SIO476: Greg Palast Claims the Election Was Stolen. Let's Check His Work. PART 2

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:13 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 476. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I'm excited to get to part two with Dr. Jenessa Seymour on the myths around the election that some weirdo on the internet is trying to spread and a lot of people are buying. But, you know, not en masse, though. I think that, largely speaking, Democrats are much more sensible, obviously, than Republicans, than MAGA, and so this isn't really, like, anywhere near as popular as Trump's election lies were with the right. But it is present and it does get shared and it does get engagement when it's shared. I think it's just good to debunk this stuff. I Think it's good to engage skeptically and we learn so much along the way. So let's get on to part two. If you remember in the end of part one, she started talking about guardianships and how you can lose your right to vote if you have like a conservatorship type thing and then she started to get into voting rights around felons and that's where we will pick up the conversation in this part. So that's what we'll do after the break. Hey Hey, please support the show, patreon.com/seriouspod. If you like stuff like this and want to hear more of it, that's the way to make it happen. And it's also the way for you to get more money. It's also a way to avoid the auto ads. All right, after this break, we'll get to it.

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0:01:32 Jenessa: Okay, so as far as that guardianship goes, it varies by state. Please check your state laws. Don't just assume that because you have a guardianship or someone you care for that they can't vote. Check your laws. The same thing is going to be true for these felony voting rights. We do not want to just dismiss this offhand. There's a couple states where it just doesn't matter. You can still vote regardless of your interaction with the criminal justice system, which I think we can probably get on the same page that's the right way to do it yeah

0:02:03 Thomas: I think so. I don't understand, like, why in the world we would ever do this at all. Like, it just strikes me as trying to further marginalize and punish people who are probably already marginalized. Like, It's not like all the prisoners are going to get together and vote for, like Voldemort or something. Thing it just strikes me as like imagine if you live in a police state and the recourse you have try to change that is voting but wouldn't you know it everybody who's a quote -unquote criminal can't vote just seems like you would never be able to get out of that police state which strikes me as a strong reason to not have that policy but that's just me

0:02:32 Jenessa: Yeah it makes no sense that we have this punishment that continues after you've served your sentence

0:02:42 Thomas: Yeah I was talking about people in prison but yeah that's even stupider like yeah no totally I forgot that that was the you're right it's even people who are out then still can't vote in places ridiculous

0:02:52 Jenessa: Yeah yeah in some states it persists forever you would think right like there's no other right where we're like oh for the rest of your life you have to quarter soldiers in your home as a punishment like that doesn't it make sense? And you've served your time. And a lot of times people are plea bargaining and they're not told, oh, you're pleading from, you know, you don't want to risk 15 years. You're going to plead a five, but you're playing to a lifetime of no voting. They don't tell you that. Yeah.

0:02:56 Thomas: That should be unconstitutional yeah that's

0:03:22 Jenessa: So some states never again. Some states it's while you're on parole. Some States like Florida love to do well, you have to finish parole or probation or whatever, and you have have to pay all your fines and so they will just hold it over you. Just ridiculous fees that you haven't paid that you kind of probably can't pay because you're struggling to get a job because you have a felony record. A lot of states do what New York does, which is if you are currently serving a felony sentence, you can't vote. The second the sentence is over, you CanVote. If you you are awaiting trial, even for a potential felony, you can vote.

0:03:21 Thomas: Crazy yeah sure oh

0:04:03 Jenessa: Of course, you're not convicted yet, right? That doesn't make any sense. A misdemeanor doesn't affect it. That's relatively recent in New York. So there's a lot of people in Newark with a felony conviction who think they can't vote and they can. So please check your state laws once again. It varies a lot by state and it's really important to check your laws. It changes. You got to stay on top of this. So again, Again, really unfortunate that we have this big article about voter suppression, and we are in one sentence just dismissing this huge chunk of people. It's 4 .4 million people in 2022 were blocked from voting because of a felony conviction. And that's 2 % of the voting eligible population, and 75 % of them have fully completed their sentence.

0:04:49 Jenessa: We have more than a million people with a guardianship in the U .S., guardianship or conservatorship and depending on your state may or may not be able to vote. So let's not dismiss this.

0:05:01 Thomas: So just clarifying these are things that this guy doing his calculations kind of just said ah not counting this which fair enough but you're just bring to our attention more detail about how this

0:05:10 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. I want to draw attention to it for anybody listening for your purposes and also because it would have really helped his calculation to note like 4 .4 million people and that's 2 % of the voting eligible population and that is disproportionately Black and Hispanic Americans, but you just can't quantify exactly how many would

0:05:19 Thomas: Works oh like if he did add that

0:05:34 Jenessa: Have wanted to vote, how many would have voted a certain way, and so we're just ignoring them for this calculation. Who knows what that would have done? Maybe?

0:05:43 Thomas: I have to imagine just demographically it's going to be a lower propensity type of voter but you never know yeah who knows

0:05:49 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah. How would we know? Because they're not allowed.

0:05:53 Thomas: In an alternate reality in which in 2014 democrats didn't lose the senate I think maybe we have a whole different supreme court and maybe that whole different supreme court would declare this unconstitutional and so all these folks could vote who knows we'll We'll never know because, you know, it just wasn't important enough in 2014 to vote in the terms.

0:06:07 Jenessa: Yeah, who knows? Apparently not.

0:06:13 Thomas: Just wasn't, wasn't importante enough. The entire course of history would have been changed in my view.

0:06:18 Jenessa: So, all right, we've got these claims about provisional ballots that are not accurate. We've got these claims about challenges that are not accurate we've also got some really inaccurate claims about how people are being taken off the voter rolls. So again just to clarify there are huge problems with purges. It's important to note that sometimes people are taken off the voter roles inappropriately sometimes it's an accident sometimes it is clearly a targeted campaign and it's a problem. He is going to do this math and explain the law completely incorrectly here. So the way he frames this, he starts the section and says, I'm talking about a trick that has been perfected by politicians of both parties to eliminate voters of the wrong persuasion, the poison postcard. Here's how it works. Targeted voters are mailed postcards by state election officials. Let's remember state voting chiefs, secretaries of state, are almost to a one partisan hacks. Vote. Just real quick, plenty of states don't even have a secretary of state. And in many states, that is not the person who runs elections. But anyway, yeah, yeah. Lots of states have like just a board of elections that could be appointed by the governor. Those could be elected officials. It varies by state. But in Georgia, it's a secretary -of -state, and I think he's coming from a Georgia perspective. Voters who don't sign and return the cards, which look like junk mail, will be purged.

0:07:49 Thomas: Uh, well, I'm definitely familiar with something like that happening, right?

0:07:54 Jenessa: Yeah. So here's the critical thing. First, we have to separate out a couple of different ways this could be happening. One is caging, which is really a huge problem. This is when not government officials at all, people in a political campaign or some sort of activist group, they mail you something, you don't respond, and they use this to make a list of suspected, affected, like, oh, these people moved. This is voter fraud.

0:08:23 Thomas: These people value their time and sanity and don't check all their junk mail all the time.

0:08:27 Jenessa: Yeah. Especially when it is, right,

0:08:28 Thomas: Better make a list of them.

0:08:30 Jenessa: Especially when this is not government officials. You have no legal obligation to answer this whatsoever.

0:08:31 Thomas: Oh this isn't I thought this was the sorry this this isn t

0:08:37 Jenessa: There's a couple of versions. This one, caging, that we're talking about, this is really bad. So these private groups are making this list, and then they're going to go to the government officials and say, I want to challenge all these people.

0:08:39 Thomas: Oh gotcha oh okay I see gotcha

0:08:51 Jenessa: This this is terrible. This, yeah, of course not.

0:08:53 Thomas: I cannot imagine responding to whatever that is or checking it in no

0:08:58 Jenessa: Yeah, if I got something that's like, this is from the whatever Republican Party, I'm not answering your bullshit. Like, no. And you can imagine, of course, how this would be targeted at, you know, different neighborhoods, different groups of people. Totally unacceptable. Something that is critical, just because this private person sends this in, there are times when they've tried to get around like, oh, no, no no, this isn't a a challenge, we're just making you, government, aware they might have moved. And there have been the beginnings of legal challenges and to say like, hey, you can't say it's not a challenge just by not calling it a challenge. It's clearly what you're doing. And the rules about challenges should apply here. To be fair, still, we got to remember boards of elections are not just taking this at face value. They are still investigating. When we look at mailers actually sent by officials. There's two possibilities. One is having already had reason to believe you have moved. You don't live here. That could be a DMV record, a post office record, something like that. They can send you a mailer. And again, it varies by state how they want to handle this. It could say, hey, return this. And this all gets ignored. Show up and vote at the next election and you're good to go. Any number of things that just say, hey, also, if you are a new person who lives here and you know for a fact this person doesn't live here, you can send it back. There's all kinds of versions of that. You register at a new address and they send

0:09:25 Thomas: World yeah yeah

0:10:30 Jenessa: It to you and they say, you've registered here. And you could be like, who the hell is this person? This is not their home.

0:10:35 Thomas: Sure I still get mail from the previous owner forever and ever and ever so important reminder if we haven't said already plenty of legitimate reasons to take someone went off a voter roll yeah

0:10:44 Jenessa: Exactly. You can't vote for my city mayor if you don't live in my city. Like, that's just fair. So they actually have a legal obligation under federal law to keep their voter rolls. They call it like voter hygiene. You're supposed to be triple checking that people live where they say they live. Some of this is to prevent voter fraud. Some of this government records should be accurate. So we shouldn't have the post office record and the DMV record and the voter record have a different address for you. That doesn't make make sense. You know, it's sometimes there's a lot of flexibility for like college students and people in nursing homes, because it really isn't clear, like, what do you call home? There's not one right answer to that question. For the vast majority of us, there is one right answer to where you consider home, domicile, whatever, and that's where you should be voting. And it shouldn't be your vacation home, and it shouldn'T be an apartment you lived in four years ago that you don't even live in, obviously. But for like college students, there's again, check your state laws. There's a lot of flexibility about is your college town your home right now or

0:11:57 Jenessa: Where you used to live? There's there's a lot of it really depends.

0:11:57 Thomas: Actually I don't know how that works where are you supposed to vote is up to you

0:12:04 Jenessa: Kind of. Yeah. So in New York, you know, you got to pick one. Can't vote in two places. But basically, we'll let you just kind of pick one, you know, like you shouldn't be switching constantly. It's kind of vibes, honestly. Like, do you feel more at home and invested in the local politics of the place that you live eight months out of the year, or, you know, bless the heart of, yeah, you know, check your laws, you know, I bless the heart of every college town I ever went

0:12:10 Thomas: Yeah fair or which state are you actually have a chance of making a difference in so check your hey liberal college students listening uh just check your electoral college your see what's going on yeah oh true

0:12:41 Jenessa: To college in, I was like, I will not be living here. My hometown is still like home in my heart. And I intend to at a minimum go back to my home state. And and I know this. And so it was not inappropriate. I went back there four months out of the year, and that was really home and not my college dorm. So either was appropriate. Once you are out of that contract work or college or nursing homes where it's like, what's really home? Your average person, there's pretty clearly one right answer. You got to pick a place. So yeah, there're lots Lots of reasons to make it clear in these records. DMV, post office, voter reg should almost always line up for everybody. And so they'll send out these postcards. One option that was a problem, and there's a rule in the National Voter Registration Act, federal law, you cannot send a postcard and they don't respond and you take them off the voter roll. It's never grounds alone that they just didn't return a post card. One option is they didn't return a postcard and did not vote in two subsequent federal elections. Then you can say, we really have no evidence they live here. Do I love this? Not really. Sure.

0:13:58 Thomas: I ask uh what may be a dumb question. Why is this important? Like, I'm sure there's some reason, but like, if the fear is that while someone's going to vote in the wrong, it's again, a felony to vote in two places. Is this purely a naked attempt to constantly mess with voters? Or, I mean, I guess there's something to it. I don't know, something in terms of, I know that stuff is available to like people who run for stuff. I think they can get like voter roll information.

0:14:23 Thomas: So I guess There's that argument, but how important is this?

0:14:27 Jenessa: You know, I guess to an extent, it's a matter of opinion, personal opinion. I would rather keep people on the rolls than not. And especially two elections, to me, that's not enough because what if you skip one presidential and you're somebody who doesn't vote in the mid terms?

0:14:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:14:42 Jenessa: I don't love that. I would love to encourage you to vote in every single election. There's like four every year. There's your board of education and your town mayor in April and like all this other stuff. Please vote all the time. But tons of people vote like every four years in the presidential and sometimes they forget and they just don't do it. And so purging them off the voter rolls for not answering a postcard and then like not voting in a midterm in a presidential and now they're just ineligible for the next midterm. I don't love it. I could see a logic to wanting to keep this. I Don't Know Man. There's... Okay, from the perspective of getting a bill through by including something semi -reasonable about preventing voter fraud while also extending voting rights because these are within the same bills, fine. Because it's probably, I'll give you an example here. There was a lawsuit and this is in Wisconsin, 2019. Board of Elections sends out a bunch of letters to people it suspects may have moved. So this is not the, we just randomly send send a postcard and we're going to kick you off. But they think you moved and they send you a postcard. And they say, hey, here's what you can do to prove you live here. Return the postcard, re -register. This is always an option, by the way. If you ever get told like, oh, we might take off your registration, just send in a new voter registration form showing your eligibility. Or just vote in the next election, they say. Hey, prove to us you live hier by showing up at your local precinct and do whatever you got to do to demonstrate your eligibility, we won't even put put you on the inactive list if you do that. So they do that in Wisconsin. Somebody sues them and they try to get rid of mandamus. I'm going to force the board of elections to take them off. You had reason to believe they don't live here and you sent them a postcard. If they don'T answer, you should have to kick them off, they say. They win at the lowest at the trial court and they get rid of Mandamus. The Wisconsin board of election says, hell no, we're not doing it. They get a contempt order. They're getting fined every day. They don't do it .They stick up for themselves. We're not doing it. We're not doing it." The appellate court decides to send it back to the trial court on some, you know, I don't remember exactly what the grounds were. Eventually, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April of 2021, so this is after the election, they end up holding, it was correct on the weirdest grounds. The law in Wisconsin was really clear. If you have independent reason to believe they don't live there and they they don't answer the postcard, you do have to take them off. But it was the local election officials. So a writ of mandamus to make the state board of elections do it just wasn't, you can't do that. The law said you had to make like the county or local board of elections do so it's not going to work. So they didn't exactly win on grounds of you can't make me. It was more grounds of like the law is crystal clear and the law is fine, but not as to this person. When it started, if I'm remembering it correctly, the list of people had about 200 ,000 on it. By the end, by the time this hits April 2021, because remember, the Board of Elections never went through with kicking people off solely on the basis of the postcard. A bunch of people, 58 % of that list, do register at a new address. They were correct to suspect that these people didn't actually live there and those people registered in a new address. 4 % got inactivated by the local clerks for various reasons, which is kind of the thing that the law said they had to do. Some of them, you know, had died, confirmed a move. There were 69 ,000 people left, so about 31 % of the original. And of those, not one was purged and not one of them voted in November 2020. They could have, they weren't purged off the list and they didn't. So probably they had reason to suspect they didnít live there, they donít answer the postcard, and then they never did show up and vote. Now some of them, who knows what was going on there, why they didnít vote in November of 2020, but ultimately this whole thing over which there were many lawsuits, nobody who would theoretically have been purged didnít vote. Everybody either re -registered or the board stood their ground, they werenít purged, and then they didn't vote anyway. So yeah, it

0:19:12 Thomas: Yeah. So it pretty much made no difference.

0:19:16 Jenessa: Appears to have made no difference. So the guy who wrote this article, Greg Palast, he has the Palast Investigative Fund. The way he explains it is this way. In 2020, the Palst Investigative Fun produced a technical report for Black Voters Matter Fund on a proposed purge of 153 ,779 voters. That's where it was at by the time it hit like appellate court. It started higher than that. A plan pushed by Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. We brought back our team of location experts who proved, name by name, the proposed purge was wildly riddled with errors. Notably, we found the purge was aimed almost exclusively at African Americans in Milwaukee and at students in Madison. The nonpartisan elections board agreed with us, allowing those voters to cast ballots, with the result that Biden squeaked by Trump in Wisconsin by 20 ,682 votes. So the actual document, I found it, his organization's own experts say the error rate was 25 .8%. Then they say it's 44 .8 % if half the people who did move within their county were still within the right jurisdiction. I don't know where they're getting that, like, okay, so we know they moved within county, bounty but if they were within the right jurisdiction then they were still eligible to vote at the same polling place so if we assume half of those did that the error would be 44 .8 percent like I don't know why you would assume it was half I don'T know where they're getting that number from this

0:20:54 Thomas: I'm not following this argument at all. Wait, did you say Biden and Trump? So this was about 2020?

0:20:59 Jenessa: Was about 2020 and so like we know the reality is from reading the cases 69 ,000 didn't get purged because of all these lawsuits and they didn't vote anyway and he's saying as a result of his report that came out when it was at the appellate court and claims this big error rate, Biden won in Wisconsin by 20 ,000 votes. But none of this adds up. And the proposed error rate here is about like, well, some of them moved within county. And it's like, so they did move. I don't know.

0:21:32 Thomas: It's not really an error, huh?

0:21:33 Jenessa: No, it isn't. And their proposed like way to do it is just using different databases and, like, claiming this is the wrong database to use. They tried the same thing in Georgia, and the court was like, the law says that the Board of Elections can use this database. Like, I never want to defend Georgia voter purging because it's bad. Like there's problems. But, you know, he just has a habit of really overselling, A, the extent to which there there are errors, and B, the extent to which his personal involvement has somehow swung an election. It happens a lot, and I think it's telling, concerning. I looked at that lawsuit, and at no point is Palast Investigative Fund, Black Voters Matter Fund, this report, nothing about it is cited because it just doesn't have anything to do with that, and the timeline doesn't add up. He releases the report when it's at the appellate level already. Like, it doesn't, I guess.

0:22:32 Thomas: I helped though. I loosened it. So this is like stolen valor, trying to claim credit for something that you didn't have anything to do with.

0:22:41 Jenessa: Pretty much. Really, what happened was the Wisconsin Board of Elections stood their ground in the face of a contempt order that was, like, fining them a ton of money every day. And they were just like, no, no. I'm not doing it. The other thing that's important to remember is this was not the poison postcard caging of private people. And it was not, they sent a postcard and then we're going to kick people off. And it's not the, we send a postcode and wait to elections thing. He never mentions anywhere in here, the whole thing about if you're doing that version, you send a Postcard and they don't vote into elections, you may not must take them off the voter rolls. He explicitly says this, according to EAC data before the 2024 election, I found it. This is in the 2022 EAC report, 4 ,776 ,706 registrants were removed nationwide simply because they failed to return the postcard. That's just not true. They failed to turn the post card and didn't vote in two subsequent elections. So I'm not saying I love that rule, but it's not as simple as if you miss this junk mail postcard, you're off the voter rolls. And again, that would not mean you

0:24:01 Jenessa: Can't vote necessarily. You can show up and vote provisional and there's a 71 % chance your presidential at a minimum gets counted. So this is all off and again, scaring people into, oh my God.

0:24:10 Thomas: If anyone's trying to scare me into checking my junk mail I how dare you how dare you never

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0:24:29 Jenessa: So that's all over the place. And there's just tons of evidence that a substantial portion of the people not answering postcards, getting sent postcards showing up on these databases as having moved, they did move, they re -register and they vote. So like they're not that number is not lost votes.

0:24:46 Thomas: Yeah yeah it's yeah you know that it's not lost votes at the very least it'd be hard to calculate those percentages but it sounds like you take all that away and you take away the fact that like are a hundred percent of them gonna be kamala voters or whatever you know It's like you're getting to a percentage of a percentage of a percent and exaggerating what's happening.

0:25:06 Jenessa: So I certainly don't doubt that, especially in certain places, this can be done maliciously. This can be targeted at certain populations. Violations. This can be done in a really racist way. But at the end of the day, it is the law that you can't just kick somebody off for not answering a postcard. And we have no evidence that that is being done. It seems really clear, even in the states with the worst voter suppression, they seem to be at a minimum sticking to that bare minimum. And then we see people re -registering and voting. So we've got that problem. We start putting this all together. Basically, we have have a certain number of rejections related to provisionals, which has problems in the calculation, rejections, related to challenges, which as problems with the calculation rejections with this postcard thing, which is wildly misrepresented. We finally get to the end here and we get a calculation and here's where I absolutely lose my mind because I've been reading this whole thing and trying to fact check and trying trying to find sources that are not linked and sources that just say according to the federal government and I'm pulling my hair out. Okay. After the 2012 election, I was able to

0:26:01 Thomas: Here we go.

0:26:22 Jenessa: Calculate with cold certainty that 2 ,383 ,587 new voters had their registrations rejected, 488 ,136 legitimate absentee ballots were disqualified and so on yeah great thanks in that election a total of 5 ,901 ,814 citizens were blocked from voting or had their ballots

0:26:41 Thomas: And so on. Etc, etc. Blocked. Blocked from voting.

0:26:56 Jenessa: Disqualified I think that's like the and so -on if you put it all together it would have been that These stats were based on hard data from the EAC, which gathers detailed reports from the states. So, I am like, where did you get this from?

0:26:58 Thomas: They show up and they're yeah. Well, it's hard data so you can't argue with that. It's not soft data, Jenessa. It is hard data.

0:27:22 Jenessa: Okay. Today, with new sophisticated and well -financed voter suppression operations, the number of voters purged and ballots disqualified are clearly far higher than the suppression count of 2012. I actually found a ton of sources that ballot rejections went way down in 2020. It's been getting better and better. Like people are getting, I don't know if it's like, it's probably a combination of like policies are getting better, and people are Getting more savvy about like, you better get that absentee ballot in correctly, you You better do all these things. Campaigns are getting more savvy about ballot cure procedures and like still funding after the election. Like you better fix this. So to just take your 2012 thing and assume it's going to, if anything, get worse.

0:28:05 Thomas: Yeah, like adjust for inflation. Yeah.

0:28:08 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah. You can't necessarily do that. Unfortunately, the EAC won't release data, if it does at all, for at least a year. The EAC releases a report every two years and they do this based on surveys of the states to give you really detailed numbers. That being said, you can get the general numbers. Like if you just Google like state board of elections results 2024, you're going to see like all the numbers, including rejected ballots. So I don't know if he just wants like the more detailed breakdown.

0:28:35 Thomas: But is it hard hard though like is a hard data yeah yeah

0:28:40 Jenessa: God damn it. Like by precinct, like to the vote, to the singular vote, it's there. So I don't know. Maybe he just want it like by exact reason for rejection, but he's not separating that. So I DON'T EVEN KNOW. The point being, we're admitting we don't have the 2024 data. We're doing all of this with estimates of like 2016 provisional rejections and 2022 people kicked off the voter rolls and 2020 registration. It's all over the place.

0:29:11 Jenessa: Okay. For those who can't sleep without my best estimate, why did I come here? Let me apply the most conservative methodology possible, as I would do in a government investigation. Investigation so okay apparently we would say this under oath I've updated the 2012 suppression numbers with the newest available data god damn it I am not finding your 2012 son of a bitch it's nowhere in here is the actual formula so I was like what is this 2012 thing and it's a book that he wrote it turns out every four years or so he writes this exact post about

0:29:09 Thomas: Jeez what a mess thank you thank you oh cool

0:29:47 Jenessa: How the election was stolen every single time um and yeah pretty much in 2020 trump stole the election in 2016 they almost stole the selection in 2012 no

0:29:50 Thomas: Wow even no matter who won so wait is he a republican so you said in 2016 they almost stole in 2020 they did steal it those are the opposite of

0:30:08 Jenessa: Right no in 20 in 2016 they stole the election in 2020 Trump almost stole election in 2012 we get the book billionaires and bandits its. How to steal an election in nine easy steps. With introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

0:30:14 Thomas: Oh, gotcha ah oh no No. Oh, wow.

0:30:29 Jenessa: Yup. He has been doing investigative reporting with co -investigator Robert F Kennedy Jr., they did like, I don't know, the Rolling Stone, the two of them wrote together. He has been doing this for so long I found the like oh colorado he's like oh obama won colorado but then colorado purged a bunch of people say goodbye to colorado in 2012 obama one colorado again by 30 000 more votes in 2012 like he just makes this prediction and steamrolls ahead like Like nothing happened every single time.

0:30:34 Thomas: Oh I bet. Yeah, sure. Mm -hmm. Yeah. God, these grifters.

0:31:07 Thomas: Because only you are going to check. But hey, if you show RFK where he's wrong, he will be the first to apologize. So he'll be the FIRST to say he's right.

0:31:15 Jenessa: Oh my God. That was the most infuriating hearing I've ever heard. Yeah, he conveniently is no longer writing the introduction for the 2020 How Trump Almost Stole the Election book. They seem to have parted ways.

0:31:30 Thomas: Never mind. I'm actually fine with this stealing the election now. Completely amoral, this guy.

0:31:35 Jenessa: Oh my god. All right, so here's how he ends it with like sort of telling us, I used my 2012 calculation. The number of voters has increased by 41 .3 million since 2012. That's not true.

0:31:49 Thomas: Yeah number of what? Of what? Eligible voters or

0:31:51 Jenessa: The closest, exactly. If we just go voting age, it's 31 .7 million. Voting eligible, it is 22 million. For registered voters, the source I had didn't yet have that compiled for 2024, but 2020 to 2012, it was 15 million. It's not even close. But as far as I can tell, hell, what he's going to do is take his 2012 calculation and just like scale it up by 41 .3 million more people.

0:32:16 Thomas: Is he just talking about turnout and 20 or something is using turnout or something

0:32:22 Jenessa: I don't know. I doesn't make sense. I guess.

0:32:29 Thomas: Is it I mean it would be a net of people who aged in and people who died I guess

0:32:34 Jenessa: But the source I had a voting eligible gap is 22 million, not 41 .4. So it definitely can't

0:32:34 Thomas: But it sounds like it's not even close either way yeah

0:32:43 Jenessa: By turnout be unless I guess

0:32:45 Thomas: Well wait what year to what years this

0:32:47 Jenessa: 2012 to the number of voters has increased by 41 .3 million since 2012 I don't know if

0:32:50 Thomas: I've lost track of what level of bullshit because you did you is this today he's saying from 2012 to now

0:32:55 Jenessa: He specifies I think he's saying I think she's saying to to now which would be the biggest possible gap is from then to now because it's get I don' know so that's wrong he's a minimum two to one racial and partisan disparity in voters purged and ballots disqualified it depends on where you are and what what type of, but whatever. I'm just going to give it to him because I don't even care anymore. All right. He says the 2024 suppression factor is no less than 4 .596 % of the vote. I don'T know. I DON'T know how he got there, but then he's going to back off a little. Those familiar with data mining will note there's some double counting in the 9 million votes because, yeah, if you talk talk about like, well, people purged and then provisionals, a bunch of the people who fill out a provisional are people who showed up and go, why am I not on the voter roll? Or discounted absentees, they then go cure at the polls. Any number of these people overlap. You can't just go through that list at the beginning of these, this many million and this many hundred thousand. Some of those are the same people. In addition, we must recognize this. Okay. This part's crazy.

0:33:09 Thomas: Okay all right yeah Oh,

0:34:16 Jenessa: I try to help me here. I can't do this.

0:34:17 Thomas: Sure. Okay. I don't know if I can. This has gone beyond my bullshit levels.

0:34:22 Jenessa: Good luck. In addition, we must recognize that many voters caught up in the purges and challenges would have cast their ballot for Trump. Therefore, I conservatively cut in half the low end of the range of the calculation of votes suppressed to two point three percent to isolate the effect on Trump's official victory margin. So here's if I read that as no no none of this means anything because if you just cut it in half because you're assuming half the people purged would have voted for trump well if it's completely unbiased then it can't swing the

0:34:45 Thomas: Isolate the effect? None of those words mean exactly what he's saying.

0:34:55 Thomas: Yeah, because they just cancel out. You don't just take away half the votes and like, okay, we won't count those, but the other half, that would, what? What?

0:35:01 Jenessa: Election yeah those yeah but he also said up here given a minimum two to one racial and partisan disparity so you already put a bias in and now you're gonna half it to cut the bias back. What? Are you?

0:35:15 Thomas: Okay. So, oh, that might, if he's two to one halving, maybe that, so would that make sense? Because that's the net. Is that the net? I don't know. I'm not looking at this. So it's kind of hard to keep in my mind, but

0:35:28 Jenessa: I don't know. It's cut in. If he just said he cut it in half. I mean, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but whatever. Cut in half the low end of the range of the calculation of votes suppressed. I guess the

0:35:38 Thomas: He's going to use the low end because it's conservative is what I was assuming, but I don'T know what, I don' t, again, don' T,

0:35:45 Jenessa: Low. I don' I don'.

0:35:45 Thomas: I'm NOT looking at thIs. So is he taking the low -end estimate and he's cutting in half? Okay, let's say 10 million voters were purged. If he's saying a two to one ratio, then we're to presume that 66 were Democrats, 33 were Republican, which would mean the net effect would it would essentially be plus 33 or minus. Yeah, what would it be? I guess you would say it's if you're saying that's what happened, then you would Say Democrats are down 3 .3 million.

0:35:49 Jenessa: I guess he's saying is 66. Okay. Okay,

0:36:14 Thomas: Million and so but does taking half of that that is that still isn't half though I don't yeah

0:36:14 Jenessa: I don't know. I don - whatever. I don't. None of this means anything. Alright, so then he says, in other words, vote suppression cost Kamala Harris no less than 3 ,565 ,000 votes. Well, I think what he did is 2 .3%. If you look at 152 ,320 ,193 people voted in 2024,

0:36:31 Thomas: Three million wait what how did we get to three million okay but like you can't take california and new york and assume the same voter suppression percentage like you got to be more specific I mean I guess if you had a valid national average and you're using it both times then maybe but but it's still not really.

0:36:58 Jenessa: Well, see, here's the problem is all of the sources he used have it broken out by state. So he could have just done it by state, but instead he's doing it. But here's The problem is, okay, well, you can't take 2 .3 % of the number of people who voted because we're assuming the number of people voted is minus, you know, the real number minus 2 .3 percent.

0:37:06 Thomas: Maybe just do that. Yeah. Yeah, you have to divide by whatever. Yeah.

0:37:22 Jenessa: Yeah, you have to do all that thing. So what it comes out to is that you would have predicted 155 ,906 ,032 people tried to vote, but that would come out to 358 ,838 missing. And he said 356 ,000.

0:37:41 Thomas: Okay. We're getting somewhere.

0:37:43 Jenessa: It's close. It it's close. At least he, but I mean, he can't even do a, whatever, whatever. He says he was an economics professor, whatever and then that says Harris would have topped Trump's official total by 1 .2 million. I calculated it. If you gave her 3 ,565 ,000 extra votes on top of what she got in the popular, she would have been ahead of Trump by 1 ,280 ,033 votes. So that's close to what he's saying so at least he like sort of kind of a little bit at the end and knows how to do percents I am in hell I and yeah you can't assume that here and here most important this 2 .3 percent suppression factor undoubtedly cost harris the states of wisconsin michigan pennsylvania and in georgia how no like I don't

0:38:21 Thomas: Yeah. Really? It's hard for me to track every step of this idiot clown car equation, but definitionally, the closer the state is, the more the suppressed vote is likely to kind of even out unless you're very targeted, unless you'RE saying we're somehow only doing this to cities, which I don't think they do. Like, I think that's pretty tough to pull that off and survive legal challenges. But you tell me, I mean, if a state election body, whatever, is sending a bunch of those notices, but only to cities and not anywhere else, like they're not going to get in trouble.

0:39:09 Jenessa: See that's the thing is like I I would imagine once again you would have to suspect they moved and then at least a little over four years ago send the postcard and then have them not vote in 2020 or 2022 in order to purge them well enough in advance of 2024. And I think that still only puts them on the inactive list. They can go vote and show up.

0:39:29 Thomas: Yeah, right. And you're taking that whole number, which, as we said, you know, some of them do go back and vote.

0:39:38 Jenessa: A lot of them, a lot of then go register at the new address where they did, in fact, move to and vote.

0:39:46 Thomas: And like you say, I means, if we say 10, if you say there's I just for fun again to use round numbers. If we say there's 10 million, quote unquote, suppressed votes, if it's 50 -50, it has no net effect. So like even major cities are not 95 to 5, you know, like there's some places that are pretty, pretty darn whatever. But in a close state, in a swing state, definitionally, it's going to be if it'S 60 -40, then you're already reducing that amount by so much that it's a net for Kamala. Plus, given the fact that those numbers were overstated by a lot anyway, because of all the factors you're talking about, like I don't know what a normal person, like a real like a genesis version of this calculation would be I don't know if you did that or if it's not even answerable uh

0:40:22 Jenessa: I lost my mind by the end because I really was like, like, okay, the things I would really care about, what was the impact on shrinking early voting hours? What was the effect of voter ID and felony voting and all of that? And I was like, I mean, I believe it for Georgia that I betcha if you really could quantify that it was so freaking close. Wisconsin was 29 ,000 votes. Like I bet you, but like, could I sat there and thought to myself, like, good, I quantify this somehow. And I just really don't think that I could because Because, like, you know, Wisconsin, there were 57 provisional ballots in Wisconsin in 2020.

0:40:44 Thomas: It was really close

0:41:04 Jenessa: Like, I don't, that's it. Because Wisconsin is pretty restrictive about provisionals. In Georgia, it was 9,347. And the state was won by Trump in 2024 by 115,100 votes. This is Georgia.

0:41:03 Thomas: Whoa that's it wow which state it was won by that much I thought it was closer oh

0:41:24 Jenessa: That's what I just wrote down. I wrote down Trump at 2,666,000, some change, and Harris 2,548,000.

0:41:34 Thomas: Okay that's not as close as I thought

0:41:35 Jenessa: It's still close as hell. It's the biggest gap of the four swings we're looking at right now. Wisconsin was 0.86% gap, and it was 29,000 votes.

0:41:47 Thomas: I thought he won pennsylvania by a whole lot more

0:41:49 Jenessa: Pennsylvania was 120,000 people and a 1.71% gap. Yeah, by percentage, it was big enough of a gap that it's quite hard to imagine winning. So, like, you know, if you do that failure to return a postcard, in everywhere but Georgia, that number is bigger than the gap. But, again, remember, in that Wisconsin case back in 2020, 58% of those people had moved, changed their registration, and voted.

0:41:51 Thomas: Oh but this percentage yeah

0:42:15 Jenessa: Even if 100% of them were Harris voters getting kicked off, 60% of them would have fixed it. So, it just doesn't add up this way.

0:42:15 Thomas: Huh

0:42:33 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:42:33 Jenessa: So I just think overall, this is scaring people. It's bad, but it's not like that bad. And it's bad in different ways. Like it's NOT scaring you about the things that should scare you about. And he just does this every year and it's very frustrating. I got a really, I got one for you that's gonna absolutely make you lose your mind.

0:42:56 Jenessa: So this was one I, as I was searching for, like, can I find the formula from 2012 to even figure out how did he do this? I'm searching around and I find just, he writes this article all the time. Here's 2022 record turnout in Georgia. Not quite. A 1 million vote nosedive and turnout was well concealed by GOP Governor Brian Kemp to cover up the effects of Jim Crow 2.0 at the launch of his presidential campaign. Pain.

0:43:23 Thomas: Brian camp's presidential presidential campaign?

0:43:26 Jenessa: Yeah, did Brian Kemp run for, did he?

0:43:26 Thomas: What? No. Is he assuming he's going to be in the primary or something?

0:43:30 Jenessa: I have no idea. I don't remember him joining the primary in 2022.

0:43:33 Thomas: I do not either. That would surprise me. Maybe he's, charitably, was he assuming he was going to?

0:43:37 Jenessa: I dunno, this guy, maybe? Was that ever floated? I donno. Maybe he tossed the idea out there, but whatever. Fine. From the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, math-challenged reporters have repeated the completely upside down fable of a record turnout in the Georgia Senate runoff. Record turnout? My ass. Okay, so

0:43:48 Thomas: What? Just prima facie, if there's any time that you would think would be record turnout, and I have to assume when he's talking about the special election, he's got to evaluate versus other special elections, right? Otherwise that would be crazy.

0:44:11 Jenessa: This is, do you remember 2022, Raphael Warnock is running again, like, less than two years later, right? Because he had, okay, yes, correct.

0:44:18 Thomas: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He won the special selection in 2020.

0:44:22 Jenessa: So we're comparing those two. And no,

0:44:24 Thomas: Yeah, we're comparing, sorry, which two? Just to be be clear. He says turnout increased by a ton in 2020 in Georgia, which obviously, yes, it did. But he says, no, actually, that's a lie. It's hiding this.

0:44:34 Jenessa: He's saying 2022 is a million vote vote nosedive from 2020.

0:44:40 Thomas: Hold on. Read the thing. Read how you started this.

0:44:43 Jenessa: Okay. So this is in 2022. Record turnout in Georgia, not quite. A one million vote nosedive in turnout was well concealed by GOP Governor Brian Kemp, blah, blah.

0:44:55 Thomas: Oh, OK. I misheard.

0:44:57 Jenessa: So here's our thing.

0:44:58 Thomas: Yeah. He's shocked that the 2022 midterm had a million fewer votes than the record breaking 2020 election, which, obviously, was the presidential election. That's insane.

0:45:08 Jenessa: Yeah. Also, you might remember something a little interesting about the 2020 2020 Georgia Senate runoffs?

0:45:16 Thomas: Well, the runoffs were. Yeah, so is he judging by that or is he comparing?

0:45:19 Jenessa: Yes!

0:45:19 Thomas: Oh, he's comparing the runoff, not the presidential election, not the general, I guess.

0:45:23 Jenessa: Yeah, he's looking at Warnock's runoff, which normally would have been December 2020. It came in January 2021.

0:45:31 Thomas: I remember we got the results, I think this January 6th, because I remember the good news of that being overshadowed by yeah, that's my memory of it.

0:45:37 Jenessa: Yep, it was the same. Yes. Yeah, I remember that. So yeah, you might remember in 2020 special election in Georgia for the Senate, that was the one him and Ossoff were going to decide the balance of the Senate. Yeah.

0:45:52 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, it was very important.

0:45:54 Jenessa: For an an incoming Democratic president, and it was a special election that got this crazy turnout. Also, I don't know, we had 2020 mail -in voting still going on. He writes, In Senator Raphael Warnock's runoff two years ago, the turnout was 4,484,954. This time, the vote plummeted to 3,538,910. Since when is a million -vote nosedive a record turnout? Out. Yeah. Yeah, of course. A special election that was deciding the entire Senate versus a regular old midterm. Yeah!

0:46:23 Thomas: If you count apples to apples and count a midterm versus a, yeah.

0:46:36 Thomas: Yeah. After enthusiasm for Biden and Democrats completely went out the window. Yeah? Yeah, it seems

0:46:41 Jenessa: Of course! When you compare it to the last time his seat was up, in 2014, it's actually a million votes higher. A midterm, a boring old Senate election. Yeah it it was record turnout. He then goes on to say, mail-in ballots fell off a cliff. Absentee ballots, which Warnock won two years ago by a stunning two to one margin, plummeted by a breathtaking 83% from over a million.

0:46:42 Thomas: You would think. Almost like we weren't in peak COVID anymore. Yeah.

0:47:10 Jenessa: Yes! Like, God, dude, you can't think of any other reason why mail-in voting.

0:47:16 Thomas: But what point is he even making? He thinks there's been massive voter suppression?

0:47:20 Jenessa: Yeah, he says that this is because of Jim Crow 2 .0 that got enacted in Georgia. Here's the thing. If you look at the regular election, because he's talking, he's comparing 2020 runoff to 2022 runoff.

0:47:35 Thomas: They did have another runoff in 2022.

0:47:36 Jenessa: They had another runoff? Yeah, it was him and, uh, mm -hmm.

0:47:39 Thomas: For Hershel Walker? Wow.

0:47:41 Jenessa: Yeah, neither cracked 50%, so they did a runoff, mm -hm.

0:47:46 Thomas: That's right, runoff to runoff. Okay, right.

0:47:46 Jenessa: So he is comparing 2020 runoff 2022 run off, which makes sense if you're, like, thinking about all kinds of, you know, social science stuff. But if you are saying voter suppression is the problem, the 2022 regular election had 500,000 more voters. They did not enact this voter suppression law between November and December of 2022. So he's literally calling

0:48:10 Thomas: This guy is full of shit, completely full of shit,

0:48:11 Jenessa: It a he's just full of shit. He's claiming literally this article, math challenged reporters. And he's like, oh, mail-in ballots fell off a cliff because he can't even think about the context of COVID. He's comparing the runoffs and not looking at what happened a month ago. And he's not even thinking about how the 2020 presidential that decided the balance of the Senate after Trump had like ruined everything versus the 2022 midterms that was just like, meh.

0:48:44 Thomas: Yeah. When we had, we had so much time to like get the word out, we needed to swing this to swing the election versus a special election that, eh, I mean, it's not nothing, but it didn't, didn't really make a difference. We already had lost the Senate majority, hadn't we?

0:48:53 Jenessa: It mattered. Yeah, I thought, no,

0:48:56 Thomas: Or, or wait, no, we lost the house. So it didn'T, or wait actually now I can't remember.

0:49:00 Jenessa: No. This would have been the next election. So in theory, it all hung in the balance. It's just people don't turn out for, oh yes, you are correct. Yes, at that point, we already knew what had happened in the midterMs and it was just this one seat left for the runoff. So we already knew.

0:49:06 Thomas: No, but if it's a, if it'S a runoff, then we already knew essentially the, oh, we gained one. We actually gained one toy, but we lost, didn'T we lose the house? We lost the House though. We didn'T have a trifecta. Right.

0:49:24 Jenessa: If we gained one in the Senate, that means by the December 2022 runoff, we knew we didn't need Warnock to keep control of the Senate.

0:49:34 Thomas: It would have been the same.

0:49:35 Jenessa: Yeah, it would have been right.

0:49:36 Thomas: So IT wasn'T even really, nothing really swung on it. Other than having a margin. But because we lost the House, we already knew we lost the house.

0:49:44 Jenessa: Right, which also is rough.

0:49:46 Thomas: So that pretty much ends everything anyway. I mean, it still matters to have the Senate for some reasons, but with our stupid system.

0:49:51 Jenessa: Yeah, matters for certain things and it would be better to have 51 votes and have Warnocke than to be hinging on, you know, some of the more conservative Democrats. But at the end of the day, we had 51 votes because we had the VP. So the point being, by December of 2022, it didn't hinge on that, which is why November of 2022 there was higher turnout.

0:50:14 Thomas: I'm declining. Ding, ding, ding. He sucks. He's wrong. We got to call it. He is wrong. You win. Jenessa wins. This guy who is an idiot and a tuxer drifter

0:50:20 Jenessa: Yeah, for real. Yeah, it's a disaster. I would like to read you two quick excerpts from an interview that I would like to petition for you and Lydia to reenact because this interview is horrific. He's being interviewed. This is a transcript from an interview these are his exact words where he's describing like Obama's gonna lose Colorado and everything my co -investigator and I bobby kennedy called the secretary of state of california a democrat who told us her gop predecessor blocked 42 of new voter registrations because they had suspicious names like muhammad for this reason despite massive voter drives and the increase in latino citizenship hispanic registration has dropped by 1 million since 2008 carumba he says these words the interviewer asks just a moment later why do you think there isn't more public outrage about the gop attempting to crush democracy because democrats are in on it too and that's the sick sad truth in New Mexico, a

0:50:31 Thomas: Okay, sure, caramba no

0:51:25 Jenessa: Solid democratic state where latinos are half the citizenry Bush carried the state and the gov has a governor's mansion why because the hispanic democratic elite of that state don't want no poor folk voting. This is like a 70 -year -old white man. I just, this man is not your ally. This interview is horrific. I'm gonna send it to you. The way he speaks is insane. I don't, good God, don't take voting advice from this guy. He doesn't know what he's talking about. I do not know how he has reached this level of prominence in like testifying.

0:52:04 Jenessa: I don't know. It's weird. There's like one case where he was like getting, I don' t know, it's very strange, the resume here. He did testify in one case that didn't go anywhere and got dismissed in Georgia. Yeah, this is bad. Voter suppression is real and bad, and this isn't it. That's my point.

0:52:04 Thomas: Well I've never heard him and this and so is this guy all right well thank you so much for breaking that down I I hear how insane this made you and I don't blame you I I too am mad but yeah hey we're there's no we're not blue and on we're not the same as the other side. We're not. Look, as you said at the outset, voter suppression is real. Who knows if we had a just and fair administration of our elections and voting rolls everywhere? Who knows? Because yeah, they've been eating away at the Voting Rights Act for a long time, especially Chief Justice Roberts. It's been his long -term project. So who knows? Not saying that, but this article is stupid and wrong and he's a grifter. So there you go. There's my top line. Thank you so much for doing this.

0:53:02 Jenessa: Thank you for having me.

0:53:03 Thomas: Is there any place you want to our direct listeners to.

0:53:05 Jenessa: Yeah! So keep an eye out because your elections are coming up sooner than you think. A lot of places in March and April are going to have board of education, school budgets, local elections, like your village mayor. It matters and it's coming up and pay attention to it You could be one of 200 people eligible to vote in that election So get out there pay attention To it and check out resources that will let you look up all of your representatives Not just like your senator and your house rep, but your local representatives They want to hear from you and they're way more available to listen to you. They have a big impact on your life

0:53:44 Thomas: Good message. All right, Dr. Jenessa Seymour, thank you as always. Go drink a nice hot cup of sanity. I don't know.

0:53:51 Jenessa: Yeah, will do deal.