Common Sense – Only Citizens Should Vote – with Cleta Mitchell – [Ep. 270]

Linda J. Hansen:  Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101 Breakroom Economics® Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck® and the creator of the Breakroom Economics® Online course. The book, the course, and the entire podcast library can be found on prosperity101.com. 

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Thank you so much for joining with us for this episode, I know that you will really appreciate the information that we'll be sharing today because it's so relevant to everyone. Everyone who cares about freedom, about truth in elections, about making sure America remains the land of the free and the home of the brave. So I know that you appreciate protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that's what this episode will be about.

But before I introduce my special guest, I want to say thank you to our prosperity partners, those who support us by helping us keep the podcast on the air. If you'd like to become a prosperity partner, please go to the website, prosperity101.com and hit the prosperity partner link and just support us with whatever you can afford. We appreciate every gift and we appreciate your engagement with this effort.

We also want to say thank you to our strategic partners. They'll be listed in the show notes and on our website. Please support these like-minded businesses that support freedom, liberty, and all the values that made America great.

So please go to our show notes and the website to support our strategic partners. Now for our guest, I'm so glad to have Cleta Mitchell. Cleta is not only a friend and a longtime colleague in the fight for freedom, but she is an expert in her election integrity efforts and she is really the leader in election integrity around the nation.

I'm just so thankful for her vision, her leadership, her courage, her tenacity. I am so grateful for Cleta Mitchell. She is an attorney…

Cleta Mitchell: Well, thank you. 

Linda J. Hansen: No, I truly am so grateful. Cleta is an attorney who has practiced in the fields of campaign finance and election law for many years.

She is presently the senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, D.C. and founded the Election Integrity Network in 2021. She is the co-convener of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, which is focused on the threats to America's elections posed by illegals and other non-citizens registering and voting in our elections. These things are so important, Cleta, and without you, I just can't imagine where this election integrity effort would be across the nation.

So thank you for your leadership and thank you for being here today. 

Cleta Mitchell: Well, thank you, Linda. It's very nice to be with you. And yes, I have to say what I try to tell people is I don't care what issue you care about, if it's taxes, if it's regulation, if it's foreign affairs, if it's school choice, whatever your issue is. If you don't, if we don't get the election system to be fair and accurate and accountable and transparent, then the system will produce results and people who are taking office who may not be the actual choice of the majority of the people voting.

And the left is all about changing the election systems to try to manipulate the outcomes, to shape it so that their people will always win. And so it's a struggle to keep that from happening and try to claw back some of the problems in our elections that were inflicted on us over a period of, I would say, maybe even 30 years, starting with the National Voter Registration Act in 1993. So we have a lot to do.

But fortunately, we have a lot of patriots around the country participating and trying to really fix our election system and repair the damage done over so many decades.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, we do have a lot of patriots around the country, but thanks to people like you and your leadership, helping to educate all of us about what we need to do. I've worked with you and the Election Integrity Network in the past to help build the local task forces that help to keep eyes on local elections because we vote where we live. So we have to make sure that those elections and the process for voting, for counting the votes, for registering the votes, for handling the votes, everything is absolutely secure and that every ballot is matched to a citizen, a legal citizen.

And we just thank you so much for that. But, you talked about this going back 30 years, for those who've really never been engaged in this conversation or really understand, what are they talking about? These people if you listen to mainstream media, they say we are election deniers, right? But we're not election deniers. We're saying let's expose the facts.

So start back at that 30 years ago that you mentioned and just give a brief synopsis of how that led to where we've been more recently.

Cleta Mitchell: Well sure, and I'll start with one of the things that people need to understand. I say this to conservatives all the time. The difference between conservatives and lefties, left wingers, I refuse to call them progressive. I don't think they're progressive. I think they're more, they're further left than that. Socialists, maybe communists.

But they believe that if they can control the process, the procedures of political engagement, that they can dictate the outcome. So it's very clear that that is actually true. If you look at the empirical data, when Oregon, let's take Oregon, for instance, in Colorado, those are two states that used to have and they still have a number of Republican people in there.

There are lots of Republican voters in Oregon and in Colorado, and they used to send bipartisan delegations to Congress and Republicans could win statewide in Oregon and Colorado. But once they did away with precinct voting and went to all vote by mail, there are no polling places any longer. And once they did that, Washington state is another example, it was the first to do this. And then California followed suit. There are no Republicans able to be elected statewide in any of those states any longer.

We know that what happens is when Democrats take over a legislature or the Congress, what's the very first bill that they take up? It's a bill that has to do with the political process. And that has been true for decades.

Let's start with 1993. When Bill Clinton was inaugurated in 1993, what was the very first bill that was introduced by the Congress? It was the bill, and remember, 1993 was before it was still Democrat control.

So you had Bill Clinton in the White House and you had control of both houses of Congress held by Democrats. It wasn't until 1994 and ultimately 1995 when they took office that Republicans took over control of Congress for the first time in 40 years. So the Democrat trifecta, what did they do?

What was the very first bill that they took up after Bill Clinton became president? It was a bill to change how we register to vote, turn the Department of Motor Vehicles, the driver's license agencies in America, the National Voter Registration Act. Some people refer to it as Motor Voter, and it turned it into the largest precinct, really, the largest registration agency in the country.

And that's still true today, because that is where most people in America become registered to vote, because they're required under federal law to offer voter registration at every Department of Motor Vehicles and also social services agencies, the agencies that hand out food stamps and payments, so welfare payments. So they believe, the Democrats believe, that if more people can register to vote, that then the Democrats will win. They've always believed that if more people, particularly on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, that if somehow we could just get them, they could just get them registered, then they would automatically vote for Democrats.

And that to some degree, that's true, but it really hasn't worked out entirely the way they wanted. So they started with Motor Voter, the National Voter Registration Act, now, Wisconsin isn't covered by that because in 1993, there were six states that had same day registration that you could register to vote the same day as the election.

Now, there are 22 states that have same day registration, which is terrible because you can't verify anything before the person actually casts a ballot, which is not a way to ensure integrity, that's what the law said. It was really the first major incursion of the federal government into the voter registration process, other than the Voting Rights Act that was enacted in the 1960s and renewed every 10 years thereafter until 2013, when the Supreme Court said we no longer have to have these race based requirements for states.

So the National Voter Registration Act went very deep into voter registration and into list maintenance, the accuracy of the voter rolls, and because of federal law, it makes it virtually impossible, even though there's a provision in the statute that requires the states are to keep accurate voter rolls. Nonetheless, there are blackout periods and requirements.

The hurdles to removing bad registrations are so high. It has caused us to have voter rolls all over the country in every state that are completely inaccurate, flawed. They are filled with inaccuracies, dead people, people who've moved and been gone for 20 years, and non-citizens.

And so one of the things then fast forward to 2002, remember the presidential election of 2000 in Florida and all the hanging chads and the Democrats with Republican acquiescence, which is always fascinating to me, passed the Help America Vote Act because they didn't like the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. And it was quite all right for them to be so upset that they passed a federal statute and appropriated several billion dollars to replace the old punch card systems and basically said to the states, you can no longer use the punch card systems or a lever machine. I remember going with my mom in the 50s to go play when she went to vote.

And that's what they used in Oklahoma at the time. And those were banned for federal elections by Congress and then Congress appropriated money to replace those systems and basically gave us the voting systems, voting machines, and technology that we have today, which is somewhat problematic because most of the voting technology in our country that's used across the country has not been certified since 2005.

There were guidelines issued in 2022, in February 2022, issued by the Election Assistance Commission, the 2.0 guidelines for the first time since 2005. In 2022, they were updated and there are no voting systems in use in America today that comply with the 2022 guidelines. So we have voting technology that is not safe, it's not secure, it hasn't been updated in 20 years, just 2005 to 2025.

So that's a problem. We have voter rolls that are a complete mess. And then you add to that what happened and the left is all about, the Democrats with their leftist allies are all about, quote unquote, access.

Their latest insult that they hurl at people like me who care about integrity of the election, making sure that only eligible people are registered and voting, they say that we're anti-voting. That's the latest anti-voting Mitchell, they say.

Because why? Because I think that people ought to be U.S. citizens to register to vote, and they ought to be citizens to vote, and they ought to be alive, and they ought to live, if they're registered in Wisconsin, then they need to be voting in Wisconsin and not other states. So what we've learned since 2021 and the election integrity movement, we've learned all of the problems with the elections and all the threats that we face.

And so we have started working on a, we published earlier this year, if you go to the website, www.electionintegritynetwork.org, we have published the U.S. Citizens Elections Bill of Rights, and that has 10 principles of areas that we believe are important for election integrity. And the first is that you should be a U.S. citizen in order to be a U.S. citizen to register to vote. That's a big part of what we've been working on for the last year.

It's not the only thing, there are a lot more things, but that's been a real focus. As we saw the tens of millions of illegals coming into our country and getting IDs, such as in Wisconsin, where you didn't have to have a birth certificate or any sort of papers to be able to get an ID. And that ID, the ID that's given to illegals in Wisconsin, looks exactly like a driver's license that is issued to citizens in Wisconsin.

You cannot look at the license or the ID and tell a difference. So it'd be very simple for someone to come in, present that, register and vote the same day in Wisconsin, and no one's the wiser. So that's an area I can talk about at length, but the voter rolls, voter registration, all mail, voting all by mail, no excuse, absentee voting, the vulnerable voting machines and technology, all of that.

It's a very real, it's a very real problem. And that's what the Election Integrity and all of our many wonderful volunteers around the country, that's what we work on.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, it is so important. And you brought up even in Wisconsin, I know it's true in other states, the same day registration, I've actually worked the polls and done registration same day, it's very hard to know some of the things. And then it's almost like you are creating a huge problem, if you're actually trying to check to make sure that this person is truly a citizen.

It's very, very difficult. So this is just so important. And when we educate the public, and we help people understand, these are actual problems with our voting system. Do you believe that only citizens of this country should vote? I mean, overwhelmingly, they typically say, well, yes.

Cleta Mitchell: 89% in one poll, 87%, and another poll of Americans believe that only US citizens should be registering and voting in our elections. Problem is that 10% who don't agree with that, either don't know or they disagree. They happen to be the Democrats, like Tammy Baldwin, in Wisconsin, and the Democratic Party, right?

I mean, that I worked with the House leadership, and Senator Mike Lee last year, and again this year on the SAVE Act, which as the SAVE Act was to require that in addition to checking a box to register to vote saying you're a citizen, they actually have to prove that you're a citizen by providing documentary proof, a passport, a birth certificate, a driver's license, or other government issued photo ID that says on it that you are a citizen.

And of course, it passed with all the Republicans voting for it. It's passed the House twice now with all the Republicans voting for it. In 2024, in July, we had five Democrats who were in an election who voted for it.

And this year, we had one Democrat who's in a very tight district in Maine, that's really somewhat of a… it's been a Republican district in the past. And so he voted, that congressman voted for it, but all other Democrats vote against it.

Linda J. Hansen: They all vote against it. It's interesting, you talked about how the American public is definitely for if they're educated about it, they're very aligned with the fact of having only citizens vote. However, I remember standing in line to vote at one election.

And there was a plane flying above with the tail message saying, count all votes, count all votes. And I found out it was flying, a plane like that was flying above so many polling areas, count all votes. So I started asking people, do you think we should count all votes?

Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course we should. Right? I said, well, what about legally cast, certifiable, handled accurately with the proper chain of custody, with all legal provisions followed? What about those votes? What if they're not legally cast? Should they be counted?

What if they've not been handled properly? What if they've not been secure? What if all these things and then people start to think, but if you just say count all votes, anybody who goes against that would… you think, oh, they're against voting?

Well, no, it's not that at all, we're against the votes that are illegally cast. They are not certifiable, they don't have a proper chain of custody. They don't follow all of the legal provisions for casting an illegal vote, a proper ballot. And these ballot measures and things that people have all over the country, people really need to read them carefully. I just appreciate your work because it's helping citizens to be educated and these local task forces that we helped develop and really brought forth.

People are so much more engaged, you brought up the volunteers. So I just think it's so important these volunteers all over the country have been really alerting people. So we've just had some major legislation or major court cases in Arizona, right?

We just had a major one here in Wisconsin. We've had them all over, you start to see the cracks are beginning to widen in terms of what we're seeing. And hopefully, over time, it's just the wheels of justice move slowly.

Cleta Mitchell: And truth in time will always- Legislation moves slowly.

Linda J. Hansen: Yes, yes. And court cases move slowly. Everything moves slowly. People look and say, well, why don't we just fix that? Well, there's people trying to fix it.

Cleta Mitchell: Well, the Capital Research Center has done a really very deep dive into the amount of money that's been poured into changing our election system by left-wing billionaires. Pierre Omidyar, who was an eBay founder, is a billionaire, and he has given hundreds of millions of dollars to create all these left-wing election-related organizations. And they're like amoeba, they're everywhere.

And they have set about to weaken transparency and accountability of election procedures. They don't like it that we have been out recruiting people to become poll watchers and actually watch the process. And someone famously said in one of our groups over the last four years, the only thing that should be secret about the elections is how someone votes, who someone votes for, the secret ballot.

That's the only thing. Everything else should be subject to oversight and transparency so that we can hold election officials accountable. The Wisconsin Election Commission is particularly bad, but it's not the only one.

There are a lot of threats to the system. And if I might talk about the threats of non-citizen voting, that is something that we really became concerned about, I became concerned about. I really will tell you, I felt like God put that on my heart.

It wasn't on my scorecard or my dance card. I hadn't planned to work on that. And then I just kept coming back and finally said, I think God wants me to pay attention to this.

And that's why I organized the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, because I knew that this was something that the American people cared about. And if we didn't raise the alarm about it, I was just worried that there were going to be so many illegal votes cast by illegals or getting them on voter rolls by left-wing activist groups, and then just basically voting in their name. That happens too, because these leftist voting groups, they really do manipulate vulnerable populations, like where it's the elderly in nursing homes, as we see in Wisconsin, or people in group homes, homeless people, everywhere.

And so we started working on that to require documentary proof of citizenship. That's what the SAVE Act would do. And of course, it passed the House. It's passed the House again this year, and we're waiting to see whether it might be brought up in the Senate, maybe attached to some must-pass bill. But in the meanwhile, there's something that individual patriots around the country can do. There are things that people can do to have your voice heard on this, and that is the America First Legal Foundation filed a petition for rulemaking with the Election Assistance Commission.

That's the body that was created in 2002 with the Help America Vote Act. They're the ones that issued guidelines and certifications for voting technologies and other election administration issues. And one of the things that they do is they publish, they adopt and publish the federal voter registration application that all states must accept and use.

They develop that, and that goes through a rulemaking process at this federal agency. The America First Legal Foundation filed a petition to request that the EAC, Election Assistance Commission, change what's on the voter registration application to include not just the checkbox, are you a citizen, but to require that people would have to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. So that has now been posted on the federalregulations.gov website, and there is a requirement that any time an agency of government, an administrative or executive branch agency, is going to adopt rules or regulations, they have to, under the 14th amendment, provide due process to the citizens because these have the force and effect of law. 

And so they have to publish the proposed rule and they have to, that's the notice, and they have to have a comment period. We are now in a comment period until October 20th that people can go to regulations.gov and then they can put in Election Assistance Commission 2025, that's this year, so you go EAC-2025-0236. So it's, so you go to regulations.gov and then you go to, you put in EAC-2025-0236 and that will bring you to the page where you can file comments. 

It'll have the letter that was filed with the EAC, the petition, saying please change the form to require documentary proof of citizenship, and then you can just write, I support this and here are two or three reasons why I think only citizens should be registering and voting in our elections. You can just put something in the comment box or you can write something more formal and upload it and file it. And there are over 200,000 comments that have been filed to date.

The last time we were able to see those, but only 15,000 have actually been published or posted because the government employee has to go through every one of them before they're posted, and of course with the government shutdown there's nobody working on doing that. So until October 20th, anyone who supports the idea of requiring documentary proof of citizenship, please go to that website regulations.gov and then put in EAC-2025-0236 and that will bring you to the page where all you have to do is just say comment and it'll pop up. You can write in your comments and put your name in there so that people know and put your email in so you can get an email back confirming that your comments have been submitted.

If you don't get that email back, then it may not have worked. It may not have actually been submitted. That happened to me on some other comments recently.

So it's really important that you put your email in there and get the information back saying, yes, your comment has been submitted. So that's something that we can all do. It's like having a vote.

And so it's really important for people to do that before October 20th.

Linda J. Hansen: Yes. I'm so glad you brought that up because I was going to ask about that action point and making sure that we got that through. And listeners I just want to impress upon you, I know we talk a lot about how I want to help business owners help employees understand why this is so important. There are so many ramifications. You summed it up at the very beginning of this episode when you said, if you care about this issue or that issue or this issue or that issue, here is a core of what we need to fix in order to have representation that we need in government.

I've been really following quite a bit and have had on my podcast, the people that are working hard to make sure that only citizens and English speaking citizens are getting a commercial driver's license. I really invite people to go listen to my episodes, I think it's 261 and 262, that involved this issue. But a lot of these driver's licenses, they're no name given. And then they have the DMV who is like this ID can be used for identification and voting purposes. Like how can you even do that? It's like you mentioned before about the motor voter and the DMV, so this is all connected.

So we need to make sure we fix this at the only citizens vote level. That's one thing and get this act passed where we can make sure only citizens vote but also citizens need to make sure their voice is heard.

And don't just read the headlines. And don't just read the tail messages behind the planes that fly overhead when you're waiting in line to vote that say all votes count or count all votes. You're not hearing the whole story. You're only seeing part of it. So we need to make sure that our votes are legally cast. They are certifiable.

That it's citizens only voting, we have followed the proper protocols and procedures for ballot custody and handling and all of that we need to make sure at every level that that happens. And so I just say employers, if you're educating employees about this issue, you need to not only help them know about voting days and election days and how important it is to vote, but also provide information for them so they understand what it is that would be a legal vote. And you don't have to push it down their throat or anything, just provide it for them.

Cleta, your websites and things that with the organizations you're involved in have so many resources about helping people understand. So whether you are an employer, employee, a volunteer helping to make sure things are happening properly in your area, or you're an elected official that wants to make sure your campaign and your opportunity to be elected is free and fair, we have so many resources available. 

So Cleta, I'd really like you to give those three websites, Election Integrity Network, Citizens Only Vote Coalition, and then also the information where they can submit their comments about the Only Citizens voting as well. So provide those three and then provide any other closing comments before we end the interview.

Cleta Mitchell: Well, we have many, many resources, not only about the issue of how to file comments, we have a video of how to make this, just taking you through what you have to do to file the comments. It's very easy. But if you go to our website, it's electionintegritynetwork.org, that will take you to, there's a link to the federal regulations website, which is regulations.gov. And then when you get to regulations.gov, then you just enter EAC-2025-0236. And that will take you to the comment page for Only Citizens voting and requiring documented proof of citizenship. And we do have another website that is the onlycitizensvotecoalition.com, and that has resources and arguments that you can make and information about every state and its laws as it relates to citizen voting and that sort of thing.

One thing, there are a lot of resources on the electionintegritynetwork.org website. There are a lot of resources on the onlycitizensvotecoalition.com website. We're always trying to educate people about how they can, how they can get involved at their local level. I think just as parents learned during COVID that you cannot just send your kids off to school and not know what's in the libraries and not know what materials are being taught to your children. And you have to be aware and attend school board meetings.

Parents really have to do more than just think that the experts are taking care of it. No, we as Americans have the responsibility and the right, but also the responsibility to oversee government agencies and government actions. And that's what we've learned about elections. It's not enough to just go vote. You need to go to the school. You need to go to the election board meetings.

You need to know your election officials. You need to know how this process works and know whether or not the voter rolls in your area are corrupt or if they're maintaining them and keeping them accurate. So I'll just close with this, Linda.

You know, in the very first paragraph, the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, it says governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. And the way we give and withdraw consent as Americans is through our elections. If the election system is corrupted so that it can be manipulated as to produce a particular outcome, then we see the policies that are produced by that outcome are not necessarily those that we as citizens want to have, that we consent to.

But if we don't have fair, honest, and accurate elections, then policies and government actions and programs can be stuffed down our throats, whether we like it or not. And that is really why I think that that is the hill we have to die on, because everything else flows from a proper, fair, honest, accurate election system. Everything.

So it's really important that we pay attention to the election system. And a way that people can get engaged at this moment until October 20th is to go to regulations.gov and then follow your comments. Just post some comments about why you think it's important for people to prove they're citizens before they're allowed to register to vote.

So those are my comments. Linda, I really appreciate your giving me the opportunity to talk about this, because it's really, really important to the future of our country.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, it is really important. And I thank you so much for sharing your expertise, your experience, and for your lifelong dedication, really, to this. And so listeners, you've been given a job to do. You need to go do it. I mean, it's not hard to do these things as citizens. Sometimes it's picking up a phone and calling an elected official.

By the way, 202-225-3121 is the capital switchboard. 202-225-3121. Call your elected official and tell them that you want only citizens to vote.

You can also go through and give the comments here. But educate yourself, because if you just wait for the headlines to tell you what's happening, you will be misled. And the other thing, a lot of times you talk to people and say there was a lot of election fraud, and they want you to prove every single thing.

It's like, I could sit down right now, and given enough time, I could probably come up with 100 things that I know that have happened from 2020, 2022, 2024, that I know that happened across the states. And you could come up with many more, because they're at the top of your head. But people have such short attention spans, and it takes so much time to explain these things.

So, it's just like anything. We eat three meals a day, because if we ate a month's worth at once, we couldn't, right? And so we have to take it in bits and pieces. So this is one piece that you can share with others. 

So listeners, if this is a message that resonates with you, which I certainly hope it does, because if you care about your freedom, you care about election integrity. But please share this podcast with others, encourage people to get involved, share their websites that Cleta mentioned with others, and pick one thing, at least one thing.

I think we can all do more than one thing, too. So contact your local officials and say, do you need help on election day? Do you need workers? Do you need observers? Find out what's happening at your local level, about how the votes are, are tallied, and what happens. And get involved, because it's your freedom, and the freedom for future generations that we're working to protect.

So let's keep America free by making sure our elections are honest, transparent, and really only open to American citizens. So thank you, Cleta. 

Cleta Mitchell: Yeah, thank you so much.

Linda J. Hansen: Okay, look forward to having you back again. Thank you.

Cleta Mitchell: Thank you.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you. Thank you again for listening to the Prosperity101® podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share and leave a great review. Don't forget to visit prosperity101.com to access the entire podcast library, to order my newest book, Job Security Through Business Prosperity, the Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck®, or to enroll you or your employees in the Breakroom Economics® online course.

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