>> watch campaign 2024 coverage with republican presidential candidates in the final week in campaigning. hear the closing arguments. watch candidates meet the voters. watch our live coverage of the iowa caucuses on the c-span network or online at c-span. org/campaign2024. >> sings 1979 in partnership with the cable industry, c-span has provided complete coverage of the halls of congress from house and senate floors to congressional hearings, party briefings and committee meetings, c-span gives you a

front-row seat with no commentary, no interruptions and completely unfiltered. c-span, your unfiltered view of government. tion integrity is ouc now and david becker is error guest. he is the founder of the center for election and innovation research. remind viewers what your mission is at the center. guest: i founded the center for election innovation and research in 2016, a nonpartisan, nonprofit and we work with election officials all over the country. we help them put on elections that voters should trust and do trust so all voters can vote in a process that has integrity. host: our viewers so this story yesterday.

it was from the washington times. we will get to the article but how would you describe the state of election integrity as we step into 2024? guest: there's been a lot of misinformation over the last few years about how our elections are done. they're more verified than we've ever had in election history. we have more paper ballots than ever before, 95% of all ballots were paper including all the ballots and all the battleground states. it's important because you can audit paper and recount paper and make sure the counts the machines might have done were accurate and that was done in 2020. 43 states conducted audits of those paper ballots including the battleground states. we've had more cybersecurity training and cooperation between the federal and state and local

governments than ever before. we also know that the 2020 election was the most scrutinized election in american history. more pre-election litigation that clarified the rules. seven out of eight cases filed in anticipation of the election were one by republicans. more postelection litigation with dozens challenging the results. the courts review the evidence that was presented to them and confirmed what was originally determined by election officials all over the country who run our elections. we sit here over three you sent the 2020 election there hasn't been a single piece of evidence presented to any court anywhere in the united states that would cast any doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. host: why do you think there is still so much controversy about the 2020 election? why is there a lack of trust and

callers call in and say they don't trust the results. is that still out there? guest: there are individuals who profit a great deal spreading lies about the elections from targeting the disappointed supporters of the losing presidential candidate. it's completely normal and understandable to vote for someone who has lost and be disappointed. to then be targeted repeatedly with disinformation over social media and media and in other ways, to get people angry and divided and deluded about what actually happens so they keep donating. people are getting rich off of this and taking $25 from social security checks because they are telling them that someone stole their election which is absolute false. host: this is from that op-ed in the washington times yesterday and it brings up a couple of issues --

your thoughts on some of those issues? guest: most of that is completely false. there were some accommodations made because of covid in every state, red and blue states. it was all done in advance of the election. if people did not like those rules that were adopted, they could bring a challenge in court area we had more pre-election litigation than ever before. most of it was won by republicans and by the time election day came, they knew the

rules at but not all of them like them. most people don't like the electoral college and that's a rule. many people did not like the rules in texas and ohio that limited dropbox one per county. those were the rules, that was what the courts decided and they were upheld. this disinformation we continue to see about how the 2020 election was conducted is really unfortunate. the mail-in ballot anguish was necessary due to the pandemic, that was an innovation that brought out from hourly by red states. just brought out primarily from red states. it's been proven to be secure those ballots were reviewed in every case to see if they were accurate and we know the results were. host: three years later, will there be more or less ability to use a mail-in ballot this year? guest: it's about the same. maybe a little wound down from

covid. putting ourselves back in november of 2020, we didn't fully understand how covid was spread. there were thousands of people dying per day and there was concern amongst voters about going into a place, maybe a crowded polling place and being around other people. election officials were trying to accommodate that in red and blue states. ohio had as much mail-in voting as states like georgia and the outcome was different but the rules were largely the same. i think we will see mail-in voting, the demand go back to a somewhat normalized level in 2024. the access to mail-in voting is the same as it was in 2020 and that is almost every state allows voters to request a mail-in ballot even if they don't have an excuse. it's available to voters in

almost every state and that's good. host: explain with the term ballot harvesting is. guest: it's a term that has been applied to the process by which someone might return a ballot other than their own. it is often used as a pejorative term to make it seem as if something nefarious is going on. in actuality, a wife returning her husband's ballot to a dropbox or someone taking their older parents'ballot to a dropbox in nursing homes, older residents who have less ability perhaps to have ballots taken to a dropbox. the important thing to remember is male in ballots are verified where a voter request a ballot may have to be on the voter registration rolls. you cannot get on the voter rolls unless you show an id then

they get verified when they come in again usually bite matching the signature or sometimes matching a drivers license. they are verified twice and confirmed in those ballots are kept for 22 months minimum soap anyone wants to challenge them they can. there was no challenge brought. host: how often generally are voter registration rolls updated to ensure that the people who are living in an area are the voters in that area? guest: it's really important. americans are highly mobile, one in three americans move in any given four years and many of those people move multiple times like younger people who might move to several different residences between presidential elections. it's hard to keep up with that mobility. it was hard about 15 years ago when we didn't have access to the kind of technology we have now. voter rolls today are more accurate than they've ever been. states regularly keep their voter rolls up to date and using data they have bailable just

they have available under federal law and there is a tool available now that -- that i helped develop which is nonpartisan collective of states in the states run at themselves and they shared data to try to identify people who may move between those states. it's been highly successful in half the states are using it and they find it helps them reduce the potential for fraud. host: david becker is our guest at the center for election innovation and research. you can check amount online. it's a good time to call in with your questions about election integrity for campaign 2024. democrats, (202) 748-8000 republicans (202) 748-8001, independents (202) 748-8002. as folks are calling in, i'm sure you so the associated press poll on voter confidence in the election of this year. it came out at the end of

december. about one third of republicans say they have quite a bit of confidence that votes in the republican primary election and caucuses will become to correctly. three in 10 republicans say they have a moderate amount of confidence in 32% so they only have little or none at all. 72% of democrats have high confidence. guest: this shows you how intensive this disinformation campaign has been and how partisan it has been. it doesn't really relate to reality but more on whether your candidate won or lost. that is not the definition of a secure election that your candidate won, it's whether we process these ballots and we confirm the results. today, we have the processes in place better than we've ever had in american history. does that mean they can't improve? they are constantly improving. we are getting more accurate voter lists and we have a few places where paper ballots don't exist and we are getting better

at auditing. those things are happening so 2024 will be more secure but the resilience of the disinformation and the belief that people who supported the losing candidate and only by people who supported the losing candidate that the elections aren't secure is troubling we will have to keep telling them that this is a public service. we have 100,000 public servants around the country who have devoted themselves to giving voters their voice. they are trustworthy and if you doubt it, go and visit them and talk to them and volunteered to be with them. there's a reason you need hours of training and you show up hours before the polls open and stay after the polls close because there is so many checks and balances in the process to make sure every eligible voter who chooses to vote can cast only one ballot in that ballot counts. host: we would be glad to invite

poll workers to call in. this is john in tennessee, republican line up first. caller: yes host: what's your question or comment? caller: i was watching the news the night of the election. they started jerking boxes out underneath a table. this is why we feel we got cheated because trump was way up ahead until they did that. why did they run them out? can you explain that? host: some of the videos and stories we hear? guest: quite frankly, there is a lot of video clips that have been mischaracterized in the media. it was one particularly but he might have been referring to fulton county, georgia where there is video of poll workers

who were staying in the polling place in the main polling county just taking out another box of ballots, literally tens of thousands of times during election night all over the country. they are getting the next best to count and then it was mischaracterized in the press. it's important for everyone listening to understand that there were lies spread about those two women who were doing their duty as poll workers that night. as a result of those lies, there was a nearly $150 million verdict of defamation that was stood against rudy giuliani. it's really disturbing to see our fellow americans, people who volunteer to serve on election date being defamed like this. in every single polling center around the country where they were counting ballots, there were multiple observers from both parties in the room.

we all remember the video from the detroit counting center on election night in 2020 when a near riot started outside by people supporting former president trump, claiming they couldn't get inside to reserve. on the other cited those doors were 200 observers from both parties watching the counting being done in a peaceful and orderly way under the law of the state of michigan. i just hope people of both parties across the spectrum will be highly skeptical of narratives that seek to tell them their fellow americans are their enemies and they are lying to them and they are somehow stealing elections. host: there is an article in usa today from ken bloch. who is he? host: guest: he is a former state candidate in rhode island, a republican who has alleged the

potential for voter fraud in the state of rhode island and elsewhere for some time and has worked on voter fraud. it's not surprising to trump campaign would go to him and ask him to assess how much fraud there was whether there was fraud at all. it was right after the 2020 election and he was a paid consultant of the trump campaign. he found there was no fraud he could measure that would affect the outcome of the election. this is what we've seen time and time again. we had that partisan review in arizona in maricopa county that said they found fraud but actually biden one that county. there had been assessments in wisconsin and other places. there are well over 60 court cases that looked at front and there has been no fraud. host: we found no evidence that voter fraud tainted the election. this was his study of election 2020. he said what they don't take into account is that voter fraud

is detectable and quantifiable and i get to see anyone offer up evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election that provides these three things. those are his words. doug, silver spring, maryland, independent. caller: hi, what i'm hearing by a lot of people who complain about the 2020 election is it seems like they are not concerned about the validity of their vote. they are just angry about the results. i challenge the people who were angry about the results of the 2020 election. if you think your vote did not count, that it was stolen from you, then don't vote. why would you waste your time voting if you think it won't matter? i'm saying that but i think these people will go out and

vote because it's not the validity of the vote they care about, it's the fact that they didn't win. host: i think that's a good point. if you ask republicans in georgia about why they lost the senate races in the runoffs of 2021 and 2023, there is a strong feeling supported by evidence that the constant narrative that elections are rigged to press their own turnout. it's a really dangerous narrative. by any measure, the 2020 election was more secure than the 2016 election which was also sick there. 2016 had fewer paper ballots and fewer audits but i said at the time that there is no evidence donald trump legitimately won the 2016 election. if you believe the 2016 election was secure, you have to believe the 2020 election was secure. they were better processes in place and more paper ballots, more audits and more judicial review and scrutiny of that election. it's important that regardless

of which candidate you support, there were 74 million people who supported donald trump in the 2020 election. they are not bad americans. they voted for the candidate who happens to lose. 81 million people voted for the winner in that election. they are also good americans who happen to vote for the candidate one. we have process in place with where we know that's true in the correct response when you lose an election as we saw with mitt romney in 2012 and john mccain in 2008, john kerry in 2004 and al gore in 2000 going back to richard nixon in 1960, the correct responses to concede to accept the will of the voters and go on and try to win the next campaign. host: conrad, florida good morning. caller: i'm calling about the voter districting. boys is that so difficult every 10 years to be consistent?

host: redistricting is really difficult, the way we assign house districts for instance in the united states house of representatives and state legislator districts across the country. we carve up the states by geography. there is a variety of ways to do that, not to some easy way to do it. you can't do it by counties because they are not the same population. you might have a county like los angeles county that has dozens of districts in other counties are less than one. it is a very challenging circumstance to do that. to ensure political fairness and ensure racial fairness and ensure communities of interest, geographies are kept together. i used to be a department of justice attorney and litigate some of these cases.

it's a very challenging situation given how the laws are applied. i have a lot of empathy for those who are trying to do it fairly. there are also times when both parties try to maximize their political power by drawing the districts in such a way they will get more districts than maybe their share of the population in any given state. host: it's an older story from 2019 but has good examples showing some of the dirty dozen of the most gerrymandered districts that end up looking like a duck or pinwheels, fingers that reach different areas. white isn't there one standard for redistricting or a fairer way to do redistricting so we don't have districts that in the looking like a duck? host: don't judge a district taste on what looks like. what it looks like month -- might not take into account

parts of the land that are not occupied or take into account how population centers are linked by highways and schools and other infrastructure. the shape itself, a square isn't necessarily the best shape for a district. that being said, redistricting, the united states supreme court has declined to apply strict standards on those states with regard to how politics can come into play in gerrymandering and whether they should be limited in partisan gerrymandering to pick a state that might be 60/40 and turned into a state that's 80/20. until those kind of things happen, at the federal level, we will see the disparity in how the states do it. those disparities lead to legal challenges that are going on even now as we speak four years after 2020 after the census numbers came out. host: patty, line from democrats, go ahead. caller: good morning, thank you

for taking my call. thank you so much for your work. it's great to see you. we appreciate it. i've gone two different polling places in different capacities and i'm really grateful. i have your website to go to for a resource because one of the problems we have is the misinformation. and how to talk to people about that and i appreciate the way you are speaking to address those issues. that brings me to one thing i want to throw in here. thank you for responding to the op-ed in the washington times. i felt it was extraordinarily irresponsible for pedro to read that yesterday.

it just reiterates the same kind of disinformation we are fighting daily. it would be great if c-span could read those off as when there was someone on there who could address them factually. host: i was the one hosting yesterday and i read that and i wanted to bring him on today to address that. we appreciate your thoughts on that. you said you been a longtime volunteer at polling facilities. why did you get started doing that? caller: i had a fantastic government teacher and civics teacher in high school. mr.harkness, and was always interested in the process in elections and straight out of school, i was always registered as an independent. pennsylvania, you have to be registered with the party to

vote in the primaries. i did eventually register as a democrat. yeah, right out of high school because of interest in the process and he had encouraged us to do that. i am 60 years old. i've been doing it since 1981. host: thank you for doing that. guest: thank you so much. our system of governance relies on about one million volunteers. one million pastties all over the country. they might get paid a small stipend that doesn't even cover their time. they go through hours of training and wake up at three or four in the morning on election day. they state until 10 or midnight on election night and they follow all of these intricate processes, the checks and balances to make sure every ballot is counted accurately and no fraud occurs. they do a remarkable job. our elections are a miracle and

our elections are a miracle thanks to people like patty out there and thanks to her government teacher and nice to people who have gone out and talked about their civic duty. they are not our enemies and their nuts trying to steal elections. i don't care whether they are republicans or democrats, all of them are doing such important jobs in the most important thing any citizen can do is they wonder about the security of our elections, join them and find the county election office and volunteered to be a poll worker and see firsthand all of the protections in place to ensure every ballot is counted accurately. host: you talked about the observers. his -- does every state allow observers in the polling facility? what are the general rules? host: to my knowledge, every state allows the observers and some have to be preregistered. they are always bipartisan. that's absolutely essential. they are an important part of

the process when they do their duty correctly. they can communicate with their campaigns to tell them what's going on and transparency is very important to this process. the rules require they essentially beef flies on the wall. i was a justice department attorney and i used to observe election polling places around the country. i've been thousands of polling places observing elections. host: for what purpose? guest: to ensure the voting rights act was being followed. i rarely saw any fraud. the civic responsibility americans feel about their elections is remarkable. even at the justice department with the authority i had under federal law, my job was to be a fly on the wall. i sat back and didn't interfere or talk to voters or talk to poll workers and if i saw a problem, i would call the election officials charged with it and inform them so they could take care of it. observers and polling places,

their job is not to interfere. one of the things we started to see is there are people who are trained to do -- to interfere in the process, potentially making these volunteer poll workers and election officials who are doing their duty and working long hours feel somewhat unsafe. this is something we've seen across the country in the last several years, they have been threatened, abused and harassed. it's happening as much today as it did three years ago. my organization runs the election official leave and -- election official legal defense fund. it's necessary to provide election officials with pro bono legal assistance and guidance if they feel they are being harassed or abused or not say. as we sit here today, the election official legal defense network is getting as many

requests from election officials as it was when it first started in 2021. host: this is mark, line for republicans, good morning. caller: good morning. i think the problem with the 2020 collection and the reason so many people don't respect it is that there is shenanigans going on. in the 2016 election, all we heard from the democratic party was that that election was rigged. i don't remember one democrat being called a election the mayor even though hillary clinton quentin wrote a book on it. you also had stacey abrams in georgia who lost her bid for governor who never conceded that election. she claimed it was racism or something. i think the problem is that when republicans were trying to

change voting was in georgia, but we heard it was jim crow. the democratic party is lying by omission because the democratic party omit the fact that it was their party that tried to keep the black vote down for like 120 years or something like that. it wasn't republicans the did that. that was all democrats. the other thing i wanted to mention is that on shows like these, you guys are subtly trying to move the window. i heard the word misinformation and disinformation since you been on in this segment. i have to remind the listeners out there, ask yourself how many times that word comes up in our common dialogue. until joe biden got in office, you never heard those words, the only time you would hear those words is if you were sitting in a book club discussing 1984, the book.

it's a way of implying that anybody who thinks the 2020 election was rigged must be a crazy conspiracy theorist area we were told to sit down and shut up when this was going on and stay in our houses unless we wanted to protest social justice. after the 2016 election with the russia folks and everything, it's a little puzzling. host: those terms have meaning. i use them because they have meeting in the discourse but we could use other terms like lies and defamation. that's what rudy giuliani was found guilty of by a court in order to pay one to $48 million to these two volunteer poll workers who were lying consistently for years and are still lying. the bigger point that mark raises his good which is that anyone who is claiming without evidence that elections have been stolen that will make

claims on social media or in books or anywhere else that election has been stolen without putting that evidence up in court is wrong. we should not be delegitimizing accurate, secure verified elections in this country. anyone of any party. host: the caller's question was was there as much outrage after 2016 when democrats were doing that as there was in 2020? host: there is no question what happened in the aftermath of 2016 and 2020 was different. we did not have the losing candidate started campaign in 2016 and try to use the levers of the federal government to interfere with an election and threaten state election officers as was done with secretary of state bread raffensperger in georgia. there was limited objection by some in congress because she did concede. it did not lead to a violent attack on the capital that day.

there have been instances where democrats have failed to concede and have claimed without evidence that elections were stolen. that is just as bad as when republicans do it. 20/20 was a slightly different character. we are now sitting here almost exactly three years from january 6, 2021 and it seems like many of us have forgotten what it's like to watch the events of that day and see from where you and i sit now. i remember it intensely and i remember the statements from members of both republican and democratic party. i remember statements from people like senate leader mitch mcconnell. he was right, we should remember that in the aftermath of those events in 2020, a majority of the united states house of representatives including 10 republican members voted to impeach president trump or former president trump are having insight and insurrection. that was the language of the

articles of impeachment. 57 members of the u.s. senate voted to convict him. that was 10 short of the two-thirds majority necessary. it included seven republicans. that conviction would have led to his disqualification for inciting insurrection. this is something we had not seen before, it was a different character but i definitely agree with the caller. we should not be delegitimizing elections because we are happy -- because we are unhappy with the outcome. we should require the candidates bring evidence to court to support their claim and if they can't, they should concede and cooperate in the peaceful transfer of power. host: mary, michigan, independent. caller: hi, john. i have a couple of questions and then a statement. i am sitting in the state of michigan which was recounted by our republican run congress three times and they hand

counted one time. joe biden was shown to have one bite 155,000 votes. more than three years later, the head of the republican party in the state of michigan has torn that party to shreds basically. it's because of the big lie. they have come to blows at a few of their meetings. i hear this almost daily in the state of michigan. people will actually say that there should only be one day of voting in this country in 2024, one election day and you should have to show up at the polls, they should be paper ballots and they should be counted by hand. how people think this would be possible -- we wouldn't know the winter for months. there would be chaos in the streets. i hear this daily and i heard it on c-span the other day. host: i think there was a caller that said there should be no

such thing as computerized ballots. that was earlier this week. caller: it's impossible. i wanted to ask about the lawsuit by the machine company, the lawsuit by the different news outlets and how those are going. that's the same boat as dominion. their business was ruined and people's lives were ruined over the big lie. host: thank you for those questions. guest: that's a great set of questions. this is quite accurate that michigan was decided by nearly 100 55,000 votes, all paper ballots and elections in michigan are run by clerks who are republicans and democrats. the elections are run by a bipartisan center and i work with them all the time and they are incredibly professional across the spectrum. the ballots were recanted and

audited in the margin was almost 15 times the margin of 2016 when donald trump won the state of michigan. yet we still see this disinformation, one of the leaders in the senate, a republican did a complete assessment and looked at all of the aspects of the 2020 election and determine the election was decided accurately and correctly based on the laws of the state. there has been bipartisan cooperation in michigan yet we still see a lot of the lies persist about what's going on. these descriptions we hear from some who start their analysis saying i don't like the outcome of the 2020 election, things like having all voting happened on one day. that's a really bad idea for an election security perspective. you have a single point of failure concentrating 150 or 160 million voids -- votes into 12 hours. if there had been fraud or malfeasance or malfunction, it

would decimate the election system if it happened on election day. if you want a secure system, you want to spread voting out over various modes over time. the best system which almost every state has to make it easy to request a male in ballot you can vote by mail a make it easy to vote early in person if that's what you choose, i choose personally to vote that way and make it easier to vote on election day. they are all secure methods spreading voting out over days makes it the most secure. with regard to the hand counts, that's something we've heard in several states. if you want an accurate, costly counts of ballots, you should have humans do it. humans are very bad at repetitive functions of counting ballots. american ballots are among the most complex in the world. there's is not one race on the ballot, there are multiple pages

and dozens of races in places like nevada and when they tried it, they found it would take months to count all the ballots. even then, you'll probably get an inaccurate account and you will have to do it over. host: we've been looking domestically so how much do you focus on foreign interference in the elections? host: i'm very concerned about foreign interference and we focus on that to some degree. we've seen that ramp up and it occurred in 2016 and 2020. it even occurs in the midterm elections. some agencies found that autocratic nations like russia and iran and china are actively seeking to spread lies and yes that word disinformation in 2022 and they are likely to do it again in 2024. they have a great deal of incentive not just to try to elect a particular candidate but even more so to spur the kind of

divisions we currently see that these lies lead to. these are lies about our elections and lies about whether elections work and democracy. it helps dictatorships. they want americans to be divided. they want americans to be unsure whether the person who took office actually one and it helps them a great deal. the people who are profiting off of those lies, the people telling people they cannot trust elections and getting rich off of it, whether they do it intentionally or unintentionally are doing the work of dictatorships overseas. host: hagerstown, maryland, ken, fort set -- fort smith, arkansas, you are on. go ahead. caller: my deal is that the 2020 election was fine. with all the lies going around, i'm wondering if donald trump

will somehow try to steal the election. he is the liar in chief, over 100 thousand lies at least by now. i've got a short story. when i was 15, i got arrested for petty theft. that was 100 $20. i went to jail on a friday and i saw the judge on a monday and he gave me 22 more days, court costs and two years probation. i'm wondering which of these judges will have thecojones to lock this guy up finally. host: i think it's dangerous whenever we talk about elections where candidates don't have control over elections. former president trump is no longer in control of the federal government which doesn't run elections anyway. i have absolute confidence that the 2020 for election will be as secure as any election we've ever held.

we've got all of the protections in place and these public servants, the people we rely upon to give us our voice will do an amazing job as they have in 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020 during a global pandemic. they will do their job even with the threats and harassment and even the attrition because of the threats and harassment. they will do their job. the question is whether leaders of both parties are going to stand up to perhaps members of their own party and speak the truth. right now, the republican national committee is encouraging their voters to vote by mail. this is not unusual. it's something they have done many times before. it makes sense for campaigns to want to bank as many of the votes for their candidate as they can. they have less to do on election day and they don't have to knock on his many doors. any smart campaign does that and they are pushing that it's a good thing and it's something

the democratic party likely does as well but they are having trouble because they are still getting disinformation from some of their own candidates about security of mail-in voting. that only hurts them when they take an option away from one of their own candidates. it's incumbent on both parties to speak the truth to their own voters and tell them we can trust elections and if we lose, we lost legitimately and we will come out fighting to win the next campaign. host: last call from maryland, republican, good morning. caller: here's my question for you and it parlays off of what mary said. no one is asking that week not count the paper ballots but in maryland, we do paper ballots and we put them through machine that counts them automatically. i've got no problem with that because now you've got a paper ballot as a backup my problem is that in 2020, we had the greatest change in election history of all time.

it was the greatest change ever. because of covid, we went across the states to this mail-in ballot thing. i've been in business, i'm a church leader and i work with the republican party with the campaign. none of these databases are accurate. they're all maybe 95% of people moving or dying or whatever. i know they try to keep it up-to-date. i've tried it in church and business and our voter rolls and so forth but they are never 100% accurate, they can't be, it's impossible. as you know, the elections are won by a very few percentage of voters in three or four states. in georgia come i think it was 12,000 voters who wanted for biden. when i'm saying is i have no trust that we now have an election season.

i want one day voting with absentee balloting. i want people verified. i trust those people are adding up the ballots correctly but the ballots coming to them, how do we know these ballots, how do we know they are accurate? i don't know the source for this. there was a survey done in a survey of people who did mail-in ballot thing. it came back that one in five filled out a ballot for someone besides themselves. host: let me have david becker take up those issues. guest: first of all, not as many laws were changed in 20 in regard to mail-in ballot things. certain states allowed more in states like georgia, it was the same law they had had since before covid.

pennsylvania passed their law in 2019 before covid. arizona have the same mail-in ballot and laws it always had for two decades. nevada, the same. these were very common laws for everyone. every male ballot in the country is verified when it gets sent out and verified when it comes back in. it's usually by signature matching and sometimes like in georgia and minnesota, by matching drivers license numbers. that is done every time. we could discover fraud if it occurred and that's true. people were submitting hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of male in balloting falsely for voters who had not requested then or had not sent them back in. one of those voters, 50% or more of them would show up and try to vote in person and they decoded in the poll book as having already requested a mail-in ballot. if that happens, they to bring

in the black -- the blank ballot and surrender it. what we might have done is discover the potential fraud which is rare but it sometimes happens. when it happens, it's detectable ends very easily found and prosecuted. there is so many protections about this. mail-in ballot's been around since the civil war in many states have been doing this for decades. they have secure elections. donald trump one more states with high percentages of mail-in ballots then hillary clinton and 2016. that's consistent across elections. male invalidating -- male in balloting does not trend one way or the other. host: for more election, innovation.org.

>> at 10:30, you can watch on c-span 3. >> and a live look outside the u.s. capitol this evening where the house of representatives is about to gavel in. tonight they'll start the second session of the 118th congress. in order to do so, members must establish a quorum and ask members to come to the floor to mark their attendance to ensure enough members are present to begin the session. there are 213 democrats. and establishing a quorum for the second session is all the work that is expected today. we could see members go to the floor for speeches. we'll take you live now to the house floor here on c-span.