TRUMP’S ‘ELECTORAL INTEGRITY’ PANEL IS A FISHING EXPEDITION
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s insistence that nationwide voter fraud denied him a victory in the popular vote last November prompted him to set up a federal voting commission seeking broad personal and political information on enrolled voters. The effort has triggered a broad pushback from 44 state elections agencies.
Numerous studies, including some by Republican and Democratic state governments, have concluded Trump’s allegation is unfounded. But the commission, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, has asked the state agencies to provide names, addresses, birthdates and even party affiliations and partial Social Security numbers.
Many state elections officials, citing state laws, have refused to release any of this information or parts of it. One Republican secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann of Mississippi, said the commission “can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”
The emphatic rejections are based on concerns over federal intrusion into states’ affairs and huge technical difficulties in complying, not to mention the commission’s transparent purpose. The driving force appears to be Trump’s enduring frustration over his 2016 popular-vote loss by three million ballots to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He gained the Oval Office via his 77-vote majority in the Electoral College.
In May, after much Democratic chiding over the nature of his victory, Trump created a new Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity under Pence, with a vocal Republican critic of alleged voter fraud, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, as vice chairman.
Kobach last week labeled news accounts of the states’ pushback against the sweeping request as more “fake news,” echoing Trump in the ongoing war of words with much of the mainstream news media.
“Despite media distortions and obstruction by a handful of state politicians,” Kobach wrote, “this bipartisan commission on election integrity will continue it work to gather the facts through public records requests to ensure the integrity of each Americans vote, because the public has a right to know.”
His statement notably was issued through the White House, which itself has been under fire for its skimpy and nonresponsive evasions to White House reporters’ verbal inquiries to the president on multiple news developments.
While he has been on his second trip to Europe with a much ballyhooed first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump also has been coping with North Korea’s reportedly successful testing of a new intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching Alaska.
Yet he remains preoccupied with the politically irrelevant loss of a popular vote of eight months ago. It doesn’t erase Trump’s hold on the presidency, although that may be eroding because of his own impulsive remarks and behavior on a variety of fronts.
The fact that 44 or more states have openly stood up to Trump may simply be a measure of their usual concerns about federal intrusions. Kobach chose to accentuate the positive by noting that “only 14 states and the District of Columbia have refused the commission’s information.” But the response hardly demonstrated that the bully-boy approach of the current Oval Office occupant has these state officials quaking in their boots.
Trump in a recent tweet observed: “Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTE FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?” As a president who has continued to doubt Russian interference in the American election process and has sought to derail the congressional investigation into it, one can reasonably ask: Who is Donald Trump to ask that question?
He continues to withhold his latest income tax returns, which could reveal answers to the many inquiries about his wealth, his means of acquiring it and alleged Russian connections. Along with the general secrecy surrounding this most unorthodox presidency, all of it cries out for deeper scrutiny by the mainstream news media he so defensively demeans as a generator of fake news.