"Honest Elections Project"

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcoming Jason Snead to the program. Jason as an elections
expert and executive director of the Honest Elections Project, action
as early voting is underway across the country. Jason, good morning,
Thank you for having me on the program. You bet
good to have you here. I guess they really blew
it out of the park, and Georgia already on the
early voting.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Right, that's right. In fact, they've set a one day
record for people who cast early voting. In fact, it
wasn't even close. They nearly tripled the number of people
on the first day that were able to cast an
early ballot, and that's continued into a second day. So
if you can believe it, about ten percent of all
the people who voted in twenty twenty have already voted

(00:40):
in the twenty twenty four election. And I think what
this tells you is that when you have states like
Georgia the pass election integrity laws like they did in
twenty twenty one, they make it easy to vote and
hard to cheat, and people will turn out in droves
to make their voice heard. And of course this is
the second time now that Georgia has completely blown out
of the water the voter suppression that so many folks

(01:01):
have peddled about Georgia elections.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Yeah, and this may speak to other swing states too,
because interest is I suppose naturally a little higher in
those states because they know the attentions on them. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, that's right. There's a lot of people who are
eager to vote, and there's a lot of people who
are eager to make sure that their votes are going
to be counted. So they're looking at the laws. They're
seeing that the system is more secure in some of
these places than it was in twenty twenty. And we're
going to turn out and they're going to make sure
that they're that their voice is heard by voting, and
particularly in the swing states, I think there's a lot

(01:35):
of enthusiasm. So as more states start voting early. We're
now in the final few weeks of the election, we're
going to watch the turnout numbers very closely. But it's
important again to remember that if the claims that laws
like voter ID and so forth that are designed to
secure elections actually suppress the vote, and you wouldn't see
election after election with record high turnout levels. Yet that

(01:59):
is what we can you to see in Georgia, And
I was even down in Georgia in twenty twenty two
in Atlanta on election day talking to voters. Not one
of them said they didn't have a photo ID, not
one of them said it was hard to vote, And
there were no lines in any of those polling places either.
So I think that that states like Georgia have shown
us what other states need to do in the future
to improve their elections for everybody.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Do you think we will ever get to the point
if Conservatives take power again in the White House and
both both branches of Congress, where we go back to
the pre COVID system where if you're an absentee voter, Uh,
you're fairly you're a fairly rare bird. You have to
have a good reason, and everybody else goes to the

(02:42):
polls to vote. Do you think we'll ever get back
to that?

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Well, you know, it's interesting voters are sort of telling
us what their preference is. You know, during COVID there
was a lot of male voting, more than any other election.
There had been a lot of male voting and prior elections,
but it's about doubled or so in COVID. But now
voters are going back to what they prefer. And if
you look at the Georgia numbers, overwhelmingly, out of the

(03:07):
about five hundred and eighty or so thousand people that
have voted early, only about thirty thousand of those people
have voted by mail. So you've got overwhelming data showing
that people are preferring to go get the in person
voting experience. I think you're telling us what they want
to see, and I think that again undercuts another narrative
that we've seen peddled over the last few years from

(03:29):
the left. Then we should just have everybody voting at home,
voting from their couches, voting by mail. That's not what
people want. They don't want that kind of system. And
when they're just organically telling us in a state that
has no excuse mail voting so they could get a
mail ballot if they want to, they actually prefer to
go to a polling place and prefer to cast their
vote in first.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
That's good to hear because it's so easy or much
easier to rig voting by mail. By the way, I
saw those headlines, Jason, you probably saw this this morning too,
because we know what happened in Virginia. The Feds are
suing Governor youngin for enforcing their efforts to try to
keep non citizens off the rolls, and now a federal
judge has blocked Alabama's effort to remove non citizens from

(04:12):
voter roles. This is unbelievable to me.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah, you know, what you're seeing from the Justice Department,
I think is a misreading of federal law, because the
Justice Department is saying that there are non citizens on
the roles who have told us that they're non citizens
and that the state has no legal authority to remove them,
which is an absurd misreading of a statue called the
National Voter Registration Act, which does say that you're not

(04:37):
supposed to do systematic list meet andance functions, which is
kind of that's the election law speak for cleaning up
voter roles. You're not supposed to do that within ninety days.
But nevertheless, if someone dies, you could remove that person
from the voter roles. If someone wants to be removed,
you can remove that person from the voter roles. So
there are particular actions that you can take. And as

(04:57):
Virginia has argued, now you've got non citizens that are
telling the state they are not citizens. And the Justice
Department is spending all of its energy making sure that
Virginia doesn't take those people off the rolls, and none
at all, so far as we can tell, in actually
preserving the federal law that says that it is illegal
for non citizens to vote. So this is again a

(05:19):
misplaced set of priorities within the Bited administration trying to
stop states cleaning up voter rolls of non citizens right
here on the EVO election.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Unbelievable. Jason, thanks always good to have you on. Appreciate
the time.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Thank you You've

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Got Jason snead Ilist Elections Project Action here on kaab's
Morning News