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11 05 24 CU Election Law Professor Doug Spencer discusses voting fraud and security
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Now just $129.99 at Best Buy featuring Dolby Atmos and two built-in subwoofers. Cinema quality sound is closer than ever. Plus, this Visio Soundbar has the simplest setup yet, so you can stream your favorite holiday playlist from iHeartRadio in minutes. Give the gift of incredible sound, or treat yourself to a serious audio upgrade. Even the Visio All In One Soundbar at Best Buy for just $129.99, and make your holidays sound better than ever. Election Day and as much has been made about the integrity and security of votes, some already set to challenge the process and results before we even have them. Douglas Spencer is an expert in the election law and voting rights realm with the University of Colorado Law School and joins us now here on Colorado's Morning News. Douglas, I'm curious if you've already received calls, seen things, and heard objections regarding the early vote and mail-in vote thus far. We have seen some objections in court. Some other states haven't seen anything here in Colorado that's risen to the level of systematic problems, but there's also a lot of, let's say, chatter on social media sites that's been reported of potential challenges at polling places, or even challenges as poll workers try to carry their ballots back to counting centers in their counties later on this evening, and that's something that we're all paying attention to and worried about. How could some of the legal challenges that we hear of disrupt the timeliness of when we could see the election results? I don't think any of the legal challenges that we're likely to face this year will really impact the timing of the vote count. The litigation, a lot of the lawsuits that we saw from 2020, for example, have already played out. There's been hundreds of lawsuits that have been playing out the last year or two, and so most of the most important decisions about what we'll be able to count ballots that arrive after election day in Pennsylvania, et cetera. Questions like that have been resolved, so any potential litigation that's going to arise is not going to impact any counting or the vote totals that will be reported at the end of this week at all, even though we may see some challenges to counting processes that people see some anomalies pop up. I know it's very cursory at this point, Douglas, but do any of these current challenges, objections, however we want to couch them, do you see any legitimacy with them? No, not really. The legitimate lawsuits have come and gone, and I think it was responsible of both Republicans and Democrats to air out their grievances in the courts before the election instead of waiting until after and then hoping that they could change the result in some way. All the decisions about who's going to certify the votes, whether counties can review vote totals before they certify that vote as a discretionary matter, whether ballots that arrive after election day shall be counted, a whole number of issues were litigated in advanced courts have been very clear about that, and everybody has their marching orders and now it just needs to execute. Professor, this may be a difficult question to really answer, but is there really a timeline when it comes to results, is there too early, which makes people skeptical of where they counted too quickly, or is there too late where people start to question the integrity of the elections? Is there a sweet spot when it comes to the overall timeline of the official results? Yes, a really great question. Definitely becoming longer and longer before we learn the results of these elections, in part because people are using mail-in ballots more and more, particularly since COVID. It's definitely not the case that we're going to learn the results of this election tonight before midnight, in part because several states accept mail-in ballots that arrive after election day, so we don't even know how many elections have been cast until Thursday or Friday, just by virtue of the way that we're running the elections, and so if people recognize that and reset their expectations away from, we had a watch party at our house, we wanted by midnight for the networks to call the election so that we could mark our bingo cards and if we could go home happy, those days are long gone, and instead we have what I think is a very open and transparent process. We have live streams of the vote-counting centers in all of these states that people can watch, and we're able to see the vote totals as they come in. They'll come in and dashes every hour or so, and so even if things may take a short or a long amount of time, it's not that a state's just sitting out there with no results for a week. We get to watch as this process unfolds in real time, and I think that transparency should hopefully bring confidence to people who are watching this. I want to broaden this out just a little bit with you. How many actual, legitimate cases of voter fraud have we had, say in the past few election cycles going back maybe 2, 3, 4? Well, you know, we will see dozens, let's say, of examples of voter fraud every election. You know, already here in Colorado, we've seen an example in Mesa County in Grand Junction where some ballots were taken out of mailboxes and cast, and the majority of those ballots that were cast were caught, but three of those ballots actually made it through and were counted and will be counted, and the people whose names were voted, they'll get to cast their own ballot. First things happen, like I said, the magnitude when you average this up across the entire country of dozens, maybe 100 votes or somebody impersonated or submitted an absentee ballot for somebody else. And that's not nothing. So that's the problem that I think county clerks and election officials are aware of and trying to fix, but I think it's hard for the human mind to grasp, but we're going to see somewhere like a hundred and sixty, a hundred and eighty million votes get cast today, and having a hundred or two hundred votes really is such an incredibly small number of fractions of a fraction of a percent that it's, you know, not going to have any impact whatsoever on any race, even though it's an unfortunate circumstance and it's something that people are aware of and trying to fix. Quick follow up to that then. There's been a lot been made about voter ID. But voter ID or something like that, would that mitigate whatever few cases that we have going on with this issue? I think a voter ID could potentially mitigate some of this. It would mitigate the kinds of fraud where somebody pretends to be somebody else. It doesn't mitigate the kind of fraud where you steal somebody's mail-in ballot or perhaps you purchase it from them or you, you know, steal ballots out of a drop box, for example. So, as we move towards more mail-voting than the mail-voting system is more vulnerable than the polling places, and the decision has been made, even though there's more fraud that can come about with mail-in voting, the decision has been made by legislators, that that amount of fraud isn't, that cost doesn't outweigh the benefits of making voting more convenient for the rest of us and reaching more communities. And so, there's this cost-benefit analysis that we want to make sure we're ensuring the protection of this fundamental right for those who have it, and that means making it slightly easier and opening it up to some vulnerabilities as opposed to keeping it so strict that we might take away that right, and that's a decision that our state legislatures have been grappling with in making. A voter ID law will stop some fraud in polling places, but it won't really address other kinds of fraud, absentee ballot fraud, or, for example, incompetence or poll workers who decide they want to stuff a ballot box which we saw in Chicago in the 1980s, so it's only one part of a broader regulatory piece. Professor and expert in the election law and voting rights with the University of Colorado's law school at Stugless Spencer, thank you so much for your insight on this this morning, we appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for your nice talk, you both. There's only one feeling like knowing your banker personally, like growing up with a bank you can count on, like being sure what you've earned is safe, secure, and local. There's only one feeling like knowing you're supporting your community. You deserve more from a bank, you deserve an institution that stood strong for generations. Bank of Colorado, there's only one member FDIC. I don't know if you know this, but when you don't have time to read the Washington Post, you can listen to it. Almost every article has a listening option, and right now you can become a Washington Post subscriber for just 50 cents a week. It's an incredible deal. Stay on top of what's happening by signing up at washingtonpost.com/pod. That's washingtonpost.com/p-o-d. Stayed up your holidays with Visio's 65-inch Quantum Smart TV, now just 448 at Walmart. Immerse yourself in a world of over a billion vibrant colors with Quantum dot technology. 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