- Good evening, and welcome.

I'm Pam Huff, moderator for this debate over tighter restrictions governing absentee voting being implemented in a number of states.

Should the use of absentee ballots be limited?

You know, since 2020 legislatures in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama have all passed new laws to reduce what is called harvesting absentee ballots.

Now, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, harvesting happens when a person collects and submits completed absentee ballots for other voters.

A number of other states, including Texas and Louisiana, have passed so-called Election Integrity Bills.

Again, these bills designed to reign in absentee ballot harvesting.

Now, civil rights groups, the League of Women Voters, claim that these new laws disenfranchise voters, most often Black voters, who rely on them for help in casting a ballot.

Tonight, our two guests are going to provide some insight as to what these new rules could mean for upcoming elections and beyond.

Let me introduce to you first of all Hans von Spakovsky, who is with us tonight.

Mr. von Spakovsky is Senior Legal Fellow in the Heritage Foundation Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

He is the Manager of the think tank's Election Law Reform Initiative.

Former president Donald Trump appointed him to be the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity back in 2017.

And before joining Heritage, he served as a member of the Federal Election Commission.

Tonight, he is going to be called Hans for this debate.

And on the other side of the debate, we have Jonah Minkoff-Zern, who will now be known as Jonah, Co-Director of the Democracy Campaign for Public Citizens, a nonprofit public interest advocacy organization.

Jonah has worked to pass state and federal laws and to mobilize people nationwide to advance voting rights, limit the influence of big money in politics, and protect elections and election officials.

Gentlemen, we welcome both of you tonight to this, and I know each of you now has a three-minute opening statement that you would like to give.

And Hans, we are going to begin with you.

- Thanks, Pam.

Look, no one says we shouldn't have absentee ballots at all.

I think we all agree we should have absentee ballots for individuals who are sick or too physically disabled to make it to the polls, for people who are serving their country abroad, whether they're in the military or civilians.

The problem though is that there's this move to expand and push absentee balloting as a replacement for voting in the polls.

And it's also the idea that we should go to all mail balloting.

Well, the problem with that is this.

When you vote with an absentee ballot, it's the only kind of voting that is done outside the supervision of election officials and outside the observation of poll observers.

Transparency is a vital component of a democratic republic.

Because of that, absentee ballots are the easiest kinds of ballots, unfortunately, to forge, to steal, to alter, to have them sent late in by the postal service so they are not counted.

Some years ago, the New York Times actually did a study of absentee ballots and pointed out that the rejection rate for absentee ballots was in fact higher than the rejection rate for votes cast in a ballot.

And the reason for that, obviously, is when you're in a polling place, there are election officials there who can answer questions, if you have problems, assist you.

That's not true at your home.

Now the other big problem, of course, is mail ballots being delivered.

A number of years ago, the Inspector General for the Postal Service did a study on election-related mail.

How often and when does the Postal Service deliver it on time?

The best they could come up with in a small number of large cities was 96%.

That may sound good, but that means that 4% of all the ballots being sent in by voters got there too late to be counted, in other words, rejected.

And the rates in other parts of the country were in the 80s, 80th percentiles, a very high rejection rate.

Now, a lot of states have what they call ballot harvesting.

I actually call it what it really is, which is ballot trafficking.

It's important for people to understand.

You can deliver your ballot yourself in every state, you can mail it in, members of your family can deliver it for you, and designated caregivers too.

But in about half the states, they also allow third-party strangers to deliver your vote.

You know, candidates, campaign staffers, activists for parties, people who have an interest in the outcome of the election.

That is why that is a very dangerous thing for voters, particularly those who could be disenfranchised by ballots not being delivered, by ballots being changed by those individuals who pick them up.

A number of years ago, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement actually did a study after a series of voter fraud prosecutions for absentee ballot fraud in Florida, and they called absentee ballots, "The tool of choice of vote thieves."

Anyone who believes that doesn't happen, check out the Heritage Election Fraud Database and you'll see a lot of just like that.

- And now Jonah, you get three minutes.

- Thank you.

- And then we will do with a rebuttal with both of you.

- Thank you, Pam.

I spent most of my life in my early voting, voting by mail, living in states where I could vote by mail.

I sat down at my kitchen table, carefully reviewed the candidates and mailed in my ballot.

I then moved to New York where my only option was to vote in person on Election Day.

I'm a working parent, so I had to go to work, come home, feed my kids dinner, and somehow squeeze in a trip to the polling place.

I remember how overwhelming it felt with the things going on in my life to have to go vote on dozens of candidates and issues on the spot.

And what happens if there's a snowstorm, or my car breaks down, or has recently happened to me, a death in a family?

Mail-in ballots are a safe, secure, reliable, and critical means to access the polls from millions of Americans, including seniors whose mobility is limited, veterans with disabilities, nurses working 12-hour shifts, voters in rural areas, or working parents, like me.

Mail-in ballots are popular and convenient with mail-in ballots newly accessible to all voters in New York, I can now sit down with my family and my kids at the dinner table and discuss the different races.

I can teach my kids about the elections and about the different levels of government.

During the pandemic, we could have had a crisis in our nation's ability to vote, but instead, a record number of people voted, with a majority of them casting mail-in ballots.

States that allowed better access to mail-in ballots see, on average, materially higher turnout, especially among younger voters and disabled voters.

There's no viable argument against absentee voting.

Mail-in ballot fraud is incredibly rare, as rare as being hit by lightning or winning the lottery.

In comparison, hundreds of millions of people have been able to cast their votes because of mail-in voting.

Election officials employ rigorous safeguards, including barcoding individual return envelopes, bipartisan ballot review, and secure tracking systems.

Time and time again, those attempting to show widespread fraud have had their efforts disproven and discredited.

Notably, USA TODAY and PBS FRONTLINEs investigated the Heritage Foundation's database that Hans just referred to and found that it presents misleading and incomplete information, that overstates the number of alleged fraud instances and includes cases where no crime was committed.

The investigation concluded that the database found no widespread evidence of fraud.

The risk of fraudulently mailing in one ballot, $10,000 fine and up to five year in prison far outweighs the benefit that anyone could think would occur by casting a fraudulent vote.

It's why people don't counterfeit pennies, it's not worth the risk.

So if there's no real argument against vote by mail, then why are we even having this debate today?

Because there are institutions like the Heritage Foundation that are pursuing an unpopular agenda like tax cuts to the rich, stopping families from using IVF.

They don't want all of us to vote because when we do, they don't win elections.

But let's take their argument at face value.

There are a heck a lot more cases of people drowning than there are voter fraud, but we don't ban swimming in America.

What we need to do, Hans, is work together to make sure that this growing and popular form of voting is done well.

We need to advocate for funding for our elections.

- All right, we appreciate both of your opening statements.

Hans, you now have 30 seconds for a rebuttal.

- Well, it's a sign of weakness in a debate upon when he attacks the other side rather than talking substance.

The idea that there were mistakes found in our database is totally untrue.

Only proven cases get put into our database where someone was convicted in a court of law or judge ordered into election.

And for those who say this is unimportant, well, we're filming this here in Alabama, I doubt that the voters of Gordon, Alabama, and Brighton, Alabama, whose mayors were removed from office after they were convicted of absentee ballot fraud would think that this is not an important issue.

- Thank you, sir.

And 30 seconds for you, Jonah.

- Well, people who convict or who vote fraudulently are caught, and that's why we have laws to address those issues.

So again, this is something that happens very infrequently and there are many different institutions in place to ensure that people are not voting fraudulently.

Even if we were to think that all of the instances in your database were true and valid and correct, it still doesn't show widespread fraud.

What it does is it proves our point that it happens very, very infrequently.

And what's most important is that hundreds of millions of people are able to cast their ballot because of vote by mail.

- All right, gentlemen, thank you both for setting the stage for some more questions now on whether the use of absentee ballots should be limited?

The person to whom the question is given will now have one minute in which to respond, and that will be followed by a 30-second rebuttal.

All right, let's begin with something that I do believe all of us here tonight can agree with, and that is that we want every person who is legally registered to vote in the United States to exercise that right to vote.

That said, Hans, we're gonna start with you, these new ballot harvesting laws are coming primarily from Republican legislatures, they're being signed into law by Republican governors.

So the question is this, are they protecting the integrity of the absentee ballot or are they protecting the party?

- They are protecting the integrity of the ballot process and the idea that, for example, individuals are unable to show an ID when they vote, Alabama has an ID law, so do many other states, that somehow that affects voters.

Frankly, I think is a very patronizing attitude towards voters.

And the turnout numbers, which we now have for more than a decade and a half, first voter ID laws, for example, were in effect in Indiana and Georgia in 2008, the turnout numbers show that is simply not true.

Georgia, for example, in the last election had record registration, record turnout numbers after passing its very good reforms, which included, by the way, extending an ID requirement to absentee ballots.

So we've had high turnout in our elections in recent years, including the last presidential election when we had one of the highest turnouts in many decades.

- Jonah, you have 30-second rebuttal.

- Absolutely, we had one of the highest, we had the highest turnout in record in the last presidential election.

And that's because hundreds of millions of Americans voted by mail.

That's what we're talking about here tonight, and we need to expand that program.

It's wildly popular.

States like Utah are implementing it.

Nebraska had 12 counties, extremely conservative counties just implement a program where they're mailing out ballots to all their voters.

This is a popular program, and you're right, this is something that we need to expand and we need to work together to fund election officials to make sure they can implement it well.

- Jonah, Alabama, as has already been mentioned here tonight, is the most recent state to be sued over its absentee ballot laws.

The Department of Justice has signed on to this particular lawsuit.

Now, the Secretary of State here in Alabama claims that the new rules show, quote, "Partisan third-party organizers, Alabama votes are not for sale."

Would you be able to deny tonight that ballot harvesting, which we have been talking about, and that includes the third party that Hans mentioned, doesn't lend itself to cheating at all?

- Absolutely not.

It does not.

What parties who are going out and helping voters vote do is it makes sure that voters who are traditionally disenfranchised have a voice and have a vote.

What people are doing, like the League of Women Voters, is they are going into communities that traditionally don't vote on the same level and helping them cast their ballots, showing them what they need to do, making sure they have the information, and making sure they know how to cast their ballots and helping them get them back to the polling place.

It is an absolutely essential piece of our democracy and something for us to do to work for a more equitable society where everyone's voice is heard.

These programs are essential, and it's devastating when we start to roll them back and limit them to the progress that we're making as a nation to having everyone have a voice, to having a more equitable society, to having the society where everyone is represented in government.

And we need to continue to expand those programs and build on them because all of us in the end benefit when all of our voices are heard.

- [Pam] Hans.

- Anyone who doubts that ballot trafficking is a bad idea, I suggest they look at the 2018 9th Congressional District race in North Carolina, which was overturned by the State Board of Elections because of widespread absentee ballot fraud, including engineered by staffers for a particular candidate, in this case, a Republican candidate, who were going to people's homes and essentially getting their ballots, changing the ballots, forging witness signatures, et cetera.

So it does happen, and the thing for people to remember is that we have many close elections in this country, particularly the local level, and that's where this can make a difference.

- This is a question for you, Hans.

Eight states in the United States now allow any voter to join what is they call a permanent absentee or mail ballot list.

- [Hans] Right.

- Louisiana is one of three states which makes that option available to all of its seniors.

Would you be opposed to these permanent absentee ballot list?

And if so, why?

- Yes, they're a bad idea, and one of the reasons is because of the inaccuracy and unreliability, unfortunately, of too many states' voter registration list.

The Pew Foundation actually did a study about this a number of years ago and found literally 10 of millions of voter registrations across the country that were inaccurate, not up to date.

One of the reasons for that is the mobility of the American society.

People register, they move, they register in another state.

The Heartland Institute just did a study recently in which they asked people who had voted by absentee ballot certain questions.

About a fifth of them admitted they had actually filled out someone else's absentee ballot.

About a third of them admitted, 17%, that they had voted in a state in which they no longer lived.

A permanent absentee ballot list, unless the state keeps up with people moving, dying, means that absentee ballots could be showing up where people no longer live and are no longer alive.

- [Pam] Jonah, your response?

- Well, people get in car accidents and we don't stop driving.

There are people who have voted fraudulently at a very small number, and we don't interfere with the way that millions of Americans are voting.

What we need to do is we need to make sure that elections are functioning effectively.

So if you're concerned about people moving a lot, then we should instate automatic voter registration that states upon states are doing that makes it easy for us to update voter rolls when people interact with the DMV or other government agencies.

We also just need to invest in our elections and we need to make sure that our elections have the funding they need.

- Jonah, this is a question for you.

Civil rights groups claim that these new absentee ballot laws that we've been talking about, which do carry stiff penalties in the states in which they've been passed, are meant to intimidate people.

However, these same groups often sue states requiring stronger voter ID laws.

Hans referred to that a moment ago.

According, again to Pew Research, 81% of Americans support requiring a government-issued photo ID in order to vote.

So how should states make it in the words of Texas governor Greg Abbott, quote, "Easier to vote and harder to cheat"?

- Well, I think what's important to note is that people don't cheat, and we go back to the counterfeiting pennies.

There are stiff costs for voting one fraudulent vote, it's $10,000 and five years in prison.

It's not something that people are risking in order to try to cast their one vote illegally.

So what we need to do is we need to look at scientific studies of voting and what helps people vote, what breaks down barriers to voting, and really what's happening?

And what we see is that by creating these barriers, we are limiting access to certain voters to the polls.

We're limiting access, for example, to students or seniors or low income residents, or in the case of limiting vote by mail, of rural voters, which is why those 12 counties in Nebraska expanded their voting, very conservative counties.

So we need to look at how we can make sure every American can vote and every American can have a voice.

- [Pam] Hans, your rebuttal.

- Well, if criminal laws deterred people from admitting crimes, our jails would be empty.

And we're about to add at least a dozen more proven cases of fraud, including two big cases of absentee ballot fraud, to our database, which is now over 1,500 proven cases of fraud from across the country.

We want a safe system, a secure system.

All the turnout data shows that all these claims that things like voter ID prevent individuals from voting, it's just not true.

And the data shows that and people support it.

- All right.

This is a question for you, Hans.

Only three states do not allow in-person early voting.

Those states are Alabama, Mississippi, and New Hampshire.

Is ballot harvesting less of a concern, therefore, in the 47 states that do have in-person early voting?

- Well, I don't have a problem with early voting, but that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about absentee balloting, absentee balloting that occurs outside the supervision of election officials.

And by the way, keep in mind that with absentee balloting, you don't have what you do have with early voting.

All states prohibit electioneering at the polls.

The reason for that is obvious.

You don't want candidates, party activists, political guns for hire that are pressuring, intimidating, coercing voters.

Those rules don't apply in people's homes.

There's nothing to prevent all of those individuals who have a stake in the outcome of the election, who have a stake in every single ballot.

Ballots are valuable commodities to them.

There's nothing that prevents them from engaging in that kind of pressure, coercion, intimidation at people's homes.

And there are cases like that in our database that people can see all over the country, and that is a real problem.

- [Pam] And your response?

- The number of people in his database versus the number of people voting is extraordinarily small between the billions of people who have cast ballots over the past several decades.

What we need to look at is do we limit our ability to vote?

Do we eliminate our ability to sit down and make a careful decision at our kitchen table, to have the time to vote, to make sure we can vote if a crisis comes up in our life, to make sure rural voters don't have to drive miles to get to the polls?

Do we limit all those things because of these small examples?

- Question for you.

The Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, Jonah, provides protected assistance to those who are disabled, blind, those who cannot read, those who cannot write.

So some would ask, "What more needs to be done?"

- Well, that's a foundation to make sure that we have those rights.

And I think that what needs to be done is we need to evolve our voting system as our society evolves and make sure that people have access to the polls so we can see what works.

Things like automatic voter registration, things like vote by, or mailed out voting.

We can see that these are popular things, we can see that there are things that work, and we can expand and develop our election system to make sure that people with disabilities can vote, to make sure that people who have a family emergency who can't go to the polls on one day can vote.

What we need to do is we need to build a society where everybody it can vote.

And I think we need to be concerned about ulterior motives to trying to limit voting and not follow down those avenues.

There has been a real devastating impact of these mass claims of fraud, which don't exist, of people not trusting our democracy.

And it's absolutely important that we put an end to that and that we return to an understanding that our system works.

- We've gotta stop you right there, but Hans, we would like your rebuttal.

- Well, it's very interesting.

He talks about popularity because Jonah keeps talking about New York.

New York recently had a referendum on the ballot in which they would've switched the state from a state where you need an excuse to vote absentee ballot, to use an absentee ballot to a no fault system.

Voters in New York turned that down.

They did not believe you should have that kind of mass mail voting.

They say, "You should have an excuse.

Yeah, if you're disabled, you should be able to use an absentee ballot.

But otherwise, no, you should have to go to a polling place and vote."

- Question for you right now.

A co-chair of the Republican National Committee said recently, quote, "We need to be doing legal ballot harvesting."

This comes after years, of course, of Republicans saying that ballot harvesting leads to fraud.

Isn't that a mixed message for states which have, in fact, been toughening their absentee ballot laws?

- Well, what I say to that is that when you're going into the Super Bowl as a football team, you play by the rules that are in place.

If you're in a state that allows ballot trafficking, then obviously yeah, you should use that rule, but you should do it legally.

Make sure the people who are working for you are not intimidating, not coercing voters, that they're delivering ballots, even if they know it's from individuals who are gonna vote for the other candidate.

But that doesn't mean that once the election is over, you don't keep trying to persuade the legislature to change the rule to get rid of what I think is a very risky procedure that, again, allows individuals with a stake in the outcome of the election to get their hands on a ballot and puts them in a position to put pressure on voters at their homes.

- [Pam] All right, and a quick response, and then I believe, please correct me if I'm wrong, I believe then we are ready for our two closing comments.

Okay.

- People voting at their homes doesn't mean that someone's coming around and trying to steal my vote.

People voting at my home means I get to make a thoughtful decision over who I'm voting for and mail in my ballot.

If there's candidates who want me to vote for them, they can call me at my home, they can knock on my door, they can have people who support their candidacy come knock on my door also.

That doesn't mean that the things that are, like that doesn't mean that there are the threats and intimidation that's happening to voters at the polls that are taking place right now as a result of a movement that is happening because of false claims of mass voter fraud.

- All right, gentlemen, we thank you both for your comments to the questions.

You each now have one minute to make your closing comments.

And Jonah, we are beginning with you.

- So mail-in ballots are safe, secure, reliable, and a critical means to access the polls for millions of Americans, including seniors whose mobility is limited, veterans with disabilities, nurses working 12-hour shifts, voters in rural areas, and working parents.

It has allowed millions to vote safely and at record numbers during the pandemic.

And due to its popularity and growing numbers of states, including deeply red states, like Utah, are implementing and expanding their vote by mail programs.

Investigations have soundly debunked the Heritage Foundation's claims of widespread voter fraud, finding that they're based on misleading and incomplete information that overstates the number of alleged fraud instances and includes cases where no crime was committed.

Their actions to oppose vote by mail are not just misguided, they are actively harmful, intended to suppress voter turnout and advance an unpopular political agenda.

It's time right now that we work together to make sure that everyone can vote.

- And Hans, one minute.

- Well, folks can go to the Election Fraud Database at Heritage and check it out themselves and they'll find out that these criticisms of it are simply not true.

Look, again, Jonah was trying to confuse the issue.

We believe absentee ballots should be available for people who are too sick or too disabled to get it to the polls or ,for example, are gonna be out of town the entire time of early voting and Election Day.

The issue is, should it be what's called no fault absentee?

And the problem is absentee ballots are a lot riskier, they're outside the observation of poll watchers and poll workers, and they lend themselves to everything from being lost in the mail to voters being intimidated and coerced in their homes.

And here's the way you can answer this.

If you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket in to the lottery office or would you go there and drop your ticket off?

That's the same issue with whether you put a ballot in the ballot box yourself.

- We appreciate this conversation tonight.

Not so much a debate, but a conversation that our viewers obviously now have an opportunity to think about what you said.

So thank you both very, very much tonight for participating in this.

So many Americans are concerned about the election.

Some, in fact, are still angry over the 2020 outcome.

Nobody wants to see another four years of court challenges.

And yes, just as you've heard here tonight, voting may not be as easy as you would like for it to be, but we can guarantee you it is worth the trouble.

Let your voice be heard.

After all, change comes at the ballot box.

I'm Pam Huff.

From all of us here at Alabama Public Television, we thank you for watching.

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