Steve Hayes (3:43)

And here we go. You had a terrific piece for us back before the New Year. I think it was maybe Christmas Eve or around Christmas time. So looking back at the controversy over Fulton county and the allegations, the claims, the claims, can you give us sort of a big picture overview of what the debate was back then in real time? And then also, I think the valuable thing that that piece did in particular was lay out why sort of MAGA world was so excited about relitigating Fulton county back in the December timeframe, even before this FBI raid.

Stephen Richer (4:18)

So Fulton county is the Atlanta metro area. It's the biggest county in Georgia. It's disproportionately Democratic, disproportionately African American. And so part of the reason why I think Fulton county makes for a soft target is it's obviously very politically hostile to President Trump. And your question shines a little bit of light on your previous question, which is, why are we talking about Fulton county still? Why are we re upping the 2020 election? And part of that is because the Georgia State Election Board, which is a regulatory board of five members that oversees certain aspects of election administration, has been taken over by the new Republican Party, the MAGA wing of Republican Party. And a number of members on that commission, on that board have wanted to reopen, I guess as a sign of their loyalty to Donald Trump, or perhaps because they are genuinely interested in reinvestigating the 2020 election, have wanted to reopen the 2020 election. And so part of that and why I wrote that piece was because they had subpoenaed Fulton county for materials from the 2020 election. This is the Georgia State Election Board, not the doj. And as process, they found out that Fulton county had not preserved certain zero tapes is what we call them in election administration that are printed by the box top tabulators at every voting location at the beginning of election season. And from that, a number in people online, a number of people in the maga influencer world deduced abstracted that 315,000 ballots had been fraudulently voted in Fulton county in the 2020 election. And while I acknowledge that Fulton county did not sign and preserve all of this paperwork as perhaps they should have, I wanted to explain in that article why it doesn't fundamentally corrupt the election or why we can't validate that process through other means.

Mike Warren (6:24)

Stephen, your piece in December for us, I think, tapped into something that I've been thinking about a lot the last six years, which is the way that a sort of alternative or right wing media ecosystem kind of churns a lot of this stuff up into more than what it is. And you make the point that there was actually one particular article at the Federalist, which is sort of a pro maga news and opinion site, heavy on the opinion, not so much on the news, that sort of trumped up this mistake or error or sort of oversight by Fulton county to not properly sign. You know, and you go through it in the article, I don't want to bog it down with the details and sort of, as you said, abstracted from that, this idea that 315,000 ballots were invalid in some way, and it doesn't matter that the Republican secretary of state in Georgia said that wasn't true, that it doesn't matter that the facts, as you laid out and as the hand recount, hand count and the audit in Fulton county also showed that it wasn't true. That idea took off and seems to be animating the decisions by the government right now. And I think that is something that is, you know, there's always kind of fringe media and conspiracy theories that get out there. And I imagine you experience this quite a bit in Maricopa County. Those kinds of, you know, things get amplified a lot more by the Internet and they're taken seriously by people in power. That seems like a big change and something that maybe is obvious but cannot be discounted. They're reading the blogs and kind of taking direction from them, right?

Stephen Richer (8:04)

Yeah. Well, you guys would know better than I, but I certainly agree with this. Whenever anyone would tell me, oh, you're fighting for election administration or you're fighting for democracy. You're on the front lines for democracy. I would routinely say that democracy and election administration is a proxy war for the larger war on truth. And of course, a large part of that battle has to do with our media ecosystems. And I think the Federalist, which ironically has been pushing for the nationalization of election administration in recent weeks, is one of the principal offenders in the media system of the new Right. And what they did with this article was so emblematic of what many in that world do, which is they didn't interview anyone who has actually run elections. They didn't interview anyone who actually would push back on these claims. And of course, as you noted, it was not just the Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, but it was a Republican governor, Brian Kemp. It was a Republican attorney general. There were a lot of details that were left out of that, but the most important detail was that, no, this doesn't invalidate the votes of over 50% of residents of Fulton county because one election worker or a handful of election workers forgot some ministerial process. I mean, that's just floppy in the face of everything we know about election law in this country. And so I wanted to point out that, one, that wouldn't be the remedy, but two, that's not even necessary.

John McCormick (9:35)

Stephen, I thought it was really interesting you mentioned in your piece that Fulton county or Georgia puts out a list, public list, of people who voted early. Is that correct, that they publicly put that out there or release it in real time?

Stephen Richer (9:47)

That's right. And you know, most jurisdictions in the United States that allow robust early voting do this, especially with the political parties, because the political parties like knowing which votes are already banked so that they can move on to other voters. They're like, oh, great, I got those hardcore Republicans already squirreled away. Now I can go make sure that this lower propensity voter shows up on election day.

John McCormick (10:10)

And so these 315,000 votes, these were all early voters, is that correct?

Stephen Richer (10:14)

From these particular ones, yes.

John McCormick (10:16)

So these 315,000 people, their names are out there all publicly. For there to be some massive conspiracy, I would imagine some people would have had to step forward, tens of thousands, and say, hey, my name was published here. I never voted. Has anyone in Georgia stepped forward to say, hey, my name was publicly released and I never voted? Are you aware of any instances?

Stephen Richer (10:37)

No, I'm not. Again, they took one quote from a board hearing in that case, and then they blew it out of proportion. And they didn't provide necessary context and they didn't provide any appropriate sort of remedial factors or mitigating factors. And I think that's one of them.

John McCormick (10:53)

And you also said there's a paper tally of people when they checked in.

Mike Warren (10:57)

Right.

John McCormick (10:58)

So we could go back and check how this paper tally matches to these zero tapes. I know Some of the terminology gets a little confusing, but there is a paper record here, right? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Stephen Richer (11:06)

So zero tapes are like a pitch count. When a pitcher goes out, you want to make sure that he doesn't throw. In my day, it was like if you were a high school pitcher, you didn't want to throw more than 70 pitches. But now I think they let him throw like 100 pitches. And they're throwing curveballs and sliders and everything else that can potentially ruin their arms. And thank you for allowing me the little tangent on baseball. But the important thing is that the tabulator's zero count starts at zero, so that the memory card doesn't have any ballots from a test run or from a previous election on it. And what you do is you print a tape and then you would sign it and saying, okay, we all agree that this tabulator started at zero. And if they didn't sign that, then again, there are other ways to ensure that you know, that there weren't ballots already loaded on that memory card. One of those ways is that if you had 100 people check in at your voting location, they would go to the poll pad, they would scan their driver's license, get a ballot. Then in that memory card and in that deposit box, you should only have 100 ballots. If you have far more ballots than people who actually checked in, then you've got a problem. And that's something that should be investigated. So again, if you had a hundred people check into the polling place, but your memory card says you've already tabulated 2,000 ballots, then that's something worth investigating. But that did not happen.

John McCormick (12:35)

And in November, there was a hand recount statewide. Correct. Can you run our audience through what did that involve exactly in Georgia? The bipartisan election observers, what safeguards were there, and what did the hand recount find? And how does it prove that there isn't some grand conspiracy here?

Stephen Richer (12:49)

So it's important to remember now that we're revisiting Georgia's election from five and a half years ago, what Georgia did to ensure the integrity of its election. And a lot of people say, you know, Fulton county was never the best administering elections, so on and so forth. I think that there's some basis for that allegation, but I do not think that there is any basis for intentional fraud or intentional misconduct or intentional error. But one of the ways that you ensure the accuracy of the election process is you do post election audits. And the beautiful thing about Georgia switching in 2020 was this was the first time, this was the first presidential election in a while where they had 100% paper ballots, meaning that if you voted by mail, if you voted early in person, if you voted on election Day, you produced a paper ballot. And a paper ballot is good because it's an unhackable, auditable paper trail that you can go back and check and you can, of course, recount. So not only did Georgia tabulate the ballots the first time, those paper ballots the first time, but then they did a hand count audit of every single vote in the presidential contests across the entire state. So millions and millions of ballots. They would work in bipartisan teams of two, and they would count every single vote. And then they did another machine recount using different tabulation machines than the ones that they used the original time. And so we had really we had three counts, we had the original count, we had 100% hand count of the presidential contest, and we had a machine recount. And it's worth knowing that, yes, there were some small discrepancies, as there is when people are counting millions and millions of ballots and when there are humans involved and there are errors in the process. But none of those errors was material for the purpose of the election. None of those errors were the result of anything other than, like I said, the limitations of being a human being.

Steve Hayes (14:56)

So, Stephen, you have an updated piece for us that goes several levels deeper and gets into the administration's legal rationale for seizing these 600 boxes of materials related to the 2020 elections. And you look in particular at the affidavit, at the basically the case that the government makes to justify this seizure. And I want you to sort of walk us through your argument in a broad sense. But the bottom line up front is these are not new claims necessarily. We're not seeing things, by and large that are new, that haven't been examined or investigated in the way that you just described before. You quote David Becker, you call him a longtime election professional. I think he's a consultant at CBS News, perhaps. And he writes of this affidavit that you go into great detail on. The affidavit is a total rehash of rejected and debunked claims from five years ago. You quote him in the piece. I'm assuming that means that you agree with his assessment. Can you sort of walk us through what those claims are beyond where we are and what the mistakes were that the administration made in making its case?

Stephen Richer (16:13)

Yeah. Not only do I agree, but seemingly every sober headed commentator agrees on that point. All the Legal analysts who have looked into this, as well as all the election experts, are a little flummoxed by the fact that we seem to really just be doing this again, and that this special agent who offered the affidavit pursuant to the warrant pretty much just took previous allegations and previous complaints and put them into this petition for a warrant as if they were new. And so back backing up a second in order to be able to seize this material from Fulton County. Because we believe in federalism, the election equipment belongs to the states or it belongs to the local jurisdiction. The federal government can't just come in and take whatever it wants for whatever reason. So it had to get a warrant from a magistrate judge on the federal district court. And to get that warrant, it had to establish probable cause. And that case for probable cause is laid out in the agent's affidavit, or which the court unsealed early last week. And when we all looked at this, we said, well, we know these claims. We've been dealing with these claims for the past five years. We even know who originated a lot of these claims because they've become some of our favorite amateur fraud hunters. Kevin Monkla, Joe Rossi, in particular, I think Garland Favorito, all of them were in there. And so we said, what's going on here? And then I dug in, others dug in, and they were the exact claims that were brought before the Georgia State Election Board that were brought before superior courts after the 2020 election, that were brought before federal courts after the 2020 election. And what I'm pointing out in this new piece that I'm doing for you guys and what a number of other outlets have sort of started to mention, is that these were investigated. They were investigated by professional investigators with the Georgia Secretary of State's office. They were investigated by the Attorney General's office. And in each instance, they were found to be wanting. Either that they were erroneous in their assumptions or that they uncovered minor human mistakes instead of some grand plot to steal the election from the President of the United States. And very little of that is acknowledged in the affidavit. And that's problematic, as I write in my article, because an agent and the prosecutor have an obligation to establish an alternative case. A reason, if anything, would negate probable cause, maybe even addressing the credibility of the witnesses he interviews in order to get this warrant. And I just. I think that maybe wasn't done when presenting this to the magistrate judge. And I guess I'm just surprised that the complaints that have been part of the world for the past five and a half years are now the basis for a completely new investigation and one that is really upsetting the apple cart.

Steve Hayes (19:19)

Just to reiterate that point, because I think it's an important one in making the case to those who are going to weigh in on whether they can go and seize these documents, they are required to make sort of a counter case and to include, oh, this cuts against our case. This might point in a different direction. This has been investigated before and by and large they simply failed to do that. And this reads like sort of a prosecutor's brief leaving out all of the or not all, but most of the counterclaims is that. Am I understanding that correctly?

Stephen Richer (19:53)

That's right. It's called your Franks obligation. That's named after a United States Supreme Court case. And the reason for that is the defendant hasn't been named. The defendant doesn't know this is going on. There is no defense counsel there saying, actually, you know, I don't think you need those boxes. And I don't think this is actually going to really lead you to evidence of a crime. And so in the interest of justice, which is what the Department of Justice, its calling card is, do justice, not do the president's bidding. It's do justice in the interest of justice. The agent and the prosecutor on the case are supposed to say, you know, again, lay out any mitigating circumstances or any countervailing facts that are important for the magistrate judge to fairly assess whether there's probable cause that the items that will be taken pursuant to the warrant would lead to evidence of a crime.

Steve Hayes (20:51)

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Steve Hayes (23:09)

And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in.

Mike Warren (23:14)

I don't even quite know if I have a question here, but we've been sort of asking the big question of why now? Why is DOJ doing this? And in one sense, the answer is pretty straightforward and simple, right? Like Donald Trump believes that he won or wants people to believe that he won Fulton county, that he won Georgia, that he won, or maybe not won Fulton county, but won Georgia because Fulton county was fraudulently counted. He won the presidential election in 2020. And he's sort of just insistent and stubbornly insistent on all of this. But what you describe in this new piece for us at the Dispatch and I think what the sort of all of what we've been discussing and what we've been seeing reflects the ways that sort of base, almost sort of toddler level insistence on getting his way has done is there's a lot of talk about the way Trump kind of has corrupted lots of things. Well, this is a great example of the way he's sort of corrupted the justice system, the Justice Department, quite literally in this way. They're sort of pursuing this, pursuing something that has already been it's a rehash of a rehash for that sole purpose of sort of satisfying the president's desire to be proven right no matter what the facts say. The thing that I worry about, maybe we can sort of reorient the conversation toward the future. And I'd be curious to know your thoughts on this, Stephen, is the way that this is corrupting how people will accept or not accept election results in the future. I agree that Fulton county had this reputation in Georgia of being. It was the place that I've been talking to Republicans in Georgia for years. And the they say, like the joke was always Fulton County. Oh, like that's where all those extra Democratic votes come in. And it ruins our night if it's a good night for Democrats because it comes from Fulton county and Fulton county did bad job of counting and all these things. I don't think that's the case anymore. But this really seems to be corrupting the way in which people just have this idea now that if you don't like the election results, then you can find some technicality and challenge it. And that's been validated by none other than the president of the United States, the leader of one of the major parties. I'm curious if you're concerned, what things are we not even thinking about or worried about when it comes to this is just more bad information and conspiracy theories. Is the other party going to kind of take some perverse lessons from all this? Just things going to get worse on the Republican side? How do you see things going?

Stephen Richer (25:42)

So I think the law enforcement point is a very important one. The special agent for the FBI who was in charge of the Atlanta metro area was either fired or resigned shortly before the FBI executed this warrant. And so one of the phenomenon that we're increasingly seeing at both the Justice Department and the FBI is that people who have ethical standards that they feel are inconsistent with the wishes of the administration are either being forced out or they're voluntarily leaving. This special agent in Atlanta was by no means the first person.

Mike Warren (26:19)

I don't mean to interrupt. We saw this in Minnesota. Right?

Stephen Richer (26:21)

Correct.

Mike Warren (26:21)

With a totally different issue with immigration enforcement. You had a whole number of those prosecutors leave the office. Sorry, continue.

Stephen Richer (26:27)

You know, I think the first blaring warning sign was in the Southern District of New York with the prosecution of Eric Adams. The president said that he wanted to pull back on the prosecution, and the prosecutors there said, we have a slam dunk case that we've been investigating for a long time, and we don't think it's in the interest of justice to do that. And I think three of the top prosecutors in the office, including the U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned as a result. And I think one phenomenon that could be different going into 2026 than was the case in 2020 or 2018 or 2016 is that increasingly the Justice Department and the FBI have fewer people who had that mentality of doing justice. And that includes Bill Barr and others in the 2020 election. And increasingly view the Justice Department and the FBI as an extension of the president's interests. And that's obviously very true with respect to Attorney General Bondi and the way she talks about the office. And then just even there was a viral tweet a few weeks ago when somebody was recruiting for the Department of Justice, and he said, if you're a Trump, Trump loving attorney who wants to lock up the bad guys, then DM me. And just that way of thinking, as if, like, go work for the president's law firm, very antithetical to how most people view that department who are in it.

Steve Hayes (28:03)

It's worth remembering also Georgia is the state where the president, then president of the United States, was recorded on a phone call instructing the Secretary of State to go find votes, requisite number of votes, so that he would win the state. I mean, this is one of those things. I'm glad you asked the question that the way that you asked it, Mike. I think it's really important to walk people through in some detail what's happening here, the facts as we understand them, what the implications of those facts are. And that's why we're happy to have you as a Dispatch contributor, glad to have published the pieces that we've published. But sometimes I wonder, are we, like, spending too much time on that stuff and not spending enough time on the most obvious thing, which is Donald Trump is trying to cheat. Like he's trying to cheat in the past. He's been busted, he's been caught on this. He amplifies conspiracy theories, he consults crazy people, and he's trying to claim that he won an election that he lost, both because he would like that as a retrospective argument, but also because he intends to do these things in the future? I realize that we're moving from reporting and analysis of facts as we understand them to something more speculative. But how concerned should we be looking forward to 2026 by the President's rhetoric, by the steps that he's taken, and also how much reassurance should we take by the fact that these are not nationalized elections, that these are states and localities that run the elections?

Stephen Richer (29:35)

So on the former points, those I would be guessing on, and you guys would guess, I'm sure, better than I would as to what the president's ultimate plan is. On the latter point, I think that you should take heart in the way that our elections are administered in the United States, in that we have over 9,000 separate voting jurisdictions. Election law is largely driven by state law. Elections are administered by bipartisan teams at the local level. We have paper ballots throughout the United States that, as I mentioned before, auditable. We have transparent processes where members of the public can watch. And so the notion that you can flip a switch or hack one machine and wholesale corrupt elections across the United States was always a fanciful one. And that's why it invalidated President Trump's arguments about the 2020 election. But why it should also give some pause to people who are saying that, that because President Trump is president again and because he's shown an interest in election administration, it's going to be as easy as turning off the lights for him to steal the 2026 election. Now, as to why he did what he did in Fulton county, because I do think that he directed this. I think that law enforcement very much got signals from the top on this. I don't know if it's just assuaging his ego in that he needs to continue to construct the mythology that he has never lost in any single election and certainly wouldn't have lost to Joe Biden, or if it's toward a future state in which the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI has more of an argument to go in and to administer the elections themselves. And of course, this goes to his comment about nationalizing 15 jurisdictions or thereabout. And that would be very different from anything we've seen in this country. And I think a lot of people who haven't previously been five alarms, whatever the maximum number of five alarms is, would be, would reach that level.

Mike Warren (31:42)

I do think it's important to go through these details, though, and understand. I found that when you talk to people who may be sort of partisans, deep partisans, maybe even willing to get into conspiracy theories, but who actually go and work in elections, there's sort of you get a deeper and better understanding when you do that. And I've been struck by this. I was several years ago in Georgia reporting on Brian Kemp's reelection effort in the primary, and I remember speaking to a local Republican Party chair who, because she had to be deeply familiar with what was going on in her county, who was running the election. She knew everybody, Republican and Democratic, volunteers and workers and staff. There was we just, we had a conversation which she said, you know, this, all of this stuff is ridiculous because she knows the people who do it. I don't know what there is to be done about that, but it does seem like perhaps like a reporting angle for us to do a little more of is just to talk to the people who are actually doing and conducting these elections at that local level. Because it's hard to buy into conspiracy theories when, you know, for instance, you know, you were talking about, in your piece from December about the tapes and that sort of thing. If you don't know what the tapes are, you can kind of come up with any other wild idea about what they're doing to them. When you know how it works, it's harder. It seems like there's a education element we need to get back to.

John McCormick (33:12)

Well, I think it's also useful just when we're having this discussion. I think a lot of people would say, oh, this is just Trump derangement syndrome. It's useful to run people through what Trump actually did and said in 20 and even as recently as this year about the federal government going in and seizing voting machines and rerunning elections. I mean, my recollection. Stephen, please fill in any blanks. Michael Flynn, his first national security advisor, said that Trump should declare martial law, seize the ballots and, quote, rerun the elections. He was then invited to an Oval Office meeting in December of 2020. Trump actually raised this issue with Attorney General Barr, who shot it down. He raised it with other people as well. In a New York Times interview in January of this year, he said he regretted not having the National Guard seize. Well, I forget the exact quote, now seize the ballots or go in and take something over, but maybe they weren't sophisticated enough to do it. What else has, in Trump's own words, to just, you know, obviously, I think this is still unlikely. I trust that the legal process, the courts will resolve this. But just because I think that it's very likely that the courts will hold, that doesn't mean this isn't dangerous. Entirely interested.

Mike Warren (34:15)

Talk about it.

John McCormick (34:16)

So what else am I forgetting that Trump, in his own words, has said about the federal government seizing voting machines not 60 years after the fact, but in the midst of an election or immediately in the wake of.

Stephen Richer (34:25)

So I think the very unusual circumstances that he's taken us into are, one, he's trying to rewrite election law by executive order. So In March of 2025, he drafted a lengthy executive order that got into even some of the nuts and bolts of local election administration. And we'd never before seen that. And then two more recently, he said that states will have to require documented proof of citizenship or something to that effect whether or not Congress passes this law. And so there's clearly a sense or a frustration from him that he can't unilaterally change election administration. And I think that's why maybe he'll look to law enforcement more and more because the congressional process has been cumbersome. The, the executive order has largely gotten enjoined in the federal district courts and courts of appeal. So maybe that's what prompted ultimately this action from the FBI earlier this month, which was presaged when he was speaking, I think it was speaking at Davos when he said, you're going to see some stuff that's going to happen in Georgia coming up soon. And he seemed to be really excited about that. To Mike's point, regarding trust in elections, social science literature shows that when with the justice system, that people who serve on a jury have more confidence than they did previously in the justice system. I don't know that there have been similar studies about people working in elections, but I certainly think that's a very valid hypothesis, and I know it's consistent with my lived experience. And I would also say that if something like Fulton county, thousands of temporary workers are part of that process. And so the notion of, again, any sort of grand conspiracy would have to have an awful lot of people in on it. And I think you guys are more politically savvy than I am, but my experience has been if there's more than five people as part of something political, then there's going to be a leak.

John McCormick (36:24)

So you don't believe the 2000 mules? You don't think that there were 2000 mules who were operating with a level of operational security that would have put Seal Team 6 to shame?

Steve Hayes (36:33)

2000 Mules was the documentary that Dinesh D' Souza put out with, with sort of laying out an extensive series of conspiracies that led to the fixing of.

John McCormick (36:43)

The election, claiming that there was geolocation Data that connected 2000 basically vote ballot traffickers who were trafficking ballots from liberal nonprofits to voting stations and has resulted in defamation cases against Salem.

Mike Warren (36:57)

They've apologized for it.

John McCormick (36:59)

Zezusa has apologized. The defamation case is ongoing there. And I believe Salem has settled with one person who was specifically identified in the book or the movie or both. I don't know exactly for having allegedly and falsely being accused of illegally voting. But anyway, Stephen to you guys said.

Stephen Richer (37:16)

It perfectly but if you go and talk to some in the grassroots especially, and some ardent Trump supporters, they'll tell you 2,000 mules. It hasn't been falsified. And that, I think, goes back to Mike's broader point, is that this is really about facts. And can we conclusively prove in a politically charged environment that two plus two equals four?

Steve Hayes (37:43)

Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of what has me so concerned, you know, looking ahead to 2026. But beyond is we've already seen the effect that these arguments that this rhetoric from Trump has had in, you know, hardcore Republican precincts. I have specifically spent better part of the last week reporting on a Republican primary in a Florida district and went to a MAGA rally, a parade, an automobile parade. Think of the boat parade, but on land. I covered one of those this weekend that ended at a rally and the conversation there and at a candidate forum in the middle of January. One of the top issues is election integrity for the kind of core MAGA crowd and the sort of ease with which the candidates themselves just assert that Donald Trump won in 2020. They claim, in the case of several of these candidates running in this Florida primary, it's Florida 19 who have been candidates for office elsewhere just claim that their elections were stolen and that they are speaking from experience. And you go and you, you dig a little deeper and you look at the actual substance of the claims and it's just nonsense. But you see the 100 people watching those kind of candidate forums, immediate sort of nodding of the head. Yes, I believe that is true. You know, mail in ballots have become this huge issue among Republicans, in part following the President's lead, where they said, we have to eliminate mail in ballots. We can't have mail in ballots of any kind. And when that came up, I think, I think five of the seven, six of the seven candidates at this forum were of the view that mail in ballots are inherently fraudulent and problematic. When you look, let's. First, I want to talk about mail in ballot specifically, and then I want to talk about voter id, because that's a place where I am a little bit more sympathetic to the arguments that I hear from Republicans on mail in ballots. The President has spoken out against them forever. As I say, this has come up repeatedly in the context of this election that I'm covering. What's the reality about mail in ballots? Are they secure? Should we have confidence in them? You now have states that are, you know, largely mail in at this point. How should we think about mail in ballots?

Stephen Richer (40:05)

Yeah, so, so Real quickly, though, on your point about what's discussed in Republican Party primaries, I would argue that whether or not the 2020 election was stolen has become as much of a litmus test, if not more of where do you stand on abortion? And that I would say maybe people would have more sympathy for me if I was pro choice than they would if I said that Donald Trump didn't win the 2020 election in many Republican quarters. And that, to me is pretty astonishing.

Steve Hayes (40:37)

Yes.

Stephen Richer (40:37)

And then the other thing is, I'm somebody who loves the conservative intellectual tradition, and I feel that it's the debasement of our rich heritage and rich ideas. And I also think of somebody like Brad Raffensperger, who's running for Georgia, and he probably wants to talk about, I don't know, reducing state income taxes and how that will facilitate growth in the state of Georgia. And I assume whenever he shows up in a Republican room, the poor guy has to be talking about 2020 election again. And so, so I think it has corrosive effects in lots of ways. And I think that the sort of blocking any new conversations and blocking new ideas about public policy is one of the ways. As for mail voting in Arizona, for instance, we've had no excuse mail voting since 1992. More and more states are going that way. It's especially popular in the Western United States, I think, both because the time of when we became states in the Progressive Era, and then also just because we're more spread out geographically. And so congregating polling places was always a little bit more challenging. You have to register to get a mail ballot. You can't just pick up a mail ballot at your local Kinko's and send it in. So you have to first be a registered voter. And that means that you have to go through, you have to confirm that you're a real human being. In Arizona, you have to confirm that you are a citizen. And you have to confirm your address. And so usually the registrar office will send you a voter ID card. Then usually before the election, they'll also send you a 90 day notice making sure that you're still there. And then your mail ballot packet will go out. And that mail ballot packet has a barcode attached to it such that both sides can be tracking it throughout the process. And then you fill out your ballot, you put it in a return envelope, and that return envelope also has a barcode attached to it, meaning that if you just tried to, I don't know, take a ballot and just drop it off at the doorstep of the Registrar's office. That wouldn't work. It has to come back in that return envelope because that return envelope is then scanned. When they get it back, a vote is loaded to the voter's profile. So you can't then go and vote in person or try and return a second mail ballot. Most states either do something like signature verification, matching your signature on the return envelope with signatures in your historical record, or they have some other personal identifying marker. Like in Georgia, they have, I believe it's the last four of your Social Security that's on that return ballot envelope. Then it's usually extracted by a bipartisan team and it's smooth. You make sure there's no tears and you ultimately send it ahead to tabulation. Mail voting allows for a little bit more garden variety fraud. I would say it's very negligible. It is negligible, but it does allow for a little more garden variety fraud in the form of, hey, son went away to college out of state, but he's still registered here in Georgia. Son gets a mail ballot. Mom and dad know how some would have voted. They fill out son's ballot, they send it back, they sign because they know what son's signature would have looked like. They send it back, that's fraudulent, but it's not stealing an election form of fraudulent. And then in Arizona, the prosecutions that we would often send forward is somebody dies, you know, mom's living with you. She dies four days before the election starts. Well, guess what? That information isn't getting to the register star's office in time for the mail ballots to go out. Mail ballot still goes out to the House. Son gets it, knows how mom would have liked to have voted, knows what mom's signatures looks like, sends it in the vote is tabulated only later do when we get the death record, we say, hey, mom actually died four days before the election started. So how did she return a ballot that set ahead to the prosecutor? So are there, are there examples of garden variety fraud that are a little more doable with mail voting? Yes. Is there any evidence that it's significant? No. Is there any evidence that it happens exclusively with Republicans or Democrats? No. So while some of those things might not be terribly satisfying, I would say to the extent that a few people do do that, it's probably a political.

John McCormick (45:08)

Wash. Stephen, on the ground in Arizona, how do people grapple with the fact Republicans, Trump supporters. Trump won by three and a half points in 2016 under this system. He lost by a third of a point in 2020 and then he won by five and a half points in 2024. So proving that Republicans and Trump himself can win under mail in voting, did that sort of change the way that MAGA Republicans on the ground view the ability of themselves to compete in the system?

Stephen Richer (45:37)

Well, I'll pick on my own faith and people here of Judaism, I think that this is asking, like, why do you guys think that you can't turn on lights during the Sabbath? That makes really no sense. And why did you think it was appropriate for God to flood the world when they were misbehaving and only Noah got to survive? These things aren't terribly rational is where I'm trying to go with that. I don't know if that was an artful way of doing it. They're not terribly rational. I think they're matters of faith. Because, yeah, you say, you somehow say, yeah, Trump won this election, but someone else didn't win this election. Well, that person was cheated out of it. Or Republicans won down ticket and, you know, but Trump lost, and so therefore it was cheated out of it. Or Fulton county and Georgia, Trump won handily in 2024, but they're wholesale corrupt, and they have a lot of the same actors, and somehow those actors decided that they weren't going to cheat that election. So there's lots and lots of irrationalities about it. And I think that one of the frustrating things for me is I'm, I guess, a little bit robotic in that it's just like, I'll keep hitting you with some facts and some logic. And in reality, I think for a lot of people, this is a tribal marker for them. You know, I'm part of the team. For other people, it's a way to make sense of a world that is evolving and that they don't quite understand. I think a lot of people during the pandemic especially, would hang out in small social circles, and everyone in their social circle voted for Donald Trump. And they say just, well, how can that possibly be that my Arizona went for Joe Biden in 2020? And so other people, I think, sort of don't even necessarily what they mean by the election was stolen. They maybe mean, like, Hunter Biden's laptop story was suppressed and not that Dominion tabulation equipment flip votes. So I don't know if any of that makes sense, but for what it's.

Mike Warren (47:37)

Worth, it's like we're dealing with people, you know, with all of our biases and foibles and blind spots. Nobody on this podcast, of course, has any of those.

Stephen Richer (47:45)

Yeah.

Steve Hayes (47:46)

And we work hard to see them out. Let's end with a conversation both about voter ID specifically and about the SAVE act generally. I will say I'm pretty sympathetic to traditional Republican arguments on voter ID and some of this. Stephen, you mentioned earlier lived experiences. Well, some of this comes from my lived experiences voting and living in and around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My sister had a house in Milwaukee and one election, this is now 20 plus years ago, she showed up to vote and there were 11 other people registered to vote at her address and Wisconsin doesn't have voter id. And she was alarmed by this and said, well geez, how do I know if those people are voting or not voting? And why shouldn't they be asked to show voter id? How should smart conservatives and Republicans think about voter id? Don't the people who are pushing hard for voter id? Isn't it kind of obvious, an obvious thing to do to help safeguard our elections?

Stephen Richer (48:44)

So I support voter ID as a general rule. I also support documented proof of citizenship. I think it's important to distinguish that those are two different things because they've been conflated a bit with the SAVE Act. And documented proof of citizenship is when somebody goes to register and you either have to show a passport or a birth certificate. Voter ID is when you show up at a voting location and you have to confirm that you're the person who's on the voter rolls and that's usually your driver's license. I support both. Ideally I would probably do it at the state level. Just vestiges of federalism. I think it should be done in a smart way. As I said, it shouldn't be unduly burdensome for administration or for voters themselves. I think it can be done in a smart way. I think in Arizona we have documented proof of citizenship that's done in a smart way in that most people provide their birth certificate when they get their driver's license and then you don't have to provide it to any other government agency. You don't have to provide it to the registrar's office when you go there to vote. So the there's no extra step in that. So hopefully that's a way that doesn't then impose too high of a cost. But I also think that we need to be clear about what the facts on the ground are. I wrote a piece for the New York Times recently about a number of states that affirmatively investigated their roles for any non citizens and they found some, but very few. And many of them hadn't even participated in past elections. And I think again, we can still have documented proof of citizenship requirements, but I don't think we should predicate it on a falsehood. I think we should predicate it on other public policy grounds that we think are very reasonable. And so, yes, I'm sympathetic to both of those things. And most of the social science literature shows that asking for voter id, for instance, does not have a mass disenfranchising effect on any race or age or other group, as has often been barked by many people on the left. And I understand and appreciate that we have a rich history of voter suppression in this country. We also have something of a rich history in years back, many years back, of voter fraud by different machines and ballot stuffing that was open in the daylight. I think what we have gotten a lot better our trajectory in the United States. And I think think over at least the last 40 years, we've been pretty darn good on both access and security of the ballot. But I think that we can keep experimenting. And one of the cool things about election administration is it's largely set by states, and so different states experiment and we can see what works well. And some other states might want to copy that. But I do think that there is a role for the federal government in setting very minimum standards, and I do think that that could include a documented proof of citizenship.

Steve Hayes (51:44)

All right, time for a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in.

John McCormick (51:57)

Stephen, you mentioned red states. Could you provide a little more detail? Just how few noncitizens have these red states found when they affirmatively went out looking for them on their voter rolls?

Stephen Richer (52:07)

Yeah. So Utah did it recently. Idaho did it recently. Michigan did it recently. Georgia's done it. I think Louisiana did it recently. Utah was the poster child in that. I think they have about 2 million registered voters in the state. And Deidre Henderson, the lieutenant governor who also oversees elections in the state, she had her team go through the whole voter rolls, used all the federal resources that are available. I think they found a handful of non citizens registered and they found one who had actually voted in a past election. Now, that was again, a very good sample. But even in Louisiana, where, again, I think you have about the same number of registered voters, maybe a few more. You only had, I think it was something like 70 that they found of non citizens on the voter rolls. So, yes, these do exist, but we're talking about fractions of a percent in terms of how many are on the voter rolls. And then even a fraction of that for how many participate in past elections. But we should run those audits. Part of that New York Times article, though, they wrote the headline, they wrote the title. So it wasn't just disproving what President Trump was saying about non citizens, part wrote in, but also it was meant to celebrate those election administrators and state leaders who took the affirmative step of not just saying, well, nobody's been prosecuted for non citizens, but actually did the research and averred that noncitizens on the voter rolls aren't a big problem in their state.

Steve Hayes (53:46)

Stephen, thank you for this conversation about election integrity and thank you for your pieces. We will put all of the pieces that we mentioned here today in this conversation in our show notes so you can go and check them them out yourself. Before we leave, I wanted to do a not worth your time about something else in the news these days.

Stephen Richer (54:04)

Great. Hopefully something fun.

Steve Hayes (54:06)

Yeah, I think it's fun. Have you guys been watching the Olympics? And if you have, what's your favorite moment? If you haven't, why do you hate America? No, Mike, you've been watching. Do you have a favorite moment? Do you have a favorite athlete? There's a right answer here and I'll give it at the end. But is her favorite moment, favorite athlete, somebody that you're excited to see in this second week or in this next week?

Mike Warren (54:32)

Well, I will say as a preface to that that my kids were very invested in Ilya, the quad God. And he's from here, where we live in Northern Virginia. He goes to George Mason University, which is right down the street from my house. And they were devastated by his struggle in the figure skating competition, the single men's single event. So that's just a preface, though, because my favorite, my wife and I have been really enjoying curling. It's been really exciting to see the American team kick butt in curling. We really wish that mixed doubles team, the Coreys, had won the gold, but they won the silver against a very good Sweden team. I also love the fact that the Canadians, this is like their sport, curling is their sport and they're being called out for cheating, doing this little tap as they throw the rock down.

Stephen Richer (55:21)

And isn't this the second time that this has come up with this British team? Okay.

Mike Warren (55:25)

Oh, yes, it's a problem apparently in this sport that I only care about every four years. But something I've gotten really into the American team, both the women and the men, and of course the mixed doubles.

Steve Hayes (55:36)

Mike, you can name their names. You just named their names. Yeah, The Coreys, your favorite curlers. I mean, I love it.

Mike Warren (55:42)

Exactly. I love it. It's also fun because their families are in the stands and they always go to them. And it's like the American teams are always shouting USA really loudly. And there's like, like three other curling matches going on at the same time. And I just love hearing USA resounding in the stadium. It's. It's great. Love the curling.

Steve Hayes (56:03)

John, have you ever done any curling, being from Wisconsin?

John McCormick (56:08)

I've never gone curling and I've never gone ice fishing. So I, I'm sort of.

Steve Hayes (56:13)

Your Wisconsin card has been taken away. They probably shouldn't let you vote in Wisconsin, given those facts.

Mike Warren (56:19)

I mean, that's, that's a good experiment for the Wisconsin Secretary of State. Two or three.

Steve Hayes (56:24)

John, have you been watching the Olympics at all or no?

John McCormick (56:26)

I've watched Zero Minutes and not because I hate America, because I love my one year old daughter. And I think I'm a little traumatized from staying up to watch the worst super bowl ever instead of going straight to bed at halftime. We've had a lot of wake ups lately, so that's my excuse. If you want to talk about the 1994 Olympics, though, I was into those. I was nine and they were in Norway, and my hometown had a lot of Norwegian Americans there. So if you want to, you know, rehash the 94 Olympics, I'm game for that.

Mike Warren (56:53)

Or the 96 Summer Olympics. Oh, Troy. In Atlanta, which is where I'm from. And those were terrific.

Steve Hayes (56:57)

Yeah.

Stephen Richer (56:57)

And I had the 92 games in Salt Lake City.

Mike Warren (57:02)

2000.

Stephen Richer (57:03)

2002, right? 2002, of course.

Steve Hayes (57:05)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steven, are you an Olympics guy? Do you follow closely? Do you like summer or winter better?

Stephen Richer (57:12)

Summer. I like the sports more in summer, and the Americans dominate in summer. And right now I think we're third in the medal count. I think Norway is doing impressively because they win all the, like, the long skiing stuff and the skiing shooting stuff and the other sports that I don't really know anything about. I love that our women's hockey team beat Canada. I think that's like. I think that's a big win for us. And hockey's a sport that I recognize as like, you know, a staple at least, or one of the four main sports in the United States. I watched the Ilya. That's his name. The guy who was supposed to be.

Steve Hayes (57:47)

Like the Ilya Malin.

Stephen Richer (57:49)

Okay.

John McCormick (57:49)

Yeah.

Stephen Richer (57:49)

I watched him fall, unfortunately, but it seemed like everyone else fell, so I don't know why his falls were rated lower than others, but he fell back to eight. I watched the ice dancing couple that was much heralded that lost to the, I think, French team. And I really liked that the couple was married and their parents were sitting there, all four of them, like, watching every single thing that they'd been doing for a long time. Thought that was a cute story. I get pretty national. This is probably the most nationalistic I get is during the Olympics and during the World cup. And I think it's hopefully a healthy outlet for that, especially considering I don't really interact with anyone else from other countries. So. So it's not like I can get in anyone's face about it. But, yeah, I guess Summer Games, Summer more than winter.

Steve Hayes (58:38)

I think I'm more winter in part because I grew up in Wisconsin and I did some of these, you know, I've been cross country skiing. I used to ski moguls. I played hockey growing up. I mean, all. I've done all of these things, and I didn't do as many of the Summer Games. I also went to the Winter Olympics in. In Albertville, France, in 1992, and it was a phenomenal experience. I mean, if you ever have an opportunity to go to the Olympics, go to the Olympics. I mean, it was expensive. We did it on the cheap to the extent that we could, but we took over, me and a bunch of other Americans, for whatever reason, we ended up hanging out with the Dutch and we took over this little plaza in this small French town, and there was a big snowbank that was sort of shaped like a mountain. And we bought case after case of Cronenberg beer, which was the French beer, and sort of put them up the mountain, you know, stuck them in the snow up the mountain so that it looked like they're in green bottles, famously, and it looked like a Christmas tree. But then we just sat around and anybody could sort of come and get a beer, and all the Americans came and hung out with us anyway. It was phenomenal experience. I would do it again in a second. At some point. I need to go to another Olympics when I can. The highlight for me this year, and I'm a homer on this, has been watching this Jordan Stoltz, the speed skater, who is. He's phenomenal to watch. He's incredibly powerful. You know, everybody, I think, by consensus, he's the. They say on the coverage he's the fastest speed skater in the world. And I think he's great. I love watching him. I think he's got two more events he has gold in the 500,000. I think he's got the 1500 and then some new speed skating event I don't even understand coming up. But I love him. I love to watch him. Mostly I love to listen to him. He's from Kiwaskum, Wisconsin, and the kid is so quintessentially Wisconsin. They did this video. They showed this video of him working out in his house. And he built like a little workout room in his basement. And it's like, if I were gonna build a workout room in my basement, it would look exactly like this. So he does, you know, he can do these squats, of course, that are insane. And he does box jumps, but he also does freezer jumps because the little room in his basement has one of these deep freezers that's, I think, a little bit higher than the box jumps he does. So he jumps on and off the freezer. I mean, it's perfect in every way. He still rides his bike around the area in Kewascum for four hours at a time in the non winter months. But he's a great story. Seems like a great kid. It's easy for me to get behind. So that's been. That's been a highlight. We have a lot of hockey still to come on the men's side. The men's, it looks like, I mean, both Canada and the United States has to win still. But it looks like there may be a potential gold medal clash between Canada and the United States. And that will be epic.

Mike Warren (61:36)

If we win, Canada becomes the 51st state. I think that's the stakes that we're up against here.

Stephen Richer (61:42)

Don't you think they should count as more than one medal? If you win a big team sport like that one event in, like skiing and shooting, whatever it's called, gets you a one gold medal on the medal count. And then your hockey team has to play a whole bunch of games. It represents a whole bunch of people. And you get one medal count.

Mike Warren (62:04)

Maybe the starting line should get all a medal each. Yeah.

Steve Hayes (62:08)

Anybody who sees ice time gets a medal that counts. It feels like we've got the election extra expert here proposing a totally rewriting of the way that we count who wins and loses.

Stephen Richer (62:18)

Yes.

Steve Hayes (62:19)

This is, like, sort of scandalous from you, Steven.

Stephen Richer (62:22)

I think it should be done by executive order as well.

Steve Hayes (62:25)

That's right.

Stephen Richer (62:26)

Perfect.

Steve Hayes (62:27)

That's perfect. Well, that's as good a place to leave it as any. Stephen, thank you so much for coming and bringing sort of a voice of sanity and clarity to these pitch debates about our elections. I'm worried about 2026. You've made me feel somewhat reassured, but it's good for people to actually have the facts, and this is why we spend the time talking about it as we have done today, and why we're so happy to have your contributions. Please know that we are excited to have more of your contributions anytime you want to write, between now and 2026 especially, but then looking ahead to 2028 as well. John and Mike, thanks for joining and thank you all for listening. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And speaking of support, here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as premium members. Gary Henry, Wes Toler, and Tim Murray. We're glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtabledispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from people who don't watch the Olympics. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure, thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.