Interview: Ken Cuccinelli Brings His Election Transparency Initiative to Heritage

Former Virginia Attorney General and acting Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli recently announced he was bringing his Election Transparency Initiative (ETI) into the Heritage Foundation. ETI helps conservatives fight election fraud before it happens.

Cuccinelli spoke this week with Daily Signal Virginia correspondent Joe Thomas about the initiative and the new partnership with Heritage.

This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Joe Thomas: Welcome to Heritage. Did you ever think that you guys would be part of the Heritage Foundation?

Ken Cuccinelli: Certainly not until this year. You know, we pushed along really independently. And in terms of raw manpower, we’re relatively small shop. So, one of the huge benefits of merging in under the Heritage umbrella is we bring an awful lot of election expertise and manpower to that issue.

For example, at Heritage Action, they have the whole Sentinel program already set up where they have a grassroots network of local leaders who already care about this issue, who we can help move the needle where they live.

So this is definitely a synergistic opportunity, which means that the sum is greater than the parts. And we look forward to having even more impact as time goes on.

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JT: I know you’ve done some work with my friends at the Virginia Institute for Public Policy and other organizations like that across the country. Talk about where you’ve been up to this point and what you’ve been able to manifest.

KC: Well, and the Virginia Institute was a key player in starting the Election Integrity Network, which is nationwide and who we partner with all the time. And we have had a longstanding practice of coming into states to support state leadership in pursuing good policies or blocking bad ones, rather than coming in and assuming leadership. 

And that’s a big difference I won’t name organizations that do it, but there are organizations that have a Washington focus, let’s just say, who come into states and act like they’re the whole ballgame and claim credit for everything. I will name one of them, the RNC.

One of the things that we have done at the Election Transparency Initiative is we have encouraged people to become election officials, not partisan poll watchers, but election officials. Go get trained. The Election Integrity Network does a lot of this. Again, one of the coalition partners we work with. And there are others in states.

You want to trust an election?

Run it yourself.

And there are more people on the Left inside the polling places than on the Right. But in the last five years, we have helped close that gap substantially. Drives the Left crazy, because they used to own inside the polls, and now they predominate, but they don’t own it.

And that has been very, very effective without changing a single law at securing elections all over the country.

JT: Now, I know in Virginia, there’s requirements that election officials have balance in terms of their affiliations or whatever. But often we’ve found that election officials will be pulled from the Democrat side to backfill where Republicans are not available. I don’t know if that’s every state that has laws like that, Ken.

KC: Not every state, but most states have something similar. But those fairness requirements do tend to exist everywhere, but they are also abused in many places.

And that means that they’re skewed to the Left.

JT: Has it gotten easier to find folks who are already putting down the newspaper with a picture of John Thune on the cover and the SAVE Act in the headline, grasping what it is that the Election Transparency Initiative does?

KC: So, as you noted with our name, it isn’t hard to explain to people what we do, whether they want clean, crisp, clear elections, i.e. easy to vote, hard to cheat, or whether they want it all muddy and messy, which the Left tends to. And there’s really only one reason you might want insecure elections, and that’s because you want people to cheat because you think you’re going to benefit from it.

And look, election cheating is as old as elections. I put up a post this morning on an article that literally two paragraphs, one after the other, about the California June primary. They rejected more mail-in ballots than ever before.

Well, of the 150,000 rejected, 44,000 were rejected for signature mismatches. Well, why do signature mismatches happen? Well, maybe you’re getting old and your signature is trailing off, or maybe someone else is signing the ballot. And so, the next paragraph said, and election experts say, that mail-in ballot fraud is very rare.

I mean, with a straight face, those things literally sat next to each other. And I can tell you, as a former prosecutor, that’s not one case of 44,000 signature falsifications, because of course, they are potential signature falsifications, but it’s awfully good starting evidence if you’re a prosecutor. But every single one of them has to be investigated independently.

So, these election experts who’ve never spent a day in their life managing prosecutorial resources, it never occurs to any of them the incredible weight of manpower and resources that it would take just to investigate, forget prosecuting, just to investigate those 44,000 rather obvious instances of potential voter fraud, and then prosecuting whichever ones are appropriate to prosecute, however many that might be.

And by the way, it’s cost efficient to secure elections on the front end. That’s why requiring voter ID, it isn’t just good for secure elections, it’s also efficient.

It’s so much more efficient to stop fraud than to investigate and prosecute it. And frankly, much easier to do.

JT: And that’s why the SAVE Act is so important to confirm citizenship on the front end, not wonder about it on the back end.

KC: Yeah, because then you need a bunch of investigators digging around and looking for and following trails.

JT: Do states need to devote more resources to elections as a grand scheme of things? Or they could just be more efficient?

KC: To your question about putting more money in, they’re working people to death. Sure. And there is simply no reasonable basis for a 45-day election. It doesn’t exist.

If you want people to have lots of opportunities to arrive and vote, etc. I mean, the most you could possibly defend is two weeks.

As we saw in 2020, when in some places, they said, well, we’re done counting, everybody go home, and then they close doors, and they kept counting without oversight. So that that kind of consolidation and simplification saves money. It keeps people, Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, vegetarians from getting worn out in this process.

JT: The mere suggestion of shortening the early voting windows is met with a chorus of “vote suppression, poll tax, Jim Crow,” And yet, if you look statistically, since we began in COVID, trying to find ways to keep people from all gathering together and voting in person, we’ve watched voter turnout decline across the country, even in presidential elections.

KC: You’ll recall HR 1, the Democrats, Washington takeover of elections they tried to do in 2021 and 2022.

An important person who testified was a guy named Bill Gardner. Bill Gardner was the longest serving secretary of state. And I believe in American history, he was New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, he was a Democrat.

He testified to the exact point and he brought the data on voter turnout.

New Hampshire is extremely limited in mail voting. They have a history of in person voting.

And he compared it, for example, to Oregon, one of the first states to go all mail voting. And the turnout levels in Oregon compared to New Hampshire went down.

And so, mail voting, the longer period of time is not increasing voter turnout. It might be easier in the sense that you don’t have to leave your house. But it’s more complicated in terms of the election system.

Now, I will say, some states like Wisconsin don’t even open the envelopes, they don’t even begin the processing until election day. And it takes a long time to process each mail ballot, relative to just counting a vote of someone who shows up in person.

This is why Florida, the third most populous state, can throw six million votes up on the board an hour after their polls close. Because they’ve done all their processing beforehand.

And by the way, when you process beforehand, if you’re going to do mail in voting listeners, and you find a mistake, you can notify the voter, right, instead of their ballot going in the trash can.

So, you actually get a curing opportunity that you don’t get in those states that don’t process before election day. That’s an interesting point on that.

I agree with the president on mail and voting, it should be the old Virginia rule of if you can’t get to the polls on election day, or you’re too handicapped or aged or invalid or convalescent to get to the polls, you get to vote by mail. Otherwise, you vote in person.

It’s also simpler, it’s cheaper, it’s more secure. Even Jimmy Carter in the Carter Baker Commission of 2005 identified mail in voting as the most insecure, mistake and fraud prone part of our elections. And that was 20 years ago on a bipartisan basis.

JT: This is the expertise that is coming to bear now through the Heritage Foundation and their association with the Election Transparency Initiative. Is there a plan already in place for what’s next? Or is it just getting in touch with all the state networks that are already out there and saying, how can we help?

KC: Well, we’re always doing that. And we’re always canvassing states, we do try to do quick turnaround support in state legislatures.

Issues can arise, have legislation drafted, be voted on in days or weeks, things can happen very quickly. And we have always at ETI been nimble enough to jump in and support the local election integrity efforts very aggressively and very effectively.

We can bring firepower and air cover that they just don’t have on their own. And with Heritage, we can do even more of that. And we can do it bigger and faster.

And so that’s something that people should keep in mind and look for from the Election Transparency Initiative. Heritage Sentinels are going to be a tremendous relationship opportunity for us at ETI that give us essentially ears and eyes on the ground in every state because the Heritage Action Sentinel Program is already so substantial and developed.

And, you know, that’s not a new exercise for them.

They’ve been effective on a whole range of issues. But now we’re going to we’re going to bring a lot more manpower and experience to the election integrity issue. And with the help of Heritage Action, we’re going to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.

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