30 Issues: When and Where Does Election Fraud Actually Exist

Brian Lehrer: It's Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and happy election day. Yes, I know it's only October 17th, but in some places, early voting in the midterm elections has already begun. One big example, Georgia, where that controversial voting law, seen by many as a voter suppression law, is now in effect and where control of the US Senate may be decided in the Raphael Warnock-Herschel Walker race. Early voting begins today in Georgia. If you're listening in Georgia today or if you just care about Georgia, a lot of hands are going up now, happy election day to you.

This is a good day to begin a very special stretch of our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series. Some of you will remember that during the summer, we did a week-long call-in series for people of different generations. We got calls from a 15-year-old all the way up to a 100-year-old on the different days, with you telling us what the most important midterm elections issues are to you. Overwhelmingly, across all age groups, the number one issue you cited was democracy in peril. We decided to devote a full third of our 30 Issues election series this year to preserving our democracy, democracy in peril. Today, we begin that 10-episode stretch.

Now, obviously, the main reason so many of you cited democracy in peril is because of Donald Trump's big lie about the presidential election being stolen from him in 2020 and how that led to the January 6th insurrection, and to so many Republican candidates running this year, who would politicize vote counting and election certification among other things. We decided that we would begin this stretch with this question. When is the election fraud actually a problem and when is claiming it a fraud in itself? 30 Issues in 30 Days Issues 16, when is election fraud actually a problem, and when is claiming it a fraud in itself?

We ask because voter fraud does exist, for real, sometimes, though the number of election outcomes it changes in this country is vanishingly rare, but I've learned through covering the big lie that there are some really interesting and legitimate election security experts out there who gauge the potential for actual election fraud and try to advise officials and the public on how to prevent it. We will meet one of those people in this segment, William Adler from the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Before we bring him on, I thought I would replay a few clips from the January 6th Committee hearings. I've watched every minute of every hearing and I think that one of the things they've done really well that hasn't gotten that much attention afterwards because it wasn't very sensational, was to play clips of Trump appointees going into specific details about some of the main big lie conspiracy theories to explain why they were false. I'm going to play four examples of that to establish some things first about what voter fraud was not in the 2020 election.

You all probably know that Trump's Attorney General at the time, William Barr, called the stolen election claim BS. He used the whole word on tape for the January 6th Committee. That made headlines, but I was also really interested in how he debunked specific election fraud claims. For example, here's one that committee played from last week's presentation. They made the point that Barr debunked the claim and then Trump continued to use it anyway. We'll hear both, William Barr first.

William Barr: I went into this and would tell him how crazy some of these allegations were and how ridiculous some of them were. I'm talking about some of the things like more absentee votes were cast in Pennsylvania than they were absentee ballots requests. Stuff like that was just easy to blow up. There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are.

President Trump: There were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters. That's an easy one to figure and it's by the thousand.

Brian Lehrer: There's one example. More votes than voters in Pennsylvania, note. Here's another from Barr and then Trump using it in a way. This is about the voting machines manufactured by the company Dominion that the conspiracy theorists said were rigged for Biden. Barr first.

William Barr: I specifically raised the Dominion voting machines, which I found to be among the most disturbing allegations, disturbing in the sense that I saw absolutely zero bases for the allegations. I told them that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that and it was doing a great disservice to the country.

President Trump: We have a company that's very suspect. Its name is Dominion. With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this?

Brian Lehrer: Note. William Barr and Donald Trump. Now, not as well known as Barr, but very important at the time after the 2020 election was Trump's Assistant Attorney General, Richard Donahue is his name. Also a Trump appointee and trusted by William Barr. He was Barr's, Deputy Attorney General. Back in June, the committee played a recording of Donahue debunking specific election fraud claims from the big lie playbook, different ones than we just heard from William Barr, debunking. Here is Donahue, setting up first that he spoke to Trump about these things being false, then giving an example.

Richard Donahue: Then I talked a little bit about the Pennsylvania truck driver. This is another allegation that had come up. This claim was by a truck driver who believed, perhaps honestly, that he had transported an entire tractor-trailer truck full of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. This was, again, out there in the public and discussed. I essentially said, "Look, we looked at that allegation. We looked at both ends, both the people who load the truck and the people who unload the truck, and that allegation was not supported by the evidence."

Brian Lehrer: Here is one more of Richard Donahue describing that he debunked directly to Trump another election fraud falsehood.

Richard Donahue: I tried to, again, put this in perspective and to try to put it in very clear terms to the president. I said something to the effect of, "Sir, we've done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We've looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada. We're doing our job. Much of the info you're getting is false." Then I went into, for instance, this thing from Michigan, this report about 68% error rate. Reality is it was only 0.0063% error rate, less than one in 15,000.

Brian Lehrer: There are four examples of what election fraud is not in this country or at least was not in the 2020 presidential election from Trump's top two Justice Department appointees. The biggest kind of election fraud we have in this country right now seems to be false claims of election fraud to try to subvert democracy. Now, let's take a broader look. Joining us now is William Adler, senior technologist for elections and democracy with a think tank known as the Center for Democracy and Technology.

He previously was a tech aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, which works on the cause of fair redistricting. Will, great to have you on the show and on our series 30 Issues in 30 Days. Welcome to WNYC.

William Adler: Thank you so much for having me, Brian. I'm glad you're devoting so much time to this topic and that your listeners are so interested in it.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to what kinds of election fraud are real, let's discuss these claims that are fake. Did any of those examples from William Barr or Richard Donahue stand out to you or make you want to say something about them in terms of how voter fraud has not been happening in this country?

William Adler: It's just so hard to respond to these specific claims because they are just so disconnected from reality. Some of these claims, if you trace them back, you can ultimately find something like-- there was some case on election night where unofficial results were reported improperly or something like that, something that was promptly fixed that ultimately became the seed for these really outlandish claims that every Dominion voting system machine is rigged or something like that, but many of them are just complete fiction just made up out of whole cloth and somehow they made their way up to the president or his allies. They started repeating them and they just took on a life of their own. It's really permeated our political discourse.

Brian Lehrer: I see you were on a panel your center put on called the big lies Long Tail. How do you see the fraudulent claims of election fraud threatening democracy today and in the future, even though Trump didn't get away with them and managed to stay in office?

William Adler: Yes. In that event we covered a couple of different ways that the big lie has these downstream ongoing effects on our democracy. A big one is how it's affected races for Secretary of State and for governor in a variety of states. This is the big thing that I think is probably most concerning, American democracy has this very strange feature where our elections are administered in most cases by partisan elected officials. Partisan-elected secretaries of state or governors who appoint the Secretary of State. This is a really unique American thing because we have so many elected offices in this country. No other country, to my knowledge, has partisan elected officials in the way that we do.

In an article tracking the number of candidates who repeated the big lie in Newyork Times last week, a journalist wrote that talking about how the 2020 election was questionable has become and I quote, "The price of entry to the Republican ticket." You see these claims being repeated by candidates who are hoping to administer elections in the future, and some of these might win. Then they're going to be in a pretty serious position of power to run elections in ways that they think might address the big lie as the way that they construe it, which may or may not be false, and have control on how the election is run and certified. I find that very worrisome.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some calls for William Adler of the Center for Democracy and Technology here on the first of 10 straight days on Democracy in peril in our 30 Issues election series, who has a question about election fraud that could be real, and election claims Trump's big lie that election fraud in their own right. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, or tweet at Brian Lehrer will watch our Twitter feed go by and pluck good questions from there for William Adler.

You've also written about post-election audits of ballots that were cast. Was that case of a so-called independent election audit that we've talked about on this show, a private group that was commissioned by Republicans in Arizona, and that Trump was talking up a group that did some audit of the presidential vote in Arizona? They actually wound up spoiler alert, reaffirming that Biden won in that state, which hasn't stopped Trump's false claims, but you didn't like that audit anyway. I see. What's an election audit and what was good or bad about the Arizona one?

William Adler: Sure. You opened this by talking about fraud but one question is when we're talking about fraud, what are we really talking about? We're talking about wanting to have trust that our elections are well run and that we can trust the outcome, and that's what post-election audits are intended to do. Post-election audits are intended to say, Okay, here's the outcome that we got after tabulating the ballots in a particular way. Let's just go back and double-check and make sure everything looks good, and we know the right way to do these post-election audits.

One of the best ways to do that, that we know is called a risk-limiting audit, where you hand count a sample of ballots from a race. Depending on how big the margin is, you might actually only need to sample a pretty small number of ballots to get a really, really high degree of confidence that the outcome was correct. If the margin's smaller then you might need to count more ballots potentially leading all the way up to a full hand count of the results.

This is a way to generate really, really strong public transparent evidence that the outcome was correct, or if something actually went wrong to find that out and try to figure out exactly what went wrong. Post-election audits are just this incredibly important way to build confidence in our elections, and we need to do them more often and we need to do them better. The Cyber Ninjas audit that you're referring to took place in Maricopa County, Arizona. It was in 2021. It was initiated by the leader of the Arizona Senate, who contracted with this firm Cyber Ninjas, who previously had no experience at all auditing elections.

They were the Arizona Senate subpoenaed Maricopa County to give overall 2 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona, which is, by the way, the most populous county in Arizona. All of the voting machines, all of the logs, all of the passwords, and handed it over to this firm who really had no experience with this at all. It cost taxpayers millions of dollars to run the audit itself and to replace the machinery afterward because there was no way to know that it hadn't been tampered with in a way that would corrupt future elections.

The end result was to generate disinformation. It was a sham and it damaged equipment and it cost taxpayers a lot of money. It really was not transparent at all. One of the most important features of a post-election audit is that it's transparent. It generates this public instant evidence that the election was proper. This was really a sham of a post-election audit, but what we need to do is we need to expand the use of really good, really comprehensive post-election audits around the country.

Brian Lehrer: Why use audits at all if they're just a sample of the votes as you describe it, rather than a recount which can be done in various elections, which recounts every vote?

William Adler: That's a really good question. In most jurisdictions in the US, we use optical scanners. We use electronic tabulators to count our ballots. We do this in the US because our ballots are so complicated. There are plenty of countries that have really simple federal or national elections where you just cast one vote for the party of your choice, and it's actually possible to hand count those elections quickly in a number of hours and have a pretty accurate count.

In the US, however, because our ballots have so many contests like, I said earlier, we just love having elected offices in this country. It's really just not feasible to do a hand count of a jurisdiction that has 20, 30, potentially 100 different races on a ballot. If you look at the Cyber Ninjas audit that you just talked about, the 2 million that involved a full hand count of all 2 million ballots, which as you said didn't change the result, that took months and months and months and millions of dollars.

It's very important that we get election results fast and we get them accurately, and that's what optical scanners give us, but we want to be able to double-check their work. The fastest way to do that is to count a sample of ballots. If you do it right, the math really checks out. You can really have a really high degree of confidence that your election was correct with just a small, small fraction of the time it would take to do a full [unintelligible 00:17:29].

Brian Lehrer: We're going to move on to another aspect of this, but I guess a very important piece of that is that the sample would have to be representative. You would have to sample from the most Republican parts of a district, the most democratic parts of a district in the proportions in which they've been previously represented. The sample itself is I'm sure key to a good audit. Another thing that has happened since the 2020 election that compromises election security also comes from the big lie camp.

I think people may be less familiar with this, POLITICO reported last month that authorities in several key swing states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan, have scrambled to replace election equipment after pro-Trump officials compromise their security. They also give an example in this political article from Colorado, though it wasn't a swing state in 2020, where grand jury this year indicted a Republican candidate for Secretary of State. Of course, Secretary of State is the office that oversees elections, indicted for conspiracy to breach the security of her county's voting machines. What's with these election equipment breaches? William, are you familiar with these?

William Adler: I am. I'm glad you brought those up. I really see these breaches as continuous and part of the same phenomenon as the fraudulent audit in Maricopa County. We saw some in Pennsylvania as well. I really see these as continuous because, for one thing, they're often the same people. The guy who ran the firm Cyber Ninjas in Maricopa County, was also involved in one of these election equipment breaches that wasn't reported on for until 18 months later.

They're also ostensibly to their supporters, they're aimed at trying to uncover evidence that the election was somehow stolen. The difference between these breaches that you talked about and the audit in Maricopa County is that the Maricopa County Review had the semblance of transparency. It at least pretended to be a post-election audit, but these breaches that were still just learning new details about now, particularly in Georgia, they're not even pretending to be transparent. They're just potentially county-level officials authorizing people who have no experience with election equipment to come in, copy the machines, and who knows what they do with that. That's extremely concerning and is potentially a risk to election security, not just in the jurisdiction where that happens, but in any jurisdiction using those same machines.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Bill in Rego Park has a question. Bill, you're on WNYC with William Adler from the Center for Democracy and Technology. Hi Bill.

Bill: Hi, Brian. Good morning. I recall that the For the People Act, which past the house and failed in the Senate, even though all 50 Democrats and independents supported that act contained provisions to prevent the voter fraud that Republicans are falsely claiming permeated the 2020 election. Is that correct?

Brian Lehrer: Familiar with that, William?

William Adler: Sure. Thanks for the question, Bill. For the People Act was a very, very long bill that Bill is correct pass in the house. I don't remember all of the provisions in that Bill. It was very, very long, but it did have some really strong provisions in it that would for instance increase the use of paper ballots, which give you that reliable evidence of how the election was carried out. It actually did increase the use of these risk-limiting audits that I mentioned and it did have lots of good provisions that would improve election security. I don't know exactly what the caller is referring to in terms of what provisions would've addressed Republican concerns.

Brian Lehrer: Bill, thank you for your call. For you as a democracy and technology expert, when should we be skeptical of voting technology? I think there was a wave of enthusiasm when the internet was newer for widespread online voting to make voting more accessible. People could do it from their homes, from their phones, but I think experts decided to shy away for a bit out of fear of hacking. We also heard the William Barr example of how it was a lie that voting machines from the company Dominion could switch votes from Trump to Biden. What's the big picture there as you see it?

William Adler: That's a really good question, Brian. I sometimes say that in elections there's a right amount of techno-phobic to be right. Computers play a really important role in our elections. I said optical scanners, they're really just computers. Those play a really important role in making sure that we can have our results really fast in the US, but there's this principle that researchers have come up in recent years called software independence, which really just means you don't want to be forced into a position where to trust the election outcome, you have to trust the software.

We should be able to trust our election outcome without at any point having to trust that the software is good or that the software hasn't been corrupted. I said the way that we achieve that, if we're going to use these tabulators, is we need to check their work. It's good to use technology, but we need to verify it. We need to make sure that everything is good. The big concern that people have with online voting, which you mentioned, is that we at this point don't really know of a way to implement ways for people to vote online without being forced into that position where you have to trust the software.

If there's not a piece of paper that voters can verify physically, then that means that the record of the vote is entirely digital and that to trust the outcome, you really do have to put all of your faith in the software. That's really not a position we want to be in. We want to be able to say, "These computers give us a benefit, but we're able to check their work."

Brian Lehrer: Joseph in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi Joseph.

Joseph: Hey Brian. I just wanted to talk about the idea of ballot harvesting and how it's typically the Republican party that is conducting actual voter fraud when they're caught versus what they're claiming, and how hip hypocritical that is. I love your show. This is the first time I'm ever calling. Thank you and I'll take my answer out of the air.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Let's talk about absentee voting in general mail-in voting. He's probably thinking about one particular case of election fraud involving absentee ballots that was on behalf of a Republican congressional candidate in North Carolina in 2018. We can touch on that, but let's talk first about the general category. Republicans seem to want to limit absentee voting because Democrats tend to use it more than Republicans these days.

That's the political motivation, and before the 2020 election, Attorney General Barr, who of course became so famous for denouncing the big lie conspiracy theories, Barr was warning quote, "This methodology as a matter of logic is very open to fraud and coercion. It's reckless and dangerous." That's a Barr quote from September 2020. Is he right to any degree about mail-in voting in your opinion?

William Adler: The best way to be completely free of voter coercion is to vote in a polling place. Absentee ballots do raise the risk of potentially, like families making sure that their family members vote in a particular way. Absentee voting, I think overall the benefits of absentee voting are pretty clear. People really like it. After lots of states responded in COVID to increase the availability of absentee ballots, people stuck with it. There's a lot of evidence that people really liked it and they want to keep voting absentee.

To Joseph's question about ballot harvesting, the ways that absentee ballots can be collected and can be dropped off varies a lot from state to state. It's very complicated. In some cases, there are limits on the number of ballots that can be dropped off in a dropbox. The issue that you referred to Brian, was about basically people going to people's doors and collecting their blank absentee ballots, which was, of course, terrible, highly coercive, and the guy who was running that scheme got caught.

Brian Lehrer: Let me tell that story a little bit. Let me tell that one for listeners who may not know it. As I said, this was in the 2018 midterms. A congressional election was thrown out because of absentee ballot fraud. It was committed to help a Republican house candidate get elected. As the caller indicated, it was candidate Mark Harris from a district in North Carolina. An aide to that candidate wound up pleading guilty to a fraud charge.

According to WRAL TV, one of the main news stations in Raleigh, he was accused of collecting absentee ballots from voters and in some cases fraudulently signing them or filling in votes for races that had been left blank. Do you want to go further into that at all and what it exemplifies as an actual risk? You're familiar with that case. Right?

William Adler: Yes. I'm familiar with the case and I think that is a serious risk. It goes to show the difference between what people think of as election fraud and what actual serious cases of election fraud actually look like. You presented the contrast between the big lie and the facts on the ground. I think this case when you talk about absentee ballots and absentee ballot fraud, shows the contract between the facts on the ground and what the response has been from candidates and lawmakers.

When people talk about absentee fraud, you might have this image of like, individual voters casting fake ballots or casting too many ballots, but that really just doesn't happen. There's just no incentive for people to do that. You're putting yourself at risk of a felony charge for something with just such limited benefit. One or two additional votes. Instead, the people who are incentivized to commit fraud are really campaigns or these campaign consultants like the case in North Carolina, but to actually commit fraud on a scale that might have an impact on an election, it's pretty obvious and you're going to get caught the way that that they did.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I think it's Democrats who most promote so-called ballot harvesting, meaning just simply that other people can go collect your absentee ballot and they promote it as a way to make sure that people who have accessibility problems physically getting to a drop off point or even to a mailbox, should have that additional way of having their ballot collected and counted. Is that more of a democratic thing than a Republican thing?

I'm not saying they're trying to commit fraud. I'm saying their goal is to make voting more accessible to more people, but you are saying that methodology is subject to fraud potentially. Is that something you'd like to see not go on and does it go on today?

William Adler: In general, absentee balloting is just a really, really important way to make sure that people who are physically unable to go to the polls or otherwise don't feel safe going to the polls are able to vote. Many of these people have trouble handling paper, have trouble mailing things in and you said that Democrats use it more than Republicans, but didn't always used to be that way. Before 2020 Republicans were much more likely to vote absentee because their voters tend to be older, more likely to want to stay home to vote. In the lead-up to 2020 as states changed their laws about absentee balloting, Trump turned his focus on that, was able to use that as a way to say, this is how the election is going to be rigged. He flipped the partisan polarization around absentee balloting which is why things are the way they are. He made it so people who were inclined to trust what he was saying about absentee balloting were less likely to trust it and less likely to want to be that way. He flipped.

Brian Lehrer: Are there best practices for mail-in voting in general? Because we have this debate going on big time around the country in so many states. Ironically, the controversial Georgia voting law, which many see as a voter suppression law in many respects, I believe has universal mail-in voting available. You have to have a certain ID, but universal mail-in voting, I believe is in Georgia law. On the other hand in blue New York State the voters on a ballot question last year voted down universal no-excuse mail-in balloting.

You don't have to have an illness or something or be away. New York voters voted it down so maybe some of this is a little counterintuitive, but do you as a democracy and technology expert have a list of best practices for mail-in voting?

William Adler: It's not something I've specifically looked into but I will say that there are a number of states that have been doing universal mail-in balloting for years. Utah, Colorado, Washington a bunch of others, and people there really like it and it's going really well. The cases of fraud are absolutely negligible. They have really strong ways to ensure that people only get one ballot or only able to return one ballot. Usually, the way this works is on the outside of the envelope, you sign the envelope attesting that you are the person who you say you are.

Then the ballot is in a separate envelope inside so that when they get processed the choice is made by the voter gets separated from their identity so that nobody can figure out how a person voted. There's a pretty well-established methodology that these states have been using and it works really well.

Brian Lehrer: One more area that's contentious and I just touched on it in a side light way voter ID, Republicans seem to push various kinds of voter ID laws. Democrats claim it's to suppress the votes of legitimate voters who tend to vote democratic, like poor people who tend to be people of color, and older people who are all less likely to have driver's licenses and other forms of ID these laws require. What's your take on the good the bad of the ugly of voter ID laws?

William Adler: I would say that anytime you change a voting law, particularly if you're doing it in a way that is going to make it harder for some people to vote, you better have a good reason. You better have an actual problem that you're trying to promote a solution to. We've addressed a few times on this show already, the idea that individuals are committing voter fraud and that's swinging outcomes of elections is just absolute fiction.

Voter ID prevents a very, very particular fraud known as impersonation fraud, which is you show up to the polling place and you say that you are who you are not and you sign for that person. That just doesn't happen. The scale at which that actually occurs, compare that to the scale of how many people would be affected in many states that are passing voter ID laws the contrast is really, really stark. There are actually a lot of people who don't have a photographic ID that would enable them to vote.

A lot of poor people a lot of elderly people just don't have a license and there's no-- If you're going to ask people to go to the DMV or to get a state-issued photographic ID for purposes of voting. Voting is such a marginal decision for many voters that in many cases it's just not going to happen. You're really disenfranchising people for no good reason at all.

Brian Lehrer: That is 30 Issues in 30 Days for today, we continue our series of segments on democracy in peril. This was the first of 10, we'll continue on every show this week and next week. We'll continue it tomorrow by exploring how to maximize people's opportunity to vote at all. We thank for today William Adler, Senior Technologist with the Center for Democracy for technology. Which order is it again? I forgot.

William Adler: Center for Democracy and Technology.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for joining us, this was extremely informative.

William Adler: Thank you, Brian. It was a pleasure.

 

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