Election security concerns linger as Americans vote during midterms

I'm Marla Tejas. Thanks so much for watching Fox Local. Let's talk about election security. There's been a lot of talk about that. So joining me now, I'm so glad he's able to hop on. He is Hal Kempfert, known as a global and national security expert. Thank you so much for your service to this country, former Marine as well. Hal, let me just get your thoughts about the DOJ announcing today that they are going to be sending election monitors to various cities across the country on this November 3rd. Is that typical? Marla, it's not unknown that the U.S. Department of Justice does send out monitors to look at elections. In fact, it goes back a long way. It can go back to the civil rights era in the South. This has been something that's happened before. What caught everybody off guard is they said 1,000, which sounds like a lot. Until you look at 50 states, four territories, you know, spread across all over the country, and you realize that's not a lot of election monitors. In fact, statistically, your chance of running into one of the polling places is pretty darn small. And they also, you know, the fear was they would show up wearing things like Kevlar, maybe carrying weapons, which, by the way, then they could be confused with federal agents, which is a violation of federal law. Uh, but as it turns out, they were dressed in business casual. Uh, they were told to wear things like khakis, polo shirts. The state said that they were going to monitor the state and a number of local jurisdictions said they were going to monitor the monitors. But I didn't hear of any clashes. It sounds like it was pretty quiet. And this is going into it where there was talk that the president might invoke the Insurrection Act. He might mobilize troops to show up at the polling places, that armed ICE agents would be around polling places. There was a lot of heated rhetoric. And not much has happened. I was going to say, so have you. Newsom said he was going to arrest federal agents, which I thought was pretty out there too. So, yeah. Okay, so some of our reporting has, we've seen some of the election monitors, but to your point, they're more discreet. We have not seen anything like the National Guard. We have no reports of ICE agents around these election centers. Have you heard of any reporting like that? No reporting. In fact, the only thing I heard that really stood out was someone was found in Connecticut and it's unrelated to the polling thing. Just somebody passed away in a vehicle and they're not quite sure the circumstances are investigating, but it turns it was completely unrelated to anything to do with the election. Just happened to be geographic co-location with a polling place. So it got a lot of people excited, but it's been pretty quiet out there. Everything seems to be going exactly the way it was intended to go. I can't predict tomorrow what will happen if the federal government or the Trump administration tries to do something else. They've gone to court many, many times in this election cycle. But I will say today, it does look like the fears that many had are not happening. And those fears were definitely reflected in the polls. A lot of people were concerned that the federal government was going to come in and do something like seize ballots or somehow interfere with the elections. And that just has not transpired, at least so far. And of course, in Los Angeles, the mayor who was up for reelection, she put out a statement after hearing about the move of Fanning out 1,000 of these election monitors from the DOJ. She put out a statement, basically, she just condemned it. Your thoughts on that? Well, I mean, she's the mayor in an election, I would imagine, yeah. And the thing that's different about these election monitors, and this has been brought up time and again. Previously, in years or decades past, when federal DOJ monitors showed up, It was to make sure that those were honest, fair elections, that there were no shenanigans, no chicanery was happening with the ballots or anything like that. The perception is that these election monitors are there for a very partisan purpose. That's the perception. So obviously you're going to get a partisan response from that. But as far as having federal official or federal monitors, DOJ monitors at polling places, a thousand is much larger than anything I've seen before. It's not unknown. But then again, I would point out that having election monitors from various different organizations is not unknown. In fact, In fact, in years, elections past, we have seen monitors showing up from... From various nonprofit organizations and stuff, trying to make sure things are being done fairly. So it certainly gets everyone's attention. But I haven't seen, there was a big fear that there'd be a violent clash with the federal election monitors. Nothing appears to have happened so far. And we hope that it doesn't happen, right? Your final thoughts as we head toward the close of polls here in California. Well, it's gonna be interesting to see, obviously, what the results are. This has been a very contentious election, very contentious midterms. One thing I would say, tremendous turnout from everything I'm seeing. That's really impressive. The big thing I would say from a security perspective is there are a lot of internal controls on the ballots, whether they're mail-in ballots, whether they're at the polling places themselves. And people should feel pretty Pretty confident that when they vote. Their vote is getting into the system and that vote is being verified and there was a lot of doubt about that, but there's a lot of internal controls and it's gotten a lot better over the years. Although with that said, with all those internal controls... We do tend to have a rather slow results process in California. So we'll see if it's faster than the last time. Yeah. And I was just seeing some online chatter about why it doesn't take so long in the state of California to count the ballot. And it is a very tedious process. And we know that they do count those first mail-in ballots that they received ahead of today. So those are the first numbers. And then we talk about, you know, sort of it's those ballots tend to lead more Democrat and then in-person voting tends to lead more Republicans. So you can't you can't just rely on those first numbers because we've seen that change, especially in key races here in California as the days go on. Yeah, actually, it's interesting. It's a statistical thing because so much of the in-person... Voting tends to be more conservative, I guess. There's a thing they call the red mirage, which is the initial results tend to look like it's going more conservative or more red, if you will, more GOP. And then as all the other votes get counted, the red mirage often turns into more of a blue phenomena. So we'll see what happens here within California. Some of those East Coast races are kind of indicative of where some of the big themes for the election will land. So we're going to watch that. But I'm looking at election security across the country, and it looks to be a pretty peaceful election, which maybe the big news is not so much what happened is what didn't happen that everyone feared that was going to happen. And I think we can feel confident that these elections Are going as hoped. And I think that's a big thing. And if you look around the world, it is a very big thing to have free and fair elections. Absolutely. I'm looking down at my notes because I know some states, of course, at 7 o'clock on the East Coast and states like Georgia, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, the rest of Indiana, Kentucky, most of Florida, most of New Hampshire towns, the polls closed as of 4 p.m. Pacific and many more as of 5 p.m. So. We're going to start to see some election results roll in across the country, and we'll be monitoring those for our viewers here on Fox Local. Hal Kempfer, always a pleasure. I thank you so much for hopping on. Marla, thanks for having me on. Okay.