Hans von Spakovksy: Election Audits ‘Ought to Be Conducted in Every State’

Audits of elections should be conducted in every state, Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Marlow asked, “Do you believe that these audits that are popping up in a couple of places are productive? And do you have any hopes for what we might learn from this Arizona audit that should be wrapping up sometime this week??

Von Spakovksy replied, “Yes. I think, actually, audits ought to be conducted in every state after elections, and I fault Merrick Garland, in fact, for discouraging audits. He attacked audits in his speech. … We don’t know what the Maricopa audits are going to turn up, but I’ll give you … the reason audits are necessary. They just completed an audit in Wyndham, New Hampshire, of a small race there from last year’s election. And guess what they found? They found when they hand-counted their ballots, that apparently their computer scanners were misreading the ballots.”

He continued, “They discovered a problem with with their voting equipment. The result was that they realized that the winning candidates in  last year’s election didn’t get 300 votes that they should have been credited with, and they also found that the losing candidate — who they thought only lost by two dozen votes — actually had lost by over a hundred votes. If they hadn’t conducted this audit, they wouldn’t have realized they had this problem in their voting equipment. Now they can fix it so it doesn’t happen in future elections.”

Democrats’ For the People Act — H.R.1 in the House and S.1 in the Senate — amount to a federalization of the election process, von Spakovsky explained, “to get rid of all of the safety and security protocols that states have in place.”

“It voids all state voter-ID laws,” von Spakovsky said of the For the People Act. “It requires all states to put in online voter registration, which as you know, is an invitation to fraud by hackers and others. … Then it makes changes in federal campaign finance laws that are intended to basically restrict political speech and political activity.”