American people are. They want to see something done. If the senate is not able to place,peal or repeal in senator mcconnell has said they will have to work with democrats to shore up the individual marketplace this year. Do you think the house could pass something to shore up the individual marketplace . Are those conversations taking place in the house . I think failure is not an option. As President Trump said, we need to stay here until we get it done. We had done in the house. Beyond that, i dont think bailing out obamacare and funding a program that is in a death spiral is the right way to help the American People. I would have a hard time supporting legislation like that. What i want us to do is to keep our promise to the American People, repeal obamacare and replace it. President trump said congress should stay through august it a bill does not get passed. Do you agree . I think we do need to stay until we get major legislation passed. We have a lot left to do this year. We need to get the governmentfunded, rigell obamacare, have major tax relief, which we promised the American People. Host newsmakers follows washington journal. Is guest this week congressman luke messer of indiana. You can listen to that on cspan radio. Be sure to check out our free cspan radio app. Hans von spakovsky is a member advisoryesidential commission on election integrity. Guest thanks for having me. Host let me begin with this editorial from the New York Times calling the commission of bonus voter fraud commission. The truth cannot be repeated often enough. The Congressional Advisory Commission is a sham and a scam. Your response . Guest i wonder why the New York Times is so opposed to have a commission that research is and investigates the American Election process. We at the Heritage Foundation provided a printout to the members of the commission this a database of voter fraud cases across the country. We have reached almost 1100 cases. Some of them are cases in which hundreds if not thousands of fraudulent ballots were cast. Elections were overturned. You have to wonder why the New York Times is so opposed to looking at that, and how can we make it that are so everyone is eligible to vote and no one spoke is overturned ones vote is overturned. Ont trumps new assault Voting Rights, and it includes a photograph of you and says you are a former attorney in the george w. Bush Justice Department described as the from person for undermining the civil rights mandate that protects what he writes. Guest that is to the point of being defamatory. I was a career lawyer at the Justice Department point. You will find the Bush Administration file four times as many cases as the Obama Administration did to enforce section two of the Voting Rights act. This idea that we did not protect Voting Rights is just false. Host why the assault on Voting Rights . Guest you have to wonder what it is they want to hide. What are they so afraid of finding . One thing they dont want people to know about is the fact that several studies have shown this is that voter rolls across the country are in terrible shape. Manzi counties have more people registered and the senses shows they have voting age population. We have hundreds of thousands of individuals who are not just registered in that state but also in other states. Some of that maybe mistakes and errors, some of it may be individuals illegally voting in more than one state. We should look at what are the steps weekend recommend to fix those kinds of problems. This is an advisory commission. It has no executive power. The only thing it can do is write a report and make a recommendation to the president , congress, the states what they can do to fix and improve the security of the election process. Host is it bipartisan . Guest it is. There are a number of democrats, for example the secretary of state of maine, individual county clerks, the people who really know how our elections are run. Elections in this country are run at the county level. You would not believe this from the New York Times editorial, but at the meeting on wednesday there was almost complete unanimity among the commissioners at all the issues that should be looked at to figure out how good is the Voter Registration and election process, and what can we do to recommend solutions . Host one of the things the president said earlier this year is that Hillary Clinton got 3 million more votes, but had there not been brought in the election, he would have gotten a majority in the election. The you agree with him on that . Guest we dont know how much truth there is in that. The possibility is there. We dont know. There has never been any kind of complete indepth study of the voting process across the country, particularly looking at things like how many noncitizens are actually registering and voting. Right now we have that honor system. No one in the country verifies the citizenship of individuals when they register to vote. We have cases all over the country of noncitizens who got caught registering and voting. Host do you think it could be 3 million . Guest i dont know. There have been various studies looking at this. They range from a couple hundred thousand noncitizens to several million noncitizens voting. I dont know the answer to that. The whole point of this commission is to look at issues like that and other issues. We asked the states in the letter that went out what kind inincidents have you had attempts to keep people from going to the polls . Host we will get to your comments and just moment. I want to get your reaction to the missouri secretary of state, governor ande lost. [video clip] this commission was started as a way to justify the biggest lie a sitting president has ever told. It has morphed from there. It has become a vehicle for Voter Suppression. It is important for us to remember what the recent gop history on Voter Suppression has been. I am the former secretary of state from missouri. I have seen the gop Voter Suppression playbook up close. Step one is to undermine faith in american democracy. Up obstacleso put to voting. Step three is one of obstacles to those obstacles. What youre seeing from the trump commission, what i refer to as the Voter Suppression committee to reelect the president is just step one in that process. Host Hans Von Spakovsky, your reaction. Guest nothing of what he said is true. In particular, he makes this whole point that somehow this commission is going to suppress votes. I dont know how make time i have to say this, but it is an advisory commission. The states in this country are the ones that run elections. The only thing this committee can do is make recommendations. It is not any different than prior commissions. President obama appointed a similar commission, a Bipartisan Commission in 2013. It also came up with how it saidons on our Voter Registration list should be cleaned up. There was not this hysterical reaction to president obama setting up a similar commission. Host lets get your calls. 202 7488000 is our line for democrats. 202 7488001 four republicans. Alabama joining us from on the republican line. Caller good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I applaud the effort to clean up the voting registration process in the united states. I wanted to bring to the discussion the idea and the fact that many of our votes are being counted in spain by an Organization Called scytl. Backupsould always be sf the vote so that vote counted may be reviewed for accuracy. Guest what i say to that is that i understand the concern, particularly because of the news recently about attempts from foreigners to hack into our system, but the idea that votes are being counted in spain is one of those internet rumors that has been going around. I took a look at that. That is just not the case. Counties counted in all across the country. It is not outsourced. Is the coauthor of the book, who is counting . What one thing did you take away from this book . Guest we have now for a long time had an honor system in our election process. Unfortunately, there are people who are willing to take advantage of that. A lot of people dont understand how close so many elections are in the country. If you go down to the county, city, and town level, we have many elections decided by a small number of votes. That is what the Supreme Court said, the u. S. Has a long history of voter fraud. It makes the difference in a close election. That is true. Host you are saying voter id is not suppression. Guest the data shows it is not. States such as georgia and indiana have had voter id laws in place for more than a decade. The turnout data shows it does not keep people out of the polls. Georgia had a surge in turnout after its id law went into effect. Host our guest is from the Heritage Foundation. You can read his work on heritage. Org. Good morning. Caller good morning. I would like to ask the representative think that he is talking about, voter id, how is it that he would allow yes, my question is how with the licensesative allow and you have kids who are in colleges and they would not accept college id as a form of voter id . Guest i will be happy to talk about that. That has been brought up in the texas id law. , would point out in georgia the university id is allowed to vote, not in texas where a gun license was. There was a big reason for the difference between the laws in those states. The difference was in georgia, the Georgia University system does not encourage illegal aliens to go to school there, does not provide them with instate jewish and. Texas does. Texas provides instate tuition for illegal aliens. The university iv in texas would have been a route for people illegally in the country to vote. That is not the case in georgia. That is why there is a difference between the statutes in those states. Host there is this from barbara, please ask what was the result from the Obama Commission . Guest everyone should remember we only had our first meeting. It was an organizational meeting in which we were talking about the scope of what the commission is going to do. One of the things that was brought up by one of the commissioners is the voting equipment that is used throughout the country and the issue of Cyber Security. That would include looking at what kind of protection are the states putting in for the computers and software that are used to count the votes. Host president obamas commission, anything come from that . For example, i dont have a list of all the recommendations. They did not really look at the Cyber Security issue. They did make recommendations on how the voter rolls should be cleaned up. One thing they recommended was online Voter Registration. A majority of states now have that. Host our guest is with the Heritage Foundation, a graduate from m. I. T. , earned his law degree from vanderbilt university. Joining us is from the democrats line. Guest i just caller i just have a couple questions, how long has this mission that in place . What does President Trump expect them to find . It seems to me because he disagrees with the popular vote, i dont see how that is going to make the commission find anything different than they havent been finding already. Host thank you. Guest the commission has only been in existence for a short time. The president signed an executive order in may. The first meeting was this last wednesday. It was an organizational meeting to determine what the commission is going to look at. We are going into this with an open mind. All the commissioners have said that. We are going to take a look at the entire election process throughout the country from the time people registered to vote to the day they go into vote to the vote counting that goes on after election day and take a look at what kind of Security Issues are there, are people being kept out of the polls, what can we recommend to actually make the process easier, smoother, but still secure . Host this is from time magazine, the secret history of election 2016 as it looks at the other part of the equation which is russia. He writes, Riverside County da Michael Hester was at his desk last year when the calls started coming in. It was the day of the california president ial primary, and upset voters wanted the top prosecutor to know they had been prevented from casting their ballots. People said they were trying to vote and registration had been changed on the most to them. Wnst to them. Bekno toy dispatched investigators discover what was going on. They say that was one sign of s anda changing the roll could have been a precursor to a russia plan in november. Will you look at that as well . Guest yes. One thing that concerns me is with states going online for Voter Registration, it is a good idea, but when you have online registration you obviously have an online portal hackers can potentially use to get into the system. I am concerned about what steps are the states taking protect against that kind of cyber hacking. I would say anyone who was not allowed to vote because of some kind of Voter Registration issue , local Election Officials were not following the law. Under federal law, anyone who goes to a polling place and says i am eligible to vote, has to be given a provisional ballot and allowed to vote. If they were not allowed to vote, the local Election Officials were not actually following federal law. Host lets go to jacksonville, florida, independent line. Caller good morning. Guest good morning. Caller i know i have seen him on cspan before. Host Hans Von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation. 38th year ofin my watching cspan beginning from brian to chuck todd and steve i remember when you started on the program. I have seen objectivity from cspan for 38 years to give you the true news and allow the opinion to give their on what you are reporting. All these criticisms that you are getting on the first part of the program, my comment is you are very balanced. Party a every political chance to give their opinion. Host thanks for that. We approve that message. Guest i agree with that. Spakovsky,. Von spot i have seen you on the program before. Of one found out out billion votes cast in all American Elections cast between 2000 and 2014 there were only 31 known cases of impersonation and fraud. I know you are looking at other forms of voting fraud, but with because you are trying to suppress the vote, not looking into Voter Suppression from the legislatures of north carolina, georgia, or texas. The reason for that is because you are very slanted in trying to suppress the minorities and other people color. Keep up the great work. Thanks. Host thanks for the call. Guest i am sorry, that is just wrong. If you go to the database the Heritage Foundation has put up, you will find almost 1100 proven cases of voter fraud. These are cases where individuals work of the were convicted in a court of law of fraud in the election. Water brought israel. Real. Er fraud is the idea that voter id theresses the vote, American People dont agree with you. The majority of American People believe voter id is a common sense requirement. Look at the turnout data in the states that have had id laws in place for more than a decade. You will see it did not keep individuals out of the polls. If it had in georgia, whose laws were in place for 10 years, there would have been a lawsuit and courts would have found against the state. That hasnt happened. Black americans, hispanic americans, everybody has an id. Every state that has put in a lot like this has put in a requirement that a free id will be provided to anyone that doesnt have one. Host let me go back to this mornings New York Times editorial. They are calling it the bogus voter fraud commission. They write, it would focus on real problems afflicting Voter Registration like aging voting machines, hourlong lines at the polls, and cyber attacks, instead they plan to rely on tools like the interstate crosscheck system, a historically inaccurate data fraudrogram data program. For every actual double voter it finds, it returns 200. Theres. 200 false positives. Guest they did not watch our meeting. If they had, aging equipment came up. We wanted to find out from the state what kind of equipment they are using. That issue was brought up. Cyber security, the New York Times talks about. We talked about that at great length at our meeting and said the commission will investigate that. It is clear they did not actually watch what happened at our commission meeting. Host republican line, tom, youre next. You 20 you cannot name 20 people who are doing time for voter fraud. Whose heritage are you talking about . Thank you. Guest i can name almost 1000 individuals who were convicted in a court of law of committing election fraud. They are in our database. Every one of those cases is listed there. The idea that there are not people in jail for committing fraud, youre just wrong. Host lets go to our line for democrats. Good morning. Caller good morning. Thank you for having me. If thision is that election with trumpet clinton trump and clinton was 3 million votes, she won by 3 million hink if thei t Electoral Commission had chosen are present, and you go back to al gore and george bush, that count there, was that an electoral vote that made the difference for that presidency . And then you say 20 or 30 votes as fraud, that doesnt seem to make much of a difference when a lot of these people who were elected when by hundreds of thousands of votes were 50,000 or 50,000 depending on the level of the election. Guest first of all, there are literally hundreds of elections across the country that are decided by one vote for a small number of votes. You talk about the 2000 election where the president ial election was really decided by about 800 votes in florida. I think it was the new york daily post did a study in which they compared the Voter Registration list in new york with the Voter Registration was in florida. They found hundreds of people registered in both states, and the possibility was people were illegally voting in both states. It does not take a lot of fraud to change the outcome of an election. A quick example, a study was released a little while ago that found over 5000 individuals had been removed from the voter rolls in virginia because they were not u. S. Citizens. Many of them had voted in prior elections. Altogether, they cast 7000 ballots. The state of virginia has had to attorney general races decided in the last decade by less than 1000 votes. That shows you how important it is that we have clean water registration lists, and that we have accurate lists and make sure that people who are not allowed to vote are not ballots. A casting birth,ull name, date of and last four digits of their Social Security number. Why that . 1992, federal law required collecting the last four digits of the Social Security number to vote. The reason for that is to prevent false positives. The reason is if youre comparing two states, if you use the name and birthday, you may end up with a number of john smiths with the same birthday that are not the same person. If you have the last four digits of the Social Security number, then you know you are person and the same not different people. Host Political Party affiliation, the list of elections voted since 2006, whether or not there have been any felony convictions, whether registered to vote in any other state, living overseas, and marital status. Guest we wanted to look at the disenfranchisement rate of overseas military voters. That is the highest rate of people who do not get to vote. Voter history is important because if somebody is registered in more than one state, it may be an error. They moved, did not notify the prior state. If it turns out they had been voting in both states, and you know it is intentional wrongdoing. You may recall a couple years ago a woman running for congress in maryland who was forced out of the Democratic Congressional primary is of opposition her, was done on primary because Opposition Research was done on her because she had voted in multiple elections in both states and was forced out of the race and eventually pled because of voter fraud. Host when will the commission, with the final recommendation . Guest it will probably take at least six months to have our different meetings across the country and collect the data. It will take time to process that and come up with a recommendation, so probably six months to a year. Host if the commission is recommending states need to do a better job, would there be federal dollars to pay for upgraded things . Guest that is a good question. One of our commissioners, a democratic commissioner, product that very issue. That has a problem for many , county governments not getting enough money for voting equipment. That would be an issue we would look at. Of the commission looking at voter integrity, thank you for being with us. I want to share with you a tweet from linn energy meghan mccain. Senator mccain underwent surgery. You can see that photograph of the senator wearing a hat