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Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. I'm June Grosso. Every

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Speaker 1: day we bring you insight and analysis into the most

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Speaker 1: important legal news of the day. You can find more

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Speaker 1: episodes of the Bloomberg Law Podcast on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud,

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Speaker 1: and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. North Carolina's ninth

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Speaker 1: congressional district is the last undecided House contest in the country.

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Speaker 1: The state Elections Board has refused to certify the results

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Speaker 1: of Republican Mark Harris's slim win while it investigates allegations

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Speaker 1: of election fraud. Republican State Senator Tommy Tucker says this

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Speaker 1: isn't the first time something like this has happened in

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Speaker 1: North Carolina. The Blatant County has had a long history

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Speaker 1: of absentee ballot fraud, even in both parties. So we

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Speaker 1: are being once again embarrassed in this state that our

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Speaker 1: elections don't count. Joining me is one of the foremost

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Speaker 1: election law experts in the country, Rick Hassan. He's professor

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Speaker 1: at the University of California Irvine School of Law and

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Speaker 1: founder of the Election Law blog. So Rick explain what

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Speaker 1: the allegations of election fraud are here. Well, they seem

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Speaker 1: to involve absentee ballots UH in at least one county

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Speaker 1: Blatant County, and maybe in more counties than that, and

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Speaker 1: they seem to involve two kinds of activities. One is

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Speaker 1: collecting absentee ballots from people who may or may not

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Speaker 1: have requested themselves, but for whom there was a request,

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Speaker 1: and then filling those out if they were blank for

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Speaker 1: the candidate Mark Harris, who has declared the winner of

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Speaker 1: the election. And the other is that they were collected

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Speaker 1: from some people and potentially destroyed if they were marked

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Speaker 1: for UH McCready, the candidate on the other side. And

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Speaker 1: while there's about a nine vote difference between the two

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Speaker 1: candidates UH, it is possible that there was enough activity

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Speaker 1: UH related to UM either filling in ballots or destroying

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Speaker 1: ballots that it could have changed the outcome of the election.

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Speaker 1: And this is now under investigation by the state Board

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Speaker 1: of Elections as well as it appears by state and

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Speaker 1: federal law enforcement officials. This is not the kind of

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Speaker 1: election fraud that Republicans across the country have used to

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Speaker 1: justify ballot restrictions in recent years. Explain the difference well, so,

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Speaker 1: the most common kind of election restriction that we've seen

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Speaker 1: put in place in recent years are voter identification laws.

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Speaker 1: These are laws that would require you to show a

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Speaker 1: certain kind of i D A photo i D like

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Speaker 1: a driver's license or passport before you're allowed to vote.

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Speaker 1: That kind of requirement would prevent impersonation fraud, where one

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Speaker 1: person goes to the polling place and pretends to be

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Speaker 1: someone else. That kind of fraud is not really a

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Speaker 1: kind of fraud that we see on any kind of

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Speaker 1: scale as a way stealing elections. While fraud related to

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Speaker 1: absentee ballots, while a small problem, it has been documented

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Speaker 1: as a problem this Blatant County is certainly not the

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Speaker 1: first instance where we've seen this. Having a voter ideal

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Speaker 1: in place doesn't stop someone from collecting absentee ballots, filling

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Speaker 1: them out. Destroying absente ballots really has nothing to do

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Speaker 1: with it. And so while the many of the laws

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Speaker 1: are aimed at stop in one kind of fraud, a

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Speaker 1: kind of fraud that doesn't happen uh, the laws are

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Speaker 1: not really aimed at stopping this other kind of fraud,

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Speaker 1: And so it makes you wonder whether these laws are

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Speaker 1: actually being passed to prevent fraud as is claimed, or

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Speaker 1: maybe they're being passed to suppress the vote of those

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Speaker 1: who are least likely to have a kind of voter identification.

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Speaker 1: In the Shelby County case, the Supreme Court gutted the

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Speaker 1: landmark Voting Rights Act. Does this situation show that that

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Speaker 1: was done too quickly and that that this situation might

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Speaker 1: have been prevented if it had still been in place.

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Speaker 1: While I do think that the Court is wrong in

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Speaker 1: gutting the part of the Voting Rights Act that required

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Speaker 1: that jurisdictions with the history of race discrimination and voting

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Speaker 1: get approval or preclearance before they made changes in their

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Speaker 1: voting rules, I don't believe that this kind of wholesale

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Speaker 1: fraud being conducted with absentee ballots would have been affected

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Speaker 1: by um the Shelby County case. I mean, really, this

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Speaker 1: this is not a situation where something that was would

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Speaker 1: not have been precleared, like say a voter I D law,

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Speaker 1: strict voter ID law that my disenfranchised minority voters would

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Speaker 1: now be able to go into effect. So, while there

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Speaker 1: are many things to say against the Shelby County decision,

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Speaker 1: I don't think this is affected one way or the

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Speaker 1: other by that what would have prevented this sure, So

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Speaker 1: the states have different rules for um making sure that

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Speaker 1: absentee ballots are handled properly. One of the big controversies

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Speaker 1: is over whether someone can collect the ballots of someone

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Speaker 1: else who's a non relative. This is known somewhat pejoratively

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Speaker 1: as ballot harvesting, and the concern is that you might

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Speaker 1: have people collecting ballots and doing things bad things with them,

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Speaker 1: as as has been alleged in this election. UH. There

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Speaker 1: are safeguards that can be put in place to prevent that.

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Speaker 1: So one of the things is that when these ballots

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Speaker 1: are collected in North Carolina, they have to be witnessed,

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Speaker 1: so two people have to sign or there has to

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Speaker 1: be a signature under penalty of perjury with affidavit um.

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Speaker 1: And so one of the things that's going on in

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Speaker 1: this investigation is that they are looking at the patterns

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Speaker 1: of the people who have signed these UH as witnesses

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Speaker 1: signed these ballot um applications at ballot applications, and when

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Speaker 1: you're seeing one person signing thirty fifty of these applications,

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Speaker 1: you can kind of see if there's a pattern there, see,

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Speaker 1: you know, what, what was it? And one of the

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Speaker 1: things that we've seen is that you see some of

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Speaker 1: these people who collected dozens of ballot those people have

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Speaker 1: now been interviewed. There was a story in BuzzFeed that

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Speaker 1: that some of them were, uh, we're being paid to

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Speaker 1: bring the ballots and not deliver them to election officials,

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Speaker 1: but to bring them back to a consultant's office. The

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Speaker 1: reports that this involved um this being done potentially in

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Speaker 1: exchange for drugs, and so there's all kinds of nefarious

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Speaker 1: allegations here. The fact that you can look at the

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Speaker 1: signatures and see the patterns is one way of knowing this,

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Speaker 1: and another way of knowing this is looking at the

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Speaker 1: patterns of absentee ballots that have been requested and those

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Speaker 1: that have been returned. And it looks like a lot

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Speaker 1: of ballots that were requested, many more were requested in

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Speaker 1: this county compared to other counties, and many fewer democratic

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Speaker 1: ballots were returned in this county compared to other counties,

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Speaker 1: which suggests that you can kind of look at the

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Speaker 1: data and look for patterns. And I think the the

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Speaker 1: overall lesson here is that when you have safeguards in place,

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Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that the elections are always going to

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Speaker 1: be perfect, but it means that there's enough uh evidence

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Speaker 1: there data there that you could look at to try

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Speaker 1: to figure out when there is a problem and then investigate.

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Speaker 1: Which is so I think this show is actually the

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Speaker 1: system is working, not that it's not working. Just for

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Speaker 1: a moment, let's go to Georgia and tell us a

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Speaker 1: little bit about the federal lawsuit there between Democrats Stacy

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Speaker 1: Abrams and Secretary State Brian Kemp and what the issue

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Speaker 1: is there with about a minute, sure, so Kemp's now

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Speaker 1: out of office. This is a suit against his successor,

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Speaker 1: and it's claiming that a whole host of problems and

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Speaker 1: how the elections have been run, from voter purges to

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Speaker 1: how the voting machinery works to the handling of things

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Speaker 1: at the Poland place, and all of the things together

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Speaker 1: violent the Voting Rights Act and are unconstitutional. They're trying

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Speaker 1: to make a claim that you should look at this

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Speaker 1: holistically and when you look at it as a whole,

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Speaker 1: it is disenfranchising voters, uh, and that there needs to

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Speaker 1: be a kind of global remedy to fix Georgia's election system.

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Speaker 1: Thank you so much, rick Always a pleasure. That's Ricksen

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Speaker 1: a professor at the University of California Irvine School of

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Speaker 1: Law and founder of the Election Law BLAG. Thanks for

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Speaker 1: listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and

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Speaker 1: listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on

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Speaker 1: bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is

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Speaker 1: Bloomberg