What's a reporter? Plus, cleaning the voter rolls | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. Every Monday at two o'clock, we chat with AP Dylan. She is the publisher of, More to the story. It's a Substack newsletter. And she also works for, I'm not really sure in what capacity, for the North State Journal, NSJOnline.com. The, I don't know, the unknown titled. A.P. Dillon, welcome to the program. How are you? I'm great, Pete. As a conservative activist, I just want to say thank you for having me on your show. Of course. Absolutely. Yes, we've been talking about this whole saga for the last week. And so the audience knows who this guy Brian Anderson is at this point. And I just, I find it to be, it is illustrative. of a lot of the thinking and the mindset of so many people in the quote-unquote legacy media that they believe that they control the keys of some credentialing bureau, that they get to determine who is and who is not a reporter. So just for the record, are you or have you ever been a reporter? Yes, sir, I have been since 2019 with North State Journal. and with another outlet for a year before that, and I was freelance before that. So well over a decade, yeah. Did you get, at any point over this time period, were you ever, did you ever apply for a reporter credential for official reporter recognition from Brian Anderson? No, I can't say that I ever did. Interesting. So, I mean, I'm just going by The definition of the word reporter, and maybe that's my mistake, but I look up the definition of things when people are, you know, disputing what a thing means, and a reporter is described as a writer, investigator, or presenter of news stories. That would be accurate, yeah. Yeah, and I kind of feel like you do check the box there and have for a while. And in all seriousness, this is the issue. It's like they are losing control over the narrative and being the only ones that can shape a narrative for the public discourse. And as the media landscape has fragmented over the last 15 years, people in these legacy outlets have they see themselves as like we are the last defenders of this institution and we're the only ones that get to determine what is and is not news. And the hilarity of that is that, number one, we don't trust them because we see what they push out as, quote, news. But also they use like social media posts to. order to do news stories and they're not even news stories it's like people are arguing about is the dress blue or white and they do stories on that and they pretend like there's some reporter like there's some there are some elevated status when these are the things that they crank out and then you're out there doing like on your your old blog the Lady Liberty blog and we've been talking to you when you were doing that blog and you were focused on education issues and You were looking at legislation and committees and stuff, and you got law changed, which if you worked for WRAL or, I guess, the Assembly, and you got a law changed, you'd get an award for that. You would be recognized for that. Oh, yes. Yeah. That was interesting that he pulled that up as considering that activism. No, that was following a story for eight years, following a series of data for eight years. And now that I'm sussing it out on the end, you know, and during that time, I came across things that needed changing and I was able to write about them. And, you know, lawmakers and officials use those things. And that's kind of the point of reporting. Yeah. To get pieces of information like that out so that those who need to see it can see it. What's interesting is it's every accusation is a confession, right? And so the accusation is that he applied this label to you, although he then had to change it from, what, activist to writer, I think is what he, that was his correction. He's not calling me a conservative writer. Right. Okay, go to North State Journal and tell me what's conservative about the reporting that I do. Yeah, it's just all, like, Like, if you did it as a bullet point thing, it would be, like, it would fit that format. It's just like, this happened, this happened, this happened, they said this, they said that. Those are your reports. That's why I like your reporting, is because you just, you present the information, and that's it. Yeah, I link to the source, I quote what the person said, you know, and I leave the rest of it out of it. It's up to the reader to decide, you know, what happened there. Right. And the accusation that he's making, which is a confession... is that he's an activist as well. Like that, like if, if the, if the, if the bar is that you're focused on a story or a topic, or you dare I say, have a beat, if you're on a beat. And so you're focusing on a particular say government entity or something, right? Like you're the, you're the school board beat, you're the city council beat or something. Right. That you're doing all of these stories and that somehow then that makes you an activist, which then would make him an activist because he's always covering the North Carolina General Assembly. And don't forget that he posted some poor woman's voter registration who happens to be a Republican and shares the name with me. It wasn't even me. He had been forced to take that one down. Nice vetting you got there. He just docked some poor woman. Right. Yeah, we had some fun with that as well because that's the reporting standard that he uses, which is somebody gave him some information about a woman with a similar name to you or the same name. Was she in Wilmington area, I want to say, down in New Hanover County? Yeah, down in New Hanover County. I'm like, dude, I live in Wake County and you know that. Right. Yeah. What? The minute I looked at that, that was the first thing that struck me by his post was he completely had it wrong. And then he followed up again and accused me of taking money from county parties. I was being paid. And I'm like, yeah, I gave a speech and I got paid. A lot of people do that. Rachel Maddow, I think, made $ 12 million last year from speeches. Um, is she an activist? Um, you know, it's questionable, but it was also an honorarium. This wasn't something I didn't charge for it. This was something that they offered to me for my services because they wanted to. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We, we covered this as well. Like I've, I'm asked to give speeches all the time and a lot of them are Republican and conservative organizations. And you know why they don't ask people like Brian Anderson? It's because they don't trust Brian Anderson. to give them the facts. They think he's going to come with an agenda. And so they asked me to come and I'll talk about issues. And I've been offered money as well to do those things. One time, mine was the UNC Chapel Hill Young Republicans or something. And they were like, we could scrape together some money. I was like, kids, keep your money. You're in college. Normally I do these things for free, but I talk to all kinds of groups, education groups, parent groups, you know, it's not just county party officials or that kind of, I mean, it's so stupid. The lack of vetting was absolutely ridiculous. And the fact that he didn't know it was an honorarium told me he hadn't even talked to the county party in question about that money. Somebody just found it in a filing somewhere and was like, ooh, look at that. What? Look at what? Right. Yeah, well, those are his reporting standards. And then he comes back at you when he hears this information, probably for the first time, And then he's like, oh, well, then, OK, fine, I'll take it down. If that's not, you know, if that's not you and your voter record that I just doxed, I'll take it down. It's like, shouldn't you have vetted that first? Wouldn't that be one of the things that one does as a reporter is to ensure that what they are pushing out and telling people is true, that it is in fact true? That should be one of the standards. And like when I was a reporter, that was the standard. You don't put stuff out unless you have confirmed it to be true. Exactly. And he got slapped down by his own outlet, apparently. I saw the post and everything. And then within 10 minutes of them making that post, he was already out there rehashing the fact that I'm a conservative writer. And that lasted all of like, what, eight minutes, nine minutes? Good job, Assembly. Yeah, well, and I haven't seen anything else since that one statement. It's being addressed internally or whatever, and then he sends out that thing that says, oh, you know, I should have referred to as conservative writer, not activist, and that wasn't even an apology. But it's like, okay, so that's what you're going with, is that now she's a conservative writer. So I'm curious then, do we also judge every reporter in all outlets? Are we going to start putting those adjectives on everybody, right? Based on what? As I understand it, I should ask you, right, but my understanding was that you're unaffiliated. Well, the whole point of it was to spin the fact that we got a cease and desist letter from Roy Cooper's campaign for asking if he would fulfill his term and if there were any health impediments. So that was the entire reason he called me a conservative activist, because I dared to ask that question, which got responded to with a legal letter from the Elias Law Group. A threat. I mean, who sends a cease and desist for asking a campaign a question? That's what I'd like to know. You know, I mean... They could have done anything. The campaign could have ignored me like they normally do. Or they could have just responded and said, yes, he's fine, whatever. And there would have been no story. Right. But instead, they do this incredible self-owned goal there where they send out this letter. Now it actually has teeth and we have something to report on. Right. Now that's the story. Yeah. Right. Whether it's true or not, now it's out there in the ether. Good job. Whoever the attorney is was probably getting his lunch eaten for him. Well, he's with the Elias law firm and, uh, that might actually be, uh, a bona fide form, uh, cause it got publicity. And I think that's really what drives that, uh, drives that guy. Um, yeah, so that it's the, it's the Barbra Streisand effect, right? Like you made a big deal about this thing and nobody even knew about the thing. And now everybody knows about the thing because you made a big deal about it and you didn't have to, it's just so stupid. And, uh, and I noticed then that, uh, uh, on the heels of all of this, if it wasn't so comical, like, on the heels of this, we get back-to-back tweets from quote-unquote reporters, one from NC Newsline, which is a, you know, leftist NGO, basically, and they've got some picture of Roy Cooper's shoes while he's running around. I saw that. Yeah, he's running around on the make stuff cost less tour, he's running around with custom Nike sneakers that say on the back, one shoe says Dem and one shoe says Gov. And then of course people start wondering like, why is he wearing these sneakers? First off, like, were they donated? Like how much money did he spend for these things on his make stuff cost less tour? Is it because like, is he, does he have to have the, the, the shoes differentiated in some way because there are some issues like, What's going on with this? And then what was the other one that there was another one that they sent out? Danielle Bataglia sent out a tweet and it's just like, oh, my gosh, you guys are sending out tweets about like the stupidest things that he says, like these like these benign, banal kind of comments. And nobody's it's like, can somebody ask him if he's going to vote to pack the Supreme Court? Could somebody please ask him that? Like anything related to an issue, some issue. Yeah, that would be nice. I mean, of course, it's all supposed to be fodder to move the news cycle along kind of thing. But I mean, basically, the reporter pool here in North Carolina has returned to the days of the diet soda sommelier stories. What's his favorite diet soda? What kind of barbecue does he like? Who lives and gives a crap at this point? I mean. Well, it's a protection. It's a protection racket. They don't want to ask him these questions because they're afraid it might jam them up on his answer, or they're afraid he might answer, and that would hurt him in the polling. I know. And what I found interesting, too, was after our story dropped two days later, it was early voting, and he comes jogging up from his car, and Ms. Patakouli was there, apparently on the spot to film that. And then... And then Brian Anderson asks if he will fulfill his term during the press gaggle. The same question we asked, but no cease and desist got slapped around there, and he answered them with a smile. So where was my answer? Right. You know, and where's the news media saying, you know, another outlet asked us, why didn't you answer them? No, none of them asked that because that would be bad. Yeah. The defenders of the press, when Donald Trump lays into the media is fake news and you can't have a seat in the press pool and everybody's all upset about this. But a cease and desist letter, a threat of litigation for asking a question, nothing to see here. In fact, we're going to attack the reporter in the outlet that did it like that. Yeah, so it's why Ed Morrissey at Hot Air calls it the protection racket media, and he's exactly right. That's what they're running for Roy Cooper in this state, and it's just disgusting. All right, well, I was going to ask you also about the non-citizens on the voter rolls, but we've run out of time. People can read that at the North State Journal, nsjonline.com, from the reporter, A.P. Dillon. A.P., thanks for your time, as always. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks. Take care. The holidays will be here before you know it, and so now is the time to create precious and priceless family heirlooms that will last for generations. Take your old photos, slides, films, and tapes to create a video in Mint Hill. There, they'll turn those memories into the story of your lives, memories from past family events captured forever to pass down to future generations. Create-A-Video's skilled team will professionally transfer your family's stories onto easy-to-use USB drives or DVDs, that won't deteriorate over time like the old photos and tapes are doing right now. They will create a keepsake video that you can share and copy and keep forever. I can see it now. You're gathered around the holiday table with your loved ones, watching all these memories and people of your lives. You're sharing laughs, maybe some tears, telling stories that make your family uniquely yours. Beat the holiday rush and get your memories in now. Go to createavideo.com or visit them in Mint Hill just off I-485. Your photos and videos are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you. And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. Thanks again to A.P. Dillon. Also, thank you to everybody that donated to the Alzheimer's Association for the Walk to End Alzheimer's. We did the walk this weekend. We had a bunch of people show up for the team to walk with me. Jason and Christy and Christy and Russ and Sharon and Matthew and Catherine and Andrea and Kristen and Christina and Christina. I feel like we had an We had a bumper crop of Christina's this year on the team. But we also had a lot of other donations. We had a bunch of anonymous donations, so thank you, anonymous. 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You can still donate if you want, ALZ.org. And then if you look for the name of my team, Pete's Pack, you can make a donation through the pack. It's not a political action committee, people. It's a pack, P-A-C-K, Pete's Pack. Although now that I'm, that would be a good pack name. All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax-advantaged gold IRA. It's real. It's in your name. And 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to Calendarmetals.com. That's Calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. All right, so we did not get to this story by the, yes, reporter, A.P. Dillon, over at the North State Journal. Headline, State Elections Board Issues Letters to Potential Non-Citizens on Voter Roles. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has sent out letters to almost 1,400 registered voters in our state, 1,392 to be precise. And these voters have been identified as potentially non-U.S. citizens. This is part of the state's effort to clean up the voter rolls. And this is because Democrats are not in control of the Board of Elections any longer. Oh, come on, Pete. That's not true. Actually, that's is very true. OK, they refused to do this kind of work and to use the various databases, database, database, database, database, whatever the multiple platforms that are available. They wouldn't do it. Remember, you know, Democrat governors in our state as well, they refuse to work with the interstate cross-check program where they were trying to match up, you know, various states, voter rolls, names, last four digits of social security numbers, birth dates, right? You just get that information and then you can cross-check to see if people are registered in multiple states. And then you can clean up the voter rolls, right? They didn't want to do that. 20 years ago. So 15 years ago, whatever. Well, probably about 20 years ago. So now we have the SAVE database. Okay? This is a federal database. It's called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database. The SAVE database. Okay? And these voters in North Carolina, these 1,400 voters, they were identified using that database. And The State Board of Elections entered into a memorandum of agreement with the federal government to use the SAVE database in April. This would have been after the Board of Elections was moved from under the governor over to under the state auditor. The state auditor is a Republican and the governor is a Democrat. And Josh Stein didn't want to do this. Roy Cooper didn't want to do this. Dave Bolick does. And so they entered into the MOA, and this is what they've been using. Now, they also point out that the results from using the SAVE database had identified almost 35,000 deceased individuals in our state. We talked about that a few months ago. The two-page letter that has gone out to all of these 1,400 people notifies the recipients that they have been identified as being a potential non-citizen and provides instructions for either verifying their citizenship or canceling their registration. The letter and the press release both emphasize that receiving the letter does not mean their voter registration has been canceled or removed. So before you start screaming suppression... OK, that is they're not being removed. You're getting this letter because your name came up in the database. So we need to verify. No voter will be automatically removed from the voter rolls based solely on the information obtained through the database, through the save. OK, any removal proceedings have to comply with applicable state law and federal law, including requirements for notice to appear, due process, right? All of those things are already codified. Before they can take you off the rolls, there has to be a process. So they're telling the people that got the letters, like these are the avenues that are available to you, but you have to correct this. We have to verify that you are in fact eligible to be registered to vote. The press release also says, that the letter does not automatically prevent an otherwise eligible voter from participating. So again, no suppression happening here. A recently unsealed federal grand jury indictment alleged 10 non-citizens illegally voted in the 2024 elections here in North Carolina. That was a separate case. In late September last year, the Board of Elections formally sought data such as the full social security numbers from the North Carolina DMV to be used to clean up the state's voter rolls. Outrage ensued, of course. It makes you wonder, why are you guys on the left so mad when we try to do list maintenance? I will tell you, as one who did some list maintenance in my day, in fact, I worked at the time for the local public radio station here in Charlotte. And one of my duties, aside from mailing people their coffee mugs and their canvas tote bags and such, it was also to do the daily deposits. So I was entering people's donations. I'd take their checks and then I would walk them across the street and deliver them to the bank and all of that. But I also had to do list maintenance of the membership rolls. Because you want to identify if people are active or inactive. And then if they're inactive, they haven't made donations, you send them a different letter and all of that. So you want to do list maintenance. It's important to any organization and it is really important for the democracy, right? If you're trying to protect the election system and you want people to have confidence in it, then you have to have safeguards. Because if you don't have any safeguards, anybody can vote and then people don't have confidence that the votes are actually legitimate. In an April interview, the head of the, who is this, Hayes, yeah, the head of the Board of Elections told the North State Journal that the DMV commissioner, Paul Tine, who's an appointee of Governor Josh Stein, aka Minnie Cooper, that Paul Tyne had been blocking their efforts on legal grounds. Tyne, a former state lawmaker, became DMV commissioner. In May of 2025, he replaced Wayne Goodwin, who was terrible at the job. Language requiring the DMV to cooperate on the Social Security numbers was put into House Bill 958, which passed the General Assembly but got vetoed by Minnie Cooper. A veto override has not yet been attempted. The Board of Elections press release cites last month's U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows continued use of the Save database for voter list maintenance while other litigation still proceeds through the courts. OK, and these letters went out two days before the start of in-person early voting. So this is list maintenance. This is protecting the election. States can do this. North Carolina has. So we got 1,400 people. You're on the clock now. Fix your voter registration. But it's not really a problem, Pete. It's a tiny number. Yeah, it's a real problem. From the text line, Rick says, Pete, I moved from Arizona four years ago, registered to vote in North Carolina. I am a citizen, but thought that when I registered with North Carolina, my Arizona voter registration would be canceled. It was not. Therefore, I agree that these things should be looked at. It does not mean we're trying to disenfranchise voters. That's exactly correct. That's exactly correct. Like, you would think that the administrations in these various states, right, that they would send notifications back and forth to each other and all of that, but either intentionally or accidentally disenfranchised it doesn't happen. And so if it doesn't happen, that means you've got a bunch of people who have left the state and they're still on the voter rolls, which means somebody can go vote for them, especially in states without voter ID. You can walk in, claim to be somebody, they then give you the ballot and you cast it. That's it. And there's no way to go back and verify because you're not going back to Arizona to vote. Brett Winterbull, who hosts the three to six show here on WBT, I believe he still is receiving ballots from California. And he hadn't lived there in years. And they still send him a ballot every year. And he keeps telling them, like, I don't live there anymore. But it's a problem. That's a problem. Jeff with a G says preventing a Democrat from cheating is not voter suppression. That's good. That's true. Very true. All right. This is from Michael Grebrock. senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, writing at the National Review. He says the Trump administration's investigating allegations of non-citizen voting fraud. And that news was met with the usual media roll of the eyes based on the assumption that election fraud simply is not happening. And as I've gone through before, the stages of this are always the same. It's number one, it's not happening. Number two, okay, it's happening, but it's not a lot. And then, okay, it's happening maybe a lot, but it doesn't impact the races enough. And then final stage is, okay, it's happening, and it may be happening a lot, we don't know, but here's why that's a good thing. It's happening, but this is a good thing. New Jersey recently found 6,600 non-citizens on its voter rolls, 400 of whom cast ballots. Virginia, they flagged more than 6,300 non-citizens potential non-citizens on its voter rolls. Texas has found more than 6,500, nearly 2,000 of whom had a voting right. history. Federal law has a massive loophole and it lets non-citizens register to vote at virtually any welfare agency in America. That is a blatant invitation to fraud, okay? And states can do something to protect the ballot box. I suspect many of them will not. The loophole has existed since 1993. It's been in plain sight. When the National Voter Registration Act became law, it required states to designate, quote, all offices that provide public assistance as voter registration agencies as well. That list includes Medicaid offices, food stamp offices, and agencies that oversee programs such as cash welfare. Basically, whenever you show up at one of these locations in all but a handful of states, you are asked if you would like to register to vote. If you're a non-citizen and you say, yes, register me to vote, the agency signs you up. At the same time, it enrolls you in the welfare programs. But while your application for welfare is checked on the back end to ensure that you are eligible or not, the voter registration is not. It's not checked against your citizenship records. So you can be denied taxpayer support because you're not a citizen, yet still get approval to vote, even though non-citizen voting is illegal in federal elections. And even if your welfare application is denied, a welfare agency does not have to inform state election officials about your initial voter registration. So to people with common sense, you can see this is a pretty easy loophole to close. Nationally, yes, you would need an act of Congress and Trump has been pushing the Save America Act for this reason, but Congress isn't doing it. But first and foremost, what you could do is routinely check voter rolls against the federal save system, which I just went over. North Carolina is now doing. Every state should use that system at a minimum. Also, states should require their welfare agencies to screen anybody who registers. So there's back end verification of the eligibility. And then they should tell the elections people, hey, this person isn't here illegally. They're not here legally. So you should not register them to vote. They came through our agency. Just let them know. Now, the media may ignore this problem. State lawmakers should not. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them, too, and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete Kaliner show dot com. 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