CHRIS JANSING (HOST): I'm joined now by a member of that commission who was in the meeting. Ken Blackwell is the former secretary of state of Ohio. It's good to see you again. The president has made it clear, he thinks that there have been millions of cases of fraud, something that has never in any way been proven. How are people supposed to trust that given what the president has said, given the fact that both the head of this commission and the vice chair are Republicans, that this is going to be any kind, fair judgment of what actually happened?
BLACKWELL: I hope the public listened in to our meeting today, it was streamed live. And what they saw was a bipartisan commission that focused on the mission of protecting the concept of one person, one vote in the country. You know, sometimes we go too large. There are hundreds of decisions that are made, important decisions that are decided by one vote. And we want to look at ways that we can guarantee that all of the votes cast are legally cast ballots.
JANSING: Would you be better off making sure that people who are entitled to vote can vote? Because the fact of the matter is there have been studies on this. There have been a lot of secretaries of state who are very concerned, who as you know better than anybody, this is their job, very concerned about already the requests that have been made. Let me play for you what the California secretary of state had to say about this today.
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XAVIER BECERRA: They know what the truth is when it comes to voter fraud. There have been studies. There have been investigations. There have been reports issued. And they all say the same thing. Voter fraud is extremely rare and always very isolated.
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JANSING: Are you a commission in search of a problem?
BLACKWELL: Oh, absolutely not. Listen to what he said and what I said. You know, there are many public policy decisions, many decisions on elected officials that are decided by one vote. What we know is that there are 3,140 counties or the equivalent of counties across the country responsible for registering and counting votes. We have dozens, if not hundreds of counties that have more voters on their registration rolls than they have residents. That is an opportunity for fraud.
