October 23, 2020 • 19 mins
We have been hearing a lot about voter and election fraud recently, specifically with regards to mail- in voting. While officials maintain that voting by mail is secure and there is no widespread fraud, many voters are still concerned that there are problems. Corbin Carson, reporter for KFI News in Los Angeles, joins to talk about his seven-part series examining the various types of voter fraud concerns, the data behind how often it happens, and what protections are in place to keep elections safe. To hear Corbin’s full series on voter fraud you can find it at kfiam640.com Keyword: Fraud.
Next, movie theaters across the country are struggling to survive as the pandemic has slowed down the entertainment industry. Many cinemas have been allowed to reopen, but they must operate at limited capacity and many people are choosing not to go in part because Hollywood is postponing big movie releases. But for small family-owned theaters, the problems are worse. They are playing classic movies and even renting out the entire theater for showings. Alexander Gladstone, reporter at the WSJ, joins us for how small movie theaters are trying to stay alive.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Friday October. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the Daily Dive. We have been hearing a
lot about voter fraud and election fraud recently, specifically with
regards to mail in voting. While officials maintain that voting
by mail is secure and there's no widespread fraud, many
(00:21):
voters are still concerned that there are problems. Corbyn Carson,
reporter for KFI News in Los Angeles, joins us to
talk about his seven part series examining the various types
of voter fraud, concerns, the data behind, how often it happens,
and what protections are in place to keep elections safe. Next,
movie theaters across the country are struggling to survive as
the pandemic has slowed down the entertainment industry. Many cinemas
(00:44):
have been allowed to reopen, but they must operate at
limited capacity, and many people are choosing not to go,
in part because Hollywood is postponing big movie release. But
for small, family owned theaters the problems are worse. They're
playing classic movies and even renting out the entire theater
for showing. Alexander Gladstone, reporter The Wall Street Journal joins
(01:04):
us for how small movie theaters are trying to stay
a lot. It's news without the noise. Let's dive in.
I think they're just not find they're not reporting it.
It's not insignificant. It's hiding in plain sight. There's always fraud, period,
no matter what. Balants being sent to people who don't
even know they're receiving a ballad. How can it not
be right with fraud. I'm terrified over voter fraud. I'd
(01:26):
rather go to the booth physically, no way. I know
I put it in and somebody didn't alter it in
any way. Joining us now is Corbin Carson, reporter for
KFI News in Los Angeles and Orange County. Thanks for
joining us, Corbin, Hey, how's it going good? Thank you
so much. We've been hearing a lot throughout this election
cycle about voter fraud, and the President has been saying
it a lot that the election is rife with fraud.
(01:47):
There's gonna be a lot of concern with mail in ballots.
When we hear from officials, they say the elections are safe,
there's no need to worry, but there's a real concern
on the part of voters. You spoke to a lot
of voters. You spoke with several experts about the types
of voter fraud, concerns, the data behind all of this,
how often it happens, the protections that are in place
(02:08):
to keep elections safe. But as I mentioned, the concern
is there for voters. So I want to start off
with a clip of voters that you spoke to, just
a quick compilation of how they feel about it. I
think they're just not find they're not reporting it. It's
not insignificant. It's hiding in plain sight. There's always fraud, period,
no matter what balance being sent to people who don't
even know they're receiving a ballad. How can it not
(02:29):
be rightful fraud. I'm terrified over voter fraud. I'd rather
go to the booth physically. That way, I know I
put it in and somebody didn't alter it in any way. So, Corbin,
you made a seven part series. We're gonna talk about
the first four parts of next week. We'll join back
up with you to talk about the last three. But
start us off. You took a tour with the Orange
County Registrar of Voters, Neil Kelly, to go through the
(02:50):
life of a ballot and all the protections and individual
things that are put in there to help keep these
things up and up. During that tour, Kelly told me
about that he double his capacity for printing and scanning
in preparation for this surge of mail in ballot. He says,
back in March when it was in the primary, he
noticed that he had the inclination of what if everybody
(03:12):
had to vote by mail in? What if that was
like nationwide depending on how bad the virus had got.
So that was his preparation, and we used Orange County,
the Orange County Registrar's office as kind of an example
for what a ballot might go through. And the first
thing I learned, at least in Orange County is that
they do everything. All the printing process is done in house,
so the ballot is kept in house from the printing
(03:33):
process all the way through until when it's mailed out.
And so once it's mailed out, there was a bunch
of new technologies that were mentioned, and you can listen
to him explain that in clip too, there's new technology
and what it does is it sprays a bar code
on the return envelope for the voter. So when a
voter puts us back in the mail, they can see
the full service of that ballot being tracked, so they
(03:55):
can get a text passage from us and said, you
mailed your ballot, we received it, it's been mounted. I
always tell people like I'm they're gonna track your pet
food coming from Amazon, we aren't you tracking your ballot?
I forgot that he mentioned that Amazon part. But that
was this point because I had heard so many different
people talk about ballot dumping. You heard that in that
clip we played at the beginning, constantly ballot dumping, ballot dumping,
(04:16):
ballot dumping, and if you think about it, because of
the data and the way that they can track things. Now,
the government, I've heard even voters tell me this, the
ones that we're not against voter fraud. The government has
everybody down to a number, just like your ballot, just
like the tracking system. So if an Amazon driver, it's
just to take his example a little bit further. If
an Amazon driver would have let's say, fifty packages in
(04:37):
his truck of varying degrees, and he decided, Hey, I'm
just gonna leave all this stuff at my house. No
one's gonna notice you and I both know, the buyer's
gonna notice, the seller's gonna notice, and Amazon is gonna
notice because all that stuff is tracked. From what Neil
Kelly was saying, they can maybe not track the individual
mail carrier, but they know who has it around which area,
and it goes beyond that. There's specific paper types that
(04:59):
these ballots are printing on, water marks, the barcodes, signature verifications.
There's four layers of that, so there's a lot of
protections in place to make sure that at least once
you get it and turn it back in and it
gets counted that it's going to be from you, and
they can get it down to the actual mail carrier.
They do go Actually I asked if it goes down
to the street. He was like, no, but we know
(05:20):
when it goes into that Individual America carrier's pouch. So
if that ballot disappears, they're gonna know it and they're
tracking that data, he told me every day. So on
the return side, if a bunch of ballots from one
zip code or one area don't come back, that's going
to be noticed in the data. That's one of those
big data things that you can easily pick out, like hey,
(05:40):
we're expecting X amount of ballots, and all of a sudden,
ten a hundred thousand have disappeared from this area. It's
obvious that this is where it came from. Another thing
that I was asked a lot about was how many
live ballots are out there. That was a big concern
because of this record number of mail in voting that's
going on, and so the idea being the record now
I think we just heard the other day was there's
(06:02):
already almost four million ballots that have been received in California,
and at this time during the election it was around
four hundred thousand, So that's an incredible increase and that's
just California. So people were concerned that they were just
randomly mailing out ballots to anyone, whether they were voters,
not voters, people who are not allowed to vote, etcetera.
(06:23):
And one of the things that the registrar told me
is something that everyone does across county wide is these
ballots are only sent out to register voters, so there's
only one voter per ballot. If you think about all
the different kinds of things you hear about concerns as
far as fraud, that really kills a whole lot of things.
Because if you're dumping a bunch of ballots, a hundred ballots,
(06:43):
Let's say you're assuming those hundred people aren't going to vote,
so maybe you get five of them and then you
you still them out and assuming you can get past
the signature process, etcetera, people are gonna say, hey, where's
my ballot? And then when they go and ask the registrar,
is gonna say you already voted? And what are ninety
people gonna say? No, I didn't. And that's just one
(07:03):
of many things that comes out in this series that
shows how difficult it would be to pull off something
like this. One of the parts that you delved into
for the series was the data on voter fraud, and
really there was a very miniscule amount of cases that
came forward through this, and you let a team of
people that looked into all of this tell us a
little bit about that data. I started studying voter fraud
(07:24):
when I was in graduate school in twelve. I led
a team of reporters as part of a fellowship, and
I had this idea there was like, why don't you
look in the voter fraud. What it ended up being
was a year long process. We're talking thousands of public
records requests follow ups. I mean, I'm getting coffee stained
responses from this pokeytown in Nebraska at no voter fraud.
But if you think about this for a second, I
(07:47):
am asking for and this was in the election. The
big thing that year was the voter i D Laws.
The next year was the hacking with THEE and then
this year, obviously it's the mail in. But in twelve
I'm sending public records request to Republican counties and Democrat counties.
I mean, we're talking Secretary of State, we're talking the
attorney general, We're talking each county's election official, begging for
(08:09):
voter fraud. So, if you're a Republican or a Democrat
who really wants to push this narrative that there needs
to be voter i D laws for people to be elected,
here's your chance to send all this voter fraud to me.
And we want cases, etcetera. And don't get me wrong,
we got a lot. We got two thousand sixty eight cases,
but it was two thousand sixty eight cases of all
different types of election irregularity. So that two thousand sixty
(08:32):
eight cases keep in mind was over the course of
twelve years, and during that time more than one point
two billion votes were cast. So when you do the math,
it's this very miniscule amount, and a lot of this
was mistakes. It was election officials trying to stay in
office and they wanted to live over here, but they
were over there. That was called voter fraud. Briefly, in
the time that we have left, tell us a little
(08:53):
bit about the difference between voter fraud and election fraud,
because there's different concerns. Registration fraud, double voting, I know,
a lot of concern for people, as you mentioned the
vote I D. Why can't you just vote with an
I D. These are all the different kinds of concerns,
double voting, dead voting, campaign for our valot harvesting in
The interesting part is you also have the different people
doing it. Maybe it's an election official, maybe it's a
(09:13):
campaign official, and then all the way down to the voter,
which was the least one. And I know, if we're
running out of time, I do want to get this
third clip in. It's from you see Irvine professor Rick Hassan.
This is a guy that's been doing this twenty years.
He talks about in one of our parts of the series,
how here's a nationally respected election official and what he's
about to say in this clip. It lends to the
idea of what people would have to go through to
(09:35):
try to swing an election. It would be what is
the point, right, Basically, you're risking years in prison for
one vote? What are you getting out of it? And
if you want to go ahead and play its clip three,
if you're trying to swing the presidential election, you know
you'd have to have thousands of ballots being cast, and
people would notice if their ballots were stolen from their
mailboxes or someone was requestioning them and voting them on
(09:55):
their behalf, because when they go to vote, they'd see
that they couldn't. You do see occasional staff conspiracies to
swing elections with absentee ballots or other kinds of fraud,
but those are hard to pull off. They happen in
very small elections. Typically, the idea that you've put off
in the presidential election not be detected is not a
reasonable thing to think. There are just too many protections
in order to be able to do something like that.
(10:17):
And just two quick things on this here. One I
want to make very very clear. Every person we talked to,
every law enforcement official, there's people that are looking for that.
So this year and past years, every election, off their official,
every academic, they're not saying that couple of things in
small elections is not important. They're trying to catch that.
No one is saying that it can't happen. I mean,
we're watching the news. These people are getting double ballots
(10:38):
in the mail though, and which is an election accident,
not not fraud. These people over here, the whole system
is down, etcetera. I'm not trying to downplay the importance
of making sure and none of these officials were either
of the importance of making sure that elections are secure.
So they constantly we're saying, we're adding new securities, were
constantly upping the watermarks on the ballots, etcetera. To make
sure people can't get away with stuff and their prosecute
(11:00):
the people that actually do get caught. The second thing
I want to mention out of what he said is
think about what a person does when they're going through
a crime, they're trying to get something out of it.
You go steal a car. You're at least going to
drive that car until they catch you. But if you
do all this work, get through all those things we've
talked to here, and you get your one vote through, Hey,
you don't even know if your guy's gonna win. That's
(11:22):
there's no chance that you're you don't know for sure
that that one vote that you're risking. At least it's
four years here in California, it's five years of other places.
You're risking that for the chance of something that won't work.
And keep in mind, we're talking about something that has
to go through the signature checks, it has to get
except that you would have to get a voter that
didn't want to vote. I've named them, and there's several
more that I'm probably forgetting right now, all for the
(11:44):
chance of something that isn't certain. You know, there's the
outcome is not certain. I have to say that the
seven part series, what I've heard so far is really enlightening.
You've got some more stuff coming up on ballot harvesting,
voter intimidation, Americans losing trust in the tegrity of these elections,
what that all means. So we'll touch base next week
to finish all this off. But if you want to
(12:06):
catch Corbin's full series on this go to k IF
I am six forty dot com. Keyword fraud. Corbyn Carson,
reporter for KFI News in Los Angeles and Orange County,
thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for
having us. The second pressure point to that is if
(12:29):
people themselves that even if they are legally allowed to go,
if even if you had drop in, a lot of
people who are regular movie guards just don't want to
go out because they're afraid of catching the virus. Joining
us now is Alexander Gladstone, reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
Thanks for joining us, Alexander. Thank you. Oscar read to
be here. I wanted to talk about movie theaters throughout
(12:51):
this pandemic. Obviously, we've seen some news from some of
the larger chains, like Regal closing down operations in the
UK and the US AMC still open, but they're saying
they could run into cash by the end of the year.
I think they've started a new plan, maybe renting out
whole theaters just for smaller groups things like that. But
the small movie theaters, they're really doing anything that they
(13:14):
can to survive at this moment. You know, they're showing
older movies getting creative with selling out the theaters as well.
So Alex, tell us a little bit more about what's
going on with these smaller movie theaters. I'll tell you what.
So just to let you know a bit more about
who I am and what I do. Might eat at
the Law Street Journalist to cover financially distressed companies and industries,
(13:36):
so I don't cover any specific sector. I come in
when companies are facing major illegal and financial problems, and
so early on in the pandemic, I identified the movie
theater industry is being especially vulnerable, just given that with
the contagious respiratory pandemic like COVID, obviously people aren't going
(13:57):
to want to be sitting in a closed room with
no windows, side by side a lot of other strangers.
And so it's an industry that as soon as the
pandemic hit, the revenues when almost every theater heights in
the country had to close for several months and then
you know, July August. It so depends on the state.
But theaters have been opening up again with restrictions on
(14:20):
their capacity. So I think at this point every state
is open for business for movie theaters, but certain regions
of certain states are not open. For example, New York
City is not open. New York State was opened up
by Governor Clomo has made an announcement on Saturday, but
New York City is not open. Also, the Los Angeles
(14:42):
metropolitan area is also not open in California. So, from
what I understand is near owners, this is across the board,
not as small ones, the large ones too are. They're
confronting three separate pressure points or threats to their business.
The first is that there are government restrictions on how
many people they can accommodate, and there's also government requirements
(15:05):
to invest in upgrading ventilation systems and installing plexiglass dividing
is improving sanitation and stuff like that. The second pressure
pointed out is that people themselves that even if they
are legally allowed to go, if even if theo has
are open, a lot of people who are regular movie
guyers just don't want to go out because they're afraid
(15:26):
of catching the virus. And the third treasure point to
impact these years, this is sort of becoming the case.
I guess there's just this. This is more and more
issues that the major food studios are not releasing movies.
They're delaying their movies. Let's focus on that a little
(15:46):
bit only because you know, this is why the movie
theaters are open. How you get constant turnover new people
is to come see the new flicks that are out,
and we've seen it in recent weeks and all just
these delays and delays is being pushed un till next year.
Tenant came out. That was Warner Brothers big movie, but
it just struggled, as you mentioned, without theaters in New
(16:07):
York and Los Angeles. So other big movies have just
been pushed back. Some movies have been released on digital platforms,
and that thing that actually brings people to the movie
theaters is just not there for them. So that's a
big problem because movie theaters they came show archive films,
you know, like old classics, and that's what a lot
(16:28):
of them have been doing. You know what, I spent
the last week or two talking to tons of different
movie theater owners, everyone from Adam Arons, who's the CEO MC,
which is the world's largest movie theater company, down to
people who have owned single screen movie theaters around the country.
And you know a lot of these people have you know,
they when they were allowed to reopen. They began to
(16:50):
join classics like Jaws and Back to the Future and
Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Last Starts. So they've they've
been playing these historical movies. But you know there are
people who going to come out, but it's not enough.
But these theaters they need to pay their fixed costs,
need to pay their staff or pay roll. Doesn't have
to be a license licensing fee to the movie studios,
(17:10):
so it's very hard to break even when you're limited capacity,
and even at that, not them and people want to
come in. And we're getting to this critical point where
they've been closed so long as you mentioned, costs have
been piling up. They were expecting to see some of
these go out of business now. So you've got some
stats from the National Association of Theater Owners. Really only
(17:32):
about five percent of some theaters have shut down right now,
but at the end of this month October, and by
the end of the year, they're looking at a lot
higher numbers and a lot of these smaller to midsides theaters,
you know, are looking towards Congress to see if they
might pass more stimulus bills and things like that. So
it's really getting into this dire part of the year
for them, absolutely, and you know it's it's the same
(17:55):
where from what I understand is that the cinemas need
either one of two major things to happen. One they
need for Congress to pass a new stimulus program. Most
of the theater owners that I spoke to have obtained
a p p P long, but it's not enough. They
need another one essentially, so they either need more federal
(18:16):
support or they need the studios start releasing movies again.
And one key element that pretty much ever and I
spoke to has said is that New York City is
so critical in the movie business, and without New York
City being open, movie studios don't want to release new movies.
And the reason thing is one New York is the
(18:37):
most lucrative movie theater market in the world and to
most of the famous film critics live in New York City,
and so New York is one of the capital of
show business in a certain way. And so without New
York City being open, most studios are not going to release.
And so Governor Cuomo is letting pretty much all of
(18:57):
New York State, including upstate in Long Isle, open, but
not in New York City. So it helps to some
degree out people throughout the state who owned movie theaters.
But without New York City being open, the studios aren't
going to release new movies, and so that impact the
entire movies theater. Indus really a frosty entire country. Alexander Gladstone,
reporter at the Wall Street Journal, thank you very much
(19:18):
for joining us. Thank you, Oscar. That's it for this week.
Join us on social media at Daily Dive Pod on
both Twitter and Instagram. Leave us a comment, give us
a rating and tell us or is that you're interesting.
Follow us on I Heart Radio, or subscribe wherever you
(19:40):
get your podcast. This episode of the Daily Divers produced
by Victor Right and engineered by Tony Sorrentino him Oscar Ramirez,
And this was your Daily Dive
It's Friday October. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the Daily Dive. We have been hearing a
lot about voter fraud and election fraud recently, specifically with
regards to mail in voting. While officials maintain that voting
by mail is secure and there's no widespread fraud, many
(00:21):
voters are still concerned that there are problems. Corbyn Carson,
reporter for KFI News in Los Angeles, joins us to
talk about his seven part series examining the various types
of voter fraud, concerns, the data behind, how often it happens,
and what protections are in place to keep elections safe. Next,
movie theaters across the country are struggling to survive as
the pandemic has slowed down the entertainment industry. Many cinemas
(00:44):
have been allowed to reopen, but they must operate at
limited capacity, and many people are choosing not to go,
in part because Hollywood is postponing big movie release. But
for small, family owned theaters the problems are worse. They're
playing classic movies and even renting out the entire theater
for showing. Alexander Gladstone, reporter The Wall Street Journal joins
(01:04):
us for how small movie theaters are trying to stay
a lot. It's news without the noise. Let's dive in.
I think they're just not find they're not reporting it.
It's not insignificant. It's hiding in plain sight. There's always fraud, period,
no matter what. Balants being sent to people who don't
even know they're receiving a ballad. How can it not
be right with fraud. I'm terrified over voter fraud. I'd
(01:26):
rather go to the booth physically, no way. I know
I put it in and somebody didn't alter it in
any way. Joining us now is Corbin Carson, reporter for
KFI News in Los Angeles and Orange County. Thanks for
joining us, Corbin, Hey, how's it going good? Thank you
so much. We've been hearing a lot throughout this election
cycle about voter fraud, and the President has been saying
it a lot that the election is rife with fraud.
(01:47):
There's gonna be a lot of concern with mail in ballots.
When we hear from officials, they say the elections are safe,
there's no need to worry, but there's a real concern
on the part of voters. You spoke to a lot
of voters. You spoke with several experts about the types
of voter fraud, concerns, the data behind all of this,
how often it happens, the protections that are in place
(02:08):
to keep elections safe. But as I mentioned, the concern
is there for voters. So I want to start off
with a clip of voters that you spoke to, just
a quick compilation of how they feel about it. I
think they're just not find they're not reporting it. It's
not insignificant. It's hiding in plain sight. There's always fraud, period,
no matter what balance being sent to people who don't
even know they're receiving a ballad. How can it not
(02:29):
be rightful fraud. I'm terrified over voter fraud. I'd rather
go to the booth physically. That way, I know I
put it in and somebody didn't alter it in any way. So, Corbin,
you made a seven part series. We're gonna talk about
the first four parts of next week. We'll join back
up with you to talk about the last three. But
start us off. You took a tour with the Orange
County Registrar of Voters, Neil Kelly, to go through the
(02:50):
life of a ballot and all the protections and individual
things that are put in there to help keep these
things up and up. During that tour, Kelly told me
about that he double his capacity for printing and scanning
in preparation for this surge of mail in ballot. He says,
back in March when it was in the primary, he
noticed that he had the inclination of what if everybody
(03:12):
had to vote by mail in? What if that was
like nationwide depending on how bad the virus had got.
So that was his preparation, and we used Orange County,
the Orange County Registrar's office as kind of an example
for what a ballot might go through. And the first
thing I learned, at least in Orange County is that
they do everything. All the printing process is done in house,
so the ballot is kept in house from the printing
(03:33):
process all the way through until when it's mailed out.
And so once it's mailed out, there was a bunch
of new technologies that were mentioned, and you can listen
to him explain that in clip too, there's new technology
and what it does is it sprays a bar code
on the return envelope for the voter. So when a
voter puts us back in the mail, they can see
the full service of that ballot being tracked, so they
(03:55):
can get a text passage from us and said, you
mailed your ballot, we received it, it's been mounted. I
always tell people like I'm they're gonna track your pet
food coming from Amazon, we aren't you tracking your ballot?
I forgot that he mentioned that Amazon part. But that
was this point because I had heard so many different
people talk about ballot dumping. You heard that in that
clip we played at the beginning, constantly ballot dumping, ballot dumping,
(04:16):
ballot dumping, and if you think about it, because of
the data and the way that they can track things. Now,
the government, I've heard even voters tell me this, the
ones that we're not against voter fraud. The government has
everybody down to a number, just like your ballot, just
like the tracking system. So if an Amazon driver, it's
just to take his example a little bit further. If
an Amazon driver would have let's say, fifty packages in
(04:37):
his truck of varying degrees, and he decided, Hey, I'm
just gonna leave all this stuff at my house. No
one's gonna notice you and I both know, the buyer's
gonna notice, the seller's gonna notice, and Amazon is gonna
notice because all that stuff is tracked. From what Neil
Kelly was saying, they can maybe not track the individual
mail carrier, but they know who has it around which area,
and it goes beyond that. There's specific paper types that
(04:59):
these ballots are printing on, water marks, the barcodes, signature verifications.
There's four layers of that, so there's a lot of
protections in place to make sure that at least once
you get it and turn it back in and it
gets counted that it's going to be from you, and
they can get it down to the actual mail carrier.
They do go Actually I asked if it goes down
to the street. He was like, no, but we know
(05:20):
when it goes into that Individual America carrier's pouch. So
if that ballot disappears, they're gonna know it and they're
tracking that data, he told me every day. So on
the return side, if a bunch of ballots from one
zip code or one area don't come back, that's going
to be noticed in the data. That's one of those
big data things that you can easily pick out, like hey,
(05:40):
we're expecting X amount of ballots, and all of a sudden,
ten a hundred thousand have disappeared from this area. It's
obvious that this is where it came from. Another thing
that I was asked a lot about was how many
live ballots are out there. That was a big concern
because of this record number of mail in voting that's
going on, and so the idea being the record now
I think we just heard the other day was there's
(06:02):
already almost four million ballots that have been received in California,
and at this time during the election it was around
four hundred thousand, So that's an incredible increase and that's
just California. So people were concerned that they were just
randomly mailing out ballots to anyone, whether they were voters,
not voters, people who are not allowed to vote, etcetera.
(06:23):
And one of the things that the registrar told me
is something that everyone does across county wide is these
ballots are only sent out to register voters, so there's
only one voter per ballot. If you think about all
the different kinds of things you hear about concerns as
far as fraud, that really kills a whole lot of things.
Because if you're dumping a bunch of ballots, a hundred ballots,
(06:43):
Let's say you're assuming those hundred people aren't going to vote,
so maybe you get five of them and then you
you still them out and assuming you can get past
the signature process, etcetera, people are gonna say, hey, where's
my ballot? And then when they go and ask the registrar,
is gonna say you already voted? And what are ninety
people gonna say? No, I didn't. And that's just one
(07:03):
of many things that comes out in this series that
shows how difficult it would be to pull off something
like this. One of the parts that you delved into
for the series was the data on voter fraud, and
really there was a very miniscule amount of cases that
came forward through this, and you let a team of
people that looked into all of this tell us a
little bit about that data. I started studying voter fraud
(07:24):
when I was in graduate school in twelve. I led
a team of reporters as part of a fellowship, and
I had this idea there was like, why don't you
look in the voter fraud. What it ended up being
was a year long process. We're talking thousands of public
records requests follow ups. I mean, I'm getting coffee stained
responses from this pokeytown in Nebraska at no voter fraud.
But if you think about this for a second, I
(07:47):
am asking for and this was in the election. The
big thing that year was the voter i D Laws.
The next year was the hacking with THEE and then
this year, obviously it's the mail in. But in twelve
I'm sending public records request to Republican counties and Democrat counties.
I mean, we're talking Secretary of State, we're talking the
attorney general, We're talking each county's election official, begging for
(08:09):
voter fraud. So, if you're a Republican or a Democrat
who really wants to push this narrative that there needs
to be voter i D laws for people to be elected,
here's your chance to send all this voter fraud to me.
And we want cases, etcetera. And don't get me wrong,
we got a lot. We got two thousand sixty eight cases,
but it was two thousand sixty eight cases of all
different types of election irregularity. So that two thousand sixty
(08:32):
eight cases keep in mind was over the course of
twelve years, and during that time more than one point
two billion votes were cast. So when you do the math,
it's this very miniscule amount, and a lot of this
was mistakes. It was election officials trying to stay in
office and they wanted to live over here, but they
were over there. That was called voter fraud. Briefly, in
the time that we have left, tell us a little
(08:53):
bit about the difference between voter fraud and election fraud,
because there's different concerns. Registration fraud, double voting, I know,
a lot of concern for people, as you mentioned the
vote I D. Why can't you just vote with an
I D. These are all the different kinds of concerns,
double voting, dead voting, campaign for our valot harvesting in
The interesting part is you also have the different people
doing it. Maybe it's an election official, maybe it's a
(09:13):
campaign official, and then all the way down to the voter,
which was the least one. And I know, if we're
running out of time, I do want to get this
third clip in. It's from you see Irvine professor Rick Hassan.
This is a guy that's been doing this twenty years.
He talks about in one of our parts of the series,
how here's a nationally respected election official and what he's
about to say in this clip. It lends to the
idea of what people would have to go through to
(09:35):
try to swing an election. It would be what is
the point, right, Basically, you're risking years in prison for
one vote? What are you getting out of it? And
if you want to go ahead and play its clip three,
if you're trying to swing the presidential election, you know
you'd have to have thousands of ballots being cast, and
people would notice if their ballots were stolen from their
mailboxes or someone was requestioning them and voting them on
(09:55):
their behalf, because when they go to vote, they'd see
that they couldn't. You do see occasional staff conspiracies to
swing elections with absentee ballots or other kinds of fraud,
but those are hard to pull off. They happen in
very small elections. Typically, the idea that you've put off
in the presidential election not be detected is not a
reasonable thing to think. There are just too many protections
in order to be able to do something like that.
(10:17):
And just two quick things on this here. One I
want to make very very clear. Every person we talked to,
every law enforcement official, there's people that are looking for that.
So this year and past years, every election, off their official,
every academic, they're not saying that couple of things in
small elections is not important. They're trying to catch that.
No one is saying that it can't happen. I mean,
we're watching the news. These people are getting double ballots
(10:38):
in the mail though, and which is an election accident,
not not fraud. These people over here, the whole system
is down, etcetera. I'm not trying to downplay the importance
of making sure and none of these officials were either
of the importance of making sure that elections are secure.
So they constantly we're saying, we're adding new securities, were
constantly upping the watermarks on the ballots, etcetera. To make
sure people can't get away with stuff and their prosecute
(11:00):
the people that actually do get caught. The second thing
I want to mention out of what he said is
think about what a person does when they're going through
a crime, they're trying to get something out of it.
You go steal a car. You're at least going to
drive that car until they catch you. But if you
do all this work, get through all those things we've
talked to here, and you get your one vote through, Hey,
you don't even know if your guy's gonna win. That's
(11:22):
there's no chance that you're you don't know for sure
that that one vote that you're risking. At least it's
four years here in California, it's five years of other places.
You're risking that for the chance of something that won't work.
And keep in mind, we're talking about something that has
to go through the signature checks, it has to get
except that you would have to get a voter that
didn't want to vote. I've named them, and there's several
more that I'm probably forgetting right now, all for the
(11:44):
chance of something that isn't certain. You know, there's the
outcome is not certain. I have to say that the
seven part series, what I've heard so far is really enlightening.
You've got some more stuff coming up on ballot harvesting,
voter intimidation, Americans losing trust in the tegrity of these elections,
what that all means. So we'll touch base next week
to finish all this off. But if you want to
(12:06):
catch Corbin's full series on this go to k IF
I am six forty dot com. Keyword fraud. Corbyn Carson,
reporter for KFI News in Los Angeles and Orange County,
thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for
having us. The second pressure point to that is if
(12:29):
people themselves that even if they are legally allowed to go,
if even if you had drop in, a lot of
people who are regular movie guards just don't want to
go out because they're afraid of catching the virus. Joining
us now is Alexander Gladstone, reporter at the Wall Street Journal.
Thanks for joining us, Alexander. Thank you. Oscar read to
be here. I wanted to talk about movie theaters throughout
(12:51):
this pandemic. Obviously, we've seen some news from some of
the larger chains, like Regal closing down operations in the
UK and the US AMC still open, but they're saying
they could run into cash by the end of the year.
I think they've started a new plan, maybe renting out
whole theaters just for smaller groups things like that. But
the small movie theaters, they're really doing anything that they
(13:14):
can to survive at this moment. You know, they're showing
older movies getting creative with selling out the theaters as well.
So Alex, tell us a little bit more about what's
going on with these smaller movie theaters. I'll tell you what.
So just to let you know a bit more about
who I am and what I do. Might eat at
the Law Street Journalist to cover financially distressed companies and industries,
(13:36):
so I don't cover any specific sector. I come in
when companies are facing major illegal and financial problems, and
so early on in the pandemic, I identified the movie
theater industry is being especially vulnerable, just given that with
the contagious respiratory pandemic like COVID, obviously people aren't going
(13:57):
to want to be sitting in a closed room with
no windows, side by side a lot of other strangers.
And so it's an industry that as soon as the
pandemic hit, the revenues when almost every theater heights in
the country had to close for several months and then
you know, July August. It so depends on the state.
But theaters have been opening up again with restrictions on
(14:20):
their capacity. So I think at this point every state
is open for business for movie theaters, but certain regions
of certain states are not open. For example, New York
City is not open. New York State was opened up
by Governor Clomo has made an announcement on Saturday, but
New York City is not open. Also, the Los Angeles
(14:42):
metropolitan area is also not open in California. So, from
what I understand is near owners, this is across the board,
not as small ones, the large ones too are. They're
confronting three separate pressure points or threats to their business.
The first is that there are government restrictions on how
many people they can accommodate, and there's also government requirements
(15:05):
to invest in upgrading ventilation systems and installing plexiglass dividing
is improving sanitation and stuff like that. The second pressure
pointed out is that people themselves that even if they
are legally allowed to go, if even if theo has
are open, a lot of people who are regular movie
guyers just don't want to go out because they're afraid
(15:26):
of catching the virus. And the third treasure point to
impact these years, this is sort of becoming the case.
I guess there's just this. This is more and more
issues that the major food studios are not releasing movies.
They're delaying their movies. Let's focus on that a little
(15:46):
bit only because you know, this is why the movie
theaters are open. How you get constant turnover new people
is to come see the new flicks that are out,
and we've seen it in recent weeks and all just
these delays and delays is being pushed un till next year.
Tenant came out. That was Warner Brothers big movie, but
it just struggled, as you mentioned, without theaters in New
(16:07):
York and Los Angeles. So other big movies have just
been pushed back. Some movies have been released on digital platforms,
and that thing that actually brings people to the movie
theaters is just not there for them. So that's a
big problem because movie theaters they came show archive films,
you know, like old classics, and that's what a lot
(16:28):
of them have been doing. You know what, I spent
the last week or two talking to tons of different
movie theater owners, everyone from Adam Arons, who's the CEO MC,
which is the world's largest movie theater company, down to
people who have owned single screen movie theaters around the country.
And you know a lot of these people have you know,
they when they were allowed to reopen. They began to
(16:50):
join classics like Jaws and Back to the Future and
Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Last Starts. So they've they've
been playing these historical movies. But you know there are
people who going to come out, but it's not enough.
But these theaters they need to pay their fixed costs,
need to pay their staff or pay roll. Doesn't have
to be a license licensing fee to the movie studios,
(17:10):
so it's very hard to break even when you're limited capacity,
and even at that, not them and people want to
come in. And we're getting to this critical point where
they've been closed so long as you mentioned, costs have
been piling up. They were expecting to see some of
these go out of business now. So you've got some
stats from the National Association of Theater Owners. Really only
(17:32):
about five percent of some theaters have shut down right now,
but at the end of this month October, and by
the end of the year, they're looking at a lot
higher numbers and a lot of these smaller to midsides theaters,
you know, are looking towards Congress to see if they
might pass more stimulus bills and things like that. So
it's really getting into this dire part of the year
for them, absolutely, and you know it's it's the same
(17:55):
where from what I understand is that the cinemas need
either one of two major things to happen. One they
need for Congress to pass a new stimulus program. Most
of the theater owners that I spoke to have obtained
a p p P long, but it's not enough. They
need another one essentially, so they either need more federal
(18:16):
support or they need the studios start releasing movies again.
And one key element that pretty much ever and I
spoke to has said is that New York City is
so critical in the movie business, and without New York
City being open, movie studios don't want to release new movies.
And the reason thing is one New York is the
(18:37):
most lucrative movie theater market in the world and to
most of the famous film critics live in New York City,
and so New York is one of the capital of
show business in a certain way. And so without New
York City being open, most studios are not going to release.
And so Governor Cuomo is letting pretty much all of
(18:57):
New York State, including upstate in Long Isle, open, but
not in New York City. So it helps to some
degree out people throughout the state who owned movie theaters.
But without New York City being open, the studios aren't
going to release new movies, and so that impact the
entire movies theater. Indus really a frosty entire country. Alexander Gladstone,
reporter at the Wall Street Journal, thank you very much
(19:18):
for joining us. Thank you, Oscar. That's it for this week.
Join us on social media at Daily Dive Pod on
both Twitter and Instagram. Leave us a comment, give us
a rating and tell us or is that you're interesting.
Follow us on I Heart Radio, or subscribe wherever you
(19:40):
get your podcast. This episode of the Daily Divers produced
by Victor Right and engineered by Tony Sorrentino him Oscar Ramirez,
And this was your Daily Dive
The Daily Dive News
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