Preborn needs your help to provide an ultrasound for every pregnant woman
>> Walker Wildmon: We would like to take a moment. To thank our sponsor, preborn. When a mother meets her baby on. Ultrasound and hears their heartbeat, it's a divine connection. And the majority of the time she will choose life. But they can't do it without your help. Preborn needs us, the pro life community, to come alongside them. One ultrasound is just $28. To donate, dial pound250 and say the. Key word baby or visit preborn.com af.
>> Walker Wildmon: We inform Religious freedom is about people of faith being able to live out their faith, live out their convictions no. Matter where they are.
>> : We quit.
>> Rick Green: Sacred honor is the courage to speak truth, to live out your free speech.
>> Don Wildmon: We also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character and character hope.
>> : This is at the core on American Family Radio.
Walker Wildmon: It's a brand new edition of American Family Radio
>> Walker Wildmon: welcome to The Core here on American Family Radio. Walker Wildmon here with you on this brand new edition of the program. And I'm, not really sure which live programs were not brand new editions, but Bobby, it kind of sounds good, right? I mean it sounds very official. Yeah, it's a brand new edition. It's a brand new addition. Yeah. But if we re air it, it's not brand new, so maybe I shouldn't say that. Or maybe it's not branded. Oh, true, true. Yeah, maybe take that out. Right? Take that out. It would be like a boys band new edition. Yeah, I just want people to know that they're getting fresh content. Right when I say brand new edition. So. And when we do re airs, we tell you guys we're doing re airs. That's right in the disclaimer. So, we are being honest. We are being honest. But we may be contradictory. But we're being honest.
John chapter 14 refutes and disproves all other religions
All right, let's turn our attention to the scripture. John Chapter 14 is where we are this week. Where we are this week. John chapter 14. here, Jesus says, that no one accesses the Father except through him. No one accesses the father. John chapter 14. Jesus says here no one accesses the father, except through me. And ah, also talking about Jesus being the way, the truth and the life. So, this, this point here, it refutes and disproves all religions. Which religion? Folks, I want to be clear. religion, there are false religions. All right? There are false religions. The only one true faith, it's not really truly by definition a religion, but the one true faith is Christianity and the Bible and the God of the Bible. And so when I say other religions false Religions, false faiths, teach salvation, many of them without Jesus as messiah. Some of them teach that, like Islam, that Jesus is a prophet, but Christianity teaches that Jesus is the son of God. Not just that, but he is the only way into salvation. And so that's what we can take away from John, chapter 14. looking at some of the stories, I want to get to this segment and then we're going to talk all things election integrity and the Save America act over the next two segments in the second and the third.
Kevin Hassett says private payrolls are up and government jobs are down
But while we're here, during this time I want to talk about the economy and AI. let's listen to this clip. This is going to be Kevin Hassett from the White House National Economic, Council, head there talking about how private payrolls are up and government payrolls are down. This is going to be clip four. Let's listen.
>> Kevin Hassett: Labor force participation, the number, percentage of Americans that are looking for a job or have a job, actually went to its highest level since 2001. So, so actually people are coming back off the sidelines into the labor market because they see the high wage growth, all the factory starts and so on. And so that's thing one, you know, thing two is that because we've been reducing government, workers, federal government workers so much, about 360,000 this year, that the jobs numbers actually kind of understate how wonderful the economy is doing because the government worker employment has been a drag. And to put it in perspective that we've got the lowest government worker number since 1966 and the lowest share of government workers in the labor force, in all of history. and so we have done something really, really dramatic and downsizing government. And what that does is it helps us be fiscally responsible and get interest rates lower. Now the bottom line is that I've been saying on your show really since we started over a year ago, Stu, that I think that we're going to have a big positive supply shock and that we could have high growth and low inflation. Right now we've got high growth and low inflation and I think there's plenty of room for the Fed to cut rates, because this theory about why you would lift rates right now because of high growth is an old fashioned Phillips curve story that doesn't really apply when you get a big positive supply shock from AI or the Internet. Allen Greenspan understood that back in the 90s and let's hope that some people at the Fed understand it now.
>> Walker Wildmon: So private payrolls are Up. most of the jobs added, by the way, at least for January, were in health care and education, which I personally don't like. no shade on health care and education workers, but we've been adding jobs in those categories for months. And I don't think that's indicative of a necessarily, healthy economy. Health care is up. health care has been dominating the labor market for a couple years now, because healthcare costs are up. And that's not good for your average American because we're seeing premiums go up double digits virtually across the board. So that's a little bit of a negative. But nonetheless, job adds here up to 170,000. We'll talk more with this with Chris on Friday. But very strong jobs numbers. Double the expectations, by the way. They were expecting roughly 70,000 jobs added, and they got over 150,000 jobs added for January. Government jobs are down by the hundreds of thousands. We're at the lowest level of federal workers since 1966. Who would have guessed that? Lowest level of federal workers, comparatively speaking, since 1966. This is historic levels of shrinking the federal government and the amount of the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. and around the country. And so that is good news.
I think AI's effect on the workforce is taking place more quickly than expected
I want to play this clip while we have time talking about jobs. Elon Musk was on with Rogan recently. Joe Rogan talking about AI taking digital jobs faster than physical. This is something that some people did predict, but this is coming a little bit quicker than some might have imagined. Let's listen to Elon Musk. This is clip 5.
>> Elon Musk: AI is really still digital. Ultimately, AI can improve the productivity of humans who, who build things with their hands or do things with their hands. You know, literally welding, electrical work, plumbing, anything that's, that's physically moving atoms, like cooking food or farming, or like anything that's, that's physical, those jobs will exist for a much longer time. But anything that is digital, which is like just someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs. Like lightning coding. Anything along those lines, that's going to take over those jobs, like lightning. Just like digital computers took over the job of people doing manual calculations, but much faster.
>> Walker Wildmon: There you have it. That's Elon Musk on which jobs will be replaced first. I think this is coming, and I'm going to make a very unpopular prediction here, and then we'll look back in a year and see if it's true or not. But I think AI's effect on the workforce is taking place more quickly than some of us might imagine. some of the, you know, some people say, oh, we won't see the effects of AI, ah, on the workforce for five years or two years. Some say, oh, it'll be 10 years before we see a real effect on the labor market, on the workforce, because of AI taking jobs, which it in fact will do. I would suggest that we're actually seeing AI's effect on the labor market happen more rapidly than we had hoped. I think most of us hoped that this would be kind of a slow introduction into the economy and into the workforce, thus not shocking the system, if you will, from a replacing human standpoint, which I think replacing humans from a AI computer standpoint, I just think it's wrong. Now some would disagree with me, but I just have a really bad feeling about us building robots and computers to take our jobs. I mean, how self, you know, how much do you have to hate yourself or hate your profession to build your replacement in the form of a robot? This is just very unnatural for the human to build something to take its place. And I know people, hard work gets a bad rap. People, some people don't like to work with their hands. They're not taught to work hard. And so they have this unbiblical view of work which really, feeds a lot of this. The unbiblical view of work is where we moan and we groan and we don't want to work and I have to go to school and I have to take a test and woe is me and I've got to actually break a sweat. that type of mentality is unbiblical. the moaning and the groaning and the complaining about work is unbiblical at its core. Right. It's more of a humanist mindset. and a I, am God mindset that, well, I shouldn't have to work. Well, God created us to work and if you don't like that, then you've got a fundamental problem with scripture and God's created order going back to Genesis. God created us to be working beings. And this is before the fall, might we add. All right, so work is not necessarily a curse of the Fall. God created us to be laborers in his vineyard. So work is a good thing. Work is a biblical thing. So I think in essence building non human things to take our jobs is not a good thing. Not a good thing. Now I'm not going to go as far to say it's, it's sin or it's unbiblical. Or anybody who participates in this is, you know, disobeying God. But at some point, don't we have a line here to draw, is what I'm getting at. At some point, don't we have a line to draw? And in the past, technology, yes, you could say in the past technology. And not just technology, but even, mechanics and robotics, which I guess is a form of technology, has taken jobs in the past. So in some ways this isn't a new issue. I guess the rate at which this is happening and the scale at which this is going to happen is what makes this different and what makes me very, very concerned, about the labor market and the workforce in the future. So this is actually an interesting debate. I wish more Christians were having it, and I'm not smart enough to really have a deep debate on this, but we probably need some like Bible teachers and theologians to get together and do a podcast or something and really debate the morality or the lack thereof of artificial intelligence. It would be an interesting debate to have and it would be interesting to see where people land on this. But back to the point of the Elon Musk clip, the reason I believe that AI, while it's still kind of in its infancy, if you will, is having an effect on the labor market already, is because I think employers are not going to onboard employees in which they think they can get an AI chatbot or computer to do that job. Maybe it's not ready today, but in six months or 12 months it's going to be ready to go and can do the same task that the human does. So companies are hesitant to hire humans and replace positions of maybe retirees when they think in the next 6 to 12 months or 24 months, they can have an AI robot or chatbot that does this for, in place of the human. So that would be an example of AI advancements having an effect on the workforce, at a much quicker pace because of the hiring practices that this is affecting, when it comes to, these companies, especially software companies. When you look at the charts of hiring, software engineers have actually dropped off a cliff during post Covid, right on the front end and during the kind of initial A.I. boom, if you will, probably goes back to 2022ish. They were, hiring software engineers like crazy. Right? It was just, right after Covid, it was just. Who could find a software engineer? Nobody. It was very difficult to recruit software engineers because, everybody went remote all the technology boom. Everybody wanted to have the computer guys around to make sure that they could continue to run their business in an efficient manner. Following Covid and, and the whole remote work, model, all of that was being deployed. And so everybody needed software engineers to get all their systems out and going. And then, here we are now where AI in some instances is building software that the software engineers used to build. So the software, get this, get this. Software engineers built AI and software engineers are going to be the first to go in the AI takeover of the workforce. Can you imagine being one of the software engineers that built this animal? I mean this is just crazy. And Humlink, Humlink. If you're one of the software engineers that built AI and now you're being replaced by the non human that you built. Crazy world we live in. Hey, we're going to have Jason Sneed with us to talk about election integrity in just a few minutes. Stay tuned.
>> : The AFR app is a powerful tool, but it does have limitations. You can't use it to change the oil in your vehicle or get rid of carpet stains. It won't walk the dog, won't pick up the dry cleaning or take the kids to practice. But while you're doing those things, you can listen to your favorite AFR content through the app on your phone, smart device or Roku. Just go to your app store or visit afr.net Listen to AFR wherever you go with the AFR app at the Core. Podcasts are available at afr.net now back to at the Core on American Family Radio.
American Family Radio welcomes Jason Snead to talk about election integrity
>> Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to the program here on American Family Radio. Well, earlier this week, on Monday, we talked, with our good friends over at the Conservative Partnership Institute about election integrity, the Save America act, and why the US Senate needs to pass that. It's currently being resent through the House of Representatives and then back to the US Senate, hopefully for passage. we got to get a lot of pressure on the U.S. senate and the Republicans to get that thing through the finish line. But nonetheless, that's the latest on it. So we're going to keep tracking it and we wanted to have on our good friend Jason Sneed, a previous guest of the program. Jason Sneed is executive director over at the Honest Elections Project and he's here to talk about all things election integrity, securing our elections starting at the local state and of course making it to the federal level. Jason, welcome back to the program.
>> Jason Snead: Thank you for having me back on.
>> Walker Wildmon: Well, Jason, if we could take this from the ground up so our listeners have kind of a complete picture as to what we're dealing with the elections. Obviously, there's local, there's state, and there's federal elections. And then local could either be municipality or county. And, there's a lot that goes into the different layers, and you've got different governing authorities over different parts of the election. but there's a lot of control and authority that local and state officials have over elections even before you get up to the federal level. so give us kind of a background or in some context as to the problems with our elections, because some people might listen to this subject and go, well, what's the big deal? What's wrong with our elections? because maybe they themselves haven't experienced voter fraud, are cheating or ballot harvesting or things like that. But give us. Give us kind of the background or in the case for why people should be paying attention to this.
>> Jason Snead: Well, that's a great question and a great place to start, because, if you haven't been the victim or you haven't experienced firsthand voter fraud, I think that's a good thing. And I think it speaks to the success of so many of the safeguards that I know we're gonna get into in the program today. You know, having rules on the books against vote harvesting, having rules on the books to make sure that only citizens are voting, that you. To show voter id, that you have clean voter rolls, and on and on and on. It sort of shows that the system is generally working. But one of the things that my organization is committed to is always improving our election system. We can't take our eye off the ball just because things are working reasonably well. We always should be looking for ways to make the system work better. We should be looking at what our states are doing and replicating successes and avoiding failures. And, you know, one of the best examples of this is. Is Florida. You know, in the year 2000, with the. The infamous chads of the Bush v. Gore election, Florida really became the butt of every joke in the country. It was a laughing stock. And then 20 years later, we get hit with a COVID pandemic, and we still get election results on election night. They spent two decades refining and improving their election system and making, really, a model of robustness so that you can throw a hurricane, you can throw a pandemic, you can throw almost anything at the election system in Florida, and it can chug right along and get you accurate results, generally speaking, on election night. And this matters because no matter what it is that we care about, no matter what it is that motivates us as conservatives, as voters, as Americans, as human beings. We make decisions in elections. Elections decide who is going to be president, who's going to be governor, who our lawmakers are going to be. They decide ballot measures and referenda, on and on and on. And if we don't get the rules of elections right, if we don't get guarantees against fraud that protect the integrity of that process, then what motivates us downstream of that almost doesn't matter. And eventually we may wind up losing faith in our elections, which is a place we do not want to be as a republic. So that's why this is so crucial and that's why my organization is doing the work that we're doing to, as we always say, make it easy to vote, but also hard, to cheat.
One of the things you highlight in your most recent reports is voter roll maintenance
>> Walker Wildmon: One of the, one of the compelling reasons that the state has the ability to clean up a lot of the problems here is one thing you highlight in one of your most recent reports was voter roll maintenance. And you can look at California or Illinois or NewSong York and see some of the major issues with non, voter roll maintenance. But states are the ones that are going to have death certificates. Obviously they're going to have the most up to date information on individuals and citizens and voters in order to properly purge voter rolls. So the federal government doesn't have access to all of that information in order to. Obviously the federal government can't purge state voter rolls. That's state authority. But nonetheless, states are positioned exclusively to properly maintain voter rolls. So what's obviously there's incompetency in some instances, but what's the issue with cleaning up voter rolls? And do some states regulate this through law as opposed to leaving it up to some state official to figure out?
>> Jason Snead: Well, this is one of the most important foundational things to clean elections is having accurate voter rolls. And the reason that this is so important is that while you might have one person who registers to vote and never moves, stays in the same town their entire life, the reality is that there's going to be somebody else who's their next door neighbor who moves away. Right. Each year about 10% of the American population moves across state lines or within a state. But you know, you've got millions upon millions of people that are constantly moving. Many people are unfortunately passing away or they're convicted of a felony that renders them ineligible to vote. In other words, there's a constant churn. And the basic reason that we have voter rolls in the first place is to Establish who is eligible to vote in an election in our states, in our cities and our communities. If you're not keeping up with that constant churn of people that are coming in and that are going out, then you get a lot of deadwood and that deadwood builds up and eventually you have a massively inflated, bloated voter roll with bad data. And that creates all sorts of problems, including exposing your elections to, to fraud. And so you have to keep up with that churn and you have to have effective state laws that, that allow you and indeed require election officials to do that. One of the things unfortunately that we've seen is that the push for clean voter rolls, like so many other things, has got caught up in the partisan politics of the moment. And you'll often hear the left derisively refer to this as voter purges. Right. With the kind of scare quotes surrounding that. And really what they're saying is you shouldn't be able to effectively clean up the voter rolls. People who are dead should stay on the rolls. People who have moved away should stay on the rolls. That's really what they're arguing for. And there's really no good reason. You know, this is very common sense. We all routinely go into our refrigerators and we find spoiled food and we throw it out. And that's all we're doing here with clean voter rolls is making sure that expired, outdated you registrations, registrations that are ah, duplicative, registrations that are no longer valid are being removed so that we know at bottom who is allowed to vote in our elections and who are not. And there are many red states that do this very well. But then you get blue states like California that will do almost everything humanly possible to avoid having to clean up the rolls. So much so that a recent lawsuit from ah, an allied group of ours, judicial ah watch, led to millions of outdated registrations, millions being removed from just one county's voter roll. Los Angeles county, just a couple of years back.
>> Walker Wildmon: Yeah, and this, this outdated voter registration or voter rolls is obviously a problem for many reasons. One of the primary ways that, that an outdated voter roll can be used and you can, you can if you've got something else. You guys study this more than I do. But I'm just thinking off the top of my head here is for when we were dealing with the ballot harvesting in 2020, one of the ways that folks can, one person can vote 10 times is by easily identifying, hey, these 10 people, number one, they don't even live in the state anymore, or maybe they passed away, they're dead. But I'm going to use their name, and their address because I know that they're not around anymore and I'm going to vote 10 times for the same person or the same people. this is the kind of stuff that's happening. And so when you, when you leave people on the voter roll that have either, that are either no longer alive, don't live in the state, maybe they're felons, you're opening the door for these mass ballot harvesting schemes where you've got paid individuals going around, addresses, filling out different forms, getting stuff shipped around and they're filling out 10 or 12, 30 ballots. that's just exhibit A of some of the things we saw in 2020.
>> Jason Snead: Well, that's right. And that's one of the big problems. And you know, a lot of times people will ask me why this is such a big deal. After all, it's just a voter roll. But then when you add in other policy choices, particularly in blue states or even some of the laws in battleground states, right. Nevada, for instance, when you start sending mail ballots to every single person on that voter roll, well now suddenly an outdated, inaccurate roll that has hundreds of thousands or millions of additional registrations that actually are not people that are in the state or even people that are alive becomes a massive problem. And it creates opportunities for exactly the sort of fraud that you were just talking about. Especially if you're pretty confident, if you're an election fraudster and you're committing this in a blue state, that nobody's ever going to come back and take a look, nobody's ever going to come back and take a close look at what's going on. Because to do so would be to admit, against the interest of liberal politicians, unfortunately, that voter fraud is a problem, that it does occur and that maybe some of the laws like voter id, like clean voter rolls, like bans on vote harvesting and the basic requirement that, hey, if you're going to vote by mail, you should at least have to actually request that ballot, that these are all good ideas. And this is where you can immediately start to see the snowball effect. It begins with something very simple, which is a state choosing to allow its voter rolls to become bloated and inaccurate.
>> Walker Wildmon: You know, once again we're talking to Jason, Sneed with the Honest Elections Project.
Jason Snead: American elections are operating in like the 1970s
Jason, there are so many things that we do in our day to day life that has robust security measures, ah, associated with it for Example online banking. There's a litany of security measures that banks use to ensure that if Jason's logging into his bank account, it's in fact Jason. Right. and we can take that over to social media platforms. Some of our business accounts, companies, have all kinds of robust security measures to make sure, hey, it's only my employees logging into the company system. you can look at 100 examples at robust security measures that are not necessarily costly, don't take a lot of time, but they ensure that only people who are supposed to be in systems are using those systems and make sure it's the right person. But Jason, you look at our elections and we're so operating in like the 1970s. Some would say we're operating in the 40s, but it's, we're so laxed with.
>> Walker Wildmon: It and it's just shocking to me. Maybe not, maybe not so shocking, maybe I'm naive, but, but it's just frustrating to me that we don't treat our elections in the same type of serious, secure, robust manner in which we treat things like online banking. I mean, it just seems like a no brainer. And the technology is out there.
>> Jason Snead: Well, it's 100% right. And the technology has only gotten better in the last 20, 30 years. And yet we continue to see problems crop up that weren't even there before. I mean, you know, I don't know how many of your listeners remember the TV show the West Wing, but that's a show from the late 90s. And there's an episode where the president's running for reelection and there's a little, you know, kind of chiron on the bottom of the, of, the reelection episode one Election day. And over the course of the episode, you see basically everybody showing up and voting on one day. And that was in the late 90s with a fairly liberal television show. It wasn't that long ago that we didn't have mass male voting and that we got results reliably on election night. And now here we are in a world where we see more and more mail voting, we see states trying to let those ballots come in for days or even weeks after election day. You know, Illinois will accept mail ballots up to two weeks after the election is over, which means that you can basically go to bed confident that one side is one, and then wake up and, you know, three days later, suddenly the other side is winning. As more and more ballots just keep trickling in and we get those delays that crop in and that really reflects choices that we're making. And they're not choices incidentally, that most voters want. I mean, if you look at the polling, it's very clear voters want common sense safeguards by overwhelming margins. Americans are demanding this and they're frustrated that they're looking at really poor choices being made and really foisted on them under the guise of protecting their right to vote. But what they're actually doing in so many cases is leveling down on basic safeguards that to your point, we expect in every other aspect of life. And they are leveling down on those systems and they're exposing our elections at a minimum to questions about the integrity of the process and at worst to fraud. And I think that's unconscionable. And I think that's why it's been so good to see so many conservative states really leading the charge over the last few years to plug holes, to tighten safeguards and to give voters what they're asking for, which is elections they can trust.
>> Walker Wildmon: Once again, we're talking to Jason Sneed, executive director of the Honest Elections Project. We're going to keep him on for the next segment. Talk about the Save America act, talk about some of the state laws that he's been working on to shore up America's elections.
Jason Snead asks practical question about how states are handling the ballots
Jason, let me ask you this practical, hands on question about how states are handling the ballots. and I want to get your, tell me why what I'm thinking is wrong because there's got to be some reasoning behind it. But I've always thought to myself, why don't we have our state issued ID number on the ballot where not our, not our full name and address, but my driver's license number or whatever state uniform ID you have is on the ballot. So people can look, an election official can look and go, oh, that's Walker Wildmon's ballot, or that's 804 fill in the blank numbers ballot. what, what's the, is that, is there privacy concerns? Are we concerned about political retribution and doxing people? What's the reason that we don't have state issued ID numbers on everyone's ballot?
>> Jason Snead: Well, it's actually several of those things that you just mentioned. So, if you, if you go back into American history, a lot of times, in the early Republic, you know, voting was a very public, it was a very public process. Right. And so, you know, not quite the same thing as putting an ID number down on ballot, but the same basic idea. There was really no privacy in the voting process. But what you saw was also endemic corruption. Right. Think back to Tammany hall or Chicago style machine politics where where, where folks would would be expected to vote in particular ways and then you could actually enforce that. Right. And so we came up with a whole series of reforms a little over a century ago that included a right to a secret ballot. And part of that was to disrupt those political machines that were corrupting our politics and were essentially enforcing their will by you know, offering voters everything up to and including, you know, a couple of shots of free liquor. As long as you guarantee you vote for a particular way. Yeah, but you know, you can imagine, you can imagine in a modern day political context, imagine a union boss that wants to make sure that all of his union, union workers are voting the way he wants. And now he can very easily do that. That's the danger.
>> Walker Wildmon: Okay, that makes complete sense. Well, hey, Jason's with us. Jason Sneed on a selections project. He's going to be back with us in a few minutes. Stick around.
Preborn is on the front lines for at risk babies and mothers
>> Walker Wildmon: In many ways, abortion was on the ballot this past election. And there's reason for concern. There are many counties, cities and states who have radicalized abortion and thousands of tiny babies will continue to lose their lives every which is why the ministry of preborn is on the front lines for at risk babies and mothers with unplanned pregnancies. Preborn sponsors clinics positioned in the highest abortion areas in the country. By providing them with resources that they.
>> Walker Wildmon: Need to rescue babies.
>> Walker Wildmon: Preborn continues to expand their life affirming care. Their end of year goal is to equip 10 more clinics with ultrasound machines. These life saving machines cost $15,000 each, more than most clinics can afford. When a woman meets her baby on ultrasound, she is twice as likely to choose life. And when she comes to a preborn clinic she will also be embraced with God's love. $28 sponsors one ultrasound. And now through a match your gift is doubled. How many babies can you save? Please donate just dial £250 and say the keyword baby. That's £250 and say the keyword baby dot or you can go to preborn.com afr that's preborn.com afr all gifts are tax deductible and PreBorn has a four star charity rating.
>> : This is at the core on American Family Radio with your host Walker Wildmon.
American Family Association put out a statement supporting the Save America Act
>> Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to the corps here on American Family Radio. And just out this morning, American Family Association. We put out a strong statement in support of the Save America Act. This is A piece of legislation that, we're talking with Jason Sneed about from the Honest Elections Project where we're going to begin talking to him about. We've been talking state and local elections mostly, but we put out a statement of support and we've been activating our audience to email and call their congressman and their senator in support of the Save America Act. Broad, bipartisan support, for this legislation. Over 70% of Democrats, nearly 90% of Republicans are in support of this. 85% of the general public is in support of it, both Democrats and Republicans. It's just a no brainer. And, has broad, broad bipartisan support when it comes to what the voters think about it. Jason Sneed is with us.
One of our biggest priorities has been getting foreign money out of our politics
Jason, let's get into the law, state laws and then what's going on in Washington D.C. tell us about some of the work you guys have been doing at the state level to shore up some of, the election procedures and laws at the state level.
>> Jason Snead: Well, one of our biggest priorities over the last couple of years has been getting foreign money out of our politics. there is a long standing federal ban on foreign nationals contributing to candidates. But federal law doesn't consider things like ballot measures to be elected. And so there's actually been a loophole in our laws that's allowed groups on the left, if you can believe it, to launder hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign money into campaigns to rewrite state constitutions and state laws. And this foreign funding loophole, as we call it, is so absurd that a foreign billionaire can pump unlimited millions into ballot measures that change the rules of elections in our state elections, that they are forbidden from independent influencing because of that federal law. That's how absurd this foreign funding loophole is. And we've been working to close it. We, worked closely with Ohio to get foreign money out of their ballot measure process. And not a moment too soon. Because in the middle of that fight in 2024, you had this one group on the left, the 1630 Fund, pumping millions into a redistricting measure to try to take control of Ohio's redistricting process. And these are millions in foreign tied funds because this one group, group has taken almost $300 million from a foreign billionaire and then turned around and spent $130 million in 26 states on ballot measure campaigns. So that's the scale of the problem and that's just the tip of the iceberg. And so after we got our successful ban in Ohio, we've been working in other states we got eight more states to pass it last year and we're working with more than a dozen this year to try to make sure that we have these kinds of protections against foreign money in our politics. And then we're also looking at other critical issues. You know, we've got the left on the back foot when it comes to ranked choice voting. This is something that they're spending millions to try to push on, our state and local elections all across the country. They're even trying to bring it to presidential elections. but we've been successful in getting 17 states to ban ranked choice voting. And we're continuing the fight this year with even more because the left isn't stopping. They're trying to expand it. In my home state of Virginia, Democrats came into power and this is one of the first things they're doing. They're trying to expand it up in Maine, they're trying to bring it to Ohio. So we really, we really need folks up in Ohio and, and every other state to pass these bans even without ranked choice voting, because there's no ranked choice voting in Ohio, but two cities want to put it on the ballot in November. So it's better to cut that off early rather than wait for the mess and try to clean it up later. And then we're looking at other common sense reforms too. Proof of citizenship laws at the state level. They should be passed and they should be passed now. And and we're looking at other protections as well to make sure that we have the best possible and the strongest safeguards for our elections. And we're not stopping this year. This is not just about the 2026 election. It's not just about any single election. this is about the long term fight to make sure that we have only American citizens voting in our elections and that our citizens can trust the results of those elections.
>> Walker Wildmon: Jason, when I heard recently that you did not need to prove citizenship in order to register to vote, I was quite shocked. And I don't know why that hasn't stood out to me before. But I just assumed, right, I just assumed when you go register, you've got to show some kind of proof of citizenship. But obviously that's not the case and it's not the case across the country. So tell us. And then this is going to end up leading to the Save America Act. But why is that? Isn't there some kind of court rulings or congressional action that has really clogged up the system and made it where stant states currently can't require proof of citizenship. What's going on here?
>> Jason Snead: Yeah, that's exactly right. So there is, there's a real problem here because ordinarily you would expect exactly as you said, that before somebody is able to, to get on the voter rolls that you got to prove at bottom that you're an American citizen. But you've got federal law that's been twisted in the courts at the behest of liberal special interests that are filing, you know, incessant lawsuits. And they've been successful, unfortunately, here with the Supreme Court ruling that says that federal law, which requires states to accept and use a federal voter registration form, cannot attach additional requirements to that form. And the form does not require you to provide what we call documentary proof of citizenship. That's something like a birth certificate or a passport or something else that actually proves citizenship. It just asks you to check a box. That's all you have to do is check a box saying, I'm a citizen, and then sign on the line. And then you have to use that form and add that person to the voter rolls. Now, afterwards you can go in and you can try to identify non citizens on the rolls and take them off, but you still have to accept and use that form. Which means that it's now impossible for states to actually require proof of citizenship from every single person who is registering to vote in our elections. And that's a huge problem. And I know we're going to talk about the SAVE act here in a little bit, but that's that bottom of the SAVE act is designed to fix is to make sure that federal law is no longer a straitjacket constraining states. It will act instead as a way of making sure that states have to actually verify citizenship before they allow somebody to vote in our elections.
>> Walker Wildmon: So the SAVE act has passed. By the way, folks, the SAVE act has been introduced in at least two Congresses and has passed the U.S. house of Representatives on multiple occasions. I believe upcoming, if it passes this evening, which Jason's tracking, I believe that'll be the third time it has passed in recent years. but nonetheless, this is the bill that will address a lot of our concerns here. And if this bill is passed, it will address federal elections and require two things. There may be some other provisions that Jason wants to note, but the two primary provisions is the SAVE act, or as it will be called in the Senate, the Save America act will require proof of citizenship upon registering to vote. So you take birth certificate, passport, some form of proof of citizenship with you when you register to vote. Secondly, it requires photo ID when you show up to vote. All right, so that's two different ways in which we'll address this. Should this Save act or this Save America act become law and President Trump sign it. Those are the two main provisions. But, right now, Jason, getting this through the House seems like it's going to be not a problem, but it's the Senate that there's a lot of question marks about.
>> Jason Snead: Well, that's right. It looks like it's going to pass, unfortunately, on partisan lines. it doesn't look like there's going to be any Democrats in the House that ultimately vote for this. They're going to, to smear and slander the bill, and anybody who supports it is as supporters of Jim Crow 2.0. It's the same tired, broken record talking point that they've been using for years to attack any election integrity law that, they don't like. And in, the Senate so far, the only Democrat that has indicated that he'd vote for this is John Fetterman, who very rightly, I think, took his colleagues to task for suggesting that, that something as basic as showing an ID amounts to racist voter suppression. but it's unlikely to get through the Senate because you don't have any other Democrats that are publicly on board. And that, to my mind is really, that's the thing that nobody in the media has talked about, that's the thing that so few people have actually engaged on, is you've got more than a dozen Democrats up for reelection or retiring, which means you've got people running for those seats. You only need seven of them, them to break ranks and say, look, enough is enough. I'm tired of the wild progressive politics that are dominating my party. Only American citizens should be voting in our elections, full stop, and you can't get there. And, ah, that's really the question that I think should be dominating the discussion because obviously conservatives want this, Republicans want this, and if you look at the polling data, almost all Democrats who aren't elected to office want this. And yet you can't find any, except for John Fetterman, to his credit, that are willing to break ranks with the party. And, say enough is enough. Only American citizens should be voting in our elections.
>> Walker Wildmon: Yeah, this is, it's going to be very telling, Jason, to see how Senator Thune handles this, because this cloture rule that the Senate has been hiding behind for a couple decades now, it requires 60 plus votes to pass any piece of Legislation, unless they want to deal with the reconciliation budget process, which actually has a lot of, a lot of things that keep your hands tied from addressing, policy, like voting, et cetera. So you can't do that through the traditional budget process. but Senator Thune and McConnell, going back to McConnell, they have been very married to these rules, almost religiously. It's kind of weird, It's a weird fascination that they have with these rules. But rules change, and majorities make the rules of the Senate and the House. So, for example, the House of Representatives, every time they get a new speaker, the caucus all gets together and they debate the rules, and then they change the rules if they want to, to, determine how the House represents Representatives is going to operate. The same thing over on the Senate could be happening here. The, majority can alter the rules. And I just think we've got to get this passed. And what we're suggesting here is not completely get rid of the filibuster, which, it's truly a fake filibuster, but we're saying let's do the real filibuster. And the real filibuster is that every senator gets two speaking slots. You guys can talk this out for 24 hours or 48 hours, and then we're going to vote on a simple majority basis.
Jason Lewis: Chuck Schumer and his party tried to nuke filibuster
What do you say, Jason?
>> Jason Snead: Well, I think that, it's really unfortunate that we had to have these kinds of discussions, because I think that we wouldn't be having these discussions if, Chuck Schumer and his party hadn't tried just a few years ago to completely nuke the filibuster. And, the first things that they wanted to do, of course, were take over the nation's elections, impose California's failed election, program on the entire country. And then also, they wanted to, pack the supreme court and add D.C. and maybe even Puerto Rico as a state to pad their margins in the Senate. So they really pushed the nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis. They came within just two votes of getting rid of the filibuster to do it. And now I think there's a lot of folks out there that are very rightly concerned that the next moment that they get all three right, the House, the Senate, and the White House, that they'll get rid of the filibuster in order to do a radical scheme like that. I think those folks are rightly concerned, and I think that is. Is. Is, you know, sort of reflected in the broader debate. But Again, I think that there's a really, there is a first question that should be asked which is, you know, who is in charge of the Democratic Party? Is it Chuck Schumer or is it AOC and the donor base? Because if, if, if Schumer and the democr for the American people as they always say they are, then they can look at every poll going back 20 years and they can see that proof of citizenship is extraordinarily popular. Voter ID is extraordinarily popular. California policies are not. And yet they continue to look at a 9010 issue, which is basically what voter ID is at this point, and they pick the 10%, they look at the 9010 issue of non citizen voting and they pick the 10 again and again and again. And I think that is really telling about where the left is. Whereas you've got conservatives at the state and federal level that are trying to make sure that we have elections where it's easy to vote and hard to cheat.
>> Walker Wildmon: Yeah, this this 60 vote rule, this 60 vote cloture rule is, it's extra constitutional. It's not in the Constitution. The founding fathers did not envision this. And actually the funding fathers, there were only a couple things that they required more than a simple majority. One of them is impeachment or amending, ah, the Constitution. There's only a couple items in which you need more than 50 votes or 60 votes in order to change. And basic legislation was not in the cards. And our founding fathers debated this rigorously when writing the Constitution is what items do we want a super majority to take place in order to, before it gets passed? And simple legislation was not on the table. You, needed a simple majority in both chambers in order for things to become law and go to the President's desk. And so it's not as if what we're doing here, what we're asking is, you know, doing something unconstitutional or against what our founding fathers envisioned. We just want legislation to need a simple majority vote. So when we send 51, in this case 53 US senators to Washington, and we want them to actually pass legislation and enact the will of the people. Jason, thanks so much for coming on. This has been a great conversation. Before we let you go, tell our folks your website how they can track your work.
>> Jason Snead: you can find out more@ah, honestyelections.org or you can follow us on xnestyelections to get all the latest on the fight, for free and fair elections in Congress and in the states.
We need this Save America Act to pass the House this evening
>> Walker Wildmon: All right, Jason Sneed Honest Elections Project executive director. Thanks so much for coming on the program.
>> Jason Snead: Thank you.
>> Walker Wildmon: Absolutely. That's, honest elections.org honest elections.org Jason Sneed, executive director there, with honest elections.org honest elections project. Go check out their work, folks. We need this Save America act to pass the House this evening. We need to get it over to the Senate, and we have to continue the press pressure campaign on Senator Thune and others to pass this legislation. We have to pass it. It is a must. Passed bill, pass bill, so we can secure America's elections heading into the midterms, heading into the 2028 presidential cycle, and every election in the future. It's broadly bipartisan, and we must pass it in the coming weeks.
>> : The views and opinions expressed in this broadcast may not necessarily reflect those of the American Family association or American Family Radio.
