'If You Can Keep It': The Pushback Against Election Deniers

0:07You're listening to the 1A Podcast. I'm Jen White. And I'm Todd Zwilling. Conducting elections in the U.S. is complicated. With more than 174 million people registered to vote in the U.S., in communities that are geographically spread out, and with many local races to manage, state and local governments are responsible for managing the polls. The federal government, and especially the president, has had a limited role in how American citizens vote. But President Donald Trump and his administration are trying hard to change that. The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security are pushing for states and local election officials to turn over vital information like lists of voters and even actual ballots.

0:48Trump officials have even moved to gain access to voting machines in places like Colorado. And a lot of secretaries of state and local election officials have refused. Meanwhile, the administration has appointed political activists with ties to Donald Trump's election denier movement. The effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election he lost. For today's If You Can Keep It, our ongoing series on the state of our democracy, we look at the moves the Trump administration is making to gain more control over elections, even after falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen and what it could all mean for 2026.

1:24Stay with us. All that and more after this short break.

1:31Let's get right into it with our first guest. Joining us from Los Angeles is Alexandra Berzon. She's an investigative reporter for The New York Times covering election systems and the federal government. Alexandra, welcome back to the program. Thanks so much. Alexandra, the Trump administration has made requests of many state and local election officials through the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. What are they asking for? They're asking for lists, the really complete voter files, including people's social security numbers and things that are normally quite private. So there's been a reluctance.

2:08This is something they've been trying to do even since the first Trump administration. And at that point, even Republican states were really balking at providing this kind of information out of privacy concerns. But they're trying to compel states to deliver this information. Right. In September, the DOJ sued eight states, including two Republican state election officials in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, over voter roll information. What did the DOJ say in those lawsuits? They're saying that there's a few different election laws, federal laws governing elections, that they're saying that the laws really talk about the states have the obligation to enforce, to keep proper voting lists.

2:54And they're saying that because of that, they need to do checks on that and that they have the right to do that. And also these laws do provide for some amount of public transparency in the list. But the folks who have responded say basically that the list that they've always been able to keep things like Social Security numbers private and that judges have agreed with that and that there really is not this oversight role that the federal government is claiming. Alexander, is there a concern from states and state officials who don't want to hand over this information beyond just sort of the privacy of Social Security numbers?

3:32Is there a general discomfort with giving voter information, detailed voter information to the federal government? Yeah, I think at this point, there's a loss of trust on a lot of levels with the federal government because some of the folks that they've put into place in high level positions have been the same people that have taken information in the past and kind of skewed it to create things that election officials have really come out and said this is not true and debunked it. So I think that there is some concern with the federal government kind of using the imprintor and that stamp of the federal government to create kind of more misinformation or a sense of problems with elections that aren't there is really, I think, one of the main concerns, as well as retribution against election officials and other things that President Trump and others have pointed to wanting to do.

4:25Well, Heather Honey is one of those people. She now serves in the new role of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security. Here's Honey speaking in 2024 at a conference for conservative activists in Pennsylvania, and she's talking about that state's elections. The first step if we want to fix something is to admit that we have a problem. And if you compare Pennsylvania's election system to just about any election system, any in any other state, look at Ohio, for example, there are these gaping, you know, vulnerabilities, all of these opportunities for bad actors if they wanted to to do bad things.

5:03So first, Alexandra, just fact check that a bit for us. Lots of opportunities for bad actors if they wanted to do bad things. I mean, there are studies and things that have shown some vulnerabilities in election systems, but those are also being mitigated. And the actual elections that have been conducted have been found to be completely valid and safe. And so often what folks like Heather Honey do is they take small mistakes. There's always little things that happen in elections, maybe some kind of, you know, or numbers that they don't understand, historical patterns or things that seem a little strange at some point, different points or votes that are counted at different times and things.

5:43And they sort of make a case that this is showing some kind of large impropriety. And often it's specifically regarding election results that they don't agree with. And so that it's often sometimes can be based on, you know, there might be some something that that comes out, but they sort of blow it up in ways that are that are not valid. Well, you and your colleagues at The Times have reported on Heather Honey, other individuals who were various activists or even lawyer roles in the Stop the Steal movement helping Donald Trump try to overturn the election or talking about elections in the aftermath.

6:22Alexander, can you talk a little bit more about Heather Honey, her track record, the role that she played in Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election and how far she's come? Yeah, Heather Honey is somebody who was a private investigator at the time working for companies. She had nothing to do with elections. And she was one of these people, there were many of them, who kind of got really immobilized during 2020 by the claims of President Trump and others that the election was stolen. And they wanted to find more information of that. But they didn't also, in many cases, totally understand the systems they were looking at and they were creating.

6:57So she went and kind of looked at the election systems in Pennsylvania and came up with a bunch of numbers and things that she claimed didn't seem right. She was able to get them in the hands of congressmen and people who were close to Trump. And they became talking points that he and others repeated. And then she went on to kind of become a national activist, part of a network called the Election Integrity Network that was growing and coming out, kind of pulling everyone together that was coming out of the 2020 election and wanted to continue this movement to claim that election systems were not safe.

7:30And so she really continued to become kind of a national leader on all of that. Now, it should be said that the election officials and folks who have looked at her data have repeatedly said, you know, this is not true and they've explained why. But she often will kind of just continue to repeat the same things nonetheless. Well, and we should just note that more than 60 cases were filed related to the 2020 election. And just remind us briefly, Alexandra, what's the aftermath of those cases? Yeah, none of the cases found that there was any issues with the 2020 election at all. And in fact, in many cases, there were specific evidence that was presented that was debunked.

8:13But many of the same people have continued to promote the same ideas and come up with new theories and kind of continue to add to that. Well, Alexander, the Trump administration has also elevated other people to government jobs related to elections and election security who have a history of participating in election denial, as we mentioned. You talked about Heather Honey. What about people like Kurt Olson? He's not a household name. But for those of us who dug deep down the rabbit holes of election denialism and post-2020 litigation trying to help Donald Trump overturn the election, Kurt Olson was – he was a main character.

8:53He was. And it's funny, like there's a few of us at the time of myself and others who have been following this very closely. And these people, these same people keep popping up over and over again. And now we see them in government. So Kurt Olson is one of those people. He filed a kind of notorious case where the Texas government was suing in 2020, trying to throw out all of the votes and overturn the election based on a whole kind of everything in the kitchen sink kind of approach to various conspiracy theories and whatnot. He's really one of the main people behind the whole idea of the election machines being having problems and Dominion voting.

9:37And he has continued to promote that idea as one of the right-hand men and lawyers for Mike Lindell, who's from MyPillow, who's one of the main promoters of the election machine conspiracy theories. So he's really continued. He also tried to help. He was the lawyer for Carrie Lake when she was trying to – who was the running for governor of Arizona when she was trying to overturn – very unsuccessfully overturn the results of that election in 2022. Where is Kurt Olson now? He now is working in the White House as an advisor and specifically is supposed to be reinvestigating the 2020 election, which, of course, as we've said, has been litigated, investigated, and there's been no problems.

10:25But as we know, President Trump has continued to promote this idea that it was stolen. Peggy emails, I'm a poll worker in north central Florida. If people doubt election results, I suggest that they should go to work for their supervisor of elections and see it for themselves. It is an impressive and trustworthy system. Coming up, secretaries of state are often the officials tasked with running their state's elections. We talked to Arizona's secretary about the Trump administration's efforts and its rhetoric around elections.

10:58Let's get back into the conversation and add a new voice. Joining now from Phoenix is Adrian Fontes. Since 2023, he's served as the Secretary of State of Arizona, the chief election official of that state. He's a Democrat who previously served as recorder for Maricopa County. Secretary Fontes, welcome back to 1A. Thanks for having me. We also heard from Kathleen in Pittsburgh, who says, My experience is if you have any doubts about the security of elections, go through poll worker training and work for one long day. You will be reassured. Secretary Fontes, we've been talking about how the Trump administration is asking state officials like you to collect data about voters.

11:37It's now suing some states, although it has not sued Arizona. Just demystify all this for us. What do the voter rolls in Arizona consist of? What kind of information do they contain? Well, the voter rolls in Arizona, just like in a whole bunch of other states, and they're all a little bit different. Let's just put that out there. All 50 states run their own elections the way they're supposed to, the way the Constitution calls for. So we have a variety of information in our voter rolls, which may include things like social, so that last four number of social securities, full dates of birth. Sometimes we've got folks who will give us their parents' maiden names, like mom's maiden name, things of this nature, depending on the age of the form.

12:16We've got a lot of older forms out there, and people will just give us a bunch of information. We put all that information in our systems, and we've got an interesting set of systems here in the state. We've got two counties that run their own voter registration system, and I hold the statewide system for the other 13 counties, but I'm really a trustee. This data is actually owned by the county recorders, which I used to be, as you said earlier, in Maricopa County. In one of America's most important swing counties there in Maricopa County. So, Mr. Secretary, back in August, you publicly rejected that DOJ effort to get its hands on Arizona's voting rolls.

12:57Now, in your response, you said complying with that request would run against privacy laws in the state when it comes to disclosure of people-sensitive information. What was your reaction personally, maybe not in a legalistic way, but knowing election systems and voter rolls as well as you do, when you got this request from the DOJ? What did you think? What did you think they were up to? Oh, well, they're up to no good. It's shenanigans of the worst variety. And here we go again, really was what I was thinking. You know, the constantly debunked lies from 2020 that keep popping up over and over and over again are a tired and feeble attempt to try to cheat the system, a system that works very well, by the way, and is administered, let me be really clear, by folks who like the folks whose emails and correspondence you've read.

13:47These are regular Americans who do our polling places, the regular Americans who are the clerks and the office staff in our variety of offices around the entire United States of America. And right here in Arizona, as long as I am the secretary of state, we're going to follow the law, which includes not just state laws that provide privacy for the information of our voters, but the 1974 Privacy Act, which we can, some of us remember, was enacted after Watergate so that the federal government wouldn't be able to consolidate personal identifying information and use it in nefarious ways. Alexandra, your colleagues at the Times report the Trump administration is trying to build a national voter database using voter rolls from states.

14:30What exactly would that database include? The database, I mean, what they're trying to do is, yeah, get all of this information, and then they could use that in any variety of way to including to try to prosecute folks who they, as well as potentially, as I mentioned, there's the idea of retribution against election officials. And DHS, by the way, Department of Homeland Security, has also been collecting much of the same information through a program they've done as well. So there's several efforts right now underway. Secretary, is there any benefit in having a national voter database to your mind?

15:14Well, yeah, there would be if we wanted to be like Taiwan. I mean, but it wouldn't just be a national voter database. Let's be real. If we're going to do this, let's do it right and go to the logical end. Let's issue every single person a national ID. Let's do a complete survey of the entire population of the country, whether they're here legally or illegally, issue everyone a national ID card, and then we could use it for banking. We could use it for healthcare. We could use it for anything in the world. That's where this is leading us. That sounds outrageous, what I just described. And those are the same folks now that are looking for this national voter database that were railing against Real ID back in 2005 when it was first launched because they didn't want the federal government to be in control of this data, which is traditionally within the realm of what the states should be in control.

16:04And it's shocking to me that this federal government, run by alleged conservatives, would be screaming against the 10th Amendment, which is one of the stalwart sort of backdrop arguments for the conservative movement and states' rights. It's a complete 180 degrees. And I can tell you right now, constitutional conservatives from 10 years ago, if you time warped them back over to today, they would not recognize what is going on in this country. Well, meanwhile, back in Washington, Alexandra, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, has also revamped a tool that checks the citizenship status of voters.

16:40This is called the SAVE database. What do we know about how that database has changed this year? There have also been some recent court rulings over the Trump administration's desire to link citizenship status with voting. What do we know? Yeah, this is something that also they've been trying to do for a number of years on the right and is to use the citizenship information that's collected and maintained through DHS. And states have had local election officials have had some access, but it was really kind of a case by case basis. And now what they've done is created a way that you can up a state or a local election office can upload an entire database to them and then they will sort of check it in bulk.

17:28And they've also added in and they never had access to Social Security information through this. It was just like immigrant IDs. And so what they do now is they've actually brought in the Social Security Administration's database to also check against that. So it's a much broader collection of information, and a number of states have already started using this. Well, on Friday, a judge barred the Trump administration from requiring proof of citizenship. Back in March, the president signed an executive order that called for voters to prove their citizenship on election forms, among other changes to election procedure.

18:04What's been the effect of that executive order? For now, that aspect of the executive order has been blocked. But there's also a in Congress, there's been a push to try to pass a law requiring this. This is something that they want. They really started last year, especially. I mean, it's long been this idea that there's a real issue on the right with non-citizens voting. But last year, they really started combining that with the kind of movement, the election denial movement, and pushing it in a much bigger way into this conspiracy theory that basically Democrats were stealing elections based on illegal immigrants voting.

18:46Of course, there's no evidence for this, but a lot of there's been a bigger push for to require this proof of citizenship and other aspects regarding non-citizen voting. Well, in their announcement of the DOJ's suit against six states that Jen mentioned earlier, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Assistant Attorney General Harmut Dillon mentioned, quote, clean voter rolls. That's a term that they used. Mr. Secretary, this suggests that some states might not be keeping accurate voter lists. Is that the case? Is this pretext? How do the voter lists stay clean in Arizona? Well, the voter lists in just about every state stay as clean as they can.

19:26I mean, and let's think about what this actually is. These are dynamic databases. You know, we've got 4 million plus voters in Arizona. We have thousands of changes every single day across all of our counties. So even the notion of getting a snapshot and uploading that doesn't give you any accuracy that can last beyond the moment that you're talking about. So it's sort of, I think this whole thing is a red herring to some other scheme that I'm really not fully apprised of. But the bottom line is this. We do a hell of a job checking, and we have been utilizing the SAVE database here in Arizona.

20:05But we've been doing that to verify citizenship, not to exclude folks from voting. And we've been doing that for a long time. In fact, the elections procedures manual that I promulgated in 2023 specifically speaks to that. as have prior editions. So our databases are about as good as they can be, given the multiple moving parts, the dynamism of what's happening, the variety of offices and information sources. It really is a difficult task, but we do very, very well. As a matter of fact, you can go to a place as aggressive on some of these things as Georgia, my colleague, Brad Raffensperger. They did a survey over there, and they only found 20 folks who apparently had out of their 7 million or 8 million, I think it was, voters that might not have been citizen.

20:57And at the end of the day, they could only verify that just eight of them had not prior provided or had not obtained citizenship. So you're literally talking about one in a million at the worst. And so we've done about as good as we can, given the dynamic nature of this. Now, I'm not making excuses, but I am saying this. When you insist on perfection in a system that doesn't provide you the capacity to achieve that perfection, you're going to automatically come up short. But we do well better than I think a lot of people out there think that we do. And I wish more people would understand that this is complicated work.

21:39It's done by folks across all sizes and spaces of offices with an enormous amount of data. It's very challenging. But I think we do a very, very good job, all things considered. Alexandra, I know we have to let you go, but I want to get to this question quickly from Paul in Maryland who asks, Does the acquisition of Dominion Voting make a difference in possible election interference? Now, Dominion Voting Systems was in the crosshairs of election deniers in 2020 because more than half of U.S. states use its voting machines. In October, a businessman and former Republican elections clerk named Scott Leindecker bought the company and has rebranded it Liberty Vote.

22:15He says he wants to improve election integrity in America, echoing some of the same language we've heard from election deniers. And people will also remember Dominion voting machines. They were the plaintiff in the suit where Fox News had to pay a$787 million settlement for defamation around the 2020 election, alleging that Dominion voting machines were part of a massive fraud in the 2020 election. It's that Dominion. Alexandra, briefly, what questions does the purchase of Dominion raise given how widespread its machines are? Yeah, I mean, what they've really done is they're using a lot of the branding of the MAGA base that was so suspicious of Dominion and had become kind of a boogeyman.

22:54And they're trying to rebrand it. Liberty, use Eagle in the imagery and talk about how we need paper ballots. The fact is there already are paper ballots in nearly every jurisdiction. So a lot of what they're saying is not necessarily changing anything. They've reassured election officials on this sort of quietly, like, well, nothing's actually going to change. And so it's unclear at this point whether it's kind of for show or if there really will be anything that comes of that or significant. But it's certainly something to watch and pay attention to. That's Alexandra Berzon. She's an investigative reporter at The New York Times who covers election systems and the federal government.

23:31Alexandra, thanks so much. It was great to talk to you. Still to come, what all these efforts and rhetoric actually mean for the 2026 midterm elections.

23:44Let's add one more voice to the conversation. Justin Levitt is a professor at Loyola School of Law. He was also a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice under former President Obama. He joins us from Los Angeles. Justin, welcome back. Hello. Great to be with you again. So how would you describe the maximum legally allowed role for the federal government to take in U.S. elections in terms of the power of Congress and of the executive branch? Well, Congress has all the power it wants in federal elections. Congress has an enormously way to write and or rewrite the rules about how federal elections are held.

24:22They've generally used that modestly or sparingly. They have enacted a few laws with some restrictions on what states can do. and a few national prerequisites, but they haven't taken over the process. I contrast that with the executive, where the role is virtually nothing. I know from having served in the federal government in several different instances that the federal government enforces the laws that Congress has passed, but otherwise can't freelance and decide on new rules for the states or local governments to follow. It's just not their job and it's not their role. and officials like Secretary Fontes and others know full well when the federal government has authority to act and when they don't.

25:06And often, usually, normally, the answer is they don't. They don't really do that much. And yet here they are, Justin, requesting all kinds of information via DOJ, via DHS, the whole alphabet soup, and the White House itself through executive order seems to be requesting a lot of this information that we've covered from the states. You argue that these DOJ requests might not even be legal in the first place. What's the main problem here? Yeah, the problem is, well, it's twofold. One, the requests for voter data don't seem to be authorized by the statutes the DOJ does enforce on elections, which require a general program of list maintenance.

25:51You heard Secretary Fontes talk about before that the roles are dynamic and state officials do a great job, Secretary Fontes included, of keeping them accurate and up to date. The DOJ's request for a voter file doesn't really further its own enforcement authorities in this zone. So the things they're citing as means of access don't really provide them access. There's a bigger problem though, and this is something that Secretary Fontes also mentioned, the Privacy Act of 1974 says that the federal government can't collect information on private individuals without a public conversation first, without notifying the public, without notifying Congress about what it's going to take, how it's going to use it, how it's going to safeguard it, who's going to have access.