Somebody who testified yesterday in court.
The second witness.
He is now the executive director of the Colorado County Clerk's Association, former clerk of Arapahoe County, a republic, and he testified as himself. He wasn't representing his organization, but he joins me now, Matt Crane, welcome.
Back to Kowa.
Hey, Jimmy, good to see you.
Good to see you, my friend.
Now, first of all, why were you a participant in the testimony? Why did you testify yesterday? What is your relation to all this?
Sure?
Well, first of all, I was subpoenaed by Eric Komer's attorneys to show and testify for two reasons. One because Eric and I have been friends and I've worked with him, you know, professionally he worked for Dominion, as you know, and so from when I became clerk up until you know when I you know, when I lost in eighteen, we had worked together on various projects and building out the new version of the voting system so that we could make sure it was more auditible, more secure.
And then also with my.
Role as executive director of the Callelroado Ninny Clerks Association, I was able to provide unique perspective on the impact of the lies of Lindell and what they had on election officials here in Colorado across the country, what it's done to undermine voter confidence, those types of things. So that's why they subpoenaed to bring me in to talk about.
So one of the things that they were showing in the trial, and they asked you questions about this, and this is sort of what Oltman had made a big stink about, going back to November of twenty twenty, getting the ball rolling for what Eric Kumer in a number of lawsuits it's Mike Lindell against Oltman against others is alleged is defamation. There were a number of these very controversial, vulgar at times posts, mostly from his private Facebook page.
Sometimes there were a few tweets that he responded to Trump or to Milania Trump, very left wing. Talk to us about your understanding and working history with Eric Komer as particular as a clerk but also head of the County Clerk's association, and how you sort of may have come across some of these more hostile seeming political views that Oltman painted this picture and said, look, this is a guy who you can see as a villain who might just want to steal the election.
Sure, So, as I mentioned, I met Eric I think in twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen when I became clerk in a Rapahoe County. One of the first things that we started working on was trying to get a better post election tabulation audit for our county and for Colorado.
So we had signed up to do a pilot project with the EAC Election Assistants Commission in DC and with the Secretary of State's Office under Secretary Guestler, where we would work on the risk limiting audit concept and try to try to crack the nut because it hadn't really
been done in completion before. And we learned some great lessons through that process, including that the voting system that we were on before, which was an older Sequoia voting system, wouldn't enable us to do a full risk limiting audit.
And so one of the things I'm talking with Dominion was I.
Let them know of what changes we needed to the voting system so that we could better audit it and provide the public greater confidence. And how these tabulation systems worked and functioned during the course of an election. So it was during those meetings and discussions with Dominion when
I first got to know Eric. After that, I would see him at various clerks conferences, at various national conferences, you know, whether it was you know, in sessions or maybe you know, have at the bar later having a drink. He and I very quickly after knowing each other, you know, we quickly realized we were on very opposite ends of the political spectrum. You know, I'm very conservative, he is very progressive, and so we would have debates and have a lot of fun doing so, and sometimes they would
get heated, but never never in a crazy fashion. You know, it was really just robust debates where we would have these conversations.
So would people around, you know, to expect this.
One hundred percent, like, okay, here goes Eric and Matt. Put it on an egg timer and see which one starts yelling first, and so we would have a great
time doing it. So, you know, I know how progressive Eric is, but I also know, through the context of working with him through these meetings and working on the voting system, how seriously he takes his work working in elections, how dedicated he is to making sure that dominion customers have the best possible systems to be able to provide fair and secure elections, and just what the work, what it meant to him to work in elections, to know that we are helping people be able to cast a
ballot let their voice be heard.
That was sank or sank to him. That meant more to him than anything.
So he checked his politics at the door.
Yeah, he did. He absolutely checked his politics at the door.
So when some of the you know, I saw one of the posts they had brought up on Facebook, we're Facebook friends, and my thought was, okay, Eric, that's really over the top.
But I knew it was Eric.
Now, is this the one where he said unfriend me and trump me now and drop F bombs and other vulgar language about Trump? And this was round twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, right, I.
Think it was July of twenty sixteen, Okay, And so I had seen that, I'm like, oh, Frevn's sakes, Eric, you know, that's way over the top. But again I know Eric, and you know, did I ever think for one single moment that that meant he couldn't come in and be objective when working on election systems and helping people conduct elections.
Never in a million years, And I'm not the only one.
Other people who knew Eric also knew that they could trust him to work on elections and be upfront and honorable in the way that he conducted and worked on these systems.
Matt Crane joining us here in studio.
He testified yesterday in day three of the trial of Mike Lindell. My Pillow and Frank Speech, both companies of Mike Lindell, and there Komer brought this case and Matt when we look at the claims being made, so the defamation that is being alleged by Coomer isn't just that you know, he was named and attack was that the implication was he was the trader used. That word was
used as trader. Lindell talked about melting down the voting machines, and he would be the first behind the bars that would be made of the metal from the voting machines.
And so forth. That was all in the context of.
Eric Kumer's the main guy, the sort of the ring leader of stealing the election. The two things, one, what do you make of that claim regarding Klumer?
And then more broadly, when you.
Look at the allegations that we've seen for five years now just about of stolen election from twenty twenty, how do you look at whether at determining whether that's the case, let alone that it isn't the.
Cases you've concluded, Well, the claims from Lindell and others about Eric and calling him trader and saying that he's going to be in jail versus, it's laughable on its face for a number of reasons. One, you know, the election community knows Eric knows he would never do anything like that. Too, It's impossible for one person to change
entire federal election like that. In three, we know that with the security and defense and depth posture that we have around our voting systems, that it wasn't possible if something the fairies had happened, we would have discovered it.
So that part, you know, we knew it.
Was garbage from the very first minute it started coming out. But then when you start to use words like trader and belong in jail, then that leads to death threats, intimidation. Eric had people camping outside his house putting videos online threatening his life. He's you know, he had to leave his house Ultimately he had to leave the country for a while because the death threats that were coming against him,
all because it was based on a lie. So I think, you know when you talk about the impact, And of course Lindell he may not have been the first one to start this. I think we know Joe Oltman was the first one to start these lives. But what Lindell had was the largest platform and the most money, and he hired he worked.
With with oatmen, right.
He brought in others like you know, Sharona Bishop started Cause of America with other bad actors from Colorado to go and they kept perpetuating these lines about Eric, about dominion.
A couple of things.
One to be clear, you said, so before you were a Republican, you were the clerk in Arapo County. You were appointed in twenty thirteen, then elected to a full term, and then you were unsuccessful in your re election bid, and then a couple of years later ended up as the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association.
But your experience goes back twenty five years.
Yes, So when you look at that, what is sort of the cornerstone of our system particularly and let's say Colorado. Since there are so many allegations from for example, Tina Peters, the convicted former clerk of Mesa County, and others like Joel and so forth about Colorado in particular, what sort of the cornerstone that from your twenty five years of experience you look at and say, Okay, if we just crosscheck this and this, you could.
Tell that it's legit election right, Well, certainly, I mean when you look at the when you look at the chain of custody, the access controls we have around these voting system components, the way that we they are certified and tested before they ever get to be used in an election, and then the way that we audit the
election through the through the risk limiting audit. After the fact, a lot of counties do extra auditing beyond the risk limiting audit to validate that the results are accurate and true. And so, you know, when people put out claims like this, it's always interesting because they may say, oh, well, this part of the system is vulnerable, but they never talk about the ways the mitigations that we put in place
to protect that vulnerability and others. They always take one one or two aspects cherry pick on that, and they purposely leave out all of the rest of the detail because the goal here, right is to scare people, right, they want political change, and many of them are doing this for financial gain, so they keep saying even though they show no real instances of fraud, they say, well, keep giving me money because the big reveal is coming.
Yeah, I want I want to play a little example of this. I played it earlier, so maybe this is an event to give I give an advertisement. But this was at the end of the interview, yes, or on Tuesday that I saw outside and.
Again, and I'll post pictures.
On my x account at saying center saying with an E, not an a center. But I saw him give this interview to his own outlet, Lindell TV. And the end of the interview with of course a classic Mike Lindell promotion, says.
Something to everybody. If you want to support my pillow, who needs the resources right now to keep fighting, you can go to my pillow dot com and and use promo code We're gonna use or LTV for this, I use promo code truth. We're on Emerald Shaw use promo code truth today or everybody use promo code truth. You guys are gonna get the forty nine to ninety eight sheets we put. We got them all in the warehouse. We're gonna liquid datum so we have resources for this.
It's how important to everyone.
And you can get as many as you want, any size, any color. You're gonna get a free commemorative my pillow two point z for any purchase.
And I want to say.
This, if you want to help out directly, go to my pillowtrial dot com. My pillow trial dot com is gonna redirect you.
Huh. Isn't that interesting?
You're giving an interview during the lunch break to your own outlet, which I don't know.
The related if Lindell TV.
I think it's under it's maybe a new name of Frank Speech, but I'm not clear on that either way, it's clearly is his media property, right and there you go, that's what he's doing.
To your point, well, yeah, not surprise, grifters are going to drift.
So when we look at this, uh, well, actually two things. One paper ballots. I mean to me, that's the corner, the real cornerstone of being able to verify the results.
And I'm glad Eric's attorneys asked me this on to
redirect yesterday. Because the way, the biggest way that we know all of this is a farce, right, and all of it is you for those political and financial motives, is because if somebody really questioned the twenty twenty election or any election, and you're worried about the way, you think there's something wrong with the voting systems, the clearest, cleanest, most direct way to validate whether the voting system performed properly, after all the audits had done everything else is to
put in an open records request for the ballots. They're available under KORRA under the Colorado Open Records Act, so you can. It may cost some money to do that, and it may be very expensive if you want all the ballots, depending on how long you know you want them available for.
But you can do that.
And Lindella spent forty million dollars in the last four years he said something like that on this or it would have been a drop in the bucket for it. But do you think that he or anybody else has actually gone in before the ballots were destroyed after the necessary retention period to say, hey, let me see those ballots. This was always Tina's biggest mistake. But I'm not surprised she didn't know the job. She could have always hand had handcount of those ballots after the election.
She never did. And there's a reason they don't do that.
To me, it's because they know their whole life falls apart if they go back to the original source, which is those paper ballants.
That's abundantly important.
Also yesterday, I have to say, at least for the first the two days that I watched, you.
Had the line of the trial.
I think that got a laugh from everybody, maybe even Liddell in the court room.
Where they were trying to say okay.
So you went into the witness room during the break, and then Eric Komer and his attorney came in after you again we're talking with Matt Crane came in after you, and then by the time you needed to come back out,
the three of you came out together. And so one of Lindell's lawyers, who was doing the cross examination with you on the witness stand, was talking about that and trying to give the implication like something's going on here, and you said, if you to come in, I would have hung out with you too, which I thought was excellent.
That was fun and it was I mean, I didn't know they were going to follow me into the room. They just said I didn't have to stay on this stand, and so I got up went to get a new bottle of water. They all came in to get another bottle of water and a little something.
To eat too.
They all made very clear, we cannot talk about any of your testimony, so don't say anything, and we didn't.
We were in there, I don't know ten minutes, and then we went back out together.
I was a little surprised they tried to make something of that, but you know, I was able to have a little bit of fun with it too.
And I saw after the courtroom his attorneys came up to talk to you, and we're a very pleasant conversation, it seemed, yes, so real quick, because we're just about at a time Matt Crane joining us, I want you to put your hat on as the Colorida County Clerks Association head and former clerk of Rapaho County, the county that you oversaw elections for, has now been back in the news, not as much as in the news as in the midst of a new conspiracy theory over this
published document. Called a cast vote record that had issues with redactions. I'll just say real quick that Colorado law requires you're supposed to keep the an anonymity a secret ballot, right, And so that means when you release this cast rote cast vote record that shows how voters had voted without identifying the voter for really small precincts that may just have a few people living there, you're supposed to just delete those, right. But something else happened, and this is
from the twenty twenty election. Talk to us real quick about that as briefly as you can.
Sure, So a Rapo.
County created a redacted cast vote record and as a transparency document to be able to if people want to go through and see they can see it. Now we do have to go back and redact, as you said, that's under state law that we have to do that. I think there were only something like fifteen ballots that were impacted, so certainly out of a I think there were over three and fifty thousand votes. Casting a Rapo fifteen ballots is basically nothing. It really does nothing demonstrable
to the file. So a Rapo County post they created that file on December tenth. Now that date's important because twenty twenty. Yeah, it was after the election was certified, and so they did it, they sorted it, they put it up as they have in years past. They didn't know that there was either an error made in the sorting process or some kind of other error maybe made with a file transfer to an FTP site, where the rose inside the file got shuffled.
The overall vote totals for.
The candidates remained intact, but the votes got shuffled between precincts.
The rose got shuffled.
Nobody noticed this, although there were some people that had pulled down the file and analyzed it and said, hey, the way the vote trans are happening and pro Trump pro Biden precincts aren't matching up, and so that's a problem in particular.
A professor for MEA, yeah, well, I think there was a guy.
Named Edd Solomon who's using the mistaking cast but record in a lawsuit in Nevada. So then four years goes by a professor from Yale's looking at the file. He contacts the county head says, hey, I think I see an error here, kind of looks at it and says, yep, there's some kind of error there, so they pulled down the erroneous file, reached the redaction, and then reload the
corrected file. Now, of course, because we know that there are bad actors there who will take anything, that's what we call malinformation, right, a little bit of truth, and they create a lie on it out of it. They say, well, look a Rappaho county changed this file. They were changing ballots. We can't trust the election. It's not auditible, all of these things, when truth in fact, it's a transparency file. The original cast vote record used for the audit and certification were not impacted.
They're pristine, they're in good shape.
They throw all these other legal citations out, saying counties can't redact, you're not allowed to do this. All of their legal interpretations, just like in the MESA counter reports is garbage, it's wrong. But that doesn't stop these bad actors from running around and creating narratives so they can continue their goals.
And you don't have to.
Say anything in this, but I'll say the failure of Clerk John Lopez to act quickly, I think precipitated the ability for these as you quit, so call the bad actors to take advantage of a vacuum and put out false information and give falseom ess. But I appreciate you clearing up some of what happened. There were way overdue for a break. Once again, I'm running behind today, but that was great.
Thank you so much. And great job yesterday, Matt Craig, thanks to me.
I appreciate it.