As vice-chair of the commission Kris Kobach observed, “I’ve often thought that at the very foundation of our republic are really two bedrock things — the American Constitution and the faith and reality [...]]]> One short-lived Trump project was the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity that was supposed to investigate and root out voter fraud.

As vice-chair of the commission Kris Kobach observed, “I’ve often thought that at the very foundation of our republic are really two bedrock things — the American Constitution and the faith and reality that our elections are conducted fairly. If you take away either of those two things I believe that our republic cannot stand for long.”

Unfortunately the commission was not successful because some Democrat-run states did not disclose the relevant information.

And it looks like attention is warranted: On June 19, 2017, the Washington Times headlined, Study supports Trump: 5.7 million noncitizens may have cast illegal votes.

Authorities consistently downplay the danger of fake votes, but simple precautions like requiring identification would help.

Below, a series of polls showed that US voters support ID proving American citizenship to vote.

The subject of voter fraud should certainly concern the Trump administration regarding the 2020 election.

Tucker Carlson discussed the issue recently with Guy Benson, a writer who also does a Fox podcast:

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, voter fraud is impossible. It never takes place in America. And only flat-earthers and crazy people believe otherwise.

You know that because you’ve been told it again and again and again. And that’s why we don’t need any safeguards against it or investigations into it or voter ID laws. And that’s why extending voting over the course of a month is no problem at all.

The only people capable of threatening American elections are Macedonians with laptops and Facebook accounts. That is all true — except it’s not true. It’s not even close to true. It’s a full-blown lie like a lot of the things they tell you. How do we know?

Well California is currently purging its voter rolls after settling a lawsuit from Judicial Watch. One of that group’s findings is that Los Angeles County had more registered voters than it had adult citizens, which even if you’re not a math major doesn’t make sense.

Guy Benson is a math major, also a Townhall reporter, and the host of a famous radio show, he joins us tonight to assess these major concerns.

GUY BENSON: I was not a math major. I want to make that extremely clear.

CARLSON: You know what? You could’ve been a poetry major, and it still doesn’t make any sense, does it?

BENSON: No. So, what Judicial Watch did was an investigation. And they found that in the State of California, writ large, they had 101 percent of their eligible citizen adult population registered to vote.

CARLSON: So that means they’re doing really well then.

BENSON: I mean, hey, bananas, just like gangbusters. Then, in Los Angeles County, it was 112 percent.

So Judicial Watch has done legal actions like this in a number of states. They’ve had successes in courts in Ohio, in Kentucky, and now, California as well, where they basically said, “You guys have to clean this up. This is not OK.”

And so, there will be a purge of the voter rolls. I know that word is used sort of as a scary buzzword sometimes on the Left, but you have to legally remove people who are–

CARLSON: A correction of the voter roll.

BENSON: That’s right. So, you’re purging ineligible or dead voters from the rolls. And California was . . .

CARLSON: But that’s bias against the deceased, isn’t it?

BENSON: Well, yes, that’s very bigoted towards the living, which I think is part of the election law. Again, I’m not a lawyer here like I’m not a math major either, Tucker, but I think, again, we shouldn’t overplay the problem of voter fraud, but it does irk me when you hear over and over again from our moral betters, it’s a complete figment of our imagination, and any concern about it whatsoever has to mean that you are dead set on disenfranchising large groups of people.

I think what we’re seeing in this lawsuit, and what the California government has been forced to do because of it, proves that there needs to be oversight.

CARLSON: So, all widespread voter fraud, in my lifetime that I’m aware of, systemic voter fraud has benefited the Democratic Party. If you thought it was reversed, if widespread voter fraud was perceived to benefit the Republican Party, do you think we’d be more vigilant in trying to prevent it?

BENSON: I suspect the cultural elites would have a different view on this issue. And a lot of the verbiage that surrounds the question would be turned on its head.

I will point out, and this is actually an interesting sidebar to the California issue, one example of apparent, I think, serious allegations of voter fraud is in North Carolina recently on a Congressional race, and I believe the Ninth District, which benefited a Republican.

CARLSON: Huh!

BENSON: And what happened there was there is this practice which was illegal in North Carolina called Ballot Harvesting, where third parties can go and collect absentee ballots and there is chain of custody issues and all of that. And that was manipulated to help the Republican win. That seat is now in jeopardy that they might have to have new elections.

CARLSON: Let me just, for the record, say, I’m totally opposed to that and all fraud, no matter who it benefits.

BENSON: Oh, 100 percent. The reason I brought it up is Ballot Harvesting of absentee ballots is actually legal in the State of California.

CARLSON: It’s crazy. It’s totally, completely crazy. Guy Benson, thank you for being on that.

Below, Kris Kobach campaigned with the president at the Topeka [...]]]> Donald Trump’s Topeka rally on Saturday contained a lot of celebration of Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed as a justice to the Supreme Court after weeks of Democrat accusations, but the President was actually there to promote Kansas candidates in the upcoming election, particularly Kris Kobach.

Below, Kris Kobach campaigned with the president at the Topeka rally to become governor of Kansas.

Kris Kobach is of course a long-time hero to the friends of law and borders. He was a major shaper of Arizona’s SB1070 law that sought to allow states to enforce immigration law if the federal government was unwilling to do so. See Time magazine’s 2012 interview, Q&A: Kris Kobach, the Legal Mind Behind Arizona’s Immigration Law.

Kobach, who is the current Kansas Secretary of State, spoke about his top issues at the rally — immigration enforcement and preventing voter fraud:

Spare audio:

KRIS KOBACH: I want to give President Trump credit for something really important — it’s something he and I have worked together on; we’ve worked for on a number of things, but the most important is stopping illegal immigration. I’m so glad that America has a president who gets it and knows that illegal means illegal.

I want to tell you a quick short story about illegal immigration. I began working on this issue when I was an adviser to John Ashcroft at the time of 9/11. I was there during 9/11, and we all remember how the world changed, but let me tell you something that you may not know. All nineteen hijackers came into this country legally on temporary visas. Five of them became illegal mostly by overstaying their visas; four of those five were stopped by state and local law enforcement for speeding violations. They were illegally in the country at the time, but the cops didn’t know it and so they didn’t make an arrest even though they could have if they’d had that information at their fingertips. Now get this — three of those four illegal aliens that they could have arrested were pilots, so if they had made those arrests they could have stopped 9/11 from happening.

Those numbers have shaped my career: the gravity of that has never left me, and I will not and I know President Trump will not allow our immigration system to be used again as a weapon to harm the American people. Stopping illegal aliens is not just about jobs; it’s not just about crime; it’s about our nation’s security, and that comes first.

And illegal immigration’s at issue in this campaign for governor. Did you know that my opponent Laura Kelly voted to continue allowing sanctuary cities in Kansas? She did, she did. Look it up it’s in the roll call vote. When I’m governor, God willing, sanctuary cities will end in this state.

Laura Kelly also voted to allow illegal aliens to continue getting welfare benefits. So while we’re struggling to pay our electricity bill, to pay higher taxes, we’re meanwhile giving taxpayer dollars to illegal aliens. Is that fair? It’s time to stop illegal aliens from getting taxpayer dollars. It’s time to put Kansans first, not illegal aliens.

There’s another big issue, there’s another big issue that President Trump and I have both been concerned about — voter fraud. Because of the law that I drafted and the Kansas Legislature passed, Kansas now has the most secure election laws in America. Photo ID creates trust in our elections. If you need a photo ID to cash a check or to buy the kind of Sudafed that works, you probably ought to need one to go cast a vote in an election. And proof of citizenship too, proof of citizenship — every time an alien votes, every time an alien votes it cancels out the vote of a US citizen. You know the Democrats and their socialist friends claim they care about voter cancellation or voter suppression, but they don’t care about US citizens votes being cancelled out. It’s time for other states to require proof of citizenship too, just like Kansas.

Early on, President Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as [...]]]> Voter fraud has long been underplayed in the press, despite well known cases like “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson’s victory in his 1948 Senate race after supporters “found” 87 extra votes to put him over the top.

Early on, President Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chair. Secretary Kobach has been making controversial statements about messy subjects — like saying the 2016 New Hampshire US Senate election result was changed by out-of-state voters. His honesty has made him a target for the mainstream media.

Voter ID to prevent fraud has long-standing support among the public yet Democrats consistently block it.

Reporter Stephen Dinan included some interesting facts about non-citizens who have voted unlawfully. With at least 11 million illegal aliens loose in the country, you have to wonder how many are gratefully voting for the Democrats who support open borders and lots of freebies for foreigners.

Detailed stories of fraud and weaknesses in election system are sent to voter integrity commission, By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, September 11, 2017

One man’s mother, who was in a “memory care” ward of a nursing home and deemed too incapacitated to vote, somehow still managed to have a ballot cast in her name in Florida.

A man in New York said he got voter ID cards sent to his home for family members who moved away decades ago and now vote elsewhere. He said it would have been easy to go vote in New York in place of those people.

A Texas election judge said that when he asked one voter to show his ID, the man whipped out his green card, signaling he was a legal immigrant but not a citizen and shouldn’t have been voting at all.

For a problem that critics say doesn’t exist, Americans seem to have a lot of stories of voter fraud or the potential for it. They are sharing those stories with President Trump’s voter integrity commission as it wades into one of the administration’s thorniest fights.

The stories are buried in the thousands of public comments being collected by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which holds its second meeting Tuesday in New Hampshire.

The reports are unverified, but some of those writing offer detailed histories of their brushes with fraud.

Chris Moore wrote of his mother, Maxine E. Moore, who at age 96 was in the “memory care” unit of an assisted living facility in Broward County, Florida. She suffered from dementia so serious that she “did not know what day it was let alone what was going on in the world.”

Although election officials determined her not competent to vote, she was still registered as a Democrat and ballots were cast in her name in the March primary and the general election.

“The specific reports of alien registration and voting show that the current system is broken. The system must be improved, and it’s easy to do it,” said J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and one of the members of the voter commission.

Mr. Adams‘ organization released a report Monday finding hundreds of noncitizens registered to vote in 11 counties in New Jersey. Some 10 percent of those ended up casting ballots, the study found.

In some cases, the immigrants told election officials that they weren’t citizens but were kept on the rolls and were even allowed to vote, the study says.

That tracks with one of the other reports filed in the public comments with the voter commission. Mark Annotti, a deportation officer at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said he has encountered thousands of immigrants during his service in Boston and Florida and regularly asks them whom they voted for in the latest election.

“While very few illegal aliens ever admitted to voting in the national election, I was surprised at how many lawful permanent residents admitted to voting in the national election. When lawful permanent residents were informed that they were not authorized to vote in the national election, many claimed they were not aware,” he said.

“When pressed to explain further, many simply stated that they were provided a ballot, made their selections on the entire ballot and returned the completed ballot,” he said.

(Continues)

In charge of fixing the voter [...]]]> Preventing voter fraud by dead people and illegal aliens in 2018 and beyond is an important project to fight against anti-sovereignty interests. We can be sure that Democrats will turn out every voter they can recruit from cemeteries and foreigner hiring halls to defeat efforts to enforce immigration law.

In charge of fixing the voter mess is the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was set up to examine how many votes are ineligible and what might be done to make elections more honest.

The pushback by some states to hand over public records to the commission has been intense. Democrats have apparently decided on privacy concerns and the claim that no voter fraud has been proven as talking points against the reform measure. Virginia’s D-Governor Terry McAuliffe refused to co-operate, saying, “This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November.”

Voter fraud does happen: the question is how common it is. Last November, Hans Von Spakovsky (co-author of Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk) opined in a Breitbart interview that “We know for a fact, from all kinds of different reports we’ve had and cases, that there are non-citizens registered and voting all over the country.” On June 19, the Washington Times headlined, Study supports Trump: 5.7 million noncitizens may have cast illegal votes.

The vice-chair of the commission, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach reflected on the scope of the problem in his remarks at the opening session on Wednesday:

KRIS KOBACH: I’ve often thought that at the very foundation of our republic are really two bedrock things — the American Constitution and the faith and reality that our elections are conducted fairly. If you take away either of those two things I believe that our republic cannot stand for long.

So for a long time there’s been lingering doubt among many Americans about the integrity and fairness of elections, and it’s not a new issue at all. If you look at the polling data, it goes back decades. Public opinion has been consistent on this, in that there is a substantial number of people who wonder if our elections are fair. A 2014 survey showed that only 40% of voters thought elections were fair to the voters which indicates that 60% either did not think so or were undecided.

We owe it to the American people if you take a hard dispassionate look at the subject. . . .

For example in my state of Kansas we’re engaged in litigation right now defending our proof of citizenship requirements at the time of registration, and we engaged in extensive fact-finding for the federal courts involved and have discovered 128 specific cases of non-citizens who either registered to vote or attempted to register to vote. . . .

You can watch a longer video (1 hour 13 minutes) on C-SPAN where the members of the commission discuss ideas of what they would like to investigate.

The long-standing support for voter IDs shown in polling may reflect the public’s suspicion about voting integrity as well as a basic desire for fairness:

Vice-Chair Kobach wrote on Wednesday about how the commission is moving along through the obstacles placed in front of it.

Kobach: A Victory for Public Information, Breitbart.com, by Kris W. Kobach, July 19, 2017

On Tuesday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida denied temporary restraining orders (TROs) sought by the ACLU, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and others. The plaintiffs were attempting to prevent the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, of which I am Vice-Chair, from having its first meeting on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Fortunately, the federal judges rejected the TRO requests. In a well-reasoned, 24-page opinion, the District of Columbia federal judge explained why the plaintiffs’ claims that the meeting would violate federal law were unlikely to prevail.

On Wednesday, the Commission met and launched its fact-finding mission. President Trump himself addressed the Commission members, highlighting the importance of the Commission’s work.

The Commission is a bipartisan body dedicated to collecting factual information and providing advice to the president about the integrity of the voting process and reporting that information to the American people. But the ACLU and the Lawyers’ Committee don’t want that information-gathering to begin. They, along with groups like Common Cause and the NAACP, have filed a total of seven lawsuits to thwart the Commission’s work.

The ACLU and allied groups on the Left have long used the tactic of litigation to achieve policies that they could not accomplish through the legislative process. But with this latest onslaught of lawsuits they have taken their litigation approach to a whole new level – they are attempting to prevent the president from receiving advice and prevent the American public from gaining information. They are literally trying to stop the Commission from doing its work.

What information are they so determined to keep under wraps?  Facts that show the extent of voter fraud in this country. Among the facts presented at the first meeting was a list of 938 criminal convictions for election crimes, almost all after the year 2000. So much for the claim that voter fraud doesn’t exist.

This tactic of attempting to stop a commission through litigation is unusual. There were 28 presidential advisory commissions established under President Obama and 24 presidential advisory commissions under Bush. None were besieged by a flurry of lawsuits like this. And only a very small number faced any litigation at all.

For example, in 2013 President Obama formed the Presidential Commission on Election Administration to study lines at polling places and other issues. There were no lawsuits from conservative groups to stop the commission from doing its work. Indeed, I was a witness who provided evidence to that commission about how we kept wait times to a minimum in Kansas.

Although a few States like Kansas have done extensive research on voter fraud, most States have not. Never before has there been a nationwide effort to analyze voter fraud and other threats to election integrity. And the ACLU and the Lawyers’ Committee wants to do everything they can to make sure that no such analysis occurs.

(continues)

Therefore the Voter Integrity Commission created [...]]]> Verifying voter rolls to keep out the Democrat base of illegal aliens and dead people should be a top priority for the Trump Administration, because the 2016 election results has surely convinced the left that they can only win by vastly increasing the numbers of fake and foreigner voters.

Therefore the Voter Integrity Commission created by President Trump is the first step to determining how bad the problem is. But some of the usual Democrats have resisted handing over public voter rolls to the commission:

Dem state officials refusing to cooperate with Trump voter fraud probe, Fox News, June 30, 2017

Democratic state officials already are refusing to cooperate with the voter fraud investigation ordered by President Trump, saying they will not hand over the extensive “voter roll data” the commission is seeking.

The response comes after Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state serving as vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, wrote to all 50 states this week asking for their input as well as voter registration data.

“I have no intention of honoring this request. Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia,” Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe countered in a statement Thursday, claiming the commission is based on the “specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November.” . . .

Interestingly, thousands of fraudulent voters were found a couple months ago in Virginia, so Gov. McAuliffe’s squawks of probity are suspect.

Polls have shown for years that an overwhelming majority of Americans across racial and party lines support voter IDs.

Kris Kobach, the vice-chair of the commission, appeared with Tucker Carlson on Friday to discuss the resistance he is experiencing for trying to analyze public information about who is voting in America.

Here’s a spare audio file of the video in case it disappears:

Kobach thinks the Democrat states may fear the public learning how many illegal aliens are voting in states like California that lets anyone vote:

”For example one thing that’s never been done that’s very important is the federal government knows the names of more than 15 million aliens who are living in the United States, in fact it’s closer to more than 20 million. The individuals are here on green cards, they’re on temporary visas. But the states have never been permitted to see how many of those aliens have registered to vote in my state.

The number is likely to be very high, but let’s find out what the number is and that’s one of the reasons I think California is afraid of what they might find out; they don’t have any sort of precautions that effectively ensure that non-citizens aren’t voting.”

Fifteen to 20 million imported alien Democrats is a lot, and they must be made to stay away from American polling places on future election days.

Fox News reported the story on Tuesday:

This case will [...]]]> We hear from liberals that unlawful voting doesn’t happen, and particularly that illegal aliens don’t cast ballots. But the Public Interest Legal Foundation has investigated voting behavior in Virginia and found a different story, that in fact thousands of illegals voted there unlawfully.

Fox News reported the story on Tuesday:

This case will add to the evidence of broad voter fraud that Kris Kobach is investigating for President Trump, who claimed widespread fraudulent voting when he was a candidate. Kobach already found that 18,000 illegal aliens were registered to vote in Kansas, where he is Secretary of State.

Polls have shown for years that an overwhelming majority of Americans across racial and party lines support voter IDs. But Democrat pols spin the lie that requiring identification suppresses minority turnout, because the party thinks it can’t win without dead and illegal alien voters.

As apparently happened in Virginia, where Democrat Governor McAuliffe went straight to coverup mode to hide the fraud.

More than 5,500 illegals registered to vote in Virginia in last decade; 1,852 actually cast ballots, By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, May 30, 2017

Critics say McAuliffe kept key facts hidden

When Maureen Erickson registered to vote in Prince William County, she listed her home address as a street in Guatemala, in what should have been a very strong indication that she wasn’t a regular Virginia resident.

Yet she remained on the voting rolls for years, and even cast ballots in 14 different elections, up through the 2008 presidential contest. She was only purged in 2012, just ahead of the election, after she self-reported as a noncitizen, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Ms. Erickson was one of more than 5,500 noncitizens who were registered to vote in Virginia this decade, and were only bumped from the rolls after they admitted to being ineligible. Some 1,852 of them even managed to cast ballots that were likely illegal, though undetected, the PILF, a conservative voter integrity group, said in its report.

Just as troubling, the PILF said, was Virginia’s efforts to try to hide the information from the public — a problem foundation President J. Christian Adams said began at the very top, with Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

“At the instruction of Governor McAuliffe’s political appointees, local election officials spent countless resources to prevent this information from spilling into the open,” Mr. Adams said in a statement releasing the report. “From NoVa to Norfolk and all urban and rural points in between, alien voters are casting ballots with practically no legal consequences in response.”

The report should give an early sense for the problems that are likely to be turned up by President Trump’s new voter integrity commission, which has been charged with getting to the bottom of both the scope of illegal voting and barriers to legal voters casting their ballots.

Edgardo Cortes, Virginia’s elections commissioner, said the new report actually represents a victory, showing how well Virginia does at weeding out voters who admit they are ineligible.

“As the PILF report shows, Virginia election officials have been and are continuing to promptly remove individuals who self-identify as non-citizens from the statewide voter registration list in accordance with federal and state law,” Mr. Cortes said in a statement.

He also said Virginia publishes its efforts to maintain voter lists, including removal of voters who died, were deemed ineligible or moved.

“As part of the McAuliffe administration’s commitment to transparency, this information, and other information cited by PILF, is readily available on our website,” he said. “It is hard to ‘uncover’ something that is readily made available to the public on an ongoing basis.”

The reports Mr. Cortes pointed to do give a number for noncitizens purged from the rolls each year, but do not include the more extensive details — such as the woman who gave her address as Guatemala — that the PILF was seeking.

Mr. Trump singled Virginia out as a locus of massive voter fraud after last year’s election. In late November, explaining his shortfall in the national popular vote, Mr. Trump said there was “serious” fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.

He didn’t give specific evidence, but attributed a lack of attention to the issue to “serious bias” in the press.

“Big problem!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter.

Mr. Cortes at the time said there were no indications of fraud, saying that the ballots cast were counted properly.

But Mr. Trump’s contention is not that valid votes weren’t cast. He says, rather, that millions of ineligible voters are being allowed to vote.

The most ineligible voters counted in any year in Virginia by the PILF were 1,065 votes cast during the 2008 presidential election year.

No academic analysis has documented that large a problem — though voting integrity advocates say that’s partly because nobody is looking very hard.

The new PILF report is meant to put some numbers behind the scope of fraud.

Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest jurisdiction, also notched the most reports of noncitizens who had to be kicked off the rolls, with more than 1,000. Prince William County was second with 523, and Virginia Beach City was third with 517.

The PILF said those numbers could be just a fraction of the problem given that they only cover noncitizens who somehow admitted to state officials that they weren’t legally able to vote.

Cameron Sasnett, the registrar in Fairfax County, said he’s bound by the laws and cannot be proactive in trying to suss out noncitizens on his rolls.

He said he waits for notification from the state, which relies heavily on immigrants who tell the Department of Motor Vehicle they aren’t citizens. He declined to guess at how widespread noncitizen registration might be in Fairfax, saying those were questions he left up to the state.

“We do everything we are required by law to do,” he said.

Noncitizens are not supposed to register, but many of them do anyway because of U.S. laws meant to encourage higher turnout. The National Voter Registration Act, dubbed “Motor Voter,” required states to offer voter registration at places where government officials are likely to encounter citizens, such as motor vehicle bureaus.

Virginia says it’s trying to tap into Homeland Security databases to try to use them to weed out noncitizens, but says the federal government makes it almost impossible to harness them for the purpose of cleaning up voter rolls.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of Mr. Trump’s new voter integrity commission, said he expects the panel will use those databases to try to figure out the scope of the problem for at least some states.

According to voting [...]]]> It’s not too early for the president to shore up the nation’s protections against voter fraud which are rather slim these days. The Democrats will be loaded for bear in 2018 with expanded Get Out the Vote efforts, and that will include recruiting dead people and illegal aliens to mark the D-candidates.

According to voting expert Hans von Spakovsky, Trump is right to think that illegal aliens are voting. As the co-author of a book about voter fraud (Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk), he is well versed in the subject.

In a discussion of non-citizen voting, Spakovsky observed, “Based on the surveys it could be anywhere from two percent to over six percent of non-citizens voting in elections which could be anywhere from a couple hundred thousand to over a million.”

Another expert on non-citizen voting is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who will be the co-chair of the Trump commission. Kobach has long been an advocate of photo IDs being used in elections, and Kansas began requiring it in 2012.

Kobach pointed out recently that if there really is no voter fraud as liberals insist, then the commission will report that result and libs should therefore be more supportive of the project.

As Trump creates commission to study voter fraud and suppression, liberals cry foul, By Stephen Dinan and Dave Boyer, Washington Times, May 11, 2017

President Trump established a commission Thursday to study voter fraud and suppression, tapping Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach to lead an effort that is drawing fire even before its first meeting.

On an issue where anecdotes, conjecture and accusations from both sides have dominated the debate, the commission hopes to break new ground by producing a comprehensive national look at the extent of voter fraud.

The commission, for the first time, will delve into Homeland Security databases in an effort to determine the scope of noncitizens who end up illegally registered to vote — and sometimes even cast ballots.

“People have their different opinions about whether this is big enough to be considered a problem, how big a problem is it. But oftentimes they don’t have a whole lot of data to work with. This commission will provide that data,” Mr. Kobach told The Washington Times just after Mr. Trump signed an executive order creating the commission.

The idea for the commission stems from Mr. Trump’s insistence that Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s popular victory last year was padded by illegal votes. Liberal voting rights groups dismissed that, saying there isn’t enough evidence of fraud to give the matter attention.

The commission’s charge is broad and the wording is tempered, but Mr. Trump’s signature ignited ferocious pushback from Democrats and activist groups, who said he was setting the stage to strip voting rights from some Americans.

The ink was barely dry on the executive order before the American Civil Liberties Union said it had filed an open records request demanding that the White House release the evidence Mr. Trump is referencing when he makes claims of fraud.

Dale Ho, ACLU voting rights project director, called on sources to boycott the commission to try to prevent it from completing its work. He called Mr. Kobach “the king of voter suppression” and said his participation makes the commission “a sham.”

Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, Illinois Democrat, called Mr. Kobach an “enemy of American democracy,” and Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, said Mr. Kobach displays bigotry in his efforts to tighten voting and immigration laws.

The Brennan Center for Justice, another of the advocacy groups, released a report last week surveying election officials in 42 cities and counties and saying that 40 of them reported “no known incidents of noncitizen voting” last year.

Mr. Kobach, though, said there are types of fraud that no local official could identify. A legal immigrant who hasn’t obtained citizenship could have registered, perhaps while at the motor vehicles bureau, and it’s unlikely local elections officials would become aware.

“To make broad statements like ‘It’s not a problem, it doesn’t exist’ — that is factually impossible to do. So what the commission is going to do is provide facts,” he said.

“Their reaction is, ‘Oh no, we don’t want to see facts, we don’t want to see data.’ Well, all we’re going to do is provide data to the public, and people can draw their own conclusions about the numbers,” Mr. Kobach said.

He said it will be tougher to gauge voter suppression, which Democrats say is a bigger problem in elections than fraud.

Mr. Kobach said nonvoting is often the result of several factors and pinning down the one that discourages a person from casting a ballot is tough.

“We’ll see what the commission is able to do, and other people on the commission and people that bring evidence before the commission may bring things that I haven’t anticipated,” he said. “That’s one that’s a really tough nut to crack because it’s hard to say 100 percent that you voted in that election because of these reasons, or you didn’t vote because of that reason.”

He said Kansas has not seen evidence that its photo ID requirement is dissuading voters but other states might have evidence.

Although academics and voting officials have studied voter fraud for years, Mr. Kobach said, they have never been able to take a comprehensive look because they have not had access to important data.

He said the commission will be able to use Homeland Security data that lists every legal immigrant and visa holder in the country — and will run a sample of state voter files against that data to try to spot noncitizens who are registered to vote.

Mr. Kobach said the commission also may tap Social Security’s Death Master File to see how often dead people show up on local voting rolls.

Conservative groups said there are hints of how bad the fraud problem is.

North Carolina’s Board of Elections has identified 41 noncitizens who voted in its election last year, and Nevada has an active investigation. The Washington Times has asked for documents on that probe, but Nevada has delayed its answers.

“Perennial questions surrounding the actual scope of ineligible voters and their rates of participation can only be answered when federal offices share information,” said Logan Churchwell, spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

In addition to Mr. Pence and Mr. Kobach, four current or former secretaries of state have been appointed: Democrats from New Hampshire and Maine, and Republicans from Indiana and Ohio.
The commission also will have one of the members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. A half-dozen other members are still to be named, though Mr. Kobach said the endeavor will be bipartisan.

“I’m keeping an open mind, and I think all members of the commission will have an open mind. The charge of the commission is to go out and collect the facts and go where the facts lead us,” he said.