Trump’s voter fraud panel, no stranger to controversy, creates another one
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s commission on voter fraud, which has ricocheted between controversies since its creation in May, is scheduled to conduct its second public meeting today in New Hampshire. Already, the commission’s de facto leader has warmed up for the session by suggesting that the election in November of Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., was rigged.
The accusation led the state’s entire congressional delegation to demand that William M. Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, resign from the commission. Gardner, a Democrat and the host of the meeting today, refused to do so, and said the state’s two senators and two representatives were being hypocritical.
Uproar has become standard practice for the fraud panel, officially called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Critics say the commission is a pretext for Republican efforts to make it harder to register and to vote, and that it will reach a predetermined conclusion, that tough new rules are needed to prevent fraud. Studies have repeatedly shown that illegal voting is very rare, and that voter impersonation — perhaps the main danger suggested by advocates of tighter election rules — is next to nonexistent.
Since its formation, the commission has been accused of skirting open-government laws; it has publicly released personal details like street and email addresses of citizens who contacted it, almost always to complain; and generated a fierce backlash when it asked state election officials to turn over data on every voter in the United States. The advocacy group Common Cause states in a new report that the request led more than 5,000 Colorado voters to deregister so that their personal information would not be sent to Washington.
In an interview, Gardner said the serial controversies had unfairly sullied the commission’s public image almost before it had begun work, adding that he had been branded by some as a vote suppressor merely by serving on it.
“You don’t judge a book by its cover,” he said. “You judge at the end.”
The meeting today will be devoted to studying declining public confidence in elections, one of the mandates given the panel by Trump, who has claimed without foundation that millions of fraudulent ballots enabled Hillary Clinton to win the popular vote in November.
The meeting will include a statistical review of decades of elections and a discussion of whether fraud has reduced citizens’ trust in the fairness of elections — a timely topic, as an allegation of fraud in New Hampshire by one of the commission’s leading members have dominated the runup to the session.
The charge was leveled Thursday by Kris Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, the commission’s vice chairman and, most recently, columnist for the far-right website Breitbart News. In his debut column, Kobach said Hassan’s victory in the contest for a New Hampshire seat in the Senate — and perhaps Clinton’s narrow win in the state — likely were the result of voter fraud.
His accusation was based on data from Gardner’s office showing that 6,540 people in New Hampshire registered to vote on Election Day using out-of-state driver’s licenses to verify their identities, but only 1,014 of the registrants later obtained a New Hampshire license.
Kobach said that was evidence that the remaining 5,313 registrants were illegal voters from other states — enough voters, he noted, to supply the narrow margins of victory for both Hassen and Clinton.
The allegation sparked an immediate demand by the state’s four legislators in Congress that Gardner resign from the commission. Gardner called that hypocritical, asking whether any of the legislators had ever quit a congressional committee because they disagreed with the views of another member.