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Hans von Spakovsky - Should States Verify Voters Before Mailing Ballots?
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Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at Advancing American Freedom and former FEC commissioner, joins Lars to discuss the Supreme Court clearing the way for new restrictions on mail-in voting. Should states have to verify who’s eligible before sending out a ballot?
Hey, welcome back to the program. It's a pleasure to be with you, and I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails. You know, yesterday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for President Trump to move ahead with new restrictions on mail-in voting. Democrats call it voter suppression, but should states have to verify who's getting a ballot, and should we have the U.S. Postal Service play a role in that, as the President's executive order suggested? I thought we'd talked to a real election expert, and that's Hans von Spikowski, Senior Legal Fellow at Advancing American Freedom and a former Federal Election Commission commissioner and former U.S. Department of Justice attorney. Hans, welcome back.
SPEAKER_01
Uh well, Lars, thanks for having me back. Although one thing I I kind of want to correct, you know, uh ever everybody is categorizing the president's order as somehow restricting mail invalidity. No, that's wrong. What it does is try to make it more effective and accurate. And I gotta tell you, the lawsuit that was filed by the 23 states, by the way, including Oregon, was was just I I think actually absurd in many instances. And that's kind of why the Supreme Court lifted the lower court injunction. And let me give you an example of that.
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
SPEAKER_01
One of the things they complained about was that the president's executive order told the Department of Homeland Security, I want you to prepare a citizenship list for every state that lists everyone in the state who's 18 years ol or older and is a citizen and send it to the states. It didn't say that the states have to use it, but it basically told DHS make that list available to states so they can use it to check their voter list and make sure everybody on it is a citizen. And yet, Oregon, California, all these states went to court and said we want an injunction to prevent the Department of Homeland Security from sending us a list. That list. Now, they why would they do that except that they don't want to know that aliens are registering a vote? I'll give you another one. Uh there was the injunction said uh that the president's order uh couldn't be carried out, which told the Department of Justice, I want you to prioritize the prosecution of state and local officials who provide ballots to ineligible voters. In other words, the states and the lower court judges were telling the Justice Department, you are not allowed to enforce the law. So that if a local official knows, absolutely knows, that somebody who's registering to vote is not a U.S. citizen, and they hand them a ballot anyway, that's a violation of federal law. And yet the lower court was saying you can't criminally prosecute them for breaking federal law. That's the kind of stuff that was in this lawsuit.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, because what the states were doing was saying we don't want the list, because if you give us the list, then we're on notice, and we're we know that we're gonna be handing ballots, sending ballots out to people who are not eligible because all we have to do is look at the list and say we can't send ballots to those people. They're not citizens. We don't want to be put on notice. That's what they were saying.
SPEAKER_01
No, that yeah, that's exactly right. Now, the president also directed the U.S. Postal Service to take a number of steps. Here's one of them that the states objected to, and again, the the judge issued injunctions saying you can't even start to come up with a new rule. The president said, create a system so that any envelope containing a ballot has a barcode on the outside so that it can be tracked. Now, Lars, you you and I both know when you order stuff from Amazon, whether they send it by UPS or or or uh Federal Express, they send you uh uh a notice that allows you to track it. Why would states not want to be able to track their absentee ballots? Well, I can tell you why. Because that would allow them uh that would provide information on how many of the ballots are delayed, get delivered to the wrong place, end up sitting in post offices, and so that their stories about how wonderful mail-in voting is would be sharply uh infringed by by doing that.
SPEAKER_00
So now the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has said the president can go ahead with this, the states uh lawsuits were not well timed because they hadn't actually suffered any damage. So, what do you expect effectively is going to happen? Will the states get those those lists and then have to make the choice do we actually pay attention to the list and compare it to our voters or not?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, that's what's gonna happen. Now, if and when the Postal Service issues a final rule on how it's gonna handle election-related mail, yeah, then they may file suit again and claim they're somehow damaged by it. But I just don't see how they can claim damages over the fact that the Justice Department is gonna violate violations of federal law, or that DHS is going to simply send them a list which they have the option of not using.
SPEAKER_00
Well, and what drives me nuts, Hans, is as you point out, Oregon's one of those. I know the state well. Uh they came out today and said, we have an honest and secure system. Now, this is the same system that within the last 24 months has found thousands of foreign nationals register to vote. Uh they've found some of them have actually cast ballots. They've they've been forced by judicial watch to cut 800,000 registrations out, which is almost a quarter of all the voters in the state, and they're having to get get those off the list. And yet they describe that system as honest and secure and and valid.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but that's the that's the um myth they've been pushing for a long time, and they don't want any data coming out that shows that they are wrong about that. And that's one of the reasons they've opposed all these uh efforts by by the president to provide really more information to the states so they can do a better job of verifying their voter lists and taking care of uh of other issues in elections. The governors and secretaries of state of every one of these states that sued ought to be embarrassed over the fact that they're trying to stop things like being able to track the envelopes containing male ballots.
SPEAKER_00
Because if they had to track them, they'd have to stop them. And if they're gonna be good, loyal Democrat soldiers and do their job as not as public officials, but as members of the Democrat Party, they're gonna have to ignore all that information because they want all those phony votes. That is Hans von Spikowski, who's a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom and a former federal election commissioner. You're listening to the Lars Larson Show and the Radio Northwest Network. This segment of the show brought to you by Nick Shivers.com. That's Nick Shivers.com.
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