A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
David Becker has been listening. He's the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. David, so as we understand it, the Justice Department was not asking to remove people from the voter rolls but to investigate a list of names. So what's the big deal? What's the harm? Why not do that?
DAVID BECKER: Well, the big deal is that the timing of this is incredibly suspicious. And also, the federal government does not have the best track record on accurately identifying whether people are noncitizens or not. So while the DOJ seems very concerned that noncitizens in very small numbers might dilute the votes of eligible voters, they seem far less concerned that eligible voters might be somehow excluded from this process, which would be clearly illegal under federal and state law.
We should remember, going back several months - I mean, this administration has been in power for 21 months now. It has had the full power of the federal government to investigate these claims. It - the California voter lists are public and could be reviewed. And back in July, as you just heard, the secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary Mullin, had a big public press conference where he announced that DHS had discovered noncitizens on four states' lists, including California.
California, he claimed, had 190,000 noncitizens on lists - noncitizens on their voter lists. And California immediately wrote back and said, show us your work. Tell us how you came up with this number. Who's on the list? - so we can look at it. And DHS went silent. They didn't respond to California for three months. They knew that California was sending ballots out on October 5. And then they waited an additional eight days and sent this thumb drive with allegedly 20,000 names to Los Angeles County, saying, time to segregate these voters' ballots.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. On a deadline, too - 48-hour deadline. So how difficult would that have been to confirm?
BECKER: It would have been impossible. It's why this looks like it is a political act and not a law enforcement act. I mean, if there was a real good-faith effort to try to help California clean up its list and find the very small number of noncitizens on it, this would have happened months ago in cooperation with California. They would have been transparent about their methodology and what they had found. And instead, they waited until after ballots went out - over a week after ballots went out - to send this to Los Angeles. I think it's very unlikely a court's going to agree with the Department of Justice here.
MARTÍNEZ: When it comes to building trust in elections, I know your group works with election officials in both parties to do that. So how damaging is this?
BECKER: Well, I mean, I think it's - at this point, there's been such a constant swarm of disinformation around elections - a lot of it coming from this administration and this president - just lies about voting machines and mail voting and noncitizens on the voter lists, which my organization tracks and confirms, thanks to data from this administration, that it's extremely rare.
But, you know, I don't know how much any of this is really contributing. It seems like right now voters are responding to a lot of other factors. We're seeing very high early-voting rates. Over 6 million Americans have already cast their ballot even though we're 18 days away from the election. We're seeing records right now in a lot of states in terms of their pace of voting. So I think we could see very, very high turnout, which is a really good sign that voters are tuning some of this noise out and just going out to vote in safety and convenience as they have for several other elections.
MARTÍNEZ: And quickly - real quick - how big of a concern is the issue of noncitizens voting in federal elections?
BECKER: Right. Right. There's a tiny number of jurisdictions that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections for, say, school board. But generally, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. That law has been on the book for decades. It is - the states are doing a very good job, based on the data that this administration has put out, of keeping noncitizens off the voter list. In nearly 21 months, looking for noncitizens anywhere they can find them, they've only found a few dozen to charge.
MARTÍNEZ: David Becker is executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. David, thank you.
BECKER: Thanks.
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