so there we are in that way. i think -- >> thank you very much. >> thank you. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book you'd like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv as c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> beginning now on booktv, hans -- [inaudible] discusses his book, "who's counting: how fraudsters and bureaucrats put your vote at risk." from the 20th annual eagle forum collegiate summit. >> our next speaker is hans. he's an attorney and former member of the board of advisers for the federal election commission. he's a staff member here at heritage foundation, and he has just written a book called

"who's counting: how fraudsters and bureaucrats put your vote at risk." anytime a fraudulent vote is cast, your legitimate vote is undervalued, so i hope that hans can help us alleviate this situation. [applause] >> hi. well, stan evans is pretty tough to follow. i don't think i have the jokes and stories that he does. but i am talking to you about a serious subject. you know, i often write for national review magazine, and john fund is tear national correspondent. so we wrote this book, and the whole point of it was to upset the left and point out that voter fraud is something that actually does occur. and you know what's amazing about that is if you google me, you will find some to have worth stuff you can possibly imagine, and it's all because of the fact that when voter fraud cases

occur, i actually write about them. now, the biggest thing that you all have heard is that even when voter fraud happens, why, it's so rare, and it doesn't really do anything. okay, well, i'm going to until you about two cases that you all probably don't know about that affected you and every other single american in this room. now, i don't know if you all have read about this, but just a little while ago four individuals were convicted by a jury in indiana for engaging in ballot petition fraud. now, why is this important and why does it affect you? well, because the county democratic party chairman in a particular county in indiana was convicted of forging the signatures back in 2008 of the petitions that got barack obama qualified to be on the ballot for the democratic may 2008

primary. now, in indiana -- like a lot of other states -- you've got to get a certain number of voter signatures to get on the ballot. in indiana you have to get 500 registered voters from each of the state's congressional districts. and in this particular congressional district where this county chairman is, they forged page after page after page of the ballot petition. now, the local authorities discovered this? no, in fact, some of the local authorities were involved in it. this was discovered by a college student who got ahold of the petitions and was looking at 'em and said, you know, a lot of these signatures look the same. now, why is this important? because if you go back to may of 2008, remember there was a very hot presidential race going on between hillary clinton and barack obama. at the time of the indiana primary, barack obama had 1,490

delegates, hillary clinton had 1,338 delegates, so she was very close behind obama and, in fact, she was ahead of him in the super delegates that also go to the democratic convention. now, she barely won the indiana primary. she won it by 51%. but what that meant was that she and obama split the delegates from that state. so it was basically a washout. if instead he had been challenged and the signature forgery had been discovered then, he would not have been on the ballot. now, can you imagine what a fiasco that would have been if a major democratic candidate wasn't on the ballot in a big state like indiana? hillary clinton had won, had gotten all 72 delegates, what would that have done to his campaign? you know, he was not the set nominee at the time. like i said, it was a hot race,

and this might have been something that stopped his momentum and allowed hillary clinton to become the nominee. we'll never know. but that fraud affected everyone because it potentially helped get barack obama elected. another piece of voter fraud that affected every person in this room is fact that in 2008 you all may recall we had one of closest senate races in united states history in minnesota. 2.9 million votes were cast, and on election day the republican incumbent, norm coleman, was ahead by a little over 700 votes. now, the challenger -- democrat al franken, former "saturday night live" comedian, he was on when i was in high school, so that tells you a little bit about how old i am -- he went to court to challenge the race. and after months and months of

litigation, after a number of recounts, you can -- there's a whole chapter in this book about the race -- al franken was declared the winner by a little over 300 votes. now, what we've discovered since then is that the vote, the winning margin was a little over 300 votes, but we now know that between 1200 and 1400 felons illegally voted in that election. so the illegal votes were four times the margin of victory. and why did that affect you if you're not from minnesota? because al franken provided the 60th vote that passed obamacare in the senate. so if al franken had not won that race, there would be no obamacare legislation that is now the law of the u.s. the point of all this is that, look, we genre have a pretty good elections system, but we do have fraud, and it does occur. and it's something we've got to fight against all the time.

that's one of the reasons states have been pushing for voter id laws, is to stop that from happening. and to tell you how much the left does not like this, there was an article that appeared in a magazine -- i'm sure i would never ordinarily recognize you read it -- called "mother jones." have you heard of it? it's probably the most left-wing magazine there is. well, they had an interesting article in january this year. one of their reporters made it into a meeting that was held in washington a month after the election. it was held at the offices of the national education association. and at the meeting, everybody always talks about the vast right-wing conspiracy? well, this was actually the vast left-wing conspiracy, having this meeting. three dozen of the powerful liberal advocacy groups and unions were at this meeting. everyone from the nea to the afl-cio, the seiu, the sierra club, people for the american way. and the whole point of this meeting was how to pool their

money and come up with a strategy for their goal which is to turn the united states into their version of a progressive liberal utopia. and they set out three objectives. the first objective was to get rid of the filibuster rule in the senate so that they can ram through legislation and nominees including judicial nominees. and by the way, the second goal was to oppose all voter id laws and any other efforts to improve the integrity of the election process. now, what does that tell you about hem? it tells you that they are willing to break the rules to win, and they don't want any rules in place that will make that more difficult to occur. the point of this is that you're hearing today from lots of people talking to you about the kind of public policy solutions we want for the problems we

have. well, we're not going to be able to put those, our ideas for solving those problems in place unless we elect the right people to office. and conservatives who often think that as long as everybody follows the rules, we'll be able to elect our folks don't you said that the left believes -- don't understand that the left believes it's okay to cheat because the end justifies the means. so what i would say to all of you is if you're not working in a campaign on election day, then go get a job as a precinct worker and work in the polls. because having you there is one way of stopping the kind of fraud from happening. or if you're not going to do that, volunteer to be a poll watcher so you can do that. and in the states where you live, convince your state legislators to do things like pass photo id laws. because they are very, very important. and now i'll be happy to answer questions. >> good. yes, right many front here. >> yes, sir.

>> thanks. my name's kevin keen, i'm from pennsylvania, and i don't know if you're aware, but we've had voter id and fraud issues there for a while now. >> are yes. >> the state legislature actually passed voter law, and it had a lot of support in the state, but it was overturned by liberal courts. and also there was one district in the 2012 election outside of philadelphia that voted 92,000 votes for obama and 0 for mitt romney. so i think it's, like, pretty grossly obvious. how do we combat something like that when the courts are so active? like we had legislation there, legislation that seemed like it would work, and then it was overturned by the courts. what's your suggestion like for situations like that? >> yeah, no, i'm very aware of the pennsylvania situation. i testified in front of the legislature in favor of the voter id law. actually, we're winning on this issue. it may not seem like it from what you read in the newspapers, but the left has lost almost

every single court case they have filed against voter id. now, in the pennsylvania case i'll the tell you that the attorney general's office is doing a really lousy job of litigating that case. i mean, i cannot believe some of the really stupid things they've done and the stupid mistakes that they have made. but i can tell you in most states they have lost those cases, and that's why today, you know, voter id laws are in place in places like georgia and tennessee and south carolina. the biggest problem in pennsylvania is that nobody there is fighting the really ludicrous claims being made by the left that there are huge numbers of people without id. that is simply not the case. and i've written a number of papers for heritage that point out the complete fallacy of that claim. anybody else? >> yes, there's a lady over here.

>> hi, my name's emily, i go the university of dallas. how do you respond to the claim that these voter id laws make it very difficult more people to vote? for example, you know, people who make the argument that they don't have id. >> right. that is a fallacy and a myth perpetuated by the left. and i, i don't say that as an opinion, i say that from facts. i've written a number of papers for heritage which are on our web site where i went and i got the turn data from past elections data. georgia's photo id law first became effective in the 2008 presidential election. and contrary to the claims that have been made that this is intended to suppress the vote, particularly minority voters, black voters, in georgia they had a huge increase in the turnout of black voters in the

2008 election. after the photo id law went into place. now, whenever i say that, people say that's because barack obama was on the ballot. well, he wasn't on the ballot in 2010 when we had the midterm congressional races, and as you know, we had a huge republican surge in that election. the number of black voters in georgia went up tremendously again. and, in fact, the increase in 08 in georgia was larger than almost any state in the country. the same thing happened in indiana. indiana was also one of the first states to put in a photo id law. they've had huge increases in turnout. the data shows that these claims are not true. just like in pennsylvania, i think in pennsylvania right now they're claiming that something like 600,000 people don't have photo id, right? they made that exact same claim in a lawsuit filed against the georgia photo id law. well, georgia keeps stats on the people who go to get a free photo id because they don't already have one x the number of

people -- and the number of people who get an id out of the six million registered voters amounts to like a couple of hundred a year. and it's because all of you know, you cannot function in our society today without a photo id. almost everybody's got one, and anybody who doesn't can easily get the free one that every state provides. yeah. i'm sorry, that's your job. >> no, that's all right. beat me to it. >> hi, my name's emily daniels, i'm from bush por began in indiana, so i know all about that first case you're talking about -- >> i'm sure, had anybody else in this room heard about the case? >> it was on fox once or twice. >> yeah, hardly any. if that had been the bush campaign that had done that, it would have been front page news. >> so unfortunately, this issue of voter fraud is something i deal with. i worked on a congressional campaign in that district.

what are some things that campaigns can do to combat voter fraud? we've seen it in our own race. what are some things that we can do? >> well, first of all, you need a really good poll-watching program. i tell you, a lot of candidates running for office just completely neglect that. you know, they work, they work hard on getting their ads out, convincing people to vote for them, they work on having a get out the vote campaign to get people to the polls, they completely neglect having a poll-watching program. and i can tell you, that is vital. listen, all of you probably, you've seen the video of the new black panther party guys in philadelphia in '08, have you seen that? do you know why we have video of that? because there was a student, a college student who was a poll watcher at that polling station. and what did he do? he got out his -- i don't think he had a blackberry like i did, but he had a camera phone, and he got out, and he took video of it. we would never have known that happened if the republicans in

philadelphia had not had a poll-watching program in place. the other thing candidates should do is before you run a campaign, before you start doing that, work on being sure that in your particular state and county they're putting in things like voter id and other things that will improve the integrity of the election. >> [inaudible] >> [inaudible] >> oh, yeah, in indiana. yeah, yeah, it was, like i said, it was also a college student there. and that's because, i'll until you, local authorities are not very good at finding voter fraud cases. and even when they do, often they don't want to president -- prosecute them. particularly local das, most of them are elected. right in they run in partisan elections. and no matter who they prosecute

for voter fraud, they're going to upset half of the electorate because of the party that they're members of. so it's often hard to get prosecution of these cases. >> something that's a little more off the wall, i had heard a little bit about in the past the federal government stopping -- and others -- stopping people from checking photo id at voter stations. that, obviously, hasn't been a whole lot on the news. i've mostly heard about it through more, quote-unquote, underground channels, if you will. how much of that happens, if you know anything about that? >> well, the holder justice department has been running a campaign now for the last five years to stop voter id laws. i mean, that's why, for example, when south carolina passed a photo id law, the justice department objected to it. south carolina had to go to court. they spent $3.5 million fighting the holder justice department,

and in the end they won. so the photo id law is now in place. but they've been doing everything they can to stop that. another example of the absurdity of their views is, i don't know if you all know this, but last year the holder justice department went to court in florida to try to stop the florida government from removing people who weren't u.s. citizens from the voter rolls. now, you commit a federal felony if you are not a citizen and you register and vote in an american election. and florida had set up this program, they were discovering people who weren't citizens, and they were taking them off the rolls. holder went to court to say, you can't do that. now, fortunately, he lost. they got a good federal judge who said it is not a violation of federal law. but that shows you the extent to which they are willing to use their authority and abuse federal law to try to help their election prospects. >> thank you. >> sure, thank you. >> it was a pleasure.

[applause] >> we'd like to hear from you. tweet us your feedback, twitter.com/booktv. >> when you write a book, i mean, a lot can go wrong. i mean, that's just sort of the way i approach the world. i have, i mean, i'm somewhat neurotic in my writing and reporting, and a lot can go wrong in 110,000 words. i've been pretty shocked by -- i guess if there's been criticism from inside, it's been mostly in the vein of how dare he, meaning how dare an insider give away the secret handshake, how dare an insider talk about other insiders in a way that perhaps might not be, you know, in keeping with the codes that we have in washington. and people keep asking me why are people uncomfortable here, and i welcome the discomfort, but i also think this is journalism. i mean, this is what we do, and

we should invite discomfort. >> booktv's book club returns next month with mark leibowitz's, "this town." look for daily book club posts starting september 3rd to get the conversation going including discussion questions, links to interviews with the author, reviews of the book and video from our booktv archives. >> all we ever had to go on and what's been accepted by everybody is what manson himself wants to tell people. illegitimate son of a teenage prostitute mother who cared so little about her child that she once tried to sell him for a pitcher of beer, how as a child he was abused by the uncles she would have move in to their home one after another. how when he was 9 or 10, she was so tired of having to even try to per feng to havely take care of him that she threw him into

the juvenile justice system where he suffered greatly, and from there his life turned bad. he didn't know who his father was, he didn't think his mother knew who his father was. so he said he finally learned even as a child that the street was his father and prison was his mother. and that's what everybody pretty much accepted. i decided to check it out. so the first part is let's look at the man's whole life. how did he get there? second question, where was he and what kind of things were happening in our culture that made it possible for a charles manson to recruit a few dozen followers who would do these kinds of god awful things? again, history doesn't happen in a vacuum. and i'm kind of convinced that if charles manson had been paroled from prison in nebraska and ended up in omaha instead of

los angeles and he tried these things, he'd have been impaled on a pitchfork and tuck up in a field -- stuck up in a field as a scarecrow. he was in the right places at the right time. how did that happen? so what i thought i'd do because you folks tonight, you've heard over and over during the years people's different versions of what happened on the nights of august 9th and 10th, 1969. i will tell you there's some new material in my book, because in the course of my interviewing quite a few people including especially patricia cent winkle who was involved in both nights and who, besides a couple sound bites, on the 25th anniversary of the murders has never given a full account of it. she explained it all in such depth with such honesty, with such clarity that she ended up answering the final couple questions that the lapd's had about the murders all these

years. so, yes, there's some new things. but most of all, if it's okay with you, i'd like to talk very briefly about four parts of book, charles manson: his life and the world he grew up in. let's begin with his childhood. we talked just a minute ago about all the things manson claims. guess what? they're all lies. and it's all documentable. i put 21,000 miles on my car in the last couple years, and i went every place he went. a lot of the lies can be proven with simple visits to county courthouses. charles manson was not illegitimate. his mother, kathleen, when she was 15, was unhappy with her fundamentalist christian mother nancy who believed that girls should not cut their hair, shouldn't wear makeup and, above all, should not do that terribly

sinful thing that led to every evil in the world and that, of course, is dancing. we know now kathleen's side of the story for the first time because charles manson's sister, nancy -- never before interviewed anywhere, and i found her, and she told her mother's side of the story for the first time, gave me dates and places that i could go try to look. so here's what happened, and this is what everybody in the family knew, the real manson family, including charles himself. when she's 15, kathleen maddux, living in kentucky, crosses bridge over the river to a town called ironton. she sneaks out of the house, goes to ironton because already some clubs there where people can dance. and at one of these clubs, ritzy ray's is the name of it, she meets a man, an exciting older

man, 29 years old, his name is colonel scott. colonel is his given name, not a military rank. but the colonel doesn't mind letting the 15-year-old girl think he's a war hero. of course, he actually works in a factory, is married and has two children, that's the part he leaves out. not long later kathleen becomes pregnant. she's 15. and she tells colonel scott. the colonel announces that he's going to do the right thing for her, but he's just been called away by the army. he's going to come back in just a couple weeks, and they'll take care of everything. and so kathleen goes to her mother, says she's pregnant, the father is going to marry her. you can imagine her mother's reaction, but nancy really does

love kathleen. and so she says she'll stick with her, they'll all get through this, it's not the child's fault. and colonel scott never comes back. and kathleen is furious. there's another fellow in kathleen's life who would like to get her attention. his name's william manson. he's a common laborer whose dream is to be a dry cleaner. and knowing kathleen is pregnant with another man's child, he marries her about five months before the birth. there was never any question that charles manson was an illegitimate baby. his birth certificate was filed a few days after, a few weeks after his birth. william manson listed as the father. but the whole family and charles himself knew throughout that the real father was colonel scott. no doubt whatsoever. so the later rumors that manson

hated and feared blacks because he had a black father, for instance, never, folks. never, ever. manson and kathleen's marriage lasts a couple years. he divorces her. she's still a young girl. she's trying to run around and have a little fun. her son is never just left with strangers or offered for a pitcher of beef. instead -- of beer. instead, she does what many young women that age do and sticks him with her mother or for. but he's cared for always. kathleen and her brother luther spectacularly botch an attempted robbery. they try to use a ketchup bottle, poke it in somebody's back, say it's a gun. the newspapers have a great time calling them the idiot ketchup bottle bandits, the greatest dunnedderheads who ever attempted a crime, and kathleen gets five years in prison,

luther gets ten. yes, that's on kathleen's record. never once anywhere before then or in the next 15 years was there any record she was arrested for prostitution, ever warned about being a prostitute. she bunk with led a crime, she never should have tried to commit it. but charles manson was not the child of a prostitute. not then, not ever. he goes to live in west virginia, a little factory up t, with his uncle bill and cousin joanne who is three years older. i found joanne who's never talked before. and if any of you get a chance to look in the book tonight, you are see that the photo section includes pictures of charles manson from his baby pictures through his wedding album. those came from joanne and his sister nancy. they tell the real story. here's an interesting one joanne

told me about charlie. she said from the time he came the live with them 5 years old, he's scary. he's violent, he lies about everything. the first person he ever physically attacked was joanne, he picked up a sickle in the backyard, tried to stab her with it. her parents stopped him. his explanation: she made me do it. it wasn't my fault, she's older than me, i was defending myself. in first grade not only told to me by joanne, but corroborated by other people who were in school with manson at the time, first grade, he organizes some girls in his class to beat up a boy he doesn't like. the principal comes looking for charlie. his explanation? the girls were doing what they wanted to do out of their own -. you can't blame me. the same defense he uses all t

years later with tate, la by yang ca. >> >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. of here's our prime time lineup for tonight. starting at 7 p.m. eastern, susan dunn talks about the election of 1940 at the roosevelt reading festival. then at 7:45, graham rehman tells the story of new york city police department whistleblower adrian schoolcraft followed by michael novak, author of "writing left to right." then at 10 p.m. eastern, craig steven wilder joins booktv on "after words." in an interview with joe madison, mr. wilder talks about "ebony and ivy: race, slavery and the troubled history of america's universities." we wrap up tonight's prime time programming at 11 p.m. eastern with the biography of charles manson.