Editor’s note: This is the second of a two part series based on an interview on Liberty Nation Radio with John Fund, acclaimed columnist and author of two books on voting fraud, Stealing Elections and Who’s Counting. In Part One, Mr. Fund discussed incompetence and fraud in Broward County Florida. In this part, he addresses serious charges of voter suppression in the Georgia gubernatorial election and the overall state of the American electoral system.
Charges of official corruption are nothing new in American elections. Republicans have long blamed Democrats for encouraging non-citizens to vote, and Democrats in turn have attacked the GOP for trying to limit turnout with ID laws and aggressive purging of voter rolls. But distrust in the very way we elect public officials has reached dangerous levels following Democrats’ claims that Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, and now the 2018 midterm elections, which were fraught with allegations of official misconduct in Florida and Georgia. In this final part of our two-part series, we discuss stinging charges of voter suppression in the Georgia gubernatorial election with John Fund, acclaimed columnist and author of two books on election fraud. [perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”24″]Most of those non-profit voter registrations that came in…were done by a group founded by the Democratic candidate for governor Stacey Abrams.[/perfectpullquote]
Tim: John, there was outrage on the left about the Georgia gubernatorial race, charges that Secretary of State Brian Kemp put up all kinds of obstacles to minority voters, purging hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls, closing a lot of polling places, generating long lines in heavy minority districts. Doesn’t at the very least, the notion of a Secretary of State at the state level, the person usually responsible for supervising elections, being in charge of his own election raise red flags by itself?
John Fund: Well it certainly does in the view of many in the public, but there’s a couple things we have to remember. One is the actual supervision of the elections takes place at the county or city level. The Secretary of State in almost every state exercises a ministerial function, they coordinate the county activities, they conduct oversight over the counties, but they don’t actually run the elections, they don’t actually count the votes. But most people don’t know that, they think the Secretary of State runs the election system. So just for perception purposes, I think it would be better to go to a nonpartisan secretary of state system so you don’t have this problem that you had, not only in Georiga, but in a couple other states where a Secretary of State was running.
The counties run the elections. All of the problems that result in, for example, in Florida, or in Georgia, were at the county level. Now, the one thing that the Secretary of State did have a responsibility for in Georgia was the maintenance of the statewide list of registered voters. That list hadn’t been cleaned up since 2012, or 2011. There were clear problems, 15 to 20% of people had moved, had died, had left the state. The list had to be cleaned up, because if you have a bad list, just like with anything, you’re going to have potential problems, and people can misrepresent themselves, impersonate someone else. So this was a routine cleansing of the list.
John Fund
Basically, what the people forgot was, even if you were thrown off the list, even if you were flagged as somebody that had to be asked questions about, or show your ID, you could still vote. All you had to do was cast a provisional ballot on election day at the polls, and then clear up whatever bad information was on your voting roll, or voting record. That took care of the whole problem. Much of what this voter suppression hysteria is about is simply because Brian Kemp set himself up as a target, because as the Secretary of State, it looked as if he was in charge of the election. It also looked as if he was taking people off the rolls, but actually it was entirely routine, and entirely understandable given his responsibilities.
And by the way, just to tell you, two-thirds of the bad registrations, the new registrations that came in, were on paper forms that had been distributed, or collected by non-profit voter registration groups. Most of those non-profit voter registrations that came in that had bad information like missing social security numbers, or bad addresses, were done by a group founded by the Democratic candidate for governor Stacey Abrams. She was responsible for the very bad information that resulted in these people being taken off the rolls. You’d have to read down to the 37th paragraph of any article just to discover that interesting fact.
Tim: Of course. I’m more than prone to believe that given that it was Democrat supervisors in Broward County in 2000 that created such a confusing ballot that it cost a Democrat the presidency. Now John, you’ve studied voter fraud at a microscopic level over the years, that’s obvious. So how significant are these allegations of irregularities, or actual irregularities from 2018 in the grand scheme of things? What’s the state of the American electoral system this year compared to say six years ago?
John Fund: I think it’s better. I think a lot more states have voter ID laws. I think our election systems continue to improve. I think there’s less chance, not more chance, of people hacking into systems to try to change the software, or outcomes. Remember, the election machines can’t talk to each other, they’re not connected to each other, they’re not hooked up to the internet. So if you really want to steal an election by hacking into a machine, you’re basically going to have to do it one machine at a time, which is a very cumbersome, very difficult thing to pull off without being detected.
Having said that, when an election is perceived to be close, the temptation to tilt the rules in one direction, or to commit outright fraud grows exponentially. If you don’t have people watching out for fraud, if you don’t have prosecutors who let people know that violators will be sent to court, and prosecuted, you can’t have problems, because if an election is close, these problems surface. At a national level, people know which states are likely to be close every time, it’s going to be Pennsylvania, it’s going to be Florida. So that’s where the problems tend to crop up, especially in presidential elections.
That’s why for 2020, we have to guard, and make sure that we let people know someone’s watching, someone’s minding the store, and so that we minimize any fraud, and we also clear up any incompetence. Election officials should be fired if they can’t do their job.
