August 1, 2025 • 42 mins
On this episode of "The Federalist Radio Hour," Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to explain how election integrity is systemically undermined by "dirty voter rolls" and bureaucratic inefficacy.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittles, senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
(00:42):
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Jay Christian Adams, President and legal
counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Much to talk
about in the world of election integrity. Thank you so
much for being here today with us on this of
the Federalist Radio Hour. Thanks for having me. You bet
(01:05):
from Alaska to Maine, state voter rules are riddled with errors.
Battleground Pennsylvania appears to have thousands of shady voter registrations
on its roles, according to a review by election integrity
watchdog the Public Interest Legal Foundation. And we know that
(01:26):
Pennsylvania is not alone. Take us through some pretty extensive
reviews that the folks have done on the voter roles
in several states.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Now, yeah, we've been looking at voter rolls particularly in
states having elections this year, like Pennsylvania, and looking for errors,
and boy are they easy to find, or at least
it seems so, all sorts of problems. People registered in
multiple states, people registered multiple times within Pennsylvania, Maine has
(02:01):
got problems, are very similar, but all over the tri
state area, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, you have duplication
of registrations, people who are getting registered in both of
these states and multiple states, people who are getting registered
in multiple times within states. It's a real problem, particularly
(02:21):
when you move to mail voting and you don't have
to show up and vote.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, it's very concerning because the clock is sticking here.
I mean, we're going to be at the midterms before
you know it. I mean, really, let's face it, the
campaigning for the twenty twenty six midterms has already started.
How much is this going to play a part and
be a problem in the upcoming critical midterm elections.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Well, I worry most about Pennsylvania because you have Supreme
Court judicial retention elections, which ironically, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
is regularly getting involved in election law disputes. Right, So
here's a wild situation where these members of the court
(03:10):
might survive an election in an election that has problems
that they maybe had something to do with because they've
been making bad decisions about election law. It's a circle. Yeah,
so it's sort of ironic circle. In Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, Pennsylvania, you found what nearly twenty thousand duplicate registrations.
All kinds of problems there. But what's the number breakdown
in this important battleground state.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Well so, remember in Pennsylvania, we've got a variety of issues,
not the least of which, by the way, is non
citizens got on the rolls for twenty years because of
a pen dot glitch, pend dot glitch. They were actually
registering non citizens, you know, without they would be told no,
(03:59):
I'm not as in Pennsylvania's response was welcome to the
voter rolls, right, it was. It was exactly the opposite
of what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
But of course, but no, no, wait, well wait a minute, Christian,
we have been told by the left in this country,
by the Democratic Party, and by you know, integrity watchdogs,
at least they think they're dealing with election integrity. We've
(04:30):
been told for years that non citizens don't show up
on the voter rolls. It's very rare.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, well they should read all of our reports of
the Public Interest Legal Foundation, where we actually name them.
We have Pennsylvania particularly bad where people were getting registered.
You know at pen Doot it was it was like
welcome to America, come and get a ballot. Look the
other problems. Nineteen thousand, four hundred and eighty nine. Nineteen thousand,
(04:57):
four hundred and eighty nine inner duplicates between Pennsylvania and
other states like Florida and New York are the are
the leaders. Florida had nine thousand duplicates with Pennsylvania. We
had three thousand, one hundred same address duplicates in Pennsylvania.
This is a big deal. In other words, you know
(05:19):
John Smith at one two three Main Street is getting
registered twice because like in one registration it's spelled Main
Maine and in another one it's spelled Mai n E Maine,
like the state, and that results in a duplicate registration.
There are three thousand, one hundred and seventy of those
(05:43):
in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Now those are often said to be well, there's just mistakes,
you know, clerical administrative mistakes. But how can they be
used to impact elections used nefariously, I should.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Say, yeah, I wish they I wish they were deliberate.
It would be to fix if this is a plot.
Mistakes are harder to fix because first of all, you
don't even notice them. You can't arrest anybody. It's not
a crime. You don't have discovery power. If there was
like a backroom conspiracy to do all this, I'd be happier.
(06:16):
But the mistakes are more lethal because they become part
of the system where you know, no one ever sees it.
I mean, I was in Pittsburgh investigating a matter up
there and we found one person registered to vote seven times, wow,
seven times, where Sean Slade was his name. It was
(06:37):
all because of mistakes. It wasn't a plot, and therefore
it just stayed under the radar because you know, it
wasn't a repeat of the same kind of mistake. You
didn't get warning signs about it because it was just organic.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Oh tell me this, then, can Shawn Slade vote multiple times,
maybe seven times, and affect the outcome of election of
an election and ever really be found out of.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Course, especially in a state that has easy male voting.
No thanks to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that when you
have easy male voting and you have bad voter roles,
it's a toxic combination. The worst of all is Nevada.
You should watch the public Intersleingcole Foundation video. Yes, where
we go to all the strip clubs and casinos. Well,
(07:25):
not so many strip clubs, more casinos, only one strip
club and I was at that one, but I didn't
go inside. And these people are getting male ballots and
then don't live there. So when you combine dirty voter
roles with auto mail voting, it's the worst combination.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I remember my dad talking about years ago saying that,
yes he did get a subscription to Playboy, but he
got it for the articles. Just for the record, I
can put that in there, but I have you know,
I have covered it. My colleagues, Sean Fleetwood and others,
our election integrity team, we have covered the stuff that
(08:04):
you folks at the Foundation have and uncovered in Nevada.
I mean, what a mess those voter rolls are. And again,
when you think about universal mail ballots, you know what
could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Right, It's one of the worst ideas, and it's all
born out of COVID. You know, you know, COVID's over with.
It's done. If you're walking around wearing a mask, it's
not doing any good. And if you get COVID, you're
barely going to notice it. So this whole idea that
we had to move our elections to mail was something
(08:41):
that we need to throw in the garbage. It's a
terrible idea.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, they're still doubling down on all of that, and
you know, we take a look at the numbers behind this.
You have some new information out of New York forty
nine thousand, nine hundred and thirty three nearly fifty thousand
New Yorks registrants are registered in at least one other state.
(09:04):
The largest overlaps, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation,
are with Florida almost twenty five thousand duplicate ballots between
the two states. North Carolina has another sixty two hundred.
New Jersey five thousand, seven hundred plus, and New Jersey
as a problem in itself. But my goodness, look at
(09:26):
just how dirty these voter rolls are. And what can
you do to compel the elections officials in states that
simply don't seem to care about dirty voter roles.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Well, that's a tough one because we've been litigating this
for a long time in federal courts, and the federal
courts have begun to limit the effectiveness of the National
Voter Registration Acts voter cleanup provision, in other words, the
part of the law that requires voter roles to be clean.
So it's discouraging. You know, you have a stay like
(10:04):
Maine with an ideologically hostile secretary stage Sheena Bellows, an
extremist leftist who you know hates hates politicians that are
Republican like Donald Trump, is consumed with Trump arrangement syndrome.
Tried to keep him off the ballot unsuccessfully, I might add,
(10:28):
and lose his court cases all the time about voter integrity,
about election law. When you have secretaries to stay like
Sheena Bellows, I can promise you keeping the roles clean
is not a top priority. They were more interested in
targeting conservatives for fines like they did the Public Interslegal Foundation,
(10:49):
than they are getting a dead person off the roles.
They probably have eb White still in the roles. He
he used to live in Maine, you know, the author
of Charlotte's Web. Sure you got to look to see
if he's still voting.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. I want to talk about Maine. Actually,
I want to talk about Maine and Colorado in particular.
Is it any surprise to you that the secretaries of
state in those two states fought so hard to keep
Donald Trump off the Republican ballot. But in Maine, you
(11:21):
folks were threatened. Didn't they write a law to stop
you from talking about this stuff like we're talking about
here right now.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, this is a great story and it shows you
the authoritarian tendencies of Sena Bellows and the progressive left.
They like to talk about authoritarianism. Let me share a
story about authoritarianism. So we asked for the voter roles
in Maine, and under the National Voter Registration Act, courts
of Hell, these are public records. So the federal court,
(11:56):
the district court in Maine agreed with us and said, yes,
these are public records. As soon as that happened, the
Democrat Party of Maine and certain progressive lat legislators quickly
passed a law that said, Okay, you get these roles,
but if you talk about what you find your subject
of punishment. If you talk about it, then you could
(12:18):
be fined for speaking about it to other people. Besides
Sheena Bellow's honest and goodness, that's what the law that
was passed said. We found out that it was enacted
after a bunch of emails flew around about our lawsuit
that okay, if they get the roles, let's keep them
from talking about it. These are actual emails we obtained, wow,
(12:39):
the Maine Democratic Party from certain legislators. So there's authoritarianism
for you. So let's fast forward. We appealed, or I'm sorry,
Maine appealed. It wasn't even PILF that appealed. Remember we
wanted at the district court level, the federal district court.
Maine wasn't happy with their loss. So Sheena Bello's, the
(13:02):
authoritarian Secretary of State in Maine, appealed to the First
Circuit Court of Appeals and said, hey, we get to
punish people for speaking about our voter roles, and nobody
should be getting our voter roles. That was their legal position.
You want to talk about authoritarianism, there you go. She
was trying to keep Trump off the ballot while she
(13:24):
herself was engaging in some of the most mischievous authoritarianism imaginable.
So the First Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Pilf
and Shena Bello's lost, and the Court of Appeals said,
you can't punish people for speaking about the voter rolls.
That's exactly what Congres intended was to have people like
(13:47):
Public Interseinggal Foundation cleaning up the roles and talking about
what they find in public records. Sorry, authoritarian Sheena Bello's
that's not how America played. We have a right to
speak about government mistakes.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Remind me again who the real threats are to democracy?
Didn't we hear a lot about that in twenty twenty four.
Don't we continue to hear about that from the Democratic Party?
Aren't we hearing about that still? That Donald Trump and
Republicans are the threat to democracy while we find out
through newly to classified documents who the real threat to
(14:27):
democracy was and remains in this country? Well, that is
it's curious to me. So does Pilf have any intention
and he plans to file a lawsuit at the federal
level because what the State of Maine has done it
has to be considered a civil rights violation on many accounts.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Well, the courts took up to the law in our case.
I mean we actually did. We found a part of
our lawsuit in Maine was to strike down this infringement
on our civil rights, and the court, you know, both
the federal court, the district court, and the appellate Federal
court in Boston struck it down. So we won. So
we already fought that fight against Sheena Bellows and defeated
(15:13):
her authoritarian tendencies to chill speech to talk about her mistakes.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
I can understand that. I guess what I'm asking is,
do you plan to file a lawsuit and a separate
lawsuit against the state of Maine for what Sheena Bellows
did to suppress your speech and to go against the
law when it comes to voter roles.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, that's an interesting question. Whether a corporation can exert
a federal civil right. Remember, because it was PILF, it
was PILF in corporation on the charity. I might add,
if you ever want to donate, this is you know,
we rely on donations to keep this going. So it
was a nonprofit corporation, and whether a nonprofit corporation can
(16:00):
sort of civil rights claim in that context is one
I'll have to research.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Well. I understand that I think maybe in this case,
it's a matter of a citizen of Maine, a voter
in Maine, who certainly could be said to be aggrieved
by what the secretary of state in Maine was doing.
Now I to turn my attention to Colorado. You've worked
extensively in that state. There, you have another doozy of
(16:25):
a secretary of state there. What are you finding in Colorado?
Because those voter rolls long have been a mess.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah. We actually had a report I think last year
maybe two years ago about Jennat Griswold, the progressive leftist
authoritarian secretary state in Colorado inviting through direct mail. She
was actually sending out mailings to foreigners urging them to
get registered to vote. I mean, these are like documents.
(16:56):
This is not some urban myth like. We got the
document and she was encouraging foreigners to get on the
voter rolls. And so, you know, you just shake your
head and you think, how badly do progressive screw things up?
Pretty badly?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yeah, no doubt about it. And again here's another secretary
of state. Colorado was the centerpiece of the case before
the US Supreme Court, where you have nine Supreme Court
justices including the most left of the less Supreme Court
justices scolding Colorado, scolding Maine ultimately for their attempts to
(17:36):
disenfranchise millions of voters, and that at the end of
the day, isn't that what this is all about, with
these dirty voter roles, Because you know, you and I
were talking recently about this on a radio station in Iowa,
and we talked about, you know, ineligible voters being on
(17:56):
the voter rolls, and Iowa does a pretty good job
at that, but still a review before last year's election
found something in the neighborhood of three hundred non citizens
on the ballots, on the registrations, and we saw thirty
five non citizens voting in the twenty twenty four election
(18:18):
in Iowa alone. Of course, the associated press and the
usual suspects in the corporate media, this is very rare,
thirty five, and they like one million plus people voted
in Iowa, and you know all this sort of thing.
It's so rare. Every vote that is ineligible takes away
(18:40):
from every eligible voter. I mean, that's the bottom line,
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah. And it's worse than that, because we have a
database at the Public Intersligo Foundation of tied elections, and
it's over seven hundred tied elections where that single vote
of the ineligible alien would have made the difference in
the case. So you know, elections are close. They end
(19:05):
up in ties all the time. So I think thirty
four foreigners voting in Iowa is astonishingly bad. I think
the reporters at the New York Times and the other
predictable outlets who try to downplay it, I know where
they're coming from. I know what their job is. Their
job is to defend the status quo. They're all in
(19:25):
for having voter roles being dirty. They are ideologically aligned
with the left. They're supposed to minimize a bunch of
foreigners voting in American elections because that's their job that
the New York Times. I don't expect anything less from
them because they are ideological warriors. That's why they signed
(19:46):
up to be a reporter at those institutions.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
You are right, I mean, take a look at how
many elections. A lot of local elections, but it's also
been at the congressional national level in Iowa. Representative Marionette
Miller Meeks in twenty twenty, they get in twenty twenty four.
A handful of votes decided that election, and if you
(20:12):
think about those, you know the possibilities of non citizens
and other ineligible voters on that list very much could
have impacted that raise.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
I'm going to go out on a limb, and this
is where places like the soon to be defunct Media
Matters and the probably already defunked Right Wing Watch. Although
I haven't looked for years, you know, like to record interviews.
I'm going to go out on a limb. I will
bet that if we knew everything in Florida from the
(20:43):
two thousand election from the Bushey Gore, there were more
foreigners who voted in that election than the margin of
victory in that famous two thousand presidential election. I think
it was like two hundred and forty eight or something
like that, or thereabout to give or take a hundred.
I can look it up everyone with maybe five forty seven.
(21:06):
I will go out on a limb and say more
foreigners voted in that election than the margin of victory.
Now do I have evidence of that? Oh no, no, no,
I don't I get it. But based on my experience
researching this elsewhere over the last fifteen years, I'm going
to wager that that's the case.
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Speaker 1 (22:09):
We are talking about election integrity on this edition of
the Federalist Radio Hour. Our guest today is Jay Christian Adams,
President and legal counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
You testified before Congress on this very matter recently, and
you talked about the Motor Voter Act, the National Voter
(22:31):
Registration Act of nineteen ninety three, and that was a
big compromise piece of legislation. Republicans compromised by giving Bill
Clinton and the Democrats what they wanted registration at the
mvs across the country. But in order to do that,
(22:51):
the compromise was we would have clean voter rules. Thirty
plus years later, we don't have clean voter rules obviously.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, And a lot of that is because courts. Namely,
i'll name the courts the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals,
which is the federal Appeals court over Florida, Georgia, and Alabama,
and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the
Federal Appeals Court roughly over Michigan, Ohio. I believe Tennessee
(23:23):
and maybe Kentucky. I'm a little off there, but I
think I got it right. They both ruled that the
motor voter law you cite really only requires states to try.
They don't require states to succeed in getting dead people
off the rolls. The proof is not in the pudding.
(23:43):
The states only have to make an effort. They get
a gold star for effort, they get a participation trophy.
They don't have to actually produce results. And that is
not what Congress intended in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
What is the language in particular, yea there is in
federal courts should certainly understand the intention and the documents
and the testimony surrounding it that said, what is the
specific language and how have these courts used the language
to come to these kinds of interpretations.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Well, the specific language, and this is a pop quiz
I think I'm going to get it right, is that
states must have a program that makes a quote well
quote makes a reasonable effort to remove the dead and
the list of ineligible people from the voter roles reasonable
(24:39):
effort to remove. That's the key language and motor voter
and these courts, I think wildly incorrectly set a reasonable
effort to remove. Only looked at the word effort and
not reasonable or remove in the text of the statute.
It's not just like do your you know, make an effort.
It's not even say do your best. It's like, just
(25:01):
do something and you win. That's kind of the position
of the State of Michigan that hey, we did something,
go away, public interor single foundation. You can't sue us
because we did something. And our legal position was you
need to actually be effective, and that's something you do.
And there's the difference between the two legal positions.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So the position is, well, we gave it the old
college try, so we all good, right now?
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Hey, take what you said and remove old college try
old college. We gave it a try. It doesn't even
have to be like an old college try.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Okay, Yeah, well's that's what I'm gonna ask. I mean,
the numbers tell you the story is New York with
fifty thousand registrants registered in at least one other state,
you know is Pennsylvania nineteen thousand plus nearly twenty thousand.
Are they giving this a you know, reasonable effort to remove?
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Like there's actually a verb there that is a requirement.
It's not you know, to ponder or to think about removing.
It actually says to remove.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
So that's the thing. Are you finding any evidence that
they're trying. I think about, you know, covered particularly the
battleground states Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan. I think about
how many years it takes and court battles, quite frankly
in a lot of these states to get them to
(26:37):
do what they're supposed to do and remove anybody that
clearly is ineligible on that list.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Here's probably the most important thing I could tell your listeners.
It is too easy in this space to think that
there's some kind of plot or conspiracy. It's too easy
to think that the system is like really and I
wish it were. I wish it was rigged. I wish
there was a group of five people in a smoky
(27:06):
room responsible, because we could go in and bust up
the place. But it's more dangerous than that because these
people at state officials, you know, at state election offices,
actually don't really think they're doing anything wrong. They're not
part of a conspiracy. In their mind. They've got systems
in place and well established procedures, and like all the
(27:29):
bureau speak to defend their ineffectiveness, they have what, like
Hannah Ardent, who wrote a lot about detlitarianism, called the
banality of evil. I mean, I'm not saying they're evil.
What I'm saying is evil people in history don't think
they're evil. Right. The guy at the Gestapo just thinks
(27:51):
he's doing his job. And again I'm not comparing state
election OFFICIALSPO. I'm trying to be here. I'm talking about
a philosophical concept that burocrats are more dangerous because they
don't think they're doing anything wrong. I wish they thought
they were doing something wrong, and we're shamed and trying
to hide their guilt. They don't they really think that
(28:15):
their failure to clean the voter roles in our version
of failure to clean the voter roles, they think they're
trying hard, and that is a more dangerous situation than
a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Well, first and foremost, I mean, it's like the corporate media.
You have to have shame to be shameless, I suppose,
or to feel shame. But so many who are pitching
these ideas they don't want to hear any opposition to this.
You've come across that on many, many occasions. And if
you want a real, true style rigging of elections, you
(28:50):
just need to head over to the Democratic Party nominating process.
You'll find you'll find real rigging, as we found out
through wiki leaks and other sources over the years, super delegates,
super delegates and all kinds of DNC emails showing that
Bernie Sanders has a case. If Bernie Sanders wants to
(29:11):
talk about rigged elections, he certainly can through his own party.
But let's look at the battleground states, you know, in particular,
because let's face it, they have been deciding over the
last several years a handful of states and siding over
the last several years in this country, who is President
(29:33):
of the United States, who controls Congress. So we look
at Wisconsin, we look at Pennsylvania, We look at Michigan,
and Nevada and Arizona. Some of these states are not
becoming that much battleground anywhere. They're turning really quite red.
But you have the principal battleground states, the old Blue Wall.
What's going on. You talked about Pennsylvania, but what about
(29:54):
Wisconsin and Michigan.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Well, Michigan's a wreck. I got to tell you. There
is a report that we published called Serve and Observe.
It's got a car on the cover if you want
to read it. And first of all, one of the
things happening in Michigan on election Day that we observed
and documented, there's even photographs, were leftist groups inside the polls.
(30:22):
Like I was in the polls too, so it was
our team. But these leftist groups are inside the polls
essentially pretending to be election officials. They were acting as
election officials, directing traffic, giving instructions to voters, and engaging
in quasi governmental functions. And they all do it under
(30:45):
the name of election protection. But they're infiltrating the polls.
It is a phenomena that is growing and is not
being addressed. It is not being countered, not even being
documented hardly. And I got to tell you it's a
big deal, and it's not something that I think the
(31:08):
conservative movement has a good handle on.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
That's troubling, to say the least. So how much of
that is going to impact Do you think the twenty
twenty six elections play into this? Because what we saw
obviously in twenty twenty all kinds of shenanigans, not the
least of which the nonprofits who were involved that received
bucketfuls of money from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. And
(31:36):
we saw operatives Democratic Party operatives entrenched in local election
offices in battleground states. We're going to see that kind
of thing again, not maybe with Zuckbucks, but with operatives
doing exactly what you've been reporting on.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Well, of course, I mean, that's a given that that
election offices are being high jacked by progressive ideological warriors.
That's a given. What I'm noticing I saw this when
I was a DOJ too, is in the voting section
when I worked at the Justice Department. What I'm seeing
as a cultural blind spot where the left has figured
(32:18):
out how to take advantage of cultural tailwinds to influence
and alter the experience of voting. For example, in Detroit,
one of the things we write about in our Serve
and Observe report is the left wing funding of DJs. Now,
when I mean DJs, I'm talking like, you know, twelve
(32:40):
hundred watt amplifiers, speakers, turntable signs. There is nothing illegal
about this. Okay, let's be clear. But what they do
is they set up all over Detroit like beacons, audio
beacons to the neighborhood that something's happening, there's something to
(33:00):
go check out. And what it does is it draws
voters in and these beacons of sound and you know,
you guys can guess what music is being blasted is
drawing in people out of the neighborhoods to get into
the polls. It's called DJs to the polls or some
movement like that. I guarantee it's left wing philanthropy. It
(33:20):
is behind it. It's too expensive to be organic. It's repetitive,
meaning it's being replicated, voting site after voting, site after voting,
site after voting site with the exact same branding. So
it's clearly a well designed cultural effort. In other words,
it's relying on culture, not on the ideas or arguments
(33:43):
or whatever to increase the vote. And I think it's genius.
And trust me, it's not illegal. You're allowed to do this.
But I think we have a cultural blind spot in
understanding ways that the left alters the election process.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Absolutely right, there's nothing illegal about it. And more power
to organizations that are clearly working for the Democratic Party
to bring voters out in legal ways. But are they
bringing out ineligible voters? That's where it becomes the problem.
You can have all the DJs doing what they want
and there's again nothing illegal about that, But when the
(34:23):
operative is when the nonprofit leftist organizations are saying, well,
we don't care. More so if the elections office is,
they're saying no, yeah, come on in and vote, it
doesn't matter what we have in the registrations on you.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Well, don't forget some of these states that are using
these tools that I just described are same day registration states, right, Yeah,
like I think Michigan is. And so if you're blasting
you know, I don't even want to start to try
to name the bans. You know, if it was forty
(34:57):
years ago to be run DMC. Yeah, which, by the way,
I like to play as a DJ myself. That's a
whole nother story.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Sure, we know it's not thirty for now. We know
it's not thirty eight special.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Right, it's not Leonard Skinnard.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
I don't think that. Yeah, fog, there's no fog hat
being played in the Detroit circles. Yes.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
So if you're in the same day registration space or
state and you're drawing thirty forty fifty people, you know,
some of whom are probably had a wonderful morning getting high,
and you know, apparently in Michigan there's nothing wrong with that,
and you're drawing them out to go see what's going
on in the neighborhood. And you've got a same day
(35:39):
registration state. Ooh, genius. You bring him in with sound
and you get him inside the polls.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Wisconsin has done it several times, or at least leftist
scripts in Wisconsin to DJ stuff all of that prizes
and giveaways, and some of those folks have been caught electioneering.
They have been caught breaking the law because obviously you
can't give anything over a nominal level in election law
(36:07):
to get people in to vote. But you know, we've
seen thousand dollars prizes and gift cards and all of
this sort of nonsense. So those are the sort of
tactics you have to be prepared for.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
When you testified before Congress, you were talking about the
Motor Voter Act of nineteen ninety three and the language.
We've talked about that and how federal courts are interpreting it.
Is it time for Congress? Can Is there the will
in Congress to make it absolutely clear? It should already
(36:40):
be absolutely clear, but there is there is this an
opportunity for Congress to make sure that the voter roll
cleanup language is cleaned up.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yes. In fact, I am quite confident that the right
members of Congress, and the right committees and the right
positions of authority are looking at this and reversing the
six Circuit Court of Appeals and reversing the Eleventh Circuit
Court of Appeals and putting into some standards though to
(37:15):
require Michigan Secretary of State Joscelyn Benson to actually clean
up her voter roles, I think that is they laughed
at her by the way. Joscelyn Benson testified to them
a couple months ago and said, there's no problem that
the Pills lost that case. Well, they lost the case
on standing and lost it on a technical issue, but
(37:39):
didn't lose it on the facts. You still have a
whole bunch of tens of thousands of dead people on
your voter rolls. Nothing about our factual allegations were wrong.
Maybe you're not ashamed of that, Secretary Benson, but you
should be so. I think Congress may well be fixing this.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Is it any one to you that we have so
many Democrats in Congress, virtually all of them that have
repeatedly voted against the Save Act making sure that and
holding accountable those who allow non citizens to be on
the voter rolls.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Well, look, I've been dealing with this crowd for a
long time on alien voting. If they'd like to denounce
you and smear you if you say that there's any
aliens on the roles, because that's who they are. They
like to denounce and smear. That's rhetorical tactic number one
before they actually get into the merits of something. It's
always to announced and smear the messenger. So No, nothing
(38:40):
surprises me when it relates annances in't voting from the
left because they spend so much time denying it exists,
right Like, you know, why trust your lion eyes? Why
trust the records we published at Stealing the Vote? A
report you can get at pill if if you google
Stealing the Vote Public Intersligo Foundation. You know why trust
(39:03):
the letters from aliens saying please take me off the
role I'm an alien in Pennsylvania, which we publish over
and over in that report. You know, why should you
believe that when you got the DNC telling you this
is a fake issue.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Final question for you? Are it sounds like it? And
based on the numbers? I think I know the answer
to this. It should be how concerned are you about
the integrity election? Integrity flaws in the system that we've
talked about heading into twenty twenty six and twenty eight.
(39:37):
What needs to be accomplished before long before those elections.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Well, I'm a lot less concerned about the next two
federal elections than I was about twenty twenty and twenty
twenty two. Things have gotten better on a lot of fronts.
What needs to change? The dirty voter roles in mail
ballot combined is a disaster. We will not be lucky
(40:03):
all the time like we were in twenty twenty four
about places like Nevada. I mean, talk to Adam Laxhall.
Adam Laxhall almost certainly lost a US Senate seed because
of the garbage going on in Nevada in twenty I
think twenty twenty two. You know, he lost a governor's
race for sure because of the garbage going on with
(40:28):
in Nevada, or at least certainly the Senate seat because
they had mail voting by then. So I'm very worried
that states like Nevada with intensely dirty voter rolls. I'm talking,
like I said, like my college apartment level of filth.
You know, there hasn't seen a bit of soap in
(40:50):
this place for you know months. I'm worried about places
like that.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Yeah, I am too, And believe me, I've been down
that road before. Ask the student attendance at the University
of Wisconsin, Milwaukee about my dorm room. I think they
still have then put up a museum to that museum
of atrocities.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
You know, I have to tell you, like the old
match game, Jean Rayburn, you say my apartment in wester
Virginia University was so filthy, and everybody goes, how filthy
was it? Yeah, I assure it was so filthy that
when someone flushed the toilet upstairs, it didn't just go
down a pipe, It flowed into the neighbor's kitchen downstairs.
(41:36):
Oh boy, that's how horrible it was. That's Nevada's voter rolls.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Okay, Well, I think that sums it all up for us,
in very vivid detail. And that's why many, among the
many reasons I always enjoy conversing with you, particularly on
these most important topics relating to representative democracy. Voter integrity.
Election integrity is foundational for everything we're talking about in
(42:06):
this republic. Thanks to my guest today, Jay Christian Adams,
President and legal counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation,
you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittles, senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
(00:42):
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Jay Christian Adams, President and legal
counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Much to talk
about in the world of election integrity. Thank you so
much for being here today with us on this of
the Federalist Radio Hour. Thanks for having me. You bet
(01:05):
from Alaska to Maine, state voter rules are riddled with errors.
Battleground Pennsylvania appears to have thousands of shady voter registrations
on its roles, according to a review by election integrity
watchdog the Public Interest Legal Foundation. And we know that
(01:26):
Pennsylvania is not alone. Take us through some pretty extensive
reviews that the folks have done on the voter roles
in several states.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Now, yeah, we've been looking at voter rolls particularly in
states having elections this year, like Pennsylvania, and looking for errors,
and boy are they easy to find, or at least
it seems so, all sorts of problems. People registered in
multiple states, people registered multiple times within Pennsylvania, Maine has
(02:01):
got problems, are very similar, but all over the tri
state area, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, you have duplication
of registrations, people who are getting registered in both of
these states and multiple states, people who are getting registered
in multiple times within states. It's a real problem, particularly
(02:21):
when you move to mail voting and you don't have
to show up and vote.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, it's very concerning because the clock is sticking here.
I mean, we're going to be at the midterms before
you know it. I mean, really, let's face it, the
campaigning for the twenty twenty six midterms has already started.
How much is this going to play a part and
be a problem in the upcoming critical midterm elections.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Well, I worry most about Pennsylvania because you have Supreme
Court judicial retention elections, which ironically, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
is regularly getting involved in election law disputes. Right, So
here's a wild situation where these members of the court
(03:10):
might survive an election in an election that has problems
that they maybe had something to do with because they've
been making bad decisions about election law. It's a circle. Yeah,
so it's sort of ironic circle. In Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Yeah, Pennsylvania, you found what nearly twenty thousand duplicate registrations.
All kinds of problems there. But what's the number breakdown
in this important battleground state.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Well so, remember in Pennsylvania, we've got a variety of issues,
not the least of which, by the way, is non
citizens got on the rolls for twenty years because of
a pen dot glitch, pend dot glitch. They were actually
registering non citizens, you know, without they would be told no,
(03:59):
I'm not as in Pennsylvania's response was welcome to the
voter rolls, right, it was. It was exactly the opposite
of what it's supposed to be.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
But of course, but no, no, wait, well wait a minute, Christian,
we have been told by the left in this country,
by the Democratic Party, and by you know, integrity watchdogs,
at least they think they're dealing with election integrity. We've
(04:30):
been told for years that non citizens don't show up
on the voter rolls. It's very rare.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, well they should read all of our reports of
the Public Interest Legal Foundation, where we actually name them.
We have Pennsylvania particularly bad where people were getting registered.
You know at pen Doot it was it was like
welcome to America, come and get a ballot. Look the
other problems. Nineteen thousand, four hundred and eighty nine. Nineteen thousand,
(04:57):
four hundred and eighty nine inner duplicates between Pennsylvania and
other states like Florida and New York are the are
the leaders. Florida had nine thousand duplicates with Pennsylvania. We
had three thousand, one hundred same address duplicates in Pennsylvania.
This is a big deal. In other words, you know
(05:19):
John Smith at one two three Main Street is getting
registered twice because like in one registration it's spelled Main
Maine and in another one it's spelled Mai n E Maine,
like the state, and that results in a duplicate registration.
There are three thousand, one hundred and seventy of those
(05:43):
in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Now those are often said to be well, there's just mistakes,
you know, clerical administrative mistakes. But how can they be
used to impact elections used nefariously, I should.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Say, yeah, I wish they I wish they were deliberate.
It would be to fix if this is a plot.
Mistakes are harder to fix because first of all, you
don't even notice them. You can't arrest anybody. It's not
a crime. You don't have discovery power. If there was
like a backroom conspiracy to do all this, I'd be happier.
(06:16):
But the mistakes are more lethal because they become part
of the system where you know, no one ever sees it.
I mean, I was in Pittsburgh investigating a matter up
there and we found one person registered to vote seven times, wow,
seven times, where Sean Slade was his name. It was
(06:37):
all because of mistakes. It wasn't a plot, and therefore
it just stayed under the radar because you know, it
wasn't a repeat of the same kind of mistake. You
didn't get warning signs about it because it was just organic.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Oh tell me this, then, can Shawn Slade vote multiple times,
maybe seven times, and affect the outcome of election of
an election and ever really be found out of.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Course, especially in a state that has easy male voting.
No thanks to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that when you
have easy male voting and you have bad voter roles,
it's a toxic combination. The worst of all is Nevada.
You should watch the public Intersleingcole Foundation video. Yes, where
we go to all the strip clubs and casinos. Well,
(07:25):
not so many strip clubs, more casinos, only one strip
club and I was at that one, but I didn't
go inside. And these people are getting male ballots and
then don't live there. So when you combine dirty voter
roles with auto mail voting, it's the worst combination.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I remember my dad talking about years ago saying that,
yes he did get a subscription to Playboy, but he
got it for the articles. Just for the record, I
can put that in there, but I have you know,
I have covered it. My colleagues, Sean Fleetwood and others,
our election integrity team, we have covered the stuff that
(08:04):
you folks at the Foundation have and uncovered in Nevada.
I mean, what a mess those voter rolls are. And again,
when you think about universal mail ballots, you know what
could possibly go wrong?
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Right, It's one of the worst ideas, and it's all
born out of COVID. You know, you know, COVID's over with.
It's done. If you're walking around wearing a mask, it's
not doing any good. And if you get COVID, you're
barely going to notice it. So this whole idea that
we had to move our elections to mail was something
(08:41):
that we need to throw in the garbage. It's a
terrible idea.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, they're still doubling down on all of that, and
you know, we take a look at the numbers behind this.
You have some new information out of New York forty
nine thousand, nine hundred and thirty three nearly fifty thousand
New Yorks registrants are registered in at least one other state.
(09:04):
The largest overlaps, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation,
are with Florida almost twenty five thousand duplicate ballots between
the two states. North Carolina has another sixty two hundred.
New Jersey five thousand, seven hundred plus, and New Jersey
as a problem in itself. But my goodness, look at
(09:26):
just how dirty these voter rolls are. And what can
you do to compel the elections officials in states that
simply don't seem to care about dirty voter roles.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Well, that's a tough one because we've been litigating this
for a long time in federal courts, and the federal
courts have begun to limit the effectiveness of the National
Voter Registration Acts voter cleanup provision, in other words, the
part of the law that requires voter roles to be clean.
So it's discouraging. You know, you have a stay like
(10:04):
Maine with an ideologically hostile secretary stage Sheena Bellows, an
extremist leftist who you know hates hates politicians that are
Republican like Donald Trump, is consumed with Trump arrangement syndrome.
Tried to keep him off the ballot unsuccessfully, I might add,
(10:28):
and lose his court cases all the time about voter integrity,
about election law. When you have secretaries to stay like
Sheena Bellows, I can promise you keeping the roles clean
is not a top priority. They were more interested in
targeting conservatives for fines like they did the Public Interslegal Foundation,
(10:49):
than they are getting a dead person off the roles.
They probably have eb White still in the roles. He
he used to live in Maine, you know, the author
of Charlotte's Web. Sure you got to look to see
if he's still voting.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. I want to talk about Maine. Actually,
I want to talk about Maine and Colorado in particular.
Is it any surprise to you that the secretaries of
state in those two states fought so hard to keep
Donald Trump off the Republican ballot. But in Maine, you
(11:21):
folks were threatened. Didn't they write a law to stop
you from talking about this stuff like we're talking about
here right now.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, this is a great story and it shows you
the authoritarian tendencies of Sena Bellows and the progressive left.
They like to talk about authoritarianism. Let me share a
story about authoritarianism. So we asked for the voter roles
in Maine, and under the National Voter Registration Act, courts
of Hell, these are public records. So the federal court,
(11:56):
the district court in Maine agreed with us and said, yes,
these are public records. As soon as that happened, the
Democrat Party of Maine and certain progressive lat legislators quickly
passed a law that said, Okay, you get these roles,
but if you talk about what you find your subject
of punishment. If you talk about it, then you could
(12:18):
be fined for speaking about it to other people. Besides
Sheena Bellow's honest and goodness, that's what the law that
was passed said. We found out that it was enacted
after a bunch of emails flew around about our lawsuit
that okay, if they get the roles, let's keep them
from talking about it. These are actual emails we obtained, wow,
(12:39):
the Maine Democratic Party from certain legislators. So there's authoritarianism
for you. So let's fast forward. We appealed, or I'm sorry,
Maine appealed. It wasn't even PILF that appealed. Remember we
wanted at the district court level, the federal district court.
Maine wasn't happy with their loss. So Sheena Bello's, the
(13:02):
authoritarian Secretary of State in Maine, appealed to the First
Circuit Court of Appeals and said, hey, we get to
punish people for speaking about our voter roles, and nobody
should be getting our voter roles. That was their legal position.
You want to talk about authoritarianism, there you go. She
was trying to keep Trump off the ballot while she
(13:24):
herself was engaging in some of the most mischievous authoritarianism imaginable.
So the First Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Pilf
and Shena Bello's lost, and the Court of Appeals said,
you can't punish people for speaking about the voter rolls.
That's exactly what Congres intended was to have people like
(13:47):
Public Interseinggal Foundation cleaning up the roles and talking about
what they find in public records. Sorry, authoritarian Sheena Bello's
that's not how America played. We have a right to
speak about government mistakes.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Remind me again who the real threats are to democracy?
Didn't we hear a lot about that in twenty twenty four.
Don't we continue to hear about that from the Democratic Party?
Aren't we hearing about that still? That Donald Trump and
Republicans are the threat to democracy while we find out
through newly to classified documents who the real threat to
(14:27):
democracy was and remains in this country? Well, that is
it's curious to me. So does Pilf have any intention
and he plans to file a lawsuit at the federal
level because what the State of Maine has done it
has to be considered a civil rights violation on many accounts.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Well, the courts took up to the law in our case.
I mean we actually did. We found a part of
our lawsuit in Maine was to strike down this infringement
on our civil rights, and the court, you know, both
the federal court, the district court, and the appellate Federal
court in Boston struck it down. So we won. So
we already fought that fight against Sheena Bellows and defeated
(15:13):
her authoritarian tendencies to chill speech to talk about her mistakes.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
I can understand that. I guess what I'm asking is,
do you plan to file a lawsuit and a separate
lawsuit against the state of Maine for what Sheena Bellows
did to suppress your speech and to go against the
law when it comes to voter roles.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yeah, that's an interesting question. Whether a corporation can exert
a federal civil right. Remember, because it was PILF, it
was PILF in corporation on the charity. I might add,
if you ever want to donate, this is you know,
we rely on donations to keep this going. So it
was a nonprofit corporation, and whether a nonprofit corporation can
(16:00):
sort of civil rights claim in that context is one
I'll have to research.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Well. I understand that I think maybe in this case,
it's a matter of a citizen of Maine, a voter
in Maine, who certainly could be said to be aggrieved
by what the secretary of state in Maine was doing.
Now I to turn my attention to Colorado. You've worked
extensively in that state. There, you have another doozy of
(16:25):
a secretary of state there. What are you finding in Colorado?
Because those voter rolls long have been a mess.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah. We actually had a report I think last year
maybe two years ago about Jennat Griswold, the progressive leftist
authoritarian secretary state in Colorado inviting through direct mail. She
was actually sending out mailings to foreigners urging them to
get registered to vote. I mean, these are like documents.
(16:56):
This is not some urban myth like. We got the
document and she was encouraging foreigners to get on the
voter rolls. And so, you know, you just shake your
head and you think, how badly do progressive screw things up?
Pretty badly?
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Yeah, no doubt about it. And again here's another secretary
of state. Colorado was the centerpiece of the case before
the US Supreme Court, where you have nine Supreme Court
justices including the most left of the less Supreme Court
justices scolding Colorado, scolding Maine ultimately for their attempts to
(17:36):
disenfranchise millions of voters, and that at the end of
the day, isn't that what this is all about, with
these dirty voter roles, Because you know, you and I
were talking recently about this on a radio station in Iowa,
and we talked about, you know, ineligible voters being on
(17:56):
the voter rolls, and Iowa does a pretty good job
at that, but still a review before last year's election
found something in the neighborhood of three hundred non citizens
on the ballots, on the registrations, and we saw thirty
five non citizens voting in the twenty twenty four election
(18:18):
in Iowa alone. Of course, the associated press and the
usual suspects in the corporate media, this is very rare,
thirty five, and they like one million plus people voted
in Iowa, and you know all this sort of thing.
It's so rare. Every vote that is ineligible takes away
(18:40):
from every eligible voter. I mean, that's the bottom line,
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
Yeah. And it's worse than that, because we have a
database at the Public Intersligo Foundation of tied elections, and
it's over seven hundred tied elections where that single vote
of the ineligible alien would have made the difference in
the case. So you know, elections are close. They end
(19:05):
up in ties all the time. So I think thirty
four foreigners voting in Iowa is astonishingly bad. I think
the reporters at the New York Times and the other
predictable outlets who try to downplay it, I know where
they're coming from. I know what their job is. Their
job is to defend the status quo. They're all in
(19:25):
for having voter roles being dirty. They are ideologically aligned
with the left. They're supposed to minimize a bunch of
foreigners voting in American elections because that's their job that
the New York Times. I don't expect anything less from
them because they are ideological warriors. That's why they signed
(19:46):
up to be a reporter at those institutions.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
You are right, I mean, take a look at how
many elections. A lot of local elections, but it's also
been at the congressional national level in Iowa. Representative Marionette
Miller Meeks in twenty twenty, they get in twenty twenty four.
A handful of votes decided that election, and if you
(20:12):
think about those, you know the possibilities of non citizens
and other ineligible voters on that list very much could
have impacted that raise.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
I'm going to go out on a limb, and this
is where places like the soon to be defunct Media
Matters and the probably already defunked Right Wing Watch. Although
I haven't looked for years, you know, like to record interviews.
I'm going to go out on a limb. I will
bet that if we knew everything in Florida from the
(20:43):
two thousand election from the Bushey Gore, there were more
foreigners who voted in that election than the margin of
victory in that famous two thousand presidential election. I think
it was like two hundred and forty eight or something
like that, or thereabout to give or take a hundred.
I can look it up everyone with maybe five forty seven.
(21:06):
I will go out on a limb and say more
foreigners voted in that election than the margin of victory.
Now do I have evidence of that? Oh no, no, no,
I don't I get it. But based on my experience
researching this elsewhere over the last fifteen years, I'm going
to wager that that's the case.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
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Speaker 1 (22:09):
We are talking about election integrity on this edition of
the Federalist Radio Hour. Our guest today is Jay Christian Adams,
President and legal counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
You testified before Congress on this very matter recently, and
you talked about the Motor Voter Act, the National Voter
(22:31):
Registration Act of nineteen ninety three, and that was a
big compromise piece of legislation. Republicans compromised by giving Bill
Clinton and the Democrats what they wanted registration at the
mvs across the country. But in order to do that,
(22:51):
the compromise was we would have clean voter rules. Thirty
plus years later, we don't have clean voter rules obviously.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, And a lot of that is because courts. Namely,
i'll name the courts the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals,
which is the federal Appeals court over Florida, Georgia, and Alabama,
and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the
Federal Appeals Court roughly over Michigan, Ohio. I believe Tennessee
(23:23):
and maybe Kentucky. I'm a little off there, but I
think I got it right. They both ruled that the
motor voter law you cite really only requires states to try.
They don't require states to succeed in getting dead people
off the rolls. The proof is not in the pudding.
(23:43):
The states only have to make an effort. They get
a gold star for effort, they get a participation trophy.
They don't have to actually produce results. And that is
not what Congress intended in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
What is the language in particular, yea there is in
federal courts should certainly understand the intention and the documents
and the testimony surrounding it that said, what is the
specific language and how have these courts used the language
to come to these kinds of interpretations.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Well, the specific language, and this is a pop quiz
I think I'm going to get it right, is that
states must have a program that makes a quote well
quote makes a reasonable effort to remove the dead and
the list of ineligible people from the voter roles reasonable
(24:39):
effort to remove. That's the key language and motor voter
and these courts, I think wildly incorrectly set a reasonable
effort to remove. Only looked at the word effort and
not reasonable or remove in the text of the statute.
It's not just like do your you know, make an effort.
It's not even say do your best. It's like, just
(25:01):
do something and you win. That's kind of the position
of the State of Michigan that hey, we did something,
go away, public interor single foundation. You can't sue us
because we did something. And our legal position was you
need to actually be effective, and that's something you do.
And there's the difference between the two legal positions.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So the position is, well, we gave it the old
college try, so we all good, right now?
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Hey, take what you said and remove old college try
old college. We gave it a try. It doesn't even
have to be like an old college try.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Okay, Yeah, well's that's what I'm gonna ask. I mean,
the numbers tell you the story is New York with
fifty thousand registrants registered in at least one other state,
you know is Pennsylvania nineteen thousand plus nearly twenty thousand.
Are they giving this a you know, reasonable effort to remove?
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Like there's actually a verb there that is a requirement.
It's not you know, to ponder or to think about removing.
It actually says to remove.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
So that's the thing. Are you finding any evidence that
they're trying. I think about, you know, covered particularly the
battleground states Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan. I think about
how many years it takes and court battles, quite frankly
in a lot of these states to get them to
(26:37):
do what they're supposed to do and remove anybody that
clearly is ineligible on that list.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
Here's probably the most important thing I could tell your listeners.
It is too easy in this space to think that
there's some kind of plot or conspiracy. It's too easy
to think that the system is like really and I
wish it were. I wish it was rigged. I wish
there was a group of five people in a smoky
(27:06):
room responsible, because we could go in and bust up
the place. But it's more dangerous than that because these
people at state officials, you know, at state election offices,
actually don't really think they're doing anything wrong. They're not
part of a conspiracy. In their mind. They've got systems
in place and well established procedures, and like all the
(27:29):
bureau speak to defend their ineffectiveness, they have what, like
Hannah Ardent, who wrote a lot about detlitarianism, called the
banality of evil. I mean, I'm not saying they're evil.
What I'm saying is evil people in history don't think
they're evil. Right. The guy at the Gestapo just thinks
(27:51):
he's doing his job. And again I'm not comparing state
election OFFICIALSPO. I'm trying to be here. I'm talking about
a philosophical concept that burocrats are more dangerous because they
don't think they're doing anything wrong. I wish they thought
they were doing something wrong, and we're shamed and trying
to hide their guilt. They don't they really think that
(28:15):
their failure to clean the voter roles in our version
of failure to clean the voter roles, they think they're
trying hard, and that is a more dangerous situation than
a conspiracy.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
Well, first and foremost, I mean, it's like the corporate media.
You have to have shame to be shameless, I suppose,
or to feel shame. But so many who are pitching
these ideas they don't want to hear any opposition to this.
You've come across that on many, many occasions. And if
you want a real, true style rigging of elections, you
(28:50):
just need to head over to the Democratic Party nominating process.
You'll find you'll find real rigging, as we found out
through wiki leaks and other sources over the years, super delegates,
super delegates and all kinds of DNC emails showing that
Bernie Sanders has a case. If Bernie Sanders wants to
(29:11):
talk about rigged elections, he certainly can through his own party.
But let's look at the battleground states, you know, in particular,
because let's face it, they have been deciding over the
last several years a handful of states and siding over
the last several years in this country, who is President
(29:33):
of the United States, who controls Congress. So we look
at Wisconsin, we look at Pennsylvania, We look at Michigan,
and Nevada and Arizona. Some of these states are not
becoming that much battleground anywhere. They're turning really quite red.
But you have the principal battleground states, the old Blue Wall.
What's going on. You talked about Pennsylvania, but what about
(29:54):
Wisconsin and Michigan.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Well, Michigan's a wreck. I got to tell you. There
is a report that we published called Serve and Observe.
It's got a car on the cover if you want
to read it. And first of all, one of the
things happening in Michigan on election Day that we observed
and documented, there's even photographs, were leftist groups inside the polls.
(30:22):
Like I was in the polls too, so it was
our team. But these leftist groups are inside the polls
essentially pretending to be election officials. They were acting as
election officials, directing traffic, giving instructions to voters, and engaging
in quasi governmental functions. And they all do it under
(30:45):
the name of election protection. But they're infiltrating the polls.
It is a phenomena that is growing and is not
being addressed. It is not being countered, not even being
documented hardly. And I got to tell you it's a
big deal, and it's not something that I think the
(31:08):
conservative movement has a good handle on.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
That's troubling, to say the least. So how much of
that is going to impact Do you think the twenty
twenty six elections play into this? Because what we saw
obviously in twenty twenty all kinds of shenanigans, not the
least of which the nonprofits who were involved that received
bucketfuls of money from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. And
(31:36):
we saw operatives Democratic Party operatives entrenched in local election
offices in battleground states. We're going to see that kind
of thing again, not maybe with Zuckbucks, but with operatives
doing exactly what you've been reporting on.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Well, of course, I mean, that's a given that that
election offices are being high jacked by progressive ideological warriors.
That's a given. What I'm noticing I saw this when
I was a DOJ too, is in the voting section
when I worked at the Justice Department. What I'm seeing
as a cultural blind spot where the left has figured
(32:18):
out how to take advantage of cultural tailwinds to influence
and alter the experience of voting. For example, in Detroit,
one of the things we write about in our Serve
and Observe report is the left wing funding of DJs. Now,
when I mean DJs, I'm talking like, you know, twelve
(32:40):
hundred watt amplifiers, speakers, turntable signs. There is nothing illegal
about this. Okay, let's be clear. But what they do
is they set up all over Detroit like beacons, audio
beacons to the neighborhood that something's happening, there's something to
(33:00):
go check out. And what it does is it draws
voters in and these beacons of sound and you know,
you guys can guess what music is being blasted is
drawing in people out of the neighborhoods to get into
the polls. It's called DJs to the polls or some
movement like that. I guarantee it's left wing philanthropy. It
(33:20):
is behind it. It's too expensive to be organic. It's repetitive,
meaning it's being replicated, voting site after voting, site after voting,
site after voting site with the exact same branding. So
it's clearly a well designed cultural effort. In other words,
it's relying on culture, not on the ideas or arguments
(33:43):
or whatever to increase the vote. And I think it's genius.
And trust me, it's not illegal. You're allowed to do this.
But I think we have a cultural blind spot in
understanding ways that the left alters the election process.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Absolutely right, there's nothing illegal about it. And more power
to organizations that are clearly working for the Democratic Party
to bring voters out in legal ways. But are they
bringing out ineligible voters? That's where it becomes the problem.
You can have all the DJs doing what they want
and there's again nothing illegal about that, But when the
(34:23):
operative is when the nonprofit leftist organizations are saying, well,
we don't care. More so if the elections office is,
they're saying no, yeah, come on in and vote, it
doesn't matter what we have in the registrations on you.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Well, don't forget some of these states that are using
these tools that I just described are same day registration states, right, Yeah,
like I think Michigan is. And so if you're blasting
you know, I don't even want to start to try
to name the bans. You know, if it was forty
(34:57):
years ago to be run DMC. Yeah, which, by the way,
I like to play as a DJ myself. That's a
whole nother story.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
Sure, we know it's not thirty for now. We know
it's not thirty eight special.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Right, it's not Leonard Skinnard.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
I don't think that. Yeah, fog, there's no fog hat
being played in the Detroit circles. Yes.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
So if you're in the same day registration space or
state and you're drawing thirty forty fifty people, you know,
some of whom are probably had a wonderful morning getting high,
and you know, apparently in Michigan there's nothing wrong with that,
and you're drawing them out to go see what's going
on in the neighborhood. And you've got a same day
(35:39):
registration state. Ooh, genius. You bring him in with sound
and you get him inside the polls.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Wisconsin has done it several times, or at least leftist
scripts in Wisconsin to DJ stuff all of that prizes
and giveaways, and some of those folks have been caught electioneering.
They have been caught breaking the law because obviously you
can't give anything over a nominal level in election law
(36:07):
to get people in to vote. But you know, we've
seen thousand dollars prizes and gift cards and all of
this sort of nonsense. So those are the sort of
tactics you have to be prepared for.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
When you testified before Congress, you were talking about the
Motor Voter Act of nineteen ninety three and the language.
We've talked about that and how federal courts are interpreting it.
Is it time for Congress? Can Is there the will
in Congress to make it absolutely clear? It should already
(36:40):
be absolutely clear, but there is there is this an
opportunity for Congress to make sure that the voter roll
cleanup language is cleaned up.
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Yes. In fact, I am quite confident that the right
members of Congress, and the right committees and the right
positions of authority are looking at this and reversing the
six Circuit Court of Appeals and reversing the Eleventh Circuit
Court of Appeals and putting into some standards though to
(37:15):
require Michigan Secretary of State Joscelyn Benson to actually clean
up her voter roles, I think that is they laughed
at her by the way. Joscelyn Benson testified to them
a couple months ago and said, there's no problem that
the Pills lost that case. Well, they lost the case
on standing and lost it on a technical issue, but
(37:39):
didn't lose it on the facts. You still have a
whole bunch of tens of thousands of dead people on
your voter rolls. Nothing about our factual allegations were wrong.
Maybe you're not ashamed of that, Secretary Benson, but you
should be so. I think Congress may well be fixing this.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Is it any one to you that we have so
many Democrats in Congress, virtually all of them that have
repeatedly voted against the Save Act making sure that and
holding accountable those who allow non citizens to be on
the voter rolls.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Well, look, I've been dealing with this crowd for a
long time on alien voting. If they'd like to denounce
you and smear you if you say that there's any
aliens on the roles, because that's who they are. They
like to denounce and smear. That's rhetorical tactic number one
before they actually get into the merits of something. It's
always to announced and smear the messenger. So No, nothing
(38:40):
surprises me when it relates annances in't voting from the
left because they spend so much time denying it exists,
right Like, you know, why trust your lion eyes? Why
trust the records we published at Stealing the Vote? A
report you can get at pill if if you google
Stealing the Vote Public Intersligo Foundation. You know why trust
(39:03):
the letters from aliens saying please take me off the
role I'm an alien in Pennsylvania, which we publish over
and over in that report. You know, why should you
believe that when you got the DNC telling you this
is a fake issue.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Final question for you? Are it sounds like it? And
based on the numbers? I think I know the answer
to this. It should be how concerned are you about
the integrity election? Integrity flaws in the system that we've
talked about heading into twenty twenty six and twenty eight.
(39:37):
What needs to be accomplished before long before those elections.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Well, I'm a lot less concerned about the next two
federal elections than I was about twenty twenty and twenty
twenty two. Things have gotten better on a lot of fronts.
What needs to change? The dirty voter roles in mail
ballot combined is a disaster. We will not be lucky
(40:03):
all the time like we were in twenty twenty four
about places like Nevada. I mean, talk to Adam Laxhall.
Adam Laxhall almost certainly lost a US Senate seed because
of the garbage going on in Nevada in twenty I
think twenty twenty two. You know, he lost a governor's
race for sure because of the garbage going on with
(40:28):
in Nevada, or at least certainly the Senate seat because
they had mail voting by then. So I'm very worried
that states like Nevada with intensely dirty voter rolls. I'm talking,
like I said, like my college apartment level of filth.
You know, there hasn't seen a bit of soap in
(40:50):
this place for you know months. I'm worried about places
like that.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Yeah, I am too, And believe me, I've been down
that road before. Ask the student attendance at the University
of Wisconsin, Milwaukee about my dorm room. I think they
still have then put up a museum to that museum
of atrocities.
Speaker 2 (41:13):
You know, I have to tell you, like the old
match game, Jean Rayburn, you say my apartment in wester
Virginia University was so filthy, and everybody goes, how filthy
was it? Yeah, I assure it was so filthy that
when someone flushed the toilet upstairs, it didn't just go
down a pipe, It flowed into the neighbor's kitchen downstairs.
(41:36):
Oh boy, that's how horrible it was. That's Nevada's voter rolls.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Okay, Well, I think that sums it all up for us,
in very vivid detail. And that's why many, among the
many reasons I always enjoy conversing with you, particularly on
these most important topics relating to representative democracy. Voter integrity.
Election integrity is foundational for everything we're talking about in
(42:06):
this republic. Thanks to my guest today, Jay Christian Adams,
President and legal counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation,
you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray
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