EP. 22 — THE PRESIDENT’S FRONTMAN

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Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp, and this is Swamp Stories, presented by Issue One.

Weston Wamp: He was once known as “America’s Mayor” for leading New York City through the days that followed 9/11, but Rudy Giuliani’s legacy has become much more polarizing due to his loyalty to President Donald Trump. And as we better understand what transpired in the weeks after the 2020 election, history will note that “America’s mayor” helped the former president lead a shameless and baseless attack on the integrity of America’s elections.

Rudy Giuliani: Democrat officials here in a city that’s been Democrat for 60 years, and has a very long history of voter fraud, a documented history of voter fraud, instead of going to a high degree of care to allow inspections of the mail-in ballots, there was no inspection of a single mail-in ballot. This is outrageous. An enormously important contest with a very, very suspect method of voting, there was no security. Zero. 

The people of this city, the people of this country, have no assurance at all that those ballots were actually cast. 

Weston Wamp: The Trump campaign picked Pennsylvania as the place it would launch its case that the election fraud of the century had occurred. They dispatched Rudy Giuliani to lead the fight. A week after the election, the president's personal lawyer, famous in his own right, had called a press conference at the Four Seasons in Northeast Philly — Four Seasons Total Landscaping that is.

To some extent the world was watching, especially as Giuliani had promised to detail alleged fraud and prove the attempt to steal the election. He eventually went to court — with plenty of  claims and few facts. It was the first time in nearly 30 years that Mayor Giuliani had been before a federal judge.

Gov. Tom Ridge: I was disappointed. I was surprised. It troubled me that someone with his post-9/11 stature would engage in that kind of public criticism of the most fundamental institution of our government, voting, without a scintilla of evidence. 

Weston Wamp: Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, who served as our nation’s first Secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, agreed to serve as our guide, and to help us unpack what occurred in Pennsylvania post-Election Day, and in the days and months leading up to it.

Because so many Americans — friends of mine and friends of yours — were persuaded by  President Trump and Giuliani’s claims, we are going to carefully examine the basis of their arguments in this episode. No snark, and no assumptions — we’re just looking for the truth. 

This is Episode 22 — The President’s Frontman

Rudy Giuliani: I know this city has a sad history of voter fraud. After all, Joe Frazier is still voting here. Kinda hard since he died five years ago, but Joe continues to vote.

Weston Wamp: Five minutes into what had been billed as a historic press conference and Rudy Giuliani was talking about the late great boxer, Smokin’ Joe Frazier. It was a strangely specific allegation, seemingly unrelated to the 2020 election. And the message was that Philadelphia is so corrupt, or was so corrupt, that one of its most famous, favorite sons was still voting from the grave.

As it turns out, Joe Frazier died nine years prior, not five as Giuliani had said, and per the bipartisan Philadelphia City Commissioners, Frazier was removed from the voter rolls in February of 2012. He hasn’t voted since 2006, and no one has tried to vote as him. Similar false claims of long-dead voters casting ballots also spread like wildfire across the country.

In hindsight, as bizarre as some of Giuliani's claims and behavior were, it was an effective-enough performance that a month later only 24% of Republicans said the election results were accurate. But in terms of facts, there weren’t any.

Gov. Tom Ridge: Let's just talk about Rudy's embrace of the theory that the election was stolen. He had a well-deserved reputation as a really very effective prosecuting attorney. When you are a legal professional and you decide to do civil or criminal work, the only way you're going to convince the jury is through a chain of evidence that they can look at and say guilty or not guilty.

Weston Wamp: It’s clear now, after the 60-plus losses in court by the Trump campaign that followed this bizarre event, Giuliani was showing his hand in the parking lot of the Four Seasons Landscaping. It was innuendo and mistrust he sought to spread, not facts or a coherent argument. He was just making it up as he went. The haphazard plan of the Trump team to overturn the results of the Pennsylvania election was to roll into its biggest city and try to convince Americans and state politicians of how corrupt and untrustworthy its election process is. And all this of course after months of President Trump seeding his base with concerns about vote by mail fraud. 

But prior to Trump waging war on vote by mail, Governor Ridge explained to me that a very different consensus had been established in Pennsylvania. 

Gov. Tom Ridge: Long before we were dealing with this public health challenge, the legislature in Pennsylvania with overwhelming, overwhelming Republican support, more Republicans than Democrats supported something called Act 77, which basically opened mail-in ballots to all registered voters. Here before, when I would vote absentee, you'd have to give an excuse, an explanation, why you couldn't vote in person.

And so this was a very significant change and it was pre-COVID. So it wasn't in anticipation of the need, it was pre-COVID. That has become significant in my mind, because if you look at the president's rhetoric about the election cycle in 2020, and if you can trace back his comments, maybe May, June, or July, having seen the unprecedented turnout, not only in Pennsylvania, but around the country, with the use by Democrats of absentee ballots or mail-in ballots, he began to promote the notion that the only way he could lose the presidential election was abuse associated with absentee or mail-in ballots.

Weston Wamp: Now, no election is perfect and we’re not claiming Pennsylvania was. But to the warnings issued by President Trump about voter fraud, and wild allegations presented by Rudy Giuliani, Governor Ridge remains unconvinced. 

Gov. Tom Ridge: First of all, let me tell you from a perspective as the former governor, we have in each county, a local election board, staffed by both Republicans and Democrats. I consider them to be guardians of democracy. Regardless of their political affiliation, they pay very close attention to the certain requirements that need to be met before the mail-in ballot is to be counted. 

Weston Wamp: All along there was another inconvenient fact that hung over the Trump campaign’s allegation in Philadelphia, and it was this: President Trump’s support in Philadelphia county had increased from 2016 to 2020. What they were claiming is that the fraudsters had stolen the election from Trump, and at the same time they gave him 24,000 more votes in Philadelphia county than he got in 2016. It’s a stretch, to say the least.

Weston Wamp: A couple weeks after Giuliani’s first appearance in Philadelphia, Republican state legislators created a kangaroo court of sorts in the middle of a pandemic — setting up a Policy Committee meeting at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg at the request of Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano. The meeting was designed to give Giuliani and the Trump campaign yet another stage to make their election fraud claims.

Rudy Giuliani: You sent out, in the state of, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1,823,148 absentee or mail-in ballots. You received back 1.4 million approximately. However, in the count for president, you counted 2.5 million.

Weston Wamp: This claim became one of the most popular and viral on social media. Shockingly, it all started when a state legislator tweeted an image that conflated the election registration in numbers in the primary election with the vote totals in the general election. It’s been widely debunked and the real numbers? They’re accessible to the public on an official state website.

Another claim of Giuliani’s that also spread across the country was that votes for Biden were dumped overnight.

Rudy Giuliani: On election night when I went to sleep, maybe when you did, President Trump was leading in your state by somewhere around 700 to 800,000 votes — depending on when you went to sleep. That’s a huge number of votes. 65% of the vote had been cast.

Weston Wamp: So why did the race appear to flip overnight? Well, the answer is straightforward.

Gov. Tom Ridge: Let me remind your audience that President Biden won three out of four mail-in ballots. Pretty striking statistic. President Trump won two out of three cast ballots of individuals who cast their ballots in person, an equally dramatic statistic.

Weston Wamp: So why this divide? Well it’s simple. Trump spent months discrediting mail in voting to his supporters, and they took him as his word. Biden, on the other hand, encouraged mail in voting, and his supporters? They also followed his advice.

Why were there large chunks of votes being reported overnight? The ballots being counted overnight and in the coming days were largely absentee ballots that favored Biden. And why was it that those late night ballots and the ones that followed were mainly absentee ballots? Well that goes back to Act 77, the bipartisan law that enabled mail voting in Pennsylvania.

Gov. Tom Ridge: By the way, it was celebrated as a model of bipartisanship. It was uncontroversial, but the one element that they didn't allow for, and I'm not privy to the negotiations or whether it was ever discussed, was enabling locals to begin counting those ballots as they came in.

And at least Weston, processing them. I will tell you, in Pennsylvania, you can't begin opening the external envelope, as you know, there are two envelopes, your ballot is secured in one, you put that in the other. They couldn't even begin processing those ballots until Election Day. 

Weston Wamp: Contrast that with, say, my home state of Tennessee. In Tennessee, we don’t allow absentee ballots to be counted until Election Day, but the tedious processing of the outer envelope referenced by Governor Ridge is allowed to take place on the day that ballots are received at the election commission.

Governor Ridge and many individuals and groups, including Issue One, had warned that rules preventing early processing of absentee ballots, combined with a major historic increase in mail-in voting in 2020, well those would mean inevitably delayed results. 

Gov. Tom Ridge: When the president, seemed to have won the popular vote in the early hours it was pretty clear to me that the ultimate resolution were hours, if not days ahead, because not unsurprisingly, during the primary season, again, by a factor of two or three to one, the Democrats, more of them had voted with the mail-in ballot. So you end up having a high concentration of Democrats not voting in person, a higher concentration.

Weston Wamp: In all likelihood, the results of the Pennsylvania election would have been known much earlier if the Pennsylvania legislature had allowed ballot processing to begin in the days ahead of Election Day. But their refusal to fix this problem that many saw on the horizon helped play right into the Trump campaign’s narrative. 

In the end, Ridge is concerned that the massive misinformation about mail ballots both in Pennsylvania and across the country could undermine prior consensus to improve the voting system. 

Gov. Tom Ridge: I think mail-in voting, instead of being a non-controversial bipartisan issue, may become a very partisan issue in Pennsylvania. I think in Pennsylvania and probably other states, you may see some efforts, one, to change the mail-in balloting rule, which I would certainly be opposed to, I think it was very appropriate.

It passed with overwhelming support and the notion that the Republicans would try to withdraw that support and change the law because the outcome wasn't to their satisfaction, I would find disturbing. As I said before, there is no inherent political advantage to mail-in balloting.

And so it's my hope that instead of changing the law, the Republican party, as a lifelong Republican, does a better job of informing, educating, and getting its supporters to use these mail-in ballots, as effectively as the Democrats did.

Weston Wamp: In fact, Ridge’s concern is already playing out in state capitals across the country. Many states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia, have seen bills introduced to roll back absentee voting rights.

On the next episode of Swamp Stories, we’re going to speak directly to some of the state and local election officials who ran a remarkably safe and smooth election — especially given the pandemic. It was an election that the federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called “the most secure in American history.”

Weston Wamp: Thanks for listening to Swamp Stories, presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and Independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, senior producer Evan Ottenfeld, producer Sydney Richards, and editor Parker from ParkerPodcasting.com. Swamp Stories was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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