Grand Canyon Times

The director of the Arizona-based Voter Reference Foundation said the practice of having both automatic voter registration and mail ballots “is a disaster.”

"In the 2020 cycle, we had a lot of states that had never done widespread mail balloting attempt to just kind of jump in, and you can't do that," Swoboda told host Leyla Gulen on the Grand Canyon Times Podcast. “Arizona's had mail ballots for a long time. I personally don't like them, but they've had them for a long time. States like Nevada did not have them for a long time, just mailed everybody a ballot, and it was a mess.”

“The combination of automatic voter registration, so you didn't mean to register to vote, you went and got a license, and they registered you, and then we're going to send everybody a ballot, whether you want it or not, is a disaster.” Swoboda said. 

This full episode is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Swoboda joined the podcast to discuss election integrity in Arizona and throughout the country.

Headquartered in Phoenix, the Voter Reference Foundation is a national non-profit foundation dedicated to ensuring free and fair elections in the United States.

Swoboda also is the Chief Elections Policy Officer of Restoration of America, a principal at Agrippa Consulting Group, LLC, and the Senior Policy Advisor to the Arizona State Senate Committee on Elections. 

An experienced elections officer, Swoboda previously served in the Arizona Secretary of State’s office under two administrations. 

She is an alumnus of Arizona State University (ASU), having graduated Magna Cum Laude, and is currently a grad student at ASU pursuing her master's degree in political psychology.

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Full, unedited transcript of this episode:

[00:00:00] Leyla Gulen: My guest today is Gina Swoboda. Gina is an election integrity authority. Her role as executive director of the Votal Reference Foundation is dedicated to ensuring free and fair elections. She's a graduate of Arizona State University, currently pursuing a master's degree in political psychology from ASU.

[00:00:23] Leyla Gulen: Gina,

[00:00:23] Gina Swoboda: welcome. Thank you so much. Great to be with you.

[00:00:26] Leyla Gulen: Yeah, well, as someone who works heavily in the area of voter integrity, isn't this the foundation of our electoral process?

[00:00:34] Gina Swoboda: It is. Every election starts with the voter list. Every election ends with the voter credit, uh, for every person who cast a ballot on the voter list.

[00:00:44] Gina Swoboda: If the voter list isn't accurate, the election therefore cannot be. In Maricopa

[00:00:49] Leyla Gulen: County, we saw people waiting in extremely long lines. Can you tell us a bit about your observations about what happened in Maricopa County in the 2022

[00:00:58] Gina Swoboda: election? What [00:01:00] happened in Maricopa County in 2022 is really a problem we've had with the process since 2018 and it's been getting progressively worse and part of it is they moved to a vote center model.

[00:01:12] Gina Swoboda: So instead of having your local precinct. Where you go and cast a ballot and the voters that are registered in that precinct are the people who vote in that precinct. And we election officials in my former life, we order ballots for you. We know what should be on your ballot and we know how many voters there are.

[00:01:31] Gina Swoboda: In the vote center model that Maricopa County moved to in 2020, I always say it under cover of COVID, right? The, the auspices were, Oh, it's COVID. So we're going to do things differently. Now, they kept that model in 2022. So, this is the vote anywhere, no matter where you are in a county, which we are, by population, by voting population, I believe that the third largest county in the United States now, okay?

[00:01:56] Gina Swoboda: So, anyone in Maricopa County can show up [00:02:00] anywhere and vote. Well, that means I can't have the pre ordered ballots for my specific voters. I don't know the fire district. I don't know the school district. I don't know the Warner district for that voter. Therefore, you need this ballot on demand printer model.

[00:02:14] Gina Swoboda: And this piece of equipment is problematic. They started with this ballot on demand printer model in, uh, 2018. It got worse in 2020 when they added the vote centers and now it's catastrophic. So, it's, you walk in. They scan your driver's license, and then this printer is supposed to print your ballot for you based on where you live, quote, on demand.

[00:02:39] Gina Swoboda: Well, the tabulators that are on site that are counting, so it prints the ballot, that part's fine. Voter fills in the ballot. Now you insert the ballot into your tabulator, your polling place tabulator. It was spinning them all back out, Mike. It could not read them. Investigations following the election that were conducted by the elections [00:03:00] department reflect that the ballot on demand printer was not used according to the manufacturer specifications.

[00:03:08] Gina Swoboda: There came out in the Carrie Lakes candidate Contest trial that some of the ballots were like a 20 inch image, a stretched a 22 inch image or 21 inch image on a 20 inch ballot. So there are a variety of reasons of why they said what happened. They said the intermittent usage made the ink not fuse on to the piece of paper the ballots printed on.

[00:03:33] Gina Swoboda: It doesn't matter what they say. At the end of the day, that equipment failed. The testing, that equipment is not subject to the rigorous testing that we give to tabulators. This is outside the scope of logic and accuracy tests. No one is testing ballot on demand printers. Maricopa County told us in the weeks leading up to the election, because we were concerned.

[00:03:54] Gina Swoboda: I was concerned. I knew I was going to have record. Election day turnout from the Republican Party [00:04:00] because they had seen what happened in 2020 and they were worried about mailing their ballots in, and that's exactly what happened. We had record turnout. We had the highest in person election day turnout in Maricopa County that we've had going back over five election cycles, and the ballot on demand printers were getting, like, incessant usage, and they could not keep up with it, and so it was a catastrophic failure.

[00:04:22] Gina Swoboda: It's my personal opinion that the County Elections Department has not

[00:04:29] Gina Swoboda: It is my understanding they do not plan to move away from this model, this vote center ballot on demand printer model. So it's going to happen again. And to your first point about the length of time it takes to get the results in Maricopa County, I concur. Yeah, this is like a recent kind of thing. Now, the election officials will tell you that it's because we're a swing state now and voters aren't used to it.

[00:04:52] Gina Swoboda: It is true that on election night, election officials don't call the race. The media calls the race based on the [00:05:00] reporting of the results from the election officials. The problem is... They're not reporting the results and the reason they're not reporting the results is because Maricopa County among the other county election officials in the state of Arizona in this last session of the legislature, right?

[00:05:16] Gina Swoboda: So, in my hat as a policy advisor to my Senate Elections Committee, we had beautiful legislation. It was process driven things like if I walked in and I had to show my I. D. during the 27 days of early voting in Arizona, I walk in, I scan my I. D. to print that ballot, right? Why, oh why, are the election officials then having me put the ballot in an envelope, sign the envelope?

[00:05:40] Gina Swoboda: And now you're taking the envelope, scanning the signature, doing signature verification, opening the envelope, tabulating. Why are you doing that when I already showed you my ID? So that's common sense. Well, we had a bill for that and the counties lobbied against the bill such that Governor Hobbs vetoed the bill.

[00:05:58] Gina Swoboda: And I would say, [00:06:00] what is the reason for that? Also, the precinct model, they claim, the Maricopa County Elections Department states that we can't get enough locations to use as precincts, and that's why we have to use these vote centers. So we had a bill for that. We, the legislature, gave a 10 million appropriation to the county election officials.

[00:06:18] Gina Swoboda: To help them, we said, we'll make it a school holiday because the school stopped letting us use them as saying, oh, it's dangerous for children. Okay. It'll be a school holiday right now. You can go. We'll have every local government building be required to allow us to use it. And again, we're trying to give you 10 million dollars.

[00:06:36] Gina Swoboda: They lobbied against that bill that bill got vetoed as well. So, after this session of the legislature, it's my. Personal opinion that the reason that the election officials are lobbying against these bills and killing them, which is, again, designed to make their job easier, right? Faster result. Florida, you're tabulating your early ballot.

[00:06:55] Gina Swoboda: There's no envelope. There's no signature verification. They have actual early voting. So they just take the card, [00:07:00] plug it in. They got the results. You're done. They want to go to all mail. They want to go to only mail. So they're not going to do anything to make the election day experience or the reporting faster.

[00:07:09] Gina Swoboda: That takes us away. Because again, when they report out how many people voted by mail, all those people who came and voted early, but they had them fill in an envelope, they're claiming those are people who voted by mail. All the people who come in on election day and drop that mail envelope at the polling place because they don't trust the mail.

[00:07:27] Gina Swoboda: 400, 000 people did that, Mike, in Maricopa County on Election Day in 2022. That's 400, 000 people for which the election officials should not be able to report them as mail votes because they're not mail votes because they don't trust the mail because they literally walk into a polling place. That makes you a polling place voter in my book.

[00:07:45] Gina Swoboda: But yeah, it's the kind of obstruction and obstinacy where it's going to take longer. The entire world will wait and see who has Arizona's 11 electoral votes. And I think it will be worse. I think more people after the equipment failure. Are going to walk it in and they're going to walk it in an [00:08:00] envelope.

[00:08:00] Gina Swoboda: And so we could take four weeks instead of three weeks. We could easily be in the last week of November before Arizona has reported who has won the 11 electoral votes for the presidency. As an example, in, in the closing arguments of Carrie Lake's first trial, and she's got an appeal going, okay. In the closing arguments for that case, the Maricopa County attorney who represents the Maricopa County elections department closed by saying, literally.

[00:08:27] Gina Swoboda: You reap what you sow. People told the voters it wasn't safe to vote by mail, they tried to vote in person, and this is what you get. So he blamed the voter. It was the voter's fault. The stupid, ignorant voters that wanted to use their civil rights to go and vote in person and execute their civic duty. It was their fault.

[00:08:45] Gina Swoboda: It wasn't the fault of Maricopa County that has this cockamamie scheme that we're gonna let anybody go anywhere. Because think about the fact, how can you as an election official possibly project how many people are going to show up at your location if anyone can show? You can't. Yeah. You can't fulfill your [00:09:00] duty of having the proper amount of staffing, the proper amount of tabulators, the proper amount of printers.

[00:09:06] Gina Swoboda: And again, these printers flaked out in several locations in 2020. It was just a smaller scale of what happened in 2022. This model is a broken model. They should move back to the precinct model. And by the way, they're very proud, the Maricopa County Elections Director, when he presents his plan ahead of time to the Board of Supervisors, they televise that, it's like on YouTube streaming, and he always says, Our vote centers, look how many are along the light rail.

[00:09:33] Gina Swoboda: Okay, what was not along the light rail? Elderly, suburban voters of the party on the right are not. By closing their precincts, They're not going to drive far to a strange neighborhood and they don't know where they are. They can't park because now you're in an urban area, right, that's unfamiliar to them.

[00:09:48] Gina Swoboda: It's the Cass Sunstein kind of nudge method. They're going to, they have been driven to voting by mail, by taking away their location that they used to be able to get to, that was in their neighborhood that they knew where they were. [00:10:00] And it might change, it might be the Presbyterian Church, then it might be the elementary school, but it's always in your precinct, in a close geographic location to you.

[00:10:07] Gina Swoboda: So if you're in a... Going miles and miles away from where you live to cast your ballot, and I find that disgraceful. It's also the

[00:10:15] Leyla Gulen: exact opposite of what they're purporting to say that they're for, which is to make voting easy, right? It doesn't sound easy at all. Now, Gina Sabota could rub the genie lamp and have things go as smoothly as possible, not just in Maricopa County, but maybe the entire country.

[00:10:33] Leyla Gulen: What would be the best way to vote in the United States,

[00:10:37] Gina Swoboda: ideally? In my beautiful dreamland, where I can control those things, it's precinct or ward based voting, it's the neighborhood close, it's your neighborhood, it's pre ordered. Preprinted paper ballots. You have 115 percent of the amount required based on the number of voters in your precinct.

[00:10:56] Gina Swoboda: That's the gold standard and you have on site [00:11:00] tabulation. Arizona. Many of our counties don't have on site tabulation, so you're dropping your I call it a naked ballot. This is how we keep elections exciting. The naked ballot. It gets dropped in a bucket on election day, and they take the bucket back and tabulate back in their central count headquarters where no one can see that.

[00:11:17] Gina Swoboda: So One of the recommendations of for Maricopa County, when they did their own kind of internal investigation, they appointed a former state Supreme Court justice, a wonderful person named Ruth McGregor to conduct the investigation, and interestingly, in her suggestions, she at no point said, Well, why don't you go back to the precinct polling place and reprinted ballots?

[00:11:37] Gina Swoboda: That would have been great. She said, Well, maybe you should not tabulate on set. Well, that's exactly, to me, the wrong direction. So, basically, the thought there is, no one would have noticed that the printers were failing because the tabulators wouldn't have spit it out. If you had only taken them back and the disaster had happened back in central count, the voters would have been none the wiser.

[00:11:57] Gina Swoboda: That's, that's not helping transparency. [00:12:00] That, that's not the way to do it. And I personally believe that absentee ballots and mail ballots are best served for excused absentee ballots. Like, I have a surgery, I'm being deployed, I have this emergency, my dying loved one's in another state. You come in and you have, and you, you're excused and in that case, and only in that case, the wonderful Jason Sneed at the Honest Elections Project, which is a fantastic organization, does a lot of polling in this area.

[00:12:28] Gina Swoboda: And they have found that by and large, majorities of people in, in, here in Arizona, for example, they are willing to shrink the early voting window. They are willing to move to in person early voting for a week before election day. That gets a majority of our people that agree with that. And then excused absentee balloting only where, as we said, you're deployed, you have surgery, there's, there's a crisis in your life that makes you unable to vote in person.

[00:12:55] Gina Swoboda: People are willing to go there, and I think we need to take, as Trump used to say, little [00:13:00] bites there, little bites at the apple to get back to a place where we've restored integrity in the process, because I agree with you, in the 2020 cycle, we had a lot of states that have never done widespread mail balloting Attempts to just kind of jump in and he can't do that.

[00:13:17] Gina Swoboda: I mean, Arizona's had mail ballots for a long time. I personally don't like them, but they've had them for a long time. States like Nevada did not have them for a long time. Just mailed everybody a ballot and it was a mess. Now, in their infinite wisdom, the legislature in Nevada has decided to continue with that.

[00:13:36] Gina Swoboda: The combination, Michael, of automatic voter registration So you didn't mean to register to vote. You went and got a license and they registered you. And then we're going to send everybody a ballot whether you want it or not. It's a disaster. Well, take France

[00:13:49] Leyla Gulen: for instance. France banned mail in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in Corsica.

[00:13:56] Leyla Gulen: Postal ballots were stolen and bought while mail in ballots [00:14:00] were used to cast the votes of the deceased. Among the 27 countries in the EU, 63 percent ban mail in voting. 16 countries in the rest of Europe also banned mail in voting. So maybe there's something we can learn here and get somewhere through the

[00:14:16] Gina Swoboda: court system.

[00:14:17] Gina Swoboda: So Arizona won a case at this, at SCOTUS. It's a Supreme Court called Brnovich v. DNC, which took care of two issues. One was the precinct based polling model. If you insist on voting out of your precinct and we're doing the precincts, then we don't count it. And of course, the reason is you're voting in races that don't count.

[00:14:36] Gina Swoboda: So we don't want to count it. And the second was, and I call it ballot trafficking, because really, we're not harvesting a crop of good things. We're trafficking in boats when people are doing that kind of thing. And we won the, they upheld our case. And basically, now in Arizona, your family member, your immediate family member, or someone you live with, or a caretaker, you're like in a nursing care [00:15:00] facility, can drop them off.

[00:15:01] Gina Swoboda: But none of it's good. We used to not have the secret ballot. And in effect, the undue influence that people could lean and leverage on other people, uh, if your boss, if you're like, let's say you're in a state with unions and your shop steward knows when the mail ballots and they come knock on your door.

[00:15:17] Gina Swoboda: Hey, Jimmy, uh, your mail ballot come, did you hand your mail ballot over yet? Want me to help you fill in your mail ballot? It's not that In the Civil War, if anyone that's listening has been to the beautiful Smithsonian Museum of American History, there, the ballot book, the long book from the Civil War is there, because in the Civil War, we sent people to the battlefield to have people sign for their ballot.

[00:15:39] Gina Swoboda: Because we recognize the importance, even in a time of war, that people be able to personally vote their own ballot, and they should sign in there on the battlefield and have their ballot, and the military obviously was conducting the collection of the ballots, but we didn't say just show up everywhere, just mail it to their house and let somebody else fill it [00:16:00] out.

[00:16:00] Gina Swoboda: We've always in history been able to vote in person, And show our identification, whether that's your dog tags, or that's your government issued photo ID, if your dog tags are government issued, we know who you are, uh, the best among us that sacrificed everything for us. It's ridiculous. It's insulting. And it's, it adds vulnerabilities to the system that are easily exploited as the Baker Carter Commission noted so well in the report you cite.

[00:16:27] Gina Swoboda: Well, Gina, you've

[00:16:27] Leyla Gulen: got a lot of people who are proud of the work that you're doing. Do you think that you've got Gina clones out there doing the

[00:16:34] Gina Swoboda: same thing? I try. I do. I would like to replicate. I have been told there's I am nerdly in my ways. I love everything about the process on the vote ref dot com website.

[00:16:45] Gina Swoboda: I'm publishing the voter lists for the whole country so that people can do oversight and make sure that those voter rolls are accurate. If you see a single family house on your block and the list on vote ref [00:17:00] dot com shows 150 people are registered in that house. Perhaps you might want to report that to your county clerk or your county recorder because it's highly unlikely in a single family house that 150 people should be registered there.

[00:17:12] Gina Swoboda: The National Voter Registration Act says public has oversight of the voter list. So I encourage people to get involved in doing the proper oversight because it's the job of the public to make sure those roles are clean. And I thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure. For

[00:17:26] Leyla Gulen: listeners who want to learn more, you can contact Gina at info at voter reference foundation.

[00:17:32] Leyla Gulen: com Gina Swoboda, chief elections policy officer at restoration of America and senior policy advisor to the Arizona state Senate committee. Thank you so

[00:17:42] Gina Swoboda: much for joining us. Thank you. It's been an honor. I hope to see you soon. God bless you.