Jay DeLancy

 

Gautam Hathi: 0:00 – 1:47 (1:47)

As you know, we’re really interested in how you got interested in this issue. That’s sort of what we’re trying to see, like how you came to this. We were doing research and looking around and from what we saw you sort of got intrerested during the 2000 election, there was something that caught your eye. I was wondering if you could talk about where you were then and what in particular caught your eye about that that got you interested in the issue of voter integrity.

Jay DeLancy: 1:47 – 5:04 (3:17)

Ok, well I was in the military. And it was one of those moments where you realize, we all sat around watching. There were times where we were in a shop that had a TV on and everyone was talking about the election, and the way people were changing the rules during the election and it just really dawned on me how vulnerable it was if someone wanted to game it. There were games that I didn’t know about going on at the time involving the military ballot, but if somebody wanted to game it they could. And watching, the sense of vulnerability really bothered me. I started thinking about how could we check? I thought there was voter ID, but I thought there were exceptions to it. I didn’t know the law, but I called up a legislator’s aide who I knew from school, and asked her if anyone says they don’t need a signature card, they don’t have an ID. If anyone says they don’t have an ID, is there a waiver they sign and is that waiver public record. And she said I don’t know, I’ll think about it. We started talking and I said I really feel like somebody should be doing this, checking the integrity of the elections, and I feel like starting an organization someday called Voter Integrity Project, what do you think? And she said, “you know, if you did a lot of people would support it.” Her boss was Bob McDonnell, the future governor of Virginia, and I was living in Virginia at the time, so I thought that was an encouragement. But I was still in the military at the time, so I didn’t really – that’s something you can’t do while you’re in the military, so it just stored in the back of my head. Then you fast-forward to 2008, with Acorn getting busted in numerous jurisdictions all over the country, with fictional registrations by the not just 2 or 3 but 50s and 100s in Cleveland, in Nevada, in Louisiana, couple other places i can’t think of at this moment, but they were everywhere. And so I thought, Wow, what if someone were gaming this, what would be their objective. So it dawned on me then that I needed to really start thinking about this because I wasn’t going to stay in the service forever. And then a little later I realized I was content with my rank and I was not going to try and strive to make the next rank. I retired as a Lt. Col, but at that time when I decided I was going to retire I started really seriously looking, and a group from Texas called True the Vote they had just started, so I contacted them and said, “What are you doing?” And they were having this statewide summit for internal Texas summit that just coincided with me flying, they were doing it on a Friday night, Saturday morning. That Friday I was leaving New Mexico for the Air Force and coming back to North Carolina. So I called my wife and said I’m going to lay over in Houston for a day and check this out. And what I saw there that just enthralled me was data analysis, something you would like as a data guy, and it just dawned on me, wow, there’s a lot we can do with forensic data analysis and figure out just from a macro scale what’s going on with this. And that’s what we did. We started off, I finally met someone who could help in that area, and at that point we had an organization.

GH: 5:04 – 5:23 (0:19)

And so I know from what I’ve seen that you spent a good deal of time with True the Vote, or you spent some time with them. What in particular do you feel that you accomplished there? Is there anything in particular that you thought was, you know, especially interesting that you found or that you came across while you were working with them?

JD: 5:23 – 8:24 (3:01)

I went to their briefing, I liked it, they gave me the slides and I told them if you have anybody in North Carolina that’s interested in doing this, I want to help them. I didn’t even live in North Carolina at the time. So they didn’t pay anybody, of course, and so all we were doing, all I was doing really was just going around showing the slides to people that I could. And the research they did that I thought was very interesting was very, very rudimentary and it was just a neat idea, was to look at anywhere, any address that had more than, I think it was eight people. They created a cutoff, they decided that if it’s more than eight, we want to dig in and find out why. And eight’s a pretty high number. But still, eight at one address, adults, registered from the same address. And so they did stupid stuff like Google Earth. Is it a house or is it an apartment building. Oh, an apartment building? Forget it. Is it a house? Oh, wow, that’s a small house. Is it a vacant lot? Oh wow, that’s kind of cool. Is it a business? That’s kind of cool. So they put all these records up to show the authorities and the authorities there in Houston, Texas, they bought it. The director of elections is an elected guy and he stood up there and had a presser with them and said, wow, okay, we’re going to look into this with you. We think this is significant. And a funny thing happened a few weeks later. The warehouse building holding 10 million dollars of election tabulation equipment burned to the ground in Houston, Texas. The New York Times Covered it. It was ruled arson and no one ever figured out why that happened, but the things about vote fraud, a lot of times just showing up to look for it has a way of suppressing what you never know was going on. Because people are like, maybe we should go elsewhere. But the fact that the equipment burnt down really, it gave them wind in their sails, True the Vote. So I was running around the state just giving briefings, talking about True the Vote, and people were apparently going on their website and signing up and that was the extent of it. And so, we realized, they’re not going to give us money, so we got to do our own thing, so we set up our own organization just as a private corporation, because it’s too expensive to go through the IRS and we later learned True the Vote was getting hassled by the IRS and I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to go and do the research. So we formed as a corporation and started doing our work, and we discovered over 500 people in Wake County who had gotten out of jury duty by claimed they were not citizens, but they were on the voter rolls, and about 240 of them the timing was such that they had voted first, or they had been on the roll first and then they went and said they weren’t citizens. Of those, 130 had actually voted and said they were not citizens, so sequentially it meant something suspicious was going on here. And we thought we were going to get patted on the back for it but instead we got slapped down. It was a real epiphany for me that wow, people, they don’t like what we’re doing.

GH: 8:24 – 8:51 (0:27)

So actually, we wanted to come back to that but first I wanted to ask whether there was any particular – so I know you said you were doing work from what you got from True the Vote – but was there any particular incident or event that prompted you to set up Voter Integrity Project here in North Carolina? I know it was in 2011, which was after a while, so was there any particular thing, or was it just sort of organically, you know, it might be a good time to set this up?

JD: 8:51 – 10:09 (1:18)

Oh, ok, two things. One, I was retiring, and two, I knew I was coming back to North Carolina. I had taught at NC state back in 2003 through 2005 and I was in the reserves, and I would travel where the Air Force would need me to go. It was a good time, if you liked doing that, it was a good time to do it. But we kept our house in Raleigh and planned on retiring here, didn’t know what I was going to do, but I wanted to do that, that one thing. And so that was my key was to find people in North Carolina who could help, and True the Vote did help us find people. The thing they didn’t like was with non-citizens, that made them nervous. That was in early 2012, and so they asked us to disassociate from them. And, fine, I took them off of my website and proceeded, continued doing what we were doing, but realized we were alone. And that was okay, I mean, they weren’t really, I thought they were going to provide us some kind of reach back like in the military they call it a reach back capability where you have a headquarters that helps you with things. No, it was a one way. We were finding volunteers, people who would support them financially, and that was the extent of it. They weren’t giving any money back or anything, so we thought this is fine, we’ll go ahead and do our own thing.

GH: 10:09 – 10:15 (0:06)

Were you surprised at that? Do you know why that happened? That must have been sort of weird, right?

JD: 10:15 – 11:43 (1:28)

It was. It was strange, it was surprising, it was a bad week, because it was… If you Google my name and the words “temper tantrum”, WRAL did a very, very sendup of what happened that week. It’s factually incorrect but it was written like a blog and it was pretty funny. I look at it and go, wow what a great narrative. I was angry when I saw they were dismissing every one of our challenges without even looking at the evidence. I got angry and thought, you know what, I might as well do as Saul Alinsky says and if you don’t like the game, blame the officials. And so I just got up and carried my stuff and walked out. And on the way out I had a binder with me and it had a crash bar on the door and I hit it and it made a loud noise, and I was like, okay Jay, work with it and I just kept walking. And WRAL said I kicked the door open, you know, I thought like some drunk cowboy who caught his wife cheating on him – just a lot of fun. But then, following that, I sent a really detailed email on how to appeal it and I needed True the Vote to help me with legal support and that was the end of it. They called me that day and said, “ah, yeah, we’re done.” And I asked, “what do I tell the media?” And they said “we don’t know.” Because the New York Times had already been researching a story and I’d already spoken to them once and they were doing it on True the Vote but it was a question of this is going to come up and they gave me no clue so I just… I don’t know to this day I think it was the fact that we were working on that issue of non-citizens and it made them very nervous.

GH: 11:43 – 12:15 (0:32)

And then also to get into the process that you’ve been going through for finding improper registrations and challenging them, we know from what we’ve read that in addition to the jury rolls and looking at the voter rolls you also sort of went door to door as well in some places. And that just seemed really interesting. So we wanted to hear about what was that like? Did you meet anyone who you found was improperly registered or any of these things, and what was your interactions with them like? Can you talk a little bit about that process?

JD: 12:15 – 15:47 (3:32)

Certainly. It was an epiphany, to go you and meet these people. There was a 70 year old man, who lives in Buncombe County in Asheville, and he loved knocking on doors and doing this. And what we were doing was we realized that to really get these people off the roll what we’re looking for is people who no longer live where they’re voting from, you know. That’s poor grammar, but, you know, if they don’t live there they shouldn’t be voting there because they’re affecting local elections. And you know, it’s like a drop in the bucket, and we knew that, but we wanted to demonstrate the extent of the problem. It’s a lot bigger than we were able to demonstrate. What we were doing, we would find these people that were on the rolls and True the Vote’s method was get them off the roles, report them to the election officials and get them off the rolls. They didn’t know North Carolina law. There’s only one way to get them off the roll and that’s to file a challenge. And I’m never going to ask anyone to file a challenge unless I’m convinced they have enough evidence that it’s legit. I talked one guy into withdrawing a challenge once because of that. He just, “I know they’re not there!.” I said, “you better do more than that, you know you’re not going to walk into a hearing and tell them you know this. You’re going to bring some proof or don’t ever mention my name again.” And he heard it and fixed it. But what we were doing was we’d go up and if we had five or six people at a residence we’d go up and knock on the door and say, “are you so and so?” “No.” “Well, I’m with Voter Integrity Project and we are checking to see, did you know that five people are registered to vote at this house.” That’s a conversation starter, and most of the time people are like, “What? Let me see that. Oh yeah, that’s my son, he moved away 20 years ago,” that my whatever. And they’d go through it and they’d help us fill out the form and then we used that as our evidence. Because North Carolina law say prima facie evidence is a letter returned from the post office, but we decided that’s time consuming and depends on the post office doing their job, there’s too many moving parts. Let’s just talk to the person who lives there and get their word, get them to attest to that on a piece of paper. And we’ll take that to the hearing. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Cause each county has their own little political agenda and sometimes they’ll go, wow, you got to mail a letter. No we don’t. We don’t have to. The law says if we do that’s perfect but, you know, but this a homeowner from that address, and so it’s been interesting, because in one county, the very same county, one time we had a guy walk in there and say, it was a guy that we had showed him the data, and he said “I want to do this myself,” he went to hearing and he said, “yeah I live in that house and those people don’t, I want them off the rolls.” And they said “okay,” and they voted okay. Another time that happened and they said, “no, you got to mail a letter.” And so they didn’t even remember their own precedent they’d set. And so it’s just a real fuzzy area of law. They whole intent of the law, it’s designed so that the people who are governed can control who’s on that list. And the age old technique is called canvassing. And it’s perfectly, the political science major you would know, okay, not you, but your partner in crime here would know that it’s just the way it is. They always advocate canvassing and there’s nothing wrong with that. And so what we’re doing is canvassing to see who actually lived there and who doesn’t. And why Buncombe? Because people in Buncombe wanted to do it. It’s something that we encourage people to do it but it’s locally derived and they we mentor them and coach them on how to do it.

GH: 15:47 – 15:53 (0:06)

You say that most of the people who you met were supportive and people were interested to know about this stuff.

JD: 15:47 – 17:42 (1:49)

Yes, a couple of them weren’t. Yeah, did you meet anyone who was… I didn’t, Bill did. I couldn’t believe it. Who could slam the door in the face of a seventy year old man? He’s the sweetest man you ever knew. It was just like are you kidding? But some did. We made a mistake too on a couple of them, because Bill at the time, we thought, just go out and challenge them anyway Bill, let’s see what happens. And that was not a good move, we learned. We’re not going to do that again. I met one that was really cool thought. I was a lady that was in Hendersonville, North Carolina. She was, excuse me, she’s probably deceased now, and she had oxygen and a sign on the front porch saying no smoking and they had eight people registered at her house and her daughter said it was her brothers and sisters and it was a little tiny, it was a black lady, and it was a little tiny house that she said, you know, “they don’t live here now, but we all did. And we all use this address,” and I thought, culturally I had never realized that, that this is home, and they all vote from home. It’s illegal, but I’m not going to challenge it. I thought, you know what, I see what you’re saying. So we didn’t challenge that and it really has changed the way we do it. When I see this kind of thing going on, we want to be gentle, and we don’t want to be the bullies that walk in and say, “Get those kids off!” But, technically it is wrong and we’d like to see them fix that, and I explained to them that they really should be voting wherever they live, and she goes, Well they come here and sleep here once or twice a week. I’m not going to argue with that because their mother’s dying and it’s like, okay. But really, once you’ve grown up, where you live under North Carolina law, is where you’re supposed to vote, and that’s the only way you can have really ethical elections is for people to vote from where the actually have a dog in the fight.

GH: 17:42 – 17:55 (0:13)

And so, in the cases where people were unhappy or upset, they just sort of slammed the door in your face? You didn’t have any extended conversations with those people for the most part?

JD: 17:55 – 19:52 (1:57)

No, we never had that. No, people were generally – generally they were amazed. And they were impressed and they were very supportive. We had a lady in Craven County that, she built an organization doing that. She’s a big Republican, so I only help her so much because we’re not partisan and she’s more concerned with getting people to work in the Republican Party and it’s like, yeah okay. But she told me that she was using our information. It’s freely available, and using our methodology and people were going, I love what you’re doing, can I join you, and so she built an organization do that. Okay, that’s cool. I wish we can build an organization doing that, because what I’d love to see is more people observing elections and going in an working as employees in the elections who’ve been trained by us. You know, the state gives great training, but the fraud component is something that we have focused on and I know we’re getting way ahead but these are people who are, the people we talk to in other states run their own organizations and they are looking at various aspects of this too from a fraud mitigation perspective, and that’s something that election officials, they have a hard enough time just getting it right, not to sit there and look at people and say, “You’re committing fraud, you’re committing fraud.” They don’t have time for that and we don’t want them to do that. But somebody needs to do be just stepping back and watching. And we’d like to have people in that position who are just watching, and just saying “okay, that’s not right.” Our friends in California did that to the point of creating actionable evidence that stood up in front of the US Civil Rights Commission. They just documented the disenfranchisement by way of vote fraud, and it was being done by the people administering the election in California. Thank God we’re not there in North Carolina. But still it was an eye opener, and the documents they use are now the standard that we advocate all across the country for any state that wants to clean up their election process.

GH: 19:52 – 20:11 (0:19)

To go back to the fact that you’re a non-partisan organization, we’re just wondering, you know, obviously this issue especially over the past few years has become really charged, polarized. So how do you as an organization avoid stepping into that? How do you remain non-partisan?

JD: 20:11 – 22:38 (2:27)

Well, as individuals we all have partisan beliefs. If you’re friends on Facebook with several individuals you go, “Oh, he’s a Republican! He’s a radical!” You know, whatever. But when we have big data projects, when I say big data I mean we crowd source the research, because a lot of it involves eyeballs looking at records and making a trained decision. It’s the training program, it’s complicated. You don’t just bring someone, as we’ve learned, you don’t just breeze over the training. You train them, you test them, you make sure they know what they’re doing. And it was a big lesson learned with dead voters in fact, but what we did was we stripped off the party affiliation and the race, because we did not want these people who were analyzing this data to have an agenda. It’s North Carolina, I don’t want to stereotype, I do not want to encourage someone who has a racial agenda to come in and do our research. I’ve met people who go, “I know it’s those Democrats doing this, right?” And I go, “uh, no, actually it’s….The two we’ve gotten prosecuted are both Republicans.” And they’re like, “Huh?” It’s kind of funny watching them. Our motto has been let the chips call. It’s like, whatever. Do the data, and then if we have to know later, like in Buncombe, it became a big deal, because the League of Women Voters was throwing rocks at us at the hearings saying that, “You guys are just targeting these neighborhoods! You’re a bunch of racists!”

And we were like, well we happen to have the break down of the racial and the political affiliation of these people. Take a look. And it was a nice mix. We were just looking at data, we didn’t care, whatever. We just didn’t care. And so I think even thought it’s very discouraging when people do that. And like the first one we did with non-citizens, that was I met Justin Levitt from Loyola law center. Immeidately, he wrote an article saying that the people they challenged were persons of color. You know these people had Asian names, they had all kinds of names. We’re wondering, golly we didn’t know that. How did he know that? I let it go. I’ve met Justin since, and he’s an affable dude, but at that moment they were just, they were trying to discredit us any way they could. It’s very discouraging when that kind of thing happens. But no, we’re non-partisan, and anyone who says we’re racist is itching for a fight, that’s all I can say.

GH: 22:38 – 23:01 (0:23)

Also, obviously people have been critical and they’ve been trying to find a partisan angle in your organization. I know that you’ve also, just from looking at the videos around, you’ve made statements that could have a partisan angle to them. Your political views are not a secret necessarily. Do you worry about that?

JD: 23:01 – 24:35 (1:34)

Well, obviously, I spend five hours in a deposition having to defend that stuff, for example sending email to Republicans saying, “Come on, we can win this!” We, kemosabe? You know, I got in trouble for that kind of thing: “Oh, you’re really a partisan lobbyist.” I go, look, I am communicating with an audience, and I’m trying to rally them. If I go talk to unaffiliated people, I would have a different message. If I were invited to talk to the League of Women Voters, I would have a different message. I go to where I’m invited to speak to. If I’m speaking to a Republican group, I still will not get up there and say, “them Democrats are doing this,” but yeah, I’ll joke around and I’ll be a lot looser if anyone has any undercover video of me making jokes about that, it’s….yeah…Sure, I mean you’re going to find stuff. That was what we said in the deposition, which was, come on now, this was targeting a message. You read my editorials or anything write, we’re scientific, that’s really at the end of the day that’s what we are is scientists. If people say we’re partisan, it’s like, you go have fun, you can dismiss our work saying we’re partisan. It’s just like making fun of a Southerner because of his accent. You go enjoy that and then when you find out you’ve been snookered by that guy or he’s a lot smarter than you thought he was, that’s what we do. We just go alright, you’ve got your narrative, we’ve got ours. We’re scientists and we’re bringing computer science to this problem and by the way we’re getting results. You can call us names if you want to, but history will prove that we’re right. We’re not the bad guy they say we are.

GH: 24:35 – 25:01 (0:26)

To move on to the criticism as well, once you started doing this there were a lot of people who came out and there were articles written, I know Rachel Maddow did a thing, it was all a whole train of stuff. I also know there were accusations that you were racially motivated, partisan, whatever. What was you’re reaction, obviously that must have been a lot coming at you very quickly, so can you talk a little bit about what that was like and what your reaction to that was like?

JD: 25:01 – 28:34 (3:33)

Well, the year prior to that Maddow piece coming out I had taught at a high school that was 98 percent black, and I had teachers and students, I loved those people, I loved them. I had to leave, there were other reasons I had to go, but it was time to go and I spent a year there and it was just a wonderful experience. And then when I saw that Maddow piece is broke my heart that anybody at that school who saw that would think I’m a racist, and that just made me really angry. The way that happened was with our dead voters, there was a lady, I think it was Carolyn Allen, there were 41 of them on the voter roll, and we matched the wrong Carolyn Allen to the wrong dead people. Yeah this was the WRAL piece. And they hunted around and they just happened to find a black woman. I wrote her a note. I told her it was nothing personal and I apologized to her. But she thought it was racially motivated. I don’t blame her. She got a letter in the mail saying someone’s challenging your right to vote and she’s an elderly lady and she’s going, “Oh lord, here we go again. 1960s all over again.”

But WRAL took that piece, Rachel Maddow grabbed it, they ran with it. It was very discouraging. My dog even growled at me after that piece. It was really bad, but it hurt and immediately, up to that night I had my cellphone on my website, because we were low key, just a bunch of… Picture a new movie called Bambi goes hunting, that was us. We were just doing the work, be-bobbing through the forest and boy, the bears came out that night. I got so many hateful phone calls, I wish I’d saved them I saved one, but I wish I’d saved a bunch of them, because it was a real epiphany to just let people hear them and go wow. They came out that night. We got hit with a denial of service attack on our website, just the whole nine yards of what they do. And oddly enough it was only 12 hours after Media Matters had launched their first webpage on us that all this happened, so it looked like a leftist assault on what we’re doing. Which only made us go, “Wow, we must be onto something here.” So it had a reverse effect of encouraging us, number one, and number two, it’s okay, we’re going to do the research. And we had projects in the pipeline already that it’s like, whatever, you can say that all you want to but we were already onto our next project which was finding people in North Carolina and in Florida who had both voted – voted in both elections at the same time. And so we knew we were proving fraud and we weren’t really… It’s like, in the military we call it ground clutter, or ground chatter, or chaff, there’s varying terms for it, but it’s like, whatever. Okay, their shooting at us, yeah, but it’s expected. It was embarrassing, and it hurt, but you brush yourself off next day and go, okay, I’ve been wire brushed before, publicly, in front of a general officer and it’s like, it hurts, but if he didn’t fire you, and in this case Rachel didn’t shoot me. She got our name right, so I figured in the long run, it’ll be okay. My wife was so mad, though, we took her off the email distribution because she saw the hateful emails and she was going crazy. I called my web guy, my web designer, up and said, “Take Casey off the webpage now, will you?” Because she was flipping out just seeing all these people saying these hateful things about her husband, so personally it was like a kick in the stomach, but that’s all it was.

Andre Danko: 28:34 – 28:53 (0:19)

So we’re about half way through, so I’ll hand it over to Andre. Yeah, sounds good. So, one thing Gautam mentioned before was you’d spoken about the canvassing and challenging people, so I kind of wanted to flip gears on that and ask whether you’ve ever spoken to anyone who was properly registered but whose registration you’d challenged.

JD: 28:53 – 32:02 (3:09)

Yeah, we explained to them what we did and how we did it. Well, okay, for the dead people, she wasn’t even challenged, but Wake County wrote her a letter. One of them wouldn’t listen, she just screamed at me and said, “You people are bla bla bla!” And that was like, ooh, I see the winds have changed here, because we’d gotten two and a half weeks of wonderful pats on the back and coverage and suddenly I get this call on my cellphone. But the next guy who called, he kind of started the same way and I said the same thing I said to her, I said, “Sir, would you like to yell at me or would you like to hear an explanation.” He goes, “You have an explanation?” And I said, sure. And I explained it to him, and he went, “Oh, okay.” So I said I’m sorry it was an accident that we matched the wrong dead person to your name, I apologize, but as it stands right now there’s a dead person still on the voter rolls got your name, and you ain’t it, and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say you were. And he understood, and it’s been the same thing. Our guy in Fayetteville, our most recent full throttle activist, has been working in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and he’s kicking it down. The week he caught 363 more challenges, but in a previous batch he had about 200 that were in there and a couple of them, there were two people who called and blasted him. I didn’t get to talk to them, but he did and he talked them down, and one of them, she was very supportive after that, and just very friendly. Because once they understand what we’re doing they realize this is not personal, it’s just about there’s a gaping problem in the way we conduct elections in America. What these challenges do and what this research does is exposes that problem, that people are left on the voter rolls since 1993 and Bill Clinton, that law that he signed as soon as he got into office that created this wierd, just surreal universe where if you dare challenge someone’s right to vote then you’re an evil person. At that point, that’s what shifted the argument, but the result of it is that because the law, there’s hundreds of thousands of people just in North Carolina who are registered to vote who no one knows where they live, and yet they’re voting from that address and they’re not there. And the state knows it but there’s nothing they can do about it because their hands are tied by federal law. So we figured out a way, state law doesn’t tie our hands but it takes a lot of work. So we checked to see if there’s any volunteers that wanted to do the work, and if they do, whatever county you’re in, if you want to do it in your county we will equip you and we’ll show you how to do it. It takes both computer science skills and and it takes a certain amount of willingness to publicly stand up in a room full of people and get yelled at. So that’s what happened. The guy Bill, when he got yelled at for the first time and they called him a racist-sweet man, he’d worked in the school system, just a delightful man-and it really hurt him badly and it shut him down. There, you scored one, bad people, you called him names and he walked away feeling sorry. It took a while, we really had to pump him up, but it just hurt him, it changed him. Anyway, sorry I ramble, go ahead.

AD: 32:02 – 32:18 (0:16)

So I kind of just wanted to follow up on that question, you’ve spoken a lot about deceased voting and cross voting, so I wanted to move to the 2012 election and to ask you, all this research you’ve done over time, do you think it had an impact during the election that year?

JD: 32:18 – 36:17 (5:59)

I think the impact was more psychological than anything else. Mathematically, heck no. You know, it was a drop in the bucket, those dead voters we found, they were people who were registered to vote, but the only ones, I’m convinced after really sitting down and looking at the etches with all the different county boards of elections, that there might have been a couple of them who were opportunistic double voters, voting for their dead grandma or something like that who passed away recently, but there weren’t a lot of them. And so we realized that. So did we save the world from dead voting? What we did do is we put any bad people on notice that if they are going to dead vote, they’d better think twice, because they might get caught, and so that was one aspect. The other was the response. There were a couple of things that were very interesting. First, the Democrat party, we didn’t, they were watching us. They weren’t talking to me, but they were watching us. And so I knew this because everywhere I signed up to be an observer, they would be an attorney from the Democrat party who’d signed up to be an observer too. And finally the second time that happened, we were just chatting away, we were breaking all the rules, we’re not supposed to talk to anybody, but we’re just having great conversation, and I’m not doing my job of observing because I’m enjoying the conversation more, but still. Finally, I looked at him and said, “You’re here to observe me, aren’t you.” And he kind of blushed, and so there’s kind of that. And also I’ve noticed the NAACP in Wake County had actually requested UN observers come in to Wake County. The false narrative they’d built up from True the Vote, this is circling back to the stereotypes that the left through True the Vote in 2010, which is when they first did this and had great success. I just got to digress and tell you this that True the Vote, they were so successful, they had observers everywhere and Houston thats a big deal and late in the day there’s one technique called flooding the zone where people come in and they vote for all the people they need to vote for, and they get out the vote effort they found out they’re not going to vote.  When you do that, when you flood the zone, you’ve been finding out all day that people aren’t gonna vote you’re like a boiler room calling people “you going to vote you going to vote can I give you a ride?”  I’ve worked in that boiler room for Mark Earley in Virginia and Earley if the lady say’s “nah I’m not gonna go I’m too discouraged” it’s like “God we lost one” and it’s like “let me get this straight because it’s was something this morning in the paper someone saying a lot about Earley you’re not gonna vote now.”  She goes “no I’m not gonna vote.”  And so we just kind of throw our hands up and go, slam the phone down and go, “oh we lost one guys sorry.”  But in Chicago in ’82 it came out in Federal trial that they were saving those names and that at the end of the day if they needed those votes they’d send people in to vote for them and we’d seen that phenomenon in Fayetteville where at the last couple of hours suddenly 30-40 people showed up at a precinct to all vote for Rick Glazier, a guy who wound up winning by 39 votes that year so we know that happens. And in 2010 in Houston the new black panthers – this wasn’t publicized like the one in Philadelphia was – but the new black panthers came in with billy clubs and ran off the True the Vote observers late in the afternoon so we figure they were about to flood the zone and they didn’t need witnesses for it.  So this kind of thing does happen. We didn’t have a lot of observers in 2012 but because of our work, the republican party, they had a lot of observers, they had a lot, and they really took it on as a very serious initiative and so you never know what didn’t happen because observers were there.  That’s just the nature of crime.  If you see a policeman on the corner you’ll never know what crime didn’t happen but we think it had an effect and I think we had a fairly honest election for a change in North Carolina that year despite the fact that no ID was required.

GH: 36:17 – 36:37 (0:20)

And just to jump in do you think like -you had mentioned Fayetteville – you were saying their efforts to flood the zone and same thing in Houston and do you think they are still sort of conspiracies in the same way as the – obviously Chicago machine politics in the 1980’s is quite an operation – are you saying that still goes on?

JD: 36:37 – 38:28 (1:51)

Oh yeah.  Ok lemme talk about Chicago machine politics.  I hope you read that report I sent you.  The grand jury report, that report was kind of read and put away – the grand jury expected to change the world, they expected everybody to go and fix their laws.  Nobody did except Mexico oddly enough, with the voter ID that they recommended in that report, no state in North America did that, the only country that did it was Mexico so their elections are more honest than ours are in that regard. But what they did they laundry listed just a whole bunch of ways you can commit fraud.  And yes, nursing homes, eyewitnesses, I actually had a guys daughter – she was in a group home – had the mentality of a four year old and she got dragged in to vote and they were the Barry center place of severely mentally retarded – I hate that word but mentally handicapped people and people paraded in there and registered them and voted for them and those people didn’t know who they were voting for. And so there’s different kinds of fraud, there’s different flavors, and so we know that kind of machine voting is still going on.  Curbside voting: for some reason they put a loophole in the voter ID law that doesn’t require an ID for curbside voting and we had a senator.  He was all mad and hot under the collar and he was gonna fix it for us and then he was told to shut up and color.  He actually put a bill in and he was a powerful senator too but he failed at getting that fixed.  Instead they went the other way and they created more loopholes last summer so it’s a yeah, short answer.  There are a lot of ways they can steal elections.  Some of them are a lot harder now because of the voter ID laws, they’re not impossible.  But it’ll slow them down, and if you can slow them down thats half the battle so thats a long way to say yes.  But he was asking the question so sorry.

AD: 38:29 – 38:40 (0:11)

So to follow up on that, the next question was about the new voter laws and so if you could kind of speak to that a little more and if there are any additional measures that you’d like to see taken in order to ensure the integrity of the vote what those would be.

JD: 38:41 – 42:29 (3:48)

Well in a perfect world, yeah I would love to see – our voter roll is so corrupted now in North Carolina with non-citizens and with people who don’t live here. Because of the criminal operations we’ve seen of people coming in here to register and vote and leave during the same day of registration over a series of – I mean we’ve had same day registration for quite a few years and we’ve had this very lax rules about people coming in and registering from an address at which they don’t live.  I think the voter roll is corrupted to the level of somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand people and the only proof that I could have of that, that even democracy North Carolina would agree on, is that they found 200 thousand people on the voter rolls who didn’t an ID at DMV and of course their contention was “oh well those people are people in North Carolina who don’t have an ID.”  And said no, no, every state that has made that claim has been proven wrong.  In Georgia they claimed that and Indiana they claimed that.  That’s never been the case.  Instead what happens is you find a few people who don’t have ID’s and Georgia over a six year period they found about 15 thousand people who qualified for a free ID.  Did they really not have an ID I don’t know.  The ones I think really did not have an ID, maybe, maybe, were those people born by midwife way out in the country.  But even then they got social security, they got all the benefits, and so I even question that, but still Josh Lawson, the chief legal council for NC, he told me that he has seen some elderly people that they’d gone out and made sure they got their ID’s.  And we’ve made it clear.  We’ll help anyone get an ID.  What I’d like to see if I could have everything, I’d say do a complete re-registration.  You’ve gotta be alive, you’ve gotta walk in, you’ve gotta register.  And no more non-governmental employees doing registrations.  Before ’93 we had a good voter roll because you were a government employee who was signing on saying yes I have verified the identity of this person.  We don’t have that anymore.  For a long time this voter roll’s been corrupted.  I realize that’s a long ball and that would take a national law change to do that but a voter ID with the thumb print and then when you go in to vote, just like when you cash a check at the bank, when you go in to vote, when you sign your form – whatever it is – absentee ballot request, provisional ballot, or the little piece of paper called ATV or authorization to vote not only do you sign it you put your thumb print on it.  That way we’ve got a biometric.  If I’m going in there and I’m trying to vote for you and later on you show up and you vote they tell you “I’m sorry you’ve already voted” and you “go no I didn’t.”  This happens, this is not theoretical, this happens in North Carolina.  2012 it was only 165 people who actually stuck around to vote provisionally but I heard others who said I just left I was in a panic.  And they didn’t vote.  They went to the bank and changed their ID.  They were worried about identity theft.  What happened was someone went and voted for them but now if we could have a thumb print on there there would be some forensic way to find out who exactly went in there and lied and stole your vote.  Right now, they sign an affidavit saying “yeah, yeah, that’s who I am.”  There is nothing anybody can do.  You know there is no photography allowed there.  There is no way – yeah he signs an affidavit great.  A liar signed an affidavit lying about his identity.  That doesn’t prove anything.  It doesn’t prevent anything.  But he said he’d go to jail if he got caught.  Well he won’t get caught.  As soon as he walks out, number one you won’t know its a fictional voter until later and by then the guy’s gone, the vote counted, and there’s nothing you can do to unring that bell.  Your grandmother probably told you “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and so cleaning up the voter roll and making sure you know who is voting would be the best reforms I could imagine.

AD: 42:29 – 42:52 (0:23)

So my follow up question actually kind of speaks to that in that as you go about trying to ensure the integrity of the vote, do you think that ensuring everyone is legible to register to vote is also an important issue and more specifically do you think there are measures that can be taken to ensure no person or group is put at a disadvantage in their ability to vote?

JD: 42:52 – 46:41 (3:49)

This is the, I hope you’ll put this on your side, I’d love for someone to see this slide I thought I would show it and you all can have copies.  Since 1993 the biggest crime in the world is to inconvenience someone in registering to vote and if you do it then you must be an evil person to inconvenience them at all.  You think historically what you know, what my forefathers did in the military to secure that right to vote and now something like – wow I have to go get an ID – is considered discrimination.  And so I’m opposed to things like universal registration, I’m opposed to registering people who don’t know they’re registered because voting is a public act and its a deliberate act and its a sacred act.  Someone should want to do it and when you start flooding the voter rolls with people who don’t know that they’re even registered and don’t care and just don’t even care enough to go vote what you’ve done is created a situation where their identity can be stolen and theres nothing anybody can do about it.  We are generally opposed to all of those.  We’re opposed to internet voting because anybody could rig it through programming.  We’re opposed to electronic tabulation machines because people don’t trust them.  You can tell me all day from a computer science perspective, you could show me all day all the safeguards you have in it, but as we know from Apple with all their great safeguards they have to protect the identity of their phone, the FBI found a way to hack their phones and we know for any measure there’s a countermeasure so the key is keep it simple.  Make people demonstrate some effort to vote.  Make them register and just universally apply it.  Let’s get a reality check here.  If you put a bank down in a bad part of town and you run the bank there for years and you lose money.  You have to hire security efforts.  It’s been robbed.  You close the bank.  I did something that affected that community and they’re mad at me for it and they’re saying “you discriminated against us,” well no.  If I kept the bank open for white people only, or for hispanics only, or for black people only, then I’m discriminating.  When I close that bank and say we’re not operating there, no ones going in that bank.  I don’t care what color your skin is.  I’m not discriminating against them.  I’m just changing the rules on how we’re gonna do this.  As long as these rules are universally applied – and see the Jim Crow era they were not universally applied. And Jim Crow – big democrat KKK alliance that created the Jim Crow era.  They were really trying to discriminate against black people.  My Dad for being too friendly with Clarence Lightner, the guy who ran for mayor in Raleigh back in the ’60’s, I got up one morning to go to school and he’s laying on the couch.  He’d been beat up badly.  The klan had beaten him up.  That era is then and this is not that.  When you discriminate universally saying we’re gonna make you prove your identity everyone’s doing it.  It’s not a matter of well it inconveniences this population more than that population, which by the way is a very paternalistic and kind of racist thought of your own view when you say, and we heard it in the trial.  I wish I could quote him exactly, but someone saying that, “well blacks have a harder time getting an ID.”  He went on to say things that just made you realize you are being racist against black people thinking they’re not smart enough to get an ID.  I wish every black person would understand that they’re being played in that argument when no, those people are talking down to you Mister instead of just saying well get your ID cause that’s the law.  Sorry, I’m passionate on the subject.

GH: 46:41 – 46:57 (0:16)

Just to follow up, I mean obviously those are the reasons why you might want to universally apply this but obviously the perspective of the other side is – do you at least understand the fact that they’re suspicious of this given the history that’s there?

JD: 46:57 – 49:14 (2:17)

Their suspicion is greatly fueled by the Black Lives Matters, the agitation industry, who makes money sending out fund raising letters and we didn’t realize that until we got attacked on the Rachel Maddow program and started realizing we must be doing something right. Cause I know, you know, when I saw New York SEIUNY1199.  That’s a union in New York with a caravan of vans with their stickers proudly emblazon on the van. They drove down here to protest North Carolina’s voter ID law.  That ain’t about racism.  That’s about something else.  I’m afraid it’s about fraud.  It makes me really suspicious as to what they’re up to that they’re coming down here.  I just don’t believe these people I think there’s two groups.  There’s people who know they want to steal elections and there’s the masses who are being played to believe that the intent of the election integrity movement, and it isn’t a movement by the way, that the intent of that movement is to discriminate against blacks and bring back Jim Crow.  That’s just total malarkey and yet thats the only argument they have because they will not discuss the facts.  The facts are people are stealing elections, people are stealing votes, and then they dismiss it.  Its like arguing with Donald Trump. They start going after you instead of discussing the facts.  And thats what we’re into.  When they give all this racial rock throwing, they’re just trying to – they’re either played or they’re playing people.  I’m not gonna question the motive of the right honorable reverend Barber cause I tried to get to him and I did have a nice conversation with him.  And we’re gonna disagree.  He went to Duke divinity school and thats a very – I don’t know if you heard this but there’s a whole lot of social gospel kind of Marxist thinking that goes on there and I think he was overly influenced by that and so he’s bought into that argument.  And I disagree and I think as I told him I’ll tell any black activist who will come to me and I’ll say one day you’re gonna realize we’re on the same side and I look forward to that day and they look at me skeptically.  But they’ll figure it out one day cause we’re trying to be honest brokers in a game where everybody is screaming at each other and it’s like dude if they stifle our voice this union is in big trouble.  That’s all I can say.

AD: 49:14 – 49:40 (0:26)

One thing you’d spoken about when I asked about the 2012 election was that you think it was very much a psychological effect on people in that people now know that you’re looking for us we’re gonna be more cautious, more careful before engaging in voter fraud.  But given that to date there have, in comparison to the research and findings you have, there have been relatively few people removed from voter rolls, what drives or motivates you to keep doing what you do at Voter Integrity Project?

JD: 49:40 – 55:09 (5:29)

We’re not finished.  What we’re convinced of – when large groups get caught doing the same thing over and over across the country – that there is, I know it sounds like a cook, but there really was a conspiracy once.  And the day the state has given us the day to prove, to say things like – and you’re welcome to have copy of this if you want – it references the inner state cross check program and the numbers of people voting.  You know, how do you find 3500 people from Georgia who are also voting in North Carolina in the same election?  They’re not riding buses.  And I realize that number’s inflated cause it’s what we said in the military.  Initial intel reports are always inaccurate.  However, the 3500 from Georgia and 2800 from Michigan, really, and 2800 from Illinois.  These people are not driving down here to vote – no one would be that stupid.  But at one point or another they’re coming in and registering and they’re leaving the information behind and somebody’s voting for them.  We’d like to know who’s paying for this.  Our latest effort has been with law enforcement people and I’ve briefed some very high level law enforcement people about this because that’s what we want to see.  Yeah, we haven’t gotten the prosecutions and there’s a big reason for that it’s cause DA’s.  It’s the lowest form of felony on NC statute, it’s the absolute lowest.  To do anything lower than vote fraud would be a misdemeanor that’s how low it is.  To attempt, you attempt murder. Murder is a class A felony.  Attempted murder is a class B felony.  Solicitation to commit murder is a class C felony but when you get down to the very bottom of that list, a class I felony, if I solicit you that’s a class II misdemeanor, so I stand on the corner all day trying to get people to fraudulently vote for me.  If I get caught it’s a class II misdemeanor.  There are no DA’s that are going to prosecute that.  As I’ve been told, “I got meth labs to bust, I don’t have time to deal with this.”  And it’s really frustrating, it’s like the American people do care about vote fraud but our political class doesn’t and they deny it has – it’s kind of a circular logic — well there is no vote fraud because there is no prosecutions.  Well there is no prosecutions because there is no vote fraud.  And so it’s just we’ve come to see that and come to realize this is the environment from which we work.  And so that’s what drives us is to, we knows there are tons, millions of millions of Americans because this is a movement spontaneously popped up all across the country.  True the Vote didn’t send me money, they just inspired me, and I said “good idea, I’m gonna do this in my state.”  There are other groups that popped up in other states doing the same thing.  That’s a movement like the civil rights movement, like the environmental movement.  Any movement you imagine that’s what this is.  At the end of the day that movement will be happy when we believe that we have honest elections and right now there’s a lot of people who don’t believe it and the proof of that is people who just give up and don’t vote.  You go to state where they have voter ID law, participation goes up.  I wonder why that is?  It gives them hope that maybe someone’s fixing it and maybe my vote does count.  In addition to the DA’s and also the local board of elections have thrown out a lot of challenges – they’ve thrown out some, not a lot. Just wake county threw out a lot for the non-citizens.  Beyond that we’ve had great success.  But there have been relatively few people who they’ve also removed from the voter rolls as well, right? Relative to what? Well as I mean if you’re allowed to – if tens of thousands of people cross registered or people who have maybe deceased.  I know that people who’ve been thrown off have been in the hundreds or less.  We had 800 in Moore county – over 800 in one county.  Now when you consider they had about 6,000 on their roll it’s a drop in the bucket, it really is.  I get that.  It takes a lot of work and ultimately it’s a lot of work for everybody involved and ultimately what we’re doing is exposing a problem.  We have been trying to get lawmakers to fix the problem and unfortunately it’s derived from federal – it starts with the federal government’s laws.  NVRA and HAVA, Help America Vote Act, which “Hurt America Voting Act” is what I’d call it.  We’re gonna do our best in that, but Cumberland County has a little over 40,000 missing voters and we know for a fact that people were going in Cumberland, registering to vote, and going on from there to go somewhere else and they handed off that information to a third party.  As soon as we figure out exactly who that person was who did that, and we’ve been working with law enforcement to do it, we’re gonna catch that guy and catch the people who paid him.  That’s kind of where we’re at with this.  Are we gonna get ‘em all, no, but we’re gonna make certain kinds of fraud more easy to detect.  That’s the goal really, that’s one of our goals.  Make vote fraud harder to commit and make vote fraud easier to detect.  The public had better agree with both of those things cause we’re not trying to take away anyone’s right to vote except for the person trying to steal a second or a third vote or an illegal vote of any kind.

AD: 55:09 – 55:37 (0:28)

So I guess one final question I have is that you’ve spoken about the Board of Elections not necessarily going after such cases of fraudulent voting because it may be a low class illegal act or felony but given the difficulty nailing down these individual cases of voter fraud at the end of the day why should the average person, why should the average Joe, care about these inconsistencies in voter registration?

JD: 55:37 – 1:03:54 (8:17)

I got to correct one thing.  The boards of elections are not at fault here.  It is the district attorneys, the elected leaders, and the legislators who have made vote fraud such a low level felony.  We’d like it to be a class G so that if I solicit I’m still committing a felony.  Then the DA’s would have some tools to work with to discourage people from committing fraud.  I don’t want to sound like an alarmist.  I probably am sounding like one.  We have dug into this deep enough to have a better picture of what’s going on then 99.99% of North Carolina.  I’m sure some activists on the other side who are pulling the strings know what’s going on.  Most of the legislators have no clue but they’ve heard anecdotally the stories. They’ve seen mail return from brand new voters – mail return undeliverable.  How’s that work?  They register to vote and the address they gave comes back undeliverable.  That was probably a fraudulent registration.  We’d like to see those metrics go down.  So the average person should realize number one, this is not about racism.  This is about honest elections.  Yes, there is an impact on access to the polls.  But it’s not barriers, it’s not Jim Crow.  It’s equally applied law and so dismiss the idea of racism and ask yourself why is it that people are screaming so loudly about this?  In the words of Shakespeare, “The lady doth protest too much me thinks” and so that has been something that really motivated us.  That fact that people are protesting so much makes me go, “there’s something here.”  We don’t even know what it is.  We should probably be afraid but instead we just feel empowered.  People encourage us all the time and we hope people will give us an equal listen and make up their own minds on this.  One thing we wanted to make sure – we’ve covered a lot – was there anything else you wanted to add that we didn’t cover or anything else you wanted to say? Yeah, that New York Times piece.  Justin Levitt, I did mention him, and he was cited in this piece as saying voter impersonation fraud is rare.  You all are bright kids, you go to Duke.  There is a term in social science research called confirming the null hypothesis.  I don’t want to put you on the spot and go are you familiar with that?  But I’ll break it down for people who might be watching this.  If I create an instrument to look at something, let’s say I launch a tea kettle into space, a little tiny tea kettle, and then I create a telescope to look at that tea kettle in space and I don’t see it.  The only reason I know it’s there is because I put it there.  But my instrument said it wasn’t there.  I’d be a bad social scientist if I ever said “well I looked and it’s not there.”  And that’s called confirming the null hypothesis, or as Carl Sagan put it: “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Justin Levitt, when I met him in a much more sociable way, I saw that article saying “The kind of vote fraud that voter ID would prevent does not exist.”  What do you mean it doesn’t exist?  His methodology was he looked at a sample of 10 years, over a billion votes cast, and he found I think 31 credible cases of voter impersonation fraud.  I’ve found, just in my research, I found two and he hadn’t found those, so wow, I didn’t look for them hard but I found two and so I called Justin up and said how do you define credible and he said, well if they’re prosecuted and I just started laughing at him because I know how hard it is to get prosecutions.  If anything, there’s a multiplier.  If they prosecuted 31, I have no idea what that multiplier is, but there is a number that each one of those prosecutions represents that’s a tip of the iceberg.  People with any brains in social science and in the media are embarrassing themselves when they take, and Justin quickly backpedaled. I said “Justin, you’ve heard of confirming the null hypothesis right? You’re a bright guy?” He said “yeah, yeah I have.”  I said “you’re saying there is no vote fraud because you only found 31 of them?”  He said “no, no, that’s not what I’m saying!”  So he put the right delimiters in his study so it’s all academically, and conclusions, hypotheses, and all that, so it’s a scholarly study, but the media including the right and honorable New York Times even.  They cherry pick the data and go “well he said there’s none.” So they misinterpret.  Justin said “no that’s not what I meant.” I said “we’re making a movie would you like to come on that movie?” I’d love to get him on tape saying that and he lawyered up on me cause he got a job with the justice department. “I can’t you have to talk to our public affairs officer.”  I get it, you’re not gonna do it. But it’s bad social science research and so many people in academia they’re grading that and looking at it and just taking that interpretation and so I want to throw that in as a footnote just because it’s a very difficult crime to detect, very difficult, because someone walks in, they claim they’re someone, and they walk out, and they voted.  Unless that person walks in and someone remembers who came in before, don’t forget early voting and our high is 30 days.  North Carolina, we got it squeezed into 10 days.  Still isn’t enough.  Back to your question, I’d say 0 days.  Have a national holiday of Election Day.  I know the left wants a national holiday, great, but you’re not gonna have early voting, you’re not gonna have absentee voting unless you’ve got a sworn affidavit under penalty of perjury, witnessed, with a thumb print.  I wanna be sure that nobody – you go in one day and it’s a national holiday because it celebrates our freedom that everybody would come in and vote.  What we have now is days and days and days where no one knows who’s voting.  Nobody knows you.  Back in the old days everyone knew cause you’d come into your neighborhood, your precinct, and vote.  Now you go into early voting or absentee and so it’s so easy to commit fraud through both of those channels.  I’d like to see both of those cut. I think a lot of the reasons why people don’t know is because I go to a voter precinct and theres thousands of people, but you think thats different for early voting vs. day of voting in terms of who knows you at the polls and who can sort of check that you are who you say you are.  By law, a great deal of the people working in that precinct are from that neighborhood, and so if I walk in there and claim to be you, and it’s your neighborhood, there’s a reasonable chance, depending on where you live and what the neighborhood is, but somebody there might know you.  That happened, that happened to some guy – James O’Keefe – in New Hampshire. He was voting for dead people.  He didn’t vote but he was proving that you could vote for dead people.  One of the guys said wait, I know that guy, he just died.  James was like, uh, I hear my mom calling, and he just left.  When you do it locally on election day, that’s the way it was supposed to be.  It’s a very sacred public act and you vote with your friends and your neighbors and it’s the day you come together and celebrate democracy.  When you depersonalize it with absentee, with massive absentee voting.  I mean there were guys in Florida, a cop in Florida who was working with us, he said there were people that were getting registered for absentee ballots without their knowledge and the next day somebody would come knock on the door and say “we see you filed for an absentee ballot would you like any help filling it out.”  That’s called voter intimidation.  These are elderly people and they’re freaked out.  We gotta get this back in a bit or people, it’s gonna go the other way.  In Norway they tried internet voting and it failed dismally and nobody voted.  The more you make it to where its totally impersonal the more people just go forget it, its done, I don’t trust it.  If that happens, we’re finished as a country.  We’re totalitarian. We’re like Iran at that point.  I’d like to avoid that through having honest elections if it’s still possible.  That answer your question?

GH: 1:03:54 – 1:04:14 (0:20)

One other thing I was curious about as well is that you keep talking about the fact that theres this sacred act of voting – Is that from your time in the military? What sort of gave you that perspective? It seems that’s something that really gets you, right? It is. I hope my friends on the left would agree. It’s very sacred.

AD: 1:04:14 – 1:06:46 (2:32)

How did that happen to me?  Parenting, my mother, she was an activist and in 1964 I remember making yard signs for a guy who ran for governor, Dan Moore.  I was what?  Seven years old, six years old? “Dan Moore for ’64,” something like that. She had us politically involved and we would go to the booth and pull the lever with her and it was such a neat time.

I just hate these things that depersonalize it and make it to where “I just mailed it in last Thursday.”  It’s so much more fun when the campaign culminates at that moment, and then you don’t know until that moment.  That’s the best answer I got.