It's just 53 days until the U.S. presidential election, and Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart, is here to talk about why the risk of cheating and vote rigging is higher than it was in 2016.
00:03:41.100It's right, because of all of the various ways in which Democrats tried to rig the election.
00:03:49.200And I stayed away from the term rigged because I think that the election results could have been legitimate.
00:03:57.960We don't know that they were necessarily different than they might have been had all other things been equal.
00:04:03.500And one of the phenomena, for example, that people who believe the election was stolen can't quite explain
00:04:09.060is that even though Trump lost at the top of the ticket, Republicans won in many congressional races.
00:04:16.980Democrats had expected to pick up 12 seats, and in fact, the Republicans won many seats.
00:04:23.340So voters seemed to have split their tickets.
00:04:26.480You wouldn't expect that it would be very easy to cheat in such a precise way.
00:04:29.880But I do think that the election was neither free nor fair.
00:04:32.300There was violence, and there were threats of violence.
00:04:34.940There were rule changes imposed by the Democrats through the courts against the will of the Republicans.
00:04:39.960You know, if you're going to change the rules of the election, you have to do that together in a bipartisan way.
00:04:44.380Everyone's got to agree on the rules for a fair fight.
00:04:47.340If you're just imposing the rules that benefit your side against the other side, that's not fair.
00:04:52.200There were also attempts at media censorship.
00:04:54.640The Hunter Biden laptop was, in fact, censored a month before the election.
00:04:58.720Many people said they would have changed their vote if they had known that Hunter Biden had confirmed the accusations of his father's corruption and influence peddling.
00:05:06.640So there were many factors that went into making the last election unfree and unfair.
00:05:13.660It's not as bad this time because Elon Musk now owns Twitter, now known as X.
00:05:18.800And I think the scrutiny has also forced some of the other people who openly participated in the unfairness to stay on the sidelines.
00:05:28.620Mark Zuckerberg, for example, CEO of Facebook, gave $400 million in 2020 to so-called voter protection projects or I think it was safe election projects or whatever it was.
00:05:42.980But invariably, the money was spent in Democratic districts in swing states on getting out the vote, ostensibly for a public purpose, but really to benefit Democrats.
00:06:04.320When the moderators interjected, by my count, seven times to fact-check Trump and never once interjected to fact-check Kamala Harris,
00:06:13.100it's not because Kamala Harris never told lies or misstated the facts.
00:06:17.940There were many cases in which she referred to hoaxes, completely debunked claims, and the moderator said nothing.
00:06:24.900So it looks very much like the debate was rigged against Trump, and that's not an overreach to say that.
00:06:30.400I think that ABC News deliberately made the debate harder for Trump.
00:06:34.660That's not to say Trump couldn't have done better.
00:06:36.400I think he could have had a better debate.
00:06:37.680But he was up against not just his Democratic rival, but the two moderators as well.
00:06:42.040So having said that, I do think this is a more winnable, fairer, maybe not completely fair, but fairer fight than in 2020.
00:06:49.920Well, and that's what I was getting at because I remember your thesis four years ago was unfair, yeah, but they got that unfairness in legally.
00:07:00.820So it wasn't like they were fraudulently rigging it.
00:07:05.000They were legally rigging it by changing the rules, by having this mass mailing, vote harvesting, voting that's so different than what we're traditionally used to.
00:07:14.420So I guess my question is, where there is this easy peasy, no voter ID, mail-in vote mush,
00:07:22.880are those in places like California that really the Republican presidential candidate would have no hope whatsoever,
00:07:29.980are the battleground states, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, some of those places,
00:07:37.480are they as rigged or as tilted as they were last time?
00:07:43.040Like, really, I think this election is going to probably come down to a half a dozen key states, right?
00:15:18.380And how many other things are on the ballot?
00:15:20.120So, when we vote, we're not just voting for president.
00:15:22.780We're voting for governor and senator and representative.
00:15:25.020And then we're voting for dozens of judges.
00:15:26.980And in fact, you don't actually vote for the prime minister.
00:15:31.360You just vote for your local member of parliament.
00:15:34.440And then afterwards, the party that has the most members of parliament, their leader is chosen as the prime minister.
00:15:41.600So, we don't have a direct election of our prime minister.
00:15:44.020Right. So, anytime anyone says we need to count ballots by hand, and I've observed elections in South Africa where they do count ballots by hand.
00:15:51.180And again, there it's just a question of which party do you want.
00:15:53.540In local elections, which counselor do you want?
00:15:55.460But basically, it's one question on one ballot.
00:16:18.440So, we have to actually have some kind of automated system for counting the ballots.
00:16:22.160You can have a hand count if you want for specific offices when you have a recount, for example, if you think the machines haven't counted properly or there might have been some mistake or irregularity somewhere.
00:16:33.380We also, however, can improve the safeguards around that automated process, such as voter ID and such as making sure people register in advance and not simply on the day of so that they show up somewhere and bog the system and you can't verify people in time and you just wave them through and let them vote.
00:16:48.900I mean, there are so many other things we can do that we're not doing.
00:16:51.880So, I don't think we need to move to hand counting of ballots unless we want to adopt a parliamentary model.
00:16:57.220And, you know, there are some people who suggest we should do what they call straight ticket voting, which is basically our version of a parliamentary vote, where instead of voting for all this stuff, you just say, I'm voting for whoever the Republicans have chosen for all 40 of these questions.
00:17:08.500You know, you can vote straight ticket.
00:17:11.640It's difficult to go to hand voting, but we can improve everything else around the voting process.
00:17:18.940And the reason we're not doing it right now is because Republicans can't force Democrats to accept the changes.
00:17:23.460Democrats believe the current system favors them, but also because when Republicans get into office, they don't change things when they think it favors them.
00:17:29.820We have a problem of incumbency and incumbents not wanting to change a system from which they benefit.
00:17:35.020Well, I'm terrified by what you've said because I think the Republicans have to win by the margin of lawyer.
00:17:44.300You know, they have to win by so much that it can't be finagled or litigated.
00:17:48.420And I'm not sure if that's going to happen.
00:17:51.520Now, Kamala Harris, I find her grating, that cackling voice.
00:17:58.160So I think aesthetically, I find her a turnoff.
00:18:02.460I but just on the substance of it, I think she's I don't think it's contentious to say she's the most left wing.
00:18:10.140She was the most left wing senator in in the chamber.
00:18:14.900I think she's I think she's awful, but she has the entire orchestra of the mainstream media behind her that that are making her look as good as possible and unanimously pressuring for her throughout all the cultural levers out there.
00:18:30.700I mean, I think you could take a fence post and get them to 40 percent in the polls if you just have the Democratic war machine behind them.
00:18:41.960I remember you and I talking about her before.
00:18:43.880I mean, she dropped out of the race for the presidential nomination four years ago, I think, with one percent of the support.
00:18:49.720She didn't even have her own state of California behind her.
00:18:52.880Can they do the Pygmalion story, you know, turning turning an ugly duckling into a beautiful princess?
00:18:59.460Can they just fake it till they make it and get her across the finish line?
00:20:08.300And they are going to rally around her.
00:20:10.420That's going to be enough for them to be very competitive on November 5th.
00:20:14.660What Trump has to do is make the case that America cannot survive another four years of the same people running the country into the ground.
00:20:20.480And it needs to reelect him to bring him back.
00:20:24.060Remember the prosperity of the four years under Trump before the pandemic.
00:20:27.140And remember the peace in the world, the Abraham Accords, the fact that Russia didn't invade anybody during the period that Trump was president.
00:20:37.820And I don't think Kamala Harris has done much to convince voters in the middle or voters who are sitting on the fence that they should move over to her side.
00:20:43.540She really has not done a good job of reaching out to independent voters or voters in swing states.
00:20:47.800It's mostly just been a message aimed at driving out her base and getting them out to vote.
00:23:11.160And it's always been like that with Joe Biden, as you point out.
00:23:15.060Ron Klein was his chief of staff who basically was acting as president for two years before he left.
00:23:21.960Look, that incident with the hat, I think what happened was more likely.
00:23:25.380And I don't know everything around what happened there.
00:23:27.600But my impression is that Biden showed up on September 11th in Pennsylvania to pay honor and pay homage to the people of Flight 93 who resisted the Al-Qaeda terrorists.
00:24:15.980And maybe, look, maybe he just, I don't want to speculate about his mental state, which, as you point out, isn't always there.
00:24:20.460But maybe he's just enjoying not having to run, and he can have the kind of playful moments with Americans that aren't set up and managed by consultants.
00:24:28.320And he knows Trump is a cultural phenomenon.
00:24:30.440I don't think he's throwing Kamala Harris under the bus.
00:24:32.340But the fact is that Trump is a folk hero.
00:24:34.940And even though half the country is going to go out and vote against him, he is still, in some ways, revered by Americans.
00:24:42.340I interviewed left-wing Americans right after the assassination attempt who were very impressed that he got up from a bullet wound.