The Glenn and Helen Show: John Fund on Election Fraud and Its Remedies

PoliticsCentral

presents:

Fund talks about high-tech problems with electronic voting machines, more mundane problems with ineligible voters and phony ballots, and the general slackness and incompetence that have made our voting system one that can only aspire to the high standards of Mexico.

Music — “Oh, Just Have Some Faith in Me” — is by The Mr. T Experience.

UPDATE: A transcript is now available. See below.

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The Glenn and Helen Show: John Fund on Election Fraud and its Cures

OCTOBER 3, 2006

The latest Glenn and Helen Show features John Fund, Wall Street Journal writer and author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Fund talks about high-tech problems with electronic voting machines, more mundane problems with ineligible voters and phony ballots, and the general slackness and incompetence that have made our voting system one that can only aspire to the high standards of Mexico.

Transcribed for use only by PAJAMASMEDIA

by Lisa Bar-Leib

eScribers, LLC

(Music intro)

GLENN: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Glenn & Helen Show. Today we’re talking about elections and election fraud with our guest, John Fund. John writes for the Wall Street Journal and he’s the author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.

HELEN: We’ll talk about electronic voting, dead people voting and why the United States has one of the least reliable voting systems of any democracy. So stay tuned.

(Music)

HELEN: This podcast is brought to you by Volvo automobiles. Visit your Volvo retailer to drive a new 2007 Volvo XC90. The best selling European luxury SUV with over fifty international awards just got better. With 3.2 liter inline six-cylinder engine, roll stability control, MP3 capability, satellite radio preparation and available active Bi-Xenon headlights. Learn more at volvocars.us.

(Music)

HELEN: We’ve got John Fund on the phone now.

HS: Hi, John.

JF: Pleasure.

GR: Hi, John. Glad to have you. So, we’ve been hearing more about election fraud, it seems like, with every election cycle since 2000. And is that because there actually is more fraud or are we just hearing more about it?

JF: Well, in my book, Stealing Elections, I basically say we have two problems. We have what political scientist, Walter Dean Burnham, calls the sloppiest election system of any industrialized democracy and because of that sloppiness people with bad motives have often a very easy time finagling the system, adding votes or subtracting votes. Sometimes you can’t tell where the sloppiness ends and where the fraud begins.

I do know that there’s a lot more scrutiny and the general public believes that there’s more fraud, if you look at the Zogby poll or the Rasmussen poll. Something like about twelve percent of Americans don’t believe their ballots are counted properly or the votes are stolen so that their ballots are invalidated.

GR: And that’s a problem all by itself, isn’t it?

JF: Absolutely. You know, we also have these concerns about computer-generated election machines. And we’ve had that for a long time because these machines, although they look like ATMs, they don’t have nearly the kind of sophisticated software and there are concerns that they might be hacked into or that the votes might be diverted.

But the fraud that I write about in my book is separate. It’s the old-fashioned fraud that we’ve heard about from a long time ago. Everyone thought it ended with Mayor Daley, the old Mayor Daley, leaving Chicago. But it’s all over the country and sometimes it’s paper ballots, sometimes it’s absentee ballots, which is a big growth industry in fraud, and sometimes, potentially, it could be computer fraud.

HS: Now, I see we vote here using those electronic voting machines and I see a lot of stuff on the internet, mostly from lefty sites, about hacking and fraud with electronic machines. Is fraud easier where these machines are concerned?

JF: I think that the computer-generated fraud is a potential threat rather than an actual threat because we’ve been using optical scan voting which takes the computers to count them for twenty-five or thirty years and we’ve never had a documented case of somebody hacking into those computers and changing the results.

What I think we have a problem with is, we certainly don’t want to go to internet voting any time soon because that does create all kinds of potential problems. And we did see in Venezuela that a dictator like Hugo Chavez, who centralized all of the election counting in one place, a commission controlled by his cronies, probably was able to commit massive voter fraud in an election that he won, technically won, a few years ago.

I think with our decentralized system, we’re not likely to have that. But that doesn’t mean that in individual places around the country, fraud or incompetence that can mask or have the same result as fraud can occur.

GR: Yeah. That’s one thing I’ve noticed. You know, I remember after the 2000 elections, in fact, there was some talk of sort of nationalizing the election function. And that struck me as a bad idea because having stuff down on the county level doesn’t prevent fraud or error but at least it kind of compartmentalizes it.

JF: Oh, you cannot be more right. Florida was a nightmare. Florida took thirty-seven days, all of those court fights, battles back and forth. There were something like ninety counties involved. But there are 3,100 counties nationwide. Can you imagine trying to conduct a nationwide recount with 3,100 counties? So, at the very least, because of our electoral college system and the fact that individual states control the election process, I think we’ve minimized bad results but they can get bad enough. Look at Florida.

GR: It does seem that way.

HS: Now, I was amazed when I read your book to read the story about Marcia Tempel in Los Angeles who had volunteered to be a poll worker and wound up having a bunch of voting machines delivered to her house, of all things. That’s one of those things you read and hardly believe. Does this kind of thing really happen?

JF: Well, the story is, she’s a very civic-minded lady. She wanted to help out and she somehow got on the list of having a polling place even though she hadn’t asked for it. And everything was delivered like a kit to her house. So she dutifully set it up and ran the polling system for the whole day there. And what she realized is if she’d wanted to commit fraud, there were about five, six or seven points along the way in which it would have been very easy and no one would have caught her.

So, that’s the kind of sloppiness that I think we have to address. I’m not saying everyone here in this whole process is out to steal elections or to pad the road with phantom voters and have them vote. But I am saying that if you have a sloppy system, you’re inviting people to take advantage of it.

Let’s take absentee ballots. Absentee ballots have very little ballot security and we had a mayor of Miami who was thrown out of office a few years ago, literally thrown out of office and a new election called, because it turns out 4,000 of his votes were cast by absentee voters who didn’t exist.

HS: Why does the United States have such a sloppy system? I mean, you mentioned in the book that Mexico and other places have better systems than we do. They check their — you know, there’s a lot of IDs given, there’s all kinds of counter checks and balances, but in the United States we don’t seem to have that. I’ve gone to voting places and often I don’t even get asked for an ID.

JF: Well, that’s the astonishing thing. I think it’s been on the honor system for a long time because most people thought that fraud was localized in a few big cities or a few hollows in Kentucky and Tennessee. And, by the way, you can find Republican voter fraud in places like the rural areas like that, too.

HS: I’m sure.

JF: I’m not saying it’s just a one-party problem. But I think the honor system no longer works because we’re an increasingly mobile country. I think we have seen suspect elections crop up in every region and it’s astonishing. Canada, Mexico, Britain, Germany, all require people to show identification before they can vote. In over half of our states, you don’t have to show any form of identification at all. And, in fact, in California, which is our biggest state, it is against the law for an election worker to ask you for any ID whatsoever.

HS: Now, why is that?

JF: Well, that’s an interesting question because the secretaries of state in California consistently asked for some kind of identification system, editorials and most of the California papers have supported it, but the Democratic legislature consistently turn it down. I think it’s because there are a lot of rocks they don’t want to overturn and see what’s underneath them.

I think that there are documented examples, like the race between Bob Dorman and Loretta Sanchez in California a few years ago, where they found 754 aliens — they had an exact number — at a minimum, cast illegal votes. And you can find that this does happen at times because — here’s what happens: courts send out jury duty notices and one of the things on the jury duty notice says, ‘Are you ineligible because you’re not a citizen?’ Lots of people will check that, they send it back in. But some counties have done a check and they find that many of those people who say, I’m not a citizen, therefore I don’t have to show up for jury duty, have also registered to vote and sometimes voted. That’s how you can get caught.

GR: That’s not very encouraging.

HS: Now, do you think that polarization of politics plays a part in voter fraud? I mean, as the country becomes more polarized, do you think we’ll see more or less fraud?

JF: Well, I’ll tell you this much. Both sides now believe there’s fraud. They just think it’s all on the other side. I mean, after Florida, you had all of these Democrats who say Bush stole the election despite the fact that we had every news organization go through and recount the votes and say, apparently, Bush did win the election. In other elections you’ve had Republican yell about Democratic voter fraud. So, it seems that both sides absolutely find it easy to be convinced the other side is composed of the nefarious people who want to steal elections but their side is completely pure.

I can tell you, there’s fraud in both parties. There are people in both parties, because power is something that people want to hold who will sometimes bend the rules. What I am saying is, regardless of party, every American should care about this issue because we fought a civil rights struggle in the 1960s to make sure no one would be prevented from voting, there wouldn’t be poll taxes, there wouldn’t be voter intimidation. We need to preserve those gains. We need to continue that struggle. But we also have another civil rights battle now. You lose your civil right to vote if your vote is invalidated if you have your vote canceled out because someone isn’t alive who’s voting, someone who is voting twice or someone who shouldn’t be voting. That also costs you your civil rights.

GR: I think that’s right. And it’s sort of funny that the attitude has changed. It used to be that vote fraud was kind of something people joked about. I mean, when you talked about Cook County, Illinois and dead people voting and all, it was considered sort of funny. And that does seem to have changed since the 2000 election, doesn’t it?

JF: Well, elections are now much closer. We’ve had two very close presidential elections. We now have Congress with very slim margins. So every election is going to count a lot. We also have elections litigation whereby the loser now just doesn’t accept the result; they go to Court and file lawsuits. We could literally turn election day this month into election month this year if we have enough close races. Let’s say, the House of Representatives or, let’s say, the Tennessee Senate race where you are, is so close that the balance of power in either house of Congress could be determined by those elections.

I don’t want lawyers to decide the elections. I want voters. That’s why we have to make sure the election count is as accurate and respected by both sides and accepted by both sides as possible.

HS: Now, do you think Congress will ever do anything about this problem?

JF: Well, they started to this year. You talk about photo ID. The national voter commission, headed by former Secretary of State James Baker and former President Jimmy Carter, one a Republican and one a Democrat, proposed that we have photo ID requirement for every federal election. That means, that the states would have to ask voters for some kind of identification, eventually a photo identification, before people voted. If somebody couldn’t afford the photo ID, it would be given free to people. And, in fact, there was a proposal that you have mobile buses that go around and help people get photo IDs. It was passed out of the House but almost every Democrat voted against it and almost every Republican voted for it. So, it’s a very polarizing issue.

In the Senate they had a separate amendment to have a photo ID. It passed by one vote. It turns out that they couldn’t reconcile them so nothing happened this year. But this battle will be joined in Congress early next year.

And I have to ask, photo ID is something we need to use in every aspect of our life. I’m a libertarian in many respects but I don’t begrudge having to show a photo ID to board a plane or to enter a federal courthouse or to do something like that —

HS: Why is that not intim —

JF: — and I can’t understand why we don’t ask for photo ID to vote.

HS: Why is that not considered intimidation but it is if you go to the voting booth? I mean, I was reading in your book that it was a kind of intimidation to ask people for an ID. Why is that considered to be an intimidating process to show a photo ID?

JF: I find it bizarre that we are arguing against people showing photo ID because if Andy Young, who’s the former black mayor of Atlanta, former UN ambassador, says, in this life, today in the modern world of the twenty-first century, if you don’t have a photo ID you can’t really participate in the richness of American life. You can’t be part of the mainstream of society. We are helping poor people or elderly people who don’t have a photo ID — we are helping them if we ask them to get one, if in part, to vote.

GR: Well, it does seem that when I can’t even buy a beer in a restaurant without showing a photo ID to prove I’m over twenty-one, which should be fairly apparent anyway, it does seem like it’s not asking very much.

JF: Well, I think both of you must be at the fountain of youth. You both look very, very young.

HS: Well, hey, thank you.

GR: Well, I’ve often proposed, getting to the machine fraud question, I’ve often proposed paper ballots as a solution to fears about electronic voting. And that’s not because I’m terribly worried about hacking of electronic voting machines so much as I think we really need something that people are confident in and comfortable about. And we’ve seen a move that way in Maryland now as they’ve had some voting problems. But I gather from your book, you’re not convinced that’s such a good solution. What’s better?

JF: Well, paper ballots work in Canada because you’re only voting for one office. We have ballots in California, where I grew up, that sometimes included over a hundred items and offices. So, paper ballots can be very unwieldy if you get to some states that have a lot of things to vote on.

I think that if we get enough money invested and we get the bugs fixed out and we have enough audit systems, I think these ATM-style election machines can work because they’re very good for people with bad sight, they can use any language, they’re very versatile. You can prevent overvotes because it literally will not let you overvote and therefore invalidate your ballot. And I think we are close to having a machine that will give a computer-generated receipt so you can look at it, not take it with you, because that you can sell, look at it and then it would be deposited and left with the election official. I think we have to spend the money to move in that direction.

I like the idea of a paper ballot but, you know, when we had paper ballots we had a lot of fraud, too, because the first — the reason I got interested in this case, Glenn, is in college I did a college term paper on the administration of elections. And I went down to watch a recount of an assembly race in the Central valley of California. I literally saw with my own eyes somebody put a piece of pencil underneath their fingernail and mark ballots. In other words, add votes to a candidate. Now, you’ll ask me, well, why didn’t you report this to the authorities? Well, Glenn, the authorities were the ones doing it.

GR: Well, that actually goes to something else you say in your book. You call for a greater array of poll watchers to keep an eye on things like this.

JF: Well, one of the problems we have is we’re dependent on very, very nice people who are getting up in years and because, you know, it’s a long day and people have other things to do for the eighty or ninety bucks they’re paid for an election day. So, we have poll watchers whose average age now is close to 70. We need to replace them. We need to get high school and college students, perhaps giving them credit, perhaps giving them some money. We need to train a new generation of poll watchers and election workers. Otherwise, we are going to increasingly move to something which I think is worse than our current system, which is absentee ballots and mail ballots.

Oregon, for example — my sister lives in Oregon. If she wakes up on election day, she can’t go and vote. There are no polling places. If you don’t mail in your ballots or deliver your ballots, you can’t vote in Oregon.

I think that’s awful because I think it takes away the civic coming together, the joining together on one day as an expression of democracy. It basically takes voting down to the level of getting a supermarket survey in the mail and filling it out. I think we need to preserve the tradition of election day and I think that we also have to make sure that we don’t go to all absentee voting or mail voting because that’s where the real fraud can come because the ballot is out of the view of all election officials. It can be coerced, it can be intimidated. You can send dozens of ballots to an empty lot. You can send dozens of ballots to one apartment building. The guy can fill it out. There’s no identification. You can have voter fraud.

HS: Well, why don’t people care more about this sort of thing? You hardly ever hear about anyone being prosecuted for election fraud.

JF: Well, there are an increasing number of prosecutions. There’s something like 170 from the Federal Department of Justice in just the last year. I think the reason is this: priority. We have over a hundred lawyers in the Justice Department pursuing civil rights cases on voting. We have only one who’s in charge of prosecuting vote fraud cases. So there’s been a set of priorities that’s been established that minimizes voter fraud.

Secondly, prosecutors hate these cases. They hate them for two reasons. One, you’re going to get half the political community mad at you because if you prosecute a Democrat, the Democrats will be mad at you. If you prosecute a Republican, the Republicans will be mad at you.

And, guess what? You’re going to be accused of being racist or discriminating against minorities or trying to suppress the vote because a lot of these fraud cases, not all, but many of them occur in inner cities or in poor rural areas where buying and selling votes actually means something.

I’m not saying that more people of one kind commit vote fraud. I am saying that if you have a very low income, you may be susceptible to the temptation to sell your vote or to commit vote fraud in exchange for money.

HS: Is it legal to sell your vote?

JF: No, it’s not.

HS: Oh, okay.

JF: That’s vote fraud. But —

HS: Well, I mean, I can’t believe people are going around — it’d be so obvious if people are going around, like, for ten dollars, go vote. And how do you know the people —

JF: Well, remember. There is tremendous resistance to have people go out on election day as law enforcement officials monitoring these. You saw what happened in Florida. The police set up an innocent roadblock a mile away from a polling place in order to check for somebody who was a robbery suspect and they were accused of being racist because they were preventing people from going to the polls.

HS: So, maybe the key is if people would stop being so fearful of being called a racist, things might get better?

JF: Well, I think we just have to understand that if we don’t do something, we are diluting the votes of everyone. And I have to tell you, people who claim there is no vote fraud, I can tell you where there is vote fraud. Because if you go to Detroit, Michigan or St. Louis, Missouri — these are completely Democratic cities, these are cities that are heavily minority — in both primaries for mayor, in recent years, there have been dramatic and proven allegations of voter fraud and they’ve been made by Democrats against other Democrats. One faction of the Democratic party stole votes from another faction. And many people went to jail. East Chicago, Indiana, another case. The mayor and several city council members went to jail because they committed absentee ballot fraud.

So, we can find examples of voter fraud, except, generally, they don’t get the publicity and the attention because there’s a large number of people who either are afraid of being called racist, they’re afraid of being called people who want to suppress votes. Or, they benefit from this kind of activity.

GR: Well, in reading your book, I have to say that I was a little surprised. The record of a lot of the electronic voting machine companies looks to be iffier than I thought. I mean, I’ve been sort of appalled at the crappy security that a lot of these machines have. And I was reading the paper by the Princeton researchers who not only managed to successfully hack voting machines but even to infect them with a virus that would let them hack every other voting machine in the area. But reading your background on some of these companies, a lot of them have problems with sort of shady backgrounds and regardless of whether there’s really fraud going on there, that seems quite questionable. I have a feeling that ATM manufacturing standards are judged a lot more carefully.

JF: Well, you’ve hit on it. ATMs work because the average ATM cost eight times the average amount that an electronic voting machine costs. They spend a lot more money on it because they actually involve people’s — customer’s — money. So they’re very careful. I think, if we want an election system that actually has integrity and people have confidence, then we’re going to have to spend more money. I don’t think, and, again, in twenty-five or thirty years of optical scan voting and computer voting there’s never been a documented case of somebody hacking into a system and stealing votes, but incompetence, poor training, bad software, unfortunate election workers who didn’t know what they were doing, those can create problems, too. And, again, it’s not just fraud. It’s incompetence. We need to attack both because if we have too much incompetence there will be more and more suspicion that some of it involves fraud.

GR: Yeah. And the suspicion itself is damaging, of course. Even if there is no more fraud than there ever was, if a lot of people don’t trust election results, that’s really corrosive.

JF: Well, you’re exactly right. One of the things we found is, John Locke, who’s a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, found that in states that did impose photo ID laws that did toughen up election integrity procedures, voting turnout went up. Because, look, places like Chicago, places like Philadelphia, you see voter turnout often go down because nobody thinks the elections matter because they think well, they’re going to steal it anyway. In Philadelphia, Glenn, we have the bizarre situation where there are more adults registered to vote in Philadelphia than there are — the Census Bureau says there are adults over the age of eighteen. Something is clearly wrong there.

GR: I guess so.

JF: Well, Mickey Mouse is on the ballot. By the way, God is on the ballot as a Democrat. Jesus is a Republican. And, in some places, we even have dogs and cats and parakeets on the registration rolls.

GR: You’ve got to love that. Well, I wonder if there shouldn’t be a higher law enforcement priority, but, for people who are listening, are there things that can be done at the state and local level that would help a lot? And what can individuals do if they want to get involved and promote more reliable voting approaches?

JF: Well, things are a lot better than they were five years ago. Five years ago people didn’t even recognize this problem existed. I think Florida was a wake-up call. I think some of the problems that have come to light since then have certainly been a wake-up call. That Washington State governor’s race, where I think the election was literally stolen by the election workers themselves in King County, which is Seattle. That’s why they ended up calling King County Kiev County. Because that was the same time the Ukrainian election was being stolen just a few years ago.

I think things are a lot better but your listeners can do three things. First of all, they can tell prosecutors and their elected officials this is something they care about and what are you doing to make sure our elections are safe, secure and competently run?

And, two, I think they can pass ballot measures or vote for ballot measures that would allocate more money to buying better machines, better training of workers, perhaps making sure we can get more college students in to replace the poll workers that are retiring or dying.

And the third thing that I think we can all do is just be vigilant. If you hear or see something which bothers you about an election — if you see, for example, somebody doing something around the polling place that is untoward or you overhear something, make sure you talk about it. Don’t keep it to yourself.

GR: Yeah. One interesting thing about that I’ve noticed is, and I guess it makes sense in a way as a way of preserving secrecy in the ballot, but you’re not allowed to take photos in polling places. And it seems to me that I’d want video cameras running the whole time.

JF: Well, that has been proposed and that supposedly is a form of intimidation which would bar some people from voting. I don’t have a problem with that but I can understand that, in this era of Big Brother, where the British are photographing everybody for everything, I can understand people being a little bit put aback by that. But I think there are ways we can improve ballot security. For example, photo ID at the polls does nothing to prevent ballot fraud with absentee voting. But how about this? We now have a system where you can get your absentee ballot in the mail. There will be a little box on the ballot where you pull off, for example, a cellophane cover and there’s some ink there that you ink your finger and put your fingerprint somewhere else on the ballot as an identifier. That plus your signature would probably make sure that a lot of ballot fraud wouldn’t be possible. And it’s not particularly obtrusive. People get fingerprinted for lots of things these days.

GR: I think that’s an interesting idea and, speaking of inking fingers, one thing we could do is ink people’s fingers so they don’t vote more than once which has been an issue

JF: Which we’ve done in Iraq.

GR: Right.

JF: The purple finger. Which is done in Mexico. I think we should be appalled, and I think Helen mentioned this earlier, Mexico ran an election that was very close and obviously some people there, I think taking a cue from Al Gore’s lawyers, are still complaining that the election was stolen but, in general, the vast majority of people accepted the election however close it was despite the fact that Mexico has a long history of corruption and vote fraud, because Mexico implemented real security provisions that increased people’s confidence and the integrity of the election. People in Mexico looked at the election commission and all of these safeguards they had — you had to have a voter ID card, it had to have a hologram on it, you had to have your finger inked — and they said we may not like the results but, you know, guess what? He probably did win.

HS: Well, it’s amazing that we have less safeguards than Mexico and other places. That’s kind of —

JF: Because we’ve been complacent. For too long we’ve thought, oh, that’s just something they do in Chicago or in some cemetery some place where they take names off of tombstones and then go vote them. But this is a problem that’s increasingly cropping up in every state. Now, some states are worse than others. But, I’ll tell you, if you don’t prosecute it, if you continue to say that it’s not an important problem, that is precisely the climate and the environment in which more people safe to commit untoward acts. Because, remember, if you literally don’t find, don’t catch, don’t prosecute jail people and/or if the fines are just a slap on the wrist, people are going to say this is just the cost of doing business. And I can literally turn an election around and my friends and me will get hired as patronage employees by some mayor who wins through fraud.

HS: Well, what’s amazing to me is, it seems like, in the United States, people can get away with anything. You know, it seems more and more that people sort of keep their mouth shut and people get away with all kinds of bizarre and outrageous behavior.

JF: Well, I think, one of the things we’ve lost in this country — we have hundreds of thousands of laws but we have lost, I think, in many cases the power of shame to affect people’s behavior. Shame doesn’t mean putting people in jail. Shame doesn’t mean fining people. It just means we’re not going to put up with it. And increasingly, because I think of the revolution of the 1960s and the desire that people shouldn’t be judgmental, we have taken the lack of shame in, for example, areas of our personal life and we’ve extended to almost every aspect of our society. You’re not allowed to be judgmental about anything. It’s either illegal or anything goes. Well, there are some things that are illegal, there are some things that are immoral, there are some things that are unethical and there are some things that we should just say, that’s just not proper. And vote fraud is certainly illegal but even a lot of the vote shenanigans, if you can’t prove that they’re fraud, we should simply speak out and say we want to clean up the system.

HS: Well, it seems like voter fraud would undermine our democracy.

JF: It is undermining our democracy. You go to some cities like Philadelphia, like East St. Louis, like East Chicago, Indiana and you will find the complete breakdown in people’s faith in government. And those cities eventually die because people move out to the suburbs. They leave the inner cities dying and you end up with a place where crime, lawlessness and ultimately something approaching social anarchy reign.

GR: So, actually, vote fraud winds up hurting the poor and minorities in the inner cities the most.

JF: Well, exactly. And, in fact, what you find with the reform candidates in St. Louis — they’re in Detroit, Michigan, that I mentioned, who are a minority — you often find them saying, it’s because the machine constantly steals votes that they are able to keep themselves in power. They keep unqualified people running the city services. The city services deteriorate, taxes go up, people get fed up and leave.

GR: Well, I know you’ve got a new edition of your book coming out later this month, is that right?

JF: It’s an updated edition of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Best place to get it because it’s coming out later this month and if you want it close to the election, is through Amazon.com.

GR: That’s great. Well, thank you so much for joining us and do you have any parting advice on simple things people ought to do between now and the election?

JF: Yes. I think that everyone should not only vote but they should tell their friends, we have to be vigilant and we should make sure that no matter what happens, no matter whether the Democrats win in your area or the Republicans win, we do not want to turn this election over to the lawyers. Unless there’s clear and present danger of fraud, there’s going to be a lot of temptation for the losing candidates to file lawsuits. We don’t want lawyers to run the election, we want the voters to decide the election. And I think candidates who have — we should prevent the fraud before the election. After the election, we should try to minimize as much as possible trips to the courthouse to overturn the will of the people.

GR: So, one of the things people ought to be ashamed of is looking like a sore loser?

JF: Well, if there’s legitimate fraud, you have to have evidence. There are certainly people who have cried wolf or cried fraud in a crowded election booth and not had any evidence. If you have the evidence, present it and it can be judged independently. If you don’t have the evidence and you cried fraud, you’re undermining confidence of the system because our system depends on the loser and the winner accepting the result. Otherwise, we are not governed as a nation of law. We’re governed as a nation of whiners, complainers and, I think, sore losers, as you said.

GR: Well, thank you so much for joining us.

JF: Thank you. A pleasure.

HS: Thanks very much.

(Music)

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(Music)

GLENN: You know, maybe the insiders versus the outsiders is the real division here. I think in different parts of the country you’ve got different local political machines that benefit from vote fraud and some of them are Republicans and some of them are Democrats but all of them really kind of want to keep things the way they are.

HELEN: They do and I think the biggest thing is that nobody can prosecute. If you’ve got one prosecutor and tons of defense lawyers, I think that makes for a system that could be fraught with fraud.

GLENN: I think that’s right and I kind of hope that the federal authorities start investigating this sort of thing more because it is a civil rights violation. Your votes cancel out just as much as if they don’t let you in the door to vote. I think we need a new slogan and that slogan should be “Let’s make it as good as Mexico.” Maybe that’ll sell.

We hope you think this podcast was up to Mexican standards. Anyway, we hope you’ll join us again in the future. You can check our show archives at GlennandHelenShow.com for new episodes or you can subscribe via iTunes or various other places. We’ll be back whenever we feel like it. Until then, have fun on the internet.

HELEN: Talk to you next time.

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