Sept. 27, 2022

Free, Fair, Transparent – You Can Make a Difference! – with Marshall Yates – [Ep. 139]

Free, Fair, Transparent – You Can Make a Difference! – with Marshall Yates – [Ep. 139]

We have often heard demands that we should count all votes, but should we? What about illegally cast votes? What is the difference between a legal or non-legal vote? What are the laws in your state? How can you protect the security of your ballot?...

We have often heard demands that we should count all votes, but should we? What about illegally cast votes? What is the difference between a legal or non-legal vote? What are the laws in your state? How can you protect the security of your ballot? Marshall Yates, Executive Director of The Election Integrity Network, joins Linda to share action points on how you can make sure every election is free, fair, and transparent.

© Copyright 2022, Prosperity 101, LLC

--------------------------------

For information and resources visit: https://prosperity101.com

Or click here to order a copy of Prosperity 101 – Job Security Through Business Prosperity by Linda J. Hansen.

If you enjoy this podcast, please consider becoming a sponsor.  Contact us today!

 
 
The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent those held or promoted by Linda J. Hansen or Prosperity 101, LLC.
 
Transcript

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. I seek to connect boardroom to breakroom and policy to paycheck by empowering and encouraging employers to educate employees about the public policy issues that affect their jobs.

 

My goal is to help people understand the foundations of prosperity, the policies of prosperity, and how to protect their prosperity by becoming informed, involved, and impactful. I believe this will lead to greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention and to an increased awareness of the blessings and responsibilities of living in a free society. Listen each week to hear from exciting guests and be sure to visit Prosperity101.com.

 

Thank you for joining with me today. Think about the last time you voted. Do you know if your ballot was cast securely? Do you know if it was legally handled and counted? Do you know if the laws of your state were followed as your ballot was processed? Do you know the chain of custody of your ballot? We have often heard demands that we should count all votes. But should we? What about votes that are cast illegally or by non-citizens? What is the difference between a legal vote or non-legal vote? Many people have these questions and more regarding election processes. What can you do to make sure free and fair elections can be held in your state and across America. 

 

To address these questions and more, my guest today is Marshall Yates. Marshall is an Alabama attorney who graduated from Auburn University, the same year the Auburn Tigers won the 2011 National Championship. And he then attended Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. Marshall currently serves as the Executive Director at the Election Integrity Network. He previously served as Chief of Staff to Congressman Mo Brooks, from Alabama's Fifth Congressional District, where he spearheaded election integrity efforts in the House of Representatives from 2017 to 2022. Thank you for joining with me today, Marshall. I know this topic is of high interest and extreme importance to many of our listeners.

 

Marshall Yates  

Well, thank you for having me on, Linda. I'm happy to talk about this at any point, I think it's very important to really saving America is returning integrity and confidence back to the elections, across the country in each state. And each state has a long way to go to restore confidence so that the individual voters are confident in the outcome and can have some confidence in the result. And, you know, allow to vet it and make sure that the winner is rightfully declared, and the process is run according to the law and procedures in each state.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Well, that's true. I think the 2020 election brought so many things to the forefront and have helped people to understand more of the details regarding security of our ballots. And I know that your work with Election Integrity Network and the other work you've done over the years is really helping to secure ballots and secure the vote in a sense for everyone. 

 

As American citizens that is one of the privileges we've often taken for granted, it’s to be able to vote in a free and fair election. But sometimes our elections have not been all that fair. And, of course, you know, this has probably been true over the course of our country's history in some ways. But we've been hearing more and more about different ways our votes have been manipulated, shall I say, to favor a candidate or a policy that maybe the American people are not in favor of.

 

So, can you explain some of the things that have happened that you are aware of in recent elections that maybe our listeners are not so aware of that they wonder what's all the argument about? You know, what's the difference between the legal votes and non-legal votes?

 

Marshall Yates  

Well, I think that's a great question. And one of the things we'd like to tell people before we even get into what is legal and what is not is when – if somebody's concerned about election integrity, the best thing you can do is sign up to be a poll worker or a poll watcher. Learn the process and be part of the process so that we can help restore integrity with concerned citizens and patriotic Americans, getting together and participating in election cycle, to really in a non-partisan way just to make sure the election is administered fairly smoothly, accurately, and without shenanigans or questions.

 

And this, you know, poll watching is one of the best things you can do. Just to be there, to be a check on the system, will allow people to have more confidence in the outcome. And if there are problems on election day, we can get those things flushed out and addressed without causing a bigger problem. Now, I could talk about election irregularities all day long and illegal votes. 

 

And it reminds me of this situation in North Carolina. So, in North Carolina in 2016, they – it was found out that there were a number of illegal aliens had voted in the North Carolina elections. And luckily for us, Donald Trump had a prosecutor, US Attorney Higdon in the Eastern District of North Carolina. And he started digging into it the minute he was given the job by Donald Trump. He spent four years digging into it, found hundreds and hundreds of illegal aliens on the voting rolls, and helped expose a systematic abuse where in North Carolina, the illegal aliens are being added to the voting rolls when they're getting their driver's licenses because the box that was meant to be a check on illegal aliens and prevent them from signing up was being automatically filled in for them. So, they were being automatically registered to vote when getting a driver's license, even without having to do anything.

 

So, the US attorney was unable to prosecute these hundreds and hundreds of illegal aliens he found in the voting rolls because he said, “Well, they didn't do anything wrong. They just didn't change to say no. They didn't affirmatively say, “Yes, I'm an illegal alien.” But what he did was he prosecuted those who were voting. He found a number of them voting and he battled with North Carolina State Board of Elections back and forth for years. Once they figured out what was going on, they really dragged their feet, because they're an entity of the Democratic governor over there and who has benefited off of the systematic weaknesses in North Carolina.

 

So, you have illegal voting. You have illegal aliens convicted of illegally voting in 2016. But one of the most flagrant and mind-boggling things about this is even after they were convicted, the North Carolina voting rolls are so poorly managed and maintained that these illegal aliens that were convicted of illegally voting in the 2016 election, their names are still on the voting rolls during and throughout and after the 2020 election.

 

So, that's just one example of the systematic abuses we have in the system because that is the development of what we've called “motor voter.” So, when you get a driver's license, you have the opportunity automatically be registered to vote. And that was resulting in hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands, upon thousands, maybe even millions, because illegal aliens do get driver's licenses, resulting with their names on the voter registration files.

 

Now that we're lucky that in the Eastern District, North Carolina, and then resulting in the middle and other areas in the country, that we had prosecutors during the Trump administration who were trying to prosecute this despite widespread pushback from those on the Left. But that's just one example. We have things happening all over the country, Zuckerbucks. In Zuckerbucks, it was constantly like a force. And you know, that wasn't exposed before the election. It took people really speaking up after the election saying, “Look, they were embedding the leftist partisan actors into our election offices. And look, it was being paid for by the grants from these leftist organizations.”

 

So, we only found out about that after the fact. And what we're trying to do now is through our Citizens Research Project, which is where we encourage citizens to engage with their local election offices, ask questions, find out whether they're having any relationship with these left-wing third-party entities, and we have a whole list of we can publish for you, but ask, “Are they working with them? And how are they working with them and whether they are or not?” And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that he's not going to do this $400 million buy-off of an election again.

 

But what we've had in President Biden took over is he did an executive order. And that executive order gave Susan Rice the ability to give out grants. So, she's giving out federal taxpayer dollars. And those are also meant to expand “voter access.” But what it really meant to do is come over the back and follow the mapping of what Zuckerbucks did and put those left-wing actors, embed them in the system, because they're the ones counting and administering the elections. And you do not want a partisan counting or administering elections. That's just not the way it should be.

 

And I'll take you back to where I got into this. And so, as you mentioned, I'm an Alabama attorney. So, on election night in 2016, I was in the basement of a courthouse. I was in Birmingham, Alabama monitoring the absentee ballot count. And I was a very new attorney at that point in time and I've never done absentee ballot monitoring before. But I got very aggressive with it because what I've noticed while doing this is not only did a lot of the absentee ballots not have photo ID like they're supposed to or didn't have the addresses, or the appropriate signatures, or other things and every time they did, and I objected to it, and those objections were sustained.

 

But what I noticed was that the poll workers counting the ballots and, you know, they're counting it as fast as they can, because they realized it was an 80-20 split for their Democrat friends to win, is that they had a relationship with the Election Judge. They spent the whole time talking about, you know, where they were going to go watch the Hillary Clinton election night victory party that night. And I found that to be odd, considering they're the ones counting the ballots, the absentee ballots, tens of thousands of them, in one of the most heavily leaning Democrat areas in the country. The ones counting the ballots are the ones organizing and hosting the Democrat Watch Party and with the judge. It was all of them together. And, you know, they really didn't like me being there. But I was to check on the system. 

 

And that's what we're trying to do with people around the country, is, like I said, we're trying to encourage people to become poll watchers and election workers to be a check on the system so that we don't have these left-wing partisan entities that would do whatever they could to stop Donald Trump like they did in 2020, counting the ballots again because that puts our elections at question. That really does not help people become more confident in the outcome if they are partisan actors checking it without any observers or kicking out the observers. So, what we say, if you can just turn your anger into action and volunteer as a civic duty, become a patriot, and volunteer to be part of the election system, we can really reverse course and help save America.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Those are such good points turning anger into action. And you've talked a lot about the partisan divide. But I would like to bring up, too, for any buddy who's listening and is a Democrat and doesn't want to be thrown into that bucket. This is really a non-partisan effort of what you brought up, Marshall, are some examples of left-leaning Democrat operatives doing things. But we know, I mean, we're not naive enough to think that there's never been a Republican or an Independent or a Conservative in some way, who's not ever cheated, right? 

 

So, what we're saying is this is a non-partisan effort. This is – get everybody involved. It's about citizen engagement, making sure that there is an eye on every ballot, that the chain of custody is protected, that the laws of the state are followed, that citizens are educated to know what the laws of the state are. And then you brought up a really good point about volunteering. You know, that volunteering and just watching. Your example was perfect.

 

And I know I've done election observing and things at times before. And it's a great way to learn about the system. And, you know, for those of you listening right now, you know, right now take election day off and go to your local county clerk or your local political party and say, “I want to volunteer on election day to make sure the election is secure.” And it's very well worth your time and effort.

 

Marshall Yates  

Yes, and I think you can't stress that point enough. And anybody that's concerned about election integrity can be part of the solution. And part of restoring integrity and confidence in the system by being a volunteer on election day, by helping to monitor the mail ballots, to restore some confidence to say whether something bad or shenanigans happened and if they do, to help stop it. Because really, we can be the plug in the dam that protects our elections. Because if we lose our elections, then we will lose the American Republic that we were given by our founding fathers.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Well, exactly. And COVID brought a new element of this to our society. I mean, there was so much that was done kind of off the cuff. I mean, people, county clerks and secretaries of state, you know, just made up laws and made up procedures that didn't necessarily align with their state's election laws. And so, going back and finding out which states actually followed the laws, which counties actually followed the laws or didn't follow the laws. I mean, people don't realize that there truly is a detailed chain of custody for every ballot, and it must be followed according to law in order for that ballot to be legal.

 

There's a way that we handle signature verification on absentee ballots. There's a way that we handle counting the ballots. I mean, from everything from observing, to counting, to canvassing, I mean, there are processes and there's a rule of law for this that helps to protect free and fair elections. And when people are allowed to just make up rules as we go, chaos happens, which is exactly what happened in 2020.

 

Marshall Yates  

Well, and I think they emulated Rahm Emanuel when he said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” And they took the COVID crisis and really focused on the election and what I like to tell people is they took –in 2005, President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's Chief of Staff, James Baker, did a report called the Carter Baker Commission. It was on federal election reform, following the 2000-2004 federal elections. And they came out with a report saying what our weaknesses in the system and what steps we should take to address it.

 

They recommended photo ID for voting. They said that there were risks with absentee and mail-in ballots. They discussed all these things. But when the Left had the crisis of COVID, they took that as an opportunity to say, “Okay, these are the things you warned against.” And then they expanded it beyond any imaginable realm. And they said, “This is what we're going to do to take advantage of the system.” And then they put ballots out into the stream of the election that just really had no, you know, like you mentioned, chain of custody, but they had no integrity on it. These ballots should not have been turned into votes. Not every ballot should become a vote.

 

I like to tell people that there's a line between a ballot and a vote. And you know, we will scrutinize those ballots. Now, voters should be protected. People's votes should be protected, especially those that are vulnerable. But you have to do some of this to make sure that you should be voting in person and the Left used this to push against people to vote in person to mail out an ungodly amount of mail ballots into the stream. And just, you know, they just crossed their fingers that they would all be returned. And I wouldn't be surprised if you go to some dumpster sites today and still find some of these ballots, but if they haven't been harvested.

 

And that's really a new thing that we're talking about. You said that this is a bipartisan problem. And actually, I'll go back to North Carolina. They had a congressman win. I think it was in the 2018 election cycle. And he won based on ballot harvest and the Congress would not see him. He was not given the seat because he may have been primary, but a Republican was caught ballot harvesting. And they voided that victory because it was illegitimate. And ballot harvesting is a problem all across the country. But you know, North Carolina took it very seriously against this Republican this time, that'd be nice to see taken seriously the illegal aliens that are showing their voting rolls because they're not cleaned up, which is another problem that the Carter-Baker Commission warned about.

 

But you have these weaknesses that the Left exploited during COVID. And they really – they took the system, and they stretched it beyond anybody's wildest imagination. And they exploited those weaknesses just to, you know, allow there to be cast millions more votes in the last couple of elections. And that those two things are kind of hard to juggle together. You have millions more votes, yet people are told they can't leave their houses to go vote at the same time. So, you know, the only way you can do that it's just a massive mail system. And the Left has been taking advantage of it for years.

 

And it's one of the reasons why California’s elections, you know, Republicans can't win in California because the Left has mastered the mail ballot processing system. And so, it's a racket for them, but they've taken advantage of it. And all we're trying to do by having poll workers and watchers in the system is just be that check to make sure that you can't just be coming in the middle of the night with a whole box of absentee ballots without any verification on there.

 

We're just trying to be the check to make sure there's signature verification. We have great coalitions that we're leading as part of the Election Integrity Network. One in Orange County, Florida and they've done a lot of work just to make sure that there's signature verifications on all the mail ballots that are coming in because mail ballots and absentee ballots are supposed to be under a limited number of circumstances. You're not just supposed to say, “Hey, I want to mail in the votes.” That's not how the elections are supposed to work under federal or state law. But they took advantage of the COVID crisis and really for the electioneering efforts.

 

And it was quite an enterprise they ran, and they were very successful in it. But we're not going to let them do that because they've awakened a Conservative patriotic majority in this country that are going to become watchdogs of the election to make sure that these irregularities are not exploited again and the weaknesses in our election system can be held just by, you know, people volunteering and serving as a patriotic election worker or poll watcher on election day. And that will help restore some integrity back to the system and we'll all be confident.

 

You know, people lose confidence when it takes a couple of days or weeks to declare who the winner is. But if we're, you know, counting these ballots like we should be, and we've done for decades and centuries, then we shouldn't be able to have some restored integrity. Now, you know, Pennsylvania can’t find their mailed-in ballots, you know, under a shipping container for a week. And then they all bring them in after the fact, that's going to have some questions. And people are allowed to ask questions about the elections because only by asking questions and having those questions answered and addressed satisfactorily will we be confident in the outcome of those elections.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Well, that's a really good lead in to the fact that we are not the only ones who are asking questions about elections. Right now, it seems like in 2022, when we're recording this, if anybody has a question about the security of the 2020 election or the security of the upcoming elections, we somehow are election deniers, or we are harming the security of the votes. But you brought up some really good examples. One other time I heard you talk regarding others who have really questioned election integrity back for many, many years.

 

Marshall Yates  

Yeah, actually. So, what happened on January 6, and so I was calling from Mo Brooks’ Chief of Staff at the time, and we were helping lead the coalitions to object to the certification of the Electoral College as the statutory procedure under the Electoral Count Act that says January 6 is the day that the objections are to be heard. It was actually something that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg mentioned in her dissent of Bush v. Gore, which takes us back to 2000. 

 

And as I mentioned, taking us back 2000, the Democrats have objected to the certification. They've tried in the House of Representatives to object to the certification of every election that they've lost going back to the 2000 Presidential Election. They have tried to go on the floor following the Electoral Count Act procedures. Sometimes they were successful. Sometimes they weren't. And they always objected enough to try to overturn the results.

 

In 2000, Al Gore did not want to proceed on objecting to the Electoral College. He still had some rogue members and some rogue House Democrats that tried to object but those objections were not heard because they didn't have a senator to correspond with him. But interestingly enough, following George W. Bush's victory in 2004, the Democrats had Senator Barbara Boxer agree to the objections and they had a House floor debate or the floor debate in the House and the Senate break apart on January 6, where they all voted or some voted to object to the counting of the votes in Ohio because as President – or now President but then-Senator Barack Obama took the Senate floor and said on January 6, he questioned the voting machines in Ohio. He said that they would just make votes disappear.

 

And this was on you know, the famous day we now call January 6th back in 2005. Hillary Clinton was right there next to him questioning election results. And she, in my opinion, is the chief election denier. It's a funny fact because if you can go back to 2016 and you ask any of your Democrat friends who won that election, and there's still 51% of Democrats out there according to a recent Rasmussen National Survey – 51% of Democrats believe that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. That is over majority and that is kind of hard to believe.

 

We went through an entire Trump presidency, but they thought that it was illegitimate the whole time. But yet there's no pushback on them for questioning those results. And they really came up with some crazy theories about Russian meddling that were never proven, but they were given all the federal resources to investigate. And all we want to do with the questioning of, you know, the legal process related to COVID, which there are hundreds of hundreds of questions, it just says, “We need to administer elections according to the law.”

 

That means not waiving any requirements for an absentee ballot. You must meet certain circumstances for that amount and be a lawfully counted vote. But, you know, we waived everything, according to an emergency created by Dr. Fauci that ended up not being as big a deal as what the Left had argued for people, and they took advantage of the system. So, I think it's only patriotic to question your government. That's a certain level of First Amendment freedoms we have as Americans. So, people shouldn't be cowered into thinking that we cannot be part of the solution or involved in election integrity.

 

Yes, it takes courage to be involved in election integrity these days because you have to go to sleep every night on your pillow, worried that the FBI is going to come knocking on your door or come to you when you're in the middle of a drive-thru. But it's okay to question. Now, we need to find out and we need to make sure that system holds through the next election before we can look at what legislation would be to help us restore a proper process that it can't be so easily manipulated.

 

But really, you know, a poll worker and a poll watcher are really going to be some of the key things that – and Conservatives have never been involved in this before. We're talking about, you know, just like moms and dads did with the local school board. We're talking about doing that with local election offices, being part of the solution, asking questions, finding answers, becoming an expert in the process so that you know how it works so you can be educated on it.

 

The Left wants to say that we're just pushing misinformation. I think that they just don't understand what we're doing. We're not pushing misinformation. We're pushing people to find out the exact process of how their local elections are run, to become an expert on their state election procedures, to communicate back and forth to those election officials if they have any questions. That’s the reason those officials exist, is to answer questions from the public, the concerned citizens. And these are legitimate questions.

 

Let's just make sure that they're not, you know, contracting with a left-wing, you know, letting the ACLU activist count the votes. I just question that. You shouldn't let, you know, liberal activists count the votes. You know, that just – it shouldn't be the way it happens. And if it does, there should be a check in the system. There should be, you know, bipartisan poll watchers to make sure that they're counting the correct ballots and the correct procedure.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Well, exactly following the procedures is the most important thing. And it really doesn't take as much as most people would think. And, you know, if we can just restore our election system, where citizens are in charge – like we are empowered through our Constitution, and then I believe, you know, the security of our ballots, the sanctity of our votes will be protected. 

 

You brought up some ways that people could volunteer by being poll workers, election workers, observers, things. But I'd also like to bring up one that really could have helped things in Wisconsin, during the COVID crisis especially, the vulnerable voters, the nursing home residents, the memory care residents. Many times, these vulnerable voters are taken advantage of, especially like during a COVID crisis when others were not allowed in to observe how the voting process was handled in that facility.

 

I know that the Gableman report that was issued from here in Wisconsin with former Supreme Court Justice Mike Gableman did a deep dive into the things that happened in Wisconsin and that is available online. People can get that, and I invite you, listeners, to read that. You'll learn so much. And these things happen, not just in Wisconsin, but you know, really all over the country. But many people don't realize that, you know, a representative of both parties, volunteers from both parties, should be present when someone in an assisted living, or nursing home, hospital is voting.

 

There needs to be accountability and transparency. And obviously, that did not happen during COVID. Many things were not done properly. And some people who don't even know their relatives were voting and, of course, those votes were compromised. So, for those of you who might feel like that is an area where you want to serve, contact your local political party or your county clerk, and just say, “I'd like to serve for these elections where people are in assisted living or nursing care facilities.”

 

Marshall Yates  

Bingo, Linda. I think you hit the nail on the head. And that's really what you have to look at, is protecting the vulnerable voters from those individuals who may want to prey upon them, to what amounts to ballot harvesting. They will come in there. They will, you know, say, “We're here to help you vote.” But they're going to help you fill out the ballot too. And that really takes away one secret ballot. It destroys that from somebody you don't know. But it also, you know, it’s manipulating somebody who can be easily manipulated.

 

So, we have a lot of resources on vulnerable voters on our website, WhosCounting.us. We have part of our masterclass on election integrity we have up there that teaches people how they can be part of the process to help and protect those vulnerable voters. Because you really don't want to put someone in an assisted living home and then think that in October or November of every year that they're going to be, you know, some local left-wing activist is going to be coming around and you got to watch out for him because they're going to try to steal somebody's vote.

 

And yes, there is vote stealing out there. If somebody will steal a candy bar from a 7-Eleven down the street, you better believe they will steal a ballot out of a mailbox because the ballot is what represents the fundamental, you know, importance to our republic. And so, for the Left to pretend like, you know, that doesn't happen, it just – you're either burying your head in your sand or you're benefiting from that system. And that's really what it comes down to. 

 

So, people that like to say, “There's no fraud, no fraud,” really aren't looking close enough because it's human nature. We are all flawed as part of human nature and people will manipulate the system as much as they can. And our Constitutional Republic is something that must be protected. And there are those who are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to, you know, take us in another direction. And they often do that when vulnerable voters are voting in nursing homes and Racine County in Wisconsin was a prime example. And luckily, you had a sheriff out there with some courage. And he had some courage, and we don't have many of these officials that have courage.

 

Like I mentioned, attorney or the US Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina during the Trump administration, Higdon, and your sheriff in Racine County, those are people with courage that are willing to look into these despite the whole world telling them, “Shut up and sit down.” And they know there's something wrong. They're going to look into it and they're investigating. 

 

And that is glorious to see. That will help restore confidence when those people can look into it and say, “I did find something, or I didn't.” But it's the fact that we allow them to look into it to investigate it, to find it. And when you try to thwart and really tamp down investigation, it really should make you question the motives of those saying, “There's nothing to see here,” because those are usually the people trying to hide something.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Exactly. One other thing I'd like to alert listeners to is, as we're talking about these vulnerable voters, many people don't realize that dead voters often vote. I've often said, you know, there's different things you have to ensure to be a legal voter in the United States. And one of them is you have to be alive. And but those of us who have been involved with election integrity, we know that the voter rolls are filled with voters who are deceased. And sometimes their votes are cast multiple times in various elections, just because nobody checked.

 

And so, if you are a listener, who has a deceased relative or someone in memory care, where they would really not understand at all about how to even cast a ballot, you know, please check their voter rolls, see if they've actually voted. And you can do this, there's information about how to do this through the website WhosCounting.us. You can follow prompts and be able to find the voter registration lists for your state. And you can also contact your county clerk and find out how to get people off the voter rolls.

 

Also, for those of you who have adult children who may have voted in your area, but have moved out of state, they may be in college somewhere else, make sure that they're not registered in both states. Because then that provides an opportunity for fraud as well, not necessarily from your children or your adult children, but from those who would take advantage of these multiple names on the voter rolls. 

 

So, protect your vote. We've heard so many accounts of people who have gone in person to vote, and they've been told, “Oh, you already voted.” And that's because there was not security for the voter rolls and a real check and oversight of these names on the voter rolls. So, everyone can protect their own vote and those of their loved ones.

 

Marshall Yates  

I love that last example, too. And it follows something we haven't. So, we have a Citizens Guide for election integrity, Building an Election Integrity Infrastructure, is kind of what we use as a guidepost. And you can find that on our website. I encourage everybody to download it. It was put together by Cleta Mitchell, who's a long-time Conservative activist and attorney and an expert in Election Law. And she put this as the guidepost for what we can do to really fight back and become part of the solution.

 

But you mentioned people showing up to vote on election day and being told they've already voted. That happened all throughout, what I understand, Virginia in 2000. And so, a part of the model that we're basing this on is building off of what happened in Virginia, not just in 2020, but in 2021, where they created election integrity coalitions in their state, and they thought of ways to inject some transparency and inject accountability by poll workers or watchers. But they also devised ways to protect their vote. 

 

And like you said, you know, people show up on election day and were told they already voted. But what they did in Virginia was they said, “Protect your vote.” Show up in – they have 45 days of early voting, which is way too many. But they showed up for the first day in person and made sure to vote in person the first day to prevent anyone from stealing their vote, and it worked. You have to come up with these ways to counteract the thieves. And our country has a crime problem right now. And, you know, just because an election isn't going on, the crime – it happens everywhere. So, we have a crime crisis.

 

You better believe that people will steal ballots because those things are valuable. And, you know, that happens. And you know, I'm sitting in DC right now and they let prisoners vote in DC. So, this is not like it's some clean, perfectly run system. There's a lot of people that benefit and have survived their political dynasties benefiting off this corrupt and rigged system. Because what it is, it's really – it’s rigged. They write the rules to protect themselves over and over, and over. One of the places I like to talk about is Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.

 

And they've written the rules to rig it to prevent pole watchers from being in there, to prevent them from participating in there to have any transparency.

And the only way you would want to do that is if you're trying to prevent the other side from, you know, having the bipartisan, you know, balance to it that you should. And elections are completely partisan enterprise. That's the whole point of it.

 

And so, to assume that people would not you know, you know, cross the line, well, we have Congressman Ozzie Myers, who is a, you know, congressman who's now been convicted by the Department of Justice for running what is at least a 10-year vote. They call it a Ringing-up Operation. Him and the judge at the end of the night would get together, and this is all on the Department of Justice's website under a press release. I encourage everybody to look it up – Ozzie Myers. He would get together with a judge in his local precinct, and they would see whether the candidates they wanted had enough votes. And they'd call the other precincts, too.

 

And at the end, they would ring up the machines to get their favorite candidates, the ones that were paying them off to do it more votes, the local candidates. And, you know, that happened for at least a decade. The Department of Justice knows about and that's going on as we speak. But if you had a poll watcher there at the end of the night, it wouldn't happen, because the judge and the congressman wouldn't be able to collude together to ring up the votes in one machine, if we had a patriotic American standing there and saying, “What are you two doing? You are not allowed to do that.” Or they wouldn't dream of doing it if one of our election integrity activists or a watchdog for these things was standing there going, “You're not allowed to do that.” And it happens at the end of the night.

 

And that's really how we believe we can create some confidence in there. It’s just saying – just being there, being in there as a mechanism for oversight will help restore transparency into a system that the Left and the bureaucracy of it all have tried to hide from transparency, for some reason, for a long time. And we've been falling backwards, and we've been losing the cool way we should run our elections. But that's all turned around now.

 

We're not burying our heads in the sand anymore. We're not going quietly. We're going to do all we can to restore integrity. And that's why, you know, becoming involved, checking out our website, WhosCounting.us, reading the Citizens Guide. It empowers citizens to know what they can do, even at the local level, to help move the needle towards election integrity because the Democrats don't want it, but we need it vitally.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Right. And I would say that corrupt Republicans might not want it either and there is corruption everywhere.

 

Marshall Yates  

Oh, yeah. Don’t even make me get started on Brad Raffensperger in Georgia. That'll take up another hour.

 

[Laughter]

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Yeah. And so, you know, I often refer to it as the Unit Party. You know, we do not want that. We want the citizens to be in charge of our government and the citizens to be the watchdog of our government and how our elections are processed.

 

You mentioned the word rigged before and it brought up – for those listeners who maybe have never seen it, there was a movie that was put out this year called Rigged 2020. And it just has some really good points and examples that you might want to see that, Rigged 2020, and then the movie 2000 Mules. And it talks a lot about the ballot harvesting and the drop boxes and things like that. So, you may or may not agree with everything you see there. But it will be educational. And it will certainly bring up some important points for you to look into in your own local area.

 

So, again, be sure to download the information from WhosCounting.us. Become a citizen activist. Maybe you only have one day you can volunteer. You know, maybe one day, maybe it's just one day you can help gather votes at a nursing home, one day you can help on election day. Maybe you can help after the election when they do the canvassing. But whatever it is, get involved. Don't let your vote be squandered. Because you didn't step up and, you know, the future of our nation. And if you are listening, and you want your children and grandchildren to grow up in freedom, now is the time to step up. We've been complacent too long. And we need to be awakened and engaged, so –

 

Marshall Yates  

Ben Franklin said coming out of the halls of the constitutional convention, what kind of country do we have? And it’s Republic if we can keep it. And it's incumbent on all Americans right now to make sure that we can keep it, and that starts at the ballot box. That starts with election integrity. And that's where it comes down to because if we don't have, you know, trust and confidence in the elections, and it's been going downhill for the last two or three decades, then we will lose the Republic that has cherished and blessed the world with such prosperity. I mean, that's what it comes down to.

 

The Republic has granted the world a gift of prosperity, and we must protect America from some subversive interest and those who want to infiltrate us to turn us into, you know, another Venezuela or socialist country. We need to fight to keep the Republican and that's, you know, doing your patriotic duty by serving as a poll watcher. Becoming a poll worker on Election Day will really help protect America's Republic. It's that simple.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Exactly. And, you know, since I often talk to employers about how to educate employees about issues, I just want to encourage any employers listening, if you can, try to give your employees election day off. Maybe they could volunteer or make sure at least they have an opportunity to go vote. You know, you can't tell them who to vote for. But you can expose them to the Constitution.

 

I've often mentioned some of the resources I have on my website, Prosperity101.com that can help people to just understand their rights, and so that they can go to the voting booth as a more informed voter. So, whoever they decide to vote for, we want their vote to be an informed vote and a secure vote. So, you know, that's what made America great. So, employers and employees, you know, don't be afraid to talk about this in the workplace, because it's an important topic, and it impacts the prosperity of your business and of your family.

 

Marshall Yates  

That's – yeah, you hit the nail on the head right there. And we have to protect the vote to protect America.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Exactly. So, if people want to get in contact with you, Marshall, how would they do so?

 

Marshall Yates  

Well, you can go to the website WhosCounting.us and sign up, or you can email me directly at marshall@ElectionIntegrity.network. And I'd be happy to talk to anybody out there about any election integrity issues and issues you're having in your home county or in your home jurisdiction. Talk to me about it. I could talk all day about these sorts of things.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

Well, and listeners, I would recommend that you get in touch with him. Visit the website. And if there's something that you think might not be okay in your area, I'm guessing it might not be. So, please take some time to get to know this. Download the Citizens Handbook. And become part of the solution and not a silent part of the problem. So, thank you, Marshall.

 

Marshall Yates  

Thank you, Linda. It's good talking to you.

 

Linda J. Hansen  

You, too. 

 

Thank you again for listening to the Prosperity 101 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. You can also receive the free e-book, 10 Tips for Helping Employees Understand How Public Policy Affects Paychecks. 

 

Freedom is never free. Understanding the foundations of prosperity and the policies of prosperity will help you to protect prosperity as you become informed, involved, and impactful. I give special thanks to our sponsors, Mathews Archery, Inc. and Wisconsin Stamping & Manufacturing. Please contact us today at Prosperity101.com to let us know how we can serve you. Thank you.