Speaker 1: Welcome to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. I'm June Grosso. Every
Speaker 1: day we bring you insight and analysis into the most
Speaker 1: important legal news of the day. You can find more
Speaker 1: episodes of the Bloomberg Law Podcast on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud,
Speaker 1: and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcasts. North Carolina's ninth
Speaker 1: congressional district is the last undecided House contest in the country.
Speaker 1: The state Elections Board has refused to certify the results
Speaker 1: of Republican Mark Harris's slim win while it investigates allegations
Speaker 1: of election fraud. Republican State Senator Tommy Tucker says this
Speaker 1: isn't the first time something like this has happened in
Speaker 1: North Carolina. The Blatant County has had a long history
Speaker 1: of absentee ballot fraud, even in both parties. So we
Speaker 1: are being once again embarrassed in this state that our
Speaker 1: elections don't count. Joining me is one of the foremost
Speaker 1: election law experts in the country, Rick Hassan. He's professor
Speaker 1: at the University of California Irvine School of Law and
Speaker 1: founder of the Election Law blog. So Rick explain what
Speaker 1: the allegations of election fraud are here. Well, they seem
Speaker 1: to involve absentee ballots UH in at least one county
Speaker 1: Blatant County, and maybe in more counties than that, and
Speaker 1: they seem to involve two kinds of activities. One is
Speaker 1: collecting absentee ballots from people who may or may not
Speaker 1: have requested themselves, but for whom there was a request,
Speaker 1: and then filling those out if they were blank for
Speaker 1: the candidate Mark Harris, who has declared the winner of
Speaker 1: the election. And the other is that they were collected
Speaker 1: from some people and potentially destroyed if they were marked
Speaker 1: for UH McCready, the candidate on the other side. And
Speaker 1: while there's about a nine vote difference between the two
Speaker 1: candidates UH, it is possible that there was enough activity
Speaker 1: UH related to UM either filling in ballots or destroying
Speaker 1: ballots that it could have changed the outcome of the election.
Speaker 1: And this is now under investigation by the state Board
Speaker 1: of Elections as well as it appears by state and
Speaker 1: federal law enforcement officials. This is not the kind of
Speaker 1: election fraud that Republicans across the country have used to
Speaker 1: justify ballot restrictions in recent years. Explain the difference well, so,
Speaker 1: the most common kind of election restriction that we've seen
Speaker 1: put in place in recent years are voter identification laws.
Speaker 1: These are laws that would require you to show a
Speaker 1: certain kind of i D A photo i D like
Speaker 1: a driver's license or passport before you're allowed to vote.
Speaker 1: That kind of requirement would prevent impersonation fraud, where one
Speaker 1: person goes to the polling place and pretends to be
Speaker 1: someone else. That kind of fraud is not really a
Speaker 1: kind of fraud that we see on any kind of
Speaker 1: scale as a way stealing elections. While fraud related to
Speaker 1: absentee ballots, while a small problem, it has been documented
Speaker 1: as a problem this Blatant County is certainly not the
Speaker 1: first instance where we've seen this. Having a voter ideal
Speaker 1: in place doesn't stop someone from collecting absentee ballots, filling
Speaker 1: them out. Destroying absente ballots really has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with it. And so while the many of the laws
Speaker 1: are aimed at stop in one kind of fraud, a
Speaker 1: kind of fraud that doesn't happen uh, the laws are
Speaker 1: not really aimed at stopping this other kind of fraud,
Speaker 1: And so it makes you wonder whether these laws are
Speaker 1: actually being passed to prevent fraud as is claimed, or
Speaker 1: maybe they're being passed to suppress the vote of those
Speaker 1: who are least likely to have a kind of voter identification.
Speaker 1: In the Shelby County case, the Supreme Court gutted the
Speaker 1: landmark Voting Rights Act. Does this situation show that that
Speaker 1: was done too quickly and that that this situation might
Speaker 1: have been prevented if it had still been in place.
Speaker 1: While I do think that the Court is wrong in
Speaker 1: gutting the part of the Voting Rights Act that required
Speaker 1: that jurisdictions with the history of race discrimination and voting
Speaker 1: get approval or preclearance before they made changes in their
Speaker 1: voting rules, I don't believe that this kind of wholesale
Speaker 1: fraud being conducted with absentee ballots would have been affected
Speaker 1: by um the Shelby County case. I mean, really, this
Speaker 1: this is not a situation where something that was would
Speaker 1: not have been precleared, like say a voter I D law,
Speaker 1: strict voter ID law that my disenfranchised minority voters would
Speaker 1: now be able to go into effect. So, while there
Speaker 1: are many things to say against the Shelby County decision,
Speaker 1: I don't think this is affected one way or the
Speaker 1: other by that what would have prevented this sure, So
Speaker 1: the states have different rules for um making sure that
Speaker 1: absentee ballots are handled properly. One of the big controversies
Speaker 1: is over whether someone can collect the ballots of someone
Speaker 1: else who's a non relative. This is known somewhat pejoratively
Speaker 1: as ballot harvesting, and the concern is that you might
Speaker 1: have people collecting ballots and doing things bad things with them,
Speaker 1: as as has been alleged in this election. UH. There
Speaker 1: are safeguards that can be put in place to prevent that.
Speaker 1: So one of the things is that when these ballots
Speaker 1: are collected in North Carolina, they have to be witnessed,
Speaker 1: so two people have to sign or there has to
Speaker 1: be a signature under penalty of perjury with affidavit um.
Speaker 1: And so one of the things that's going on in
Speaker 1: this investigation is that they are looking at the patterns
Speaker 1: of the people who have signed these UH as witnesses
Speaker 1: signed these ballot um applications at ballot applications, and when
Speaker 1: you're seeing one person signing thirty fifty of these applications,
Speaker 1: you can kind of see if there's a pattern there, see,
Speaker 1: you know, what, what was it? And one of the
Speaker 1: things that we've seen is that you see some of
Speaker 1: these people who collected dozens of ballot those people have
Speaker 1: now been interviewed. There was a story in BuzzFeed that
Speaker 1: that some of them were, uh, we're being paid to
Speaker 1: bring the ballots and not deliver them to election officials,
Speaker 1: but to bring them back to a consultant's office. The
Speaker 1: reports that this involved um this being done potentially in
Speaker 1: exchange for drugs, and so there's all kinds of nefarious
Speaker 1: allegations here. The fact that you can look at the
Speaker 1: signatures and see the patterns is one way of knowing this,
Speaker 1: and another way of knowing this is looking at the
Speaker 1: patterns of absentee ballots that have been requested and those
Speaker 1: that have been returned. And it looks like a lot
Speaker 1: of ballots that were requested, many more were requested in
Speaker 1: this county compared to other counties, and many fewer democratic
Speaker 1: ballots were returned in this county compared to other counties,
Speaker 1: which suggests that you can kind of look at the
Speaker 1: data and look for patterns. And I think the the
Speaker 1: overall lesson here is that when you have safeguards in place,
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that the elections are always going to
Speaker 1: be perfect, but it means that there's enough uh evidence
Speaker 1: there data there that you could look at to try
Speaker 1: to figure out when there is a problem and then investigate.
Speaker 1: Which is so I think this show is actually the
Speaker 1: system is working, not that it's not working. Just for
Speaker 1: a moment, let's go to Georgia and tell us a
Speaker 1: little bit about the federal lawsuit there between Democrats Stacy
Speaker 1: Abrams and Secretary State Brian Kemp and what the issue
Speaker 1: is there with about a minute, sure, so Kemp's now
Speaker 1: out of office. This is a suit against his successor,
Speaker 1: and it's claiming that a whole host of problems and
Speaker 1: how the elections have been run, from voter purges to
Speaker 1: how the voting machinery works to the handling of things
Speaker 1: at the Poland place, and all of the things together
Speaker 1: violent the Voting Rights Act and are unconstitutional. They're trying
Speaker 1: to make a claim that you should look at this
Speaker 1: holistically and when you look at it as a whole,
Speaker 1: it is disenfranchising voters, uh, and that there needs to
Speaker 1: be a kind of global remedy to fix Georgia's election system.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, rick Always a pleasure. That's Ricksen
Speaker 1: a professor at the University of California Irvine School of
Speaker 1: Law and founder of the Election Law BLAG. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and
Speaker 1: listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on
Speaker 1: bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is
Speaker 1: Bloomberg