Rick Green [00:00:07] This is the intersection of faith and culture. It's the WallBuilders Show. We're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. And today, yeah, we lean a little bit optimistic on Friday. So we're biased. I mean, we're Joshua and Caleb types. We like to look at the good, the bad, the ugly, but we like to emphasize the good, especially on Friday. So we got a lot of good news for you today. David and Tim have been compiling some good news stories for us. And so we're going to jump right into those. David Barton, of course, America's premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders, Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. And I'm Green America's Constitution coach. Thanks for joining us today. Visit the websites wallbuilders.com and WallBuilders dot show wallbuilders.com is our main site you can access everything we do here at WallBuilders through that website and then WallBuilders dot show if you just want to grab some of the archives. If you missed the radio program over the last few days or weeks. David or Tim, looking forward to today. Let's jump into good news. David Barton with the first piece of good news. David?

David Barton [00:01:00]  Okay, guys, so we're down to the last few days before what probably is the biggest election in our lifetime. We are that every election, but we keep getting closer and closer to the lines. That really is true. And I was looking here at articles and this is an interesting article, and I think everybody probably knows there's seven battleground states that everybody's looking at. If the other states go the way they normally go. And that's not always a guarantee because it could be the state like Minnesota might actually go Republican this time rather than Democrat or, you know, things like that happen. But if it goes the way it's supposed to go, then you're looking at Georgia and North Carolina and Michigan and Wisconsin and and states like that. Nevada, Arizona, they're seven states that everybody's looking at. And so one of those states is Michigan. And so this is an intriguing headline for me. It says, Michigan's voter rolls list 8.4 million voters and the state. Now, the problem with that is Michigan only has 7.9 million inhabitants who are old enough to vote. 

Rick Green [00:02:05] That's a really patriotic state then. 

David Barton [00:02:07] I mean, they're. 

Rick Green [00:02:08] Really excited about voting, right? 

David Barton [00:02:10] They're turning out really high, you know? Yeah. You have 500,000 more people on the voting rolls than you have legal voters. Could 500,000 actually throw an election? Yes, it could real easily. There's no question about it. And this is a state that's very this intriguing to us because we were involved in Michigan. You know, I'm on the road right now doing this from on the road. We're going to all these battleground states and working with faith wins. And we're doing three meetings a day and all these battleground states, getting people out, getting people faith out, getting pastors out, getting all these these folks engaged. And so what's significant about this is four years ago, we had a similar problem in Michigan. And so one of the things we've been doing is recruiting people to poll watchers. And and one of the things that happens with poll watchers is once early voting starts and if you're a state like Virginia, which says grab this guy's 45 days of early voting, 45 days. So what we do would get Christians to be trained, poll watchers get them the takes when those state you're in may be anywhere from 4 hours to 30 minutes to be a certified state official poll watcher. And they can challenge things. And so in Virginia, we would have these there were 1343 poll watchers. We got out of 312 churches. And so they would get the voting list every day of who's voted the day before. Who are all the people who have voted early? And they would go through and they would look for certain things. And for example, I tell them that I look for people over 100 years old who voted, not that 100 year olds can't vote. There's going to be a few of them. But if there's a whole lot of them, there could be an issue. And then also look for for people look for addresses where that more than six people voted from that address. Not that you can't have a big family with that many adults, But again, just look at it. And so they found a place where the 17 people voted out of the same address and said, hey, what's this? And they went to look at that house to see if it was a big house and turned out to be a cow pasture, that there was nobody even living there, not even a barn on the property. And 17 people voted out of that. So putting eyes on the process, having eyes on there. It's something that Bill Bennett said years ago when he was secretary of education for Ronald Reagan. He said sunlight's the best disinfectant. So having people look at it would be key. So when we were in Michigan looking into that, we we found the voter rolls up there. You can check. And same thing. We said we want to see all the people who voted who are over 100. And so each page had 100 people on it. So there were two pages. And in the first two pages, we found 67 people who voted that had online death obituaries. They're dead. They can't be voted. Then the one that was really outstanding was a guy named Jason Daniels. He voted twice in the election, but he was born in 1850. I mean, the dude lived through the Civil War and he still voting for president in 2020. That's crazy. So this is and Michigan was where that happened. And so by federal law, all the secretaries of state are required to remove voters from the voter rolls if that that person is moved to a different state or if mail delivered to their home is undeliverable, or if they don't vote in two consecutive federal elections that they haven't voted in in 11 years, you take them off the voter rolls as active voters. And so at this point in time, federal law requires that. And the secretary of state here has said, well, I think I can get that done by 2027. Now, this is the secretary of state that was there four years ago. And when we deliver all of those those things to her. She then sued the state to keep dead people on the voter rolls. So she's working really hard out of the out of the seven battleground states. Five of them are working hard to clear up the process. The Michigan is one, and this article points it out. So what you find is that Michigan's 83 counties and in 78 of the 83 counties, they have more registered voters than people of voting age. So having said that, that's the tone to what I'm about to share. So if I jumped in North Carolina, North Carolina just announced that they have removed 747,000 people from their voter rolls because they're ineligible. And that could be it took them 20 months to do it. And they were removing 1200 names a day. But it could be because those people have died or they moved somewhere else or they've had 11 years of inactivity or they became felons, were convicted of something, or they found there were duplicate registrations or found they weren't legal citizens or whatever it is. So you have North Carolina is one of the seven battleground states that's really trying to do something and clean it up. And so what they did was they removed 747,000 people off. The roles that should not be on the rolls. And that's that's a huge thing toward election integrity. So that's good news. Oklahoma, which is not a battleground state, but every state should be doing this. But Oklahoma now, they've only got 2 million people in Oklahoma. And they just removed 450,000 eligible voters from their rolls. And, you know, it's massive. And that's not going to determine a presidential election. Oklahoma. They're going to vote red. But you know what? That would determine a bunch of House to state, House or Senate seats or other seats that are there. So kudos to Governor Stitt and the secretary of state there for getting after it. They found that in the last purging that I was 100,000 people, Oklahoma died, 140,000 moved out of state, 5000 convicted felons and 200,000 inactive voters. And so they removed 400,000 from the voter rolls in Oklahoma. So it's not just the battleground states that are trying to clean up elections. And then even in Texas, which, you know, Texas is not a battleground state for presidential. Now we have a close race with our Senator Ted Cruz running for reelection, etc.. But Texas had they've just come out with a ruling that says, hey, you cannot use your driver's license as a voter I.D. If you are non-citizen, you have to show proof of citizenship. The reason that matters is Texas has nearly 3 million aliens here who are not citizens. And that's the legal aliens, not just the legal. So there's 3 million in Texas who would be able to vote if they can show driver's license and they would get a ballot. And so the secretary of state here has come out and said, no, no, no, you have to show proof of citizenship if you are from out of the nation. And so that's another thing that will help. Elections all the way top to bottom again, is not going to matter in the presidential election. But it does matter as you go down the ballot. And then the final one that I point out that I think is a piece of good news, it's out of Georgia. And this is kind of intriguing. And I'm not sure people really kind of understand what this is all about. But in Georgia, the Georgia Board of Elections approves the rule requiring the hand count of ballots. Now, if you can imagine a state that size of the millions of people, why would you want a hand count of ballots? I just thought you guys. Why does that matter? Why is that a good thing for election integrity to have a hand count of ballots? 

Rick Green [00:09:23] Been there, done that, man. You know, I lost my first election when the computers counted. It lost by 20 votes out of 30,000. Then when we hand-counted, I won by 36. So it's the most accurate. 

David Barton [00:09:34] Hey, Tim, any thoughts? 

Tim Barton [00:09:36] Well, yeah, I would say it's probably it gives you a better chance to make sure there's not a rigging. Now, of course, people might argue, but who's going to count and how can we verify that they get it correct? But to Rick's point, I think it's one of the ways that you can ensure a greater degree of accuracy in the election. And what we know in a lot of these states, there's already kind of these trigger laws in place that if an election is within a half percentage point, there's an automatic recount and then there can be requested to be another recount to make sure this can be done accurately. But generally speaking, having people that look at it, they're able to verify, does this ballot meet the standards and who do they vote for, etc.. And so it's considered to be a more accurate way to do things. 

David Barton [00:10:21] Yeah, I think that I think you're spot on both you spot out and I think it's really key because let's take Michigan where they've got more people registered than they have actual people to vote. If you take that, if you have an election, if there's contested and they simply recount what the machine counted, you're going to get the same number on the recount, on the same ballot, you're going to come out the same number. You need an independent verification. You need a different format. And going outside and looking at the physical ballots that way that they put in there. That said, every time a candidate votes, he gets one vote or every time someone votes for Canada, they get one vote. But at the same time, let's give their opponent an extra 1.01%. You would never see that if you didn't have hand-counted ballots. So if you recount the machine, you're going to keep getting the same numbers the calculator gives you every time. When you do it by hand and by eye, that's a big deal. And that was a contested thing that that happened in Georgia, you know, where they kept pulling out the things of what people said were boxes of ballots, etc.. That's really saying never because they're running the ballots through those machines. But if you can go back and hand count the ballots, then it gives you greater verification. So all this to say it's fairly long segment, but there's a lot of election law stuff that has happened in the last few days, the last few months, that give voters a whole lot more confidence when they go to the polls now. If you're in Michigan, I don't know, you know, good luck for you, but you've got a secretary of state that refuses to obey federal laws, that sues to keep dead people on the ballots. And by the way, in Michigan, it's one of the places where we have recruited literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of poll watchers who are being trained by the state, who will go into those polling areas and be eyeballs on the ground, which makes it much harder to cheat. But there's just a lot of good news going right now with the election integrity. 

Tim Barton [00:12:03] And guys, even as we have this conversation, I know if we look at some of the polling, if you look at places like Florida where early voting is happening and it looks like Trump is having a very commanding lead already with some of the indications from early voting in Florida and some of this already happening. Early voting in most states now is already taking place. Some of that going on for nearly a month. But I'm curious, not having lived through this moment, the the Reagan election, where he completely, like sweeps the board, so to speak, of the United States. I'm curious, how how skewed was the polling in, I presume, in his favor going into this? Because one of the things I've heard some conservative pundits talk about is that there is a chance and the likelihood that this election, presidential election is going to be more of a squeaker is the likelihood. But there is a chance that this could be a runaway freight train because there are so many people in so many states that as they're filling up their car with gas, as as they're buying groceries from the grocery store, as they're looking at this immigration problem and the education problems and all of these issues that there are a lot of people leaving the Democrat Party. There's a lot of independents leaning Republican. So I'm just curious, going back to like the Ronald Reagan sweep, do y'all remember what was polling like leading into that election where he took I think it was at 49 out of 50 states, I mean, just absolute and say. 

Rick Green [00:13:29] He got everything except what Minnesota when that where Mondale was from. 

Tim Barton [00:13:32] I was going to I was thinking of Minnesota. I couldn't remember. But what was it like in that moment? Did it feel like a really close election or did everybody know Reagan's running away with this thing? Because, again, some people are just speculating that with how many Democrats are leaving the Democrat Party right now, given how woke and crazy so much of the Democrat Party is, they think that Trump could win a lot of these states that right now are considered tossups or maybe some that are even considered blue Democrat states he might have a chance to win. Do you guys again, do you remember what was that like? Was it a Reagan thought the whole time, no contest. Everybody knew he's going to sweep this thing. What was that like? 

Rick Green [00:14:14] It's a good question, man. I was I was 12, dude. I was 12. 

David Barton [00:14:18] Are you looking at are you looking at me for this or are you looking at me? 

Tim Barton [00:14:23] I'm just thinking somebody did a documentary on Ronald Reagan. They probably did some research. 

Rick Green [00:14:26] Tim was just talking to me as if I was, you know, older than I actually am. And, you know, I guess since I was, you know, we were yesterday. We talked about the documentary I made on Reagan, so maybe Tim thought I knew more about Reagan than I did. But I don't you know, I don't even know. Let's ask David. David, what was polling like back in 1984? 

David Barton [00:14:45] Polling was not a big factor in any election. There was polling out there, but you didn't have the day by day polling. You didn't have the pollsters that made so much money on polling for candidates. It was not a big issue. And so polling was not something that was covered regularly in the news in the way that it is now. We're getting new polls up to the minute, up to the hour. And, you know, you have the daily tracking polls and you have dozens and dozens of companies doing polling and they compete with each other and who's the most accurate. So that was not a big factor back then. As a matter of fact. What was also not a big factor back then was news. You had the news maybe twice a day. You got a morning newscast on the evening newscast, and there was no social media. There was no instant, instant access to breaking news until you got the 6:00 or 7:00 news, whatever it was that night. You got a half hour local news and a half hour a world news. So it just was not the same issue. And we didn't look at the site. But I think there's you know, in speaking of a potential landslide kind of thing. Here's what makes me nervous. Guys, we we talked earlier that we commissioned George Barna to do two polls. And it's just with what Christians, the people that are really active, but we could call them evangelicals, for lack of a better word. They're active about their faith. They're serious about their faith. They go to church and to express their faith is part of it. And then you have just people of faith who may not be active in anything, but they claim to be, people say. So just looking at the active ones, there's 80 million people that we would call in the evangelical category. And the polling we got back just a couple weeks ago shows that 32 million of them planned not to vote. And it's not that they're being turned off by anything because we got a list of the reasons that they're not going to vote. Let me just read you some of the the reasons they say they don't want to go. 68% said they're not interested in politics and elections. So what we're looking at with that is about 21 million evangelicals say I just don't have any interest in it. So, I mean, if you take out 21 million now, that could be a potential landslide that would win 49 out of 50 states that would do it. But when you take them out of that, and then that changed it, 57% said, I don't like either of the major candidates. So we don't expect the surprise to show up because they don't like either one. And then 55%, well, neither one of them reflect my views on what's really important. And then 52% said my one vote. That won't make a difference. And then 50% say I'm so tired of controversial elections, I'm just sitting it out. And then 48% say, well, I believe the election outcome is rigged and I'm not going to show up because it will make it harder. I mean, and the 48% say, I don't know enough about either one, about what their policies are, and I don't want to cast an ignorant vote. So when you start looking at that kind of stuff, when you take 32. Now, here's what I think is startling information, guys. If you take those 32 million evangelicals out of the voting pool, the projected election turnout percentage for this election, in other words, if you take 32 million faith people out, then everybody else that is projected to vote, this will be the lowest presidential election turnout in American history all the way back to George, Wash. And we've never had an election turnout as low as this one is showing to be at this point. And if it turns out that way, I'll put the blame on Christians because 32 million sitting it out. Unacceptable. So I don't know, Rick. I you know, I kind of feel like it's not going to be the margin the polls say it is. All all the on the ground stuff I've said gives me a better. And where do all these battleground states do in all these meetings? Granted. And I just feel like it's going to be a much bigger win than anything in the polls is showing it. But at the same time, I'm not going to be surprised if it's not because the people who should be voting in our direction are sitting at home in higher numbers than ever before in the history of the United States. So that doesn't answer your question. But my my feeling from what I'm seeing is, yeah, it's high. If those people show up, I think it's kind of maybe a possibility of a Reagan type situation. 

Rick Green [00:18:45] I would love to see a map like that. And also one thing we didn't really talk about is even the down ballot, you know, the coattails. We always talk about the coattails of a governor or a president when they do extremely well. That's going to be really interesting to see as well. Quick break, guys. We got some more good news for everybody. We'll be right back. Stay with us. You're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Break [00:19:02]  

Rick Green [00:20:10] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. More good news for you. And I kind of cut us off, guys, because we were late for our break. David, did you have more on that item before we move over to Tim? 

David Barton [00:20:18] No, I just say it's a very, very intriguing situation for us to be in. And you were mentioning coattails, Rick. It's interesting thing happening in North Carolina because North Carolina, you have the internal polling shows Trump leading fairly safely in North Carolina, though, your gubernatorial candidate, Roberson there. CNN broke the scandal on him. You know, all this this scandal stuff. And suddenly he plummeted 33 points. And so when he went down 33 points to North Carolina, Trump is still above, but he's down 33 points. Now, you looking at your state house and your state Senate, you're looking at U.S. Congress. Everything is going down. But then what happened is Roberson pushed back and he filed a lawsuit against CNN, calling it just straight defamation. And he is he has busted his tail out of the western part of the state with all the flood damage and hurricane damage out there, etc.. And so he's come back really, really far. He's back within striking distance now. And so it's interesting. We would never have known that back in the Reagan days because we didn't keep polls like that, day to day tracking polls. But people do. And it affects the way they think. And so I think there's a real chance that you could see some things happen in North Carolina that nobody's counting on right now. 

Tim Barton [00:21:30] I think it's worth pointing out, too, that we we do see when you study elections and especially over the last several presidential elections, we do see a increase in number of people that vote for president only and don't vote down ballot. Now, this is also one of the reasons that there was a lot of speculation there could have been some fraud. When you go back to the 2020 election and Michigan, when they took a pause in the middle of the night, they come back and find a couple hundred thousand votes and almost all of them are for Biden. And what was interesting is that the number of votes that Joe Biden gained to increase his tally, his total was not reflective on the rest of the candidates that were running, which again, is why some speculation was, you know, these were fraudulent ballots that had Joe Biden on it and nobody voted for anybody else. Well, that's certainly possible. But it's it's also true that there are some people that are pro-Trump that don't like the Republican Party or could be vice versa that hate Trump and don't like the Democrat Party. And so it's possible you see some of these votes. But the reason I bring this up, it's worth pointing out that if you are listening and you have friends and have this conversation as as you are looking at the nation around us, we are living in a lot of the Democrat desired policies happening right now. This is literally what Democrats have been campaigning for. And now they're saying, no, it's a new way forward. No, this is literally what you wanted and what you've been working for. And actually, we would argue some of the reasons it's not worse than it is is because you had guys in the house now like Mike Johnson, who has led a counter effort to try to slow down some of what's going on. And of course, he has not done a great job, but that's mostly because he doesn't have the votes and the power behind him as he's trying to herd cats in the Republican coalition. And he has many Republicans in the coalition that are not really conservative members. They're Republicans, but they're not necessarily reflective of traditional conservative values. All of that to say is when people are looking at the election, it does matter who we elect down the ballot, because more times than not, the things that we deal with on a daily basis are are the impacts we feel from our governor, from our state legislators, even from our mayors, from our city council, from our school board. We feel the impact of that often more in our daily life than we do the president. So this idea that, well, I'm going to vote for president, but I'm not going to vote for anybody else, you are misunderstanding where the majority of the impact of political decisions come from that are making a difference in our life. Obviously, the president's important who the president has to appoint and positions. That's important. But who we elect down ballot is equally important because, again, so much of what we see is coming from state legislatures. It's coming from governors. It's it's coming from more local government to us. Then we realize that what happens in Washington, D.C. is important, but maybe not more important than what happens in our own states as far as the impacts that we feel and the way it directly changes how we navigate our life. 

Rick Green [00:24:54] Well, it guys, I mean, a lot of states are voting right now. Right? Early voting is already kicked in. And and turnout's looking really good in a lot of these key battleground states. David, I think to what you said earlier, even, which is what we're hearing on the ground, is sometimes an even better indication than what what. People will necessarily, you know, produce in polling data. And I don't know, guys. I feel like people are more engaged than ever. I know we shared the barn. A dad and a lot of Christians are choosing not to vote for silly reasons. But I feel a lot of excitement out there. What are you guys thinking? 

David Barton [00:25:25] Well, you know, one of the things I think that's cool about what's going on is that it has proven so much of the left progressive narrative to be raw, because a lot of these states that we covered enacted laws to to really secure ballot integrity. Georgia is one of those states enacted laws. And all the lawsuits filed against every one of those laws say it's going to suppress voter turnout. It's going to suppress minority vote is going to suppress Democrat. And what we're seeing in all these states is record high turnouts and early voting. So all of this stuff about if you if you tighten up the ballots, if you make them more secure, if you make sure that there's no cheating, that didn't turn out that didn't suppress vote, it went the other way. And so doing the right thing brings the right results. But that I find that another good news story, that part of this narrative that was fear and scare, and this is why we're suing. It's not proven to be right. And Georgia is a great example. You know, Georgia, just in the first couple of days, had more than a million people show up in early voting. So that's significant stuff. And I think that's good news. 

Rick Green [00:26:30] I guess we got we got a lot more good news to get to, but we're going to have to do it next week. Folks, You can get more of this good news at our website, WallBuilders.show. By simply looking back into those archives. We really appreciate you listening today. You've been listening to The WallBuilders Show.