“You’re Being Lied To”: Pennsylvania County Elections Chair Debunks Claims of Voter Fraud

AMY GOODMAN: “You’re Being Lied To About Voter Fraud. Here’s the Truth.” That’s the headline of a New York Times guest essay by Neil Makhija, the chair of the board of elections in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who will help oversee elections in Montgomery County in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are campaigning today. As Trump continues to stir up false claims of voter fraud and similar rumors are flooding social media ahead of Election Day, we begin the show with a video Makhija published with his essay called “Our Elections Are Secure. The Right to Vote Is Not.” The video is illustrated by Molly Crabapple and produced with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt.

NEIL MAKHIJA: Picture this: an America where your voice matters equally, as much as anyone else’s, where your voice carries the same weight, no matter who you are, where you’re from or what you have. That’s the promise of democracy: one person, one vote. Sounds simple, right? But it’s revolutionary. And right now that promise is in danger.

It started in earnest in 2020, when falsehoods spread about our elections became part of a calculated effort to undermine our collective voice. Since then, election deniers have been telling Americans that millions of votes are being cast illegally, by dead people, by people coming in from outside the border, by people stuffing drop boxes with illegal ballots. Election deniers brought these claims to court and lost in over 60 cases before judges of both parties. Yet the lies persist and have exploded into violence.

We saw this play out in the events of January 6th, when people who believed in the lies tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. It also hit closer to home. Just a few weeks after that, someone claiming the election was stolen fired gunshots into a campaign headquarters right here in Montgomery County, across the street from my office.

My name is Neil Makhija. Here in the battleground of Pennsylvania, I’ve been part of a new generation of election officials who are trying to combat the attacks on our democracy. I was born the son of immigrants and grew up in a small coal and steel town. I saw firsthand that while my family was different, we held shared values of hard work and opportunity in common with all of our neighbors. I also saw how easily our communities could be divided over differences.

By 2020, I was teaching election law in Philadelphia. I had to explain to my students why some folks were trying to throw out millions of legally cast votes in Pennsylvania. I knew I couldn’t just teach about this stuff anymore. I had to do something. So I ran for office, and in 2023, I won. Now, as a Montgomery County commissioner, I oversee the elections for 865,000 people. I became the first Asian American to hold this position in all of Pennsylvania’s history. My fellow commissioner, Jamila Winder, is the first Black woman. We are living proof of what democracy can look like.

When I took office as chair of the board of elections, I found that the lies about our elections have become worse than ever. Every public meeting is now full of conspiracy theories. But here’s what I’ve learned: Our elections are secure. You are more likely to get struck by lightning than to find voter fraud. Here’s why.

We have layers of protection to ensure that no one can vote more than once. And starting when a person registers to vote, we make sure that they’re eligible citizens over 18 by Election Day. Whether you vote in person or by mail, there are full paper trails every step of the way. Mail-in ballot envelopes are stamped with unique bar codes. They can be safely returned through secure drop boxes, which are monitored 24/7. Our county voter services and sheriffs manage highly secure daily pickups of the ballots. And every single ballot is scanned and kept safe and secure. After each election, we conduct multiple public audits to detect any irregularities. If we do detect an issue, or if it’s just a very close election, the law requires a full recount.

Pulling off widespread voter fraud with 10,000 different locally run elections across the country would be like trying to rob every bank in America at the same time. It’s just not happening. In my county alone, on Election Day, we have 2,700 poll workers across 430 precincts. These are your friends and neighbors, of all parties, working together to help everyone vote. Witnessing the incredible care that goes into ensuring everyone has a chance to vote, most county officials will appropriately certify an election.

If our elections are this secure, the truth is, none of these lies have been about election integrity. It’s always been about power. American democracy started with just 6% of people being eligible to vote. It took generations upon generations of activists subjecting themselves to violent opposition to expand voting rights to women, to people of color and young people, to a majority of our country. These rights were hard won.

There are some who are afraid of democracy in an ever-evolving, inclusive America. They’re part of a shrinking minority that wants to entrench itself in power and enact policies that set us back to a time when we had no rights. Instead of celebrating record voter participation in recent years, anti-democracy politicians have run for office specifically to introduce laws making it harder for us to vote. They continue to lie about the security of our process, and even go as far as to deny the certification of free and fair elections. Inevitably, this leads to violence. This isn’t just an attack on voting. It’s part of an attack on the American ideal that we all deserve a voice.

To protect democracy, we can’t just play defense. We need to go on offense to expand voting rights and access. We can make early voting easier, provide language assistance, support community voting centers. We can even bring mobile polling places to senior centers or college campuses where voters don’t drive. We need a movement in every corner of the country to celebrate our hard-won right to vote.

It’s time to step up and support those who will hold sacred our democratic process, who will reject violence and accept the outcome of elections, no matter the result. The vast majority of us agree on this, because, in the end, this is bigger than a policy debate. America is on the cusp of something unprecedented, a truly multiracial, inclusive democracy where we respect our differences and our rights, where our highest courts and halls of power truly seek to represent the best interests of everyone. That’s never existed before, not here, not anywhere. That America is within our grasp at this moment, but it could slip away. This is the dream we’ve been chasing since 1776. It’s now up to us to make it real.

AMY GOODMAN: Neil Makhija, chair of the election board in Montgomery, Pennsylvania, reading his guest essay, “Our Elections Are Secure. The Right to Vote Is Not,” the video picked up by The New York Times. It was illustrated by Molly Crabapple and produced with Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt. When we come back, we’ll speak with Commissioner Makhija, as well as former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, Larry Noble. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “The Witching Hour” by Quincy Jones. The musical icon has died at the age of 91. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are both headed to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today on the final day of campaigning before Tuesday’s election. Harris is scheduled to hold three other events in Pennsylvania: in Scranton, in Allentown and Philadelphia. Trump is also heading to Raleigh, North Carolina; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Grand Rapids, Michigan, tonight.

More than 78 million voters have already cast their ballots in the 2024 election. For months, pollsters have predicted the presidential race will come down to seven states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. But over the weekend, the most prominent pollster in Iowa, Ann Selzer, released the Des Moines Register poll which showed Harris has taken a shocking three-point lead in Iowa, which Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020. The poll showed women voters have shifted heavily toward Harris in Iowa, where a six-week abortion ban took effect in July.

For more, we go to the battleground state of Pennsylvania. We’re joined by Neil Makhija, who serves as Montgomery County commissioner and chair of the board of elections in the county, the most populous suburb of Philadelphia. Also with us in Potomac, Maryland, is Larry Noble, the former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission, now adjunct professor at American University Washington College of Law.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Neil Makhija, that was a fascinating video essay you did of your life and the elections in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. It seems, especially as this Des Moines Register poll has come out, which predicted Trump’s victory in Iowa in 2016 and 2020, but now, clearly, it has so shocked even the Trump campaign, he has doubled down on allegations of fraud around the country, and particularly focusing on Pennsylvania, where he and Kamala Harris will be today. Talk more about why you think the elections are safer than they’ve ever been, yet the allegations of fraud are greater than ever.

NEIL MAKHIJA: So, thank you so much for having me on for this topic.

And, you know, when I took office earlier this year, I had thought that we would have seen some of the disinformation die down after 2020, given that the former president took these claims to court in 60 cases, as the video describes, and lost, because there was never any evidence of widespread fraud. But unfortunately, as we’ve seen with other misinformation online, the more they repeat it, the more people believe it. And so, he’s got friends like Elon Musk that are perpetuating the idea that there are millions of votes being cast illegally, whether it’s from noncitizens or from individuals they don’t even describe, they can’t prove, they can’t show. They’re perpetuating this idea that our system is not secure.

And what I’ve done and tried to do throughout my tenure this year is make sure that in our communities, and more broadly, we’re giving people the facts, step by step, on all the safeguards that exist here in Pennsylvania and across the country. And as you say, they are more secure than ever, because our system has been challenged and questioned to such a degree that we’ve reviewed every step of the process and done everything we can to make sure that the process has integrity. And when you have it being run by 2,800 poll workers, as we do here in Montgomery County, you have people from all political parties, friends and neighbors, simply helping each other vote and exercise their fundamental rights. So, when Trump casts doubt on that, he’s really casting doubt on ordinary people.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain why Pennsylvania is so crucial to the election of president of the United States, Neil.

NEIL MAKHIJA: Well, all eyes are on Pennsylvania. And the candidates are here today, the day before the election, because we have 19 electoral votes, and this is a state that, from all indications, is the closest race in the country. It could decide — it could decide the election.

It’s a big, diverse state. I grew up in a coal and steel town in a rural part of the state where a lot has changed and, unfortunately, has been more receptive to the message of Donald Trump. But there’s both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, as well as, most importantly, the suburbs, including where I am in Montgomery County, that have shifted in the other direction, that are likely places where Kamala Harris is going to make gains. And yet the state remains divided quite evenly. I think the Selzer poll is interesting. I think some of the polling could be off, because they could be hurting and afraid to show that someone is breaking into an advantage.

But what we’re seeing right now in Montgomery County is that people are voting at historic rates. And what we don’t know is: Are there crossover votes happening? We know more Republicans are voting by mail than in 2020, and fewer Democrats. A lot of that is by nature of us getting past the pandemic and people feeling OK walking into their polling place. But we’ve had about 160,000 people vote already, and we expect several — three to four times that in person. So, we’re looking for historic turnout here in the suburbs.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how the motor election vans work?

NEIL MAKHIJA: Yes. So, look, when I took office, we wanted to do everything possible to make it easier for people to vote. And one of those things was expanding satellite locations, where you can request a mail-in ballot and submit it on the spot. And we decided to create a mobile satellite office, basically, a voter van. It’s kind of like an ice cream truck where you can submit your ballot. You can register to vote, request it and submit it all on the spot.

And the idea there was to change the story. Right now people are fearful. They are concerned about the integrity of the election. But in the process of getting out there and educating people, I’m trying to let them know that exercising our right to vote is something to be celebrated. And so, we show up in Montgomery County with our voter van. It’s the first of its kind in Pennsylvania. We go to senior centers and college campuses, and we simply make it easy for people to vote on the spot.

And, of course, the Republicans and their lawyers sued me immediately when we set this up. But thankfully, it continues to roll. We stopped on college campus at Bryn Mawr College here in Montgomery County. I remember being asked by someone on the right, “Why did you stop at a women’s college?” I said, “Well, because women have the right to vote.” So, we have to remind some folks on the right that, in fact, helping people vote is simply helping us live up to the promise of our democratic ideals.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned Elon Musk, who promised to give away $1 million a day to voters who sign up with his America PAC. He’s been sued by the Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner for calling it an illegal — he calls it an illegal lottery scheme. Can you talk about the effect of this?

NEIL MAKHIJA: So, I think one of the ironies about those who are perpetuating the lie that there is widespread fraud are often the people who are committing the fraud, and first and foremost Donald Trump in his attempt, as we all know, in Georgia to find 11,000-some votes and to pressure election officials to do so. But now Elon Musk, who’s being told by the Department of Justice that his scheme may violate the law and that they’re investigating him, and he’s also been sued by the district attorney of Philadelphia for operating an illegal lottery.

And fundamentally, it’s very clear that they will say and do anything. And it’s concerning, because if they lose, it’s going to really be a question of what their supporters do after the fact. And that’s the biggest concern for me right now, is if we know on election night, if, say, the Selzer poll is accurate and Kamala Harris does very well, are any of their supporters going to believe the results, going to trust the results, despite the integrity of the process?