— by Stephen Wolf and edited by David Nir. Daily Kos Elections Voting Rights Roundup email
In May, Donald Trump created a “Voting Integrity Commission” that we knew was purely a pretext to promote voter suppression nationwide. Now this panel has launched its opening salvo and confirmed its true purpose. The board is proposing to scrutinize each state’s voter registration records and intimidate the states into conducting voter purges—and it’s named America’s most prominent voter-fraud scaremonger to the commission itself. These actions are designed to give Trump and congressional Republicans an excuse to impose new voting restrictions at the national level.
Led by vice chair Kris Kobach, Kansas’ Republican secretary of state and one of the country’s foremost crusaders for voting restrictions, Trump’s commission has requested that every state send in its voter registration records in their entirety. For some states, these records would include voters’ names, addresses, birth dates, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, party affiliation, the history of which elections they’ve voted in over the last decade, their registration status in another state, their military status, and whether they have felony convictions—in other words, quite a lot of personal information.
Although registration information is technically public, states have restrictions on with whom it can be shared and how, given the obvious privacy concerns with such sensitive data. While the federal government already has access to some of these statistics for every voter, the commission itself is required to make all documents it receives available to the general public, which would effectively defeat the attempts that the states have made to safeguard this information.
Kobach will likely abuse these registration records to demonstrate examples of the same person voting more than once in an attempt to claim that voter fraud is widespread. These examples will be bogus, though. Kobach has done this very same thing with his national “Crosscheck” system, which he’s convinced over 30 states to adopt. Crosscheck is notoriously riddled with inaccurate information, since it often compares just a few data points to suss out duplicate registrations, such as name and birthdate, leading to many false positives. (How many guys do you want to bet are named James Smith with a birthday of April 20? A lot, no doubt.) Election experts have estimated that Crosscheck could disenfranchise 200 valid voters for every one actual case of double registration that it eliminates.
Many Democratic state elections officials have refused Kobach’s request, while even a few Republicans have said they will only comply with the legal bare minimum and won’t submit private data. (Operative Matt Berg is keeping track of all the responses.) In a fitting ironic twist of incompetence, Kobach himself is unable to supply all of the requested information because of Kansas state law. Unfortunately, Kobach will likely enough get the information he needs from more pliant Republican officials in order to be able to falsely claim that voting irregularities are widespread.
Even if there were a legitimate reason to send the commission these records, Kobach was recently reprimanded by a federal court and fined $1,000 for “patently misleading representations” he made in a lawsuit over the contents of a document he was seen carrying that outlined proposed changes to federal voting laws. From the start, Kobach’s findings have been predetermined to support future voting restrictions.
As if Kobach weren’t awful enough, Trump also named Hans von Spakovsky to the commission. Spakovsky is perhaps the country’s most notorious promoter of the lie that voter fraud is widespread. As an attorney in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under George W. Bush, Spakovsky played an instrumental role in politicizing the department to whip up the specter of voter fraud while greenlighting nascent Republican-passed voter restrictions like Georgia’s voter ID law over the objection of career DOJ employees. It’s really like they’re putting together the worst imaginable team of voter-suppression supervillains they possibly can.
Unfortunately, this commission is just one part of the Trump administration’s multi-pronged effort to impose new restrictions on voter registration. The Justice Department itself has played into this charade by sending a letter to the states warning them that it is “reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state” while querying them on how they plan to clean up their voting rolls. This action is another likely attempt at intimidation that will also encourage Republican-run states to purge their voting rolls, potentially disenfranchising many valid voters.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have introduced a bill to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission; back in February, the House Administration Committee voted to do the same thing. This latest measure is part of the GOP’s budget proposal, which stands a good chance of passing. The EAC was created after the 2000 election debacle to help states run their elections, and it’s the only federal agency tasked with ensuring that voting machines aren’t vulnerable to hacking.
Yet rather than protect the country’s elections infrastructure from the very real threat of intrusion, the GOP is whipping up hysteria over nearly nonexistent voter fraud. This fear-mongering will likely serve as a pretext to amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, and more popularly known as the “Motor Voter” law. This would be the logical culmination at the federal level of the wave of GOP-passed voting restrictions that have swept state governments in the last decade.
If Kobach gets his way, congressional Republicans will amend the NVRA to require proof-of-citizenship for all voter registrants. Kobach and his allies in fact tried to require citizenship documentation in Kansas, leading to the suspension of one in seven new voter registrations until a federal court intervened last year.
This requirement is a solution in search of a problem, since Kobach himself has only successfully prosecuted one non-citizen voter ever. Many citizens don’t have easy access to the kinds of documents necessary to prove citizenship, and the requirement would utterly destroy the ability of civic groups to conduct voter registration drives, since people don’t exactly walk around around with their birth certificates in their back pockets.
Trump’s voting integrity commission is an unmistakable witch hunt that no one who believes in representative democracy should normalize. Those who support free and fair elections should urge their elected officials to refuse to comply with the commission’s request for voter registration records. Furthermore, Democrats like New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner should end their participation on the commission, since their service only helps to legitimize a partisan effort to suppress votes in order to unfairly win elections.