>> Just as Wisconsin is heading to the polls next
Tuesday, calls from Washington to nationalize
elections. The executive order President Trump
signed this week would create a national list of
U.S. citizens eligible to vote and restrict mail in
ballots. This order is not in effect for our April 7th
election, and Democrats have filed a lawsuit over
it. But does it perpetuate mistrust in the voting
process? We turn to the chair of the Wisconsin
Elections Commission. And Jacobs, thanks very much
for being here. >> Happy to be here.
>> So what is your reaction to President Trump's
executive order? >> I think it was at best
unfortunate and at worst unconstitutional. The
administration of elections is delegated by the U.S.
Constitution to the states, and Congress can make laws
regulating elections. And an executive order is
neither of those things. >> And so it's your belief
that this would not be in effect for the November
elections or, in effect, ever.
>> My suspicion is never in effect, ever. It's sort of
a back door way to create time limits and new
administrative hurdles for voters to go through. Under
the auspices of addressing essentially what our
conspiracy theories about absentee balloting.
>> So if it were to go into effect, what would the
ramifications be? In Wisconsin?
>> So in Wisconsin, by way of example, you can request
an absentee ballot five days before an election and
you are eligible to vote. If you've been a resident
of Wisconsin for 28 days. So a new resident of
Wisconsin could come and ask for a ballot and have
the right to vote under the executive order. However,
that name and that address had to have been submitted
to the US government prior to 60 days before the
election. So you create conflicts between the
statutory rights under state law with this mailing
deadline, and now the government's going to
control whether they will even mail your ballot. And
how do you undo that? What is the remedy if the
government says, oh, you weren't on the list, so I'm
not going to mail your ballot? Ha ha. And the
reason they're not mailing it is maybe because there's
a typo in a list somewhere, or you moved or what have
you. So it's really just sort of creating an
unnecessary and unworkable mess.
>> In, in your mind. Is it more possible with mail in
ballots to experience voter fraud?
>> No, the short answer is no. There's a number of
checks and balances involved in addressing mail
in ballots. First of all, you got to be registered.
Being registered in Wisconsin requires a
driver's license or the last four digits of your
Social Security number. If you don't have a license or
ID, it has to go to your registered voter address.
If you're sending it somewhere else, we send a
postcard to your registered voter address saying, hey,
did you order this ballot to go somewhere else? It
requires a witness with an address to sign your
absentee ballot envelope that affirms that they know
you and they saw you complete this ballot. And
then when it comes in to the elections, municipal
clerks across the state, they check it off, check it
in, and that ballot then is tallied. There's just a lot
of checks and balances along the way.
>> This executive order also seems to be trying to
get at the issue of only U.S. citizens voting,
because that is considered in in some corners, you
know, rampant with with fraud. What is your
knowledge of whether that is happening here in
Wisconsin? Non-Citizens voting?
>> We actually have some numbers on that. There are
four documented cases of non-citizen voting since
2016. During that time, 25 million ballots have been
issued in the state of Wisconsin. And if you want
to do the math, it's like 0.000000 something
something. Of all ballots cast, this is quite simply
not a an issue and not a problem. Non-Citizens,
generally speaking, don't want to get in trouble with
the US federal government, and that's why we haven't
seen really hardly any numbers of non-citizen
voting. And even those cases where non-citizens
have voted many times, it's because they receive some
sort of legal status that they incorrectly believed
entitled them to vote. >> Is this executive order
separate, though, from the US? DOJ suing Wisconsin to
turn over redacted voter registration data?
>> Let me clarify. They're not asking for redacted
voter data. They're looking for unredacted voter data.
They're looking for your complete name, date of
birth, driver's license number and Social Security
number. That information under Wisconsin law is
protected. We don't give that out. And that's a
state law that prohibits that. And I think we've
also seen recent disclosures of I believe it
was a DOGE employee who loaded the entire some sort
of entire Social Security database onto a thumb drive
and took it elsewhere. Wisconsinites want their
private information protected. They don't want
it going out to be shared by the government with
random anti-voting entities so they can, quote,
investigate non-citizen investigate non-citizen