WHO’S THE FRAUD!
Trump blasts states nixing vote-roll share
President Trump on Saturday fired back at testy state officials irked at a federal request for voter-registration data.
“Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL,” Trump tweeted. “What are they trying to hide?”
At least 24 states have refused to fully comply with the request for voter data that includes partial Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, party affiliation, voting history and military status.
Even some of Trump’s fellow Republicans are annoyed.
“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico,” Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, said of the request issued Wednesday by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
“Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes,” Hosemann said.
Eleven of the 24 states that won’t fully comply say they won’t provide the feds any voter data at all. Some, like New York and California, are citing political reasons for doing so.
“I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat.
Trump tweeted in November that “serious voter fraud” occurred in California.
Gov. Cuomo announced Friday that New York state would not comply with the request, which he said is based on the wrongheaded idea that voter fraud had a role in November’s election.
Among the states partially complying with the commission are Indiana and New Hampshire.
Vice President Mike Pence cochairs the commission and is a former governor of Indiana, but he has no sway over his state’s decision to shield birth dates from the panel.
The commission’s other cochair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, told the Kansas City Star that even his state would not share Social Security information with the commission.
Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state and a commission member, won’t release Social Security data to the group.
But Gardner, a Democrat, said much of the information sought by the commission is public.
New Hampshire voter checklists “have always included names, addresses and party affiliation, if there is a party affiliation,” Gardner told New Hampshire Public Radio. “So that’s all that’s being asked of us.”
In other holdout states, like Tennessee, officials said they were barred by law from fully aiding Trump’s anti-fraud push.
“State law does not allow my office to release the voter information requested to the federal commission,” said Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett, a Republican.
Under federal law and the Constitution, states register voters and maintain the integrity of voter rolls.
Trump’s commission asked secretaries of state for all “publicly available voter-roll data.”
Trump has said Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote win in November was due to more than 3 million votes in states that allow noncitizens, illegal immigrants and out-of-state voters to register.
That number has been widely debunked. But one 2014 study estimated that 24 percent of noncitizen US residents are registered to vote, and that 6.4 percent of them cast a ballot in the 2008 presidential election.