Pushback on Trump's Unsubstantiated Calls of Widespread Voter Fraud
JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: New pushback against Present- elect Donald Trump's continued unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. Trump spokesman, Jason Miller, cited a study by the nonpartisan group, the Pew Charitable Trust, says evidence of Trump's claim that millions of people voted illegally. But the author of that study says the Trump team has it wrong.</s>KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Let's bring the primary author of that study. David Becker is the executive director and co-founder of the Center of Election Innovation and Research. He's joining us now. David, thanks for joining us.</s>DAVID BECKER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & CO-FOUNDER, THE CENTER OF ELECTION INNOVATION AND RESEARCH: Great to be with you.</s>BOLDUAN: Thank you. So, the Trump transition, they cited your study from 2012. When asked specifically about evidence of the serious voter fraud, what did your study find? I want to make sure everyone interprets it as you intended it.</s>BECKER: Yes, the study was designed to quantify the challenges that election officials have in trying to keep their voter lists up to date. This is a challenge mainly because people move in between elections. A lot of Americans move. About one in eight or one in nine Americans moves in any given year. About 30 percent of Americans move in between presidential elections. We want to try to quantify how many records were out of date. Not because anyone was committing fraud but just because they were naturally moving between states or within a state. This is something officials take seriously. There is absolutely nothing in this report about fraud. There's no finding about fraud whatsoever. It was mainly to try to determine what could be done to improve the quality of the voter lists.</s>BERMAN: Let's talk about the types of fraud often alleged by Trump supporters, among others. But noncitizens voting. Have you seen huge numbers of examples of noncitizens voting?</s>BECKER: We've seen virtually no examples of noncitizens voting. It happens. It's above zero. But it's not much above zero. There have been election officials, both Republicans and Democrats, who have looked for this in their states, who have sought to prosecute it. They at most found a handful, maybe a dozen at the most, compared to the millions, hundreds of millions, even a billion votes that have been cast. So, it's not really much of a problem. And it's understandable why not. Why would someone who is not eligible to vote, who's a noncitizen, go to the effort of casting a ballot, presenting themselves, creating evidence about this, and then be prosecuted and potentially go to prison or be deported all for the big payoff of one ballot cast in an election where 35 million ballots were cast.</s>BOLDUAN: David, what about dead people still on voting rolls? That's another thing a lot of people point to, basically, identity theft, and people using dead people's names to vote. Evidence of that?</s>BECKER: So there is evidence that there are records from people who have died that remain on the rolls because election officials don't have the necessary information to remove them from the rolls. We're starting to fix that. There's an effort that I helped lead called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which 20 states and D.C. are now a part of. And that allows them to have much better data about voters who might have died since they last voted and allowed them to remove those names from the list. But, again, there's no significant evidence of any of these people voting or anyone voting and the names of these individuals. It would be fairly easy to catch if it was happening.</s>BERMAN: So in the "no significant evidence" category, Dr. Jill Stein is looking for a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. She's doing it based on largely these reports from academicians that maybe there was hacking of the voting machines. Do you see any evidence of hacking?</s>BECKER: There's been no evidence of hacking. It would be very, very difficult to hack into a system like anywhere in the United States, Wisconsin, in particular. Everyone votes on paper in Wisconsin. There are over 1,800 different election jurisdictions in Wisconsin. They use different technologies. None of those technologies are connected to the Internet. Someone would have to physically go into thousands of different polling places to try to hack those. We've seen no evidence of that whatsoever. I think -- I think the challenge that election officials are facing is that they're seeing people from both sides of the ideological spectrum question the integrity of the machinery that runs our democracy. I think that has some long-term implications for the health of our democracy.</s>BOLDUAN: It has been a big topic during this election. And now it's become the topic even post-election, after the election's been decided. People are afraid of voter fraud. People are afraid of rigged election. As someone who has studied this extensively, is there a reason for Americans to be afraid?</s>BECKER: People shouldn't be afraid. They should feel very confident. There are really good checks and balances in place to protect against any kind of fraud or tampering with the election results. One of the unusual things we do see when we ask voters about this is their confidence in the election results and in the system varies depending on who they voted for. In 2004, when Bush won re-election, Republicans were confident in the results, Democrats less so. In 2008, that basically flipped. I think we need to move beyond any particular election and just think about whether our overall democracy is healthy enough to withstand these partisan divisions, and be prepared for the fact that the candidate you voted for might lose, and that might be what happened, and that doesn't mean the system was rigged. It just means that they didn't get enough votes.</s>BERMAN: Sometimes people lose without there being hacked voting machines. Sometimes people lose without non-citizens voting en masse. And sometimes people lose without dead people voting en masse. It just happens.</s>BOLDUAN: And some people sometimes misinterpret people's studies.</s>BECKER: Thank you, both.</s>BOLDUAN: Coming up for us, several buildings burn to the ground, hundreds more at risk as wildfires rage in Tennessee. Rescue officials are working to evacuate an entire city. We'll take you there live. We'll be right back.