Trump's voter fraud panel gets pushback after asking states for election data

Trump's voter fraud panel gets pushback after asking states for election data
In this Oct. 27, 2016, photo, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted drops off his early voting ballot in Columbus, Ohio. Husted, who is a Republican and Ohio's elections chief, said Friday, June 30, 2017, that he would only provide state voter information that is public to President Donald Trump's Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. (Jay LaPrete / AP)



Those worries intensified this week after the commission sent letters to 50 states and the District of Columbia on Wednesday asking for a trove of information, including names, dates of birth, voting histories and, if possible, party identifications. The letters also asked for evidence of voter fraud, convictions for election-related crimes and recommendations for preventing voter intimidation - all within 16 days.

While the Trump administration has said it is just requesting public information, the letters met with swift - and sometimes defiant - rejection. By Friday, 25 states were partially or entirely refusing to provide the requested information; some said state laws prohibit releasing certain details about voters, while others refused to provide any information because of the commission's makeup and backstory.

"This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November," Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D, said in a statement. "At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump's alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression."


Vice President Mike Pence, who is chairman of the commission, hosted a conference call with the group's members Wednesday morning, three weeks before they are scheduled to have their first meeting in Washington. During the call, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, R, the vice chairman, told the other members about the letters.





"It looks like they're putting together a database of who people voted for," said Jason Kander, a former Missouri secretary of state who runs the nonprofit group Let America Vote. "Democrat, Republican, independent, everybody should be outraged by that. This is from the same people, from Kris Kobach to Donald Trump, who've tried to make it harder for people to vote, and this seems like a step in the process. If the Obama administration had asked for this, Kris Kobach would be holding a press conference outside the Capitol to denounce it."










Hasen said he has "no confidence" in whatever results the committee produces. He said the commission and its request create a number of concerns, including that it is an election group created by one candidate for office - Trump, who already is campaigning for reelection - and headed by Pence, another political candidate.

"It's just a recipe for a biased and unfair report," Hasen said. "And it's completely different from the way that every other post-election commission has been done."

Justin Levitt, an elections expert at Loyola Law School, pointed to the request about voters' party affiliations, which he said violates the federal Privacy Act of 1974. Critics also said that because of varying state laws, the commission won't be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison with the data it collects, which could undermine its eventual conclusions.

The most acute worry Friday was about what the group's expected report in 2018 will recommend.

"It could end up leading to trying to create a justification for more state laws that restrict voting in very serious and what are proven to be unlawful ways," said Vanita Gupta, who headed the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration. "And that's through all kinds of cuts, through restrictive voter ID laws, through cuts in early voting [and] same day registration."

Experts also expressed concerns about Trump's appointment of Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department official and a longtime voter integrity advocate, to the commission. Gupta said that he, like Kobach, has "had a single-minded agenda to diminish voter participation and to fight voting rights, and to make voting harder."


"You meet people who say: I don't want to vote, because my vote doesn't count," said Dunn, the Arkansas lobbyist. "This commission has been broad-brush painted - and maybe rightly so - as some kind of voter suppression. But I don't feel like that's what I'm part of."


The White House bristled Friday at states refusing to cooperate with the commission.

"I think that that is mostly political stunt," Huckabee Sanders said when asked about the pushback. "This is a commission that's asking for publicly available data and the fact that these governors wouldn't be willing to turn that over - this is something that has been part of the commission's discussion, which has bipartisan support and none of the members raised any concern whatsoever."

Other states have said that they do plan to hand over information, albeit less than the broad sweep outlined in the letters. Wisconsin's elections commission administrator said that the state would give the public information for the standard $12,500 fee, but was not allowed to release other details such as dates of birth. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said his state would be handing over most of the requested information - noting that it is publicly available - though he said they would not provide portions of Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers because those are not.

Husted said in an interview Friday that his office had conducted reviews after previous elections, saying that these investigations have determined that "voter fraud exists, it's rare and we hold people accountable when we catch them."

Earlier this year, Husted announced that his office found 82 noncitizens of the United States who illegally voted in a recent Ohio election. According to his office, more than 5.6 million people cast ballots in last November's general election.

Jenna Johnson and Christopher Ingraham contributed to this report.