grassrootsspeak.com. Our work focuses on election transparency, voter role integrity, and democratic accountability through the use of public records, data analysis, and investigative reporting. And then our other guest is Kim Hermans,

Kim is the president, director, and co-founder of Project Civica. They've been a wonderful partner to us in the election protection work that we've been doing. Kim believes effective self-government requires citizens who understand how government works, have the tools to hold it accountable, and are prepared to step forward, take action, and lead. And I have to say she embodies those principles. So Allison, here we go. Great.

Thank you so much for having me. This is such an amazing passage. Voter roles, illegal registration, and violence. By the 1850s, the culture of corruption had become such a major component of American political life that a new party was formed whose hallmark was a fierce desire to combat this culture, if necessary, with violence. A nativist,

anti-Catholic party known as the Know Nothings or the American Party had a determined approach. Americanism against foreigners, the people against the government. The party itself sprang from elements who felt that their elections had been thoroughly corrupted by fraudulent immigrant votes.

Fired by almost a religious zealotry, the Know-Nothings were convinced that they should fight fire with fire. In 1850, over half of the foreign-born population in Kentucky resided in Louisville, particularly German and Irish immigrants. So the Know-Nothings hit fertile soil there

Native residents of Louisville deeply resented the presence of these populations and were obsessed with keeping such undesirables from the polls. In May 1855, Know Nothings used widespread violence to capture Louisville City Hall. I'm up now. Thank you for having me, Lulu.

Due to their newly won power, the Know Nothings then appointed 64 of 68 election judges who required each voter to read his vote out loud. This was done to spot and reject the votes of immigrants, many of whom could not read English or spoke with a heavy accent.

In August 1855, the Know Nothings worked to ensure that none of the undesirables cast their vote at all. The city council ruled that the heavily immigrant First Ward, only one voting booth would be established. One local democratic paper claimed that such a move essentially disenfranchised nearly a thousand voters. A Know Nothing editor,

whipped the nativist flames with highly suggestive rhetoric. Our friends must so organize, he wrote, to exclude every fraudulent voter. Before the polls opened on election day, the know-nothings forcibly took control of each of Louisville's eight wards and allowed only those who openly displayed yellow ballots distributed by their party to vote.

Immigrants had to bring their citizenship papers and often waited hours in the hot August sun to vote, usually with no success. If that were not enough, violence was always an effective know-nothing tool. By midday, gunfire had erupted. By late afternoon, the city was in the midst of a full-scale riot.

and a German brewery was set on fire by a nativist mob killing 10. By evening, the mob had spread to some of the city's tenement houses where 15 homes were burned. When the polls closed, the know nothings scored major electoral victories while the city totaled the number of casualties. All together, probably two dozen people died and many more were wounded.

while the property damage was estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was the culmination of a half a decade of anti-immigrant rage and resulted in an election where violence and murder rolled. The Know Nothings were certainly not a party that has received widespread acclaim, either from their contemporaries or from historians.

This is not surprising. They were bigoted and violent and represented many of the uglier undercurrents of American politics. Yet the know nothing's zealotry was fired in part by the understanding that the nation's election system was essentially broken.

They saw various undesirables helping corrupt politicians to steal elections and felt completely justified in using force to fight their righteous war at the polls. The perception that they were taking election fraud to new heights did not bother them

They rationalized that they were simply playing the game that Democrats had started and they were right about that point. Once a political group or party feels a government is illegitimate, violent methods immediately become legitimate. Considering the manner in which voting was conducted in early America, it was not surprising that such a party as the Know Nothings emerged.

Their popularity spoke loudly to the frustrations many Americans were experiencing, seeing elections stolen on a regular basis.

Although Democrats, let's just say this would be a nice opportunity to actually just have some dialogue and then we'll go on and we'll read the last part of the section. But I feel like when we read this, we all kind of just were really aware of the reverberations, you know, in regard to things that are happening today. And I know, Alison, you felt that especially.

oh my god yeah i mean i cannot believe that this was over 170 years ago but i feel like i can be describing the political situation that is occurring today and i feel like it it speaks so much to what i've been kind of finding in my research although we'll get into that more but just it is 170 years but it feels like it's happening today

I would agree. I mean, the one interesting thing I found in studying history is how much doesn't change, right?

we're still in a way battling many of the same issues that they were battling in terms of election integrity and election validity back in the early 1800s. So it appears that money and power is always a motive to try to steal and cheat, and that includes in elections.

And I think one of the things that really struck me, I don't know if you watched the interview that we did with Dr. Campbell, but there's a part of the book of his introduction where he talks about how after each election, there's just a real attempt by officials to smooth everything over. There's just no acknowledgement generally that there's been any problems or they're concerned.

really words that are used like negligible. You see the same type of language in technical reports that talk about changes to software and they say de minimis, meaning, oh, there's nothing really to look at here, it's just minor. And the candidates themselves are actually

shamed if they do raise questions. There's a real shame culture around asking questions about the election results. I know I will say I worked with Tim Canova, who was an independent candidate who ran against the DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz twice in 2016 and 2018. And the amount of

venom that he received from the Democrats for challenging that race. He refused to concede. He did not think that it was an honest election. And he had, I think, good reason to have questions. We did a statistical analysis that looked very odd. It did not look like an expected

pattern in terms of the way the votes were cast. And he told me that I think the day he filed his lawsuit, his campaign manager called him and said, I won't be able to work with you anymore. His campaign manager like turned against him. And it was it was just all the way down the line. So I think one of the things that we're trying to do with this program is just

You really see the pain that that causes us when we can't talk about these things and the dysfunction.

When you go into therapy to try to make progress, your therapist doesn't say, well, I don't want to talk about anything that happened in the past. Tell me a little bit about your childhood and about what you've been through, and then we can make progress and make change. But we just, as a culture, are just so insistent on keeping the blinders on.

And calling each other names. I mean, you know, election denier. I mean, one of the stories I've told Lulu is how post 2020 election, you know, literally afraid to get out there and be, you know, use your own name because people were getting doxxed and fired and, you know, just

It was a crazy time. And then the election flips, somebody else won, and then it flips around and it's on the other side. And so we have to really stop doing this and just fix the problem and finding where we agree and solve it. That's really what I believe. And this just proves how this issue has been plaguing us

for generations. And just some of the research I find is actually the laws are there. If we would just follow the laws and have more penalties for people when they don't, perhaps we wouldn't be in the situation we're in right now. So politically divided. Enforcement. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. And one more thing, if I can, I feel like we're going into an election season where violence is kind of,

something that is hanging over all of our heads and it's something that none of us want we're all very kind of aware of it and we don't condone it at all and this is talking about that violence but one of the things that struck me is that it seemed to have stemmed from this gas lighting this this gas lighting us

into trying to convince us that there's nothing wrong with our elections. There's only so long that people can listen to that before they say, look, I'm not going to deny what's right in front of my eyes or that I'm seeing, that I'm experiencing. So it's really about being able to talk about election fraud

in narratives that are not political, but are realistic and backed up by data and by evidence. 100%, 100%.

close scenario there, I think, in the gaslighting and that passage that you read, Kim, where it talks about if people do feel that they're, you know, that the elections are not fair and that they are being gaslit, you do get that pressure that builds up. I literally thought that passage from, this is from, I think the 1900s, right? And it could have been, it could have been January 6th. Like I felt like-

The parallels really were there. So let's move on. You had one more, Kim. I wanted to say that what actually happens, I think, is people stop voting. So it's very interesting to me. The more we seem to try to fix the problem, the more we don't talk about the problem amongst ourselves. But many people are just why vote? My vote doesn't matter.

So, you know, there then becomes an apathy and they just check out. And we've actually done research looking at the numbers in New York state where you can see that downward trend year after, you know, major election after major election, you can see less and less people are voting because of that. And then everybody tries to run around and make voting easier and stuff like that. And then, but we're not solving the main issue here.

is that transparency so we all can trust the outcome no matter who wins i absolutely agree with that um i wanted to just correct the record the year of that election was 1855 1855 that was the louisville um election with the no nothings okay so we're going to continue this story great

Although Democrats and Know Nothings had been in the vanguard of fraud and violence following the Civil War, the newly created Republican Party was not above reproach. In Goodhue County, Minnesota, for example, Republicans won big in the November 1857 election. Yet the election displayed some troubling anomalies. In 1856, the county had 499 Democrats.

and 471 Republicans. The next year, Democrats had 705, but the Republican rolls expanded to 1,223. The census showed only 1,652 voters in the entire county, making it obvious the Republicans had been busy registering false names.

At the precinct level, the fraud was quite obvious. In the Kenyon precinct, for example, there were only 33 voters, yet the final count, some might say impossibly, resulted in the Republicans winning 68 to six with only 33 voters. How do you like those numbers? It's some math, right? Wow.

Reformers tried to curtail fraud with registry laws. So there's kind of what I was just talking about. In New York City, a new registry system enacted in 1866 demonstrated the ineffectiveness of this tactic. The poll lists of the previous years served as the basis of the new list.

So the false registrants from before the war were now legal. In examining the registry rolls in 1866, the New York City police discovered that more than 15,000 fraudulently registered names had been added to the lists, which underscored how Tammany Hall could easily skirt around these reforms.

Other key antics from machine-controlled cities stand out amidst wave after wave of corrupt elections. In Louisville, Kentucky, over 2,500 African American registration certificates were bought and tucked away in a safe where the Louisville machine boss said, we can control them.

A reformer registration officer named William O'Mara was offered a glass of lemonade on registration day. O'Mara recalled, I found myself whirling around and I thought the house was falling in. He then understood he had been drugged. He was taken outside where he was assaulted and his registration book was taken.

when he saw the official role printed in the newspaper omara learned that over 65 names had been added to his registration lists which means that there were 65 extra votes by the way not surprisingly the machine candidates saw precinct majorities such as 243 to 5.

a disgusted louisville evening post article concluded the audacity of the steel is its most astonishing feature okay that's the section that we have on voter rolls registration and violence and i do want to give both kim and alice an opportunity just to talk about their work kim you had a report

that you put out about the non-citizen registrations that you're finding. And I know they were also found, your report is from New York, and then there was similar findings in Oregon and one in New Jersey, I believe. Yeah, in New Jersey, the governor actually came out and described the issue. But what we found in New York is we

In 14 counties that provided the data fields that have these indicators, we found 10,680 records with non-citizen flags. 88 of them have voting history. So Allison mentioned that it's important to follow the data, right? And so we hear all the time in the narrative, the media,

that this is not happening, it's not a big deal. But here we found it, it's in the county rolls. And what we do is collect monthly snapshots of the New York state voter rolls. And then in this project, we also looked at the local county rolls. And the county rolls synchronize to the state rolls, and they're supposed to do it every 24 hours at least.

And what we found was in the indicators where the county had actually found a non-citizen and labeled it non-citizen and correctly purged the record, when the record was synchronized or uploaded into the state level voter rolls, they used the indicator duplicate.

So that totally obscured the reason why the person had actually been originally purged. And there's a lot of talk about this whole issue. And the thing is, this is not a victimless crime when you're a non-citizen. If you are here on a visa and you want to become a citizen, for example, if you get put on the rolls just because you happen to interact with a motor vehicle department,

And the record gets automatically sent through. Now you want to become a citizen that delays your citizenship approval. It can literally prevent you from becoming a citizen. And so it's not a victimless crime. And what we found is that these records originated in close to 96% from the Department of Motor Vehicle

online registration process and also some of the other agencies as well. The never approved National Voter Registration Act, never approved agencies where you register to vote. So this, you know, we have laws and we've been talking about that. And New York actually is very clear on how it's supposed to work. And that is not what we found is happening in reality in New York state.

Yeah, and then Alison, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the work that you're finding? Yeah, I mean,

i have a group a great group of volunteers who have been helping us create a database that is independent but similar to what project civic is doing we're we're doing this in eight states and i could not even begin to list how many of the different ways we are finding things that are incredibly concerning and we're finding a lot of of the same things but also different things

state to state it actually differs in how we're seeing things but we're we've found what we call ghost voters and we're also finding that that people are being um taken off of the voter rolls with no legal basis what kim talked about

is so consistent with what we're finding is that we have laws, but there is nobody actually enforcing those laws. And there's plenty of examples of things that are happening in our voter rolls that are not following the laws. But I have to say, too, that this passage was so

I mean, Lulu, you did such a great job picking this out in terms of the journey that I've been going through because we were talking about Kentucky 170 years ago, but I actually started investigating our elections in 2018, but it really kind of went to another level in 2020.

when I actually dug into the Senate results of Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. So in Mitch McConnell's 2020 election in Kentucky, it's almost identical to what we were seeing in that passage, which is that I specifically was looking at census data and finding the same impossible math that they described, because based on census data,

it appeared that 120% of the voting age population of a certain county was voting. And then when I looked further, it again was happening in other counties as well. You cannot have more than 100% of your population voting. It's just not possible mathematically, legally, or in any way. And that really has brought the current stuff that I'm finding is exactly the same

In Florida's 2018 election, an audit of Broward County found that in over 50% of the precincts, there were more ballots counted than voters who had checked in. That was in 2018. And this is actually on the screen, literally something that I brought to your attention because I just actually pulled the voter records from my own county just yesterday.

And what you're seeing on the screen is the website is showing that there were 243,594 active registered voters in our county yesterday. But when I got the public records request from the same exact day, there is a missing approximately 40,000 voter records are missing.

So what they gave me was a list of the active registered voters that included 204,000 voters. So we have been finding that what the published data is showing is not matching what is behind the scenes. And we have a number of instances where you have 10% of the voter population

their records are missing from the voter rolls so we talked in this passage about how they kind of can add to the numbers to pad the numbers which may or may not be what is happening here padding the numbers so that they can actually be moving them in the background and vice versa deleting real votes both of those are the both sides of the coin is what we're finding

is happening right now and what we want to protect our votes our our election from coming up let me thank you so much for that allison let me just ask you a question this was which county was this that you compared the numbers in sure i'm sorry it's st lucie county that's where you live actually so you're where i live and you've been actually tracking st lucie for several years now and you keep seeing these discrepancies over and over this is a discrepancy

between what the county has on its website and then what they're sending you. It's literally like their left hand and their right hand. They're sending you a public records request that says that we have 200, which one was on the website? The website is 243. Okay, so the website said we have 243 active voters now at this moment.

and then they sent you public records requests that actually said oh we have 204 000 active voters at this moment so it's really it's an apples to apples comparison from the same county and it's just baffling and it's not you understand i think we all understand you know numbers change people register you find mistakes or something you know of even a few hundred but you're talking about

40 000 voter records in one florida county that's a lot to have as a discrepancy that's a lot of votes yeah kim uh sorry i was raising my hand um i'm i just want to point something out that

that you might not just something to think about and maybe investigate, but the website doesn't say active voters. It says 243 total voters. So remember voters can also vote. So do you know how many inactives are in your county? Maybe that's the difference.

Yeah, but Kim, if you look up on the screen, it also says active registered voters as of August 28th, 2026. So even though the 243,594 says total voters underneath it, this whole category is described as active registered voters. I was very careful to do apples to apples. And what I am finding is that the inactive numbers, I know those as well, and they also don't add up.

And one thing I have to point out is that this actually came from an independent investigation that really started St. Lucie County is not just where I live, but it was actually a basis for some of Bob Woodward's reporting in 2020 in the book Rage. In the book Rage, he reports based on his own interviews with Dan Coats, who was the the the national

He was the biggest intelligence chief under, he was the national intelligence director. And what he actually was reporting, Bob Woodward, is that there was malware in the voter registration system that could delete one in every 10 voters. And so what I actually did was I actually looked at that passage and he said it was only in two counties in Florida.

And one of those counties was St. Lucie County. So being in St. Lucie County, I decided to see, okay, can I find any evidence of one in every 10 votes disappearing? And I mean, this number is actually much bigger, but after the 2024 election, it actually came out to be almost exact. I found 10.008%

of the voter records missing almost identical to what the NSA and CIA had highly classified evidence of. So the data is supporting the reporting and the reporting is reporting on national intelligence that is still classified about

systems that are really in our voter registration systems. So I just wanted to bring to reality how the data is actually reflecting the intelligence and the evidence that others are bringing forward. And I want to just also say that both Allison, Kim, and our organization, Smart Elections also,

are not just sort of digging this information up as a research kind of like library type exercise. We're really looking for actionable information and all of these organizations are working collaboratively to protect the elections, to protect legitimate voters and to make sure that legitimate voters do not get purged from the rolls and to make sure that ineligible names don't somehow, Alison calls them ghost voters,

don't get added in there that somehow alter results in a way that can actually literally change election results. And so we're all working toward protecting the 2026 midterms right now. I have put the QR code up on the screen. If you want to sign up,

for that count the vote program that we have. And you'd like to be an election observer or you'd like to do more research. I know both of our organization and both these organizations are always looking for volunteers. And especially what I also wanna just point out is that Alison is doing a lot of this really deep dive work in her county where she lives.

And because she's there and she knows the players, she's able to really go a lot deeper and really understand it. And I've had the same experience. I've done a lot of deep dives in Brooklyn where I live and Kim's working in Erie County where she lives.

She's done a lot of research on the voting machines there. And that's the whole concept of Count the Vote. The concept of Count the Vote is that each of us will be more attached, more informed, and more passionate about our own local elections. And therefore, we get you involved. We don't send you on a bus across the country. We get you involved in your local elections. And we think that's so important. So the QR code is there if you want to sign up. And that's what it's all about, is jumping in.

yeah i was going to say yeah i was going to say that being

Being involved locally is really where it's important to get to know your own community, get to know the issues that are facing your own community. Project Civica is involved in a few other things besides election integrity. And our big thing is action, getting involved, learning about local government, state government, national government, and then getting off your couch, if you will, and getting involved. And so that's really what's important.

and advocating for the change that you want. And that includes election integrity. So we have a big arm that's involved in legislative emphasis. And we also want to definitely do it peacefully because as we could see violence in that passage, it didn't help, did it? Because we're still fighting the same issues today. It didn't help at all. Right.

Well, thank you both. We're just really grateful to you both for all your work and for your taking the time to share it with us. And people know where to find you, and I'm sure people will be following up. So thanks so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you, Lulu. Bye bye.

Okay, I think I got myself back. So I want to just show you a Venn diagram that we made that I think really speaks to the work that we're doing. You might not even realize, but Kim and Allison are both kind of on different sides of the political spectrum, but you see us working collaboratively. That's really the whole point is that it is possible to focus on what we have in common.

And so this is actually, sorry, Alison, I'm trying to keep the screen. This is a Venn diagram that we made that I think really speaks to this. And you can see on the outside, there's all these issues that we disagree on, whether that's immigration, climate change, abortion, guns, but there is also a fair overlap of people who are really interested in collaborating for fair and secure elections.

And you see the things that I think we can all agree on. You heard us talking about those all eligible voters participating, high voter turnout, a fair process, no lines to vote. The votes counted accurately in a transparent process with no cheating. Those are really some of our highest priorities. And so the code that I'm going to put up on the screen now, that's the code to donate. And if you want to continue to support our work and you think this work is meaningful,

please do take the time to make that donation. And you're going to make that at smartelections.us. And we've had that smartelections.us banner up throughout. And there's a donate link. That's our program, Count the Vote. And this is our website, smartelections.us. And the QR code will take you directly to the donate link.

And I'll also put that link in the chat. It's in the comments earlier up. We have the link to donate. And it's here. And I know that doesn't do you much good. Nobody's going to copy that link. But I'll put it again in the comments. And then we'll give you an update on where the bids are. We currently have a silent auction underway for

one of the copies of Deliver the Vote. We already gave away one copy of Deliver the Vote that Allison actually won. She was very knowledgeable and answered the quiz questions. And then we have,

the hardback copy that's going to be autographed by Dr. Tracy Campbell that's currently being bid. And I saw a bid come in and then I saw a few more bids on top of it. If you want to bid, you'll put bid and then you'll put your bid there. And let me just, I don't want to misspeak about what the last bid was. I believe it was $150,000.

I saw, yeah, we had a bid for 60. We had a bid for 100. Then we had a bid for 150 for that book. These are donations. You would just go to the QR code and make the donation if you win the auction. We're going to be going for about another hour and a half on this book. And definitely, I think it's worth it. As I said, we pretty much have all the copies now. You're not going to be able to get this on Amazon right now.

It is a used copy because it's out of print. So I think that's the latest bid. And if you want to make a bid against that and you want this book, Deliver the Vote, it's Deliver the Vote by

Pulitzer Prize nominated author and historian, Dr. Tracy Campbell, and he will autograph it personally for you. And then all you're going to do there is you'll just put up a bid like you saw other people doing. Like, for example, the latest bid is 150. So if you wanted to top that, you would put something like bid 200 into the chat.

and we'll know that that's a bid. We're only having one auction at a time right now. So that would be maybe the next bid up. Right now we're still at bid 150. That's the latest for the autographed hardcover copy of Deliver the Vote.

Okay, now the next section that we're going to go into is something that I think was hinted at a little bit in that section on Louisville where they talked about they had 2,500 African-American voters whose names were just put in a box where they didn't have to be counted. And that's just kind of one element, one indication of the types of techniques that were used to keep African-Americans from voting. And

This is something that really is dealt with in the book. One of the longstanding barriers to honest elections is the practice of preventing eligible voters from participating. The political party leading this charge has shifted. After the Civil War, it was the Democrats. And in more recent history, it has been a go-to for Republican operators. And this is information from the book. In a purge of the voter rolls before a Louisiana Senate race in 1986,

An internal Republican memo stated that the purpose was not to curtail fraud, but to help, quote, keep the black boat down, unquote. Those practices have deeply disturbing historical roots that Dr. Campbell researched and wrote about. And we're going to hear about some of those now. Black suffrage.

When the war ended in 1865, no development was as revolutionary as Black suffrage. For former slaves and freed Blacks, the promise of equality was empty if not followed by the right to vote. By 1870, that right was apparently guaranteed through the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which read,

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. With the power of the ballot, it seemed American politics would be changed forever, and the survival of the Democratic Party, particularly in the South, was in peril. On the face of it, Democrats had much to fear.

In 1867, Black turnout for a constitutional referendum in Georgia reached nearly 70%, while that figure approached 90% for a vote in Virginia. Without control of local or state governments to stop it, Southerners used a well-worn tactic to stop the Black vote, terror. The Ku Klux Klan.

emerged on the heels of the war. It opposed Black education, Black economic and social equality, Black suffrage. Consequently, the KKK was a frequent presence surrounding Election Day during Reconstruction. In Tennessee, where the Klan was born, the pattern was soon set. Freedmen attempting to vote would be whipped.

shot at and threatened with death. In suppressing the Black vote, the Klan became an operating arm of the Democratic Party throughout the South. Until more legal forms of vote suppression could be utilized, flagrant fraud was the only way Southern whites could ward off the agency of African Americans exercising their franchise.

In Camilla, Georgia, vigilantes killed nine African Americans shortly before the 1868 election. Their message was heated. Only two courageous Republicans dared to cast a vote on election day. In Americus, Georgia, only 137 African Americans voted out of 1,500 eligible freedmen, and most of them were bribed to vote for Democrats.

The whole affair was such a farce and everything connected with it so illegal, the agent concluded. I don't see how it is possible it could stand as a legal vote or showing the sentiments of this county. When African-Americans attempted to vote in Mississippi's constitutional referendum in 1868, the Grand Cyclops of the KKK issued the following warning to any Blacks thinking of voting for the Constitution. Beware.

Your steps are marked. The eye of the Dart Chief is upon you. Then the avenging dagger flashes in the moonlight. The presiding military officer in the area, Major General Gillum, refused to investigate. Due to such tactics, it probably was not surprising that the Constitution lost by 7,600 votes.

Former slaves in Mississippi in a free and fair election would have overwhelmingly supported a new state constitution that prevented former confederates from holding office. Very sobering. And what I want to do next is just do another segment that we show you about count the vote and the different techniques that we're using.

to try to help spot these different forms of irregularities in the election. So I think a good one to talk about right now would be just the form that we use to actually train people when they're doing in-person observation. One of the things that we check is that the number of voters matches the number of ballots.

And so this is like a little clip that should be able to kind of show you what that's like when you actually do in-person observation. And this is one of the things that we teach people in the training process that we've developed that will help you to do election observation. And the basic goal here is to write down, when you go into the polling place, how many

Voters check in on the electronic poll books. Most places now have electronic poll books. If it's paper poll books, then you'll write down that number and how many ballots actually got scanned. So I'm gonna go in to my polling place. I'm gonna have my credential and I'm gonna have my name tag. And when I go in, I have my name tag and I walk in and I say, hi, is the supervisor or the coordinator here?

Yes, I'm the supervisor of this election district. Hi, I'm here to observe the elections. I have a certificate. Can I show it to you? Oh, wow. We've never had anybody look at our elections here. I'm not sure what to do. Yeah, I can look at the form, but I'm not sure you're allowed to do that.

Well, I actually have the copy of the statutes about election observation with me, so you could actually take a look here. And this shows you the statute from the state election law, and it shows that I do have the right to observe. So would you like to just take a look at that? Sure. I'm going to call down to the Board of Elections and double check this to make sure. Of course, no problem.

All right. So I've made the call and I was told by the Board of Elections that, yes, under New York state law, you are definitely allowed to poll watch. So we have a book, though, that you need to sign since we're in New York City. No problem. And here's the book. Thank you so much. I'd like to just look at the totals on the electronic poll books and then I'd like to look at the scanners, OK? Sure. Let's go over to the poll book table.

And you can, you know, the people there can show you the numbers. Super. Okay. So you could hear, I don't know if you recognize Kim's voice at this point. That's Kim Hermans, who was just a guest with us previously. This was in a training that we did together to try to teach people how to do our poll watching technique. So then this is a form that we actually developed with the former election official, Virginia Martin.

And basically, you go to the electronic poll book and you put down the numbers of voters who have signed in on the electronic poll book. And then you go to the usually it's scanner. Sometimes it's touchscreen voting machines, but you go to the voting machine and then you write down how many ballots have been scanned on each voting machine.

And then you total up the number of voters and you total up the number of ballots scanned and hopefully they're equal. Unfortunately, we have had instances where they're not equal. In one of the very first times that I went poll watching, I actually found a location that had 698 more ballots than voters who had checked in. It was shocking. I was stunned.

and we never did get an explanation. We filed six public records requests with the New York City Board of Elections asking for an explanation, asking for the list of voters that have voted in that location and nothing was forthcoming. That's actually one of the points in one of the lawsuits that we have pending still is just to try to this day to figure out what happened with that election. That was 2021, the mayor of Mayor Eric Adams, who did go on to get indicted for other things. Interesting.

So, yeah, Cheryl, please, we have a question here. Oh, dear, I've got the banners up incorrectly now. I am not Shona Tucker reading from Deliver the Vote, but I do want to tell you the actors that we had reading there. It was Shona Tucker first, followed by Amy Brabson, a wonderful actress and singer, followed by Shona's son, actually, Barack Tarp.

And they did a great job there. And then we're going to have it. We're going to have some other segments and then we're going to come back and do a little bit more on black suffrage. It's a little bit hard to take all at once. So it's probably, I think, good to kind of break that up a little bit. It's very hard to hear how violent the elections were in regard to African-Americans trying to vote.

And then we had a question here. Is it okay to share the live stream on social media? Definitely. We love that. Definitely encouraged. Totally agree with that. Okay. So next up, we are going to have two guests that I'm really, really pleased to introduce. One is a, sorry, we need to pull that banner down.

So one is the Tony-winning actor, Dennis O'Hare, and the other is Lori Gallagher, who is founder of Tally Texas, which is a group in Texas that's doing fantastic work. And Lori has just honestly been a bit of a pit bull there, just digging in and trying to figure out what's going on in those Texas elections. And I'd say she's probably, there's a couple people who are very knowledgeable about Texas elections, and all of them actually are going to be participating in the program, but Lori's certainly one of them.

And so what we're going to do first is we're going to do a reading of an election from Texas, a 1948 election, fascinating, that features Lyndon B. Johnson, who went on to become the president. And then after we played that segment, which we prerecorded, then I believe that Dennis and Lori are both going to be able to join us and we can talk a little bit about their current work. And both of them are doing wonderful work.

So you're going to have to give me a minute here and I'm going to get this video queued up. I didn't want to queue it up earlier lest it would interrupt one of our other readers. But this is the election, the Duke of Duval.

I'm super excited for this next segment. It's called The Duke of Duval. And this particular segment, according to Dr. Campbell, was considered the most infamous case of election fraud in 20th century America. And we have two wonderful readers with us. We have Dennis O'Hare.

who is a Tony-winning actor. And I'll just give you a little bit from his bio. He is an award-winning performer from Take Me Out, where he did win the Tony, and also Sweet Charity. He portrayed the Vampire King on the HBO fantasy series True Blood and is known for his supporting roles in Charlie Wilson's War, Milk, Changeling, and Dallas Buyers Club.

will say that my favorite performance i think dennis is from michael clayton i love that scene that you have with george clooney we watched that scene over and over again i might actually play that scene it's it's an amazing scene but he has so many credits as well as american horror story for which he was nominated for a primetime emmy award for outstanding supporting actor and

many many other credits on stage and screen so it's really a delight and a pleasure to have him here with us and then lori gallagher really a star in the republican election security community who has worked for years in texas to try to get fair elections there and i'm sure we'll have an opportunity for you to tell us more about all the very very strong work that you're doing there in texas so we're going to start out by

Reading this section, the Duke of Duval from Deliver the Vote. And here we go. 1948, the Duke of Duval. 1948 gives us the most infamous case of election fraud in 20th century America, involving Lyndon Johnson, who later become president. Remember that name. South Texas, especially the counties along the Rio Grande, had long been the scene of some of the nation's most fraudulent elections.

Patrones, who controlled the area, exercised daunting political and economic power over their workers, many of the Mexicans who had crossed the border. On election day, thousands of voters were imported from across the river to mark their ballots as instructed and then were promptly returned. In Duval County, the boss was the legendary Duke of Duval, George Parr. To be elected to anything in the region, George Parr's support was essential.

Parr, in turn, made a fortune by manipulating county contracts. The rest of Texas was no shrine of virtue on election day, but South Texas was the most notorious area for made-to-order majorities. Parr's feared enforcer was Louis Salas. He later described how the machine ruled. Parr was the godfather. He had life-or-death control. We could tell any election judge, give us 80% of the vote and the other guy 20%.

We had it made in every election. I carried a gun all the time. Oh, I tell you, we had real power. I love that part. My God, these are such great characters. One of the election counters was Silas himself, who fabricated any totals he liked without any regard to the actual vote. Silas said, if they were not for our party, I make them for our party. If Duval County returned enormous margins of victories for Paris candidates, no one said a word.

An indignant politician knew that Parr might be needed to provide votes in another close race. In an earlier Senate primary election in 1941, Congressman Lyndon Johnson learned a bitter lesson. He apparently beat Pappy, and that's in quotes, Pappy O'Daniel by several thousand votes. Johnson had obtained the support of the South Texas bosses, such as Parr, who sent in the number of votes that Johnson camp had told them were necessary for victory.

But Johnson broke a cardinal rule. Wait until your opponent reports all his votes before reporting your own. Not written down anywhere, I bet. An overconfident Johnson wanted the numbers in early in order to build his lead. After all of Johnson's votes were recorded and he seemingly had the election won, Pappy O'Daniel's team reported some late returns that put Pappy O'Daniel's over the top.

The chairman of the Texas Democratic Party encouraged Johnson to contest the race. Yet Johnson refused, telling one supporter that he did not wish to have the details of the campaign and the election open for Senate investigators. I'm going to try to do my worst Lyndon Baines Johnson impersonation. I hope they don't investigate me. Was that terrible, Laurie? Sorry. Okay.

But if the opportunity to run for the Senate ever presented himself again itself again, Johnson would not make the same mistake. And we have a little bit of back and forth here because we're really sort of getting into the background of how the strategies worked, how the fraud was done. And a lot of it was with this, you know, wait and see how many votes do they have and then we'll see how many votes we need to get us over the top. And it had very little connection to the actual votes that people were putting in.

yeah it's crazy i mean i loved the fact that they were just like i mean what were the numbers based on what was like you know was it were they getting close to the population of the cities are they even worried about the fact that you know the city is publishing the 500 and the vote is 800 like it's so weird so bizarre yeah there's so many discrepancies and that's why he's able to document it and be accurate about that because there are these numbers where he'd be able to go and see well how many registered voters were there and how many votes were cast

And you can see there are more votes cast in many of these elections that he documents than the registered voters. Like he documents all of these discrepancies. That's what's amazing about the book. Well, we're talking about like the powers of tumult, bribery, undue influence and improper practice. And imagine that somebody carrying a big stick. Right. If you vote for them, I'm going to get you or you're going to lose your job. Right. Sometimes these these companies ran the whole county and everybody worked

for one company. And if you didn't vote the way you were going to lose your job or some, you know, somebody was going to tell, telling you. So there was these, all these powers before the stuffing occurred, right? You had these threats that if somebody found out that you voted or supported somebody else, you were going to lose your job. You weren't going to get the business opportunity. You were suddenly going to be investigated for something. And so there's all these other types of powers you can see from this, you know, like we, we told them, you better give me 80%.

And I carried a gun with me at all times, right? You could see these towers really pushing against the ballot box.

What's interesting is we're still seeing that now, actually. So like in New York, which was built on that machine intimidation structure, the political parties still run the boards of election. And for example, we're working with an individual who was trying to clean up the Brooklyn Board of Elections, and he's actually being framed, we believe, by the Brooklyn Board of Elections. They framed him for

these 22 ballots that were considered fraudulent, and they're now pressing charges against him when he was in there trying to clean things up and get things less manipulated. And so these things still exist, and I think that's what people are not always aware of. Okay, so here we go again. Laura, you're up. In 1948, that opportunity came, but it made the battle against Pappy Daniel look easy.

Johnson's opponent in the primary was the former governor, Koch Stevenson. Stevenson's deeply conservative politics and frontier image were enormously popular. He was fiscally frugal with the people's money and had supported all white primaries that excluded black voters from participating. He was known throughout the state as Mr. Texas. As the election approached, Gene Autry,

even considered producing a movie based on Stevenson's life. Defeating Stevenson in a Senate primary would take a miracle, or so it seemed. When Stevenson ran for the governorship, he received 85% of the primary vote. Part of his enormous margins of victory came from his support in South Texas from George Parr and the Patronus. George Parr had supported Stevenson in four past races, giving him nearly 97% of the vote.

But in 1948, Parr felt betrayed when Koch refused to appoint a Parr crony as district attorney in Laredo County. From then on, it was Lyndon Johnson who had George Parr's backing. On primary day in July 1948, the results were not surprising.

Stevenson beat Johnson by 71,000 votes and won 168 counties to Johnson's 72, although in six South Texas counties, including Duval County, Johnson won 98% of the vote. That's like Shah of Iran voting or Ayatollah Khomeini. George Parr had dutifully delivered his share of the vote to the Johnson campaign, but it was not enough to overtake the popular Stevenson. Yet the election was not yet over.

According to Texas law, a party nominee needed to win a majority of the vote, and since a third candidate, George Petty, had received 20% of the vote, Johnson was faced with Stevenson in a runoff election to be held in late August. George Petty's votes had come from very conservative eastern Texas counties, and Johnson had finished third in those counties, behind his opponent Stevenson.

That Democratic runoff proved to be one of the most contentious in historical memory, even by South Texas standards. A poll taken one week before the runoff had Stevenson leading Johnson 54 to 46% majority among likely voters. On election day, Johnson's campaign poured massive sums of money into highly ethnic areas such as the west side of San Antonio, where votes could be bought by the truckload.

In South Texas, Johnson's campaign was more vigilant than ever, especially in Jim Wells County, where Louis Salas was counting the votes. When Jim Holmgren, a poll watcher, demanded to look at some of the ballots he was sure Salas was taking from Stevenson and putting into Johnson's column, Salas had Holmgren put in the city jail. Wow.

And again, we're still seeing some of that. So I was a poll watcher here in the Brooklyn primary just now in 2026.

And I took photos of some of the illegal things that they were doing. Like they were seals from the election bags that were in the garbage. I took photos of that. I took photos and they had mixed copies of ballots with actual ballots while they were counting the ballots. I took photos of that. You're not supposed to take photos because they don't want people to see this stuff. So then I published those photos. And then when we came for the recount, they had me escorted out by security. I was not allowed to watch the recount.

because supposedly I had taken these photos. So, you know, they don't want the poll watchers in there a lot of times. And do you think things like that are incompetence or is that actual malfeasance? You know what I mean? Is it just like someone who's got bad training and is like breaking the seals or is that actual malfeasance?

I'd say there's a mix, right? There's sometimes incompetence and sometime maliciousness. But we've we felt like a demonization of all poll watchers. There's been like, you know, let's try to see if we can. We had our county judge blame a poll watcher for a election clerk having a heart attack and literally tried to say it was the poll watcher that caused this poor election judge to have this heart attack. And so there's this effort to kind of demonize

these poll watchers that are in there and we've had presiding judges threatened with arrest. We had a presiding judge in Collin County that said, hey, the machines had been failing all day long and they were putting it in box three or slot three and she wanted to examine the ballots. And the EA said, you look at those ballots, I'll throw you in jail. Crazy. Wow.

Okay, we're gonna keep going with the story here. And Dennis is, okay, go. So remember, we're at this election, the polls are closing. Soon after the polls closed, some of the outlines of the election came into focus. In the six counties that George Parr controlled in South Texas, Johnson won 93% of the vote. Although just a few weeks before, Stevenson had beaten Johnson two to one in San Antonio,

This time, the money that poured into San Antonio from the Johnson campaign had bought thousands of votes, enough to give Johnson a 500-vote lead. Other counties began producing overwhelming majorities for Johnson to the tune of five to one. Yet even with these figures, Stevenson still held the lead of 854 votes out of almost a million cast as the next morning dawned.

It would not be enough for Johnson's campaign to find a few more votes and overtake Stevenson like O'Daniel had overtaken him in 1941. Stevenson aides were likely to hold out any last-minute returns until they saw all that the Johnson team had up their sleeves. An aide to Johnson remembered it later, saying, We didn't rush the people in the counties where we had strong votes. We had hoped that they would hold back so the other side would have as little time to react as possible.

George Parr then announced to the election board that one precinct in Duval County had not yet sent in its final returns. Originally, Johnson's lead in Duval County had been in excess of 99%. How many more votes can you find? Oh, my God. But Parr improved upon that.

On an amended return, PAW reported an additional 427 votes, all but two of them for Johnson, which put the vote in Duval County at 4,622 for Johnson to 40 for Stevenson. Laura, you've got to unmute. You've got to unmute and start again.

By Sunday afternoon, Stevenson's lead had shrunk to just eight votes. And by nightfall, Johnson suddenly held a 693 vote lead thanks to various revisions. Stevenson decried the block voting in South Texas, yet expressed confidence of victory. With approximately 10,000 votes, ballots still to be counted, both camps were scurrying to find more votes. As the days passed, it looked as though Stevenson had prevailed.

Six days after the election, an eternity in political time, the unofficial complete returns gave Stevenson a lead of mere 113 votes. Then George Parr had one final trick at his disposal. When the Democratic Executive Committee met in Jim Wells County to certify its vote, every precinct came in as reported on election night, except for one.

In precinct number 13, Louis Salas's precinct, where he had manufactured a vote for Johnson of 765 to 60, the tally was now different. When one of the committee members read the totals for Salas's precinct, the new total was 965 to 60. In the interim, obviously one of George Parr's men had simply taken a pen and closed the top loop of the seven to create a nine.

With a stroke of a pen, Lyndon Johnson was in the lead by 87 votes. By about one hundredth of one percent, Lyndon Johnson was ready to claim victory. I can assure my fellow Texans, Johnson said in his victory statement, that I have won by a comfortable majority. Amid a swirl of allegations, Johnson was indignant.

Lyndon Johnson did not buy anybody's vote. George Barr was even more adamant, saying that the election in Duval was as clean as an election has ever been held. That's not saying much. An interesting footnote to the 1948 election came two decades later when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. Texas journalist Ronnie Duggar interviewed Johnson and inquired about the details of the 1948 election.

Duggar later recalled that Johnson retrieved a photograph of five men surrounding a ballot box marked 13. The men were law enforcement officials with guns and political figures with suits, including George Parr's cousin. With a grin, Johnson proudly showed the photograph to his astonished guest. Duggar wrote that the president held it forward to me with a kind of pride. Johnson said not a word and quietly returned the photograph to its hiding place.

johnson's need to show duggar the photograph that memorialized the stolen election speaks volumes of the culture that allowed elections fraud later louis salas the enforcer confirmed that the photograph was taken on the day of the runoff election before the polls had even closed and that picture is crazy isn't it you have that box there and it says ballot 13

Like they know exactly what they're doing and they're all like as proud as could be. That is pretty crazy. It reminds me, you know, there's an old joke about, remember Chicago Mayor Daley?

yeah yeah yeah so the joke is he's on a big ship and the ship goes down and they're all scrambling for life rafts and he jumps into a life raft with two other people with a rabbi and a priest and they realize they have no water and no food they only have enough for one person and they don't know how to determine you know going forward and the rabbi says you know i'll i'll sacrifice myself i'm happy to go to see my lord

And the priest says, no, no, no, no, no. You can't sacrifice yourself. It's me. I'll jump overboard. And Daley says, no, no, no, no. We'll vote. We'll take a vote. And whoever wins the vote will be the person who will get the food and the water and they will survive. So they took a vote. And Daley won 538 to 2.

I think what's really sort of the most haunting about this story is that Lyndon Johnson did go on to become president. And we're not telling the story of the presidential race here today

because it wasn't quite as juicy as this particular. The telling of the Duke of Duval, he really gets into kind of all of the seamy details. But those same techniques were absolutely used in the presidential campaign between Nixon. Well, that particular campaign between Nixon and Kennedy, Johnson was really controlling the votes in Texas.

he delivered the votes that Kennedy needed. And the same thing happened in Chicago. Daley delivered the votes that Kennedy needed in Chicago. And so you see this, it goes all the way up to the top. And that's, I think, one of the things that's most disturbing about it. And the irony, of course, is that Chicago is pretty Catholic. They would have voted for Kennedy anyway. I mean, I can't imagine that it wasn't. And it's also, yeah, it's a democratic city. I can't imagine that they needed to put their

finger on the scale that much. I think one of the most interesting things about this story was, did they look at the ballot box? Did they open that ballot box? The proper remedy would have been the judge says, okay, all the people that were in the polling location, Salas and all of his men, should have been hauled in before a judge. And that box opened up with the paperwork right before the judge and every ballot examined to make sure

that it was a legal valid ballot, but that box never was opened. It stayed closed the entire time. But what happened with that actually, there was a whole trial. So Stevenson took the case to court because he did believe there was fraud. And we didn't get into it because we just don't have time, but basically they got turned down. The judges said, no, we're not going to look at the ballot box.

And then Johnson was also working sort of the behind the scenes politics and made sure that the Democratic Committee was not going to investigate. So there was an attempt to have the courts intervene and it was not successful. And then what we find again is that that is continuing to happen. So in that case that I described to you in 2026, in the June primary, where we saw obvious irregularities

We did take the case to court. We did challenge it. And then the judge said, basically, there's no fraud here. These are just irregularities and there's really nothing worth looking at. Just move along. So we've actually taken that to an appeal now. So we'll be appealing that the appeals already been filed. And I will just pivot on that and say that's one of the reasons that we do encourage people to donate to us is just because we have

different cases moving forward in the courts right now. We actually have two different cases in court where we do believe that there were very concerning irregularities. And so we do encourage you to give us a donation. It is tax deductible and support us. You can find that at smartelections.us. So we're going to continue the conversation and we'll be back to have Dennis and Lori live and we'll talk about the work that they're doing now, which is really fascinating. That's coming up, so stay tuned.

Okay, I think we got everybody live, which is really exciting. That was pretty cool. Oh, I think Lori's having some tech issues, but I'm sure she'll get them resolved. You want me to try again, Lori? Let's try it. Can you see me? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, in the car. We absolutely can see you. So great to have you both here live. That was a wonderful story, like pretty intense. I like it.

yeah you just might want to be careful with your background noise there uh you might mute if you're not talking and i do want to just let people know the qr code that we've had up on the screen that is the qr code that takes you directly to our donation page so um if you're thinking oh my god these people are doing incredible work and i'm learning things that i've never thought about before don't we want to make sure these people are able to keep doing this incredible work that qr code will take you right to the place where you can help us out

And we're going to talk now about some of the projects that are currently underway. Dennis has a really fascinating novel that he's written and is producing as a podcast. And Lori is doing really great work in Texas. So, Dennis, do you want to just go first and tell us a little bit about A House Divided?

Sure. House Divided is an idea that I had and developed with my husband for a while. And then I went off and wrote a novel, an 800 page novel, which nobody would publish. And then I wrote a TV show pitch, which everybody loved and nobody would buy. And I let it go when I was like, what? I'm not letting it go. So now I'm making a fiction podcast and I'm actually going to be in L.A.

And I'm going to start recording some of the episodes and I'm hoping to get it out there. It is basically a dystopian, near future dystopian political thriller. And the idea is that the United States is divided between two countries, red and blue, and it comes about

Kind of because of a dare, someone raises the idea that the Democrats are planning a plebiscite. Democrats go, we're not planning a plebiscite. We're not doing that. And it takes on its own momentum. And suddenly politicians start going, well, maybe we can pivot and pitch this in a certain way to make it work for us. And they decide to go ahead and have the plebiscite, both sides thinking it's never going to pass. And lo and behold, it passes. And they actually have to honor it.

So in 2033, the country is divided between the ACS, the American Coalition of States in the North, the blue, and the FSA, the Federal States of America, which is the red state country.

my idea is one family the pakistan family is caught in the middle of this so they're actually literally divided this one house is divided and we have some members who live in kansas and some members in pennsylvania and some who live in brooklyn and my podcast and my novels about watching the family struggle to stay together watching the individuals struggle to figure out what they believe how those beliefs change how those beliefs evolve

And it's sort of a thought experiment that what if you let the blue state policies go as far as they wanted to the nth degree? What would happen? And so in my novel, The Blue State's Outlaw Driving,

They outlaw smoking, of course. They have everyone chipped, and everybody has to have their calories counted because they're providing your health care, so they want to actually be complicit in your health. And so you have calorie targets, and you have exercise targets. You have fat intake targets. If you go over your quota at the end of the month, your pay is docked. But they're taking care of all of your needs.

And on the red state side, they're going to do away with all sorts of Social Security, Medicare, any sort of state support, buses go away, everything is private capital, everything is private corporations, it's unregulated. And my idea is not to take a side, but to just show what happens when there's no debate, when there's no negotiation, when there's no

new ideas coming in from other places and the irony of course is that in the blue state side you're still going to have a right and a left you're still going to have you know more liberal and more conservative and the same is going to happen on the red state side and so in the blue state side there's this kind of like

um eco terrorist organization that wants to punish anybody who is responsible for global warming and they start winning seats in the parliament because the blue states become a parliamentary democracy and they actually start advocating the death penalty for anybody who is complicit in global warming including con edison any lawyer who works for con edison so i'm showing the extreme you know

length to which both sides can go. And the red state side, militias start to take over. Texas becomes the biggest power base. The federal government is a rump state. It doesn't really have any power. Texas is the mega state. They sort of like bring everybody into their orbit. Florida set itself up as its own sort of mega state and they try to get Louisiana in their orbit and Georgia in their orbit. So Texas and Florida kind of like

face off is these two mega powers and there's this internal struggle in the red states. It ends up in a civil war. I'm not going to tell you who wins, but it's a fascinating podcast and it's about this one character, Evan, who is, we're watching her evolve.

What is the evolution of a person's conscience? How do you believe what you believe? How are your beliefs changing over time? Who influences your beliefs? Do you change your beliefs as you get older? So that's what I meant to say. That's my idea.

Sounds really fascinating. And I feel like so relevant to our conversation here. We're talking so much about how we're trying to, you know, really reach out and build those bridges. And then you're really demonstrating what happens if those bridges collapse.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you really get to see kind of the extremes. It fits right into the messaging from today. And I do just want to let people know that Dennis is looking for funding for his podcast. So if that's something that people are interested in supporting, do you want to maybe let us know how people can reach you if they have funding for you or some ideas? Yes. I've got my website, DennisO'Hare.com. I'm also very, very active on Instagram. I'm O'Dennis, which is O-H-D-E-N-I-S.

That's my handle on Instagram. I've got the little blue check, so you know it's me. Yeah, and I'm... Say that Instagram again. What are you on Instagram? O-H-D-E-N-I-S. Odenis. Which is an old Jack Benny joke. Odenis.

Okay, I think we can get that up for people to take a look at. So take a screenshot of that if you're trying to reach out to Dennis and maybe have ways to support him. I sure hope you get that off the ground. I'm looking forward to hearing it. It really sounds fascinating. I've got a great cast. I've got Adina Porter, Gina Davis, Bill Collins and Adia Pard. I've got Jane Kaczmarek, Rachel Bay Jones, Anika Nani-Rose. Yeah, it's a great cast. You do have a great cast there. That's exciting.

then i do want to take a few minutes and just give lori a chance to talk a little bit about your work in texas lori we did one of the quizzes earlier telling people what a hash test was for the um logic and accuracy testing and i feel like you've done more work on that than anybody that i'm aware of all the research that you've done with us and s can you just fill us in a little bit about the research that you did

Yes. Um, you know, I, I actually, I can't wait to hear your podcast, Dennis. Um, fascinating idea. Um, I'm sorry, I'm coming from my car. My daughter had a play date that I dropped her off at, but, um, yeah, we, I went back and Doug, there's some great experts that have written, um,

about this hash test, including Dr. Andrew Appel, Jenny Cohen, Kim Zetter, and several others that really dug into the congressional record from 2008. And what it says is basically when these vendors present their system to the EAC testing laboratories, there could be malicious code already hidden in these systems.

And all this does is it takes a snapshot or a fingerprint at that time of certification. And so when the delivered product gets to the county, the county is supposed to say, okay, does this match what was certified at the federal level?

But it doesn't do anything to tell you whether or not there's malicious code on the equipment that's actually being used in the election. It's really a did anything happen or was another type of software uploaded on the delivered product since the time of certification. So there's some great experts out there that have written about this. And I think I have some put on X.

But in Texas, all over the state, citizen auditors and election workers have been present at this logic and accuracy test. And many times it won't match, there won't be a match, and other issues will come up. So it's good for

educational purposes, right? To go and attend the LNA test. I used to say this is worthless. What's the point? This is theater. But it has been a great opportunity for auditors to learn about the process and then communicate to educate the voters that, hey, this does not mean that this system is safe and secure from unauthorized access and manipulation. And it's really great for testing. But we had Brian Meckler, one of the Texas technical examiners,

in the state run this hash test on an ES&S. I think it was 6100 or 6110. In 2020, he wrote a report and he did not put the image that he was going to compare. He did not insert in the USB stick and he ran the test and ES&S had the system program to say everything's great. It's a match.

so so it's a positive basically it's saying it's fine not even running the test that's right and he found that it was some bugs and dr rappel uh wrote about this on his princeton blog and it was really scandalous jenny cohen uh read about it i found it in december of 2020 and it the way that brian meckler put it was that they found a bug and really minimized the seriousness of

what he had found. And so since then, you can go on the Texas Secretary of State's website and find a technical examiner report for all the various versions of ES&S and HART. And you also can find Dominion has been denied certification three times in Texas.

because their systems were not safe and secure from unauthorized access and manipulation. But you'll also find an ES and S heart systems also in similar ways do not meet

the same standards, so it's interesting why they're certifying ES&S and Hart when three times they've denied Dominion for similar or lesser reasons. So, yeah, it's been an interesting journey. Essentially, the hash test is theatrical and performative.

yeah and i feel like you've done so much research you also did public records requests and it seems to me one of the things you communicated to us was that that hash test was basically just meaningless because it was just providing a false positive false assurance that the software match they were doing that test that way in as many as 18 other states wasn't that the public records

Yes, correct. It was. And it was actually, I think, Jenny Cohen in 2020 got the records request that showed all the various states from the particular Meckler findings. And she linked those in her report. It was on who, what, when.

which is some sort of independent news organization, her article on there. But when I submitted my records request for information, the technical examiners were questioning ES&S saying that their script was written in plain text

Very easy. Watson, one of the examiners said it could be hacked in under a minute. And they were asking, you know, ES&S, why are you doing this? Why are you not putting encryption in and all these other stuff? And they said they'd take it under advisement. So really, and also they had lied, I'd say lied, deceived the Secretary of State saying that the issues that they found in Texas were just Texas specific issues.

And, and our secretary of state, at least election director, Christina Adkins, um, said, you know, Hey, you're being misleading here and called them out on it. So, um, I've got some of those on my at Lori on a farm, uh, on X. If you put, if you put in hash, uh, you may put, put some of those up and, and we'll have more of those emails, maybe added to a Dropbox so that you can read them because they're relevant to any state or County that has ESNs in there. And it's just amazing.

great to understand the process. It's, it's really theatrical and performative gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling. We tested it. We, you know, it's certified. Let me try to put that up. You said at Lori on a farm is your X tag. Yes. Okay. Let me put that up so people can find you there and make sure, just take a screenshot of that if you're trying to reach Lori. So just really appreciate all the work that you've both done. I think it's,

just great to see how people are following their passion and really

trying to improve the situation, whether that's by, you know, kind of enlightening us like Dennis is doing or actually like on the ground, boots on the ground work like Lori's doing. So we're so grateful to you both for being here. I have had the code up there. The code's been alternating. So sometimes the code will be to take you to smartelections.us. Sometimes it takes you to the donate link. And sometimes it takes you to the sign up for count the vote. This one is the sign up for count the vote.

And then this one now that I just put up, that's the donate link in case you want to support us. So if you get a QR code in the broadcast that's not the one you're looking for, just scroll along and I'm sure you'll find one that is the one you're looking for. So I just really want to thank you both and people know where to

i want to i want to thank you lulu and just tell everybody what a blessing it has been to work with lulu i've done the count the vote project with her um obviously i'm on the republican side of the spectrum and i worked with all of her poll watchers and went through that process and it was wonderful um everything

um it was just a great experience and lulu thank you for bringing us all together and everything that you're doing and um it has just been a blessing to know you and we're so grateful for your service to our country appreciate you laurie dennis thanks for coming my pleasure i feel like you guys are doing real work and i'm doing i'm doing play play work but uh i admire you both well it's all in there okay take care okay

So I want to do, we have a really great guest coming up, actually a bunch more really great guests coming up.

So next up, we're going to have Ken Bennett, who is the former Secretary of State of Arizona. But we're going to do a quick giveaway first because we said that we would be giving some stuff away. And so we'll do a quick quiz here. Ken, you can play along in the quiz also if you want. You can put your answers into the private chat, and I will take them under consideration.

So the first one that we have here. Oh, first, I should tell you what we're giving away. So this is something that's kind of unique. You will not be able to get this anywhere else because this is an original T-shirt from Smart Elections. It says Hammer Paper Ballots. It was our very original logo, our first logo. Jenny Cohn actually helped design it. That is kind of one of the election security products.

ex and Blue Sky advocates who tweets a lot on this issue and she helped me design it on the back. It says smartelections.us. You cannot get this t-shirt anywhere else. This is a one of a kind because we don't make them anymore. I have a medium and I have a large.

And I'm going to do a quiz here. So these are your quiz questions that we got, and they're going to get a little bit harder as we go along. So the first one I think should be pretty easy if you've been following this issue at all. Quiz question number one, what is the method of marking a ballot that most security experts recommend? And we'll take the first answer in the comments

What is the method of marking a ballot that most security experts recommend? And just checking if anybody is getting this.

T-shirt, free T-shirt. So if we don't get an answer to this question, then we'll come back. There we got one, by hand. That is correct. Marking a ballot by hand is the, yeah, now we got a few, but by hand is correct. Paper is good, but actually marking your ballot by hand, that is the method that security experts do recommend. And then of course, for voters who are unable to mark by hand or are not comfortable or need a little assistance,

We always have to have ballot-marking devices for voters with disabilities. Our friends in the disability rights community have a right to vote privately and independently, and we absolutely support, and it is legally required, to always have a ballot-marking device at every polling location, and we absolutely support that. But if you're able to mark by hand, that is what security experts recommend. Okay, so I've got a win here. Not the T-shirt yet, but first question from Stenographer.

So I'm just going to take a screenshot of that actually, so I don't lose track of Mr. Stenographer.

or Ms. Stenographer. Okay, now we're into our second question. Allison, you cannot win again. I'm sorry, you've already won once. You can play, but you can't win. Oh, stenography, that's Mark McAfee. Okay, great, I know how to find you if you win. And I do have a large T-shirt. Okay, so next up, our question number two. This is a little bit harder. Are there documented incidents of voting machines counting incorrectly and you have to name one?

and it has to be actual documented incident, not, well, I was kind of suspicious of something. So question number two, are there documented incidents of voting machines counting incorrectly? And anybody who wants to, Allison's still gonna play, love that. I like that spirit.

everybody's saying hi to each other anybody able to answer that question you've got to be able to actually cite a documented incident of a voting machine counting incorrectly it could be a few votes could be thousands of votes I I know a number okay Allison

but you're going to ruin it because you can't play. Now she's taken that one off the table. There are plenty documented. She mentioned Northampton, Pennsylvania. There are actually two separate incidents of voting machines counting incorrectly in Northampton, Pennsylvania.

There's one in 2019 where the ExpressVote XL miscounted tens of thousands of votes and declared the wrong candidate the winner. And there's also another incident that was very disturbing in 2023 where people recorded a vote for one candidate, but the machine actually showed them on their paper record a vote for a different candidate. And then they said, even though it was showing them that paper record,

the vote was actually counted for the person that they actually voted for. It was incredibly confusing. The audit was such a mess, and people actually started changing their votes because they were like, well, it's not showing me the right candidate, so then they actually may have voted for the wrong candidate. So that was 2023.

Oh, honestly, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to put up 2024 rigging because that's, I don't know that we have that documented. You'd have to be more specific. There was a lawsuit that we brought in 2024 in Rockland County where we did demonstrate there were affidavits for people who had their, who seemed not to have their votes counted. But I need more specifics if you're going to win the t-shirt. Here I've got one.

Denton County, Texas showed zero votes for Tallarico this year. Very interesting, Mark. Was that an actual documented problem when they went back and looked and there were actual votes for him? We've also got Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Cambria County, Pennsylvania was a huge mess in 2024. Absolutely. So I'm just waiting to know, Mark, for sure if that was documented in Texas.

If so, you've got two. Otherwise, Gromito gets one, and you've got one, and we'll go down to the quiz number three for the next one. Okay, so Mark, just throw that in the chat, in the comments, if you know for sure that that was documented. Oh, and then he says, yes, the voting machines had to be reprogrammed. Okay, so Mark McPhee, I had in the

I don't know how anybody could beat him now. He's got two votes going for the, he's got two votes, but we'll go ahead and we'll do the third question. Okay, the third question is the hardest one of all. Here we go. This is for the win. This is for the free T-shirt, free T-shirt with the old Smart Elections hand-marked paper ballot logo on it. I think you can see that.

Okay, and question number three is a little tricky. How do scanners count votes? So you fill in your little bubble and then you put it through the scanner, but technically, how does the mechanism work? Put that into the comments for the win to get the free t-shirt. Yes, we'd love, Mark's going to get the source for us.

for the problem with the Tallarico votes in Denton County. We like sources. We like things to be documented. Anybody who has an answer for our third quiz question? This question is, how do scanners count votes? Allison's going to sit on her typing hands. That's right. You already won. You can't be greedy, Allison.

I don't have anything yet. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and Ken and I are going to do the next segment from Deliver the Vote. Let's see. Read the votes off the ballot images they have created. Okay, Dale, I'm going to give you that. Read the votes off the ballot images they have created. That is actually the correct sequence.

the scanners take a photograph of your paper ballot and then they use that ballot image and then the way they do it actually is it's kind of like a spreadsheet so the think picture a spreadsheet format and where you mark your your circle for a candidate that might be sort of um a1 and then the candidate that you don't vote for that might be a2 and so if the scanner

after it takes the picture, pulling that information off the ballot image, it sees a circle in that A1 slot, it knows that's a vote for your candidate. If it sees a circle in that A2 slot, it knows that's a vote for the other candidate. So the scanner doesn't read the text of your ballot, and it's something that a lot of people are not aware of. So Dale won that one, but Mark is going to win the T-shirt.

No, I don't believe they use an algorithm. So Meow Browse, I don't think that's correct. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never, I don't believe that there's an algorithm involved when you're correctly counting ballots. Okay, so we are ready for our next guest. If he is ready for us, and we're going to talk about this segment of Deliver the Vote that is super fascinating. And this is,

Now we got to get rid of our quiz now. Okay, we're moving on from the quiz. And this is Ken Bennett. He is former Arizona Secretary of State. Ken, it is so kind of you to join us. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Lulu. Thank you for having me. And so we're going to read this section, which is, I think, one of the most brazen of the incidents in the entire book and fascinating. And I'm just going to let you take it away because I just, I love it. And I think it really speaks for itself.

Well, let me say I enjoyed Laurie and Dennis's story about what happened in Texas, but there were other areas of the country that found that elections had little validity for measuring the people's will. In 1855, a governor's election in Wisconsin displayed how a statewide election could be stolen, but a courageous court in Wisconsin took dramatic actions that demonstrated how fraud could be remedied.

On election day, the incumbent governor, William Barstow, again, this is in Wisconsin, 1855, defeated the Republican challenger Coles Bashford by a mere 157 votes out of over 72,000 cast. The election itself was relatively quiet. The real action took place afterwards. In Wapaka Falls, Wisconsin, for example, observers noted that 612 votes had been cast.

all but 59 of them for Governor Barstow. Yet the town had a population of only 200 citizens. A Republican newspaper congratulated the town for getting out, quote, all the voters, women, boys, babies, and all, unquote. When investigators looked into the returns from the town of Spring Creek, which gave Barstow a 91 vote majority, they were shocked to discover that

no such town existed in Wisconsin. Similarly in Bridge Creek, which gave Barstow a 76 vote majority, investigators learned that no one lived there or was even eligible to cast a vote. In all, investigators discovered hundreds of votes cast from fictitious locales for Barstow and that if all fraudulent votes had been duly thrown out by the state canvassers, Bashford would have won by over a thousand vote majority.

As Governor Barstow assumed office for another term, Republicans took the case to the state Supreme Court. In early 1856, the conclusive evidence was found in scrutinizing the returns from Spring Creek and Bridge Creek, which were supposed to be 60 miles apart. The official tear sheets or ballot sheets were not only from the same type of paper, but were from the same sheet

which had been torn in half when the forged returns were submitted. When the two sheets fit neatly together and proved obvious fraud, the Barstow administration was plainly in trouble. By late March, the details of the election were well known and the pressure was growing on Governor Barstow to resign. In the closing statement that the lead attorney for Bashford made, he spoke in dramatic language of the political culture that surrounded the election.

Quote, What is the condition of public morals in this state if such things are tolerated? It is a bitter and terrible reproach upon the whole state that any man could be found to claim the meanest and lowest office, even that of a dog killer, on such frauds as these. The court apparently agreed with this conclusion and overturned the results of the election, proclaiming that the Barstow government was guilty of, quote, gross maladministration.

An unrepentant William Barstow resigned, saying that he did so in order to save the state from civil strife, and Coles Bashford was quickly sworn in as the governor of Wisconsin. By giving the voters of Wisconsin the man who had actually won a majority of the votes, even four months after the election, the state Supreme Court exercised considerable political courage. Yet the court's action had far larger ramifications.

By carefully following the evidence and ignoring the barstow cries that too much time had elapsed since the election, the Wisconsin Supreme Court displayed how an independent judiciary can play a vital constitutional role in contested elections and can resolve them without regard to partisan motivations. In the process, the Wisconsin justices validated democracy itself.

That story is so crazy. I love that they were so blase blah about it that they just ripped the paper in half and put the votes for each town, each non-existent town into the mix.

And I have to say that some of my experiences are similar to that. Like when I was observing the Brooklyn Board of Elections, they do stuff that is just so ballsy and it's like,

They just know that nobody is gonna hold them accountable. So like, for example, I went to observe the audit and I couldn't see a thing because we were 13 feet away behind this chain link fence and a wall of equipment. And so we went into court and we said, we can't see, and it's not meaningful observation. And then the judge said,

she's got to be able to see like 13 feet is not going to do it. What, what is it going to be? And so they picked four feet that I have to be able to observe from four feet away. And so this is how ballsy they were. So we went in the next day with our court order to the audit to watch and they,

said okay they got out their tape measure we brought our tape measure they set up this table four feet it was like five feet away but i could see what they were doing it was fine and then they didn't count any they went to a whole dog and pony show setting that table up they didn't count a single ballot there they left that table empty and then they went and counted their ballots at the same table 13 feet away behind the chain link fence behind the wall of equipment where i couldn't see a thing with the court order

So yeah, we, we're still seeing it. And I just think it's such a, such a classic, one of the, one of the best anecdotes from the book. So, and you read it so well. Thank you so much. Thank you. And then I really want to talk a little bit about your background. You were a former secretary of state in Arizona. And while you were there, I know that there was a very close election that you had to oversee. Do you want to speak about that briefly? Yes. My, uh,

My first statewide election that I oversaw as a secretary in 2010, I became secretary in 2009. The first statewide election that I had to oversee, we had a ballot measure that was voted on statewide to about 2 million votes, and it was losing by 126 votes out of 2 million. It was the first election in the state's history that triggered the automatic recount of a statewide election, which was

if the results were 200 or less. So I had to call 15 county recorders and county elections director and tell them that we're gonna get all the ballots back out and enough machines to recount them. And I tried to sleep the night before I was gonna call everybody. And it occurred to me that if the second count was 99% accurate to the first count, 1% of 2 million ballots is 20,000 on a race decided by 126.

If it was 99.9% accurate, that's 2000. If it was 99.99% accurate from the first count to the second count, that's 200. So our second count could be 99.99% accurate to the first count. And I might be the first secretary of the state of Arizona to have to announce that we recounted an election and the result changed.

because 200 was obviously more than 126. But I called all the election directors and recorders. We recounted those 2 million ballots over the next week or 10 days, and it changed by 42. Instead of losing by 126, it lost by 168. And we reviewed every one of the almost 1,600 precincts in Arizona's 15 counties. And in 99.5% of the precincts,

The first count and the second count were identical. There were some onesies and twosies here. We ran into one precinct in Maricopa County where the difference between the first count and the second count was 30. So of the statewide change of 42 votes, 30 of that change occurred in one precinct. And so I called the county recorder and elections director. I said, ladies, what happened in precinct whatever?

And they called the people that worked at the polls. And finally, one election worker said, I think I know what happened. At about 11 o'clock on election day, we looked behind the ballot machine and there were all these ballots on the floor. Somebody had not set the door of the machine so that as the ballots fed in, they went down into the hopper. There were a bunch of ballots on the floor behind the machine. So out of an abundance of caution, we picked them up and ran them back through again.

well they double counted those ballots on election day and when they counted the ballots a week later during the recount that same mistake wasn't made so we identified what happened in that one precinct if you excluded that one precinct of a change of 30 out of a change of 42 statewide we recounted 2 million ballots and it changed by 12. now fortunately that still validated that the

the ballot proposition lost instead of losing by 126 it lost by you know 12 or 42 more depending you know but anyway close elections occur and even the story that i read about wisconsin uh barstow governor the incumbent governor barstow beating bashford by 157 votes out of 72 000

That's two votes out of 900. So if that was a county or if that was a city election and 900 people had cast a vote, it would have been 451 to 449. That's how close that election was. Now in the Arizona presidential election in 2020 that drew so much scrutiny, Trump,

lost to Biden by 10,300 and something out of 3.4 million. That's two votes out of 800. If that had been a little city and 800 people had cast their ballots, Biden would have gotten 401 and Trump would have got 399. That's how close some of these elections can be. And so when you have to recount elections to verify accuracy,

It's very important that every ballot is counted correctly. Yeah. And I have one question for you, and then I want to move into the proposal that you have that I think is very strong. When you did the recount with that race, when you were the Secretary of State, did you recount by hand or did you recount by machine? Arizona statutes say that they recount again by machine.

but they have to get the ballots back out, run them back through, and we recounted by machine. So we were recounting in the same way that we counted the first time, but out of 2 million ballots, it changed by either 12 or 42, depending on whether you include that one precinct in Maricopa that changed by 30. So the Arizona statute says you recount the ballots the same way you counted them the first time. And this is what I think a lot of people don't understand is that

These decisions like what type of voting machines we have, what type of audits we do, what type of testing has to be done, these are not a lot of times decisions that individual civil servants or elected officials or election officials can make. Those are most likely controlled by statute. The statute will tell you whether or not you can do a recount by hand

or if it has to be done by machine. The statute will tell you like, for example, in Florida, when they do a recount, they are not allowed to look at anything except undervotes and overvotes. Anything that was counted initially,

supposedly correctly by the machine. Anything that shows a vote, they're not allowed to recount it in Florida. So I think one of the things that's so interesting about the proposal that you have is it has a real sort of comprehensive sense to it about kind of checking every step of the process to try to see if things really look solid.

So we're going to step through this, and we won't take too long with each one, but I just want people to know Ken has really been on the forefront of trying to ensure that we have accurate elections, and he's also been a really good partner, like many of the other people that we've had

on the program who are working collaboratively across the political spectrum. And this is a five-step plan that they worked on, and they almost got it passed through the Arizona legislature. It was pretty close. I wrote a letter personally to the governor, I think, or it was the Secretary of State, I think it was the governor, just asking for her support not to veto it. But here we go. So this is the first step in a five-step plan that Ken is helping to design.

yeah the first step in verifying elections and being totally transparent is just to verify how many eligible voters there are um and then the second step is to verify how many the number of voters who voted uh now those pieces of information are already public information the voter files are public information there might be a few that are redacted because of law enforcement or judges or domestic violence victims or whatever but the number of voters registered are known

and public information. And then every time an election occurs, the number of voters who voted is known. And the third step is basically, as you put on the screen here, just verify that the number of ballots in that election matches the number of voters who you said voted in step number two.

Right. And then that is one of the things I showed this form earlier. That's one of the key training points in Count the Vote is we teach people to go into the polling place and check that the ballots match the number of voters. But what Ken is talking about is a much more global process where you would make sure that that's done in every precinct. You would make sure that it's done across the entire election. And then probably the most critical or I think the most critical step is number four, publish

the anonymous ballot images, as you said earlier, in your third question, how does a machine work? It takes a picture of a ballot. It's an anonymous ballot image at that point, but the votes on each ballot are recorded in a spreadsheet called a cast vote record. And the cast vote record has columns and rows. And so ballot number 500 that went through an election machine

The results from that ballot are on row number 500 of the cast vote record. And in column A, you can see if they voted for Smith and in B, you can see if they voted for Jones and in D, for Garcia. So step number four is release the anonymous ballot images and the cast vote record so that anybody, campaigns, the media, watchdog groups, anybody that wants to just verify the election,

can look at the ballot images and the cast vote record and make sure that it was done right. And some states are doing this. Ada County up in Idaho, the county that includes the largest city in Idaho, Boise, they work with a for-profit company that has produced a software system that publishes the anonymous ballot images and the cast vote record. And anybody can go in a few days after the election and see that everything added up right.

Right. Dane County, Wisconsin is putting them all online. But here in New York, it's illegal. They won't give them to us. One of the things in our court challenge that we went in and we said, well, you know, we had these questions about the election. The one that we challenged was also very close. And we said, well, let us look at the digital ballot images. And the judge said, no, it wouldn't give them to us. Absolutely wouldn't give them to us. And it was a sticking point in Arizona with the legislation, I know.

Well, the legislation that you spoke of that I got when I was a state senator a couple of years ago, I got it through the Senate and the House with bipartisan votes, Republicans and Democrats, and Governor Katie Hobbs, unfortunately, vetoed it. And I later found out that there were two voter rights groups that are kind of affiliated, I think more on the left, who convinced her that the

The ballot images and the cast vote record together would allow somebody to figure out how individual voters voted, but that is not the case. And we even had a provision in the legislation that said if a county had a very small precinct, any precincts under 25 could be grouped together in a larger temporary precinct so that you wouldn't be able to determine how two people voted in a precinct that only had two people.

and uh but so we we had a provision in the legislation to make sure that in very small precincts the anonymity of everyone's ballot was maintained but she still vetoed it unfortunately

Well, I think it's still remarkable. You got it through the House. You got it through the Senate in Arizona, which is a very divided state on elections. So kudos to you for all the work that you've done. And then one more step in that five-step plan. That's your last step. Yeah, the step number five is comparing the digital ballot images either to all or a random sample of paper ballots to make sure that nobody was manipulating the ballot images.

I mean, one way if you had an inside job going to manipulate an election, one way that you could is to program the equipment that when you found a ballot that you liked, you would take an image of that ballot and then substitute it for every 10th or 100th ballot thereafter. So step five is just a confirmation that you compare the digital ballot images to some or all of the paper ballots

to make sure that they're accurate. You would probably do that on a random sample, depending on whether you had a very, very close election. You might select every 10th ballot image and compare that to the paper ballots to make sure, or the 100th, you know, every 100th or whatever the numbers are for a limited risk audit. But compare some ballot images, the paper records to the digital ballot images to make sure that they were accurate.

So I think that's really remarkable. And as I said, very comprehensive. And I think it's just really important for people not to come out of this program and be really depressed and down and be like, oh, my God, we've had corruption forever. We're never going to, you know, overcome it. I think what's really inspiring.

is how far we've come since 1740. There have been generation after generation after generation of election reformers who have worked little by little to chip away at the corruption and to put in parameters that improve the fairness, improve the security,

And there's times when we do take big steps backwards. I think 2000, 2002, where we moved to all electronic voting equipment has turned out to be a huge mistake. There are a lot of people who predicted at the time that it was a huge mistake. There were computer security experts who testified before Congress, I think in 2002. We're computer security experts. We do not advise you to vote on computers.

So certainly there's always one step forward, one step back, maybe hopefully two steps forward. But I think the work that you're doing and other people on the program is very inspirational and really kudos to you for all you've done. Thank you. And same to you, Lulu. It takes individuals or groups of individuals around the country. The only thing that's ever changed the world is a handful of individuals stepping up and demanding change. That's it.

You know, when Arizona became a state in 1912, the original way of conducting elections then was you voted on paper. And after they counted the ballot, they punched a hole in it and put it on a string. And all of the counted ballots were on a string. And any citizen could come in after the polls had closed and look at the string of ballots and the tally sheet and make sure that they matched.

Wow. And that's essentially what my five-point, our five-point program, I'm doing it with John Brakey down at auditelectionsusa.org. Definitely, yeah. Shout out to them. That's essentially what we're doing or suggesting for today's elections. The digital ballot images and the cast vote record can be like a digital string where you have total transparency, you have the ballot images,

and the spreadsheet that the votes from those ballots were added up on, and just look at them. AuditElectionsUSA.org. AuditElectionsUSA.org. Let me fix that then. AuditElectionsUSA.org. Yeah, that's our friend John Brakey, and he's working with Ken, and they are doing terrific work, so do check their work out.

Okay, well, thank you so much for being here. And we are going to, I think, go to triumph the insult comic talk next. I think we need a little comic relief. Great to have you here, Ken. Thanks, Lulu. Okay, so like I said, I think it gets kind of heavy. You know, there's just like so much fraud and then it's so much work to think about how are we going to tackle all this and what are the reforms that are necessary. It can be kind of, you know, kind of a lot.

to think about Allison saying, love that story about the string. Absolutely agree with you on that one. That's a really interesting one. Hadn't heard that one before. If I had, I'd forgotten about it. And that again is the website where Ken works with John Brakey at auditelectionsusa.org. Okay, so I think,

I think we've got to go with triumph next. I just feel like we need a little bit of comic relief, don't you? So here we go.

This is our good friend Triumph the insult comic dog. I actually know Triumph because when I was working at NBC I would edit his videos and then he and I made these voter registration ads together that were hilarious. He would go around insulting people who didn't vote. I was directing these for VH1 actually and I wanted to do something different. I didn't want like those

I didn't want those ads that said like, Hey, you do your patriotic duty and vote because I just didn't feel authentic to me. But I thought comic, I thought triumph, the comic insult dog, insulting non-voters was something, you know, a unique, a fun approach. So Robert Smeagol and I have been friends for years and he was kind enough to say that he would come and support us here. So here we go. Here he is.

Greetings, Votapalooza. This is Triumph, reading on behalf of Smart Elections. The presidential election of 1868 was the first one conducted after the Civil War. The Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour was running against the Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant.

the former commanding general who led the Union Army in the American Civil War. Also, Ulysses S. Grant was buried in Grant's tomb. Horatio Seymour carried New York State by exactly 10,000 votes.

And a later House investigation concluded that the Democrats in New York had committed, quote, every known crime against the elective franchise. The famous boss tweed of Tammany Hall infamy later admitted that the Democratic machine went one step further. In order to, hold on, I got a beeper going.

Every time I get canceled, my phone rings. Okay, here we go. Silencer. There we go. In order to control the timing of the New York City returns to overcome the upstate totals, quote, one thing we did was take possession of the wires so as to keep them employed.

You see, Boss Tweed's machine telegraphed portions of the Bible to delay election returns until the appropriate time. Despite the fraud used in Seymour's behalf, it was not nearly enough to overcome the popular support for the former commander of the Union Army.

Grant garnered over 300,000 votes more than Seymour nationally and won the presidency by an electoral college of 214. Sorry about that. We lost his last words there, but it was great to have him here and we really appreciate him coming out. So we're going to go next to

something that we had referred to previously in voting. And we have Jan Bendor from Michigan Election Reform Alliance to talk about this. And so I'm going to go ahead and put that on. And that's a really fascinating anecdote as well. Ballot changing.

what a great invention for those who would like to cheat the problem of course is if you want to pay people for their vote you've got to have a way to confirm how they voted back in the old days you would just put in a ticket and you'd either put in one pre-printed ticket or the other and that was totally public but now

How do the vote buyers get around that? One way to get around the thorny problem is to use the chain ballot or ballot chaining. This system was designed to ensure that your purchase of the vote was reliable. The vote buyer can begin the process early

in the election day. And he would go to the polls and receive a ballot, but instead of depositing the voted ballot in the box, he would slip a blank piece of paper in the box and carry the real ballot outside. And this would be easier if you had a nice big raincoat. When a prospective vote seller arrived,

The buyer would mark the ballot and give it to the voter to take inside. The voter would deposit the marked ballot in the box, bringing a fresh unmarked ballot back out to the vote buyer who would then pay the voter. When the next vote seller appeared, the process was repeated. And this has been modernized.

by people who drive around in vans and actually pick people up and offer them a ride to the polls. And then once they have them in the van, they offer them this opportunity to get a payment, usually in something like whiskey. When I lived in West Virginia, mountain liquor was the coin of the realm.

And so you would give people generally a pint, maybe even a quart in a very important election. And that was what they would get when they came back out with the completed process. It's still going on. I live in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where many people live who are descendants of in-migrants from Appalachia.

And so they brought their customary methods of voting with them. And during the first 30 years I lived here, I actually saw this happening. I actually talked with candidates who used it. So it's not such a wild idea. It has actually worked. I'm Jan Bendor, and this is my story about

election chaining.

Okay, we're just going to try that again. Sorry about that. Okay, so Jan Bandore, who was just with us, is from the Michigan Election Reform Alliance, and she is really a legend in

a legend in election security circles. She's worked for years on so many different fronts. She was a former election official. They audited different elections. They worked on legislation. She's really done so much, so much meaningful work there. So we really salute her and are honored that she was willing to come on here and share the information with us.

And then our next guest also, I'm really honored to have with us also somebody who's been working on these issues for years and years. So I'm going to introduce you to Susan Pynchon. See if I can get her on here. Hi, Susan. Hi, Lily. I love Susan. Susan is the founder of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition. And I believe I might even have a banner that has your website. Is that okay if I put it up? Sure. Okay. I think that's great.

FFEC.org. There's wonderful information there. They've done so many wonderful reports. I think that Susan is perhaps one of the most knowledgeable people about Florida elections of anybody on the planet, maybe along with Ian Sancho. But she's really done so much research there. And what she's going to do today is to read us a section about women's suffrage. Are you good with that?

Yes, uh-huh. Okay, that's great. Then this is again from Deliver the Vote by Dr. Tracy Campbell, the same book that we've been reading from all along. I will again continue to show my copy here, Deliver the Vote. It's well-worn. And this is a section on women getting the right to vote from Deliver the Vote. And we just had Women's Suffrage Day, I will say, on August 26th, the day to celebrate women's suffrage, the right to vote.

So this is the section from the book called Women's Suffrage. The constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote was ratified in 1920, but the individual states themselves were often headed in the opposite direction, taking steps to disenfranchise millions and make voting more difficult. Literacy tests, poll taxes,

lengthening residency requirements, and provisions prohibiting non-citizens from voting were adopted. Local politicians and city bosses were obviously not supportive of women's suffrage, in some part due to paternalism, but also because an enlarged electorate was much harder to manipulate and control. Either way, as the suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt understood,

fraud was a major factor in some of the early defeats of women's suffrage. In Wisconsin and North Dakota, the ballots for the suffrage issue were a different size and color than regular ballots. This could be used by opponents to effectively control the vote. Kat's experience had taught her a vital lesson about American politics. There was no, quote, there was no protection against fraud on election day

for a measure unsponsored by the dominant party, and that after fraud, there was no redress." But the movement for women's suffrage was too well organized to quit. And with the support even of President Woodrow Wilson, the ratification process took flight. When Tennessee approved the measure in 1920, the amendment was secured. So that is the section from the book.

And I will say my birthday is Women's Suffrage Day. So I always feel, I mean, of course, I feel a special affinity anyway, but it makes it special. That's nice. I think the women's fight for the right to vote, I think, is something that inspires me. I would say even on a daily basis, because I know that the two leading women who fought for the right to vote did not actually ever get to vote because the fight went on for so long that they died

before they were able to vote. I think that's Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton. I don't think either of them ever got to vote. But I do appreciate their efforts every day because I know because of the work that they did, even if it must have felt like frustrating and hopeless at the time,

it means the world to me that I can vote today. And so I do really keep that in mind. It's sort of similar, I guess, to Martin Luther King Jr's statement about the long arc of history, but hopefully it bends towards justice.

And then I want to ask you, Susan, you wanted to tell me a little bit about the work that you're doing in Florida, particularly right now, some of the observations that you did in Volusia. We've been working with Susan also in our Count the Vote project, and she's been very supportive and helped out train one of our observers in Florida. Again, I'm going to put up that QR code if you want to sign up and be a Count the Vote observer. That is the QR code to do that.

Tell us a little bit sort of about your experience in Volusia County and some of the other counties there. Well, I live in Volusia County, and I went in to observe during this election. I was very disappointed. Well, you've had an observer from the count the vote group. We ended up going on different days. But when I was there, I was the only observer, which, you know, we need.

It's really interesting, everybody. Get out and, you know, you can go to your, at least in Florida, you can go to your precinct at 7 p.m., anybody. You don't have to have signed up as a poll worker. And you can watch them actually close up the precinct. You can take pictures of those final poll tapes. It's really interesting. Or go to the elections office and you can sit and watch the canvassing board, watch them go through the duplicated ballots or the audit or

It's really very interesting. Anyway, Volusha, I'm so proud of my county because the supervisor of elections is so transparent in everything she does. It's a big open room. You can see everything. We're allowed to sit about five feet from the canvassing board, which is what they call the elections board in Florida.

You can ask questions. They're very courteous. They're responsive. They answer all your questions. They have big monitors set up so you can see the ballots being duplicated. You can see the questionable signatures being reviewed. Everything's really very open. We have a number of problems here in Florida. There's not time to go into them, but I could just categorize them as. And by the way, I do work with John Brakey and Ken Bennett also.

trying to help them in Arizona. And they're doing great work there. But in Florida, I think people probably know this, but when you vote on a digital voting machine, which almost every voting machine is now, it takes a picture of your ballot. And the votes are counted from the picture, not from the ballot itself, not from the paper ballot. So that picture is part of the chain of custody of your vote.

If you were to sequence, you know, you put your ballot in the machine, the machine takes the picture, then the picture is where the votes are counted. But in Florida, most of the big counties are destroying those pictures, destroying the ballot images. So I've been part of a lawsuit for eight years now to try to force, it's a long, you know, tortured process. But we have very good attorneys.

And Miami-Dade County has just agreed to save ballot images, mostly really because it's a new supervisor of elections and she believes in transparency. Another big county, Lee County, based on my correspondence back and forth with them in discussions, has just agreed to save ballot images. But we have a long way to go on that.

The other big problem we have here, do I have time a little to tell about another problem, or are we on to our next? You could tell one more, and then I want to talk a little bit about, we had an observer in Manatee County that I want to talk about also. So yeah, go right ahead, Susan. We're thrilled. Okay. Well, Florida in 2004,

There were 938 overvotes statewide. An overvote, as many of you know, is when you, and it's almost always an accident. People vote for too many candidates in a race, usually because of bad ballot design. They think they have to vote for two and they're only supposed to vote for one. And when you do that, you lose your vote because nobody can determine which candidate you actually wanted.

So in Florida, we have a big overvote problem in both the presidential race and the gubernatorial race. And in 2004, when we had the old Diebold optical scan machines, again, there were 938 overvotes statewide. When election systems and software came in with the digital scanners, that number went up to 14,999. So basically, 1,400% increase.

essentially. And they've been high ever since. And the state, which Florida has to produce an overvote report after every major election, they've never acknowledged that this is a problem. And it's because our ballot says, vote for one governor and lieutenant governor, or vote for one president and vice president. So new voters, voters, inexperienced voters,

any voter, really, can misinterpret that to think they're supposed to vote for two names on the ballot, governor and lieutenant governor. They know who they want for governor. They don't know the other names, but they think they have to vote for somebody else. The machine's supposed to stop that. When they put their ballot in, Florida law says it's supposed to kick the ballot back, reject it, and then the poll worker comes over, explains they've overvoted. They have to redo their ballot so that they can get their vote. What it does now, and then I'll stop, Lulu, but

It's amazing what this does. There's a little touch screen on top of the tabulator with these two big circles show up. A green circle with a check mark and the word accept and a red circle with a big X across it and the word reject.

And the voter is supposed to press on either accept or reject. And in little tiny letters above it, it says, you may have overvoted in one or more races. Number one, most voters don't know what an overvote is. Number two, they're standing in line. People are waiting. They're feeling embarrassed because something's not right. They don't know what it is. And they have to pick accept or reject.

Well, when you put your quarter in the Coke machine and it says accept or reject, you put accept because you want to get your soda. And people push accept. Everything stops. They walk away and they just lost their vote. They think everything's fine. I think it's really important for people to understand the complexity of the election process. I think that most people don't think about it.

And I know that most voting rights groups don't think about it. And the way that I usually, I have a couple of different ways of expressing this. One is we divide kind of the voting, the election process into three stages. There's the kind of,

The before voting stage, which is we call that kind of like the beginning, the middle and the end stages. And if you talk about the beginning stages of voting, that's generally where all of the voting rights groups concentrate. And that is getting voters to the polls, making sure that they're not purged if they're eligible, making sure they're not bullied, making sure the lines aren't too long.

That's really the beginning of the voting process. But I would say like 90% of the effort of voting rights groups goes into that process. Then there's the middle,

and the middle of the process, which is how the votes are actually counted, which is highly technical. There's electronic poll books. There's usually at least one, if not two voting machines involved. It could be that you fill out your ballot by hand and there's one scanner. It could also be two machines, one that creates the ballot, a computer and a second computer

that tabulates the ballot, then those votes are transferred onto flash drives, which look like those drives that you keep your photographs and stuff on. People have no idea, but this is generally where most of our votes are stored, either in a little compartment, like a little

computerized, it's called like a PMD, a portable media drive, or sometimes they're SD cards now, but that's your votes right there. And then those get transferred into election management systems, which are sometimes often connected to the internet. Those election management systems then are connected to state and county websites and media outlets and election reporting.

companies and there is a lot of Internet connectivity, especially on that back end, as huge bulk numbers of votes are aggregated. And so that's like the middle and the back end. The middle is kind of that part in the voting location where your votes are coming in, like, you know, and they're being counted on the machines or you maybe you mail in your ballot and it's being scanned on the high speed scanner. And then what we call the real back end

is all that stuff I talked about where the election management systems connect to all these different locations. These are the types of things that we teach people to pay attention to. The way that most voting rights organizations think about votes, it's as though after you vote, your votes are counted by magic elves. That's really the way we approach it.

There's just magic elves and they never make mistakes because they're magic and they're elves. You know, elves don't make mistakes. And so it's so important like for people to understand that there have been individuals like Susan Pynchon who have worked for decades to research and understand the election process in detail. And these people want to pass their knowledge on to you.

They want you to become informed. They want you to get involved. They want you to learn as much as they've learned

because we need these type of oversight processes all over the country. And that is what Count the Vote is about. And that is why we want you to get involved. And that is why we also want you to donate to us. So that QR code is if you want to sign up to be an election observer. And then this QR code is if you'd like to donate to us. And if you don't mind, Susan, I'll just show you a few of the documents that I think are kind of interesting.

We actually had an observer who went to Manatee County, Florida, who was trying to observe the audit. And one of the things that we find is that one of the big obstacles to transparency, to oversight, to confidence in the election results is that there's a lot of running around that people are sent on there. And we don't know if it's deliberate.

or if it's just poor management or nobody really cares to make sure that these processes are transparent. So we we started weeks in advance trying to find out about the audit in Manatee County. We were told it was going to be on August 27th. So that was just like two days ago.

We called. We couldn't get anyone to answer the phone. Our observer left a voicemail message. No one called him back. There was really not much information. There was an address on the website. He went to that address at 9 a.m. on the 27th, which was the information that we had. Then he was told, oh, no, that's the wrong address. Now he had to go to another address. He went to another address. It was 1015 by the time he got there. When he got there, they said, oh, the audit's done. We finished.

I said to you, I mean, he's calling me and texting me throughout all this, which is just to tell you that these observers need support. They're confused, they're running around. And that is part of what the donation that you're giving us is going for is to hire more people to really give individual observers the support and the training that they need. So he's like right now, I'm doing a lot of the support. Phillip's calling me, he's texting me and he's,

He eventually did at least get the documents. And then I want to show you the documents that he received, and there's quite a few discrepancies in them. And so I think that it's good to realize that even if you have one observer, they can still find out really important information.

I think this is, let me see what we have here. Yeah, I might be able to blow this up a little bit, but this is the document that he received. And if you look, you can see there's this system. That's the clear ballot system. And you can see there's a column that says difference. First one, it says comparison system. That's their original system. And then are you able to see that? Is it big enough that you can see that column that says difference?

Is it too small? Let me see if I can blow it up at all. I might be able to blow it up. While you're doing that, could I quickly just explain that Florida, many of the counties in Florida now have an auditing system where they run the ballots through the original voting system and then they have purchased a completely separate voting system from a company called Clear Ballot. It's a system that's been certified by the state of Florida that then, and they rerun all the ballots

The law only requires 20%. My county is doing 100% of the ballots are rerun through the second system to confirm the election results. And this is what you're seeing in front of you now that Lulu is showing you.

Right, although it does vary. So if they're doing a recount of any race, they don't have to audit any of the others. So there was one county we were trying to observe, and they said, oh, we're not doing an audit because we had to do a recount. A recount of one race meant that they didn't audit anything. So here on this left column tab system, comparison system, I've got it blown up big. You can see that. That's their original ES&S scanner. And then you can see the clear ballot, the system. That's what they're comparing. And you can see the difference.

And then you can see here that the results actually were not identical. So you can see here, I blew it up, so now you can't see the races as much. So if you go down a little bit, you can see these are different races. This is financial officer, commissioner, state senator. And then you can see in the difference, plus one, minus one, minus one.

And then I'll blow it up again so you can see those differences more. I'll jump down to the next page. Plus one, minus one, plus, plus one, plus one, plus one, minus two, plus one, minus one. And this was just signed off on. There's no further investigation as far as I can tell of these discrepancies. And granted they are just, you know, one and two votes, but in theory, those,

scanners are supposed to be tremendously precise and also if one is more precise than the other you would think that most of the differences will be in the same direction we've been told the clear ballot scanner is more precise so I would I was expecting to see all the differences mostly in one direction meaning all the clear ballot counted you know more marks it saw the mark but I did ask my county about that because you had mentioned that to me

And they said on the clear ballot, when clear ballot scans the ballots, if someone has, say, spilled coffee on their ballot or has put a stray mark, clear ballot might call that an overvote because it's seeing a mark where the SNS system is not as sensitive and doesn't see it. So that can explain the difference between the plus one and minus one. But I'm actually going to go in and look at some of the differences and some of the, you know, but

I was actually really pleased with that because even in a hand recount, you always have discrepancies, right? Those machines are just not perfect. They're not perfect. That's why we have recounts. What bothers me is that they're presented as perfect. We're told that the machines are tremendously precise. And then I spoke to Ion Sancho.

who many of you know was a former Florida election supervisor of elections. And he said, speaking to one of the vendors, he was told that the high-speed scanners especially are not precise at all. And they're counting millions of votes all over the country, the mail-in ballots. So I think it's just, we want this awareness that some of what we've been told, oh, the machines are always precise, or the machines always count exactly correctly,

Really, that's gaslighting. That's a fiction. And what we want is for you to get in there, get involved and learn more about the specifics of your elections. I'd like to know why there's differences in each one of those little races, because each one of those races meant something to someone. Those people put a lot of heart and soul and ran for office and they deserve to have confidence that the votes are accurate.

Right. And well, of course, that is the beauty of the system. If it's that close, if the race had been lost by one or two votes, there would have been a complete, you know, well, in Florida, we only count the overvotes and undervotes, but it would have been a manual recount or machine recount. But I think if the ovals were filled in perfectly by voters, the machines might be way more precise. But ballots come in in all, you know, they come in folded and folded across the oval.

People do spill things on their ballots, and they do have stray marks, and they write a phone number accidentally when they're on the phone. Anyway, but yes, Lulu, let's pursue that, and I will pursue it in Volusia County so that we can have a better idea what happened. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, Susan. Thank you. Thanks for doing this, Lulu. It's great. My pleasure.

Okay, so we're going to remember in the beginning we showed some of the sections that Dr. Campbell wrote about black suffrage, and I said we would come back and do another section on that. So I think that's what we're going to do right now. This is a further section about what it was like for

Black voters trying to vote after the Civil War and how incredibly violent and difficult that process was for them. And we have a few different readers here. We have two influencers. We have a woman named Boss Legs. I have to say she's one of my favorite influencers because she always speaks her mind, very passionate. And Kiki Salmon, who's also really great and is out there fighting for fair elections. Really appreciate both of them.

So let me see if I can get these queued up for you. Just give me a second and we'll be playing these for you. This is excerpts from Deliver the Vote by Dr. Tracy Campbell on black suffrage following the Civil War. This is Boss Legs.

I'm sorry, I'm just going to try that one more time. I'm not quite sure why I'm not getting her full screen. So let me just try taking that out and then back in. Okay, we're going to go back to the beginning of that one.

The presidential election of 1868 was the first one conducted after the Civil War. The way in which the contest was held in Louisiana displayed how free and fair elections were little more than a farce in the Deep South. Riots soon broke out along partisan and racial lines. For weeks, armed groups of whites roamed the parish and flicked the terror on blacks.

One New Orleans newspaper reported that over 100 free women were killed during the riots, while a state investigation claimed over 200 deaths. The violence produced the desired results on Election Day. Although Republican gubernatorial candidates had received over 2,500 votes seven months before, Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant did not receive a single vote from St. Andrew Parish.

The registration supervisor put it in chilling terms. I am fully convinced that no man could have voted any other than the Democratic ticket and not have been killed inside of 24 hours. Can you hold your space?

The story of the presidential election of 1868 continues. Throughout Louisiana, threats of similar violence were heard in the days leading up to the election. In Bolsier, Paris, riots killed 160 people. In Cato, Paris, estimates of the number of African Americans murdered during the 1868 election ranged from 185 to 300.

Between the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction, more African Americans were murdered in Cato Parish for election day activities than for any other reason. Even with federal troops on guard, three freedmen were murdered near Monroe, Louisiana. Now, in the six months preceding the election, over 1,000 African Americans were killed in Louisiana. In that same period, Democratic vote totals more than doubled.

Throughout Louisiana, state workers were threatened with losing their jobs if they did not vote for the Democratic presidential candidate Horatio Seymour. Through such intimidation, the results were predictable. Seymour carried Louisiana 80,225 to 33,225. Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, received just one vote in Bozier Parish, although 2,000 Republicans were registered.

Considering that the Republicans had won more than 69,000 votes in the April 1868 governor's race, violence and intimidation had obviously stolen the state race for Seymour.

When a joint committee of the Louisiana General Assembly investigated the election, they found that the so-called election in parishes which were in a state of anarchy was no election, and so-called returns from those parishes were null and void. The state's electoral vote was thrown out. When terror was not used, more subtle tactics worked. Democratic poll officers repeatedly challenged black voters to pay poll taxes.

although the governor had declared that a person's ability to vote could not be challenged on the grounds of non-payment of taxes white voters who had paid no such tax were allowed to vote in pike county a notary named joseph youngblood warned if something is not done for the protection of loyal freedmen they will be forced to abandon the ballot box so

those are obviously painful memories from the past and then to sort of bring us forward today we have an election official actually uh keisha skipper who is currently a candidate for westchester county legislators and for the west west uh westchester county legislative board of legislators

here in New York State. And she was a voting machine technician for 10 years working at the Westchester County Board of Elections. So you can really see, again, we talked about progress over time from not being able to vote. And now Keisha was actually running the elections and now she's running for office. We don't endorse candidates, but we do like for people to know when we have candidates that are really strong on

election security. One of the things that Keisha did that is so remarkable is that we have legislation that we've been trying to pass for years in New York to outlaw voting machines that count votes that are encoded in a barcode. And Keisha was able to get the state chapter of the NAACP to endorse that legislation.

And she was a tremendous advocate in that. So we're really grateful to her and all of the work that she's doing. And so now we're going to have her again. She's reading from Deliver the Vote. And this is a passage which is about a particular type of fraud that was used in voting machines. We're transitioning now to talking more about the actual voting machines. And this is one that was

very, very clever that I think you will appreciate. Hi, I'm Keisha Skipkin, and in 1856 in San Francisco, investigators looking into a local election found an ingenious device that no doubt swayed many races. Ballot boxes deployed across the city used secret compartments that contained sliding doors.

After conducting an otherwise legal election, election judges could then merely slide open a secret door and deposit hundreds of fake ballots and hide the real ballots. One election supervisor, James P. Casey, mysteriously won an election to the Board of Supervisors, even though he had never been a candidate for office and his name was not even on the ballot.

So there you go, kind of the tricks of the trade described there by Dr. Campbell in Deliver the Vote. And now it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Walter Dougherty to join us. He is an election security expert. And Dr. Dougherty, would you just tell us a little bit about your background? We really appreciate you being here. Well, glad to be with you, Lulu, and everyone who's online.

My background and training is in mathematics and computer science. I taught computer science and engineering for 37 years, the last 32 years at Texas A&M University. And then after I retired in 2019, I thought I would have an uneventful life. And then 2020 happened and people started sending me data from elections and saying, would you take a look at this? And I've been doing that ever since and still am.

Thank you so much. I'm sorry, I'm just catching up in the chat, and I can see that people were saying that we had an echo. So can you, people who are listening now, can you just let us know, has the echo been resolved, or are we still having echo issues? I'm not quite sure why. We only had two speakers on last time. Anybody just throw in the chat?

If the echo is gone, echo is good now. Okay, I'm sorry about that. I'm not quite sure why we had the technical difficulties there and I apologize. So we'll have Susan Pynchon back on another time and we'll go through those points of information. So what we're gonna be doing now is reading from a text where Dr. Campbell started his research for the book

in 1740 and he takes it up to 2004, which is just sort of kind of the beginning of the electronic voting machine era. And so we've asked Dr. Dougherty to read the section that is written in Deliver the Vote on that and then afterwards kind of bring us more up to date about what sort of some of the current issues are with electronic voting machines and where the fight over electronic machines stands now. Does that sound like a good plan? Yes, that's fine.

I'll read this passage and insert a couple of comments along the way and then discuss it more thoroughly after I finish this section of the Deliver the Vote book. Okay, we welcome that. This is from Deliver the Vote. Many of the nation's leading computer scientists and engineers began pursuing more secure election systems.

They came up with a straightforward solution to verifying the accuracy of a vote. The touchscreen machines could print a paper receipt that the voter would check to ensure that his or her vote had been recorded correctly. The receipt would then be deposited in a ballot box. So just one comment here.

the impetus for computerized voting machines was really the hanging chad debacle of 2000 and then that resulted in the help america vote act of 2002 that encouraged states to move to computerized voting systems and away from lever

based systems or punched cards so in fact the purpose of the heva act it says the purpose of this is to move away from punched cards so that was that was the big impetus so even though that was 2002 the touch screen machines these are sometimes called direct recording electronic machines

allow the user to make their choice on a touch screen or in some cases with some buttons and a dial. So it displays the ballot on a screen and then the user either touches it or turns a dial to the race they want to vote for and pushes a button for the candidate that they want to select. And the reason it's called direct record or direct recording electronic system is that

The selection the voter made is counted in computer memory. So even though the device may actually print out a piece of paper for the voter to check that the selections that they made were recorded accurately, in many cases, the numbers that are used are simply what was in the computer memory. And as you'll see when I read further down this packet,

this passage, that's easy to manipulate because it's simply a computer program. So now back to the reading from Deliver the Vote. In a recount, the paper receipts would serve as the ultimate source for verifying the true count. But the history of American elections clearly shows that whenever technology creates new safeguards against fraud,

The manipulators, bribers, and intimidators find ways to adjust. Hackers would have little difficulty programming a machine to record a vote for X every so often when it was actually cast for Y, and it would take little more trouble to add in a corollary that a printed receipt for Y would be issued along with it.

with apparent proof in hand of how he or she had voted, the voter would be all the less likely to suspect something was amiss. So even though a piece of paper may be printed and the voter may verify, yes, that's the candidates I selected, if the computer is recording it directly in its memory, then that's what counts, not the piece of paper that the voter verified.

So the direct recording equipment was first used in an election in 1975 in Illinois. And after the HABIT Act of 2002 provided some funding for states to purchase computerized machines, the percentage grew until by 2006, more than a third of vote

across the country, voters across the country were using direct recording electronic devices. New York State was kind of a laggard because they were still using a lot of lever machines, even in 2006. But as was pointed out in the passage in the book,

It's simply a matter of programming as to what actually gets counted or if the person's vote gets flipped or deleted according to how it was programmed. And here in Texas, there were actually multiple instances where a voter made a selection on the screen, verified it because it was a multi-page ballot,

And if while the final screen was displaying that was slowly because this was old computer technology, it was slowly displaying on the screen. If you are finished verifying your ballot, then press the button to accept it. If you touch any button while it was printing out that last message, it would flip votes. And so Texas banned direct recording equipment and

There's still about 10 states that use it. I think the state of Louisiana does, and Salt Lake City and County, which is, of course, the largest jurisdiction, and Utah is still using the REC recording equipment. But the vulnerability that was described in this book that existed in 1975 still exists here 50 years later.

Back to the passage, the last paragraph I'm going to read. In 2004, the Pentagon tried to implement an internet absentee voting system for the upcoming general election. In January, a panel of computer experts determined that this system was, quote, inherently insecure and should be abandoned, end quote.

It combined the two most vulnerable areas in modern election fraud, absentee ballots and the internet, in a system that could produce, in the expert's opinion, a catastrophic result. Secure internet voting, the panel concluded, is an essentially impossible task. So that statement was true in 2004 of the time that this book

describes uh it's still true today and there is a growing uh drumbeat to try to move to either internet voting or mobile phone voting so let's make it more convenient for people to vote that they can just log on to their computer on the internet or they can

just get an app on their phone and vote on their phone. This is a horrible idea, as it was in 2004, because it just adds additional vulnerabilities to the process. They can vote as many times as they want to on their phones, you know, right? Well, particularly when you have fake registrations. So you talk about the before, middle, and end part of an election,

The before part and one of the reasons that 23 states are refusing to turn their voter rolls over to the Department of Homeland Security is, in my opinion, because they know that their voter rolls have a lot of fake names on them. So in one case in your state, in New York, one of the researchers discovered that fake names were being registered by permuting the middle initial. So my middle initial is C. So there's a Walter C. Doherty,

registered. And then someone would go in and register Walter A. Dougherty, Walter B. Dougherty, Walter D. Dougherty, down to Walter Z. Dougherty, and now there are 25 fake names that they can fill out 25 fake ballots for and put them in a drop box. Yeah, there's so many things that you're talking about that really bring to mind the work that we've been doing and

connects directly with the things that you're talking about and the work you've been doing. So for example, one of the things that we covered in one of our substacks was this very bizarre voter roll file in Bexar County, Texas. And Dr. Presley was very interested in this also. She's another expert that we work with from Texas. And Lori Gallagher, who was on previously, was very involved in researching this. But there was something bizarre about these voter rolls where

Each voter had been assigned, I believe, from five to six different voter IDs. And then each ID had been given a kind of a subsequent address. So like one Cherry Lane, two Cherry Lane, three Cherry Lane, four Cherry Lane, five Cherry Lane. So they had like a whole set of addresses and voter IDs for basically the same voter. It was always the same voter name there.

And then those voters were intermingled with other voters that did not have that repetitive process. And we sent that to Dr. David Jefferson to look at, who's somebody who's done a lot of work at DEF CON. And he just was plain blunt about it. He said, that is definitely fake data.

was just no question in his mind that somebody was clearly trying to manipulate the voter rolls in some way in order to take advantage of the system so we are actually finding very specific examples of what you're talking about i do think it's important to mention i do think that there's privacy issues and there's a lot of tension between the state control of elections and the federal government control of elections and i think we have to be sensitive to that and be aware of that these are not

easily solved issues, but we also cannot discount that there are actually problems with these systems, and the research and evidence has shown that over and over again. Well, that's exactly right, and another example is in Florida, there were ballots that were mailed out to non-existent addresses on Red Belly Road,

So when the post office said, undeliverable, they returned it to the return address on what was mailed out, but that was not the election office. It was another place that was associated with the printer. So ballots got mailed out, which were undeliverable, and they came back to some other place that now had ballots that they were able to fill out.

Right. And even if they are going like in Broward County, there was so much extra dead weight on their voter rolls there. They had voters who were this was a Christian Science Monitor investigation. There were voters who were like 120 and up. And there were many, many more people registered than actually, I think, lived in Broward County. They just they obviously had not cleared off the voter rolls for decades.

And those ballots that were being mailed out were being returned to the Broward County election supervisor of election office. But we were very concerned that in Broward County that they were being mailed back to the county and not for honest purposes. The Broward County supervisor of elections office had a lot of red flags that they were not handling those ballots in an ethical way.

Well, you just mentioned several obvious red flags, which are common sense. If you get more ballots returned by mail than you mailed out, there's a problem. If you have more votes in a precinct than there are registered voters in that precinct, there's a problem. And this has occurred repeatedly all across the country of things that are just simply impossible. Right. And I think what people

it's hard to kind of like keep track of all of this. There's like so many different sort of like schemes and possible attacks, attack vectors on the election systems. But I think the,

all of the issues with technology, you really can just think of it as an added layer on all of the other problems that we're seeing. So when you read through the book, Deliver the Vote, and he really so clearly delineates, well, this was one way that fraud was conducted.

And this is another way that fraud was conducted, and this is another way. When we moved to electronic voting equipment, all that really happened is that people figured out how to translate those methods that they were using with paper ballots into technology, into technological systems.

If they were previously stuffing the ballot box with paper ballots, then they figured out, oh, well, we can figure out how to actually hack these machines so that we can stuff the voting machines with digital ballots now. Or if it's going to be internet voting, it might be over the internet that numbers, spreadsheets can be changed. But the idea, the concept of just adjusting the ballots, adjusting the vote as

you just as you know as the the bad actor is interested in that concept does not change even though there's technology involved and the the significance of the technology involvement is the multiplication factor so yes you can cheat with paper ballots but it takes a lot of work

to inject 35,000 fake ballots, which is what a whistleblower in Arizona said were injected in 2020 in Pima County, said that there were 35,000 fake ballots injected.

That's what they believe. Well, the whistleblower went to a meeting three months before the election where every Democrat candidate was promised an extra 35,000 votes. They obviously hadn't heard this before. The whistleblower sent this to the FBI, so this is public information that I'm describing.

And the whistleblower questioned that and said, well, won't that be obvious if there's a dump of 35,000 extra votes? And they said, no, we'll spread it out through the course of the counting and the system will auto adjust. So like you said, the technology is responding. But my point is to add one fake ballot by hand takes 30 seconds to fill a ballot out.

to add a million fake ballots by hand takes a long time, but it doesn't take any longer to write one line of computer code to say add one to candidate A than it does to say add 10,000 to candidate A. It's the same amount of work for a programmer to cheat at scale, and that's what the technology amplifies is the ability to cheat at scale.

And I want people to be aware that there are indications that these numbers are problematic. So I want to play you this clip of these discrepancy reports. And again, this is from our program Count the Vote. I'm going to go ahead and put that barcode up again if you wanted to sign up for Count the Vote and be an election observer. So I was an election observer in New York City, in Brooklyn, where I live.

And one of the things that that did was it gave me access to this paperwork that I had never seen before, even though I had been observing the elections in Brooklyn for about five years at this point. And I want to just play you what we found. There were these very serious discrepancies. So remember, I showed people earlier that the results are usually on what's called a PMD, a portable media drive or a flash drive like this.

And in New York City, they have two flash drives that are in the voting machine and that's supposed to make it redundant so that the flash drives are supposed to be identical. It's the same ballot and it's the same voting machine. And so the flash drives are supposed to have the exact same number of votes. But what I came to find out is that there were these huge discrepancies and just in one, just in Brooklyn,

Just in the early voting, they printed out, when I asked for this paperwork, they printed out 600 pages of the discrepancies in the early voting between the two flash drives. And some of these discrepancies were hundreds, hundreds of ballots apart.

on these flash drives that were supposed to be identical. So let me just play this and get your response to this.

and you can see it is over 600 pages of a discrepancy report those are all discrepancies there are two flash drives in each voting machine in new york city that's for redundancy the flash drives are where the votes are actually collected so you want to be 100% sure that the data is correct and you would think that the flash drive data would be the same it would be identical because

There are two flash drives on the same voting machine collecting the same votes from the same voter. And they're supposed to be identical. But what this paperwork is, this is paperwork from votes where the two flash drives were not in sync. And that's why it's called a discrepancy report. Because the two flash drives, they're remarkably different. And then they have to go through and they run the ballots through another scanner and reconcile that scanner with one of the flash drives.

But this must happen so often that they actually have forms and they have procedures to figure out which are the correct results. But doesn't that seem like something that we would want to investigate further? Why are the two flash drives on the voting machines that are supposed to be 100% in sync not in sync so often that they actually print out 600 pages of discrepancy reports? To me, that seems like something that we want to investigate. So if you think

But that needs to be investigated further. And you want to help us make sure that the votes are counted securely and accurately. Please do take a moment to make a tax deductible donation. The QR code is on the screen, so it's super easy. Probably takes you maybe two minutes. And the work that's going forward now, whether it's through the lawsuit or through the Count the Vote program, all of this is tremendously important to make sure that we can trust

the results of our elections. And especially now we're focused on protecting the midterms as well as winning these lawsuits. So thank you so much for your interest and for all that you're doing to help protect the elections. And as soon as we know more about the Rockland County decision, we will absolutely let you know. Thank you. And I should just state there that

At that time, we were still waiting on the Rockland County decision, but we did not prevail in the Rockland County case. We believe that the candidate there that we were working with was intimidated and she left the case. She called us in a panic that she had to get off the case, and we believe that's why we lost that case.

But I will continue to put that donate QR code up there for people who want to support us. What were your thoughts about the two flash drives being so different in so many of the machines, Dr. Dougherty? Well, this is a perfect example of something that simply can't happen in a fair and honest election. So you shouldn't have to wait for the 600th page to print out. The first discrepancy, the first line that

flash drive one doesn't equal flash drive two you say bad election uh and that leads me and so this election should never have been certified and this is a requirement to say that a redundant backup has to be identical to the data that it's backing up and if it's not then you can't certify the election so there's a big issue across the country with what the word certify means

So in every other aspect of life, certified means that you are promising that what you are signing is true, correct, and complete. So whether it's a deed for a house or the title certificate for your car, certification means that you have verified that this information is true, correct, and complete when you're signing that.

unfortunately in most jurisdictions across the country the certification of elections is simply a rubber stamp the legal term for it is ministerial which basically just means yeah i've got a box to check i check the box and so the election judge at the precinct just checks the box and signs it and the election director at the county just checks the box and sign it

it and the county judge or county commissioners or whoever it goes to next just checks the box and sign it. And they say, oh, I didn't look into it. I didn't guarantee that it was accurate. I just checked the box because my job is to check boxes. So I think your ideas for improving legislation would include making a legal definition of the word certify with regard to election to say that I

swear or affirm under oath that i have verified that the results to which i am affixing my signature are true correct and complete so that's my soapbox on certifying election and the first line that the two drives did not match that should have been the end of the story to say this election is not accurate and because it's not accurate and i don't know which of those two flash drives is correct or if they're both wrong

I will not certify the election. That's my two cents. All right. Well, I see Chris Bystrop. He's another professor of computer science in the audience, and he and I have been working on legislation for a federal proposal. So, Chris, take note of that. Dr. Dougherty wants us to include a provision in there that the certification has to include some sort of oath.

Thank you so much. We really appreciate you sharing your insights with us and all of the good work that you're doing and your tremendous experience. Thank you so much for being here today. Great to be with you and everyone online. And don't forget the donate button. Oh, thank you. Appreciate that.

okay so we have to and i see that the echo is my fault i haven't been muting my mic when i'm off stage so apologies for that and i will do better uh going forward when we're playing videos um to try to get rid of that echo and i don't know why it wasn't when i played the videos earlier we didn't have it but for some reason we do now um but uh appreciate people letting me know about that and uh we had a really interesting comment from professor by by stroff uh the one i just spoke about that i'm working on with legislation and he says

Professor Dougherty was interviewed once regarding Tina Peters and the Voting Machine. It's a great interview if you can find it. So that's a good one to go and look for. And then we need to catch up on our auction. I'm sorry we let it go a little bit long. I said we'd go till four, but I just need to go back and check. The last bid that we had was $150, and we should see if anybody else would like to bid on our

hard back version of deliver the vote so it'll be like this like deliver the vote um but it'll be signed to you autographed personally by dr tracy campbell and it will be a used copy i have been trying to make sure that people are aware of that this book is out of print there are no new copies available that we're aware of so it'll be a used copy of um

a used copy signed by Dr. Campbell. And I'm just going back through and searching to see if anybody else had put in a bid after we had $150 for it. So I'm gonna open it up for bids right now. If there's any, the latest bid has been at $150.

I also have to let you know that if you get a book for that, it is not tax deductible. So whenever we give you something, it's not tax deductible. But is there anybody else who is interested? If you are interested, you just put bid and then the amount that you want to bid. So your next bid would have to be something more, at least $151 or even up to $200. Is there anybody who wants to increase the bid for this hardback book?

Autographed copy of Deliver the Vote. Just scrolling through and seeing. I believe I've gone all the way back to the beginning, so I may have missed those bids. Anybody else bidding on Deliver the Vote? This is all the way back to our first quiz. And then I wish that you could do a search. I'm going to let Wrench work on that. Wrench is backstage with me. Can I add you to the stage, Wrench?

I don't know if he's ready or not. But if you can go ahead and just check through the chat and see if we have anything else after the bid 150 for the hardback copy, hardback copy of Deliver the Vote, autographed by Dr. Tracy Campbell, and that would be sent to you. And you would need to bid on it right now. We're,

looking for your bids, you're going to put into the comments, if you want to bid, you would put like bid 151 or up. Okay, we're going to leave that for a bit and we're going to let Wrench take a look at that. I do want to just see if I can show you kind of what your bid needs to look like in case you're confused. So it would look something like this. It would be like bid 250.

if you want to go up and try to get that book. So that's one thing that we're doing right now. And then I do want to also just make sure that people are aware. We're Smart Elections. If you want to find out more about us, you're going to go to our website. It's smartelections.us. The program that we have, the election verification program that we're raising funds for is called Count the Vote.

I am the co-founder and executive director of Smart Elections and also Smart Legislation, our action arm. The QR code that you're seeing on the screen is the QR code to donate and makes a tax-deductible donation to us in order to support our work. And you can also follow us on social media. We are on pretty much all the social media channels, YouTube, Instagram, threads.

LinkedIn, Facebook, XM, Blue Sky, and we also are on Substack. We have a really, I think, a really great Substack. We put some of our best research on there. So absolutely, if you're into Substacks, definitely you want to try to follow our Substack. And our goal here at Smart Elections is transforming US elections by expanding public oversight, improving security, and advocating for fair and accessible voting.

so that's a little bit of information about us and um i will just say that we are immensely grateful for your support all of the donors that have donated uh so far and who are continuing to donate we've had some really great donations coming in uh this past few months as we've tried to raise money for the midterms i do want to give a special shout out

to Lori Grace. Lori Grace is sometimes single-handedly keeping us alive. She's been such a staunch supporter, and she has also connected us with other donors. She worked to connect us with a donor who gave us $50,000 and then also has continued to support us. She also has worked to get us funding from Threshold Foundation, who we're very grateful to, who also gave us a sizable donation.

We really, really do appreciate you. And I just want you to know that we all, we care about the work passionately, but the work requires funding. We absolutely require funding. I am working right now probably anywhere from 60 to 100 hours a week. Probably this week I'll be putting in 100. And I cannot work any harder. The only thing that really can take us to the next level and allow us to scale up

is to hire and expand our staff. We need staff especially to support election observers. The election observers, as I mentioned a few times, really do require a tremendous amount of support, and we want to have people in all of the congressional races, and that would be the House and the Senate races coming up in 2026.

In addition to that, we want to be prepared if we do need to challenge an election and go into court, you have to be able to move rapidly and usually that requires hiring an attorney and putting down a 10,000 retainer in a matter of hours sometimes. We have to be prepared for that. We cannot be coming up short when we think that we have actionable evidence that a very important election actually is on the line.

support for volunteers there's expanding staff there's attorneys there's also publicity if we can get the word out more about this process it will be easier for us to attract the numbers of election observers that we believe are necessary and so all of these things are things that your funds will go toward if you are able to make a donation and as i've said if

if you're making that donation and when you've made the donation. We have so many people who have donated to us and we are just tremendously, tremendously grateful to you. I think it would be good actually for me to just show you. We have a page where we say thank you to all the people who have donated to us since our founding in 2019. And I want to show you this because every time I look at it, I pretty much almost want to cry.

because the number of people who have supported us is so overwhelming. And I think you're gonna really be blown away. These are all of the folks who have donated to us through the years.

Some people at the top are larger donors with special thanks, but we appreciate every single donor. And then, of course, we have anonymous donors also. You're welcome to donate anonymously, in which case we wouldn't publish your name. But these are just so many people who care about our elections and who have taken the time and dug into their personal resources to make sure that we could continue to do this work.

It is really incredible, the number of people, the level of support that we've received. It is truly, truly profoundly moving. And I just want to say how much we appreciate each and every one of you. It's very, very important.

It's what allows us to do the work. Okay, so I think it would be cool if we just bring Wrench on for a few minutes. Wrench is part of the band Gangsta Grass, and they're going to be on later with some music.

and uh so it's fun i think it's we want to sort of we're heading toward the end uh it's five o'clock 5 15 now we're gonna go through uh until seven o'clock uh we do want to make sure that we have fun uh we just can't be all you know all

depressing information about how messed up the elections are all the time. We have to have a little bit of fun. So I'll just bring Wrench on mostly just to say hi and get y'all pumped for when we're going to have the music on. And we're going to be having a freestyler, our son, who's a member of the gangsta band. Great to see you, Wrench. Yes, indeed. What's up? What's up? What's up?

So we are really excited about this. Gangsta Grass is really admiring the work that Smart Elections is doing, and we want to get everybody out there to help support this because it's a huge effort.

to get people out there monitoring these election results all the places that we need them. So we're asking all of our fans and everybody to donate to that. We'll be

We'll be back soon on this live stream with an exclusive live performance video That was taken recently and we will also I think we'll auction off some gangster grass vinyl of our number one bluegrass charting album the blackest thing on the menu and I'll bring up a picture of the cover of that and

uh in a second um but it's a really really amazing uh album and you've got to hear it on vinyl for the full effect so uh get ready to to bid for that as well um and maybe if we have a lot of bits coming in maybe we'll maybe we'll auction off more than one and uh see about that

the latest bid for the hardback autographed cover of Deliver the Vote. It's at $160. I want to give a shout out to Cheryl. This is coming up, another auction that we're going to have, the blackest thing on the menu. Cheryl, if you are out there, oh, okay, now we have $170, but

bid for the book. That's from Ruth Strauss. Ruth is a longtime supporter and election observation. And she's been an active member of the California team and has been a donator to us. We super, super appreciate her. And also, Ruth, I have to let you know, she just bought this package. And I don't

know how you found that Ruth because it hasn't actually even been on the website in a long time but we had this training that we sold uh called know your voting machine and Ruth actually purchased it so that information is coming for you Ruth do not fret um uh I had it on my list to get that to you but she's bidding on that book right now the name of the book and the author okay so the book is deliver the vote and I'm gonna let's uh go full screen with us again I'm gonna just take the

Yeah, I'm gonna take that for a second. And it's delivered the vote right there. It is by Dr. Tracy Campbell. He is a Pulitzer Prize nominated historian. And is just captivating. Every chapter is like

jaw dropping you're thinking oh my god i had no idea these type of things were going on so it's so informational and it's so well written he's such a great author um okay so it looks like people are yeah and then people have actually put that up that's awesome um to put that information up so we're gonna let it go just a few more minutes i will go until 5 30 with the auction for the hardback

that copy of Deliver the Vote by Tracy Campbell. It'll be autographed by him. He's agreed to do that. Keep in mind, it'll take a little time. We got to send the book to him. He's got to autograph it and send it back to us. And then we got to send it to you. So it will not happen overnight.

be advised and it is a used copy there are no new copies the books is out of print so i just i don't want so you're getting a you're getting a a out of print exclusive limited number of books out there you can't buy this anywhere you can just bid on it here and i am planning to try to find a way to get one of these books too to read it because uh lulu has told me some stories from it

that always blow my mind and make me feel like I just learned something crazy about our history. So obviously it's got some crazy information in there that we should all be learning. And we'll do at least one other giveaway. I have these other kind of bizarre giveaways, but I think they're fun.

We have these pens that we had made to give to legislators. And for example, this one says ban barcode voting.

I think toward the end of the night, we will give away at least one banned barcode voting. We'll have maybe a few more quizzes, and we have another fun pen that opens these hand-marked paper ballots. So those are things that are coming up. Right now, we have the auction going until 5.30. Okay, so thanks so much, Wrench. Really appreciate all your energy. It's so great to see you. Wrench and I go way back. We produced, and he produced an album for me when I was a rapper.

But you folks didn't know about that. All right. Let me see. I'm going to take him out. And now I'm going to do, this is a really fascinating story. We're going to go back in time a little bit. This is the story of William Randolph Hearst's election in New York City. It's like a really kind of Tammany Hall story about kind of how entrenched

The Tammany Hall was there. And we have a candidate who actually had a very interesting experience with her election who tells the story. And then we have a conversation with another candidate who also had a really interesting experience with his election. So we have a couple candidates now. And the first one is going to be Paula Deacon Garcia. And she was a candidate in Illinois. And she's currently a candidate as well. And so she's going to tell

her story, and then she's going to read from this, again, deliver the vote. This is a story about William Randolph Hearst. Welcome. I am delighted to introduce Paula Deacon Garcia.

And she has a very interesting story to tell from when she ran for office in 2020. I think you're gonna find it fascinating and very relevant to what we're talking about. And then she's gonna read a section from Deliver the Vote about an election earlier in the 20th century of William Randolph Hearst, which also was just fraught with complications. So first, I just wanna let you know a little bit about her. She's a public servant. She's worked in government for years,

And she's running currently for the county clerk in DuPage County, which has a million voters in Illinois. And her main focuses there are to help people with financial issues that she feels are hurting the county. And also of course, the county clerk is going to be the one responsible for elections. Now we don't endorse candidates at smart elections. We're nonpartisan, but we do encourage people that we think are really interested in improving our elections.

to run and we hope that you'll learn more about her. So she's gonna tell you a little bit about this first election that she had in 2020 and then how you can learn more about her. So tell us what happened. And that was your first time running for office, Paula? Yeah, 2020, that was an interesting election just because it was during COVID. So that was a lot of knocking on doors. 2022 is actually the one where

all board members were up for election. So that was 18 board members up in 2022. And I just happened to, we have three board members per district. And of course I'm serving in district two. So they, you know,

you basically can understand why people just probably voted for two candidates in district two, because that's just how they felt they should do it. So I'm the third candidate on there. And so I actually lost on election night after I'd already been serving a term and people just thought, oh, she's got this in the bag, but I didn't because everybody was like making sure they just voted for the two that realized that I was one of the three. And I lost by about 300 votes out of a huge district.

and so then it was basically a matter of going and making sure that everybody's vote counted that's something i'm really determined to do so we did uh a thing called curing the ballots so as the mail in votes came in still because of course they could still come in a little bit after the election if they were you know postmarked uh the date of uh

the election of course that has changed right now so make sure we put your uh mail-in votes if you're doing that a couple weeks ahead of time or right now i'd actually just go drop it off because it's just changing every day um but uh so then i was actually able to

I'm sorry, I just want to make it clear also. There was a step that was pretty courageous, as I understand it, where you had to step forward and say, you know, I'd really like to know more about and understand more about what happened in my election. They said that you did not win the election. Correct. There were two candidates. So was there a they said you didn't have enough votes to qualify or what happened to that third spot? Did someone else? So a person from the other party won that spot.

okay so i actually had a whole party congratulating uh himself and everything although the votes were not counted it was a little premature so i actually said you know what what are the steps because you know people are like i just can't believe you didn't win because we all voted for you but the people who were not you know you know really paying attention to the ballot just probably just voted for two and so as a matter of going out with ballots that were not counted um that means like let's say

when you go into the election division if somebody votes by mail or or even if they vote by about and they don't think the signatures match um they have a bipartisan group of election judges that look at the signatures and if they challenge one it's pulled out and then you have it's if you have to go and find out you have to get an authorized affidavit from the voter saying oh no this is how this is me and this is how i voted

So I had to go door to door to people's houses and just say, you know, we want to make sure your voice is counted. I don't care how you voted. We want to make sure your ballot is counted. And so they were often, you know, like, oh, no, this was me. And so we had a notary that went along with us, and they actually notarized everybody's signature at the time. And then their ballot was actually counted. So after the fact, I actually won by 76 votes.

So after you went through all that, it turned out that you did have the votes. I did have the votes, yes. Right. So you just had to make sure that people's votes actually got counted by having them cure their ballots. Correct. When you're not there at the door with their ballot, the election officials keep the ballot, but you have a record of which ballots need to be cured, I guess. Correct.

Correct. So we can say, this is how they have it that your, your ballot has not been counted. Can you tell me, you know, here's a sample ballot. How did you vote? And they'll fill it out again. And then they'll notarize, we'll notarize it and make sure that their vote is counted. So, so again, it's whoever they vote for. If it wasn't even for me, I'm just making sure their votes count. So. Of course. Right. But how did that feel to go from the frustration and the confusion of,

thinking something was wrong to stepping forward. Was it hard to step forward and say, I want to know more? Well, it was hard on election night because everybody's like, oh yeah, we all won. And then you're not, you know, never a fun place, but I know a lot of people have been there. Um, but then it was like, pick up, you know, pick up your pants and just keep moving forward. And, uh,

And I had a lot of support from a lot of my people in my team. And so they're like, let's go, let's go. And so it was just two more weeks. It took us two more weeks to follow up with all of the voters whose ballots were not counted in the election. So I think the people were very grateful that we knocked on their door because they were so frustrated that their vote did not count.

Wow. As you age, you know, your signature changes. And so people have to be aware of that. And so I would say always everybody make sure that your vote has been counted. I know in DuPage County we have a ballot tracker where you can count, you know, when it's counted, when it's actually dropped, when it's mailed and when it's dropped off and actually when it's recorded. So if you don't see that your ballot hasn't been recorded, then I would definitely call and see if there's an issue. That's just something I would tell people because you want to make sure your voices are heard.

And then what did it feel like when you found out that you did actually win? It was like, it was happy because I felt like I wasn't done with the work yet because I really want to help people. You know, I'd gone through the whole COVID and helping with all of our ARPA grants we got, which is the American Rescue Plan grants to help people with food insecurity, mental health. We were just about ready to open a crisis recovery center that was, you know,

pushed by our county board chair. And so I'm also on the DuPage County Board of Health. So it's something I was really passionate about. So I was just like, oh good, I get to see these projects go through. So I was excited to be back and working. And right now I'm actually the finance chair. So I was picked to be the finance chair, which has been a huge job, but one that I'm really happy to be doing and making sure that all the money is accounted for and that we are fiscally responsible.

Well, thank you so much for sharing that story with us. So we're going to read now from Deliver the Vote, and this is a section about the election of William Randolph Hearst in 1905. Okay.

Not even the wealthiest of candidates were immune to having votes and elections stolen out from under them. In fact, William Randolph Hearst, one of the richest and most powerful newspaper publishers of the era, found this to be the case when he ran for mayor of New York City in 1905. Hearst would seem an unlikely victim of election fraud. He was, after all, one of the giant figures of American politics.

William inherited his father's fortune, and by the 1890s, Hearst owned several leading papers that became linked with yellow journalism. That meant reporting that used exaggerated, unverified claims and a focus on topics like crime. Hearst served two terms in the U.S. House, but it did not satisfy his ultimate ambition, the presidential nomination. In 1905, Hearst ran for mayor of New York on a third party platform that opposed Tammany Hall.

the notoriously corrupt Democratic machine controlling New York City politics. And here he saw how election fraud could be skillfully utilized against even someone of his considerable journalistic and political clout. After looking for someone to run against the incumbent mayor and Tammany favorite George McClellan, Hearst announced he would run on the Municipal Ownership League ticket.

Throughout October, Hearst spoke before numerous crowds, exhorting them to reject Tammany and revolt the major parties. His message caught on with the city's working class, and by early November, Hearst seemed to have a real chance of winning. The threat he posed could be measured by Tammany's desperate diatribes, which called Hearst an anarchist, a socialist, and even implied that he had played a role in William McKinley's assassination.

The New York Times went so far as to implore its readers to abandon the Republican candidate and vote for McClellan to stave off potential Hearst victory. Elections in the early 20th century were a prime target for gamblers. Days before each election, newspapers reported the amounts wagered and the odds on specific candidates, and gamblers used these posted odds in a variety of ways.

If a candidate was a long shot and if elected would bring a higher return, the temptation to coerce votes or stuff ballots increased. The open practice of wagering on elections produced many complications that added to the prevailing culture of corruption. New York bookmakers reported that election wagering favored McClellan generally by two to one, a clear sign that Tammany Hall was ready to do what was necessary.

I thought that she went further in that story. So I'm going to just sort of fill you in on what happens in the rest of that story. What happens is that there's just like all of this maneuvering by Tammany Hall and the challenger there, William Randolph Hearst does wind up losing the election because you just, I think there's a saying, you can't fight Tammany Hall because they just, the corruption was so deep and they knew what they were doing. And that's, and I think it's so interesting also that you have this,

kind of parallel with all of the wagering on the presidential election, because we are seeing that again. There was just an interview recently with a Wired magazine reporter who was talking about how those betting markets for the midterms are just taking off. There's so much money there. So again, we've seen that over and over again, how the book really parallels things that are happening currently.

Hearst loses that election and then he takes it to court. He's positive that he's going to win in court because the fraud is so obvious, but he doesn't win in court. The judges actually pretty much refuse to look at it.

What's interesting, so he loses that election despite the fact that he had these very powerful newspapers, the fact that he had this huge fortune. He really, even all of that could not beat Tammany Hall and the corruption, the endemic corruption there. And then what I did after talking to Paula

was I interviewed this candidate, Bernard Baselberg, that we worked with just recently in the June election. And many of you have heard me talk about that throughout the day. That was an election where there was really so many irregularities. We found

election seals in the garbage. We found copies of ballots mixed with ballots. We weren't allowed to observe. They broke the judge's order. There was actually an incident where we tried to watch one election worker and he put up cardboard over his office windows so that we couldn't see what he was doing. It was like, does he have a little ballot factory in there? It was hard to tell. And then of course the paperwork, the number of voters who voted didn't match.

the number of ballots that were supposedly cast in many, many precincts. But when we took it to court, the judge would not move forward with it. We asked for a new election and the judge said no.

So I think some of you have heard me talk about that throughout the day. And so Bernard was the candidate that we were representing there. And so I'm gonna play you an interview that I did with Bernard. And I think that you'll find him very interesting.

is a very charismatic, very charismatic candidate. And he was ahead initially in the race all up as the votes were counted until about 930 p.m. And then at 930 p.m., his results just plummeted. His lead plummeted. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he was seven votes behind. And it did seem odd. And here's my conversation with him. And so seeing sort of some of the parallels with the Hearst case.

so that's quite a story and i think one of the things that we want to have people understand is that there are similarities between that story and your election and the way that your election went the things that we discovered in your election so one of the first things that i want to show people is this graph that is really

disconcerting this is the chart of the election results as they came in on election night in bernard's race and you can see that he was well ahead

And then all of a sudden at 9.30, his lead just somehow plummeted and he wound up losing by seven votes according to the election results. We were very dubious about those results and it was so close actually that there was a mandatory hand count required. When we went and observed the hand count, keep in mind that that's one of the things that Smart Elections does, we have observation, we have one of the main things that Smart Elections does is

we train observers to go to audits, to go to recounts, to be there in the polling place so that we can keep an eye on what's going on. And what we found when we went to the recount was really extraordinary. We found seals in the garbage. If you see those little circles, they're around, you see the black barcode?

That's a seal from a bag of ballots, and we found those in the garbage from this election. I actually watched the person put them in the garbage, one of the counters at the Board of Elections during the preparations for the recount. And then we also found a mixture of ballots and copies of ballots intermingled together, which was really disconcerting, and you should have extremely

clear delineation if that's being done, why it's being done. It should be explained. And it was not really explained in a way that was convincing. It looked very suspicious. And then when I followed the worker who was doing that to his office, he actually put up cardboard so that I couldn't see what he was doing in his office. He actually he he behaved extremely suspiciously. And then here was another thing that we had

photos of this was an entire bag of ballots that was left outside of the cage overnight. So because of these types of things, we were very concerned about your election. Agreed? Agreed, 100%. I was very concerned also. I mean, I already got called by different people from the Republican committee congratulating me and saying that, wow, it's really a landslide. It was basically two to one. And then all of a sudden, about nine. Because you were so far ahead. I think you were 75 points up.

I mean, I wouldn't say it was a landslide necessarily, but out of approximately 1,200 votes, you were 75 votes ahead, which is significant when about 75% of the votes had been counted. Well, you also have to remember something. What I really felt bad about was we have over 31,000 Republican voters in my district, and only 1,257 came out to vote.

I get calls every day being a chaplain. Can you do this? Can you do that? But if you wanted everything done, why don't you go vote? Why do we have to worry about people going out to vote? If you want something, go and do it, you know?

It would be great to see more turnout. New York has particularly bad turnout. And so what's happened now is that our attorney, Jimmy Wagner, has filed an appeal. We did lose the first election. We challenged the election. We were in court. We got a decision that we disagree with. We believe that the judge really ignored most of the evidence. And so our attorney has filed an appeal. And do you wanna say a few words about the appeal? Well, basically the appeal is putting everything into perspective.

I was missing 17 districts in my area. If you say you were missing 17 districts, I think we want to explain that carefully. What that means is that there were 17 election districts, which in New York, a district is similar to a precinct. There were 17 districts where the Board of Elections could not provide the actual paperwork. They either lost or intentionally misplaced that paperwork. So that included the reconciliation forms from the end of the night,

None of those documents were able to be examined in 17 districts because the board simply lost them. And that's very significant because if there had been changes made to the ballots, then those original documents like the original poll tapes would have shown it. And we really wanted to see those documents.

Well, the funny thing also is this is my territory here. My opponent, they have no idea who he is in my territory. So by showing that you did that and by the judge asking their witness, which was Barrera, you'll be able to see that in the copy. The judge asked him what happened to those districts. He goes, I don't know. So what does that tell you? He's there 30 years. So something is going on.

So he says, well, I really don't know. The poll workers don't know what they're doing. So the judge says, what do you mean the poll? We don't teach them the right way. So they don't know how to handle the votes, which is ridiculous. How do you tell that? So, you know, that's what the chief clerk said under oath. He said that he thought possibly the poll workers had just thrown those documents in the garbage. Although I've observed.

many, many closings of elections. I've never seen poll workers throw the closing reconciliation documents in the garbage. They're usually extremely careful with them actually. So it's a, it was an unusual, an unusual statement for sure. And in our opinion, the clerk did actually lie under oath on more than once in regard to, you know, in regard to the evidence.

So we follow the challenge now and we're waiting to see what happens with that and we'll keep people informed about it. But I think we do want to put up your website so that people can get in touch with you if they want to get in touch with you. That's at bernardforsenate at gmail.com. Correct. We certainly hope that people will support Smart Elections also so that we can continue to do this kind of work and help candidates when they are concerned that there is some sort of

foul play or some sort of irregularities in their election. It's very important that candidates feel that they have a fair shot and that the votes are all counted accurately. Well, I really want to thank you, Lulu, because without you, I don't think we would have gotten this far. You've trained people, you teach people, you let them know exactly what's going on. You make us feel proud to be an American.

So your organization, Smart Elections, I think is fantastic. I think more people should know about you. More of the candidates that are having problems like I did should know about you. And you got to remember something. Even though this is a small district, whether it's small or whether it's big, if it's still fraudulent, it's fraudulent no matter how you look at it. You can't be a little pregnant, okay? It doesn't work that way.

If you feel you want voter integrity, you need somebody like Lulu there. So whatever you can do to make a donation, I would really appreciate it. If you want to volunteer, she could use all you can get. If you want to be part of American history to show everybody that we're just not going to lay down, which is what the Republican committee actually called me and said, why am I wasting their time? I said, why am I wasting my time? I said, I'm not wasting my time and your time. Okay. I think you're in bed with the Democrats. That's the only thing I can think of.

because at that point you're telling me i'm wasting time and i should just roll over and die i've over seven votes they don't even know who my opponent is so how do you tell me that i lost wherever i go now i can't even pay for a cup of coffee so i tell them look i gotta pay once i'm a month i'll become a candidate and i become a senator then maybe we'll talk about it but at this point

We have to make sure smart elections goes out all over the place. We have to make people know what's going on. We need the integrity of the vote. That is the main thing. Forget about me. Even if I don't make it, at least it's out in the open. So all I can say, at least, yeah, at least we're letting people know what's happening, trying to inform the public and we are doing our best to take it to the next level and make sure that it's on the record.

and that there is a chance that if there are irregularities that they will be righted and that people's votes will count. Well, the funny thing is the judge kept saying irregularities. Jimmy kept saying fraudulent. He said, well, let's not use that word. Let's leave it at irregularities, which is ridiculous because it is fraudulent.

And besides, if you read the transcript from the trials that we went to, the judge actually said, okay, so things happened, but we're not going to find a Mr. Weisselberg's favor, which is ridiculous. And he quoted a criminal law in his final ruling, which was ridiculous. It has nothing to do with criminal. So the judge, I think, has to go back to school to figure out how to be a judge.

Well, we'll see what happens in the appeal. And thanks so much for being with us. We really, really appreciate you and all the work that you've done. And we'll... Appreciate me. We appreciate you for the work you are doing. And we'll keep an eye on the case and let people know what happens. Thank you so much. A little bit slow. Just working on getting our...

technician or technical things working smoothly. So that was Bernard Baselberg. I did put up the email address because he texted me after the interview and said the first email address that he put up when we taped the interview was not correct. So if you're trying to reach out to Bernard, go for that second email address, the Baselberg4Senate at gmail.com. That's the correct email address for his campaign. And

I think we're going to finish up our auction now, and then we're going to move forward into a thorny issue that's really in the news lately, which is mail-in voting.

And we're going to look at some training that we do for mail-in voting. And then we're also going to speak to an advocate, Susan Asty from Oregon, and she's a big mail-in advocate. And I will just spoiler alert, Dr. Campbell is not a fan of mail-in voting, but it's a very complex issue. And so Susan and I are going to have a nice nuanced conversation about it, which is what all of these things really require is to patiently talk them through and figure out that there aren't always

simple solutions for everything. So let's just make sure that nobody else

is going for the book. Chris, you know you got outbid. There was a 170 bid from Ruth Strauss. So I just want to give you your last chance here. So this is 170 is the bid for the hardback copy of Deliver the Vote. It'll be personally autographed by Dr. Tracy Campbell, a used copy, which will be mailed to you in time.

So any last bids there? And I know Chris also has a copy, I think. So I think maybe he's allowing Ruth to grab that one. I know if anybody deserves it, it's her. She's passionate about this issue. So going once, going twice.

Sold for $170, the hardback copy of Deliver the Vote. Congratulations to Ruth. I think we have like some applause for you. Where's our applause button? I know we have applause. Media assets. Applause.

Okay, applause. Okay, so that's our first auction, and so we are immediately now starting our second auction. So we are going to have another copy. This one is not a hardback. It is a paperback like this, again, used, again, autographed personally by Dr. Tracy Campbell.

And so we'll start that bidding now. We're going to start the bidding. We started the last one at 50 because it was a hardback. So I think it's only fair to start the bidding on this one at $40. So yes, congratulations, Ruth. And I'm going to, let's see. So we're going to take that bid down. We just are moving on to the next book now. And

Wrench, can you see her bid? Can you get her bid down? We're moving on to the next bid. And so the next bid is going to be starting at $40. And this is going to be for a paperback copy of Deliver the Vote, autographed, personally autographed by Tracy Campbell. And

This one, the same way you're going to do it in the chat, the way we did before, you're just going to say bid and then the amount that you want to bid. So it's $40 to get this copy as a starting bid. If nobody bids $40, believe me, I'll take it. I'd love an autographed copy. My copy is an autograph, so it's very special that he's going to autograph these. But hopefully maybe somebody is interested in it. And I do want people to know that if you want to read this book, it's actually completely online.

at the archive.org and I will later toward the end of the broadcast, I will make sure to put that link up because it's just, it's such a wonderful book. So I want people to be able to, you know, to read it no matter what, whether you make a donation to us or whether you find a way to do it on your own. Okay. So I believe that we're finally ready. Susan's been back there waiting and let's see if I can get you on the stage.

There you are. Hi. Hi. How are you? It's so nice of you to join us. I really appreciate it.

So Susan emailed me with tons of information about mail-in voting. She's a passionate voter, passionate about mail-in voting. She's in Oregon where everybody votes by mail. And she also just sent me tons of information. She's going to go and see a town hall with the Secretary of State. This is exactly the type of people that we want getting involved with us. If you're passionate about your elections and you love information, maybe even information overload, you're our people.

And get involved. So why don't you tell us a little bit about why you really appreciate mail-in voting, Susan? It is extremely easy and you can fit it into your life. You feel like you have time to go over things in a quiet environment at home. You can discuss it, hopefully, you know, with other people in your family and

And it's just, it's just incredibly simple. And what about, there are things that people have pointed out, like the fact that you do go over the ballot with your family does sometimes open up mail in voting for intimidation. So say that you're,

I mean, we've seen this husbands want their wives to vote a certain way and maybe the wife doesn't want to, but the husband is going to put his foot down and I'm sure it happens in the opposite way too. I'm sure maybe a husband wants to vote and a wife can be a little domineering. So what about that type of intimidation or bullying that can happen with mail-in voting? Do you, are you concerned about that at all? I personally am not just because that doesn't happen in our family, but it would be silly to not,

figure that that could happen, yes. So yes, it could be an issue. Okay, and then I think some of the other issues about mail-in voting that I am concerned about actually are that a lot of those ballots sometimes don't get counted. And so I actually wanted to share a website where there was a research study that was done and it showed how many

states often are not counting their ballots, all of their absentee ballots. So I just want to make sure that people are aware of these types of things. And we also had a sub stack on this issue. So the sub stack is a good place to start. So let me see if I can pull up the sub stack for starters. And then from there, we can talk about some of these other issues. I don't know why it keeps showing me the wrong screen when I'm trying to share the screen.

Okay, here we go. That's you and me. There's me and the screen I'm trying to share. And there we go. That's the two of us and the screen. So this is a substack that we did on mail-in voting. And it really talks about some of the potential issues with mail-in voting. There have been two specific incidents in New York City that have been documented.

where mail-in voting was used for fraud. In one of them, there actually were documented dead voters who wound up casting ballots, and in another one, actually in that one, also people who were interviewed and said that they did not vote, their ballots were cast for them, and this was mail-in voting. So we do know that there are instances where it has led to fraud,

And I'm going to just put that sub stack into the comments so that people can take a look at that. And then I also want to just show you this study that I'm showing and you can actually kind of see, I'm going to roll when I'm rolling over that. I think you're seeing the percentages, right? Can you see them, Susan? I can see them. Do they need to be bigger or you can see that? Okay. Yeah. So the worst are the dark red. I think the worst one is,

New Mexico, 5% of the mail-in ballots are rejected there. And then Arkansas, over 4% rejected. New York, where I live, 3.62% rejected. And then even some of these other states, close to 2% rejected. And then a huge swath of states that are around 1% where the mail-in ballots are rejected. Your state, Oregon, rejects almost 1% of the ballots there, of the mail-in ballots.

We have close races, many races are won by less than 0.1%. So I think not 0.1%, how much is it? I just wanna double check my numbers there. 1%, yeah, so it's 0.73%, which is creeping up on 1% of mail-in ballots that are rejected. Do you have any thoughts about that? Well, I also have thoughts that we have so many more people that vote because of mail-in voting as well.

So I don't know if that counteracts. The amount of people that vote is so much higher. So I don't know.

It'd be interesting to see that in a study, to see the percentage of additional turnout compared with, even if some of those ballots are being rejected, possibly it's still more people ultimately voting. And we need to see another set of research on that. And then I think there were, and I don't know if this is necessarily connected to mail-in voting, but I guess

this is one of the things that dr dr campbell brings up his he has tremendous reservations about mail-in voting he he really goes through the book uh and by the end of the book he's really against it so i think the best thing is why don't you go ahead uh susan was kind enough i i love this about her even though she disagrees with dr campbell's position she's gonna go ahead and read that tag so that

About it. And that's that's the smart election spirit conversation dialogue. Don't rule other people's thoughts out. You know, other people's points of view. Consider them. I love that about you. So go ahead. And this is another section from Deliver the Vote. And this is on Dr. Campbell's reservations about absentee voting. Yes.

And he says that no state had gone as far as Oregon, where beginning in 1996, all elections were conducted by mail. Candidates in Oregon can obtain lists of those who have not returned their ballots days before the election. These voters are besieged by campaign staff and the opportunities for vote buying multiply. A study of the 2000 Oregon election showed that 5% of voters acknowledged that others had marked their ballots

and 2.4% admitted someone else had actually signed them. Since Oregon has no central statewide database to check for duplicate voting, one analysis concluded that the potential for massive overvotes, including widespread fraud, exists. So his book, when this happened, I decided, you know, there's quite a bit of time in between with the book and now.

So I did look it up and yes, we still have it that in Oregon, candidates can obtain lists of voters who have not returned their ballots. Typically a few days before the election, this information helps candidates gauge voter turnout and target their outreach efforts. In addition, so it says, even though Oregon does not have a statewide voter turnout,

voter, as far as it is, excuse me, the central statewide database. What they do maintain is a statewide voter registration database and participates in interstate data sharing through ERIC, E-R-I-C, Electronic Registration Information Center, which is a nonprofit bipartisan group to identify duplicate registrations and deceased voters.

After the 2000 presidential election, Congress mandated that states start keeping computerized statewide voter registration lists, and keeping those lists up to date felt virtually impossible for government offices with limited resources.

so 15 years ago david becker a former justice department voting rights attorney who was working at the pew charitable trust at the time asked election officials together in a room and asked them what he could do to help make voting better and he said every single election official we asked back in 2008 said voter registration well i'm going to interrupt you there actually just because david becker is a personal um

I don't know how to say this politely.

David Becker is the epicenter of gaslighting in America. I understand. But I thought I should put it out there that that's what... I just, if you're on this program and you bring up David Becker for any sort of quote or anything, I'm going to let you know David Becker lies through his teeth to the U.S. voting population repeatedly, day after day after day, year in, year out. He is like...

he is just my almost my least favorite person on the planet so so i i'm just i say this to say that there is so much misinformation around this issue and we are told over and over and over again that

Everything is fine. There are no problems. The only thing that is the problem is the way that we're thinking about this and that if we would just all politely vote and mind our own business, everything would be fine. And that is just not the case. And we have just seen from chapter after chapter of Deliver the Vote and talking to current candidates and looking at current evidence, at research that so many different advocates have done about the actual just,

numerous attack vectors that still exist on our elections and in fact seem to be being utilized, we have to be aware of it. I'm sorry to go off on you a little bit. No, no, it was because I hadn't finished because I was going to do the same thing. I'm sorry about how I was feeling about this when I looked up all this stuff on Eric and the Electronic Registration Information Center. It made me very nervous.

since they are using our DMV information, our social security information, and our postal data all in one database. Eric is. Yes. Yes. And I will say they describe themselves as a nonpartisan organization. But as many people know, conservative states are

absolutely have already pulled out of ERIC. They don't trust ERIC and they don't feel that the numbers in ERIC are accurate. And I honestly, we have not had time at Smart Elections to dig into this problem in the depth to which we'd like. That's why I was really happy that Susan would come on.

and talk to us about it because I know that she really cares about it and that she is researching it. But I would just say that this has to be a nuanced conversation. There are real issues with voting and there are real advantages with mail-in voting, right? And we're trying not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is that sort of what we're saying? Yes. Okay. Yes, that makes me very nervous.

what Eric is doing. Yes. Right. Well, because everyone, as it is right now, and it's like everyone's very nervous about having voter registration lists from the DMV given to the federal government. And it's like, okay, well, what is the difference here?

And I think the other thing to keep in mind also is that these points of information that are coming from the DMV, they're not accurate. And this we've seen in state after state in New Jersey and Oregon and New York. We're seeing that voters who register with the Department of Motor Vehicles and identify as non-citizens.

are still having their information passed on to election boards and whether that's just you know sloppiness fatigue overwhelm or you know which is probably my guess about what that would be the consequences are still very serious for both the person that is being registered who's a non-citizen as kim pointed out in an earlier segment there's one individual that they know that that happened to and he was in the process of trying to become a legal citizen

And the fact that he was listed as a voter actually tied up his procedures for, I think, several years, like totally complicated his situation. So very serious consequences for the non-citizens who are kind of innocently caught up in this.

and also very serious consequences for our election system, where you have the potential for non-citizens to be voting, and that is obviously illegal. So these are complicated issues, but there is evidence that the system is not working as it is currently structured. Right. All right. We are in agreement.

We'll leave it there. I'm glad that we came to agreement and thank you again for coming on. You're such a delight and we're so proud and grateful for all of your work. I would say supporting you has been a great thing because we need changes. Thank you so much.

And then I will make sure that that QR code, that's the QR code to donate to support Smart Elections and our program Count the Vote. And this is our hashtag that we usually use for Count the Vote. So like if you're on social media or something, you can look for that hashtag to find out information about Count the Vote. You can also go to our website, smartelections.us. There's lots of information about Count the Vote there.

including a PDF that tells you like all the different six modules of training. And then this is the QR code if you want to sign up for Count the Vote and you want to get involved and be an observer, which we hope that you will. So this is a good segue for us. Let's see, we should check in with our audit. I saw that we did have a bid. There was a bid for, we had started the bidding at $40 and

And I also want to say Boss Legs is here. Hi, Boss. She was one of the influencers who read. I know we heard that there was echo on her reading, which is a shame because it's very powerful reading. So what we'll be doing is we'll be putting that out on social media. So just follow us. I put up all of our social media channels earlier. We're on all these different social media channels, YouTube,

Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Blue Sky. And we'll be putting segments of this program up there and we will make sure that we put the influencers, Boss Legs and Kiki up there because I know there was a little bit of problem with their audio. And I apologize for that. I apologize for any of our technical difficulties. I hope you understand. We're just a scrappy, small little organization here punching above our welterweight. Is that a word? Welterweight wrench? Yeah, you're muted, I think.

Yeah, you usually just say punching above your weight, but welterweight is like the lowest class, I think. Anyway, update on the bidding. We've got currently a bid of $50 for the paperback, and we are going to keep that open for a little while longer. That sounds good. Why don't we give away a pen? Let's do a quiz.

And we'll give away one of the pens. God.

really been on this program for a long time. I was up at, I think, maybe 4.30 a.m., so if we're having technical difficulties, I know that you'll be kind. Okay, so we have two pens, and let's give away one now. I think let's give away the one that's marked ban barcode voting, and so we should do a quiz. We'll just do, we'll do two questions. We'll make it a little simpler than the t-shirt quiz, and we'll make these questions about barcode voting,

because if you're going to win a pin that says ban barcode voting, you're going to need to actually know something about barcode voting. So the first thing that I'm going to ask in this quiz, question number one is going to be, please tell us a state that uses the barcode that encodes the barcode

that encodes the vote in a barcode on their ballot. So there's a number of states that do this. And if you're going to win this pen that says ban barcode voting, you're going to have to tell me at least one state, tell us one state where they actually are encoding the vote in a barcode. Okay. I'm going to put that up as a quiz.

I know that some of the people on here definitely have the answer to that question. They absolutely have to know. So this is question number one for the ban barcode voting. And it's like, tell us a state where they utilize barcode voting. And I'm specifically talking about a QR code.

to encode the vote in a barcode because this is something that a lot of people probably don't know utilize QR code to encode the vote okay this is question number one and we need to save that and show you that question okay this is it and I'm sorry can we take that ticker tape off because uh I have a hard time concentrating if there's too much going on um so

Let's see if anybody's got this yet. I wanna explain about encoding the vote in a barcode. And Ruth is saying, California, yes, yes, you are absolutely right. Ruth got the book and she may get the pen, but somebody else can give her a run for her money. So in California, it's not all over the state, but in Los Angeles, in the voting solutions for all people system,

which they implemented, I think, in 2020, there is a big barcode on the ballot, like the barcode that's on our screen. And that barcode, your vote is encoded in that barcode. And you can just imagine why that's not really a good idea, because just think about the barcode. I want to show you this. So, like, these are the different barcodes that we have. Watch the barcode. This is smartelections.us barcode. This is the donate barcode. This is count the vote barcode.

They do not look that different. Now, if you were to see those and I wasn't telling you, you wouldn't know what they are, right? Now, what if this is a vote for Wrench, and this is a vote for me, and this is a vote for Ruth? Now, do you know how your vote's being counted? You see that on your ballot, but do you actually know how your vote's being counted? Most likely you do not. So this is the reason that we have these pens that say,

ban barcode voting. Everybody's voting for me, though. They just, lots of people who are voting for me are scanning a barcode that they think means they're voting for wrench, but they don't actually know for sure that they, a bunch of that might actually be coded as a vote for somebody else when like 99% of the people are actually trying to vote for wrench. Well, maybe they're voting for you or maybe they're voting for me.

But either way, they won't know how their vote is counted. OK, so. Boss Legs has two guesses in so far. What's the word on Arizona or Georgia? Georgia is correct, but she was not in first. Ruth was in first. So Ruth gets that answer. I'm going to put that into the spreadsheet. So Ruth has one answer right for the pen.

T-shirt went to Mark McAfee. Penn, so far, Ruth has one question right. But Boss Legs is absolutely correct that in Georgia they also do encode the vote in a barcode. They're on the Liberty Vote system there. It used to be Dominion. Arizona, honestly, not 100% sure about. Okay, so then the next question, we're going to need another question to win this ban barcode voting.

And the next question is going to be, this will be a little bit tricky, but tell me the name of the two companies that actually both have machines that encode the vote in a barcode. It's not that tricky of a question, actually, if you know.

the major vendors. There are two companies that are the main ones that are encoding votes in barcode. Does anybody know the names of those two vendors? So I'll put this as this question number two. What vendors? Oh, we got that. What is the name of a company that encodes in barcodes? I really want two companies. There's two main companies. Those are the ones that we're looking for. To win this pen,

This is a band barcode voting pen. What are the two companies? Let's see if anybody can get them. Smartmatic.

You know what? Bosslegs coming in with more guessing. Bosslegs, I'm going to give it to you. Dominion definitely, although they changed to Liberty Vote, but Dominion definitely does encode that vote in a barcode. And Smartmatic is the company that designed the voting solutions for all people. And that does have a barcode. And then, Ruth, you're also right with ES&S, Dominion and ES&S. Yeah.

So now we're in a tie situation here. We're going to have to have one more question because I'm going to boss legs came in first here with two different companies that both do encode the vote. So now we got Ruth one and boss legs one. It's coming down to the wire now for this pen. We also have at pretty much the same time. Ruth guessing the ESS.

ES&S is also a company. And then Kat Kindo actually said that. So these are the guesses that we had so far. We had Dominion from Boss Legs. Then we had Smartmatic. Both of those are correct. Lori Gallagher is saying Heart and ES&S. And Lori Gallagher would know. So I didn't know that Heart had a system that encodes the vote in the barcode. But she's not asking a question there. She's telling us.

So at this point, this is just all the major systems. The only one that maybe we haven't heard is ClearBallot. ES&S definitely has a system that encodes the vote in a barcode. That is the ExpressVote Excel system. That's the system that we're actually trying to ban here in New York State. And then ES&S came in here as well. They are definitely, yeah, so okay.

let's go boss legs let's go okay and then Lori I did see yours yeah yeah thanks for educating us about that I didn't know Hart had a had a barcode machine a QR code machine okay so we have to have one more question here about no we're not we're done with that question now we're gonna go to question number three about barcodes okay so

This is a little bit of a trick question. But the question is, there are codes around the edge of a ballot. Now, do those codes around the edge of the ballot, do they actually count your vote? I'm going to show you one. So this is a hand-marked paper ballot that we have here. And you see these codes that are all around the edge of the ballot? Do you see those?

Can you hold it up again? They're called timing marks, actually, but they are a code. So the question is, do those marks around the edge of your ballot actually have anything to do with your vote? Do they count your vote?

Codes around the edge of the ballot actually count your vote. And, oh, Lori, you were guessing. We'll have to research that. Okay. So Lori Gallagher is saying she was guessing about Hart. So then we're going to have to go back and research whether or not Hart has a QR. But you were definitely right about ES&S. But the new question now, we'll go ahead and put that question up again. So Boss Legs, the question is question number three.

do the codes around the edge of a ballot actually count your vote? And then what we have coming in here, Boss Legs is saying yes. You and Ruth are tied right now. So Ruth, are you going to vote yes or no? Do the code around the edge, does the code around the edge of the ballot, does that count your vote? They're called timing marks. Do they count your vote? Okay, and Ruth is guessing no.

And Ruth wins. Ruth wins the pen.

And the answer is no, the timing marks are not supposed to count your vote. I cannot promise you exactly what is in them. They do, they are barcodes and they could be misappropriated, but they are not supposed to be counting your vote. Those are the codes that tell you what's called the ballot style. That means, you know, I live in Flatbush, Brooklyn. So if I go to my polling location, I'm going to have a particular style of ballot as opposed to the neighbor.

who lives six blocks away from me, that neighbor might be voting for a different set of candidates. And so those little codes around the edge of your ballot, they're called timing marks, and they don't,

actually have anything to do with the vote. But there are ballots that have like a big QR code on them, like the QR code on our screen. And those QR codes do encode your actual vote and are much more dangerous. And I'll give you like a little quick story about that, which is that

When we wrote the legislation in New York to try to ban the QR code, the first time we wrote the legislation, we had to actually pull it back and rewrite it because it was written in such a way that it was going to ban the timing marks. And if it had done that, it would have actually banned every ballot marking. It would have banned every voting machine in the state. So that would have been a big mistake. So these are the kind of details that you really have to find out about if you're going to start writing legislation.

and doing things like that. So it is fascinating. And Ruth, congratulations. You did win that pen. But you know what? Just because it was a tie and because you both played so well, we're going to give Boss Legs a pen, too. Because I think that was a really close one, and I think Boss Legs

put in a lot of effort there. So boss, you're going to get a pen also, two pens. Okay. So the next thing that we're going to do now is we're going to, so we're moving on from that quiz question. We can take that one down and then we're going to take a look. We've been looking at some of the more contemporary issues. Now we looked at mail in voting. We looked at technology. We're going to look at redistricting because redistricting has really as

anybody who's following elections know become like the epicenter of the midterm races because so many different states have passed new redistricting laws. And it's really important for us to look back historically at why this type of redistricting and gerrymandering was outlawed to begin with. It was outlawed by numerous Supreme Court races. No, I don't mean races, Supreme Court decisions.

And so here to talk to us about this issue is Tanya Martin. She is the program director of North Carolina Red Wine and Blue, another collaborator in our Count the Vote program. We really love the work that they're doing there. And so this is a reading from a Deliver the Vote section about why redistricting in the way that it's being done now was

outlawed by the Supreme Court. I am really, really pleased to introduce our next guest, Tanya Martin. She is the North Carolina program director of Red Wine and Blue. That's a national community of over half a million diverse suburban women working together to defeat extremism one friend at a time.

and they train and connect women from all across the country, from all different political backgrounds, including many who have never been political before. Smart Elections has already held our first election observer training session with Red Wine and Blue, and we're excited to collaborate with them to protect the midterms. So if you'd like to be an observer,

please do be sure and sign up. And I'm putting a QR code up right now. You'll sign up to be an election observer and learn more about that with Smart Elections. And then after we hear this part of deliver the vote, we'll also have a QR code in case you want to sign up with Red Wine and Blue directly. So Tanya, take it away. Thank you. One person, one vote.

By the early 1960s, a series of pivotal Supreme Court decision had refashioned the structure of American elections, especially in the South. The power base of so many Southern conservatives in Dixie rested on the unfair power of rural districts over more heavily populated urban areas. In Georgia, the county unit system mimicked one of the problems of the electoral college

While Fulton County contained 14% of the state's population, it only had 1.46% of the vote. In Echols County, with a population at the time of just 1,876, one vote there represented 938 residents, while one vote in Fulton County represent 92,721 residents.

So the vote of urban dwellers were significantly diluted. In 1962, the US Supreme Court ruled in Baker versus Carr that these systems violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The following year, Georgia politics were the focus of the Geary versus Sanders where the court finally struck down the county unit system.

After considering the undemocratic nature of the Georgia system, Justice William O. Douglas, speaking for the majority, wrote, the conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the 15th, 17th, and 19th Amendments can mean only one thing, one person, one vote.

A subsequent case of Reynolds versus Sims also invalidated in an Alabama districting system that allowed 25% of the state's population to determine a majority of the legislative seats. In that case, Chief Justice Earl Warren recognized the latent unfairness of the old system and wrote, legislators represent people, not trees or acres.

Wow. It's really an important part of the book where he really lays out how this incredibly distorted representation was finally addressed by the Supreme Court. I think you really nailed that in terms of just giving it the gravitas that it deserves. It's so, I don't know. It is interesting to actually

digest some of the history and especially where we are right now politically. And it seems almost as deja vu, like, you know, are we, you know, moving backwards, right? I do give a lot of credit to those who fought for equality. And I think that they should also be honored and we should honor them by doing the right thing and making sure that the right people that really do care about everyone having a fair say.

that those are the people that we choose as our public servants and our judges, because those things really do matter. And it's just wild, you know, I mean, it's such in North Carolina, we're so gerrymandered, you know, our congressional districts have been redrawn seven times out of the past nine years. Wow.

So, I mean, that kind of speaks to some of this, you know, it's overwhelming. Yeah. And I think also one of the things just going through the book today, I've really seen how these patterns just repeat over and over and over again. The same themes that people have, their frustrations have been kind of they explode into the public consciousness. They explode into these movements.

And then often they're really not resolved. The movement might pass, but the actual reform doesn't take place. And that's what you see over and over again in the book is that there are these cycles of corruption and reform, but that there is sort of like just a continuing plateau of corruption that we kind of just underneath everything that we just seem

to struggle to really try to make actual progress on. And I think that's kind of my takeaway today from so much of what we've read. Yeah. It's amazing. As I sit here today, and what yesterday would be the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington, right?

and the things that people were fighting for back then, I often wonder like, what would they say if they were here today, you know, at where we are as a nation and all of the things that they fought for. And I think that the only way to really truly honor that is to remember that we the people, like it is we the people, right? And we are the majority, right? But we can really gain ground

if we start coming together more as community, right? And as a collective. And there are so many more of us than it is of the bad guys and the people that are corrupt. And I think that this just speaks to, really, I think it's urging us to pick up the baton that those of us that have, those people that fought so hard for us to have the rights that we have today,

and to really come together and have more conversations about this. I love that. Yeah, I do. I love that. And I think one of the things also that I find, especially when you talk about community, it is community that carries you through. Like I'm a Buddhist actually.

And the Buddhist teachings, they really talk about the Sangha. The Sangha is the word for community. It is the Sangha that will keep you afloat on the river. It is the community that lifts us up because these are hard things to really focus on, to really absorb the amount of corruption, the amount of deception.

from you know the deception of the public trust it's depressing it's demoralizing and you need that community you need those other souls and other people coming together to lift you up to have the strength to say how can we change it and one of the things that i'm also actually

And the Buddhist teachings, they really talk about the Sangha. The Sangha is the word for community. It is the Sangha that will keep you afloat on the river. It is the community that lifts us up because these are hard things to really focus on, to really absorb the amount of corruption, the amount of deception.

from you know the deception of the public trust it's depressing it's demoralizing and you need that community you need those other souls and other people coming together to lift you up to have the strength to say how can we change it and one of the things that i'm also actually encouraged by is the amount of community that we've been able to develop across party lines

And I find, and I will, I'm going to just put in a little plug for Smart Elections here. And please do say, go to smartelections.us and please do make the donation. There are very, very few organizations that are actually building community across partisan lines. And you have seen like throughout the day, we've had people

Republicans, Democrats, unaffiliated. We've had people, and you will find people who honestly want real reform across the political spectrum. And that's what we've done. We're building bridges with those communities. And so we do need your support to continue to do that. And I hope that you are going to make a donation and help us to continue to build relationships with wonderful people like Tonya Martin.

I do want to also give people the opportunity if they want to work with your organization directly. There is a QR code and this is the QR code to sign up with Red Wine and Blue directly. And they're doing such cool work. It's such a I love the vibe that you all have going. Well, I love what you're doing. I think it's so important and continue to fight. We do continue to fight our peaceful warrior fight.

That's right. It was a fascinating conversation. Sorry about the glitch there. We had a little repeat, but it was a good section to repeat. We're going to repeat one. And we're going to go now to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman talking about another pretty modern moment. And this is one from the 2000 Florida election.

This is one that some people may even remember. And it was kind of a political awakening for me. I think it was one of the first times that I really realized that I didn't trust the elections and that things were really, something seemed horribly amiss. And this is him describing it. I will just say, I might bail out at the end because there's a section at the end

where he disagreed with Dr. Campbell. So I might try to just end it before we get to that section. But this is about the 2000 Florida election. My name is Spencer Acker. I'm a journalist and author and occasionally a comic book writer based in New York. This is the Bush-Gore election of 2000. The 2000 presidential election was as close as a hair and came down to strategy, political maneuvering, and bullying in the state of Florida.

At 749 PM Eastern Standard Time, although the polls had not closed in Florida, the major networks announced that Gore had won the state. To observers within both campaigns, they knew this was the big prize, the crucial state that would give Gore the win. Yet the Bush camp was conceding nothing after the initial shock of the Florida news. Bush cautioned against discounting Florida.

Around 9 p.m., the network suddenly announced that new results had changed their estimates and Florida was now too close to call. Bush could still become president if he could win Florida. By 10 p.m., that seemed likely. By 2 a.m., the networks finally called Florida for Bush. Yet even that proved premature, as a glaring mistake in the counting of votes in Volusia County reduced Bush's lead to just 6,000. With over 6 million votes cast in the state, this was well below the threshold.

that required a mandatory recount. While on his way to concede, Gore realized that the election was still up in the air, and promptly withdrew the concession in a phone call to Bush. As bleary-eyed Americans awoke the next morning, they were greeted with the news that the election had not been decided. Now, an election drama played itself out, like a scene in the 1948 film Key Largo, where Edward G. Robinson says, get my boys to bring the voters out,

and then count the votes over and over again until they added up right and he was elected. In Miami-Dade County, the canvassing board's recount took place in public view as weary canvassers inspected each ballot by hand. On November 22nd, an angry crowd appeared in the halls just outside where the recount was underway. A well-planned Republican effort to bring as many angry marchers as possible to the courthouse had been going on for days.

Hundreds of calls had been made on GOP telephone banks to implore members of the party to protest the recount. People had also been egged on by talk radio hosts. New York Congressman John Sweeney led a group of Republicans to the center to, in Sweeney's words, shut it down. As hundreds of pro-Bush marchers chanted outside the closed doors, the canvassers began the process of counting over a half million ballots. Supervisor David Leahy suggested moving the process

Supervisor David Leahy suggested moving the proceedings to another floor where the counting machines in his own office were located. Yet there were no windows for outsiders to observe the proceedings, and when GOP-led protesters realized that they would not be able to see the recount themselves, they grew violent. The chairman of the County Democratic Party had to be escorted away by police for his own safety. Protesters demanded access to the room where the recount was to occur, and when they were refused, the New York Times reported,

Several people were trampled, punched, or kicked. Sheriff's deputies had to be brought in to restore calm. The canvassers inside could hear the commotion and the angry shouts. Suddenly, the canvassers became cowed and voted unanimously to call off the recount entirely. Leahy admitted the angry protest outside the doors of his office was one factor that, quote, weighed heavily in the decision. The crowd's intimidating tactics had worked beyond their wildest hopes.

and Republicans cheered the board's decision while Democrats cried foul. Local GOP leaders took the stance of quiet pride in having worked up party activists to stop the recount. Democratic party leaders described the actions of the crowd as smacking of fascism. The recount stopped as Gord picked up 157 votes.

At the end of that section, there's a really interesting comment from Dr. Campbell in the book where he talks about how America is basically becoming a banana republic, and he illustrates it with a cartoon. And then Spencer, who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, emailed me, and he was like, I'm really uncomfortable with that kind of lens, that framing that, oh, it's only other countries that have a banana republic.

Whereas in fact, it was the US who often put those banana republics in those, the governments in those, what we call banana republics, put those governments into place. So we very much had a hand in that. And I just love it. That's part of what's really cool about this process is that I keep learning things from, because we're working with such well-informed,

and interesting people. So it's time for us to have a little bit of fun now. I think we're going to get Wrench and Arson on the stage and have a little fun with Gangsta Grass. So here we go. There's Wrench and here's Arson, both from the band Gangsta Grass. Gangsta Grass is in the house.

what up yeah um and uh you are not spencer ackerman so we could just take that banner down um uh where are we at on the uh paperback bidding uh paperback i don't think we've had any bids since that original bid we did have what's our first original bid at 50 i believe oh let's double check it

um bid 50 yeah we got bid 50 going for the paperback version of deliver the vote the book that we've been reading from all day so if anybody wants to bid we will um close this fitting right before seven o'clock right before we end so this is your opportunity bids at 50 right now could go up to five thousand dollars for this book so you know you want to get in there and get it fast before people get too motivated and it's an awesome book that is out of print so this is this is your chance to get the book if you want it

You got a bid here. There's no like, oh, I'll go buy a new one because there are no new ones. This is it.

uh this is it uh okay so i think would be great just to talk a little bit about gangsta grass gangsta grass is a perfect band to be kind of like our mascot for smart elections because the same way that we're really working with people across the political spectrum they're really working with a lot of different musical genres so i think it's wrenches uh wrenches the mastermind behind this and he kind of had this idea of putting together

country music and hip-hop music so do you want to just say something briefly and then we'll play the music which is so great uh yeah i'm just gonna say that uh you know we are fortunate to be playing music that appeals to a lot of different kinds of people across the country across the world so we have a lot of contact with people of all political backgrounds um around the state and we want

We want all of their votes to be counted accurately. And we think that's going to be super important going forward for us to be able to have people checking

on whether these votes are being recorded accurately and making sure that there aren't things going on that are fraudulent in our elections is just a risk that's out there. As we've been hearing from the book and from Lulu, it's already been going on in different elections for a long time. So we need to gather as many people out there ready and trained

to watch the polls, watch the audits, watch the ballots, and make sure that this is getting done fairly and accurately and not fraudulently. It's super important. And I'm really glad that we have an organization like smartelections.us to be working that up, but they need the resources to train people and send them out

everywhere. So go to smartelections.us to donate some money right now or bid. This is your last chance to bid on a paperback copy of the incredible book, Deliver the Vote. Just put bid and then an amount in the chat. We're going to close that auction in a few minutes and then auction off a Gangstagrath vinyl. Arsene, what's up? What's going on, man?

Yeah, I gotta forgive me my I just got off my day job, but I wanted to make sure I was here to represent the whole idea of you know for collections and what's also going on like it's a it's a it's a dangerous time right now and I

i come from a from a lineage of people that that were really about the idea of particularly you know black people getting out and getting the right to vote maintaining the right to vote and most most importantly using that right you know this is uh there's a whole lot going on that is trying to

you know determine that that that does it doesn't even matter for us anymore and we got to make sure you know a lot of our people fought and bled and died for that right to vote you got to use it you got to you got to maintain it and um make sure that that everyone that you know is is is doing the same uh and so you know like i said i just got off of work but this was this is too important to miss

appreciate you being here and and saying that and we really feel that everybody we want everybody to vote every eligible voter to vote there's so many people actually who have checked out who are disengaged who are jaded who for good reason are cynical and feel like it doesn't really matter it's not worth their time or

Also, even like it isn't even worth their time to research the candidate. So many people who vote, but they don't really vote in an informed way or they only vote like every four years for the president. But there's so many local races that impact your life. So get in there.

Join our organization, sign up to be an observer and you will learn more about the elections process. You'll wind up learning more about candidates and you'll feel more connected to your community. I promise you, it really does. It has this way of just seeping down into

every aspect of your life just careful like you'll get the bug but we're gonna go ahead and play this music now this awesome gangsta grass music and have a great vibe and if we're really lucky our son might do a little freestyle for us which we would love and let's just have a little fun here yeah we'll let our son get done driving

We'll be right back.

I'm so cold

All right. That was us performing live last month in Nuremberg, Germany, an exclusive

uh live performance video uh right now that is uh nobody else is getting to see so we uh we brought that especially for you folks tuning in um to see something uh exclusive and remind you to get over to smartelections.us and donate some money if you haven't yet this is this is the time but we have another chance for you to donate some money because we're going to auction off

a uh gangster grass vinyl record of our number one bluegrass charts topping album the blackest thing on the menu i pulled over by the way our son we talked about you uh well i think before you came on but uh arson is one of the lead vocalists at gangster grass we're just delighted to have you here and as i said if we're lucky we might get a little freestyle

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's easy. I even pulled over for it. All right, so check it out. Let me see. Let me see. Let me see. Let me see. Let me see. Let me see. Let's see. All right. For all the blokes and folks, everybody out here, you need a quote. I came up on Rock Kim's. I ain't no joke. I also came up with the idea that I got the votes when I turned 18. I got my registration, went straight to the joint. The first one I voted for, I think, was the point.

i think it might have been clinton in 92 the things that i do is just enough for you that was my first presidential election now you got to make your selection you don't want to burn your stuff go on the midterms get your vote in because everyone counts every single amount and ain't no doubt everybody get your cards all tightened up so you where to go and if you gotta write it up and send it in the mail because you can still do that it's true facts

everybody get to vote in this ain't no joking and it ain't no games and if we let this get messed up it's gonna be a shame our son the voice of reason that is the name i'm not doing this for fame i'm doing this so that we can all claim that we got a better world for all the boys and the girls yes all of the kids doing all the things that we did so we don't do bids i flip it like lids but this is what it is i said it ain't no joke if you registered

You need to get out and vote like that. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. Awesome. I'm feeling that. That's so cool. So.

I'm trying to get us into a formation where we can see each other. Yeah, that's nice. People are definitely feeling that. We had a lot of nice comments going on about the music. Loving this. We had the 5-4-1, the count, and then the, like, the one. You probably could understand. Yeah, so it's all, that's all, right? Four, one. Yeah, boss got it there.

Love that. Cool. Okay, so we got bids coming in. We got a bid of 50 from Erica. Also, we signed a bid for the book. Did you see that? We had 100 for the book. Okay, so the book is going to be going right up until 7 o'clock. This is our... Oh, man. That's both Erica coming in with the hot bids here for the book and the vinyl. Okay.

Shout out to Erica. That's my people, man. That's my man, Rich. My man, Lance's wife. Me and my man, Lance, used to work together. And they have supported us and represented for us. And yeah, big ups to them, man. Thank you, guys. Cool. And then, oh, wow. So Erica's been on the album also? Yeah.

I see that. So 50 for the album and 100 for the book. OK, so those are the current bids. Just so you know, if you want to keep bidding on that. Now, what we're going to do now is we're going to actually go and have some closing words and then we'll come back and put everybody on screen at the end for a little conversation.

So we're going to bring Ion Sancho on. Ion, thank you so much for being here. It's an honor, a pleasure. We're delighted to have you here. Ion is, again, as some of the other people on the show have been, a legend in the election security community. He's a former

election official, supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida. And he was featured in the film Hacking Democracy, where the county elections were actually, it was not an actual election, but it was a demonstration that Ayan helped to shape.

and allowed to happen in his county. He was very courageous at that time. And the hacker that was Hari Hurst, an internationally known hacker, was able to change the election results on film. And it was a stunning, stunning moment.

So great to have you here, Ion. And do you want to, I don't know how much of the program you've been able to watch, but do you have any sort of, we're going to read these closing sentiments from Dr. Campbell. And do you want to share any thoughts with us before we start that? Well, I think this is the most important election of my lifetime. Wow. We face a critical point for this November, whether or not democracy can be saved. If we can capture the House,

The investigation to get the grift and criminality that is dominating this administration can be started. Without capturing the House, that can't be done.

Oh, Ian, I have to stop you. I'm so sorry, but we just don't talk politics. We talk about the actual elections. We want it to be a fair election, but we absolutely cannot take sides about whether or not we want the Democrats or the Republicans to control the House. And I'm sorry if that wasn't clear when we spoke, but we can't talk partisan politics. I think the election is very important. And what we're really hoping for is that it's going to be fair. We want a fair election. Absolutely.

Absolutely, Lulu. All right. I would love to have you read those final words from Dr. Campbell, where he's kind of talking about how we can move through this and what we're going to do. Ian and I are going to trade off reading these sections that are really, I think, really beautiful. Do you want to go ahead and start? All right.

Well, what then can be done? What does this history tell us? Realistically, the culture of corruption is too endemic to be eradicated quickly. Yet at the very least, there are some changes that might not prove popular, but could curb the cheating and make voting abuses more difficult. For over 200 years, reformers have noted how eliminating the electoral college would make selecting the president more democratic.

It would also diminish the opportunities of fraud in the presidential race because the complexities of stealing votes in a national election involving over 100 million people would be greatly multiplied. On another front, courts must be willing to throw out illegal votes. And again, this is from Deliver the Vote. The long and ugly tradition of suppressing the black vote is still alive and thriving.

In an incident in Orlando, Florida, the elderly black voters were interrogated by law enforcement. Their presence happened to fit the Florida Republican Party's goal expressed by one party member who said, it's no secret that the name of the game for Republicans is to restrain that turnout as much as possible. And voters must also understand that civil rights safeguards involve not just casting a ballot, but also

counting it. Even with some or all of the above changes, history provides us with another sobering assessment. No matter how many reforms are implemented, no matter how untrustworthy the new voting devices appear, partisans must find new ways to manipulate and cheat. Considering the rare penalties, the rewards are simply too high for cheaters to ignore the opportunities to pad their votes.

And I think we just want to make sure that the language is clear. I think there was just a little bit of a confusion. The text said, no matter how trustworthy the new voting devices appear, partisans will find new ways to manipulate and cheat. So we want to make sure that we're not saying that we're encouraging partisans to cheat. We're just apprehensive that they will cheat. And I think that's the message from Deliver the Vote over and over again is that those cheaters find a way.

And then Deliver the Vote has, as it comes to its conclusion, to reclaim the ballot box, we must start with the humblest of beginnings, the awareness that there really is a problem and confront the uncomfortable truth that election fraud has been a common component of our nation's electoral history.

This fundamental threat to our democratic birthright must no longer be dismissed by partisan finger pointing or trivialized by technology updates. The stakes are too high. And that's where he leaves it. I think his language really speaks for itself. Do you have any thoughts that you want to add to that, Ion? Just because I know you've worked so long for fair elections in Leon County.

All elections need to be audited in a scientific, verifiable way that citizens can observe. And I think that those audits must occur before certification so that, in fact, if there are errors or inconsistencies or even fraudulent activities that have occurred, we can identify them and correct them.

And this is one of the reasons why I believe the gold standard in voting is handmarked paper ballots that can be audited. The use of devices to act between the voter and that vote that are not verifiable as they are in Georgia is simply not tenable. And we can see the problems that are emerging in that state over the issues of transparency. Those are the issues that I've been working on.

They won't end until we can have excellent, certifiable, verifiable elections for all elections, for all voters. I heard that. Certifiable, verifiable. These are the words that we live by. We are working for fair, secure, accurate elections that are transparent and publicly verifiable. Those are like, you know,

Those are the key words that we look for over and over again. So we're wrapping up here. We really appreciate you being here and we're going to just take us out and have a little some celebration here at the end of just how great it's been to be here and to come together and really share our concerns and also the progress that's being made, the wonderful, wonderful work that's going forward that we've seen in state after state and county after county from all these different. Oh, yeah, there's a party on.

okay so um we have some winners i think for the different auctions um we had a 50 bid for the album i'm not it's up to 70 now we got a 70 dollar bid for the album so this is your last chance if you want to oh we got an 80 bid for the album

Last chance if you want to support smart elections and get a gangstress vinyl, we're up to 80 bucks get your bids in now Okay, and then what's the latest on the book? The book was at a hundred last time I saw anything else Going once it's 658 Going twice Here we got

This is, the book is at $100. The vinyl is way above that now. I'm looking for that $100 bid so we could see who bid $100 on that. That was Erica bidding $100 on the book. Thank you, Erica. Thank you. Yes. Okay. So anybody else? I'm just looking for it.

I see the vinyl at 80. I'm sorry. I don't see the hundred for the book now, but I'm sure it's way up there. We got vinyl for 80 and we got a hundred for the book. We're going to do the vinyl first going once at 80. This is the, the title is the blackest thing on the menu. Fantastic title, vinyl album going once, going twice,

Sold for $80. That's to Erica. To Stephanie. Oh, that's to Stephanie. Stephanie came in with the $80 bid for the vinyl. Okay, I'm going to put that in the sheet. Okay, so the vinyl is going to Stephanie for $80. And then do you know, Stephanie, because we got to get Stephanie, the other people who won so far, I know how to get in touch with them. Do you know how to get in touch with Stephanie?

We'll just tell Steffi to send us or post your social media handle, if you're willing to, in the chat. And we will DM you to coordinate getting you the vinyl. That's it. And the other option that you have there, Stephanie, is to email us. And our email address is smartelectionsact at gmail.com. And I'll just put that up.

So you can email us smartelectionsact at gmail.com and just say, I'm Steffi. And actually, with the auction, it's actually really easy. You're going to have to go and make that donation. And when you make that donation, we will get your contact information. So that's the best way to do it for that. And then any other bids for the book, last chance for the book?

Going Once, the bid is at $100 for this amazing book. Deliver the Vote, which we've been reading from since 1 o'clock this afternoon. Thank you so much to all of our amazing readers. I think they did a fantastic job. Triumph, The Insult Comic Dog, and Robert Spiegel there behind the puppet. Dennis O'Hare, Spencer Ackerman.

and all of our movement leaders like Tanya Martin and Lori Gallagher and our candidates, also Susan Pynchon, Ken Bennett. I'm sorry if I'm leaving anybody's name off, but we are super, super grateful to you all. And thanks to all our donors that have like really come through and supported us. And you're the ones that making this,

kind of amazing project happen. We are so far ahead of where we were. Like when we started in 2019, I did pretty much everything by myself. We have five people on staff now. So we are definitely scaling up and it's because of you and all of your support and coming together and signing up and volunteering. We totally love you. So thank you. Thank you so much for all of your support. Let's say the email for smart elections again. We've got that up. That's a smart elections act.

at gmail.com and I'm sure I just had it smart elections act at gmail.com so did we finish the book I'm like so delirious I've been up since the book is going to you

Erica. The book's going to Erica. Okay. Yes, here's some applause. Yay, Erica, you will get a paperback book, a copy of Deliver the Boat. It is used, but it is a treasure. You cannot get them new. They are out of print, and it will be signed personally to you from

Dr. Tracy Campbell. And so go ahead and make that donation. Let us know that you're Erica and we'll be getting that book to you. It will take a little time. We have to send it to Dr. Campbell is to send it back to us. We have to send it to you, but you will get it. This is our program. Thank you so very, very much.

And I just want to say to everybody, keep spreading the word. Talk to your friends about election monitoring and send them to smartelections.us. It's never too late to add to the resources. If you've got a little bit more to donate,

Go to smartelections.us and donate some money to help them send people all over to monitor these elections. And we need the resources to do it. So keep sending money, smartelections.us. Keep it coming in.

thank you thank you so much this will be up on youtube so you'll be able to watch this through november and even after november we will still be raising funds because after the election we have to do our reports and if there's any challenges to the elections obviously we're going to continue to reach out to you for support um okay thanks so much everybody see you out there in the voting booths

Key Points

• The book "Deliver the Vote" by Pulitzer Prize-nominated historian Tracy Campbell details centuries of fraud, irregularities, and power struggles in U.S. elections, challenging the common perception of perfect elections.

• The organization Smart Elections aims to transform U.S. elections through its nonpartisan "Count the Vote" program, which trains election observers across 47 states to monitor and verify election processes.

• Various historical and contemporary methods of election fraud were discussed, including vote buying, ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, manipulating voter rolls, and tampering with voting machines.

• The event highlighted the importance of citizen participation in observing elections, from local to national levels, to ensure transparency and accountability.

• Fundraising efforts are underway to support Smart Elections' operations, including observer training, legal cases, and advocacy for election security.

• Collaboration across political divides is emphasized as crucial for addressing election integrity issues, with the goal of focusing on common ground for fair and secure elections.

Takeaways

• Election fraud and corruption have been a consistent, deeply embedded part of American political history, often overlooked or downplayed.

• Active citizen observation and participation are vital for ensuring the accuracy and integrity of election outcomes.

• Technological advancements in voting systems, while offering potential benefits, also introduce new vulnerabilities that require careful scrutiny and oversight.

• Organizations like Smart Elections play a critical role in educating the public, training observers, and advocating for systemic reforms to protect democratic processes.

• Understanding the historical context of election challenges is essential for contemporary reformers to effectively address current issues and work towards more trustworthy elections.

This event, centered around the book "Deliver the Vote" by Tracy Campbell, discusses the historical and ongoing prevalence of fraud and irregularities in U.S. elections.

The primary purpose is to raise awareness and funds for the organization Smart Elections and its "Count the Vote" program, which trains election observers to promote transparency and integrity in electoral processes.

The core message emphasizes that election fraud is a persistent issue requiring continuous vigilance and citizen involvement.

https://smartelections.us/

© 2026. ElectionFraud2026.Com - All rights reserved.

Home - Blog - Solutions