True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss accusations of voter fraud in the 2016 election, including President-elect Donald Trump’s assertion that millions of ballots were cast by people who were not legally allowed to vote.
“You know what? I think we don’t really know,” Engelbrecht said of Trump’s allegation. “We put out a statement shortly after the President-elect’s comments came out, and we said that we support the belief that there could, in fact, have been millions of illegally cast votes, and we are doing tremendous amounts of research to try to get to some of those answers.”
“We set ourselves up, Alex, in a system where for a long time, nobody’s wanted to get answers, so questions haven’t been allowed to be asked,” she told Marlow. “That’s the paradigm that we now have to shatter.”
Marlow noted that while some illegal votes are certainly cast in every election, Trump’s dramatic claim of millions in 2016 was very broad. He asked Engelbrecht if she thought the number could really be that high.
“I think so, yes,” she replied. “And here’s why I think that: When we talk about fraud in sound bites, we often sort of get caught up in, oh, you know, the dead are voting, people are being bused in. Do those things happen, and are those all worthy of debate? Absolutely. But the real problem that we face is that fraud has been institutionalized. We have set up processes that allow for non-citizens, among other ways, but non-citizens certainly to flood into our rolls. And that’s just one of the ways that we set ourselves up with the potential for illegal votes.”
“I think that we are at a place now where we have an opportunity to have a sane conversation about the deconstruction of our process and the examination of the sieve that we’ve created and better ways to go forward,” she said.
Marlow criticized corporate media outlets, particularly CNN, for dismissing Trump’s allegation out of hand, without doing any research and without reminding their readers of notorious ballot hijinks from the past.
Engelbrecht said it was right to be concerned about vote fraud, on a scale large enough to turn close elections. She vowed that she would not be intimidated out of voicing those concerns.
“The amount of vitriol that has come at our organization and board members as a result of this discourse, this exchange of ideas, is nothing short of stunning,” she said. “It begs the question: how close to the bone must we be to engender that kind of outrage by those who would oppose this idea that, hey, let’s just take a look. You know, let’s just see how deep this problem really goes.”
“If you want an answer – I mean, if it’s so easy to be a CNN, right, to affirm that there are no concerns to be had about illegal votes, and non-citizen voting isn’t something that we should look at, then let’s get CNN to ask the federal government to show us how they can conclusively tell us that non-citizens aren’t registered. Show us the process that they use to screen federal registration applications,” she suggested.
“They can’t. Why? Because they don’t. And when states ask to, they get sued. We’ve institutionalized the fraud, we’ve made it this taboo that no one’s allowed to speak about because this is what happens. It’s a political minefield, and it’s not for the faint of heart. But somebody’s got to walk through it, or at some point we’re going to find ourselves in a banana republic where votes really don’t matter, and then you can’t unring that bell. We’re perilously close to that point now,” Engelbrecht warned.
She said it “serves all of our interests” to ask tough questions about how many illegal voters might be on the rolls.
“Every eligible American citizen ought to have the opportunity to participate in an election that is free and fair, to promote the idea of political engagement and healthy debate,” she declared. “We function better as a country when we are an active and an engaged electorate. But we’ve got to make sure that when people go and vote, they can be certain that that vote counts, and will be counted.”
“America has among the lowest voter turnouts in the industrialized world, and the reason is, people don’t think it matters,” she pointed out. “They don’t trust the process.”
Engelbrecht said True the Vote is engaged in a “massive and ongoing research effort to begin to overlay these databeds, of using the baseline of voter registration files with sanctuary city grids, on and on and on, the layering needs to go now, to really get a full and complete picture of what it is that we’re really looking at.”
“And then from there, we hope to be able to take that empirical evidence and use it to support common sense reforms at the state level,” she continued. “Our goal is to see states really take ownership of process that work, that make sense – and then together, nationally, we can all rest assured that our votes are being cast and counted in a way that is deserving of the importance and the sanctity of our votes.”
Marlow asked about claims that hackers tampered with the results of the 2016 election.
“Again, if people want to cheat, there’s a way to do it,” said Engelbrecht. “Our systems are so decentralized. We have systems in Texas that are still – the platform that supports them is Windows XP. I mean, good luck hacking that; it’s not even supported, which is a problem in and of itself. So, you know, does it merit examination? Sure. Again, bring all comers to the party. Let’s talk about the problems.”
“Is the time to do that in the eleventh hour before the election is certified, in a way that we’ve seen, to essentially disrupt the Electoral College?” she added. “Well, I think that that’s hyper-partisan manipulation, but I think the question bears asking. It just needs to be asked in the right form.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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