Commission without integrity
After the 2000 election fiasco, in which more votes were cast in the state of Florida for Al Gore, but more were counted for George W. Bush, giving the latter a controversial electoral college win and the election, Congress took some action. They passed the Help America Vote Act.
HAVA established some minimum guidelines for voting machines, improved election administration, and created the Election Assistance Commission to serve as a clearinghouse for improving the elections process in the country. HAVA was far from perfect, but it was at least an attempt, a bipartisan one, to improve the election process so that the will over the voters is expressed in the results.
Fast forward to 2016 and Donald Trump won the electoral college, but lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes. Though controversy swirls regarding Russian influence in the election process and whether the Trump campaign may have collaborated in that corruption, there is little evidence that the voting process itself was anything but valid. Secretary Clinton’s margin was real as was President Trump’s electoral college win. But Mr. Trump’s ego must be assuaged and he has stated several times, with zero evidence, that he would have won the popular vote as well, but for millions of illegal votes. Perhaps simply to prove his point, he has established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. This commission is purportedly led by Vice President Pence, but the main force will be its vice-chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
It might be helpful to know a bit about Mr. Kobach. He has been the leading national figure in attempting to prove the false notion that a substantial number of people vote fraudulently, thus necessitating security measures such as photo identification requirements, and voter purges. Despite huge resources spent, and the fact that he is the only Secretary of State in the country with prosecutorial powers, he has managed to obtain only six convictions, all for double voting.
This has been the pattern over and over. Every investigation and every study of suspected voter fraud has turned up only a handful of cases, often out of hundreds of millions of votes.
It is a solution in search of a problem. Implementing a photo identification requirement, among other measures proposed, would disenfranchise far more legitimate voters than any fraudulent ones.
Kobach runs the interstate Crosscheck program to search for double registrations and double voting. Double registrations are not illegal and happen often when a voter moves and her or his previous location does not immediately remove them from the rolls. Double voting is illegal, but again, rare. A recent study estimated that Crosscheck purge procedures would eliminate 200 legitimate voter registrations for every double voter taken off the rolls.
Kobach has been sued four times for voter his voter suppression efforts in Kansas and lost every time.
It’s not just voter suppression in Kobach’s history. He is also one of the proponents of the racist conspiracy theory that President Obama was not eligible for his office and in 2006, he was a co-author of a racial profiling law in Arizona, much of which was eventually overturned in court. His history is rife with nativism and anti-immigrant hysteria.
Kobach’s Commission made the news recently when it was reported that they had requested that every state provide to them a list of all voters and a great deal of information about them: full names, partial social security numbers, voting history, dates of birth, and party registration.
Some of this is in public records, but not in one national database, which concerns privacy advocates. Election integrity experts, actual ones, are concerned as well, that such information, in the hands of a commission with an agenda, would be dangerous to voter rights.
The pushback has been substantial. Secretaries of State from at least 44 states have refused all or part of the Commission’s request. These include voting leaders from both parties. While Democrats, such as the governor of Virginia, complained that the whole basis of the Commission is a pretext, Republicans complained as well. The Secretary of State of Mississippi invited the Commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”
It is true that voters likely to vote Democratic are from groups, minorities, the poor, and the very old, that are often less organized and thus at risk of being purged by narrow voting requirements. And Democrats should do more to improve access for those voters.
But Republicans might be better served by trying to appeal to them rather than purging them from the rolls.