Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at the Federalist,
and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge. As always,
you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on x at fbr LST, make
sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of
course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Jason Snead, executive director of the
Honest Elections Project. Here's the question, does election day actually
mean election day? That is the key issue before the
US Supreme Court, and the Court of course heard oral
arguments in the case known as Watson RNC, the legal
dispute on the challenge to a Mississippi law allowing election
officials to accept mail in ballots up to five business
days after election day, so long as they are postmarked
on or before the day of the contest. And as
you can imagine, the arguments this week have been very
interesting on this case. Jason, thank you so much for
joining us in this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Well, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having
me on the program.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you covered the oral arguments. Give me your sense
of what the court is really trying to get at
here from or at least get some answers to in
this case.
Speaker 3: Well, this case, as you very eloquently laid out, really
comes down to a fairly straightforward question. Does the election
day mean election day? And when do we actually consider
a ballot to be cast? Is it when you fill
out the piece of paper that is the ballot, or
is it when it is actually received by an election official,
by somebody that is designated by the state to take
possession of that ballot, to establish chain of custody, and
then eventually to count or not count if for some reason,
you know, you violated the lall for instance, failed to
comply with the voter I D Stand or something like that.
For a long time, in fact, for most of the
nation's history, we have understood and we have gone to
great pains to establish very clear rules that say that
ballots must be in the possession of officials by the
end of election day in order to be counted. And
it's really only been in some limited circumstances throughout the
nation's history, typically wartime, and then within the last couple
of decades that states have begun to stray away from
that and have established Mississippi style rules that allow ballots
to be received and then to be counted after election
day is over. And so what the Court is really
trying to get to the bottom of is, first of all,
through the federal laws that have been established to set
a uniform election day mean in fact that ballots have
to be received by the end of that day, and
then what does it mean to actually cast a ballot?
And a lot of the argument today surrounded what the
history and practice was throughout the nation's history, beginning really
in about eighteen forty five when Congress passed the first
of these uniform election day statutes. It was an interesting argument,
and I'm sure we're going to get down into the
nitty gritty of it, but I think it was definitely
a fascinating two hour debate really about what election day
actually means.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great place to start, really the
history of this, because that's what the Court has to
look at. How has this really been viewed by the Congress,
How has this been applied by elections officials. You note
that this thing goes back what one hundred and eighty years,
So tell us a little bit about the history where
this began and now where it has become this extended,
lengthy election period.
Speaker 3: Well, this was one of the interesting points that even
some of the liberal justices were pointing out, quite correctly,
that the concept of elections have changed quite a bit
from the beginning of the Republic until now. Of course,
I don't think that the change is necessarily cut in
the direction that they very clearly were trying to go
in their lines of questioning. But if you were going
to go back to seventeen eighty nine, for instance, voting
in the US would look markedly, markedly different than it
does today. And a lot of the things that we
sort of take for granted are the result of systemic
changes that have been enacted by Congress or by the
states over the last couple of hundred years to bring
some degree of security and predictability and uniformity.
Speaker 2: To the process.
Speaker 3: So, at the very beginning of the Republic, we actually elected,
when we were choosing presidential electors, we had states that
would hold elections at different times, and so there was
a thirty four day window across which states would be
selecting would be voting to select president of the United States,
and then in eighteen forty five, Congress stepped in and
established the first of two laws that set a uniform
date for the election, and they did so because they
wanted to bring consistency. They wanted to make sure that
states were voting at the same time to avoid fraud
or the perception of fraud. That was one of the
overarching reasons for passing that initial statute, And from really
that point forward, the default norm has been that when
we are talking about election day, we are talking about
election day, and that ballots, in order to be counted,
need to be in a state's physical possession by the
end of that election day.
Speaker 2: And during the argument today, a lot.
Speaker 3: Was made about practices dating back to the Civil War,
which is really when you saw what we would consider
to be absentee voting begin to become an actual practice
that was used in any kind of widespread scale. Because obviously,
you had soldiers that were that were deployed throughout the
entire country. They were nowhere near where they were going
to be voting, and it was important to make sure
that the Union soldiers had had access to the ballot.
But what we saw from Paul Kleman, who was arguing
for the r n C, And what we've seen in
the briefing is that even then, states were going to
great lengths to ensure that when a soldier voted, his
ballot was taken into physical possession an official that was
designated by the state to receive that ballot, and then
that was when it was considered to be cast, not
that soldiers of putting the ballance in the mail and
then the mail was taking six or seven weeks to
get back, and then you're still counting ballots that af
throughout that entire period. And really that's been the norm
throughout the majority of the nation's history that we've understood
that elections are over on election day. It's really only
been in the last couple of decades and states have
made one policy choice after another to encourage people to
vote by mail and then eventually to mandate the people
vote by mail that they decided to continue pushing the
envelope of what is an acceptable practice and then push
it into this late collection. And it's really only gone
widespread since COVID, when states like Mississippi changed their law
to allow late ballots to come in and then decided
to stick with those laws and make them permanent after COVID.
So out of two hundred and fifty years of national history,
really only the last five or so has seen the
kind of widespread sense that it is in fact okay
to allow ballots to come in days or even weeks
after the election is over.
Speaker 1: Well, can you imagine the chaos if you had from
the Civil War battlefield all kinds of ballots coming in,
you know, as you mentioned weeks and weeks and weeks.
You know, I think we can imagine that because we
have seen that over the last few years, including in
two thousand and twenty four, which I think maybe the
most egregious example of that in California, where you have
this absentee or mail in ballot count basically extending the
election period a month plus. Not only do you not
have the clear winner of a congressional race, you still
have doubt about who what party control Congress. I mean,
that is absolute bedlam. So how much do you think
the court is going to take in some of these examples?
I think of Nevada in twenty twenty two, Adam Laxalt,
who was clearly leading in that Senate contest and then
all of a sudden days later, the vote changes because
they allow all kinds of votes to come in after
election day.
Speaker 3: Well, I think this is going to be a point
that most of the justices on the Court are going
to take seriously. I think that the three liberal justices,
very much like most progressives in the voting space these days,
pretty solidly discount the problem of fraud or public perception
surrounding late ballots and elections flipping after election day and
so forth. But the majority on the Court has long
understood that states have an obligation to deliver elections that
are well run and that are secure, and have understood
that public perception of fraud and fraud itself are essentially
one and the same. In fact, you heard in oral
argument today, you heard that exact point raised, that perception
essentially is reality. So I certainly think that they're going
to look at some of these instances, some of these
examples in recent memory where ballots were coming in and
election results were flipping in the post election context, when
voting was supposed to be over, and yet ballots are
continuing to trickle in days or weeks late, oftentimes with
a postmark, oftentimes without that that was also something that
we heard the justices really wrestling with was the fact
that not all of the states that have these late
ballot laws even require that they have a postmark demonstrating
that they were mailed before the election. And it is
absolutely damaging to public confident. It's in the voting process,
not only if you are watching election results change potentially
dramatically after the voting period is supposed to be over
and all ballots are supposed to be received, but then
also if they're counting ballots that don't even have any
indication that they were voted before the election was over,
that is a recipe for public skepticism. And so I
do think that they're going to take that seriously. And
even when when when Paul Clement was being pressed about
one of the briefs that took some positions that were
counter to the r n c's, you know, the point
was made that even though this particular brief was arguing
that in fact, federal law does not and and really
can't be read to line up with the R and
c's position, they were saying that the court if there
if there was going to be a tiebreaker, was how
he put it. But the tiebreaker would be that the
Court should consider what ruling is going to be the
best defense against fraud and public concern and surrounding it.
And here I think that there's really only one rule
and one outcome that does that, and that is to
say that late balloting is illegal, it violates federal law,
and it should be ended in all fifty states, and
we should go back to the bright line standard, which
again is the standard that most people have lived with
and voted with throughout the majority of American history, that
ballots must be received by the end of election day
to be counted.
Speaker 1: I want to get to the fraud question just a moment,
but I thought this was a very interesting point and
extremely salient point that Justice Alito made during oral arguments today.
By the way, a plug for Federal Editor in Chief
Molly Hemingway. She's got a great book coming out about
Justice Alito coming up next month, so stay tuned. We
will have more details on that. Around the corner, the
Justice Alito said today, we have lots of phrases that
involve two words, the second of which is day, labor Day,
Memorial Day, George Washington's birthday, Independence Day, birthday, and election day.
They are all particular days. So if we start with that,
I have nothing more to look at.
Speaker 4: Well, maybe these maybe it's inevitable that some sort of
line drawing decisions like these have to be made. Unless
the rule is anything goes. You know, states can do
anything they want in this area. We don't have a
whole lot to go on here. We have the phrase
election day, and we have history. If we looked just
at the phrase election day, what would we take from that?
I think you've been saying, we're and we're moving in
the direction we don't have election day anymore. We have
election month, or we have election months. I mean, the
early voting can start a month before the election, the
ballots can be received a month after the election.
Speaker 1: Do you think Justice Alito's mind is set on this matter?
And what do you think about the points he raises
about these particular day days that really are just a day,
not days and days and days.
Speaker 3: Well, I suppose that if there's a polymarket bet out
there about which way Justice Alito is going to come
down in this case, I'm not sure that I would
be betting that he's going to be on the side
of Mississippi. Based on statements and questions like that that
he really peppered both the Mississippi Solicter General with and
then the US Lister General on the RNC.
Speaker 2: You know, I think that his statement is right on.
Speaker 3: You know, we have this very common sense understanding when
we're talking about a particular day, that we mean a
particular day, and you know, we can, for instance, I
know lots of people that love birthdays so much that
they want to celebrate them for.
Speaker 2: Longer than one day. But even then, you.
Speaker 3: Know, they'll say colloquially, right, you know, oh, well, it's
my birth month, you know, it's my birth week, right,
And they're not trying to argue that your birthday is
actually a seven day period that begins on your birthday
and stretches for seven days afterwards. Right, even the twelve
days of Christmas, right, we aren't literally saying that Christmas
Day itself is twelve days long.
Speaker 2: It is one finite period of time.
Speaker 3: And I think that I think that this argument that
election day really doesn't mean election day falls into a
very common trap for left wing voting policies. They're just
over complicating things so much so that they're using facts
and arguments to obscure a very basic truth, and that
is that we have this thing called election day.
Speaker 2: We know that elections are.
Speaker 3: Supposed to be over on election day, and when we
are continuing to bring in ballots, not just count the
ballots that we've already received, but when we are continuing
to bring in ballots, and results are continuing to shift
in meaningful ways, dramatic ways. And again, not just the
ballots that we're counting that we're received before the election
was over, and so vote totals for particular candidates are changing,
but the overall number of votes in the election is
changing as well and continuing to go up. Most people
would say the election isn't over. And I think that
when we have reached that point, we are state laws
are encouraging people to hold on to their ballots late,
to get them in the mail late, believing they will
be counted, and then they continue to come in late.
Speaker 2: We really have extended voting.
Speaker 3: Beyond the day that is set by federal law called
election day. That's a very common sense, very very easy
to understand explanation for what this debate really is. And
you can try to obscure that fact with legal arguments
and with policy arguments and with arguments that people need
extended periods to get their ballots in, none of which
are true or accurate. But you're really just trying to
distract from a very common sense understanding that most people
have that an election is over when the ballots stop
coming in and when you stop counting those new ballots,
and that's really what we're arguing about in this case.
Speaker 1: Well, Jason, that's just Jim Crow two point zero talk.
You're offering. That's what we hear over and over again
from Democrats in the left in another important election law issue,
which we'll get into in just a bit, but this
is particular to you. You have been studying this whole
issue for a very long time before you got to
the Honest Elections Project. You're with a Heritage Foundation working
in the former Attorney General ed mess office, and you
did a good deal of work, I know, with the
Heritage database that tracked fraud in elections. And I want
to ask you this straightforward. Do you think these extended
election days have led two fraudulent votes and what do
you think the ultimate impact is?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that the impact from a fraud and
from a security perspective is real, and I think that
it unquestionably has led to fraudulent or illegal ballots being counted.
There's really a couple of different ways that this can
play out, you know. One is the hypothetical that if
you wake up the day after the election and you
see that your preferred candidate is losing, and you realize, shoot,
I forgot to get my ballot in the mail, you
might just be tempted to slip it into the mail,
hoping that it's not going to get postmarked and it's
going to be received within the window, and then it's
going to be counted. Because what evidence at that point
would there be that you did anything illegal, even if
it is postmarked after the election, especially with this new
US Postal Service rule that says that postmarking is likely
to be delayed, meaning that it's not going to be
postmarked the day that it gets into their possession, but
potentially one or two days late. There's still no evidence
that you tried to commit any kind of fraud there,
So why wouldn't you. Boat traffickers might be inclined to
do the same thing, to go around door to door
to the folks they know have mail ballots, but they
can see with their absentee ballot tracking that they didn't
turn them in, so they go around and they start
collecting those ballots. There's definitely that possibility. And if you're
in a state, which these are mostly blue states that
have these late ballot laws, and you don't even have
a postmark rule, there's absolutely no disincentive to try that.
The other way that this could go down, of course,
is that courts could decide to read out any of
these very basic safeguards. You know, take again the question
of postmarket. Right now that you have this this this
rule that has effectively delayed when postmarks are going to
be put on ballots, you can easily see somebody like
Mark Olias, the leading Democratic election lawyer, go into court
and argue, you know, look, the state legislature said that
it needed to be postmarked by election day, but now
we know a ballot can be put in the mail
on election day and it might be postmarked a day
or too late. So you know, you, judge, need to
rewrite the law and allow ballots to come in without
postmarks or with late postmarks to be counted, because we
want every vote to count. So in that case, you
have you know, potentially illegal ballots being being counted, and
you know, we sat we heard several of the hypotheticals
of the judge to suppose about the way that these
ballots can potentially swing the outcome, right, they can be
outcome determinative, and that the loss of public confidence that ensues,
particularly if you are or are operating under a state
law that says to count you know what otherwise might
be any illegal vote. So there's a real there's a
real possibility here of fraudulent balance getting into the system.
And I'm almost certain that illegal votes have been counted
in these races. You know, one of the things that
really jumped out at me when I was doing this
work at Heritage back in the day on fraud was
that any time you were talking about fraud that affected
more than one or two votes, it was almost always
in the mail voting context. That's where the fraud happens
because voting is taking place away from election offices, away
from election officials and poll observers, and it is extraordinarily
difficult to prevent fraud in those contexts. So that's where
if you're going to do something like a widespread fraud scandal,
that's where it's going to be, and that's another reason
why you need to have these very basic, for a
common sense rules like balance in by election day. That's
a bright line that avoids any possibility of these kinds
of fraudulent ballots being slipped in after the election is over,
hoping to swing outcomes. And I think that, you know,
there's certainly some of the argument that we heard today,
so I think it shows that the justices are thinking
about some of those concerns as well.
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Speaker 1: Our guest today is Jason Sneath, Executive director of the
Honest Elections Project. Now you said two things that I
find extremely interesting curious even you said that in some cases,
I guess judges try to legislate from the bench. I
can't believe that that's not in the constitution. That seems
like a separation of power issue. Jason. Of course, I
say that all tongue in cheek, because what have we
seen but just a long line of activist judges, particularly
on election law, over the last several years in this country.
The other question is, if you can't trust the US
Postal Service, well who can you trust?
Speaker 2: Jason? Those are both excellent points.
Speaker 3: Yes, we certainly have a perfect postal service, and we
certainly have never heard of an activist judge.
Speaker 2: Those would be the day, you know.
Speaker 3: I'll respond to both of those points, and I guess
I'll take them in order. You know, first, we have
seen time and time again activist judges that will enjoin
common sense election laws essentially the moment that.
Speaker 2: They are are pasted.
Speaker 3: Right. There are particular judges on the left, and what
you'll see is when there are lawsuits filed, as they
inevitably are against state laws, there will be a degree
of what we call form shopping that is, they'll bring
their challenges in front of those particular judges. Whether we're
talking about groups like the ACLU, or whether we're talking
about the Democratic Party itself or any of the other
folks in that orbit, they will go in front of
particular judges pretty confident that they will get a district
court ruling in their favor if they're going to federal court.
And that's a real problem, right, and that's especially a
problem in blue states that aren't interested, particularly in defending
their existing.
Speaker 2: Election integrity laws.
Speaker 3: So back in twenty twenty, one of the things that
we saw was hundreds of lawsuits being filed using COVID
as an excuse to justify an attempt to rewrite all
of these state laws through the judiciary. Right when a
state legislature refused to buy what the left was selling
in terms of leveling down on election security, they just
ran to a court and said, Aha, now you have
to do what we want, because actually COVID is so
bad that the Constitution requires states to get rid of
all of their election integrity laws.
Speaker 2: And a lot of judges went along with that.
Speaker 3: And in blue states where you had left wing ags,
left wing secretaries of state they would sometimes even just
enter into collusive consent agreements with the Democratic Party, with
its lawyers whatever, and they would just agree to rewrite
state laws right then and there. So this is a
this is a real problem, and it can lead to
situations where if you look at what your law is
on paper, you think you're actually pretty good. But then
if you look at what the law actually is in
practice because of court rulings and regulations and things like that,
it's a vastly different, vastly different dynamic. And then on
the other point about the postal service, this is something
that every state has to grapple with because every state
allows absentee voting to some degree.
Speaker 2: The question is who is going to be voting by mail?
Speaker 3: And for those states that say everybody should be voting
by mail, they really have to come to terms with
the fact that they are outsourcing a critical piece of
the democratic process, the handling of ballots, to an agency
that they do not control, that they cannot regulate, and
that thinks that if they lose only five percent of
the mail pieces in their possession on any given day,
that's actually a really good day, right, And so this
is a real price. And states that are pushing mail voting,
never want to talk about the flaws with that system.
They don't want to talk certainly not about the fraud
concerns surrounding mail voting.
Speaker 2: But then they don't want to talk.
Speaker 3: About the real risks that ballots are going to get
lost in the postal services possession, they'll never get received
or even with.
Speaker 2: And this is the dirty secret of these late ballot laws.
Even with a.
Speaker 3: Ballot receipt deadline that pushes the receipt deadline out by
five days, ten days, twenty one days in the case
of Washington State, a ballot still might get so heavily
delayed that it doesn't count. So this is a real
problem also, and it's one more reason I don't think
the Supreme Court is going to rule on these particular
policy grounds. But it's one more reason why states could
be getting rid of these late ballot deadlines and encouraging
people if they are going to vote by mail, to
vote early. And that's also why I think we've seen
so many states do exactly that, for within the last year,
have got rid of their late ballot deadlines. I think
there's just a degree of common sense that is finally
beginning to seep into into folks thinking on some of
these late balloted lines.
Speaker 1: I think anybody who is a Seinfeld fan and has
seen the episode where Jerry tries to help mailman Newman
finish up his route so he can Newman can get
his sought after Hawaiian route. It was a failure because
Jerry had I think, gotten the mail to something like
sixty percent of the people on Newman's route, and they
were suspicious because that was too high of a mark
to hit for the average mail carrier. In all seriousness,
I mean, that is a huge question. It's been a
huge question for a long time, the security of our
mail system. So the question is if we have questions
about the security of our US male system, that's a
real issue you for the security of our election system
and those ballots that go in. Now, as to the judges,
the forum shopping right, what say the three liberal justices
on the court, the Katanji, Brown, Jackson's, the Kagans, So
to my ores, what kind of arguments are they making
or what kind of questions suggest to you that they
might not be in the line of thinking that says
election day should be just election day.
Speaker 3: Well, I think if you listen to the way that
particularly justices so do my Orange Jackson were to a
great degree carrying water for Mississippi. I think it's I
think it's very clear that they were in favor of
a ruling for Mississippi. And you know, really for these
late ballot laws, that's really what they're they're trying to
preserve is is the widespread mail voting and the ability
of these left wing states to extend these ballot deadlines.
And so they were they were were taking uh, the U. S.
Speaker 2: Solstitor General to task, and.
Speaker 3: They were taking Paul Clement to task on a number
of different issues, everything down to the the history and
and the practices which very clearly show that we we
have long understood ballots to to be to need to
be received by election day. They were really trying to
uh to undermine that very basic position. And and and
like I said, carrying a lot of water for from
from Mississippi, defending some of these terrible practices. And when
other judge, when other justices were raising hypotheticals about you know,
just who could actually count as an official to receive
this you know, could my neighbor count as as somebody
that we give this to They were very defensive even
of that right. So they were basically trying to say
that unless Congress has very specifically passed a law saying
balanced you know, put in the mail must be received
by the close of polls on election day, then there's
nothing that is illegal about what states are doing.
Speaker 2: And Justice Jackson even at the end raised a.
Speaker 3: Bill that is currently being debated in Congress, felled the
Mega Act Make Elections Great Again, trying to imply that
suggested that Congress didn't think that it had already made
this illegal, which I think is a pretty absurd allocation.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is, so, I think I think Congressman Brian's Style,
who who brought this forward on the the House Administration Committee,
would think that's an absurd argument because the Mega Act
does exactly what the RNC is talking about. It it
confines election day to election day. So how does you
make that square?
Speaker 3: Well, that combined with the fact that when you know,
when when you know Republican members of the House have
been discussing election integrity law is like the MEGA Act,
they've been.
Speaker 2: Very clear that you know, it is already illegal.
Speaker 3: This is a reaffirmation, This is a recodification you know,
making explicit what has long been understood. It's you know,
it's really quite I think it's really quite telling. But
we see this in a lot of other contexts too.
The basic argument that that undermines a lot of what
the left tries to do when it comes to changing
voting policies. Whether it's you know, going into a state
like Georgia in twenty twenty and saying, you know what,
you guys need dropboxes, and you need them everywhere on
every street corner. Do it right now, whether it's going
into or Texas, excuse me, and saying you know what
you should do twenty four hour drive through voting, or
now with this late ballot law that that Catangi Brown
Jackson is saying, there's no explicit text in federal law
that says you can't receive balance after election day. They're
always saying, you know, the law says that elections shall
be run according to X, but they don't say why,
and therefore you can do why.
Speaker 2: And that's a pretty absurd way to read the law.
Speaker 3: Right If the law says a polling place in Texas
should be open from seven am to seven pm, and
I don't know if those are the numbers right off
the top of my head.
Speaker 2: But for the point of argument, let's assume it is.
Speaker 3: To then say, well, it doesn't say that it can't
be open outside of those hours. It just says they're
going to be open during those hours. So therefore that
means you could do twenty four hour voting. That's the
line of argument that that we're really kind of picking
up on there. And it doesn't fly. It doesn't pass
the smell tests. And to argue that, you know, Congress
proposing a piece of legislation somehow implies that it isn't
already illegal is a pretty absurd is a pretty absurd argument,
especially when the authors of that bill have made clearly.
Speaker 2: Think it is.
Speaker 3: So you know, I think that I think there's I
think there's nothing really there, And I think to a
certain extent, they are trying to carry water form Mississippi
and are grasping its straws. If they're reaching for bills
in Congress right now, is proof that Congress hasn't made
this illegal.
Speaker 1: Well, again, the argument from the left for a long
time has been and I think the argument in part
from the representatives of Mississippi election offices in this case
is that if you do not allow this expanded voting period,
just like if you do X, you do. There are many,
many different examples. One we're going to get to in
just a moment. If you put in a law that
requires the voter to show a photo identification at the polls,
you are dis enfranchising voters. You are suppressing voters, and
that is a violation of civil rights. They have used
that and those terms without exhaustion. It's been exhausting, but
without exhaustion for a long time. This is the latest
or just another under this huge umbrella. How but most
people just don't see it that way. I mean, you
have eighty percent support for this election integrity legislation. How
do they continue to make these arguments and how do
courts allow them to get away with it?
Speaker 3: Well, I think that you actually saw in the oral
argument today, Justice I believe it was Justice Kavanaugh who
asked the question of Mississippi, you know what a state
setting an election day deadline be guilty of voter suppression
essentially where they be disenfranchising anybody? And Mississippi said, absolutely not,
this is not disenfranchisment. Your reasonable deadlines not disenfranchised voters.
So they're defending Mississippi's law, but they're not willing to,
I think, be held out as a case study for
the left and why any state that does require election
date deadlines is somehow guilty of Jim Crow two point zero.
So I will give them that for certain, But you know,
the reality is that when you actually look at the
data right about these late ballot deadlines, which are always
held out as a necessary policy choice that states must
make in order to make sure that, you know, as
they call it, every vote counts, right, when you.
Speaker 2: Actually look at states that extend their balid deadlines, they
often wind up disenfranchising, to use their language, essentially the
same number of people. You know, Massachusetts had an election
date deadlin line up through the twenty sixteen presidential election,
and then it changed to a three day grace period.
And if you look at the ballots that we're rejected
for lateness under the old rule in twenty sixteen versus
the new one in twenty twenty four, they're rejecting almost
exactly the same number of ballots the number of ballots
in Nevada. When Nevada moved from an election day deadline
to a grace period. They are rejecting more ballots.
Speaker 3: Right, So, there are policy choices that states are making
to encourage people to vote by mail and then through
these late ballot deadlines, encouraging people to hold on to
their ballots longer on the belief that they will be counted.
They're essentially saying, it's okay to put it in the
mail late, We'll still count it.
Speaker 2: But that's absolutely not the case. That's not a guarantee.
Speaker 3: Conversely, if you look at at states that have rolled
these deadlines back, you know, Ohio, for instance, moved from
a ten day grade period to a four day grace
period across that same time period, and they rejected half
as many ballots for lateness in twenty twenty four as
they did in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: So there's no truth.
Speaker 3: Once again, just like with voter ID and you know,
voter list maintenance and everything else, the left is always
saying this is Jim Crow voter suppression.
Speaker 2: There is no data to.
Speaker 3: Sustain this, this claim that these ballot deadlines are either
a essential or B they actually do ensure that every
vote counts. Really, they just set voters up for failure
and they leave them one postal delay, one bad postmark
away from having their vote rejected and being disenfranchised.
Speaker 1: Democrats have been doing it forever, Liberals in particular, but
you know, screaming racist or racism every time they don't
agree with policy. Just because you want to have common
sense markers on when election, the voting process begins and ends,
it doesn't mean that it is racist. It doesn't certainly
suggests that that's disenfranchising. But what is disenfranchising, quite frankly, Jason,
is what is not talked about, certainly by Democrats, and
unfortunately it's not talked about enough by those on the right.
But what is disenfranchising is when you allow someone to
cast a fraudulent ballot or you open up the opportunity
for that. And so I'm curious how this issue in
Watson relates to what is going on in the Senate
when it comes to the Save America Act and of
course the you know, the idea of basic voter gurification
and the notion that we do have non citizens and
a lot of them, quite frankly, on our voter rolls,
and non citizens, whether the left likes to acknowledge it
or not, have voted illegally in our elections.
Speaker 2: Well, that's right.
Speaker 3: And I think that this gets back to the fundamental
divide between the far left and the rest of the
country about whether we should actually be securing and protecting elections.
And you know, many of the people on the left
that are and this is one of the big ironies here,
many of the people on the left that are the
loudest about how much they care about democracy, that will
wrap themselves in the flag of democracy at every opportunity
and will argue that if you aren't, you know, electing
their politicians, your anti democracy right are the ones who
also say that, however much they cherish democracy, it must
not be safeguarded, It must not be secured.
Speaker 2: We must not ask for voter I D.
Speaker 3: We must not ask for for basic verifications about citizenship.
We must not go through and clean up the voter roles,
you know, we must not set, as it relates to
this case, very common sense routine deadlines like ballots in
by election day. So that really sort of puts the
line to the whole claim that they really care about democracy. Now,
I'm not necessarily trying to say that.
Speaker 2: That that that.
Speaker 3: That these these folks want to see democracy ended or
anything like that, but they are very clearly they're they're
very clearly playing artisan politics with the democratic process, and
I think that that this really puts the lie to
that and to your point about a lot of the
rhetoric that we hear coming from the left. Not wanting
to have a debate on the policy of voter id
or have a debate on the policy about proof of citizenship,
or on the policy about late ballot deadlines or what
the law says. They just want to call it voter
surprise and kind of pound to the table. It's because
they know they're out of step. They know they are
not in line with where the average American is. And
that's why at the beginning of this question, I said,
it's really about the far left versus the rest of us,
because voter i D always polls eighty five ninety percent
public support.
Speaker 2: Proof of citizenship is the same thing.
Speaker 3: We did a bowl as it relates to this Supreme
Court case, and we found eighty three percent public support
for the idea that all ballots should be received by
election day. And that's overwhelming by artisan support. That's overwhelming
support from Democrats, from independence, from Republicans. It really doesn't
matter what demographic group or what party you are in.
You just think the ballot should be in by election
day because it's election day. So you know, this really
is yet another front in this debate where the Left
is trying to argue for policies that level down on
security that are not supported by the average everyday American.
And really it's all just about rigging the rules of
the system to the left's advantage, and they are desperate
not to have a debate about the actual impact of
their policies. They are desperate not to have a debate
on the substance of their policies. They just want to
call it names and sneer anybody that raises questions and
hope that they can make enough noise to avoid the debate.
It's sort of like the old clip about lawyers. You know,
when you have the law on your side, you pound
the law. When you have the facts on your side,
pound the facts. And when you have neither, you pound
the table. And that's really where the left is these days.
They just pound the table. They make a lot of
noise because they know that they don't have the public,
they don't have the law, they don't have the facts
on their side.
Speaker 1: Now, the Democratic Party that's own members support voter verification
and these these election integrity policies by a clip of
sixty to seventy percent. So they're not only going against
you know, the concern what they call the election denys.
I like to define these folks as election integrity deniers.
They're going up against the vast majority of their own members.
And so that has to tell you something about what
is wrong in that line of thinking these days. At
least it does to me. Final question for you, given
what you have seen today, Uh, and this has obviously
been a major issue for the last several years in
this country. Where do you think this court has had
it well?
Speaker 3: I'm certainly going to to to be the optimist today
and and and hope for a good ruling before the
midterm elections that will put an end to too late
ballots nationwide once and for all. I think, if you,
if you, if you listen to the arguments, where where
some of the justices were trying to decide, if we
if we rule for Mississippi, if we say these laws
are valid, where's the where's the end?
Speaker 2: Where's the limiting principle?
Speaker 3: When when do states need to cut off their receipt
of these of these ballots.
Speaker 2: There was no limit really, I mean, it's.
Speaker 3: It basically looks like they could be receiving ballots up
until the next Congress is seated, you know, maybe even beyond.
You never know, right, So there's really no there's really
no limiting principle that that Mississippi was able to establish here.
They weren't able to address any of the fraud concerns
really really meaningfully, you know, they other than to say
that Mississippi does it better than most of the other
states have had these late ballot laws and takes the
election fraud a little bit more seriously than some of
the others do. But that's not really a good defense, because,
of course, any ruling that we get here today is
going to be either an endorsement or an end to
late ballot laws nationwide. And you know, when you're in
the in the company of states like California, it's really
hard to argue that Mississippi doing it better than California
means that California can keep doing it very poorly. Right.
Speaker 2: The Blue states always love to level down on this.
Speaker 3: It's sort of like Minnesota arguing that they don't need
voter ID because they have this fantastic thing called vouching,
and anybody can just walk into a polling place with
eight friends, vouch for their identity, sign an AFFI David,
and then they can all vote. Because nobody in the
state of Minnesota has ever committed fraud of any kind before, right,
And so I think that when you look at that,
and then you combine it with the long voting history
and the traditions in this country of how we have
actually conducted elections and what the understanding has been about
the idea of ballots coming in after election day and
those not being considered to be accountable up until very recently,
I think there's a good case to make that the
Court will come down to the right side of this issue,
and I certainly hope that they do. And one point
that we haven't addressed but is a very important one
as it relates to the midterms is this question of
for sell, which really came up at the very end
of oral argument the iman Justice Kavanaugh asked about it,
and you know, we heard a very quick but but
precisely on point argument from Paul Clement that if we
get a ruling from the Court in sort of the
normal course around the midpoint of this year. That is
plenty of time for the states that have these laws
to adapt to the new ruling and to begin educating
the public and to change their forms and to change
the materials on their ballots and to come into compliance. Now,
I would argue that the responsible thing to do would
be for those state legislators to repeal those laws today
so they have even more time, you know, But that's
not going to obviously happen. So election officials in these
in these states with these late laws, they need to
be putting in place an action plan right now. Of Course,
my fear is that they'll wait until they get the ruling.
Then they will throw up their hands and they'll they'll
say it's too late to do anything. This is going
to be chaotic, and then they will try to score
points off of the chaos that they allowed to happen.
But nevertheless, I'm confident that we'll get a good ruling
out of the court and that if it's applied in
the midterms, it need not lead to chaos, but it
will lead to a major gain for election integrity nationwide,
and it'll bring some sanity back to the voting process
before the midterm elections.
Speaker 1: Will bring confidence back as well, which has been absolutely
battered because of policies, because of laws like what we've
seen in Mississippi and California and Nevada, and you can
go down the list. You've been listening to another edition
of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections
correspondent at the Federalist. Our guest today Jason Snead, executive
director of the Honest Elections Project. Again, you've been listening
to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle,
Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back soon
with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious
for the fray