The StoneZONE with Roger Stone


Captain Seth Keshel | 03-20-26


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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Captain Seth Ketchel is a battlefield-level analyst who brings a battlefield level analytical discipline to one of the most contentious issues in the country, election integrity. He is a former U.S. military intelligence captain, a veteran of Afghanistan, and an expert on trends in being able to predict where our politics are going. He has a new book, The American War on Election Corruption, which you should go out and get immediately.

Transcript

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Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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00:00:00.000 Joining me now is a good friend of mine, Captain Seth Ketchel, who is a battlefield
00:00:29.820 level analytical, brings a battlefield level analytical discipline to one of the most contentious
00:00:36.260 issues in the country, election integrity. He is a former U.S. military intelligence captain,
00:00:41.360 a veteran of Afghanistan, but he's also, in my opinion, one of the most recognized,
00:00:47.420 incredible independent analysts investigating voter registration anomalies, election procedures,
00:00:53.640 systematic vulnerabilities in your selection.
00:00:56.460 But the other thing he is excellent on is trends
00:00:59.840 in being able to project where our politics is going.
00:01:04.140 He has a new book, which I highly recommend it to you,
00:01:06.940 The American War on Election Corruption,
00:01:10.200 which you should go out and get immediately.
00:01:12.200 It has a foreword by former Speaker Newt Gingrich.
00:01:17.040 It has a great cover.
00:01:18.640 Seth, welcome to The Stone Zone.
00:01:20.960 Roger, it's great to be back on with you.
00:01:22.880 And I will tell your audience that I am disappointed I did not make your best dressed list for 2025.
00:01:28.500 Well, you've heard of payola, haven't you?
00:01:30.560 No, not really.
00:01:31.500 I haven't looked at you in those terms, but I will reevaluate you for next year's awards.
00:01:38.340 You are someone who I have deep respect for in your analysts of the trends in voting and the anomalies in voting.
00:01:48.300 So a couple of things I wanted to ask you about that I'm very curious.
00:01:51.740 And that is, how is it possible that Donald Trump wins Wisconsin while the Republican Senate candidate in 2024 is going down narrowly?
00:02:03.040 How is it that Trump carries Arizona by the margin he does, but the Senate candidate, our mutual friend, Carrie Lake, goes down to a dirtbag?
00:02:15.560 How are those anomalies possible? Because that seems unlikely to me.
00:02:19.820 I think the 2024 election was similar to the 2020 election,
00:02:23.520 but when Trump made the catchphrase too big to rig, he meant that.
00:02:27.320 And I think that in Pennsylvania, you probably would have had a different result
00:02:30.340 had Trump not converted 100,000 or so voters that Harris probably expected to have camp.
00:02:36.260 But down ballot, once Trump had been declared the victor and all eyes were off the election,
00:02:41.220 that particular race you mentioned in Wisconsin flipped in the middle of the night.
00:02:45.260 At the end of counting time on election night, I remember specifically
00:02:48.460 seeing Trump ahead in which he comes by about four points,
00:02:51.560 which is where my numbers had him.
00:02:53.680 And, of course, over time, over a few hours,
00:02:55.840 Trump's lead went down below one point.
00:02:57.860 And with it, so did Eric Huffey's lead, and he lost,
00:03:00.500 and they didn't count a single vote again.
00:03:02.160 Yeah, I find both of those races to be enormously suspicious. 1.00
00:03:06.320 I mean, generally speaking, the idea that Joe Biden got 81 million votes
00:03:09.380 when he was essentially a diaper-wearing vegetable
00:03:14.760 for a good part of that campaign,
00:03:16.700 They kept him in the basement at his home in Delaware.
00:03:20.120 They would sometimes drive him 20 miles over the Pennsylvania border for a small meet and greet
00:03:25.940 so they could say he was doing a campaign event in the Keystone State.
00:03:31.300 Everybody, I think, on our side of the aisle gets wrapped up in algorithms
00:03:38.180 and the nuances of mail-in ballots, the integrity or lack thereof of the electronic voting machines.
00:03:48.580 But in a larger sense, wouldn't the SAVE Act in one swoop clean up a large segment of that election fraud
00:03:57.340 and irregularities that do take place?
00:04:01.060 Yes, I come to odds with people who are obsessed with machine voting or they're obsessed with mail-in ballots.
00:04:10.480 But the foundation of all the corruption in our elections is the voter registration system.
00:04:15.760 And the most nefarious act in voter registration is to implement automatic voter registration.
00:04:21.620 That wasn't a thing in the United States until 2015 when California and Oregon started pushing that through.
00:04:26.660 in the 2020 election joe biden won 18 out of 20 states that had automatic voter registration and
00:04:33.480 the edge was 243 electoral votes to nine yeah i had 90 percent of the electoral votes he needed
00:04:40.060 just because of automatic registration so that populates way more registrations than are possible
00:04:45.200 which are then outfitted with mail-in ballot requests or in the case of universal mail-in
00:04:49.440 voting all these registrations receive a ballot which are then harvested up over a very lengthy
00:04:54.060 early voting period well let's also make it clear at the same time the voting lists are not being
00:04:58.780 cleaned so uh last time i was in las vegas i gave a speech for the president at the end of the last
00:05:04.860 presidential campaign speaking of an event in las vegas a guy came up to me and he showed me five
00:05:10.140 ballots and they were all addressed to different people but all at the same address one of them
00:05:15.020 was addressed to him and i said what's this he said well these are all the mail-in ballots i've
00:05:19.100 received at my home i said well if you were a dishonest person you could cast every one of
00:05:23.420 of those for Donald Trump. She said, yeah, but I'm not even going to cast this one. I'm going to go in
00:05:27.160 and vote in person because I don't trust them. I said, well, that's the attitude. I said, these
00:05:31.440 other people, he said, well, two of them, these are all people who lived in my apartment before
00:05:36.220 me. Two of them are dead. One of them has moved out of state and the other one is still in the
00:05:41.640 state, but has moved to another location. So it just says, and that of course is a remnant of the
00:05:47.840 Mary Reid machine, which, you know, mandated that a ballot be mailed to every registered voter,
00:05:55.520 whether you ask for one or not. Well, Roger, the event that you came to in Washington, D.C. on the
00:06:01.120 19th of February, our election integrity summit, the gentleman that spoke a couple hours before
00:06:05.920 you, Dr. John Lott, I asked him specifically to come in to talk about his extensive research
00:06:11.000 on mail-in ballot fraud. And it's a really sad thing. We don't use a lot of the information we
00:06:17.200 can find openly available to our benefit 34 out of 47 european countries ban mail-in voting
00:06:23.980 outright and some of the ones that do allow it only allow it for overseas citizens so we're
00:06:28.380 talking about a couple thousand ballots mexico japan russia israel they all ban mail-in voting
00:06:33.880 so why is it that our blue states are going the other direction i think you raise an excellent
00:06:39.160 point so for example the fact that 300 000 ballots essentially popped up at the detroit
00:06:44.820 accounting center in michigan at three o'clock when the fact that they hadn't been folded
00:06:48.760 and therefore had never been mailed that that doesn't really matter does it no of course as
00:06:53.620 long as it advances the democrat agenda of when i mean they've been doing this in american elections
00:06:57.780 for a long time in my book i point out democrat operatives in 1864 trying to steal new york state
00:07:04.220 for george mcclellan against abraham lincoln by using fake signatures on absentee ballots
00:07:08.780 yeah i mean when i when i went to vote myself in the last election i was waiting in line and
00:07:13.420 Because I always try to vote in person.
00:07:16.420 And a man in front of me stepped up and produced his ID and his address.
00:07:21.780 And the lady working, the temporary election worker beyond the desk said, 1.00
00:07:25.560 I'm sorry, sir, you already voted this morning.
00:07:27.980 He said, no, I didn't.
00:07:29.600 He says, oh, no, you voted and she gave him a time.
00:07:33.620 And he said, let's say his name was John Smith.
00:07:35.840 And he says, I'm going to ask you a question.
00:07:36.960 Is there also a Rhonda Smith registered at the same address?
00:07:41.620 And the woman says, oh, yes, and she voted also.
00:07:44.880 He said, well, that's my mother.
00:07:45.800 She's been dead for 15 years.
00:07:48.120 Welcome to Broward County, Florida, ladies and gentlemen, where dirty voter lists are the norm. 0.99
00:07:55.400 This claim by Governor Ron DeSantis that we run the gold standard of elections is just not true based on the myriad of problems.
00:08:05.240 Even when the boards of elections mail out a mail-in ballot, it has to be returned, requested, in an event that is undeliverable.
00:08:13.640 In the primaries two years ago, 4,000 returned to the Lake County Board of Elections, and somebody, somebody cast those votes.
00:08:22.100 So it's a very corrupt system here, and you're right.
00:08:24.680 I think it all goes back to the voter lists.
00:08:26.620 And that's exactly why you don't see a lot of these states, almost all the states, including the red ones, cooperating with the DOJ and the orders to turn over voter rolls.
00:08:36.100 So I love the – he puts Boss Tweed on the cover of his great new book, The American War on Election Corruption, The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting.
00:08:48.480 Newt Gingrich wrote the forward. It's a terrific work. I'm only about a third into it, but it is also a great cover.
00:08:56.620 You say you have some concerns over the Texas Senate primary.
00:09:02.380 I am concerned about it, and I think it presents a combination of issues.
00:09:06.240 It presents a very serious political problem, number one, because it was a nasty primary.
00:09:11.640 I'm not one of these people that panics over Texas every two years,
00:09:14.880 but I think you've got one race that sticks out to people that is causing some concern,
00:09:19.080 and that would be Ted Cruz in 2018 and his re-election bid against Robert Francis Beto O'Rourke,
00:09:25.520 who came within three points of flipping that seat.
00:09:28.640 Now, Ted was a very lazy campaigner, in my opinion.
00:09:31.560 I think that he listened to some pretty bad advice,
00:09:34.340 and he was going for a blowout when he was barely winning.
00:09:37.040 But Ken Paxton got outspent big time.
00:09:40.260 Cornyn put $60 million in the race to harm him,
00:09:42.620 and I'm not so sure where Wesley Futs candidates he came from.
00:09:45.240 I think I have an idea.
00:09:46.960 But Cornyn really damaged Paxton,
00:09:50.140 who underperformed by at least 6.5 points, if not 10,
00:09:53.520 putting the president in a very difficult position.
00:09:55.300 Now, I think that there's leverage over the U.S. Senate and Cornyn and Senate President Thune, Senate Leader Thune, to get the SAVE Act across.
00:10:06.000 But it doesn't sound like, based on the news today, that that's going to happen.
00:10:09.360 So I almost wonder if we should just say the hell with it and endorse Paxton, because he's a far better Senate candidate and senator waiting to happen.
00:10:18.020 It is. I must say that in the 50 years I've been in American politics, I have never seen a more selfless act of.
00:10:24.300 Ken Paxton, who could very well still win this Senate seat, in fact, I would argue might be
00:10:28.860 well positioned to do so, to say, look, I'll give up my personal ambitions and my candidacy
00:10:33.820 if the Senate will simply end the filibuster and allow J.D. Vance to break the tie to pass the
00:10:40.980 SAVE Act, which the president correctly calls the Save America Act. It's really not that
00:10:44.680 controversial. It simply says that one has to be a qualified U.S. citizen to vote in a federal
00:10:49.600 election and one needs to have a certain form of idea these are perfectly reasonable concepts we
00:10:55.160 have 50 votes but because of an antiquated rule among gentlemen we don't have the filibuster now
00:11:02.900 the instant republicans lose control of the senate if they would if they do they will end
00:11:07.320 the filibuster and they will ram through some of those left-wing extremist legislations you've
00:11:12.040 ever seen we have a unique opportunity right now to save the country by passing this vote and john
00:11:18.020 thune i bet donald trump wishes if he had to guess again he had supported rick scott to be the
00:11:24.980 majority greater than john thune who thune who will not even uh leave the senate in session
00:11:31.060 so that trump may have recess appointments i mean there are many jobs in the trump administration
00:11:35.960 that are yet vacant or even worse still filled by biden quizlings that have not been filled because
00:11:42.480 there's no process for confirmation. If the Senate was kept technically in session, Trump would have
00:11:51.280 the ability to make at least temporary appointments so we could actually run the machinery of
00:11:57.960 government. But of course, they won't allow that. On top of this idea that both senators
00:12:06.320 must agree on the choice of a U.S. attorney, a U.S. attorney who might be in a position to
00:12:12.180 investigate the corruption of, well, those two U.S. senators, the so-called blue slip system,
00:12:18.580 where a U.S. attorney has to have at least the acquiescence of a Democrat senator in his state.
00:12:26.360 All of Biden's appointments were duly approved by Republican senators. He had the right to appoint
00:12:31.600 his U.S. attorneys, as horrible as some of them were, but they have not given Donald Trump the
00:12:35.940 same courtesy. In fact, they continue to refuse to confirm his appointments. And I think that is
00:12:42.700 hurting his administration. And you can't sue because it's not a law. It's an antiquated
00:12:49.280 custom. We got to break the filibuster first. I think that's next. You know, I think all roads
00:12:55.340 lead back to the corruption of our elections, because you have the problem with not enough
00:12:59.940 senators willing to get this across. But you have the last three federal election cycles, 0.69
00:13:04.520 Where if you restore these Republican losses that we've already mentioned, my count is that since 2020, if you take those three elections, we should have 62 Republican senators in office, not 53.
00:13:15.660 Well, once Saskatchewan and Alberta secede from Canada, which constitutionally they have the right to do, and maybe in the process of doing, and then become independent, then applying for statehood, I get you at least four more conservative members of the Senate and a bunch of conservative members of the House.
00:13:37.060 I'm thinking maybe Cuba and Venezuela, too, give us four more.
00:13:39.800 uh that's an interesting idea i wonder if the president would also then appoint marco rubio
00:13:45.400 uh in addition to being the archivist of the united states the national security advisor
00:13:50.980 the secretary of state uh but would also appoint him governor of uh of uh of cuba that would be
00:13:59.020 you know one more thing for him to put in his resume he's handled everything really well so far
00:14:03.300 no i'm very very uh pleased and happy with my home state senator his politics were not always
00:14:09.260 mind i did support him over charlie christ in the tea party circle and i'm glad i did he has been a
00:14:14.320 valiant warrior against marxism and marxist narco trafficking in this hemisphere where he and trump
00:14:20.460 are obviously based on what they did in dorau this weekend with all those central and south
00:14:25.100 american leaders in this new coalition to fight uh the the narco uh drug trafficking that's
00:14:33.000 mostly done by these leftist Marxist states in this hemisphere.
00:14:37.620 I think that is laudable.
00:14:40.360 If I were the Cubans, I'd be very, very, very nervous right now
00:14:44.360 after big wins in Venezuela and Honduras
00:14:46.960 and cutting off Cuba's oil.
00:14:49.260 Is Cuba next to fall?
00:14:50.860 We'll be right back with Captain Seth Ketchel.
00:14:53.380 I'm going to ask you a bit more about the 2020 elections
00:14:57.500 and how you see 2026 shaping up.
00:15:01.320 This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
00:15:05.300 He likes politics and he's a professional at the highest level.
00:15:09.900 Roger Stone.
00:15:11.000 Where's Roger?
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00:16:59.740 next you will have as much life to live as you allow yourself the madison new series now streaming
00:17:07.300 only on paramount plus this is the stone zone with roger stone roger stone who's a very very
00:17:24.640 one of the smartest political minds rogerson was persecuted people forget he's actually a
00:17:29.000 Brilliant, brilliant political analyst.
00:17:30.760 Now, get him a zone.
00:17:32.500 It's the Stone Zone.
00:17:34.460 Here's Roger Stone.
00:17:36.320 And we're back with Captain Seth Ketchel.
00:17:38.820 He has a very lively feed over there at Substack.
00:17:42.720 He is an author, election integrity analyst, former U.S. Army intelligence captain.
00:17:48.180 And he is also, I think, a very shrewd reader of political trends.
00:17:54.100 I do have to ask you, in your new book, which is The American War on Election Corruption, The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting, which I highly recommend to you, you say that elections are not stolen but rigged.
00:18:07.460 What do you mean by that?
00:18:08.520 You know, it was actually Newt Gingrich's comment about the elections not being stolen but rigged.
00:18:13.700 And I wanted to pick the speaker right before because, you know, we all, you and I, Roger, we've toured a lot of events and we tend to talk in circles.
00:18:20.520 And one of the more difficult audiences, and we deal with them all the time in Arizona, regular rank-and-file Republicans that may not like the president's style who don't want to talk about election corruption.
00:18:29.760 And I always knew that Speaker Gingrich felt the same way about elections that I did.
00:18:33.780 And by not stolen but rigged, I mean that the 2024 election made it very obvious to me what the capabilities and capacities of the various states to produce which ballot counts are.
00:18:43.460 And it's all based on what types of laws they have on the books.
00:18:46.140 So, while Governor DeSantis may say that he's got the gold standard of elections, I wouldn't call it that.
00:18:51.380 I would say maybe states like Iowa have the gold standard of elections.
00:18:55.000 But for a large state, clamping down on how much cheating is possible with the more than 3 million mail-in ballots that Florida has every cycle has really turned that state into a blowout.
00:19:04.920 I mean, nobody's going to win Florida for the Democrats for our lifetime, my lifetime, and I'm 41 years old.
00:19:09.440 So, forcing voters to request a mail-in ballot, verify addresses, that really tamps down on how much cheating is possible.
00:19:16.140 So rigging is done by what types of laws? The big three laws are automatic voter registration, universal mail-in voting, and ballot harvesting. You have those, you have a Democrat superpower.
00:19:25.660 Yeah, it's very interesting. The trend in Florida now for the first time Republicans have over one million dollar one million voter voters voter registration edge over Florida Democrats. This was a state that until not that long ago is a purple state rather than a red state become a solidly red state. A lot of this has to do with with Hispanic Americans beyond Cubans, Venezuelans, even Puerto Ricans who more traditionally Democratic gravitating to the new Republican Party of Donald
00:19:55.640 trump and therefore i think it's i think it is easy to say at this point is whoever wins the
00:20:00.420 republican nomination to be governor of florida most likely congressman byron donalds who's been
00:20:05.280 endorsed by the president uh based on uh that endorsement alone but but whoever wins the
00:20:11.300 republican nomination there are several other candidates um the democrats have no bench here
00:20:16.780 and their party has atrophied very badly uh so i think roger there's a few things in florida
00:20:21.860 I like to watch. There are three things in Florida I really like to watch.
00:20:26.380 Number one, Miami-Dade County is a pretty interesting opportunity for the Republicans everywhere.
00:20:32.000 I get frustrated watching the party in Pennsylvania.
00:20:34.520 They don't seem to realize that if they could just go into Philadelphia County and be anti-crime, anti-corruption, and be 10% better,
00:20:40.700 they could never lose the state again based on the trend in the rest of the state.
00:20:43.880 So Miami-Dade County offers an urban roadmap for Republicans if they can figure out how to replicate that.
00:20:48.440 Number two, the overall trend of Florida.
00:20:51.040 So Florida was R-plus 7.8% by registration, 1.1 million more Republicans than Democrats when Trump won by 13 points.
00:20:59.020 Now it's R-plus 11.2, almost 1.5 million advantage.
00:21:02.860 What that means is Florida is on pace to be redder than Texas in the next presidential election, whether that's J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio as the party nominee.
00:21:09.760 And Florida has a 1952 to present, brand present, in which Pennsylvania and Michigan move in the same direction as Florida.
00:21:17.400 So Florida's current lean suggests very strongly that the next Republican nominee will carry both Pennsylvania and Michigan.
00:21:22.620 And then the third thing I like to watch is Duval County, Jacksonville.
00:21:25.400 It has shifted in the same direction as Georgia in every presidential election since 2004.
00:21:29.740 So I can't get party registration figures in Georgia because they don't register by party.
00:21:34.480 But I can read them in Duval County, and Duval County is almost flipped to a Republican registration advantage.
00:21:39.420 I know some of these demographic trends are very, very interesting.
00:21:42.880 Of course, they also, the negative side, look at New York City and the white flight, the flight of Catholics, the flight of working class white voters changing that Democrat primary to produce a memdami. 0.74
00:21:57.560 You know, there's never enough time.
00:21:58.940 I'm going to have Captain Seth Ketchum back because I want to get his thoughts on 2026 and 2028.
00:22:04.520 I think we beat up the last election pretty good tonight.
00:22:08.220 Seth, good luck with your book again, The American War on Election Corruption, The Crusade to Restore Trust in Voting by Captain Seth Ketchel.
00:22:17.080 You can go to Amazon. Grab your copy right now.
00:22:20.000 Yeah, thank you very much, Roger, for having me on.