Based on the U.S. Constitution, there is a scenario in which the U.S. House of Representatives is the one that ultimately picks the next President, says Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.). And each state would have only a single vote.
In this episode, we sit down with Rep. Brooks to discuss the allegations of election irregularities and voter fraud and what they’ll mean for the 2020 election.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I’m Jan Jekielek.
Jan Jekielek: Congressman Mo Brooks, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Congressman Mo Brooks: My pleasure. Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek: Congressman Brooks, you have been on the floor of the House talking [about] election integrity. I think at the time that we’re filming right now, you’ve been out there twice. Why are you doing this? Why is this so on your mind? Tell me more.
Rep. Brooks: The speech series I’m going to give will probably be in excess of 10 over the coming weeks, and the reason that I’m giving these speeches is because I am very much concerned about the election integrity in the United States of America. I want a system whereby the only votes that count are those by American citizens who are eligible to vote and are lawfully cast. Everybody else’s votes should not count because they’re not American citizens or they’re otherwise ineligible to vote.
And the system we have now, unfortunately, has so many loopholes in it that I’m very much concerned about voter fraud and election theft. And when you’re talking about the presidency of the United States, or for that matter, any other elected office in the United States, the one thing that is very, very important to the trust in our republic is that we have confidence that the numbers being reported by these election officials actually correspond with what the law requires, which is lawfully cast votes by American citizens.
Now, personally, I’ve been on the wrong side of voter fraud and election theft back in 1982, in the days when Alabama was totally Democrat. By way of example, in the Alabama legislature, we were outnumbered 136 Democrats to 4 Republicans in 1982. Of our 31 statewide elected officials, that’s all the appellate court judges, the governor, everybody else, it was 31 to 0 in favor of the Democrats. In my home county, Madison County, there were zero elected Republicans in partisan office. For that matter, in the entire Tennessee Valley, from Mississippi on the west to Georgia on the east, there were zero Republicans holding a partisan position in any of the local or state elected offices.
And so for whatever reason I ran as a Republican. Quite frankly, I’d seen Ronald Reagan, seen Jimmy Carter, and they kind of persuaded me what my ideology was and who I best fit with. And then on election day, I started getting a whole bunch of phone calls from angry voters and those angry voters were saying, “Wait a second. I thought I was in your district. I have a yard sign of yours in my yard. My machine won’t let me vote for you.”
And in Alabama at that time, we had these little lever machines. You pull a lever down and an X appears next to the candidates names so you know that you’ve actually properly voted for that candidate, and then the machine is supposed to register all those X’s for all those candidates.
I naively went into this process at age 28 thinking that yes, politics is hardball but believing that at least the election system was honorable. Lo and behold, after everything was said and done, we conducted an investigation and determined that 11, roughly 25 percent, of the 45 voting machines in that Alabama House district were rigged to vote for any of the 26 candidates on the ballot except for Mo Brooks.
Things were so bad, by way of example, that in one voting location in the heart of the district, a strong Republican box where there were 5 machines, none of them would register votes for Mo Brooks when the day started. And so the poll workers, at least they did something constructive, they started publicly announcing that if you wanted to vote for Mo Brooks, go sign your name on the wall. So at least you could vote for Mo Brooks albeit you had to lose your secret ballot right in order to do it.
As the dust settled, we were very fortunate and blessed. We still won the election with 57 percent of the vote, but you can imagine my shock and anger, [and] the shock and anger of voters, when they discovered that the Democrats had rigged the election process in order to prevent me from being that breach in their dam and becoming the only elected Republican in the northern third of the state of Alabama, and the Alabama legislature.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s an incredible story. So this present situation is personal to you.
Rep. Brooks: Absolutely. I’ve been through it. What are the odds that out of 45 machines, 11 machines would register votes for all 26 candidates except for Mo Brooks? If you know your math, that’s 1 chance in 26 for any 1 machine. For 11 machines, that’s 26 to the 11th power. That is 1 chance out of 3.6 quadrillion chances that it was an accident and was not intentional. We had a pretty good idea from our investigation who actually did it. Unfortunately, the whole system was run by Democrats, so you got nowhere in trying to seek relief for that problem.
And we have that kind of problem today, too. That was back in 1982 but around the country, there are so many flaws in our election system that I do not have confidence at all in some of the states that the election results that are being projected are in fact the will of a majority of the votes lawfully cast by American citizens.
In my judgment based on what I have seen so far and my own personal experience with voter fraud and election theft by Democrats, in my judgment, if you only could count lawfully cast votes by American citizens, Donald Trump won the Electoral College.
But we need that magic wand and we need the sword of Damocles to come down to confirm that because the way the election system is set up, it is very, very difficult to prove voter fraud or election theft. Extremely difficult. By way of example, you’ve got someone who casts a ballot illegally. You know what happens to that ballot? It’s not marked in some way so that you can pull it back out once it’s been mixed with all the other ballots. So how do you prove how that illegal voter voted? Extraordinarily difficult. Our system is set up not to ensure that we have fair and honest elections. Rather, it is set up in some ways to encourage dishonest elections by making it so easy to get away with dishonest elections.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about some of the scenarios that we’re seeing. I think [in] the news today again, as we’re filming here, there’s a third memory card that is alleged to have been missing. I don’t know the exact details. This is, I believe, in Georgia. What do you make of this particular element of these memory cards not being counted, for example?
Rep. Brooks: People need to understand that we do have criminals in America. They commit murders, they commit rapes, they commit robberies, they commit burglaries, they steal, and some of those folks, like it or not, happen to be involved in the election process. And if they’re willing to commit these more heinous criminal acts against their fellow citizens, do you think for one second they’d be hesitant about stealing an election or engaging in voter fraud if they thought they could get away with it?
We’ve got to have more safeguards. We have to have a system that the criminal element in American society, that the hyper-partisan element in American society cannot illegally rig to the benefit of their partisan flavor as opposed to the other partisan flavor. And I wish that we had cooperation from the Democrats in that regard but we don’t. Instead, the Democrats in America are trying to make it easier for people to commit voter fraud and election theft.
Now, I’ll give you an example. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, one of the first things Democrat Bill Clinton did with a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate they had control, Republicans by and large voted against it, Democrats overwhelmingly voted for it.
In America, who’s supposed to be allowed to vote? American citizens, right? At least in federal elections, there are some Democrat enclaves where they’ll legally allow illegal aliens and lawful immigrants, non-citizens, to register to vote and vote in municipal elections. But in federal elections, only American citizens are supposed to be allowed to vote.
The Democrats passed in 1993 this legislation that makes it illegal for our voter registrars to determine whether a person who is registering to vote is an American citizen. Makes it illegal. So how are you going to limit the election to American citizens when the people who are supposed to be registering voters cannot make the kind of inquiry that is required to verify whether the person who walks into their office is in fact an American citizen? That’s an example of what the Democrats have foisted on us, which in turn results in my judgment and a lot of illegal votes being cast. The question being, why else would the Democrats do that if they didn’t think they’d be able to take advantage of it in order to win elections?
You’ve got another major problem. Various states do not require any kind of identification at all when you go vote. So someone comes in and says, “I’m going to vote [as] Joe Smith,” and [the real] Joe Smith later shows up, the poll worker’s notes are going to reflect that Joe Smith has already voted. So what do you do with real Joe Smith in a state where no identification at all is required?
We ought to have photo identification. We have it for all sorts of different other things in America. It is easy to do in a lot of different ways. That’s what we do in the state of Alabama, we have a photo ID requirement. That’s not foolproof but I promise you, it minimizes the number of illegal votes that are being cast compared to the states that have no photo ID or have no ID requirement whatsoever.
But again, the Democrats are opposed to voter identification, presumably because they see that as a way to take advantage of a loose system. It’s much like the mugger who victimizes someone in New York Central Park where all too often the victim gets blamed. That’s happening in our election process in my judgment where the perpetrators of these crimes are basically thinking, “You’re letting me get away with it, so I’m going to get away with it,” and that’s wrong.
We’ve got to stop that kind of thinking, stop that kind of voter fraud and election theft by having some real penalties for those who commit these criminal acts, substantive penalties, and also make it easier to find and catch these individuals. But perhaps most importantly, have a system whereby it doesn’t happen in the first place, but if it does, you can correct the election result as opposed to all of these ballots being commingled, or there’s no way to determine after the fact which ones are legal and which ones are illegal.
That’s one of the problems with the hand count in Georgia. What difference is it going to make if all they’re doing is recounting illegal ballots? You’re not going to see anything constructive come out of that hand count, other than perhaps determining whether the Dominion software or other software in the voting machines was rigged or otherwise inaccurate, either because of software error by the company or operational error by whoever’s operating the devices.
Mr. Jekielek: Congressman Brooks, you mentioned earlier that based on what you’ve seen, you believe that President Trump may well have won the Electoral College. Now, this would suggest fraud at a scale perhaps in multiple states where the outcome would actually change. Where do you see the most significant examples of this type of potential fraud?
Rep. Brooks: I’m not sure if I want to focus just on areas so much as systemic across the board with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. It’s across the board that you cannot lawfully cull out non-citizens because you are prohibited from determining whether they’re non-citizens.
That’s a problem when you can’t ask a citizen or a voter registration applicant for proof of citizenship, either a passport or a birth certificate. My kids, to play soccer, have to have a birth certificate, but we don’t require that for people to register to vote. So it’s systemic, in all 50 states, that problem. The lack of voter identification is a systemic problem in probably 30 or 40 states in the union, with photo identification.
When you have this in-mass mailing out of ballots to people who no longer live in that state, to people who have died, that opens up a whole new can of worms. So every state that has this in-mass mailing of ballots system, that’s a systemic problem that results in who knows how much election fraud and election theft.
And then you’ve got some particulars, some notable problems, “notorious” probably is the word I should use, where poll watchers who are assigned to different areas of the country by candidates and political parties to try to make sure that the election process is legal. When all of a sudden, you’ve got poll workers who exclude these poll watchers from their check and balance position where they can’t observe what is going on.
In Pennsylvania, you had at least one court order that directed the local poll workers to comply with Pennsylvania State law and allow those poll watchers to verify that the election was being lawfully conducted, and the poll workers not only ignored state law, they also ignored a court order commanding them to obey that state law. So that’s a problem in Pennsylvania. That is highly suspect whatever their results are.
Georgia, highly suspect, whatever their results are. Perhaps Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, I’ll have to look further into that. Perhaps even Arizona. Perhaps North Carolina, by way of example, where they don’t require much in the way of voter identification in order to go vote. And I’ve had people complain to me in North Carolina before, I don’t remember their names unfortunately, it’s been over the years, where they tried to vote and they weren’t allowed to because someone else had already cast a vote in their name. We should not have these kinds of problems.
But certainly, if I were to focus on four or five or six, Georgia would be at the top of the list, Pennsylvania would be at the top of the list, Michigan would be at the top of the list. Minnesota and Wisconsin have some issues, perhaps Arizona has some issues. And to me, I don’t have enough confidence in their process to make me feel warm and fuzzy about the accuracy of the returns that they are sharing with the American people as election results. I don’t believe that they’re accurate. My problem is I don’t know how inaccurate they are.
Mr. Jekielek: People will say, and people have told me actually on camera, there’s voter fraud in every election. It always happens. But the question is, is it significant enough or can you prove that it’s significant enough to actually change things at all?
Rep. Brooks: In the United States Congress, we control who the President of the United States is. The courts do not. Federal courts, Supreme Court, they have a role in the process. For example, in the year 2000, Al Gore versus George Bush, when they ordered the poll workers in the state of Florida to use the same kind of chad checking system in all Florida counties, not have a different system in the Miami Broward County area versus the Panhandle, when it had to operate the same under equal protection grounds all across the state, that closed down their different counting system in Broward County and in Dade County, and surrounding areas. And that resulted in Florida certifying the state of Florida as having been won by George Bush.
However, the ultimate say over whether to accept or reject those electoral college votes—in that instance, in Florida; now, for any state—is not a court’s job. It is Congress’s job. Under Article I, Article II, Amendment XII of the United States Constitution, coupled with federal statutes that govern this issue, the United States Congress has the absolute right to reject the submitted electoral college votes of any state which we believe has such a shoddy election system that you can’t trust the election results that those states are submitting to us, that they’re suspect.
And I’m not going to put my name in support of any state that employs an election system that I don’t have confidence in, and I’d go through the top two or three states that I mentioned a while ago that I lacked confidence, that the returns that they’re being reported accurately reflect lawful votes by eligible American citizens.
Now, how do you do that in the United States Congress? On January 6, at 1 p.m. Eastern time, the 50 states will report to Congress, the President of the Senate will preside over this meeting, will report to Congress what they contend are their electoral college results in their state. If a house member and a senator objects to the submission of electoral college votes by any state that immediately triggers a house floor vote and a senate floor vote on whether to accept or reject those electoral college votes submitted by that particular state.
The amount of debate on the House and Senate floor is limited to two hours under federal law, and if we reject those electoral college votes, then they’re taken out of the mix. If the election process problems are so great that after subtracting the electoral college votes of states that are running a poor election system, a system so suspect that you can’t give credibility to the results that are being reported, then the United States Constitution mandates that Congress determine who the next president and vice president of the United States will be.
Under Article I, Article II and Amendment XII of the United States Constitution, the House of Representatives will be the body that determines who is President of the United States, the vice president will be determined by the United States Senate, and they can even be members of different parties if that’s the will of the House and the Senate.
Now, in the House, there’s a little bit of a twist. It’s not a majority of 435 congressmen that determines who the President of the United States will be, rather it is a majority of the state delegations that determines who the President of the United States will be. That being the case, based on the election we just had a couple of weeks ago, the Republicans control 26 state delegations, the Democrats controlled 20 state delegations, with the remainder being tied with the possible exception of Iowa. There’s an uncalled Iowa House race.
If that is called in favor of the GOP candidate who’s up, last I saw, about 47 votes, then there will be 27 state delegations that have a majority of their members being Republican, hence the house would be in a position to elect a Republican to the White House based on what we saw a couple of weeks ago on Election Day earlier in November, on November 3.
I don’t know who the Senate would elect as the vice president. That would be up to them but that’s the process that is embedded in the United States Constitution, should no candidate get a majority of the electoral college vote, either because there’s a tie or because there are so many candidates—as was the case in 1824 where there were four candidates that split the vote so no one got a majority, and the House then elected the second place finisher John Quincy Adams to be President of the United States over Andrew Jackson who came in first—or should it be the case that you’ve discounted electoral college votes such that no candidate for President of the United States got the magic number of 270, which is a majority of the Electoral College.
Mr. Jekielek: This is absolutely fascinating. I suspect that not a lot of people know these realities. What about this Dominion software? This is something that the president’s legal team has been talking about. They say that they have considerable evidence that there was fraud through these systems. Are you concerned about this software?
Rep. Brooks: I don’t have personal experience with the Dominion software, so that is a backdrop. I am very troubled by what I am hearing when I hear that the state of Texas, their leadership, rejected Dominion software because of unreliability issues, when I’ve heard similar comments by people in the state of Alabama who make those kinds of decisions as to what kind of software is going to be used, when you go into Michigan where either because of a software error or it’s so complicated that there was an operator error, it turns out that there’s a major swing of thousands of votes from one set of candidates to another.
By the way, it just happened to benefit Democrats. Nothing new about that when you have these kind of problems. Fortunately, that one was corrected because this is such a Republican county, people immediately discerned there had to be an issue because there’s no way that a Democrat did that well in that kind of Republican stronghold.
But still, had that error not been counted, then there would have been at least one Democrat who was elected to office illegally. Instead, that was reversed and his Republican counterpart was elected to that very same office once they corrected the issue with the Dominion software itself or were the operator error because the software was so complicated to administer.
Then we’ve heard other examples of Dominion software problem issues in Georgia and elsewhere. I don’t have personal knowledge of that. We’ll see how that plays out. But this kind of software, if you’re going to attack an election today, that’s one of the easiest ways to steal an election: just program the software such that it doesn’t count votes for one party or one candidate, or shift those votes from one party and one candidate to the opposition party or the opposition party’s candidate.
That’s an easy thing to do and it’s very difficult to catch because most people have such confidence in the election machines to actually spit out the correct number. Not often do you see someone having the guts and the courage as they did in Michigan to investigate, and then discover that there was a software error or an operator error to the tunes of thousands of votes.
Mr. Jekielek: The President recently fired Chris Krebs from being in charge of the CISA, part of DHS. Basically, they published something saying that there is no evidence of fraud in the elections. What do you make of all this?
Rep. Brooks: It’s categorically false that there’s no evidence of fraud in the election unless you have the most narrow definition of the word “fraud.” Might you think that every single error was a mistake and not fraud, I guess you can have that kind of mindset, but it doesn’t make any difference to me if it’s a fraud or a mistake.
If the election results are not accurate, then it’s wrong and needs to be corrected, and that’s the way they should have been approached. And there are unquestionably numerous instances of counts of votes that are inaccurate for whatever reason, whether it be fraud or mistake, people with more knowledge of the specific instances than I have would have to make that kind of judgment call. But this election has not been accurate overall, in my judgment.
And I’ve heard some people say, “It’s never accurate. There’re always dead people voting. There’re always people who moved out of state voting. There’re always illegal aliens or other non-citizens voting. You just can’t have a perfect election.”
I’ll tell you right now, we’re a republic and the integrity of our government is based on the credibility of our election processes. If you do not have confidence that your election processes are yielding the correct results, then how can you have confidence in the governance of our republic?
So we need to tighten up the rules, we need to impose far more severe punishments that are imposed now in order to deter voter fraud and election theft. And instead of doing that, what the Democrat Party has been doing is making it easier to steal elections and engage in voter fraud, and that is absolutely wrong, and to me, it is corrupting the system and it’s undermining our republic.
Mr. Jekielek: This is something for the future that you’re just describing. You wanted to tighten up all the rules around the elections, make sure everything is free and fair. What about this specific election? How to deal with potential fraud issues with this one?
Rep. Brooks: What we can do is what I described earlier. Congress can interject itself. They have the statutory authority under federal law, they have the constitutional authority under the United States Constitution, because after all, we are the final judge as to whether to accept or reject electoral college votes, we are the final judge as to who got the majority of the electoral college votes, and if nobody did, we are the body that elects the next President of the United States in the House of Representatives and Vice President of the United States [in the] Senate.
So I can tell you what my position is going to be: I am not going to accept the electoral college votes of states who I believe have such a poor election system that you cannot trust the votes that they report as being an accurate reflection of the will of the citizens of those states. That’s what I’m going to do.
If the rest of the Congress joins with me in that regard, then that would force the election onto the House floor for the President of the United States and the Senate floor for the election of the Vice President of the United States.
But the only way to force these states to do a better job is to kick them once or twice, and if you reject their electoral college votes, that’s a pretty strong message that you better straighten up and come up with a better election system with more safeguards, more security, than you have right now.
Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts before we finish up?
Rep. Brooks: Thank you for interviewing me in this regard. I hope the American people will pay more attention because our republic is at stake. Whether we are able to improve our election processes is ultimately dependent on the American people electing congressmen, senators, presidents, legislators, governors, judges, who have as their first priority an election system that is honest and accurate.
Mr. Jekielek: Congressman Mo Brooks, such a pleasure to have you on again.
Rep. Brooks: Pleasure’s all mine. Thank you.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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