James Dickson - Do Duplicate Ballots Undermine Trust?

More than 150 voters in Green Bay received duplicate ballots and while officials call it a mistake, critics say it’s exactly the kind of error that shakes confidence in elections. When ballots can’t be fully accounted for, how should voters react?

James Dickson, founder of Make Politics Local Again, joins the program to break down what happened, how systems are supposed to prevent this, and whether this kind of issue is more common than people think.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show on a First Amendment Friday. Consider this, because for all of us who have for years said that America has a very flawed election system, that we are counting ballots that come from dead people, that come from illegal aliens, that come from foreign nationals, uh, all these other things, and a flawed system that gets more flawed the more that we adopt things like vote by mail or uh extreme levels of absentee voting. More than 150 voters in Green Bay, Wisconsin got two ballots in the mail. Was that just one of those honest mistakes that happens from time to time, or exactly the kind of sloppiness that makes people lose their faith in elections? James Dixon joins me now, founder of Make Politics Local Again, MPLA. Uh that's a movement, and a former New York Post swing state reporter. James, welcome to the program. How are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Hey, good evening, Lars. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Is this just one of those crazy little coincidences or a tiny accident, or is it indicative that we have the system that just doesn't work very well?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Lars, I think our system is built to be broken. And so what we have here, I mean, when you send out 152 duplicate ballots and you don't you don't catch it, people who got the ballots are the ones who report it. And then when it's reported, you kind of the the election official kind of hems and haws and goes directly to the media rather than address the complaint. This is a job that's too important. Oops is simply not good enough, but oops is what we continue to hear from these election officials.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Well, you know what's funny about it, James, is that I'm not an accountant, but I know how accountants do a lot of their work. They they make sure they can double check. They go in and they audit the books. Wouldn't you think that when you're sending out ballots, something hugely important, where you don't want to send out one extra ballot, you don't want to send out one too few ballots because then you're cheating somebody, that that there would be some double checks in there. This sounds like there was no double check, and they really didn't want to hear a double check, even if it came from a human out there getting ballots, saying, Why'd you send me two ballots?

SPEAKER_00 2:15

No, they didn't want to double check. This is the system working as it's designed to. Uh, the system is broken in its very design. Uh, one of these people who got two ballots actually asked that election officials voided both of them. Another 116 of those, you know, people actually did vote. And so, but and what I never heard is that the system itself said we had a way to stop this, right? We made the initial mistake, but we have safeguards in place to make sure no one could double vote. I have never heard anyone say that. And that's terrifying because, yes, today it was caught without any further problem. What might happen tomorrow?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Well, and what I wonder about James is just simple van, you know, plain vanilla kind of solutions. Like if you say, I know we have a city that has this many precincts, we know we have a known number of voters in each of those precincts. So you you create the ballots for a precinct and you say we have 8,122 people in that precinct. That means we shouldn't have one more or one less than exactly that number. That doesn't seem like it's that hard to double check, is it?

SPEAKER_00 3:23

No, especially not with computers. And just to use an example from history, so in Michigan, uh in the 1890s, we had this Secretary of State named John Jocum. And he certified a ballot measure that would have given a race to state officials like himself and the state treasurer and such. And so he said it it won by several thousand votes. It turns out it actually had lost by several thousand votes. And then he tried to say, oops. And a governor from his own party, a fellow Republican, actually had to remove him from office. And so back then we we saw high stakes and understanding of the seriousness of the job, that the job of a clerk is to certify and verify, not just to certify. And then you saw, you know, the decisive action after a mistake was made. None of those things exist here.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

You know what's funny about this is that the there are so many places on the planet where we have major countries that vote. They use picture ID, they use physical ballots, they have the count done that night, and I mean uh countries like France, and then and then you come to the United States and you say, We're the most technological country on earth, and you say, What what system are you using? Oh, we're we're putting uh putting ballots out by an old-fashioned mail system that was created in the 1800s and uh and it gets delivered to somebody's house. Well, on a given day? No, sometime over a two or three-week period, and then the ballots are sent back sometime over a two or three-week period, and then they're counted sometime over a two or three-week period. It sounds like we've gone from a fairly precise system to one that is that almost is designed to lack precision.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

That's exactly it. There's so much flab and failure built into the system. It's like being shocked that after leaving the barn door open, the horses all escaped. Well, well, what were they gonna do, right? You don't have to look for the thief. You're the problem yourself. And so the same thing happened, a very similar situation in Michigan in 2024. Uh, our Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, uh, goes out and says, uh, non-citizen voting is a myth. It's the Loch Nest monster, right? He says that in September 24. The very next month, a Chinese man named Ho Ching Yao votes in Ann Arbor, and because it's early voting, not absentee, the vote is run right then and there, and his vote counts. She studies and finds out that there's at least 15 more non-citizen voters, and then, after finding this, hasn't done one single thing to safeguard our election, so this could not happen again.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

By the way, James, can I share with you an example from my neck of the woods? I live in Washington State, but Oregon is right next door. And do you know how they found out about a couple of thousand foreign nationals registered to vote? It was by accident and with the help of a very liberal political group from none other than Illinois. Because what happened was this liberal group in Illinois said, we're kind of curious how is it they're automatically signing up all these people, everybody who gets a driver's license or a state ID card uh through the DMV is going to be automatically signed up to vote. How do they make sure they keep the foreign nationals out? So this very liberal group reaches out to the state of Oregon and says, How do you how are you doing that? And they said, Well, we'll just send you the data and you can look at it yourself. And so this liberal organization gets the data. And they looked at it and said just a small sample, and they said, We just found a couple of hundred foreign nationals in your voter rolls. And the state went, oh, oops, that was one of those oopses. And so they did a little bit of looking. At the end of the day, it was almost 2,000 foreign nationals who are registered to vote. But they had only checked about one-third of all the registered voters. And you know what happened when we asked, well, are you going to check the rest of the registered voters? If you already found a couple of thousand foreign nationals, they said, no, no, no, no, we're just gonna we're we'll we'll catch them as we go. You know, we'll we'll figure them out down the line somewhere. So this is the attitude that predominates when it comes to checking to for for foreign national voting. It doesn't exist, it's not there, and if somebody accidentally finds it, then we're gonna do our best to just deny its existence and move on down the road. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

You know what that tells me, Lars, is that these Democrats are running a common playbook. So in Michigan, it's the exact same situation. So say my wife is from Canada and she moves to Michigan, but she's not a citizen yet.

unknown 8:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

She gets her driver's license in Michigan, she would be registered to vote automatically. And here's the kicker, Lars. The only way you could not be registered to vote automatically as a foreigner in Michigan is if you furnish proof of non-citizenship. So we want them to furnish proof of citizenship so as to vote. No, in Michigan, you'd have to prove furnish proof of non-citizenship to not be registered to vote.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

So if you just want your license, go it sounds like the reverse of the Save Act. That's James Dixon, who is founder of Make Politics Local Again and a former New York Post swing state reporter. James, thanks very much.