Legal for All or Legal for None – with Cleta Mitchell [Ep. 75]

Linda J Hansen: Thank you for joining us today.  We have so many things to discuss regarding issues of the day and I have a very special guest, Cleta Mitchell.  Cleta Mitchell is an attorney, licensed in Oklahoma and the District of Columbia who has practiced election campaign finance and political law for decades.  Cleta graduated from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Oklahoma-College of Law.  She is one of the founders and is chairman of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.  PLF is the only conservative public interest law firm devoted solely to election integrity.  Cleta has served as outside counsel for the NRCC, the NRSC, the National Rifle Association and dozens of GOP members of the House and Senate as well as many local and state Republican Party committees.  She represents numerous conservation organizations and was one of the key attorneys who fought back against the Obama IRS during the targeting of Tea Party groups.  She was a volunteer attorney for the 2020 Trump legal team in Georgia.  Cleta has recently been named as the Senior Legal Fellow for the Election Integrity for the Conservative Partnership Institute founded by former Senator Jim DeMint. She is also serving as chairman of the National Election Protection Task Force for Freedom Works, Inc., established to engage citizens in the grassroots fight for election integrity.  Cleta is admitted to practice before many federal district courts and the U.S. Supreme Court.  And with that I welcome you, Cleta.  Thank you for being here today.

Cleta Mitchell: Well, thank you, Linda.  It’s great to be with you.

Linda: Ahh.  I’ve been wanting to have you on the podcast.  We’ve talked about election integrity before with John Fund especially.  But I know you and I have spoken a few times since the 2020 election and I’ve been anxious to get you on the podcast as well.  Your experience and insight is so valuable and I know the listeners will be excited to hear from you.

Cleta: Well, thank you.  I’m excited to talk to you about it.  I could probably spend many hours.  How much time do you have, Linda, (Linda laughing) to talk about election integrity?

Linda: (Laughing) Well, we can always do a two or three part series.

Cleta: Well, you know, it’s one of those things that I have spent many, many years working in this arena and I’ve literally done everything from…it’s one of those things where my avocation and my vocation have merged and as you’ve described, I’m an election lawyer.  I’ve been doing that for many, many years, but I’ve also done a lot of things that citizens need to do.  So that when I am now trying to organize people and structure election integrity programs, I’ve been on the absentee ballot boards which is where you take ballots to people in nursing homes and you have somebody from each party and you make sure that people are not taking advantage of the elderly voters, but that they are actually being allowed to vote.  That’s a real problem there because of the way the left has basically taken advantage of these vulnerable voters.  So I’ve done that.  I’ve done my time on county election boards, by going through voter files and voter lists.  I’ve run Election Day operations.  I was President of the Republican National Lawyers Association and the national co-chair of the RNLA which trains lawyers that I know how to fight on election integrity issues.  But I know that there is so much more to be done.  I guess I would just say, I’ve been doing this both as a professional and as a volunteer for many, many decades and so all of that culminated in my being sent to Georgia by the White House the day after the election.  (Laughs.)

Linda:  Right, which is a great story that I want you to tell us about.  But that’s really fantastic because you show that the importance of being a citizen who’s involved in making sure our elections are run legally and fairly and with integrity.  Every citizen needs to do their part.  I was, for many years, a Republican County Chairperson.  So when you talk about making sure things were balanced when they went to the nursing homes or absentee voting things.  I did all that and it’s so important.  

The problem with how these things kind of happen is good people don’t get involved.  It was Edmund Burke who said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”  A lot of times people just don’t know what they can do.  They don’t know how important these small activities really are.  They seem small in some ways or unimportant, “Oh, should I really take time to do that?”  But it is critically important and now in an election like 2020, we’re seeing how things can just balloon into major problems in terms of election integrity.  It’s not just count every vote, we need to make sure we count every legal vote, every legal verified, certified vote.  

So tell us how you ended up in Georgia right after the election.

Cleta: Well, I’ll take you back a little bit.  I had talked with Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff, last summer.  He had been my client when he had been in Congress.  I represent a lot of the conservative members of the House and Senate, or did when I was with my law firm.  I talked to him after he went to the White House and I said, “In the Presidential election 2000, you remember what happened.” And I said, “That’s going to happen again this year, but it’s not just going to be just in one state.  It’s going to be in six to eight states and we really need to be prepared for that.  We need to have teams.  They need to be prepared.  There needs to be people who are not involved in the election itself because they need to be trained and ready to go.  People who work in the election, you get to Election Day and they’re exhausted.  This needs to be a fresh team and they need to be trained and we need to have lawyers and citizens.”  

Anyway I said, “I’m willing to put all of that together, but it has to be done.  I’ve talked to the campaign, the top campaign; they’re not doing that.  They’re not doing it.”  So he said, “I think that’s important.  Will you talk to the President?”  So he had the President call me and I talked to the President about how important this was and the President said, “Well, Cleta, first I have to win.”  I said, “Yes, but you have to protect the victory.”  And I just think that… and so he said, “Okay, that sounds good and you’ll do this?”  I said, “Yes and I’ll call Mark Meadows.”  “Well, you tell, Mark Meadows I said, ‘Yes, do this.’”  I call Mark back and I said, “The President said, ‘Let’s do it.’”  He said, “Great.  I’m going to talk to the campaign today.  I have a meeting this afternoon.”  

Because starting in September, the first of September is late, particularly when I’ve been watching what the left has been doing for two years, filing law suits to rewrite the election laws all over the country.  And trust me on this.  They did it before Covid.  By May of 2019, I had taken Hans Van Spakovsky and Christian Adams and we’d gone over and I’d organized a meeting with the top lawyers for the Trump campaign and said, “Listen, boys.  Look at all these law suits that they’re filing.  They are rewriting the laws.  They’re going to slug us with absentee ballots and they filed all these lawsuits.  We need to marshal the resources to fight back.”  

I was actually…I went to Montana for the election because I represented Senator Daines.   I represented the gubernatorial candidate.  I represented the Montana Republican Party.  So I said, “I’m going to go out there.  I’m going to work with them.”  I’d gone out there and worked on their Election Day operations.  I’d been working with their people leading up to it and I really want to help. 

So I was literally leaving Bozeman, Montana, the day after the election.  I was in my car putting in the coordinates to get to the airport in Bozeman and Mark Meadows called and said, “Where are you?”  I said, “I am in Bozeman, Montana.”   He said, “Would you go to Atlanta?”  I said, “Okay.”   

So I redid my flight.  When I got to the airport, I changed my flight and went to Atlanta and spent the next, I don’t know; I still say I spent…I do something on Georgia every day, whether I want to or not because it was such a disaster.  

I can just tell you that ultimately what happened was that we prepared.  We called ourselves Team Deplorables because we were there to help the President and to try to understand what had happened and identify if illegal votes had been cast and counted.  Were there sufficient numbers of illegal votes to overcome the margin of victory? 

That’s the basic principle in election law.  If you want to overturn an election or challenge election results, you have to be able to document that there are more irregularities and illegal votes included in the count, the certified count, and that exceeds the margin of victory.  

In Georgia, the final, the third margin that was certified by the Secretary of State, the ridiculous, horrible Secretary of State of Georgia, is 11,779 votes.  That is the difference.  That’s the margin of victory between President Trump and Joe Biden.  We identified over thirty categories of illegal votes.  In just one category where…the Georgia law requires that in order to be a registered voter you have to register at a residential address, your primary residence.  That’s what the law states.  We identified 18,325 votes that were cast and included in that certification number, cast and counted, voters who are registered to vote at a post office box, a commercial address or a vacant lot.  That’s right there enough to overturn the election.  So we filed a sixty-four page complaint in the election contest under Georgia election code.  We had over 8,000 pages of affidavits signed under penalty of perjury and with reports of experts who had poured over publicly available government records, meaning the postal service, the Secretary of State’s own records, other public records.  We filed all that and it’s supposed to be an expedited proceeding as all elections contests are.  The courts are supposed to swing into action and appoint a judge or whatever.   No judge was ever appointed to hear our case.  

It’s a story that no reporters have ever reported.  I now have a rule that if any reporter calls to talk to me about election, the election or anything, I say, “I will send you the link to our complaint and I’m not going to talk to you until you read this.  You have to read this,” because they don’t know.  That’s a whole different subject.   But it never had crossed my mind as an attorney that judiciary would be so feckless in all these cases all over the country.  The press always says, “Well, the President filed all of these cases and lost all of them.”  Well, that may be so, but not a single evidentiary hearing was conducted in any case. Not one.

Linda: I want to stop you right there too, because that’s a really important point.  The media has continually beat the drum that Trump lost all these cases.  For those of us that care about election integrity, we know that this isn’t about Trump.  This is about election integrity.  This is about the future of America and the future for every candidate at every level to be able to elected in a free and fair election and for the representation of the citizens to be brought forth with legal, fair, certifiable votes.  

Cleta:  Well, it’s real…

Linda: …and to have these courts that didn’t even hear the evidence, it’s a travesty.  It is a travesty for our entire nation.

Cleta:  Well, one of the things that I want people to understand is that in our Declaration of Independence it states that the governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.  Well, if you take that principle, I mean what Thomas Jefferson wrote was that…and if the government’s not doing what you say, maybe you ought to have a revolution every twenty years.  Well, we’re probably not into revolutions, but if you take that principle—a government deriving its power with the consent of the governed—and you couple that with the structure, the framework, that was put in place in Philadelphia in 1789, to create a structure which has elections of Congress and the President and how those are supposed to take place.  To me it is the implementation of how the government is deriving its power from the consent of the governed.   When you create a system that basically makes elections irrelevant and I think that’s what…that’s where…we’re at a tipping point in my opinion, right now, where the Democrats and I hate to say because I think this is important to all Americans, but the Democratic elites I would say.  They are only about 30% of them, because most Democrats agree with us about, most rank and file Democratic voters agree with voter ID and verification of absent, verification of identity to absentee voters.  It’s just the leaders, these elites.  But what’s happened is that; remember in 1990, after Bill Clinton was elected, 1993-94 with “Hillarycare.”  Well, what did the people do?  They rose up and they said, “No, we don’t want that.”  They elected a Republican Congress for the first time in forty years to say. “No, you don’t have our consent to do what you’re trying to do.”  Remember what happened after they came in and took power and with Obamacare and the citizens rose up and they said, “No, we don’t give you are consent to do that.  You’ve done it.”  Of course then Congress didn’t manage to figure out, the Republican congress didn’t manage to figure out how to undo it.  

But I think now what we see with these very far left proposals going through the House, flying through the House of Representatives, the Democratic House, which is only…this is almost an evenly divided House of Representatives.  There’s a margin of four votes between Democrats and Republicans in the Congress, in the House.   It’s 50:50 in the Senate.  You would think that the people in Washington would say, “We’d better make sure that what we’re doing is not over reaching,” because there’s no mandate.  There’s no mandate for Republicans and there’s no mandate for Democrats.  But what are they trying to do?  They are trying to take over our election process to codify all the mischief from 2020.   To me, that is utterly eliminating the power that is described in the Declaration of Independence which is that the government derives its power from the consent of the governed.  And if we lose that, we lose the republic.

Linda: Yes, we really do.   We will lose the republic and America as we know it will fade.  I know in the Senate right now is S.1 or people know it as H.R.1.  I’ve had podcast interviews with John Fund regarding H.R.1 and the enormous problem that is regarding election integrity.  For anyone listening, if you haven’t contacted your elected official about that yet, you may want to take a look at the details of that legislation and make sure you provide your opinion to your elected official because it is portrayed as being an election reform bill and it increases the ability for people to vote.  But honestly, if we look deeply at that, we can see that it just increases the ability for people to vote illegally.   This is just hurting our entire nation.  

You know how I always try to tie back to how does it affect businesses, how does it affect jobs, how does it affect the average family?  A lot of people don’t think about this.  They don’t think about, “Well, that‘s happening, but what does it matter to me?”  Well, it matters because now we have a fence up, wired fencing across our Capitol grounds, but we don’t at our border.  It matters because now they’re talking not only about higher taxes here in America, but they’re talking about a global tax.  It matters because the people who worked on the Keystone Pipeline are out of a job and we are no longer energy independent.  It matters because of what’s being taught in our schools.  Parents are rising up all over to…

Cleta: Yes, they are.

Linda: Thankfully, parents are rising up and they are saying, “Not on my watch.  You cannot do this with my children.”  But not enough parents actually know what is really happening.  So these parents rising up, it’s helping to send the message that we’re not going to stand for this, but if we lose the battle on election integrity, we’ve lost the battle.

Cleta: That’s true because what happens is that … and the Democrats in the House and Senate are desperate.  They understand that they have overreached.  I read, one Senator, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia made the statement that passing these election changes.  If we don’t do this, it’s an existential threat to the Democrats.  Well, why is it an existential threat?  It is because you want to take the voters out of the equation and be able to do… 

Look, let me just run through some of things in this bill.  It would outlaw, ban voter ID which as I have said, over 70% of Americans support.  It would ban efforts to have voters verify their identity before voting by mail.  It would expand; it would mandate longer time periods for voting early as well as mandating vote by mail as well as creating vote at home.  It would prohibit enforcement of the laws against non-citizen voting.  It would prohibit enforcement of the laws, state laws against mental incapacity or felon voting.  States have established certain rules and laws about felons and about mentally incapacitated people.  Well, the Democrats look at that, I’m sorry, the left looks at that and says, “Oh, those are vulnerable people.  We want them to vote because we can manipulate their votes,” just like we were talking about the elderly.  

Then there are all these provisions in it about…that infringe on free speech rights, political speech, and require a disclosure of donors to issue organizations.   Why do they want you to do that?  Why is that so important to them?  Because they…we’ve seen their cancel culture.  We know they come after people who give money, even small amounts of money to an issue organization.  We saw what they did to people who gave money several years ago to Prop 8 which was a ballot issue in California.  Anyone who gave $100 or more is disclosed because it was a ballot issue and California has these very direct draconian laws on disclosure.  So people who had given $100 or more than or as little as $100 to support the referendum that defined marriage as being between one man and one woman.  Whether you agree or disagree, it’s a First Amendment right.  The Supreme Court has confirmed that it is a First Amendment right to make a contribution to a candidate or issue of your choice.  Well, the left took the donor list and they published them and said, “Go after these people.”  There were people who had their cars keyed; people who lost their jobs, because they started this cancel culture against conservatives.  That’s why they want; they want to dry up the funding sources for conservative organizations.  That is part of H.R.1, S.1.  

Then they want to get rid of the state legislature’s ability to draw congressional districts because they tried and failed.  Obama and Eric Holder started a project and they raised 400 million dollars to try to flip state legislatures because of redistricting after this 2020 census.  They didn’t flip a single chamber anywhere in America.  So what’s the option for them?  Oh, we’ll rewrite the rules.  We’ll take that power away from them.  We’ll put it into “independent commissions” that they control.  

So, look.  It is a massive power grab federalizing the elections and creating public financing for campaigns which the public hates and tax payer dollars for politicians. So it’s really bad, but they are not finished.  Let me just say this.  If … Senator Manchin announced over the weekend, defendingly, “I’m not going to vote for it, I’m not going to vote to upend the filibuster.”  However there’s another bill that they’ve been introducing every year since 2013 and it would essentially cut into the hands of the left wing bureaucrat’s at the Department of Justice approval veto power over every election decision anywhere in the country and that’s what they are going to come up with next.

Linda: Do you know the name of that bill or how it’s referred to?

Cleta: They’re calling…they are referring to it… it was originally in [Unintelligible {23:16}] it was called the Rosa Parks bill and then they changed the name to the Fannie Lou Hamer bill.  These are great women of the Civil Rights Movement and now they changed the name last year to the John Lewis bill.  But actually what we’re calling it, those of us who have been really studying it, are calling it the Nancy Pelosi Power Grab bill because it really…it would subject…if a local election board wanted to move the polling place from the school cafeteria to the school library, it would have to go to Washington D.C. for approval.  That’s how granular and how oppressive and egregious this proposal is.  It would undo every voter election reform bill that has been enacted and it would up end the entire system and put it in the hands of left wing groups and their allies in the voting section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.  It’s very frightening.  Senator Manchin has said that he would support that.   So we’re not out of the woods frankly with this and we have some squishy Republicans in the Senate.  They like it—federal meddling.

Linda: We need to stand up as citizens and let our voices be heard because if we can put enough pressure on…sometimes it takes the citizens to roar and become so unmistakably visible…

Cleta: That’s right.

Linda: …that they have to back down.  They realized that they’ve overstepped.  Now they know they’ve overstepped.  The interesting thing is so many people across America even those who are not conservatives, you hear about people who have been Democrats their whole live and they are standing up and saying, “No, I’m not for this.”  

Cleta: Right.

Linda: This is not America as we know it.  I think this is a great time for America to unify, to unify back to our founding principles, back to what made America great.   Americans do absolutely need to rise up and let their voice be heard.  They need to let their voices be heard at the local level as well.  We’re talking about making sure we let our federal elected officials know.   But we have to make our voices heard at the local level.  Be involved at the local level.  Go to the school board meetings.  Go to your local political party meetings.  Go to your grassroots conservative meetings.  When they’re talking about election integrity, say at the elections commission meeting, join in.  Be involved, whatever you can do.  We can’t all do it all, but we can all do something.

Cleta:  It’s interesting you had mentioned that because Jenny Beth Martin who is the president of the Tea Party Patriots.  I’m sure you know her.  She’s literally started a program of doing exactly what you’re describing which is do one thing a month.  Go to a school board meeting.  In July, go to a school board meeting.  In August, go to your county commission meeting.  In September, go back to your school board meeting.  Show up.  Just show up and watch what they’re doing and begin to learn.  People think, “Well, I don’t know enough.”   But I’ll tell you what, if you go enough, you’ll finally learn.  I ran for the legislature and was elected just out of law school.  The reason that I ran is because I’d spent a lot of time at the legislature when I was an undergraduate and in law school.  That’s a whole different story, but I was up there and I watched them.  I would sit in the galleries.  Finally I thought, “You know.   I could do this.  I could do this. If I could stay awake, I could do this as well as half these people.”  So I think that at first, you think, “I don’t know enough.” But the more you go, the more you watch, the more you participate, the more you learn and the more you know.  And so knowledge is power.  

I think a lot of parents in particular have experienced a situation with their kids and Covid and seeing what hasn’t happened.  They’ve watched how the teachers have demanded to continue to be paid for full-time work when they worked maybe three days a week, if that.  They’ve seen some of the problems, some of the things their kids are being taught, now more things that their kids are being taught.  We call it state-funded racism.  That’s really what it is.   I just think that the only way that we’re going to save this country, is for us to save this country.  You’re right about the local level.

Linda:  Yeah, it really is true.  I know when I first got involved in politics as a young mom; I was involved with Concerned Women for America.  Then I became a chapter leader for Concerned Women for America and they taught me so much.  Then Michael Farris and Chris Klicka at Home School Legal Defense Association—I learned so much from them.  I’m always so grateful for Michael Farris.  He’s always been quite a mentor to me, Dr. Mike Ferris, but they really taught how to lobby from your kitchen table basically. So even when I was a young mom, I knew I could write letters to my elected officials.  When I would meet them, they knew me.  I had some clout.  They paid attention to me because I tell you, I just wanted to learn.  I wanted to learn how to be a better advocate.  I really wanted my children to be able to grow up in a free country and to be able to raise their children in a free country.  This is one of the things I think this youngest generation does not understand is that, if America falls, we have nowhere else to go.  No one is coming here to airdrop food to us if we have a natural disaster.  No one is coming here to defend our borders if we are attacked.  No one is coming here to rescue us.  America is the last best hope for freedom for the world.   When we talk about these election integrity issues, it’s just so critical.  It’s like the bedrock for how we can hold on to our freedoms and we absolutely have to stand firm on this.  

I would say, before we have to go, I really want to touch too, a little bit, on two things.  We can look and say, “How does this help us move forward?”  I almost feel like if things had gone the way that actually we believe the way the vote chose and that President Trump would have been reelected, we would never have found out the depths of this fraud that occurs in so many levels and in so many ways.  These audits, the forensic audits in Arizona and that may be happening elsewhere.  I know Vernon Jones has called for that in Georgia.  Others have called for that.  These audits that are happening are really unearthing things.  Good things happen when truth is exposed.  I think when truth can be exposed, American citizens will rise up and they will see.   Hopefully, they’ll be more engaged and do the next thing like I did as a young mom or like you did.  We do the next thing.  You can’t do it all, but you can do something and let your voice be heard.  This is so important.

The other thing I wanted to touch on too was just how this really plays in again to the economic security of our nation as well and our international security, our military, every bit of our nation.  We talk about these election laws and policy is decided through who we elect.  If we give them the consent because we’re not paying attention or we’re allowing illegal voting to occur, we have rampant problems and we’re to blame as the citizens.  So we need to be more engaged and stand up.  

You mentioned before about how some businesses were targeted based on their donations.  Well, we have a right in America to donate, to support issues that we care about.  When we let these things happen, we lose that and that impacts jobs.  It impacts families.  I mean the trickle-down effect of all of these policies, the fact that we can have illegal voting which brings in people who want policies that are not necessarily good for America, is really something.  

I want to ask you about one other thing—and then I’ll be quiet.  I want to hear more from you—is immigration.  I was just listening to something the other day about how even years ago they were bringing in people.   The cartels are so involved at the border and everything.   They were bringing in people and obviously spreading them out in different states, putting them on planes—these illegal immigrants—putting them on planes to go to Tennessee, Virginia, Texas.  Now it’s even worse in 2021; it’s so much worse.  We actually, in the Trump administration, we were able to cut that down and bring some sanity to the border issues, but now we have all of this happening.  It’s really populating America in a whole new way and they are looking to get these people to vote and almost bribing them.  Can you address that—how the immigration issue and voter ID and all— plays into election integrity and to the future of our country?

Cleta:  Well a couple of things as a huge issue.  Number one, just think about this, California would have lost congressional seats.  It has lost population and the only way that it is able to maintain the number of House seats and is able to maintain is because they counted all inhabitants and not citizens only.  Remember President Trump, and the left was howling about this, but he had said we should only count citizens for purposes of apportioning how many congressional seats each state would have.  California is only able to maintain its population level because of the illegal immigrants into California.  That’s number one.  Illegal immigration is a huge part of the power, the plans by the left for maintaining power.  They are using…again I keep coming back to the most vulnerable people; they are using these people.  

And number two, you know that there are cities, San Francisco is one of them, where they have said. “Well, we’re going to allow non-citizens to vote in our municipal elections.”  They want non-citizens voting.  Now mind you, they are going to have two sets of poll books and two sets of collections because it is a federal law.  It’s a violation of federal law.  It’s a felony under Title 18 of U.S. code for a non-citizen to register to vote or for a non-citizen to cast a ballot in a federal election.  That’s the law, but rather than repealing that law, this S.1 says that states can’t enforce that law, which is preposterous. 

This whole business—adding Puerto Rico as a state, adding the District of Columbia as a state to have four more senators that are going to be guaranteed to be Democrats, allowing massive illegal aliens to come across the border and register to vote, vote, and not have any way to stop it—that’s all part of their plan.  It’s all part of their plan.  President Trump talked about that on the campaign trail.  Everything he said, and of course, they all—the left and fake media—all made fun of him, but it’s part of their plan.  

So look, I think you’re right that if President Trump had won, which I think he actually did win.  But the media, if you read any news article, here’s what they say.  Election restrictions—these voting restriction bills that are being passed by Republicans—they call them voting restrictions just because we say we want people to prove who they are when they vote.  If they are illegal, they don’t pass illegal votes.  Then they say which is done in the name of election integrity that was the political story over the weekend, done in the name of so-called election integrity, which is being fostered by those who perpetuate the lie.  This is what they say, the lie that there was illegal voting in 2020.  

I think it’s really important for us to document for all time, through the Arizona audit, through audits that are being sought in other jurisdictions, to be able to demonstrate and document, “Yes, there were illegal votes cast and counted.  There was a conspiracy to do that.”  I think that it’s really important for us to continue to promote and perpetuate, try to get to the bottom of it through litigation, or in the case of Arizona; it was the State Senate that has sponsored the audit.  I think we need to do this because the media narrative and the left’s narrative is a false narrative and it’s going to be perpetuated as part of our history unless we document that what they’re saying is what’s false.  Theirs is the big lie, not that the President—they contend when the President does say that the election was stolen, they call that the big lie—No, the big lie is that there are illegal votes cast and counted in a number of states sufficient to determine the outcome of the Presidential election and I don’t want that to happen ever again.

Linda: Not ever, not any election.  Again we just are reiterating it’s not just about President Trump; it’s about every single election.  They will often claim that we’re being racist or we’re suppressing the vote or something, but we’re actually not, because people of all colors vote and have their vote disenfranchised by illegal votes being cast.

Cleta: Right

Linda: It doesn’t matter what color or background or anything.  Everybody deserves to have their vote counted legally and verifiably and honestly.  I find it interesting that people who are so against IDs for voting are often, not always, but often the same people who want us to have vaccine passports which…

Cleta: Right

Linda: …of course we would need an ID then.

Cleta: Right

Linda: That’s not racist.  They are separating society into two segments.  We’re talking about this segregation.  My goodness, I watched a short, little clip of Governor Cuomo talking about how this passport gives you your freedoms back.  I remember thinking, “Wait, my freedoms are still guaranteed in the Constitution, so don’t tell me I need to get them back because you shouldn’t have taken them in the beginning.”

Cleta: In the first place.  Well, you…

Linda: Yeah, they weren’t yours to take.

Cleta: It’s interesting, if you get the chance, I would urge everybody to listen to, just Google Mark Robinson.   He’s a Lieutenant Governor, black Lieutenant Governor, conservative, of North Carolina.  He’s just so inspirational.  He testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution in April.  Of course, the whole premise of their hearing was that these election reform bills that are being passed in several states to really make sure that people are who they say they are before casting a vote.   So this was the whole Jim Crow thing and he testified.  He said—it’s very powerful and I can’t do it justice so you really need to listen for yourself—and he said, “As a black man, I’m telling you my people—we rose up from slavery; we fought the Civil Rights Movement; we struggled to get the right to vote; and are you telling me, for you sit here and are tell me that black people are not able or willing to get a free ID in order to cast this hard-won right to vote, that is not only insane, it is insulting.”  It was so powerful.  I thought we need to all stop letting them make us defensive because they pull out the race card and say we’re racist.  

I took that Georgia election bill, signed into law, and I made two columns.  I went through every section.  They said we want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. So I had two columns and the “easier to vote” had plenty of places where it was easier to vote.  It mandates that every county election board has to take a ballot to a person who’s in the hospital and wasn’t able to vote by absentee and they can’t get out of the hospital.  They have to take a ballot to them.  Now that makes it easier to vote.  But they make it harder to cheat.  The law now says that if you are going to cast a ballot, an absentee ballot, you have to prove who you are just like you have to present a voter ID if you vote in person and most Americans agree with that.

Linda: Yes, they do and they agree with things like making them be a citizen, a legal citizen.

Cleta: Correct.

Linda: They also agree with having them be alive.

Cleta: Alive, there we go.

Linda: Alive is good. I know there are lots of reports of…

Cleta: A resident of the state, not a resident of a vacant lot.

Linda: Right and just one vote per person, not multiple votes.  

Cleta: Right.

Linda: These are all things that have happened and it’s just reached epic proportions.  Now I think it’s really time where more people are waking up to this.  It’s just so important.  I want to tell you, thank you for staying in the fight.  You have been a leader for these principles for your whole career.  We can’t thank you enough for working to defend freedom both in your day job, shall we say, which is never just day, it’s day and night, I’m sure; but also in your volunteer time that you have fought for freedom and have done the small things that really become the big things to help protect our Constitutional Republic.  We’re so just really grateful for that.  If people want to reach you and become more involved in the efforts that you’re doing with election integrity, how would they do so?

Cleta: Well, you can send me an email to one of two places: electionintegrity@cpi.org. CPI: conservative partnership institute, or that’s probably the best place because the other email hasn’t really been activated yet, but that one is where we’ll receive anything else now: electionintegrity@cpi.org.

Linda: Okay, listeners if you want to reach out to Cleta.  Maybe find out how to be involved or learn more about that organization, you can go to electionintegrity@cpi.org.  That’s great.  So just reach out there and find Cleta.  We just are really thankful, Cleta, for this.  We thank you for standing up, for taking heat, shall we say, from the left and the right at times.  This issue is so important.  It’s not a partisan issue; it’s a policy issue.  It’s a freedom issue.  It has nothing really to do with partisan politics as much as it has to do with protecting the rights of freedom and free and fair elections for every single American citizen.  So thank you so much.

Cleta: Thank you, Linda.