Two recent tweets by President Trump appear to be the match that lit a tinderbox of progressive fury over the incendiary topic of voter fraud. The advocacy media was quick to jump all over the president for his apparent misstatement that Michigan had sent out some 7.7 million ballots to its citizens. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson issued an immediate correction that her state sent out “applications” for absentee ballots, not actual ballots. Fair enough, but even that might not be entirely legal. The legacy media has yet to explore the real topic at hand, and one must wonder why the critical issue of voter fraud is flying under the radar and being dismissed as a figment of the president’s imagination.
The potential for voter fraud in the coming presidential election might rightly be considered a looming national disaster that few in the media are willing to address. The Fourth Estate seems much more interested in catching Trump in an error than it does in determining whether there is a serious problem afoot.
At issue are wildly inaccurate voter rolls, which have the potential to alter the presidential election in November. To further public understanding and in seeking truth rather than writing superficial stories that offer little in the way of substance, Liberty Nation publishes this article.
The following is an interview with J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation – an organization at the forefront of mining erroneous voter data, calling out offending counties and states, and taking its research into the courts for resolution. Within this brief, fascinating one-on-one interview lies some profoundly disturbing information that should concern all Americans.
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LKD: I would like to spend a few minutes discussing the president's tweets today and the frequency of voter fraud – how it happens, where it happens, and when it happens. Let's begin with the president's tweets. Today he had two – one concerned Michigan, and the other one concerned Nevada. So, in your estimation, is the president creating a non-existent issue out of whole cloth?
Adams: Well, vote by mail is the most vulnerable form of election – that's undeniable. And both sides of the political spectrum have said so. When you put elections behind closed doors and outside of the public, transparent view of a polling place, bad things are bound to happen, and they do happen. So, there's no doubt that vote by mail is a vulnerable form of election, and for Nevada and Michigan to be doing vote by mail, they're inviting problems.
LKD: Now, if you read The New York Times, The Daily News, and many others, they say that there really is nothing to show that mail-in voting causes any additional problems. In your estimation, what makes it more open to fraud?
Adams: That's why I don't read The New York Times. So, The New York Times doesn't, hasn't done what we've done. For example, in Michigan, we've looked at the voter rolls. We found thousands of dead people on the rolls in Detroit. They would be getting ballots automatically, and there is no way to know who voted them because Michigan doesn't even realize these people, these registrants, are dead. We find the same thing all over the country. We just settled a case this week against Pittsburgh, which is in Allegheny County, for the same problem. There were people in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, that were registered to vote actively seven different times, seven different voter registrations. I mean, I tried a case when I was at the justice department in the Southern District of Mississippi that involved mail ballots where we put the victims on the stand, the United States put the victims on the stand and proved that they were being voted by other people. I could go on and on, with example after example, but The New York Times readers don't want to know the truth about voter fraud. And so that's why The New York Times delivers what they want.
LKD: That brings us to your action against the city of Detroit. What is the basis for your lawsuit?
Adams: Well, that's one of the things the Public Interest Legal Foundation does. We bring litigation against counties or states that have vulnerabilities in their election system. I can't think of a place that has more vulnerabilities than Detroit right now. What we did is we took the voter rolls in Detroit, and we bounced them up against public information, private information, commercial databases that enabled us to determine that they had sizable numbers of dead people on the rolls. We also took their voter rolls and found people who were registered multiple times simultaneously. The same people. We found one person, for example, who was registered to vote with their birthday listed as 1823 – that is even before Michigan became a state. I'm not sure how that happened, but nonetheless, these vulnerabilities were discovered, and that's why we brought a lawsuit under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to get the problem fixed.
LKD: Have you found a willingness on Detroit’s part to fix their voter rolls?
Adams: Oh, certainly not. That's part of the story. When this data were presented to Detroit – and this is right in our complaint – they dug in, and they didn't want to do anything. They still haven't done anything. That's the problem – places like Detroit do not want to fix the problem. That's why I give credit to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, who settled our lawsuit this week because they are going to fix the problem in Allegheny County. Detroit, Michigan, doesn't quite share that same attitude.
LKD: So, are you saying that Michigan does not cull their voter rolls and perhaps has not done so since they became a state?
Adams: Well look, they should have a process in place where they're reviewing their voter rolls up against other information to see who has died. That process has broken down if it exists. And so, I'm saying that they're not doing the job that's necessary to have clean voter rolls there. They're lackadaisical and obviously ineffective.
LKD: The Public Interest Legal Foundation’s analysis also found duplicate and triplicate registrations for the same person?
Adams: Right. Well, this is a common problem. These are active voter registrations for the same people. We found one in Allegheny County and the Pittsburgh lawsuit; one guy, Rashaan Slade, was registered to vote seven times. And the funny part is – at least it's funny to some people – was that they were all done within the space of two weeks right before the 2016 election. So, double registrations and triple in Detroit – that's not surprising at all, but it is, unfortunately, the state of play on the voter rolls in Michigan right now.
LKD: So do you think the president has reason to be concerned in this Coronavirus atmosphere with all the push to go ahead with mail-in ballots – that there is good, solid reason for concern?
Adams: No state should be going to automatic mail ballots when they have the kind of problems on the voter rolls that Michigan does. It means that ballots will be being mailed out and landing in the homes where the people are often in the grave. Ballots may be going out in duplicate, triplicate, or quadruplicate to the same people if they do automatic vote by mail.
LKD: They can presumably check their box for three and four times and send them in, and then there's no way to cross-check those once they are sent into the state?
Adams: Well, the state has already failed to cross-check; otherwise, they would have caught these problems. We are the first people – The Public Interest Legal Foundation – to catch these problems. Nobody else had ever caught them. The state didn't catch them. Detroit didn't catch them. They don't want to fix them now if they know about them. So, what you have is an intransigent stubbornness to fix the problem. Look, it might be a crime to vote twice, but people commit that crime all the time. And in a close election, you don't want a lot of people committing that crime.
LKD: Christian, how many of these states and counties do you think exist out there with errant voter rolls?
Adams: Well, The Public Interest Legal Foundation has developed a database of 42 states, and we'll be issuing a report on the scope of the problem. But suffice to say, it's severe and the number of problems on the voter rolls are about the same number of problems that Hillary won the popular vote by. They are significant. The voter rolls are a mess. People are registered multiple times simultaneously – dead people are registered. This is not a Michigan problem. This is an American problem.
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If you want to know more about what's happening on a local level and the danger to democracy, head over to Graham J. Noble's fascinating dissection right here on Liberty Nation. Here's a sneak peek:
"Stealing elections isn't about presidential candidates conspiring with foreign agents or investigating their political rivals. It is a more insidious and covert process and it is happening at the local level, directed by a hundred different progressive groups that are working to shape the electoral landscape in their favor."
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Read more from Leesa K. Donner.
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