Episode 130 - The TRUTH About Minnesota’s Election “SECURITY”

Are Minnesota's elections really as "secure" as Steve Simon would have us believe?

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Harvard is capping the number of A grades students can receive, an illegal immigrant was deported after driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.364, and school choice was finally added to the Minnesota GOP platform (and it’s an older concept than you might think). Bill Walsh joins the show to walk us through the state’s voting system and point out some concerning vulnerabilities.

QOTW: What’s the highest BAC you’ve heard of?

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the American Experiment Podcast. Catherine, what do we have on the docket today? Well, we've got a fun one for you today. Harvard is capping A grades and what this may mean for Minnesota kids. An illegal immigrant is getting deported after driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.364. And a school choice update for you all after an exciting weekend. On the back half, Bill Walsh is giving us a full rundown on the state of election integrity in Minnesota. You will definitely want to stick around for that. Let's dive in. If this is your first time joining us, welcome. Things are pretty crazy here in Minnesota, and we try to bring you a more sane perspective and take on things. As always, I'm Grace Keating here with Catherine Johnson. Yeah, and we, of course, as always, have an audience question for you all. And this one is based off of our second story. So you'll have to wait past the first one to get to the story, but then it'll make sense. Um, the question is what's the highest blood alcohol level you've ever heard of? Yeah, because today we're talking about a 0.364. And I I maybe I'm sheltered. I didn't know that was even possible. I thought point two was like, you're off, like that's crazy. Yeah. But we have a point three, and I think he was driving a car, right? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. This was a drunk driving arrest. I did ask um our public safety policy fellow, Dave Zimmer, on my way to the studio what is the highest you've ever heard of? Thinking like, you know, career in law enforcement. Maybe he's crazy. He's got some crazy stories. And he said he has heard of 0.4 somethings. Good lord. But this is up there, 0.364. This is this is at the high end of the range. So drop us over that. Drop us a comment. What's the highest you've ever heard of? Or achieved yourself if you want to share that information in the YouTube comments. Feel furry. Well, our first story is about Harvard capping A grades for students. Nearly 70% of Harvard's faculty has just voted to limit A grades in every course to roughly the top 20% of students. Grade inflation, as we all know, has impacted not only K through 12 schools, but also colleges and IEV leagues like Harvard. Harvard has been no exception to this structural pressure to hand out A's. Last spring, a full two-thirds of grades were A grades. Two-thirds? Two-thirds! Within the last 15 years, the median GPA at graduation had risen to 3.83 from 3.56. An undergraduate prize awarded to the graduating student with the highest GPA had a 55-way tie last year. A split between a group of students who had only received A grades. This is just this is so stupid because it becomes meaningless so quickly. I mean, it's exactly like that. This is so niche. This is it's like that quote from The Incredibles when he's like, everyone's gonna have superpowers and then no one will be super because everyone's I hope this lands for someone watching this episode. But it that's what it makes me think of because what is the point of achieving the A grade if everyone's getting them like their, you know, candy getting thrown out? Right, exactly. I remember this happening in high school too, with like the valedictorian. It was all kinds of people had a grades, and it was often the people who were taking less difficult classes, you know? So then they had to change the criteria for the valedictorian, and it was a whole hubabaloo. So like you took four credits of gym. Like we can't make you valedictorian. That doesn't count. All right, many secondary schools similarly struggle with grade inflation. Recently, about two-thirds of all grades given at the Used Twin Cities campus were A grades. Okay, see, that's that's so interesting because there's the school of thought that, well, you know, this is the nation's most elite universities. It's Harvard, it's the Ivy Leagues, maybe the kids there really are just that smart. They're all two-thirds of them are producing A-level content. Right. But it's happening even at like our local Minnesota University, too. Yeah, exactly. And you I think about the diversity of people that are at the U of M. It's like, wow, well, there's definitely, it seems like there should be uh a wider distribution of A-grades, if you will. Of course, undergraduates overwhelmingly uh despised the proposal to cap A-grades, with almost 85% opposing the move. I mean, of course. Yeah. Student writers complained that Harvard's culture valued extracurriculars and networking opportunities highly, leaving little time for classes. Oh, dude. They also noted correctly that other top universities in the nation suffer from great inflation, meaning that Harvard students with lower GPAs but the same amount of like actual understanding, maybe, would be at a disadvantage um after they graduate, which seems like it could be true, but Harvard, as kind of the top Ivy League as many of us think of it, I think, um, should lead the way on this, I feel like. I mean, other people will follow suit, I think, once they have made this decision. Yeah, that's also only true to the extent that something like GPA matters when you're applying for jobs right out of school. Like they're gonna see that you graduated from Harvard. If you or do not have, you know, a 3.8 or whatever the average was, I think you're gonna be fine. Right. A 3.5 from Harvard still sounds like pretty solid to me, but what do I know? But I I get it, I get it. If your school is the only one, if you're kind of the class, the generation that's taken the fall, that's taken the hit, everyone else has had inflated grades, yeah. You're the first one, you're the guinea pigs. I I totally, yeah, I get it. It is also worth noting that all other Harvard grades, including an A-remain uncapped. So most Harvard students will still be able to enjoy their extracurricular pursuits while still graduating with a strong GPA. So unlimited A minus for all seems like it's still an option. I don't think they should be complaining then. And out A-s. It's just not surprising. I mean, the thing that I think will be interesting to see is if you can uphold, I mean, Harvard and the Ivy Leagues have been kind of the leaders of this equity movement and in um in admissions in particular. And if you're going to have a really academically rigorous campus and college experience, can you still admit people on the basis of things like race over grades? I mean, lots of colleges now even don't accept ACT or SAT scores. So they don't even know. You know, you go through high school with grade inflation. Now you can AI write all your essays. You don't have to take an SAT. So can you keep up all that and then go to an actually really academically rigorous college that caps grades? It seems like something has got to give there, and we might see other changes down the line, but I think it's moving in the right direction. Yeah, that's what's so interesting, is and this is what kind of draw drew our attention to the story in the first place, is I think we are sort of starting to see the pendulum swing back the other way. We're starting to see more colleges and universities require the ACTs and the SATs because they're having these kids that are arriving at college, supposedly having been prepared for it during high school, and they can't read long books. They can't do basic math, you know, basic mathematic mathematics. Um and and that's that change is, I think, starting to make its way even into like the K-12 system in Minnesota. I think we're slowly starting to see this return to prioritizing grades, prioritizing these, you know, genderless, raceless, identity-less measures of understanding. I hope so, because otherwise, um, what's gonna happen is Minnesota students are gonna continue to be at a disadvantage if our schools continue to prioritize equity measures over uh, you know, actual academic achievement or like the social studies standards implementing insane, woke standards for learning um instead of actual academic learning. Well, students will just be at a disadvantage. And Minnesota students will do worse on the national scale than students from other states. And that's a really sad thing to think about. Yeah. Yeah, it is. Well, Grace, would you like to lead us onto our next story? I would love to. This is uh this is, I'd say, our feature story of the day, which we teased at the start of this episode. Uh, an illegal immigrant, Hugo Cardona Jimenez, will be returning to his native Guatemala on his third deportation order following a hearing last week that our own Bill Glauhn was at. Cardona was picked up in September on a state drunk driving charge with a blood alcohol content of 0.364. Again, let us know in the comments. Is this the highest you've ever heard of? What's the highest you've encountered in your own life? I am dying to know. This is far and away the highest I've ever heard of. What's crazy? How are you turning a wheel? What are you How are you functioning? What tolerance have you built up to alcohol at this point that you can have a 0.364 and you're and you're still like conscious? I I I don't understand it. I don't understand it. What's insane is this was his fourth such case, and this was the one that resulted in a felony conviction. This was not his first drunk driving charge, supposedly. Cardona, now 31, pled guilty to a federal felon federal felony criminal charge of illegal re-entry of a previously deported alien. He's been deported twice before, according to court records, in 2019 and 2020. He was in He was actually deported. He was actually kicked out of the country twice before. He has come back twice. So hopefully the border is a little more secure now, or this guy's just gonna keep popping up like a like a gopher. Yeah, and driving around a 0.3 BAC. He was sentenced to federal time served 52 days and will soon be returning to Guatemala as a now twice convicted felon. It's worth noting that in the normal course of things, this drunk driving felony would have resulted in a sentencing minimum, the absolute minimum of six months in federal prison. Oh. And everyone involved in this most recent hearing was like, nah, we can just skip that. Let's just get him out of the country. 52 days, 52 days, time served already. Let's fast track this guy. And so even though this conviction, this sentencing process, this is actually part of a program at the Department of Justice called the Fast Track program to get these illegal aliens out of the country as fast as possible. Love it. Yeah, I'm all for it. And it's Bill Glon was, again, he was at this hearing and he he was kind of counting up the people in the room who were involved in this, you know, hour-long hearing, roughly. That hearing required a presiding judge, several court clerks, a prosecutor, a probation officer, a taxpayer-paid Spanish language interpreter, a taxpayer-paid defense attorney, two deputy U.S. marshals to escort the defendant, and a courtroom security guard. That's a minimum of 11 people on the taxpayer payroll who were assembled for this hour-long hearing for a guy whose whose deportation is conviction was already predetermined. He was driving drunk with a 0.364 blood alcohol content level. It's like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna kick him out of the country. Yeah. Wait, wait, 11 people. He can't speak English either. He needs an interpreter. He's broken into the country illegally three times now, and he still can't speak the language. He's he's got a 0.3 BAC can't speak English, and he's on the roads. That's insane. I mean, it's so lucky that no one got hurt in this incident. It is incredible that this guy has does not have any like, yeah, exact fatalities attached to him. It's just so interesting. Like, yeah, yeah, I mean, the amount of people and resources it takes when, yeah, like you said, the result is already decided. He's got a deportation order. And there's this myth that illegal immigrants don't receive due process when they're on their way out. That could not be further from the truth. In fact, they have more due process a lot of times than our own citizens. This is just such a good example of that. No, that's that's exactly it. This guy should never have been here. He's re-entered illegally several times. He's been arrested for drunk driving several times. This is his second felony conviction. Get him out! And please don't come back. Yeah. I just hope our border has reached a point of security where we're not going to be talking about Hugo, Cardona, Jimenez, you know, two years from now, four years from now. When he's killed someone because he's driving around with a huge blood alcohol level and can't speak English. Yeah, exactly. Now, last weekend we had some pretty exciting movement on the school choice issue that we've been pushing so hard here at American Experiment for the last, you know, year, year and a half or so. Um, we did finally get school choice added to the Republican Party uh platform, which is so exciting. We were trying to do the same to the DFL's platform. I think that that resolution actually passed in one precinct, but it didn't go any farther than that. But still, it's so exciting to see, you know, one of the two major political parties in Minnesota agree that school choice should be a priority for the citizens of Minnesota moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. There was uh a lot of, you know, drama to come out of both of the uh conventions this weekend, which was, of course, fun for me to watch from afar. But it's important to point out, too, where things were successful. And this was a huge success, I think, just to acknowledge that school choice is something that people want. It's something that Republicans want, but also Minnesotans. Um, we see that repeatedly in our polling, that this is a really popular thing that Minnesotans are um are wanting. Yeah. Um, if you do want to hear more about how that shook out, Bill Walsh has a really good column up right now at americanexperiment.org, kind of walking us through, you know, the the politics of school choice. If you will, you should definitely go check that out if you want to hear more. And I just want to say thank you to anyone who signed the petition at 7kforkids.com or introduced this resolution on Precinct Caucus Night. I mean, the number of people in Minnesota, it's hundreds, it's thousands of people who have taken action on this issue, and we're getting closer every single day. So just thank you if you've if you've taken a moment of your day to do something like this. And it's not a foregone conclusion. As Bill wrote about, we had a lot of trouble getting this issue to receive any attention, um, even with Republicans in the legislature. And we're kind of shafted towards the end of the session and said this isn't a priority, which is absurd when you see how many Minnesotans want school choice and how it really is an issue that across the aisle people are clamoring for. I mean, look at the first story we talked about. What we need in Minnesota are options for students. So they're not stuck in these failing schools. And yet there still is this myth that's pervasive on even the right that school choice is somehow unpopular. And so thank you to everyone, like Grace said, um, for participating in that. We just hopefully um have finally broken through and made a huge impact this year with school choice, which is great news. And so we wanted to take a moment and just kind of look back and reflect on school choice as a policy, as a concept, because it's seen as this relatively new thing that mostly conservatives push. And that's just not that's just not the case. Uh, Catherine Wingfall had a really great article in the last issue of Thinking Minnesota magazine, which if you are not getting delivered to your doorstep, you should go to AmericanExperiment.org slash donate, minimum donation of $35. You'll get it for the entire year. That next issue is going to be coming out, I think, in the next month or two. Uh, so you should get on the list now. All that to say, she had a really great article kind of walking through the history of school choice and how it's, as a concept, education freedom goes back to the roots of the great American experiment. Pennsylvania, back in 1802, had a policy that provided public funds so poor families could choose among neighborhood schools, including religious institutions. 1802, 200 years ago. Catholic schools in Connecticut received public funds in the 1860s. Vermont and Maine launched town tuitioning programs in 1869 and 1873, letting towns pay tuition at approved private schools. These policies recognized education as a public concern while respecting family choice. Now, the the sort of common school movement, what later became public education institutions, that started happening in the 1830s, and that was where the character really, Catherine Wright, of America's schools began to shift. Common schools were designed to be locally controlled, publicly funded, and open to families regardless of income. They were common in the sense that children of different economic backgrounds would share classrooms and absorb a shared civic culture. And that's what's so interesting is at the time, this system of schooling was being promoted really as a way to push conformity, uniformity in culture, uh shared values, shared ideas, which what interesting foreshadowing. Jump ahead today. I mean, it would be so great if our current schools were pushing some of the uniformity that I bet they were in the early days of America. I mean, think of if our kids were being taught more about American values and um the things that the founding fathers really uh created this country on instead of things like equity or whatever these nouveau ideas are that people on the left in Minnesota are trying to push into our schools. It's so funny. And I took it the I took it the complete opposite way. I was almost thinking today's education system has become so focused on teaching kids to conform to ideologically leftist views, equity, DEI, a very narrow worldview of American and Minnesotan history, and just completely squashing any diversity of real thought. Which seems it seems like it's come full circle for the education system in my mind. But so from from about the 1880s until 1955, school choice as a policy was pretty dormant. We had a pretty uniform education system, but that philosophical foundation was always there, Catherine writes. And then the civil rights era came and it completely reshaped the debate. You had Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which exposed the deep injustices that were going on in American schooling. And some Southern segregationists misused that language of choice, of school choice, to preserve racial separation through private school choice or private school tuition grants in defiance of the federally mandated desegregation orders. And courts did strike those programs down, recognizing that obviously genuine school choice cannot include discrimination. And that period is sometimes framed by anti-choice activists as the origins of the school choice movement. They say, like so many other American institutions or concepts, it was rooted in racism and oppression. And that's not true at all. School choice and education, freedom as a concept went back all the way to the early 1800s. And this was just a moment where it was, it was co-opted almost by Southerners who wanted to keep the schools segregated. Yeah, that's really interesting. I didn't know that history. Yeah, yeah. It was kind of a last-itch effort, one of these scholars wrote, when all of the other efforts to maintain segregated schools had failed. So while, you know, Brown v. Avoid of education, while that ruling triggered the South's massive resistance efforts, it also actually reignited this movement, advocating for f educational freedom as a fundamental right. And so her big takeaway from this story was that, you know, conservative advocates, conservative advocates have played a big role in the school choice movement. But actually, a lot of the key actors have come from the political left. Uh scholar Ron Mattis writes, they are found in the centuries-old struggle for educational opportunity in the black experience, in the liberal academics who saw vouchers as a tool in the war on poverty, in the counterculture dissidents who sparked the free schools and homeschooling movements, and even for 20 years in the Democratic Party's national platform. And this gets back to what you were saying. Today, this is a bipartisan, hugely popular issue with Minnesotans on both sides of the aisle. And it is, in my mind, it is only a matter of time before Minnesota joins the list of states who are giving parents the actual freedom to choose their child's education. Yeah, well, and it's still today disproportionately our bad schools in in Minnesota disproportionately affect people who have lower incomes, people who cannot afford to go to better performing private schools. And yeah, if you care about equity, if you care about equality, um, that's disproportionately impacting families of color, black families in often urban areas who don't have the money to go to a private school. And yet it's the Democrats who claim to care about those values, and then they leave those kids stuck in bad, underperforming schools with no other options. So it's really one of the most hypocritical things, I think, that they do. And it's so obvious to me, just like it was um during the civil rights era. It's so obvious that this is something that we should allow our students to do, give them more opportunity to succeed. What is the point of just keeping some people down? Yeah. Uh, if you're not familiar with the 7K for kids campaign that we've been running, you can go to 7kforkids.com to learn more about education savings accounts, which is our American Experiment's preferred policy of school choice. Now we're gonna sit down with Bill Walsh, who is gonna walk us through some of the vulnerabilities that he's been observing in Minnesota's voting systems. Don't go anywhere. American Experiment is supported by thousands of individuals like you. To join the movement, go to www.americanexperiment.org and click the yellow donate button. From all of us here, thank you. As you might have heard, the GOP and DFL last weekend held their conventions to determine which statewide candidates each party will be endorsing ahead of the 2026 elections. So we thought this would be an opportune moment to bring it onto the podcast Bill Walsh, who, even though he now leads communications here at American Experiment, spent most of his career running and winning election campaigns here in Minnesota to sort of go over some of the election integrity issues that Minnesota is facing. Welcome, Bill. All right, great to be back as always. Well, this is obviously one of the top issues for conservatives all over the country, election integrity. But one of the things that I found for myself and other people when I notice the conversations happening around this topic is that a lot of people don't actually know how the process works. Um, it's different in every state, for one. It's super complicated. And I know you found on your tour that you've gone around the state and given this presentation many times now. And I know you've found that even like county to county, there are differences in the way that people administer these elections. So hopefully today we can just get some clarity. On the way elections work in Minnesota. Right, absolutely. We did a we did a presentation at Rigder Fair Election Integrity in Minnesota, and we've done it three or four times this year. We did it in 2004 as well, tweaked the prop the presentation a little bit this year. But yeah, you bring up a funny point. We'd always, there's always election judges in the room when I present this program. And then at the end, those are the first hands that would go up. Well, you know, you got that wrong, you know, a little bit, that's not exactly how it's done. Here's what we do, that's the law. And then before I could even answer, someone else would say, Well, I'm an election judge in a different county and we do it the way he said it. You're wrong. And so we'd have these debates over, you know, what the law is or not. And and what we found is that even though the law is the law, and we can actually go to the source and find that, by practice, elections are actually done differently in in different counties. It's not a good thing. You know, if you're a secretary of state, you would think that'd be number one priority, educate election officials to make sure that there's uniform practice of state election laws. But it's not uniform. And some of the things you hear, here's what we do. And you think I looked at one guy and he said, This is what we do. I'm an election. I said, Well, that's illegal. That's against the law what you're doing there, you know? So you should stop. I think the most practical way to do this is just to start at the beginning with registration and kind of move through the process of voting in chronological order. So let's start there. How does voter registration work in Minnesota bill? Well, it's most of us are already registered if you read, you know, voted before. But if you're new to the state or if you move, um uh voter registration is pretty easy. Uh, you can you can mostly do it online. Um, you can get the documents online, you can go to your county elections office uh any time of the year and say, I need to change my voter registration or register. But the registration process is actually pretty robust, too. There's a pretty good um accountability in the in the registration process itself. So you're you're you're proving to the to the state, to the secretary of state, essentially, your county election official, two things. I am who I say I am, and I live where I say I live. Those are the two things. So I'm Bill Walsh, here's my photo ID. Uh, there's my picture, match it to me. Yes, that's you. Okay, you are who you say you are. And then I live where I say I live. So um we're gonna what the Secretary of State does is they'll check against your registration against databases. They have access to the driver vehicle services database, the sick uh state, what am I trying to say, the social security database. So they they check things on the back end to make sure you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live. And if all your documents are in order and you're good, oh they'll think those they'll send a postcard to your house. So you come in and sign up or register online and say, I read, I live here. They'll send a postcard to your house, return address guaranteed. So if it doesn't deliver, doesn't get through, that's a red flag for them. If they find anything wrong in your registration when you register in advance like this, they'll call you, they'll have you come in, they'll have you fix it, they'll keep working on it until you're registered to vote properly. There is a good, robust registration process on the front end. That's kind of important to remember, I think later when we when we talk about same-day registration, not so much. Okay, but there were some changes made recently to that registration process by the legislature, right? Like I know now if you're 16 or 17, you can register to vote even though you can't theoretically vote. What about things like that? How has recent legislation changed that process? Yeah, the 2023 session with the trifecta where they kind of went off the cliff. We did that off the cliff thing, a couple of legislative changes to voter registration. One, like you said, 16 and 17-year-olds. So I guess, you know, Steve Simon, the Democrats, the people that wanted this done said, well, let's get them used to it. You know, we'll get them when they get their driver's license, we'll get them, we'll get them registered to vote. They'll be all teed up and ready when they turn 18. They're already being the system. We want to encourage voting. All of these changes, by the way, all of this discussion is about we got to make voting easy, which, okay, great. We should make voting easy, but not that easy, not so easy that you have all these vulnerabilities that we're gonna talk about. Not easy at the ex at the expense of integrity. Exactly. In in making my vote not count. But so 16 and 17-year-olds, let's have them register to vote. What could the hard what could go wrong, right? Well, the first election we had with the new rule 2024, the there was a there was a high school that was a polling place, and the the high school also had a um mock election. Come vote in the mock election, see who the high school bullshit. It was like down the hall from the voting location. So now you've got 16 and 17-year-olds in the voter file. You got people wandering around, which which table do I go to? The mock election one. You got real voters going to the mock election one thinking, is this where I registered? No, this is fake. The real one's down the hall. Oh my god. And then you the so that actually got pointed out in the morning, and I think they shut down the mock election. I think Steve Simon actually thought, yeah, that's a bad idea. So it's like, what could go wrong? Let's register 16 and 17-year-olds. It's just, it's not necessary. It's not necessary. When you're 18, you can vote, you register, you vote. The other one is uh that has not gotten as much attention is uh you know, what about the homeless? You know, I'm a homeless person, I have a right to vote, but I don't have an address. So now in the law, you can describe your address using directional uh signage language like north. So let me just say, I live under the bridge, uh White Bear Avenue in 694, north of Maplewood. That's now a that's now something you can write down when you register to vote. So we talked earlier about you know eligibility and mail you a postcard. How do you mail a postcard to I live under the bridge in 694? I'm not sure how they're doing it. That's something we need to look into. I'm not sure if there's even a list of homeless people that have described their address so that they could vote in a precinct, but that's now prescribed in law. Um And that's the problem, is the address check isn't an arbitrary thing. Like it'd be nice if everyone in Minnesota could vote regardless of whether they were housed or not. But we need a physical location to send documents to in case we have a problem with your registration. Well, not only that, it's it's it's we need to know where you live because we base representation on where people live. Right. So your your representation is connected to your legislator. That's your legislature because you live here. Right. So we can't have nomads running around all over the twin cities and have them represented in the legislature. You gotta have a place. Yeah. It's based our our system of of representation is based on geography. That brings up another question I had, which is how do they ensure that people aren't registered in two different places at once? Uh, do all the systems talk to each other and they can cancel that out, or how do they know for sure where you live? And then even like statewide, uh, or excuse me, like state to state. Is there any system where like if you're registered in uh Wisconsin and Minnesota, would anyone ever know that? Well, I'll take that first. Yeah, not really, but kind of, I guess is my answer. There's no official database nationally of the voter file. There is a system called ERIC. It's an acronym for ERIC. I don't know what it stands for, um, but um that states uh are members of. Minnesota is a member of the ERIC coalition. It's quite controversial. A lot of people say we shouldn't be involved in ERIC. And so they do share information like you just talked about, you know, when when voters leave and come and go so that they can try to answer that question. You can't vote in what more than one state. Um within the state of Minnesota, there's this, you know, the state voter registration system, the SVRS. It's a database maintained by the Secretary of State with the help from county elections officials. The counties have access to upload data uh to the SVRS. Uh it's uh it's mostly open to the public. Um you can you can you can um not open to the public, but you can request um, you can buy the database essentially. It's public information, um, like who the voters are, which elections they vote in, their age, their address, all that kind of stuff. Um political parties and campaigns buy that list and use it to base base their their work on voter ID and voter voter contact off of. Um there's been some controversy lately on that though, because there's there's a part of that list, and we can talk about it now. It's there's a part of that list that is the the the challenged voter file. There's there's a status of your of your vote that that becomes challenged if you don't meet these requirements and you're not registered. And there was a lawsuit filed by one of our allies, the um um um voter lines, thank you, um filed a lawsuit to Steve Simon. Say, we want to see the challenged voter list, the ones in the database you have marked as challenged. In other words, there was a problem. We don't know what the problem was, but give us the list. We'll we'll we'll look into it, we'll look to see if there's fraud. He said no, it's private. They sued him, they wanted to support and the judge said give it to him. The Secretary Simon appealed to the appeals court. The appeals court said, give him a list. It's public, it's not private. He appealed to the state Supreme Court. Supreme Court decided with Steve Simon. Uh it's private data. Uh so it could be private data. So the next Secretary of State could do that on the first day. They could release the challenged voter file. That would be very interesting. And we could look into that and see this is probably where the problems are. If there is fraud, it would be there. Um, we think that data is public, uh, even though the Supreme Court doesn't. So that's in the state voter registration system. They do a decent job of um uh maintaining that list, make sure there are duplicates. Um, when people move, it gets recorded right. Um, that any database has flaws in it and has problems. It's a living, breathing thing. It's impossible to be perfect. Um, dead people is a big issue. I don't know if that was gonna be your question. I was just gonna ask. I mean, I'm anticipating questions here. I shouldn't do that to you guys. Um so in Minnesota, we purge our list every four years. So if you don't vote in four years, um, you'll be taken off the list. You will not be registered to vote anymore. And if you show up in year five, you'll have to re-register. So there is a bit of a purge in Minnesota, which is okay. Some states, you hear these fights about, you know, they're trying to purge the voter list, like just as a one-time deal. We have a four-year running purge. I think it could be shorter, I think it'd be one year or two years. And I think technology is good enough to do that. Um how does that interact briefly with the uh permanent mail-in ballot request that Minnesota has? You can request to only vote by mail once, and then you're on that list forever, right? Right. So that's completely separate from this purge that happens for voter registration. They'd be working with each other. I mean, not against each other, but yeah, you could be on the automatic um Yeah, that's a good well, you you asked to be that's another thing. This new new thing in 2023, the automatic voter, uh, the automatic absentee list. I call it the lifetime list. Yes. So instead of instead of saying, hey, you you you want to vote absentee, you did last year, apply for a ballot, we'll send you a ballot, they just send them the ballot. Yeah. So everybody that's on that list just gets a live ballot. It's like live ammunition in the mail sent to their home at the right time, assuming, well, they said they wanted to, so assuming they want to vote absentee every time. Right. So yeah, I guess if they move, die, you know, leave the state, um that ballot, you know, unless they tell the Secretary of State they're moving or it gets picked up in another place, like if you die, they do check against the death registry. So that's a regular thing. Um, if they don't get picked up, that live ammunition is floating around in the mail. Right. Again, make it easy to vote, make it easy to vote. Forget this application process. I'm not sure we shouldn't make it that easy. If you want to vote absentee, I think every two years when you vote, it's not too much to ask to ask for a ballot. Yeah. Sign up, say you live where you live, you are who you are, and they send you a ballot, you vote absentee. This automatic thing is just making it too easy. Another thing that the legislature did is they uh had uh driver's licenses now are available for illegal immigrants. Um, at the same time, they made it so that if you get a driver's license, you are automatically registered to vote. So naturally, a lot of people have had the question well, how do we make sure that illegal immigrants aren't voting in our elections? What's the answer to that? Not a good answer. Sorry to give you not a very good answer. All right. Yeah, you're exactly right. If you change your driver's license now at the motor vehicle office, they just automatically re-register you to vote, change your voter registration as well. You used to have a checkoff, you know, thing, hey, yeah, I want to do that now. Ah, we're gonna just do it automatically on the back end. And then you also have licenses for all. So during the licenses for all debate at the legislature, um members of the legislature stood up and said, Okay, driver's license for all. Let's see, I agree. Let's make them a different color, though, right? Because the some will be used for voting, some can't be used for voting. Nope, nope. That amendment was shot down. Um, all right, well, let's put some language on there that says only to be used for voting. It can be really small, just a little thing that says this license not to be used for voting. So the election judge was a volunteer sees that says, Oh, wait, this is the wrong kind of license. Nope, nope, shot that down. I guess we're worried about stigma somehow. Stigma, that was the reason. Well, that's the only logical thing that you could imagine, except to say, I want to allow for illegal immigrants to vote. You know, I felt stigmatized when I was under 21 and you get this big banner and it's like under 21. I felt stigmatized. Yeah, well, anyway, that those amendments were shot down. So the illegal immigrant, the the license for all for illegal immigrants or non-citizens looks exactly like all of the other driver's licenses. And so there is no, there's no if you ask Steve Simon, if he he was a guest on your show, and we should ask him to come on maybe, um, he would say illegal immigrants wouldn't do that. They won't use the driver's license to vote because it's a felony. And if they commit a felony, they'll be deported. And so when he said that originally, I said, there's nobody in the United States being deported right now, anyway. So that's really not a thing. Although that's kind of changed. Gotta admit that people actually are being deported now. But basically, it's the honor system. It's like they'll never do it because it's a felony. They have to sign an oath. You know, they would, they would, they would never do that. Well, so illegal immigrants would never commit a crime. You mean another crime? I mean, it's just silly. It's just silly to think. And our system can't be based on the honor system, but it is in that case. Yeah, that's like a complete fallacy. We have articles written pretty frequently at americanexperiment.org highlighting the murders, another felony, I would imagine, the murders that illegal immigrants have committed in Minnesota. So I don't think that the threat of deportation is actually going to stop people from committing a crime if they want to. Well, you're not the Secretary of State. Well, you should be. You should be. Okay, one last thing on the voter rolls, because it's been uh a big story that the feds have requested our voter rolls, and Steve Simon has repeatedly said, no way, not handing those over. And your professional opinion, is this a sign that even though you've said our voter rolls are probably pretty good, do you think that that's a sign that there's something funky going on there? Yes. Yes. I mean, I I there's no other explanation for it. Just like he with went to court, you know, and kept appealing to protect the challenge voter file. He's there's information in there that he doesn't want the rest of us to see. And you can only conclude that that's why. And by the way, he makes up these logical fallacy. He he says his main reason put forward for not giving the data was, well, we have people that don't want their names out there, you know, like they're battered women, they're in a shelter, they're in danger, we can't have the and and we have a whole process in law already for that. He knows that. There's that that's there's already protections in law for people in that circumstance. If they feel that getting your address in your voter file makes you unsafe, you can put that in the data. And and he knows that, but that's his only reason, the only excuse he gives for not releasing the data. He should release the data. Okay, so let's move on to the actual voting. We know we've already registered. Let's go on to voting. Um, because to gone are the days of you know the one election day every two years, every four years. Uh, Minnesota is, I think, one of the longer voting windows in the country, actually. So, so how far before you know election day can you vote? 46 days. And we're number one. We need to get a foam figure. We're number one. We're the longest. We're number one. We're tied. We're not I don't know. We're not exclusive, you know, as what as number one, but we are the longest voting window in the state. 46 day six days. I believe this year it's September 20th, you'll be able to vote um early. Our window opens up. I mean, think about what kind of information can come out in an election campaign, right? 46 days out from the actual It's the same thing. Okay, God, gotta make it easy. Gotta make it easy to vote. Let's get the window long. That's too easy. 46 days is too easy in my mind. Too easy, and there's no reason to have a window that long at all. Um, one of our Thinking Minnesota polls in 2024, we asked that question, and it was like no one was anywhere near. We said Minnesotans, how long should the voting window be open? Like 10 days was, I think, the longest people were comfortable with. So Minnesotans don't even like this. We don't even like being number number one. They don't, they didn't ask for it. They didn't, they didn't say we need a longer voting window, but but that's what we have. That's what we got. I hate that. Okay, so there's two ways to vote early, right? You can go in person and you can also do a vote by mail. We talked a little bit about the automatic sending out of the ballots. How does the state ensure that if you're voting by mail, it's actually you voting and not someone filling out your ballot for you? Well, there's a there's a signature match. So there is a signature on the application to get an absentee vote and then you sign the ballot. That's one way. Uh the other way is it just like looks like a signature you've done before? They match signatures. And then when they come into the county, there's what's called a ballot board that will look at the applications. The it's actually the outer envelope of your ballot. So your ballot's in an in an envelope in an envelope, and that outer outer envelope they compare signature to signature. And there's a human on a ballot board that that decides that. One of the controversies is who's who's on the ballot boards of these counties. Sure. Specifically Hannibal County, another lawsuit, said, Hey, you're not, you know, we present a list of the parties present list of uh partisan election judges, Democrat judges, Republican judges, and the ballot boards are supposed to use partisan election judges from each side, and the county, Hannibal County specifically was not using them, they're using staff. And so Hannepin County staff was being the ballot boards. I wonder what party they're from, which is legal if you don't have party judges available. Sure. And so the party said, Well, we sent you 1,500 names. And they said, You did. We got them, and we sent all those out to uh election judge uh in-person locations. We assigned them to cities and polling locations, and then we ran out and there were none left for the ballot board. Well, no one told them to do that. You know, they they should have kept, if you were administrating election, you would have kept some available for the ballot board. But in Hannibal County, they sent them all out and then ran out. And it's true, they the need was 10,000 and they got 1,500, but they could have had partisan judges. They won the lawsuit. The judge sided with them that they they were within the law to send them out to the city. So ballot boards and who who looks is a big deal. So they they match signature in that process. And then the other thing is there's a witness signature when you vote, when you vote absentee. You're supposed to have a witness sign an oath, or you can have an odor republic, but a witness say, I I watched them vote. Not that I don't who who you voted for, but I watched them open it. They are who they are, they and they live where they live. And just a little aside there, in 2020, during the pandemic, you know, people wonder why. Why do you Republicans, why do conservatives, you know, don't have faith in elections? You're always saying, you know, Trump's always saying the election was stolen. Well, these are the reasons why people don't have faith. In 2020, Secretary Simon went to court or he had plaintiffs sue him, and then he agreed with his plaintiffs and went to the judge and said, We agree. The legislature should have um not have waived the the witness part of absentee balloting because there's a pandemic, and we can't possibly have two people in the same room, one witnessing the other vote. We have to waive that. So the legislature had ample time in 2020 to deal with it and they didn't. And then he got a friendly plaintiff to sue and then went to the judge together and said, Rudge, we agree with this lawsuit. And the judge said, Okay, no witnesses. So in 2020, their witness requirement was dropped just for 2020. It was picked, put back up in 2022. It is the law. He also said we should keep accepting ballots because there's gonna be a lot of mail-in ballots, and this whole idea of getting them in by election day that's gonna be too hard. Maybe they should be postmarked by election day. We should keep accepting them all the way a week after. That actually did not hold up in federal court, had to go to federal court to fix the state problem. So Simon is trying to legislate from his office essentially election line. I think that's at the Supreme Court right now. I can't remember if it just got decided or just got heard. Well, they that was one right before the week before the 2020 election. So they did have to cut that off. Another huge concern that you hear with Minnesota elections is ballot harvesting, which you know is the idea that someone's gonna go to an apartment building, a senior care facility, and collect everyone's ballots, maybe fill them up for them and take them into uh the polling place. Now there it is technically legal in Minnesota, isn't it? Some form of that. Well, a very, very narrow form of that. I would not call it ballot harvesting. Ballot harvesting is illegal in Minnesota. Okay. You there is only one circumstance where you can bring someone else's ballot in with yours, and it's called agent voting. And agent voting is a limit of three. Three three ballots. Okay. And it's really to be considered yours and two others. And the two others, the way that was the law was crafted, the intent of the law was your elderly parents who can't get to the polls because they're too sick, they're they're in a they're in a nursing home, they're under your care. And so you can bring your ballot and two others. Uh, and it again have to be related, have to be sick. Oh, you have to be relatives, have to be related. So very limited agent delivery is the only instance where you where a person could bring another ballot to the polls. Otherwise, it's illegal. There's no accounting for ballot harvesting. Now, that being said, we know it happens. Um, and and you know, these these boxes, these ballot boxes left unattended make me very nervous. We saw in the 2016 primary, the Democrat primary for Congress and City Council, the famous video from Project Veritas where Libon is in the van and he's like doing a Snapchat how excited he is to his friend. Look at all these ballots I got. He had 200 ballots on the on the the you know windshield of his car and dashboard of his car, thank you. And he's bragging, you know, about how we're gonna win because we got the money, we got the votes, and he's bringing those to Hennepin County to hand them in. I don't know how he handed those in. If he walked up to an election window at Hennepin County and said, Yeah, I got 200, they should have said you can't hand in more than one ballot here, unless this agent delivery thing. But we know that I assume those guys handed those in. So we know it happens, but if you see it, hear about it, uh let somebody know because it's illegal. Okay, so that's kind of everything on mail in balloting. I think a lot of the problems people bring up. Now let's go to if you go in person. Person. The main issue that I think we have in Minnesota with same day, well, same day voting is same day registration. Right. Because there are many ways you can register to vote on election day. Could you walk us through those? Yeah, we have same day registration, which not many states do. North Dakota does, we do, some others do. We've had it since 1972. Minnesotans like that. It polls very well. It's part of our culture. So you walk in on election day, you have to show photo ID. Again, same thing. I prove who I am is who I am, and where I live is where I live. So you're going to need some kind of photo ID to prove who you are. There's my picture. You know it's me. And then here's where I live. Here's a light bill, here's a cable bill, here's some mail I got. So that's the number one way to do it. And you register to vote and sign an oath that says, you know, I attest these things. The other way, if you can't do those things, you can have somebody vouch for you. So we have this thing very unique in Minnesota. We have vouching. So I could bring somebody with me or have somebody with me who lives in the precinct and is already registered. So they have to be a registered voter in the precinct. And they can say, I live in the same building as Bill, and I see him every day at the mailbox. I'll vouch for him that he lives where he says he lives. Still got to prove who you are is who you are. But I'll vouch for his residency. I'll vouch for him. And then you sign a note that says, I vouch for somebody, you know, that they're they live in the precinct. You can vouch for up to eight people uh on an election day. And so I this is kind of funny. We've had a lot of national attention on Minnesota lately for all kinds of reasons. And then somebody in Pennsylvania, some big Twitter guy, says, you could vouch for eight people in Minnesota, and the country went nuts. I watched it blow ups. Like, well, yeah, we've been doing this forever. It's actually used to be unlimited, you know, you can vouch for unlimited people. And then we got to 15 and now it's down to eight. So, but the rest of the country is like, you guys are nuts. You know, how do you just let somebody vouch for you? Yeah, he's good. And here's the problem can we just jump to it? The most important thing you need to remember from this whole podcast and from everything in elections is people who register to vote on election day, either by showing up and giving documents and proving it or by getting vouched for, they then vote. And the vote goes into the box, into the machine. It's gone. It's it's in the sea with every other boat. Can't get it back. And then after the election, their paperwork, their documents, the vouching form is verified, much like we talked about earlier in the podcast, where they go through, okay, they're gonna mail you a postcard, they're gonna look you up in the SOS database, they're gonna look against the Social Security, they're gonna try and figure it all out. And if they have a problem, they're gonna call you. But here's the problem the vote is done. It counted. Yeah, yeah, and we we verify after the vote. That's the biggest flaw in Minnesota's election system. It needs to be changed. Secretary Simon was in Congress this year, a few months ago, and Senator Howley was walking him through this and got him to admit it essentially. But the vote counts. And Secretary Simon, yeah, the vote still counts. You know, he was so people get this, it's a huge flaw, needs to be fixed. Um, you can you can register on election day either by documents or vouching, your vote counts. Because other states, here's the solution. Other states would have this thing called provisional balloting. Right. So you would do all that. Let's say you do that, and then your your your vote would go into a box, the provisional ballots would go in with other ones. And then then it would have to be proven. So let's say it you'd have to do it quick, like it during the week after the election, they do that verification. Okay, it's good, now we can count it. And just imagine the close elections we have in Minnesota, where there's a recount. So those provisional ballots become very important. Right. And we gotta we gotta but we it's better than throwing them in the pool and counting them. Sure, better, but best is you can't register on election day because we need to have results quicker than that. We should live in a functional, functional democracy where we don't get results weeks later. You know, we we get them on the day that we voted. So people need to register beforehand and they need to be confirmed beforehand. Okay, and so lucky for you, there's this thing called the Save Act. Yeah. Let's get to solutions. I think that's a great idea. The uh Save Act is what you would want. And uh I'm a little tiny bit uncomfortable with the federal government telling states how to run elections because that is a function of the states. Um, but the Save Act is doesn't really get at so much the issues we're talking about, but it does get at essentially says everyone's got to re-register to vote. And and when we re-register to vote, uh it you've got to prove citizenship. And we haven't talked about that a little bit, but but this whole process, you've got to prove citizenship before you can get registered to vote. In Minnesota, we don't really have that. All these different ways we've talked about votes are happening before that's done. Um so so that means how do you prove citizenship? You know, birth certificate's the number one way. And yes, women that have a birth certificate that are now married with a different name, you're gonna have to also bring a marriage license that shows why your name has changed and that that progression. Definitely. I'm not not trying to sugarcoat it. That's a that's a burden, but it's not an insurmountable burden, certainly to vote. Um, if you have a real ID, an enhanced real ID, then you in like 55 or 51 or something percent of Minnesotans have real ID, the citizenship test was done in that process. So your real ID is gonna be fine. But otherwise, I was just thinking I had to like to keep my sky miles. I had to send them, I think both of those things. Like I think for voting, I'd be willing to do that. Sky miles, yeah, constantly. Yeah. So right. Uh, but but not to downplay it. It's a it's a we're gonna reboot the system. But the bottom line of the Save Act for Minnesota is it blows up our that whole scheme of vouching, registering to vote on. By the way, registering to vote on election day without provisional ballots is against federal law. And you say, well, how could it be against federal law when we do it in Minnesota? The law was changed in 93, 1993, and Minnesota and a few other states, I think five other states, were grandfathered in. Our system of voting that we just described was grandfathered in in the 93 act. The SAVE Act ends that grandfather. The SAVE Act says no more exemptions to the federal voting right uh voting act of 93, and so it blows up our scheme, which is a good thing and uh necessary. So SAVE Act is your answer. Bill, how likely do you think it is that realistically, you know, past election outcomes have been impacted significantly by voter fraud in Minnesota? Uh significantly is a really strong word. Um, but you you imagine some of these things like vouching. Um, we we saw some of the percentages, you know, uh 5% of same-day registrants were vouched for. Well, that gets to be, you know, a pretty big number of votes. And you look at some of the close elections we've had in Minnesota, you know, even going back to the Frank and Coleman U.S. Senate race that was just down to a few thousand votes. Um, so I mean, you you know, they always say, you know, you got to too big to rig. That's a thing. I mean, if most elections uh are probably beyond what voter fraud could have affected, but when we have a close election and legislatively, the legislative races, sometimes we have tie votes, sometimes we have votes that are within 10 or 15, and there's a recount done. So on the margins, yeah, this this kind of thing absolutely can affect. Um, and the other thing is I think it maybe is important, more importantly, is confidence in the election and the process. We found in our poll that 30% of the Minnesotans don't have confidence in our election system. And you think, well, 30%, that's a low number. But on something like that, I mean, it really should be closer to 100. Yeah. 100% of people should be confident in our election system, and we don't have it. So all these anomalies, all these weaknesses in our system lead to people not having faith in the system. When you don't have faith in the system, maybe you don't vote. Uh maybe you're too cynical, maybe you think your vote's outcounted by somebody else's, and then you don't trust the outcome. So then you don't trust the government that that's been elected. Um, and that's a problem, and that's a big problem in our country right now, and a lot of the divisiveness is that a lot of people don't trust the outcome because of perceived voter fraud. So anything we can do to make the system tighter, um, not saying that there's you know rampant fraud. I don't, we're not here today with here's the list of people that that voted fraud. But if we can fix these things and make the system better, you'll have more faith in the system, the process, which means more faith in the governing, which would be good for everybody. Well, Bill, thank you so much for taking your time today and walking us through Minnesota's election system. Always great to be here. Thank you to everyone who made it all the way to the end of this week's episode of the American Experiment Podcast. Please remember to like this episode and share it with someone you know who needs a little more sanity in their life here in Minnesota. And remember to answer our question of the day, which is what is the highest blood alcohol content level you've ever heard of in your life? Mine after today is.