FITTON: We Need to Get Back to Election DAY!

➡ The dispute revolves around the 2020 election procedures and the belief that ballots must be received by election day per federal law. A lawsuit was initiated in Illinois arguing against the state’s law allowing ballots to be counted upto two weeks after the election day without a postmark, claiming that it undermines confidence in the results and extends the voting period unduly, which potentially leads to fraudulent practices.

A lot of the 2020 election disputes were over the counting of ballots. And people were concerned, oh, you know, we have an election day, and they didn’t figure out who won for weeks afterwards, or days, depending on the state. And I would argue that’s contradictory to federal law, certainly at the presidential level, and arguably it’s contradictory to congressional law if there’s a congressional case race involved. So we didn’t just make that argument in theory.

We went to court over that in Illinois. Could you describe that case to our viewers? Because I think it’s an important one, because it addresses something that is of great concern, and we may go to court again, but what we’ve done is we started a lawsuit in Illinois where we said that federal law provides that an election day is the cutoff for election officials to receive ballots. They have to receive ballots by election day.

And you’re not receiving a ballot if you just put it in the US. Mail. Those aren’t election. So going on election day, dropping your ballot in the mail, ain’t going to get it. There the question. And they’re intersecting laws. And so it’s hard to describe. But here’s a simple way to look at it. You take a ballot home a mail in ballot, when it’s sitting on your kitchen table.

It is not a cast ballot. It has not been received by election officials. You fill it, know you’re walking down the street with it’s not a ballot. You put it in A-U-S. Mailbox, it’s not a ballot. It’s being handled by the postal service. Okay? It is a ballot that needs to be counted when it’s received by an election official, and it needs to be received by election day.

And there’s two federal laws that we believe mandate that result. And what a number of states have done is say that if they receive a ballot anytime up to two weeks after election day, specifically Illinois, that’s the law. Illinois, it’s the law in a couple of states. They extend that deadline. If that’s the case, then those ballots are counted even though they weren’t received by an election official for all that time, even if they’re not postmarked.

My understanding is they don’t even need a postmark. Yes, those statutes typically do say that. What’s the problem? If they were mailed generally, I say that because you think it’s obvious, but maybe it’s not obvious. Why is that an issue? Generally speaking, people are voting. They’re dropping stuff in the mail. Why not count the ballots? Well, I’ll start at a place that maybe a lot of people wouldn’t start, but I know you started this place.

This is what the law says that matters to me. I hear you. It’s not an 8th grade debate society where we can say, sure, that’s what the law says, but here’s what we want. You can’t make up your own rules. No, you can’t. But also, it has been a degradation of the electoral system to have election day extended and extended and extended. People are not voting about the same thing if the issues at this point in time are different than the issues at this point in time, you run risks.

You run risks if you don’t have to have a postmark. Well, I mean, let’s say someone is perfectly compliant with the law. Polls close at 07:00 P. m. In Illinois or whatever the jurisdiction, the actual time is. And the announcement is Congressman BOST is winning by ten points and he’s our client in this case and where it’s very close and there’s someone in the district who hasn’t voted yet.

So well, I’m going to vote for them or I’m going to vote against them, and I’m going to vote after the polls across. I know what the results are, practically speaking, and I’m going to impact those results by voting late, in essence, right. We would allege and that vote and you mail, you mail on that day. You go to the post office at 08:00, the 24 hours post office.

Usually there’s someplace around that takes mail and you’ve got a leg up on all the suckers who voted on time. That’s why it’s illegal, or at least that’s why there’s the law there. And I recall Supreme Court justices in even the last two years voting, counting ballots after election day undermines confidence in the elections because people just assume that’s just the temptation for fraud and to change the results as, ascertained on election day is so strong that you’re tempting a drunk in a bar.

Am I fairly characterizing it. That’s true. Although I have to say the first thing I said again, which is we’re not suing and saying that any Illinois election was decided wrongly because there was fraud. Right. We’re saying that federal law says you got to do it this way. Federal law could say differently, but it doesn’t. But it doesn’t. If you’re not following the rules, that’s a part of fraud, too.

And people have a right to expect that the rules are followed. And if someone cheats, then why you have a very good description of why someone you should presume that something is untoward is happening and you can’t have confidence in the outcome. Yeah, it needs to be under the rules. As you say, elections should be clean. They just should be. It drives me crazy when people say there are few instances of fraud, so therefore we don’t need protections against it.

No, elections are where you need the protections. And one example I like to use to compare that is that there may be a couple hundred securities law violations that are pursued in the courts each year. A couple hundred. There are billions of securities transactions. Do we need our securities laws? Of course we do. In the same line of thinking, of course we need our election laws. Yeah. There aren’t that many bank robberies compared to the number of banks, but you don’t want banks to be robbed by suggesting it’s okay to do so, because it’s really no big deal, even if a bunch of because the numbers aren’t all that great.

Well, again, I’ll be blunt in a way that you sometimes are less comfortable than being the careful I’ve been pretty blunt, but go ahead. The left wants to be able to steal elections. That’s why they want to be able to count votes forever. And today after Election Day, that’s why they hate the idea of cleaning election rolls. That’s why they oppose voter ID. We didn’t even get into that.

And all these other sane security measures that are supported, I would submit by 70, 80% of the public. Why would you? Poll after poll. Yeah. So stop pretending that it’s anything other than you want to be able to seal elections when necessary. That’s my view. So before we go, what next? I guess we’re looking at states to see their roles. If their roles are being cleaned, we’re in it.

We’ve sent letters to 14 states inquiring about things that we noticed in the last federal report. So we’re being nice. We’re saying there’s an issue here. We’re not going to sue just yet, but give us some details here so we can figure mean what’s happening. As my mother says, you’re either right all the time or you’re nice. So we’re being nice. But I mean, there’s also this sometimes the numbers are wrong for innocent Pennsylvania, by the way.

We sued after begging them to tell us what the numbers were, and they blew us off. But when we sued, some of the counties said, oh, well, these numbers are totally the numbers we certified to the Election Assistance Commission in Washington were incorrect by a factor of several. And Judicial Watch, you were terrible for relying on the numbers we gave. Yeah. So we’re looking at these states. So we’re prepared to clean up the roles over the next year or so? We are where the NVRA is concerned.

It’s hunting season again. We have a new report from the federal government that describes what states have been doing in the past two years based, as I said, on their own representations. And we’ve looked at that and processed it, and we have inquiries out, and if our inquiries are not satisfied in the way that makes us happy, we’ll get more serious, which includes lawsuits. So we’ve been doing these cases for ten years, some of which have gained significant national notice, certainly within the election community, we’re well known.

Have the roles gotten cleaner? Have we noticed that people are more sensitive to this, even in places where previously they were disasters? I would say yes. It’s impossible to know what effect you’re having when you send a threatening letter and then you get no response, or you get an ambiguous response, and then you see that the roles have been cleaned up. I mean, what happened there? And we do know through some of our FOIA work that, in fact, when a letter is received from Judicial Watch, there is an awful lot of attention paid to it and a lot of running around.

What are we going to do? How are we going to fix this? How are we going to approach it? So we do have that effect. I say this with some, frankly, amazement, because that used to happen at, you know, the Department of justice comes knocking, people sit up and pay attention, and people would consensually take the steps the Department of justice thought they should take because they were concerned about potential legal.

And we’re doing what the justice we are the Justice Department in that regard. We’re getting that reaction, and it’s a good reaction. It means that we can punch above our weight. So how many voter registrations I’m not putting you under oath how many voter registrations are there in the country? I don’t know, but 150,000,000? Oh, more? 200. 200. And what I’ve seen numbers don’t hold me to this.

I don’t know experts out there, I don’t know. What percentage of the voter registrations currently on file would you think need to be cleaned up? Well, the typical inactive list for a state is about 10% of their voter rolls. So when you hit a state where one 6th of their registrations, one fifth of their registrations, sometimes more, are inactive, you’re probably looking at a problem. So maybe 20 million names need to be cleaned up over time.

Yeah, but I mean, to be fair, some of them might be legitimately in the Nvra’s drawn out process. Right, that five year process. Yeah. Well, the point is you need someone who’s diligent and diligent in doing this and committed to this process. And if the process is ongoing, then there’ll be names that are getting old, but they age out after a period of time. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button.

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