it used to be that secretaries of state were very little known positions it used to be the case that most people here in America couldn’t even name their Secretary of State however after what took place in the year 2020 many people across the country both on the left and the right have woken up to the fact that secretaries of State in their official capacity to administer elections are actually incredibly important positions they determine how a state’s election is run and as we learned in recent years they also often decide which laws to follow and which laws to ignore for instance during the pandemic the secretaries of State in multiple different states allowed for ballot dropboxes as well as mail-in voting Provisions that were actually directly at odds with what was written in the law such as the case over in Wisconsin however since that election since the election of 2020 the different states across this nation have moved in one of two directions they’ve either gone the route of California allowing for Universal mail and voting and explicitly not requiring photo ID or they have gone the route of Georgia by tightening up who can vote when they can vote limiting the use of dropboxes and explicitly outlawing the practice of sending out Mass absentee ballot request forms to everyone now the state of Ohio has taken a similar approach to that of Georgia according to the current Ohio Secretary of State Mr Frank Larose they have not only implemented new legal Provisions that make it easy to vote hard to cheat but also his office has referred over 630 people to law enforcement because their investigators have found that those individuals were likely engaged in some form of voter fraud and wouldn’t you know it well I was down in Washington DC I actually had the opportunity to sit down and speak with the Ohio Secretary of State regarding how to keep elections safe his opinion on what took place over in Arizona as well as what common people like you and me throughout the entirety of their country can actually do to help make the elections in our local area safe and secure and so smash that like button smash that subscribe button and take a listen so Ohio has a long history of doing elections the right way under Republican leadership we’ve we’ve passed important legislation to really make it both easy to vote and hard to cheat I’ve continued that and certainly 2020 put us to the test I was just talking with some friends we were sued a lot in 2020 by left-leaning groups that were really trying to put their thumb on the scale and change the rules at the last minute one of the things that we decided is we’re not going to settle these lawsuits we’re going to fight them settling a lawsuit days before an election is a bad idea for two reasons one you shouldn’t make election law at the courthouse that happens at the state house but also if you give the ACLU 30 of what they’re asking for they’re just going to come back next year and get another 30. it’s like paying the hostage takers ransom one of the things that we do in Ohio is we maintain accurate voter roles we work hard to remove deceased voters from the voter rolls in fact we do that on a monthly basis it was a bill that I passed in the state Sen Senate that created that process we removed non-citizens from the voter rules the good news is it very seldom happens but every year we find 150 non-citizens that for whatever reason have become registered to vote and we remove them from the voter rules we enforce our laws I’ve referred over 630 individuals for law enforcement action because we believe that they’re conducting voter fraud in the state of Ohio the good news is out of 8 million registered voters 630 is a small number I think the last thing that we need to talk about is really doing the logistical work to prepare ahead of time I was just talking with with Abe who ran for attorney general in Arizona one of the biggest problems they had in Arizona with the mess that they had was lack of Prior preparation as an army green beret when we plan for a mission when we do our mission prep it’s not like some Hollywood Montage where you’re just grabbing guns and going to get the bad guys it’s hours at the dryer race board thinking of everything that can go wrong mitigating against that making sure that you have all of your materials in place well we took the same approach to elections and made sure that machines are tested before the election that we had adequate poll workers and enough materials and so election day runs smoothly in Ohio because of all of that work let me ask you you mentioned a few bills and laws that are on the books that say for instance you need to clean the voter rolls regularly a lot of states have laws in the books that the Secretary of State chooses to not follow or to sometimes disregard entirely great examples you know what happened in Wisconsin in the year 2020 California regularly does not clean their voter rolls that’s why oftentimes it needs to get sued if you’re a citizen in those other states and you’re seeing the Secretary of State kind of function in this in this way disregarding certain laws that they might not agree with what can the individual person do to force the Secretary of State or the election Department to actually comply a couple things first of all it’s a patriotic duty to call out when elected officials are not doing the right thing unfortunately the hypocrisy on the left is when Republicans do that they call us election deniers when Democrats do that like uh uh uh for for example Stacey Abrams in in Georgia uh they don’t get tarred with that with that same brush it’s important to call it out get involved in Secretary of State races it’s a down ticket race most States elect some states appoint their Secretary of State but get involved in that race because it really does make a difference and hold that Secretary of State accountable really the shadiest things that have happened in recent years about elections have not been some Cloak and Dagger secretive conspiracy they’ve been things that happened in full public view really the Democrats aren’t ashamed of it they’re proud of their activist lawsuits and and really their crisis is opportunism in Secretary of State’s offices so call that out because it’s happening in full public view these lawsuits you got to fight them not settle them final thing is sign up to be a poll worker every state needs tens of thousands of poll workers in Ohio it takes 40 000 individuals to run election day it’s a long day and these are volunteers they get paid for their work but they volunteer to do this task they’re there when the sun comes up and they’re there until well after the sun goes down in the evening sign up to be a poll worker in Ohio vote ohio.gov is the website but check your local jurisdiction if you live in another state and sign up to be an election day poll worker it’s a real way to make a difference and make sure your elections are being run by the letter of the law all right the sponsor of today’s episode is a phenomenal company called AMAC that’s AMAC and it stands for the association of mature American citizens they are quite literally one of the fastest growing conservative organizations in all of America and you should consider joining for three main reasons the first is the money saving benefit because as a member of AMAC you get access to a ton of discounts at many many different verticals things like vitamin stores restaurants retail shops and so on and so forth if you want to check out the full list it’s pretty exhaustive you can do so over on Amax website the second benefit is that you get exclusive access to the AMAC magazine it’ll be delivered directly to your doorstep and it contains phenomenal coverage as well as deep analysis and then the third benefit the one that people say is their favorite is that AMAC fights for your values over on Capitol Hill in fact you can check out the online version of this on their website it’s the AMAC action advocacy annual report and it shows exactly what they’re doing on Capitol Hill in terms of fighting what they call the Socialist storm that’s brewing in this country so head on over to amad.us forward slash facts matter and sign up today I’ll also throw a link down in the description box below let me ask you from your perspective as being the Secretary of State of a fairly large swing state where you’re you’re likely I imagine paying attention to what was happening in Arizona right during the previous midterm election cycle two questions one is if you were in that scenario where you’re the secretary of state so technically you’re in charge of the elections in in that state do you think it was appropriate to not to not to not uh see the conflict of interest and resign from at least running the your own election basically as the situation happened there so the system that we have in in Most states has an elected Secretary of State that’s a partisan elected office and that person is responsible for running the elections that person is elected because they earned the trust of the voters and so that doesn’t mean that you need to necessarily uh step down from the position simply because you’re on the ballot but it does mean you need to be smart about I’ll give you an example I had a primary opponent last year we won I had a general election opponent we won that and in anything related to those races questions of candidate eligibility or policy specific to my race not broadly across the Spectrum I would I would recuse myself from those and have a senior member of my staff that made those decisions if nothing else it removes that kind of question and that’s the smart thing to do and that’s what Chief elections officers in state should do when they’re on the ballot but it is your job to run the elections the voters put you there uh for a reason and they expect that you’re going to be a candidate especially in a state like Ohio with term limits they expect that you’ll be a candidate for something else eventually you can do both and do them well but it’s important to recuse yourself from specific decisions that relate to the administration of an election where you’re on the ballot before we before the cameras began rolling you mentioned that in Ohio right now you’re working on a data transparency Bill relative to elections can you sort of break down what what the problem is that the bill is trying to solve and how it was so it would solve it this is something that we’re proud of and it’s the first in the nation it’s called Senate Bill 71 in Ohio and we wrote it working with the experts at the America First policy Institute again if we can get this done in Ohio I think it should sweep the nation and they should do it in every state it shouldn’t be controversial it’s about transparency data analytics it’s making sure that there’s nothing to hide in the way elections run but imagine this scenario imagine you’re putting some money aside for retirement you want to invest your hard-earned money when you look at the the balance sheet of different companies you know that they follow generally accepted accounting principles standard charts of accounts you know that you can look at the financials of two different companies and get in apples to apples comparison that’s because in the financial world world they’re very serious about that that same level of care has not been applied to elections it was in the the 1960 Civil Rights Act that it was a requirement that election officials would keep all of the documents for 22 months couple things happened though that’s a analog era law being applied in a digital era in many cases those databases get overwritten on a daily basis and they’re gone so if you asked your county who were all the registered voters on Election Day they may not be able to tell you that because it’s an electronic database that’s constantly overwritten here’s the other thing standard definitions don’t apply from jurisdiction to jurisdiction simple questions like what is a voted ballot does an absentee ballot count does a provisional ballot count how about if somebody turns in a blank ballot which happens sometimes when a voter gets to the polls and isn’t excited about any of the candidates so is that counted as a voted ballot how about registered voters what constitutes a registered voter somebody could be in confirmation status inactive status and so if they’re not defined uniformly across all of the counties in your state you can’t do that post-election audit in a way that’s really going to expose where there are problems and my belief is that in most places I know in Ohio elections are run cleanly and smoothly if um if you have full transparency then you can prove that to people and you can show them nothing to hide here at the Board of Elections everything is an open book but if there is a problem the data bill that we’re working on the data Integrity bill will make that obvious it’ll stick out like a sore thumb again just like looking at the balance sheet of a company you should be able to look at the balance sheet of your Board of Elections so last question yeah in regards so so earlier you said easy to vote hard to cheat I think that’s uh that would sum up I think what most Americans would want their elections when the argument is made against voter ID yeah but probably most people think that it’s a little bit odd because whenever you go anywhere you pick up a movie ticket that you pre-ordered and show you me your ID no problem it’s never it’s never a racist issue until it gets to the topic of voting and the argument there is always that well when you look at the percentages even though most people have IDs disproportionately more black people don’t have ideas so when you have a situation like voter ID laws I mean that argument could make sense because it would disproportionately affect this group what what would your response be to someone who’s making the argument that voter ID laws are racist first of all that um it’s a silly argument and it’s an insulting argument it’s saying that because of your skin color or your ethnicity that you’re less capable of maintaining proper government ID in States like Ohio what we passed is a voter ID bill that doesn’t leave anybody out right we’ve learned from other states we we knew that the left would challenge this and so we passed a bill that includes free IDs for anybody that can’t get one so you can go into any Bureau Motor Vehicle office in Ohio in a couple weeks when the law takes effect and get a free ID if you’re part of a small religious group that doesn’t want to be photographed like for example we’ve got a large Amish population in Ohio there’s a religious exemption where you can sign an affidavit but for the other you know 99.9 percent of Ohioans they realize that showing a photo ID is not an undue burden it doesn’t have any kind of race-based impact on people but what it does do is make sure elections more secure and makes people confident the elections are being run honestly that really is our job and by the way that bill that we passed in Ohio is being challenged in court we are fighting it aggressively a shady partisan lawyer named Mark Elias has come after us in Ohio and not only is he fighting Us in court but then he’s going on MSNBC and spewing lies like this is some sort of a race thing uh he’s using it to raise money for himself and to promote himself that’s really what lies at the heart of that agenda on the left we’re gonna fight that because by the way 75 percent of Ohioans agree that you should show an ID when you go to vote it’s a common sense thing and by the way we still have absentee voting if you want to do that we have early voting we make it truly easy to vote and hard to cheat that’s something we’re proud of Ohioans want that here’s another statistic there was a poll done just a few years ago and the question with a large sample size nearly a thousand likely voters from both parties were asked is it easy to vote in Ohio 92 percent of Republicans said it’s easy to vote in Ohio even 88 percent of Democrats said it’s easy to vote in Ohio so this tired old line that the left is trying to sell about voters oppression even their own people don’t agree with it and again that’s something that Ohioans can be proud of and show up confidently to vote on Election Day what you mentioned is interesting because if if your provision says you have to show an ID but if you don’t have an idea the provision allows for you to go to the DMV without any cost and get an ID from the government absolutely but what then what what’s their argument at that point uh their argument is it’s hard to get to a BMV even though there are hundreds and hundreds of them around the state or their argument is that uh people may not know that well one of the reasons why we’re engaging with the press in Ohio and making sure to get information out there so Ohioans know if they come to vote in local elections this year and we hope they do there’s a there’s a primary this spring there’s a general this fall we want people to know that if you don’t have an ID for whatever reason you can go and get one for free again we want to see high turnout this this idea that Republicans are interested in suppressing the vote is utter nonsense and it’s been proven false over and over again we had record turnout in 2016. record turnout in 2018 2020 2022 you and so if my objective as a republican who serves as secretary of state is to suppress the vote I must be terrible at that of course that’s not my objective we don’t want to suppress the vote we do want to make it honest States like Georgia that have passed mandatory photo ID laws have seen an increase in voter participation because when people are confident that their elections are honest they’re much more likely to show up and that’s why this hypocrisy from people like President Biden calling George’s Bill Jim Crow 2.0 is it’s rank Hyperbole and it’s completely irresponsible and now lastly I’d like to quickly mention that over on Epic TV just this morning we published an awesome documentary called altered humans how biotech is changing who we are it’s a movie which delves deep into the recent Innovations in gene editing in reproductive Technologies as well as what you can call Longevity Innovations and that explores the question of what all these new technologies will do to the meaning of the question of what it actually means to be a human here’s a trailer medicine has moved from making us well to making us better than well bigger faster stronger smarter to even make human beings in a sense superhuman the big product of the 21st century are going to be bodies and Minds take genetic editing like uh just as an example it’s you who are changed this new Gene editing technology known as crispr is to genetics and genetic Technologies what the atomic bomb was to physics it’s like doing surgery with an ax we’re taking genetically modified organisms and we’re injecting them in little kids arms we just shoot right into the vein it’s experimental for a reason if you want to be a lab rat go for it I was it’s not for you none of these things are for you they don’t exist for the good of humanity that was not the main point we simply cannot be dismissive of our place as human beings in this world people that the gods wish to destroy they give enormous power and these guys are seeking enormous power I think we are heading towards the upgrading of homo sapiens into guns that’s why I think it’s the biggest scam of all time it is the biggest scam of all time and we’re living in it if you’d like to check out that awesome documentary as well as the plethora of other great content over on Epic TV the link will be right there at the very top of the description box just click on it and you can watch the documentary right away again that link right there at the top of the description box below and then until next time I’m your host Roman from The Epic Times stay informed most importantly Stay Free [Music]
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Video Duration: 00:18:35
