They Stole It Legally

Ladies and gentlemen, they stole it from us legally. Please welcome, from Ohio, Secretary of State Frank LaRose. Former Arizona prosecutor and U.S. Army Reserve Captain Abe Hamaday. From New York, former Congressman Lee Zeldin. And your moderator, Vice Chair of the Center for Election Integrity and former National Press Secretary for the Trump campaign, Hogan Gidley. Let's have a seat. Good morning, CPAC. How's everybody today? Now, Lee, you're a very important person, but I did not know you required this much security. They locked down this whole perimeter to get us in here for you this morning. I hope everybody stays once we're done. There's some other speakers coming today. That's right. I know everybody's here for us. Obviously, people are here for us. It's pretty clear. Folks, I think this panel is one of the most important we're going to see at CPAC in large measure because the policies you want implemented, you have to have the people elected you want to implement those policies. And it's getting more difficult in this country to elect those folks if we have countless examples of irregularities, illegalities, anomalies, and, yes, fraud in our election system. And I think the purpose here is to talk about how we can make it easy to vote but hard to cheat. And you guys are kind of in the front of that fight, I think. And many of you are also out in this room. And I remember in the last several election cycles, we've had problems in this country that both the right and the left have been complaining about for decades. But it seems like no one wants to do anything about it. And so in 2000 in Florida, we had hanging chads, dimpled ballots. We've traded all that, of course, for mass mail-in and drop boxes. But either way, there have been problems in our election system. And I think the people up on this stage, and we're going to let you guys talk about it, it's so important that laws are passed in the states, which is, of course, where the Constitution puts that right and responsibility to the state legislatures, to protect every single legal vote and every single legal voter. That's what this is all about. So, Frank, I'm going to start with you because you are a sitting Secretary of State. You guys have done some incredible stuff in the state of Ohio with legislation. But also start, please, first with a data project that us at America First Policy Institute, we're working with you on some of that information and data that's so important to securing our elections. Absolutely, Hogan. And you know what? As you said, easy to vote and hard to cheat. One of the other watchwords that we have is that we run elections so well in Ohio, transparently, honestly, we run them so well that even the loser knows they lost. And that's part of that idea that on election night, you should be able to know you trust and can believe those results. That's the way we do it in the Buckeye State. Listen, the data project that we're working on with America First Policy Institute is going to be a first-in-the-nation example of how we can throw open the books and make election data so much more transparent. I've described it like this. Imagine you're trying to invest your savings. You want to save for retirement or what have you. But if there's no generally accepted accounting principles, standard charts of accounts, you could look at two different companies' spreadsheets and not be able to make heads or tails of it. It works that way with election data. Across different jurisdictions and certainly across different states, there is no standard definition for things like what is a registered voter? That seems pretty elementary, doesn't it? But sometimes they're inactive. Sometimes they're in confirmation status, et cetera. What is a voted ballot and how many ballots were voted on election day? All of those things need to be standardized. This bill that we're doing in Ohio called Senate Bill 71, written with the support of America First, is going to throw open the books and make sure that elections in Ohio and other states are transparently run so that you can do that post-election audit and actually make some sense of these numbers. That's great. And I remember when we first started looking at this, folks, we took a look at the top 100 most populated counties in the country in 14 swing states and tried to compare the number of voters who voted versus the number of ballots that were counted. Not even close. They don't match anywhere. You wouldn't let that happen at your bank, of course. You went in there and gave $100 to the deposit, slipped, came back, said 50 or said 150, there'd be a problem. But somehow, someway we let this happen in our election system. So thank you for what you're doing in Ohio. But also for your future. There are some rumors in the state of Ohio that you may be seeking another office, maybe for a Senate, let's just say, to help us gain more power and control. Hogan, I'll tell you this. There's a guy named Sherrod Brown who's become a national embarrassment to the state of Ohio. He's passed himself off as this working man's hero. Everybody in Ohio knows better. 2024 is the year we beat him. Our party needs to nominate a good candidate that can actually take it to him and finally defeat this guy. It's something I'm looking at. But no announcement here on the Z-Fact stage today. No announcement, folks. I gave him the chance. Could have done it right here. Thank you so much, Mr. Secretary. Now, Abe, fascinating, because I've been looking at your race for a while now. Obviously, Arizona, for whatever reason, is problematic, it seems, cycle after cycle. You lost by 280 votes, I think is the current count. Seems fair. You win some, you lose some. But when 61 percent of the polling places went down on Election Day, talk a little bit about how frustrating that is for you. Well, how many of you heard of Maricopa County here? See, what happened on Election Day is a disgrace to democracy. And the same people who told us that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, the same people who told us that the COVID didn't come from a Chinese lab, the same people who told us that Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation are the ones telling us we can't question our elections. The incompetence in our elections is the biggest threat to democracy. We have to start questioning election officials, because what happened on Election Day in Maricopa County when the printers malfunctioned, supposedly. And we advertised to the electorate that we were voting on Election Day, and I think that was the biggest mistake that we learned. Every state runs elections differently. Some states have mail-in voting, some states have early voting. You've got to use the system that we have right now. But we are down 280 votes, but it ain't over yet. There's 5,000 uncounted provisional ballots, and we are fighting to make sure every voter is enfranchised right now. But the reason why I'm fighting so hard, me, Lee, and Frank, we're all veterans. You know, we've served our country. We understand that this country stands for democracy in our elections. And I know more than most what a rigged election looks like. My parents came here from Syria back in the 80s. When you can't question your elections, that's what it looks like, tyrannical government, where the president wins by 97% of the vote. So a healthy part of democracy requires questioning your election officials. So I'm in this fight still, because whether it is for the next 100 years, we're going to have elections. We need to make sure that there's competency, people are held accountable. Because in Arizona right now, look what we have. I mean, consequences of elections are real. We have an open border right now. We have criminals on the streets. And the Democrats, once they take power, they are relentless. And we've seen what they've done in Arizona. But, you know, Carrie Lake still has her lawsuit. She's up at the Supreme Court in Arizona. Right now, with our litigation efforts, we're fighting because the 5,000 uncounted provisionals, the RNC, by the way, has been really good to us. We've looked at the data. Some of these voters, they were removed from the voting rolls erroneously. So we're trying to get them to count. And on election day in Arizona, we were winning same-day voters with 75%. So we are still in this fight. But, you know, without elections, we all know there's no country left. Amen. Thank you very much. A quick follow-up, though. You put out a tweet the other day I found interesting, talking about how there's some ballots that weren't counted by people who serve in the military? How is that even a thing? So it's really interesting. I actually, in 2020, I was serving in Saudi Arabia with the U.S. Army Reserve. And I voted with UOCAVA, right, absentee ballot, by e-mail. You know, I don't think we all accept that e-mail voting should happen. But when I came back to Arizona, I had four mail-in ballots in my house, not in my name. So this whole idea of cleaning the voter rolls is important. But here in 2022 election, sometimes when you're added on the UOCAVA list, which is the military absentee voting, if you come back to Arizona, they don't automatically put you on to the registration here in the county. So they don't know where to go vote. They vote in the wrong county, for instance. So we're just trying to make sure that if you vote, that your vote should count, especially if it's legal. And it's so interesting. All I'm doing is taking the Mark Elias playbook right now, which is count all the votes and we'll win by a couple thousand right now. That's right. Well, remember, in 2016, it was your patriotic duty to ask questions about the outcome of an election. If you didn't, you were somehow in league with Vladimir Putin. You were a Russian stooge. But 2020, you were like, I have a question. In 2022, I have a question. And you're an insurrectionist somehow. You should be put in prison. The whole thing is insane. But speaking of insanity, let's talk about the state of New York for a minute, if we could. This man ran one of the best races I've ever seen, a candidate run. I want to get to that race specifically in just a minute. But first, you've been doing a lot of work to figure out what conservatives can do better at getting out the vote, doing the blocking and tackling that is necessary to win elections. Talk a little bit about that. Explain to the crowd what you're working. Well, first off, all 50 states should have voter ID. Yeah. Secondly, what we're seeing this move in local municipalities we saw in New York City, we're seeing in Washington, D.C. There's others who want to follow it. Noncitizens should not be given the right to vote. It's a constitutional principle of one person, one vote. Right. And when you give a noncitizen the ability to vote, it dilutes the vote of a citizen. So they no longer have that one person, one vote. When litigation needs to be filed, file it right away. If you wait until after the election too often, it is too late. Then I would also add that if in your state you have Democrats trying to, say, legalize ballot harvesting, if you oppose ballot harvesting, do everything in your power to make sure that it doesn't pass. But this is what conservatives need to do better. Right. Once it becomes the law, do ballot harvesting so much better than the Democrats that they regret passing it in the first place. Right. As soon as they see conservatives beating them on their laws, they're going to stop trying to pass it all across the rest of the country. Don't sit back on our heels and lose. It's time for conservatives to be on offense, leaning into all of this and win across the board. Red states, purple states, blue states. Remember, such a great point. Remember, folks, what Barack Obama was able to do with Facebook was revolutionary, according to the media. And then all of a sudden Donald Trump did better on Facebook and what did the left say? We should probably censor Facebook. That's what I'm saying. You outperform them with the laws in place and they'll want to change bad policy all day long. So we've got to get out there and we've got to ballot harvest the heck out of this next election better than they ever will. And they'll want to change that policy, no question. But I need to ask you about your governor's race. Tell us a little bit about that, how that kind of worked. I would argue in large measure we were able to take back the gavel in the House of Representatives because of the race he ran in New York and because of what they did in California, of all places. So tell us a little bit about that. Well, we need to be competing everywhere in all 50 states. I don't care what state you come from. There are important races, especially down ballot. We saw it. Instead of New York sending six Republicans as part of our delegation to D.C., we ended up sending 11. We ended up flipping control of the House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi is no longer speaker. We need to go into Democratic areas and the best way to get Democrat votes is not to act like Democrats but to explain why we are proud, principled conservatives. And don't pander. If you go speak to a black group or a Hispanic group or an Asian group or a Jewish group, don't say, I love black people, vote for me. I love Asian people, vote for me. I love Hispanic people, vote for me. Say, we need to improve safety on these streets. Here's how. These are our proposals. We need to improve the quality of education inside of your kids' schools. Here's how. These Democrats are unhappy with the Democratic policies and the Democratic Party as a whole. But they aren't going to just swing to the Republicans on their own. It's a bad assumption that we are making. Instead, what we need to do is to show up over and over and over again. When your high-paid political consultant tells you not to go to a heavily Democratic area, that's exactly where we need to show up and earn the support of these Democrats. We cannot relinquish the cities. We cannot relinquish the suburbs. We need to drive the message in these campaigns as we talk about what needs to get done to make our streets safer, to make life in these states more affordable, to protect freedom, safety, prosperity, our kids' education, and more. We cannot relinquish anything to the Democrats. And if we're on offense confidently, that will be the path for us to earn a red wave, because in 2022, we did not earn a red wave nationally. In 2024, we must to save America. That's great. Lee, you get everybody fired up. I love talking to you. And, look, we used to have to point all the way back to Reagan to say, look at our Republican Party, how great it used to be. Folks, two years ago, we had record-setting success in record-setting time because of the leadership of people like Lee, Abe, and Frank, and because of the man who's going to speak here later this evening, Donald Trump. So big success there. I asked Frank, but I have to ask you, too. Some rumors out there, there's a certain senator named Gillibrand who may be in for a fight come the next election. Is that her last name? It's Gillibrand? Something like that. This is one of the laziest, most forgettable and unaccomplished senators in the country, and certainly in my lifetime in New York. It is a wasted Senate seat. I would say that the reason why this keeps getting discussed, about her having this competition next year against me, is because she won't shut up in mentioning my name. She's been doing it to try to get urgency and viability to get her donors to want to give to her starting this first quarter of 2023. She's like wishing this thing into existence. I have nothing to announce. Quite frankly, it wasn't even anything that I was thinking about. All I do know is that Senator What's-Her-Name is wasting a Senate seat inside of New York, and New Yorkers all across the board, from left to right, Republican, Democrat, Independent, are getting rolled and screwed because we have a senator who is not doing a good job representing all of us in New York and not showing up until it's election time. Y'all, I tried. I had two people up here. I tried to get them to announce something. Seems like it's not going to happen. But listen, thank you each for what you're doing in your states. I really appreciate it. Folks, just as we wrap up this panel, I want to point out something I think that is important to remember. We're in a bad place right now, I think, in this country in a lot of ways. The policies that this administration has put upon us has really hurt American families, really threatened our American way of life. But the uplifting message, what you've heard today on this stage, but also at CPAC, reminds you of our best days are still ahead. And understand, I was born in a very small town in North Carolina, and then I was raised in even a smaller town in Arkansas. And when I worked in the White House for Donald Trump, I went on the computer system and I found out in the first year I'd been there, I'd traveled on Air Force One over 100 times. I'd been in Marine One many times. I'd been in the Beast with the President of the United States. I even had the First Lady ask me to open for her on the campaign trail. She called me up, hold on, I can't do it, but you know how she talks. Wonderful woman. I got to open and go on the road with Ivanka Trump as well. I say all that not to say I'm great, because this country's great. I'm a nobody from nowhere. I was raised by a single woman. I don't have a last name in politics like Kennedy or Bush or Clinton. Thank God I don't have a Clinton as a last name. But nonetheless, I got to walk into the Oval Office every single day, stand right in front of the Resolute Desk in front of the President of the United States and give him advice. Now, he never took it, but that's not the point. The point is, in this country and this country alone, I got to give it. That doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. And there is a reason that other people are walking around in other countries like Cuba carrying our American flag, screaming the words liberty and freedom, because they know what you know, what the left doesn't know, that this country is still a beacon of hope and of strength and of democracy and goodness all over the world. And I am very happy about the future of this country, where she is headed, because people like you are willing to show up on a day like today, on a Saturday, sacrifice your time, your treasure, to learn how we can better prepare ourselves to take this country back and lead her in the right direction so that future generations have a chance. Thank you very much. God bless each of you. God bless CPAC. God bless these men. God bless America.