“’The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’”—DeLancy’s theory of the case

Jay DeLancy:

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 there’s thousands of people, but you think that’s 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 it’s totally impersonal the more people just go forget it, it’s 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?