Voter fraud and the right to cast honest ballots
Dissolving his national commission on voting fraud, as President Trump did last week, was certainly the right thing to do. There was little evidence of such fraud in the first place, and the commission didn’t turn up any new polling skulduggery.
If such a commission shouldn’t have been formed in the first place, well, that’s water under the bridge. Vice President Mike Pence, its chair, showed little enthusiasm for an obsessive meme that seems to be the president’s alone, that “millions” of fake ballots were cast for Hillary Clinton in November 2016, and that’s the reason she won the national popular vote.
When the president threw in the towel and got rid of the commission he had formed only last May, he tweeted: “Many mostly Democrat States refused to hand over data from the 2016 Election to the Commission On Voter Fraud. They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.”
It’s true that only a few states were willing to comply with the request from the federal government to send it the full names of registered voters, dates of birth, party registration, last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting history.
But there were vehement objections from the start even from heavily GOP states. The day of the request, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican in a heavily Republican state, said: “My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from. Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”
It is not at all clear that voter fraud is rampant in our country. There never was evidence that millions of illegal ballots were cast in 2016, as the president claimed. But it is certainly important that allegations of voter fraud be taken seriously and investigated. This presidential commission was simply not the right body to investigate such allegations. Initially, it should be left up to state law enforcement, bringing in the feds when necessary. And, as it happens, Department of Justice already has authority to oversee the states’ voter registration systems.
That authority comes from a law President Bill Clinton signed in 1993 as the National Voter Registration Act, also known as the Motor Voter Act.
Along with creating a process whereby voters may register to vote as they are applying for their driver licenses, the act mandates that states “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists.” It says that if there are voters — or former voters — who states wish to remove from its registration, the state must first send correspondence seeking a confirmation of address to those registered. People who don’t respond can then be removed from the rolls if they don’t vote in the next two federal elections.
Even that can go a bit far in at least the appearance of removing Americans from the voter rolls who wish to vote in the future. Administration officials have been confronted, for instance, by members of the military who did not respond to such mail because they were frequently deployed overseas. And, as we all know, some voters aren’t motivated to always go to the polls in years when there aren’t issues of concern to them. The balancing act is, same as it ever was, ensuring election integrity while not blocking any American’s right to vote.
— Orange County Register,
Digital First Media