The heat of the partisan fight that was at that point to come, we did not lose the principles of free and fair elections. So were working every day to defend the right of every american to participate in an election that they can trust and find legitimate. Host and youre funded by individual donors, by larger groups . Guest were a 501c3 nonprofit and we dont talk about donors. They respect their privacy, as do groups on all sides of the political spectrum. Host as you look at the president ial race, where are we now and how many legal challenges across the country has the Trump Campaign put forth . Guest well, there are a number of legal challenges that have been filed by the Trump Campaign or related entities, particularly targeting a few key states based on the results and what i presume to be a calculation about how they can get to 270 in the he leble college. Those states would be pennsylvania, michigan, arizona, nevada and georgia. Those seem to be getting the most attention. Most of these lawsuits, at least so far, focus on process questions. That is to say, processes dealing with either the recreate or the counting and tallying of ballots and allegations of some sort of either misconduct or mismanagement of the election system in the runup to or on election day. S host all of these states have statemandated deadline for providing the results from the president ial election. Do you expect that any of these legal efforts will push those dead the counting of the results past those state deadlines . Guest i think that remains to be seen, and im not sure exactly what still remains in the pipeline in terms of additional litigation, but certainly were seeing lawsuits filed almost every day at this point. You are right that states have deadlines and state laws certify elections and those are sort of spread out between now and the next few weeks, and then, of course, theres the ultimate deadline, which is the safe deadline for participation in the electoral college. Thats in early december, a Lara Setrakian by statute by congress. States have to certify their results and produce a slaste electors before that in order to ensure that congress cant question the electors that they point to the electoral college. I think at this point it remains to be seen exactly how long the litigation will stretch on for. It could all stop today. I dont think thats likely. It could go on for another few weeks. I think thats certainly a distinct possibility. Host i guess the question i ask you is where do you think that the Trump Campaign has the best case . Guest i think right now most of the action is concentrated in pennsylvania. And i think that in terms of the state that seems most primed for a lengthy litigation, it would be pennsylvania. The reason being that not only are you seeing lawsuits filed there, not only are there some concerns emerging out of philadelphia in particular of what seems at the very least to be poor management of their election system, but you also already had a case teed up in the Supreme Court dealing with the States Election day deadline for the recreate of absentee ballots and a previous state Supreme Court decision to extend that by court order three additional days to essentially render the requirement that a ballot be at least even postmarked into more of a presumption that even if it doesnt have one, that the ballot is still a valid one. So i think that right now pennsylvania is probably the oddson favorite to see the most litigation, but you can also see i think potential medical challenges in michigan, probably also again in georgia, and georgia, of course, is also headed to a runoff now where the state Just Announced theyre going to do a manual hand recount of all ballots cast in the president ial race. Host are they mandated to have that done by a certain time . Guest im not sure if theres a particular deadline, but i know based upon the process that its going take some time, and i think the secretary of state described it as a pretty heavy lift, so i think some patience there would be a good idea. I do think the recount is a smart move and is a wise move, because youre talking about a momentous election, and right now the vote count between joe biden and donald trump is separated by only about 14,000 votes, if i recall the numbers correctly. Host right. Guest thats a pretty narrow margin, so i think that a hand recouldnt will help to bring certainty to that. It will also help to uproot any potential irregularities, as well as disprove any rumors that might be circulating that have no basis in fact. Host we are talking about the Trump Campaign legal challenges to the votes across several states, welcome your calls and comments. If you are a supporter of joe biden and kamala harris, the line to use is you 2027488000. Supporters of sandrump mike pence, President Trump and mike pence, 2027488001. For all others, 2027488002. Jason snead with the honest elections project. Let me ask you about the Supreme Court. Do you envision any role, potential role for the court in any of these cases . Guest i dont think that im seeing a role for the Supreme Court just yet. But as i was saying before, i dont know what additional litigation there might be in the pipeline. I do think if there is a world in which the Supreme Court becomes involved, i dont think that were on that path just yet. In fact, i think just speaking as a factual matter, a lot of the cases that have thus far been filed are heading into some stiff legal head wind. I think it remains to be seen whats coming up. I think, again, depending on what that is, depending what the underlying ed is, theres a possibility the Supreme Court could become involved, and i think thats just something thats sort of hanging in the easter right now. Host the Trump Campaign signalled on monday they may be changing tack, legally, as opposed to just challenging individual batches of votes, challenging the entire state result as a whole. Do you think thats a wise strategy . Guest i think we need to be very careful the way that we are talking about this, and i would advise that anyone talking about that strategy allow the initial investigation to play out, because obviously underlying that would be allegations of either stem fraud or error, and i think it would be important to prove out that underlying assertion first. I think we should let that process play out. At the end of the day, any credible instance of fraud, any credible allegations, i should say, needs to be investigated, and voters deserve to be whether or not it is, in fact, true and if theres any basis to that claim. I think whether you are a supporter of trump or a supporter of biden, whether you believe that fraud is real and tainted this election or not, everyone should be supporting investigation into credible allegations. You either want to be able to state with certainty that fraud did happen and then find the people who are responsible, bring them to justice, and show voters that their system is being defended, or that it didnt happen, in which case you want to set the record straight once and for all and be able to show voters clearly that the facts say that voter fraud did not occur and did not taint the election. So i think that we should be letting this investigation play out first. Host your organization, the honest elections project, are you providing any guidance or any input to any of the Trump Campaign legal efforts . Guest no, not right now, and i dont think that we will be. Theres a possibility that my organization could be involved in future litigation. In fact, we were in the runup to the election, we supported a couple of lawsuits in michigan and in minnesota, which aimed to restore those States Electionday ballot recreate deadlines, because we wanted to make sure that we were defending both the constitution and the rule of law. And in those states, there was an effort to extend the ballot recreate process through courts , in minnesota in particular, through a Consent Decree where the secretary of state simple al greed to the demands put forward by a group that was suing. And we argued in court that the constitution is quite clear that state legislatures have the four regulate the manner of an election. In minnesota, as well as in michigan, the state legislature had set election day as the deadline for the recreate of ballots, and in minnesota we went up to the eighth circuit and we got an order to segregate ballots and also its a very strongly written opinion basically back our assertion that the constitution does, in fact, not allow an executive branch official to simply unilaterally rewrite state election law, even in the midst of a pandemic, because theres no pandemic exception to the constitution. Host the Trump Campaign making a similar case in pennsylvania with the rulings of the pennsylvania Supreme Court. What do you think of their legal arguments there . Guest i think theyre on solid ground there, just as we were in minnesota and in michigan. The constitutions language is fairly plain that, again, its legislatures that have the power to regulate the manner of an election. I think that we have to be very careful when were counting either executive Branch Officials stepping in on their own authority and countermanding established laws that are passed in accordance with the constitution or courts counting that same conduct. Theres sort of another shade to this, another wrinkle to this, and that is the lawsuits being brought to extend these ballots deadlines were being brought by some of the same lawyers that represent democratic party, super p. A. C. s and other liberal organizations. I think that its not a good look at the very least for our democracy when one side is suing in a state, and then executive official, the secretary of state or otherwise that theyre suing, are agreeing effectively rewrite the law and doing so behind closed doors at the demands of deeppocketed groups on one side of the political spectrum. So i think thats something that we also need to be very careful about. I do think that case in pennsylvania thats now pending before the Supreme Court is on some strong legal footing. Host let me ask you your reaction to the opinion of ben ginsburg, who was a lawyer involved obviously in the 2000 trump v. Gore count. He had an opinion piece in the Washington Post just before the election, but it was about allegations of fraud. He said a systematic attack made completely without evidence aimed at undermining a basic pillar of our democracy, i know theres no evidence for systematic fraud because i spent the better part of every election for four decades working in full programs and election day operations. Jason snead, your thoughts. Guest well, i know for a fact that voter fraud happens. It happens in essentially every election cycle. When i was at my last job at the heritage foundation, we stood up an Election Fraud database, which zpracks proves that, in fact, there are always people who are ready to cheat and steal in order to win an election. They have their own personal agendas, often their personal ambitions are on the line. We know that there are people who have, shall we say, flexible senses of right and wrong and what the law says when it comes to an election. We know that fraud exists in basically every other aspect of life, so why should voting be any different . Host i guess the question would be, in what volume, what volume it has to be for the votes that the president would need to win the election. Guest well, thats right. As i was saying, we know that fraud exists, so now the question is to what degree does it exist and how impactful will it be . Frankly, the vote count being what it is, n a lot of these states, its going to be a very, very difficult hurdle for the campaign to overcome. Of course, if they actually do have credible evidence backing up these claims, and i would think that the American People would want to see it, because we all have a right to participate in free and honest elections, and so as i said before, if there is a credible allegation out there, it should be fully investigated so we can get to the bottom of what did or did not happen. Host President Trump this morning critical of the vote counting in North Carolina. His tweet moments ago saying it took long enough. What is taking North Carolina so long . Are they looking for more ballots to fix that one also . Now with a recount, we will win georgia also, pennsylvania and michigan. Wouldnt let our poll watchers and observers into counting rooms. Illegal. Lets go to calls and hear from peter in valley cottage, new york, a President Trump supporter. Go ahead. Caller everybody has a problem with saying valley cot only, i dont know why that is. [laughter] anyway, mr. Snead, my question is, i voted in person, so i dont have any idea exactly whats on a mailmany ballot. Once the ballot itself is separated from the envelope, how do they check the signature . In other words, one of the accusations that was being made was that the there were people who were voting who shouldnt vote. Can you explain to me, is there a signature on the ballot itself that can be verified afterwards . To certify that the ballot is legitimate . Nd also, is there a way to check these machines that are registering the ballots . One of the accusations that i heard was that the software of these counting machines was able to be flipped and votes could be sent to one candidate or the other. Is there any legitimacy to the fact that they could be hacked . Can you explain that, please . Thank you. Guest sure. In terms of the first question about what the absentee ballot actually looks like, there is not a place to sign the ballot itself. The reason is that most state laws, actually every state law where youre allowed to cast an absentee ballot, it also respects the privacy of the individual voter, and thats something that i think is obviously an important thing to protect. And so the way this process works is, when you are finished casting your ballots, youll put it in a privacy envelope, and then you will sign that outer envelope. That is the signature which is being vetted by Election Officials when they receive the ballot and theyre comparing it to the signature on file for the particular voter. And so the problem is once, of course, you separate the ballot from that envelope, its virtually impossible to actually be able to bring those two back together, so thats why that process at the outset is so important. Thats why it was so unfortunate that in several states, like pennsylvania, for instance, the signature matching process that was in place there was simply ended, and so now youve got a situation where lets assume that there is evidence of fraudulent ballots having been cast, the question is how do you actually deal with that problem . What is the appropriate remedy . Thats why its so important that we have these rules that provide the verifications at the outset and that we stick to them and not try to change those rules in the middle of an election. I think if for no other reason we want to show voters that they can have a sense of trust and credibility in the results of the election. As to the voting machines, it generally is considered to be a best practice that these machines not be tied directly to the internet so that their ability to be hacked is significantly limited. Im not aware of any credible concerns so far that any significant number of machines were in any way tampered with or the software was corrupted. Its certainly, i think, a possibility, but because these machines are air gapped, that would be a rather difficult thing to do. I think youd have to go machine to machine manually, plugging in a u. S. B. Device or Something Like that to install the malware or corrupted software. So certainly these machines are auditable. You can do checks of the software. But im not aware yet of any credible allegations that the machines themselves were tampered with. Host next is halifax, pennsylvania. Diana, good morning, on our biden line. Caller good morning. Ll due respect to mr. Snead, hes being paid for this, and he said that the private donors could not be divulged. I cannot find that anyone would not know that this election was so different from other elections that weve had in the past. I vote absentee for health reasons, and how many millions of people chose not to go out into a public arena to vote this year . Its mindboggling that this is continuing and continuing. We are in a terrible situation in this country. Everybody, individuals, need to take a good look at whats going on and choose for themselves whether to stand up for an election that took place, and we cannot take four more years of the divisiveness of this country. Thank you, sir. Host jason snead . Guest well, the caller is absolutely right to point out that the election was conducted very differently from how it normally would proceed. There were lots of states that made fairly significant changes to their voting process. We saw a huge surge in absentee balloting. Thats not inherently a problem in and of itself, but the problem really comes in when you are doing a few different things. One is, when you are rushing those sweeping changes into place, and if youre doing that in a state that doesnt custom airline deal with large numbers of absentee ballots, youre talking about new processes, new procedures, new training requirements for elections officials, potential confusion on the part of voters, all of which is to say there are a lot of things that could go wrong. We saw that in the primary, and any post mortem analysis of the election will show that there were problems and certainly hot spots in the general election as well. The other thing that we need to keep in mind is that a lot of the rules changes were essentially imposed on states in the course of litigation, and these lawsuits, which often were brought by politicized groups, were aiming to undermine a lot of the key safeguards and verifications that protect absentee ballots. We were talking a second ago about s