My question is, do you now encourage and embrace early and
voting, voting by mail and legal ballot harvesting?
>> Speaker 2: I do, but I also have to say something else,
because the one thing a lot of people, >> Speaker 1: But this is important.
>> including you don't talk about, they also create phony ballots.
And that's a real problem.
That's my opinion.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> But they create a lot of phony ballots.
>> Speaker 4: During his town hall just recently, Donald Trump was basically
asked by Sean Hannity over and over again to embrace ballot harvesting,
embrace various voting processes that could help him win elections.
But Trump isn't into it even though he engages in mail in ballots when he votes,
for some reason, he keeps speaking out against it.
So Republican voters have been inundated with right wing lies, some of which come
from Trump himself portraying early voting as nefarious or fraudulent.
For instance, let's give you one example.
Here's a statement from Trump dating back to December of 2022.
Remember, you can never have fair and free elections with mail in ballots.
Former President Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social,
actually, apologies in November of 2022, never, never,
never won't and can't happen the next day.
He added to the thread never, okay.
>> Speaker 3: And now he's spent [LAUGH].
It didn't quite get across the idea with the three nevers,
which you delivered it as, like, two actual tough guy.
I can't read that without seeing never, never, never.
>> Speaker 4: Yeah, >> Never.
>> That's probably a better way
of reading it, absolutely. But, okay, you know you're screwing
yourself over, right? And you're screwing Republican voters over
by feeding them this misinformation about mail in ballots, early voting,
ballot harvesting.
He doesn't know he's doing this, but he's giving his political opponents the upper
hand here, his Democratic political opponents.
So as a result of messages like that, by the way, Democrats have tended to dominate
at the polls leading up to Election Day in recent years.
So I just wanna give you some data on that.
According to the data compiled by US Election Project,
33.8% of the early vote in the 2022 midterms came from
Republicans, while 42.5% came from Democrats.
That's a three point jump from 2018, by the way, when Democrats accounted for
41% of early votes, compared to 35.1% for Republicans.
>> Speaker 3: Can I say what I wish we had?
>> Speaker 3: Sure. >> Maybe someone has it.
So that information is interesting.
But what I would like to see and I don't know exactly how you get to this would be,
so that's the breakdown of how much of the early vote came from the two
different groups.
But it's entirely conceivable that if the Republicans, or
that the Democrats who chose to early vote could have just not chosen to early vote,
and they could have just voted on the day,.
What I would wanna see is, were early voting not to be an option,
how much would that actually change the net number of votes?
Like, does early voting being done more by Democrats actually result in them getting
more votes than they otherwise would?
Or does it just change when the votes are made?
>> Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a really good question.
>> Speaker 3: You would hope that opening up more time for people to vote,
more flexibility, would result in net more votes being cast.
>> Speaker 4: I don't have that data, so I think it's a good question.
I'm curious myself.
I can say this just based on anecdotal evidence and
what I've experienced with my own family.
They're more likely to vote if they can vote by mail, right?
Like going to a polling place, potentially standing in line.
These are all, they're small deterrence, but they do serve as deterrence for
some people.
So I remember in the last election process, in 2022, mail in ballots come in.
California automatically mails ballots to everyone that's registered to vote,
of course.
And then I asked my parents, you guys gonna vote?
What's going on?
Here's your ballot.
Your ballot's right here.
You should vote super easy.
You just leave it there for the postman, post person and they'll pick it up and
you're good to go.
>> Yeah. >> Speaker 4: And then they voted, right.
>> Speaker 3: Every house just needs to have you to hold up the ballot and
be like, yeah.
>> Speaker 4: And look, the other thing is, there's a bunch of judge related
elections and they get a little bit intimidated by that.
Just vote.
>> Speaker 3: I get it. >> Speaker 4: Vote for what you can,
vote for what you know you wanna vote for, I guess, anyway.
But I do think that it's just making it easier to vote,
I think does translate to more people voting.
>> Speaker 3: You would hope.
>> Speaker 4: I would hope.
But again, we don't have that data in front of us.
Now I do wanna move on to how the pandemic impacted this.
Obviously because of shutdowns, because of social distancing and
all of that mail in ballots really exploded during the Coronavirus pandemic.
And that was also the time in which Donald Trump kept spreading lies and
the Republican Party kept spreading lies about voting by mail.
And so let's take a look at that graph here,
which shows 43.2% voted by mail, compared to just 30% on Election Day.
>> Speaker 3: And clearly it had been going up, right,
pretty much every election going back decades.
But yeah, that's a pretty big spike.
>> Speaker 4: Exactly.
So combined early and absentee ballot voting accounted for
nearly 70% of the 50 million votes cast in 2020.
>> Speaker 2: Good.
>> Speaker 4: So it kinda answers your question.
I don't know if that data would play out exactly the same today, but
it still shows that giving people the ability to vote, I guess making it
easier for people to vote increases the likelihood that they'll vote.
Now and because so many of their voters are unwilling to participate, Republican
voters specifically, it's created this problem for the Republican Party.
Which is why during that town hall, you hear Sean Hannity try to encourage
Trump to encourage his voting base to vote by mail, to be open to these various
forms of voting in order to increase the number of Republican voters.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, because Sean Hannity wants Republicans to win elections,
right, and Trump kind of sometimes wants that.
>> Speaker 4: I don't know.
>> A little.
>> He votes by mail.
>> Yeah. >> I don't know [INAUDIBLE].
>> Speaker 3: None of this makes any sense, obviously.
I mean, look, some of it doesn't make the sense that it's implied that it should,
but it does make a different sort of sense.
So if you know that there's gonna be a lot of early voting and voting by mail, but
you also know that you're the sort of person that as soon as polls close,
you demand that all the votes be counted.
And if it takes more than ten minutes, you're gonna whine about it for
literally weeks and try to overthrow the government, then you would think
you would support laws that allow those votes to be tabulated before election day.
But when you are going to expect that they're instantly tabulated and
you are specifically passing bills so that they can't be counted until the polls
close, well, that doesn't make the sense that it seems like it should.
>> Yeah. >> But it does make sense if you throwing
a fit is not actually an accurate reflection of what you think, but
it's just a convenient cover to contest the results of an.
>> Yeah, go ahead.
>> Speaker 3: I'll also say, what Trump is doing, what you saw in that first clip,
you would think you'll say whatever you need to say to get people to vote for you.
But then, considering Trump's history, you think, okay,
you'll mostly say whatever you need to say to get people to vote for you.
But you'll also say just enough so that people will buy that if you lose,
you didn't actually lose because it was probably the phony ballots or whatever,
but then you might even go further than that.
If you really didn't expect that you're gonna win and
you really only care about the COVID story, then you might actually set fire to
your chances of winning because you know you're not gonna win anyway.
>> Speaker 4: God, he's so dumb.
Okay, all right.
So, I mean, you even have, like, Ronald McDaniel trying to encourage people to
vote by mail and all that, trying to reverse the damage done by Trump and
the spread of this misinformation because it's not just about Trump,
it's the rest of the Republican Party.
So all these other Republicans.
>> [INAUDIBLE] senate races, yeah.
>> Speaker 3: Exactly, yeah, 100%, exactly.
So, by the way, I don't really care, okay?
If the Republican Party wants to continue throwing their support
behind a guy who is harming them and their other candidates by spreading
disinformation about voting by mail, you guys made your bed.
So it is what it is.
I mean, no skin off my back, right?
But with that said, I do wanna go to some more clips of this town hall
because you could just seeHannity and his pleas to Trump to just like,
please shut up with these lies, stop doing it.
But Trump can't help himself.
He's just his own worse enemy.
Let's watch.
>> Speaker 1: I think if Republicans start out Election Day down 200, 300,
500,000 votes, that becomes nearly impossible to catch up with.
>> Speaker 2: For some reason, Republicans always wanted to go out on Tuesday, and
they wanted to vote.
And I respect that.
I think it's great.
And it would be great if we could get back to one day and
we all the things that you said with one,.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> I agree with you with voter ID.
>> Speaker 2: With voter ID,
because the Democrats don't want signature verification.
How about this?
They don't want voter ID because they wanna cheat.
They wanna cheat.
The one thing we have to be very careful of is phony ballots.
Everything you say is great, but they create ballots.
That's my opinion, and that's the opinion of a lot of people.
>> Speaker 4: All right, okay, so he gave in just a little bit, okay.
But he also admitted that it was to basically please Hanity.
One more clip. Let's watch that.
>> Speaker 1: Will you encourage your voters based on the system we have to go
along with the system of early voting and voting by mail?
>> I will. >> Because I think if you don't,
it's a big mistake.
>> Speaker 2: No, no, no.
I will, but those ballots get lost also, Sean.
You know, they send them in, and all of a sudden they're gone.
Those ballots get lost also.
The answer is, I will, because you would like it.
But you know what?
Can I be honest?
>> Speaker 1: [INAUDIBLE] For me, okay, I gotta take a break.
>> Speaker 2: But, Sean, a lot of bad things happen to those ballots also.
They're sent in early, and all of a sudden, where are they?
Look, we have very corrupt elections.
We have no borders.
If you don't have borders, and if you don't have good elections,
you don't have a country, and that's where we are, but I'm okay with.
>> Speaker 3: He was in charge of the borders for four years.
Again, all of this stuff that he is so worried about but
apparently didn't improve the situation.
Whatever, it's all nonsense.
Sean Hannity is doing what he's supposed to do,
which is do whatever it takes to get Republicans elected.
>> Speaker 4: To vote, yeah, to get them to vote.
>> Speaker 4: And with Trump.
>> Which, by the way, I like democracy, right.
>> Speaker 3: I think it's the best.
>> Speaker 4: Encouraging people to vote regardless of their political
affiliation is a good thing.
>> Yeah, but what if you're found. [INAUDIBLE] of all these people in Trump's
orbit trying to correct the errors of his ways, and
the damage he's causing to their own party.
Just like it's both funny to watch but
also super depressing because they can't come get your man's.
They can't control the guy.
Nobody can, yeah.
You say that you like democracy.
I like democracy.
They have a full crowd of people who are like, yeah,
I should have to vote on that exact day, and if I can't well, screw me.
>> Speaker 4: Yay, voting is harder.
>> Speaker 3: I don't get it.
And also think about how much how devolved the arguments about
that make up the big lie have become over the last few years.
It used to be Hugo Chavez was doing it from beyond the grave and
there's Italian satellites and there's a demonic portal over the White House, and
now it's, I don't know, phony ballots.
They got fake ballots and I don't know about the mail.
You send something, it doesn't show up.
It's literally just they make it up, that's it.
What are you gonna put Rudy Giuliani on the case of they make up phony ballots?
You're gonna lose another court case.
It's just they're barely even trying.
But why would you do better?
If the bar is that low, and clearly it is, because people are clapping,
then you're not going to work harder than the bar.
>> Speaker 4: And look, while he is publicly saying one thing,
it is kinda fascinating that when it comes to his email,
fundraising efforts and all of that stuff, little different.
Little different messaging here.
So Trump is asking donors to chip in for his ballot harvesting fund,
saying in a fundraising email, either we ballot harvest where we can,
or you can say goodbye to America.
>> Speaker 3: But do you know why there's that gap between what he says on
Sean Hannity, what he says in the email?
>> Speaker 4: No, more importantly,
is he going to use those funds on ballot harvest?
>> Speaker 3: Well, that's also probably true, but regardless of that,
it's because he had nothing to do with those emails.
>> Speaker 4: Nothing at all.
>> Speaker 3: Not his voice, he didn't type it, he doesn't look at it,
he doesn't support it doesn't matter.
It's some person who's been subcontracted through his pack or whatever.
>> Speaker 4: It reminds me of his time in the White House where he would give orders
and everyone around him,
knowing how damaging his orders were, would ignore him.
>> Speaker 3: And knowing he'd probably forget them anyway.
>> Speaker 4: Right? And he did.
He would.