Show Notes
President Donald Trump’s televised speech on election security to the nation last week may have been more watched, but for Eric Eggers the bombshell information came the next day during the Homeland Security secretary’s press conference.
“He [Markwayne Mullin] laid out the 278,000 non-citizens that they have identified on the voter rolls just from the limited data they’ve been able to access thus far,” Eggers notes. “They’re being proactive, sending copies of letters to different states like New Jersey saying, ‘We found 19,000 people on your voter rolls that have the same name, address, birthday, social security number as people that are in our system as being non-citizens. So, we’d like to know what you’re doing about it.’”
Host Peter Schweizer agrees. “That’s the first big question – election integrity. What the states often say is ‘well, these people don’t vote,’ which of course prompts the question — Then, why do you have a problem with just taking them off the voter rolls?”
Voter roll integrity was a key topic of Eggers’s 2018 book, Fraud: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election. As part of the research for that book, GAI commissioned a company that specializes in cross-referencing customer identities for businesses to inspect a selection of voter roll data from 21 different states. That study found evidence of the more than 2,000 people registered to vote in more than one state at the same time.
Still, not everyone is taking Trump’s or Mullin’s warnings seriously, Eggers notes on the most recent podcast episode of The Drill Down.
“The intelligence agencies obviously haven’t taken it seriously,” Eggers continued. “They actively hid, according to declassified documents, evidence that China had hacked 220 million voter files across the country.” The White House released declassified emails between intelligence and national security officials from 2020 that showed that, during Trump’s first term, they were actively removing information about the hack from the “President’s Daily Briefing” that Trump received each day.
On top of that, he notes, “you’ve got all these Democrat-led states that are not participating or complying with the Department of Justice requests to get these voter rolls so they can review them.”
Voter rolls are just one aspect of the problems with election security. Voting equipment, which differs from state to state, has its own vulnerabilities. The hosts play a video clip of Hillary Clinton and various other Democrats after the 2016 election about the security vulnerabilities of on-screen voting systems.
The threats are not only foreign. Eggers notes that in 2018 at a “hackathon,” an 11-year-old hacker successfully changed election results on a replica of Florida’s state website in just under 10 minutes.
Indeed, in 2019, a concerned group of Democratic senators including Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) sent a letter to the owner of Dominion Voting Systems, noting, “We are particularly concerned that secretive and ‘trouble-plagued companies,’ owned by private equity firms and responsible for manufacturing and maintaining voting machines and other election administration equipment, ‘have long skimped on security in favor of convenience,’ leaving voting systems across the country ‘prone to security problems.’”
Schweizer, who has written three bestselling books on Chinese interference in American politics and society, says one possible threat from China’s election data hack would be to identify those voters who are registered but haven’t voted for several years, then generate fake IDs in the names of those voters and have someone vote for them. “They can do things with this data,” Schweizer says.
Eggers adds, “China thrives on undermining confidence in our systems. They did the same thing a couple of years ago to England, where they hacked 40 million different voter files.” After that occurred, he notes, “the Biden administration responded with sanctions and criminal charges against the people responsible for it.”
Schweizer thinks about this as a detective story. “Did China have a motive? Absolutely. Did they have the means? Yes, by hacking voter data.”
He adds that election fraud is always a factor in every election, but the question is always whether it is happening on a large scale. “You don’t need a lot [of election fraud] if you know an election will come down to a handful of swing states.”
Eggers adds that in the Spring of 2020, “roughly 20,000 fake IDs were seized at a US airport in Chicago. The vast majority came from China and Hong Kong. So, China does have a demonstrated history of creating fake IDs.”
Election security has unfortunately become embroiled in partisan politics, Schweizer says, but Democrats who are opposing efforts to harden America’s election security, as the SAVE Act purports to do, must explain their hesitation.
“So, if the Chinese are gathering this data, and they’re hacking into our election systems, and you’ve got people that are illegally registered to vote, we should get rid of those vulnerabilities,” Schweizer says. “My point to the Democrats would be why not do this? Either they are opposing it because some of them [Democrats] want those people voting, and they want the fraud because it helps them win,” he says.
Or else, “some of them are just opposing it because Trump is the one asking for it, and they don’t want to do it for that reason.”
