Battle lines are drawn over voter panel Heidi M Przybyla
Fraud commission has rights groups fearing chilling effect
A private document snapped by an alert Associated Press photographer offers clues about where President Trump’s new voter fraud panel may be headed — and it risks a hyper-partisan battle over voting rights.
The paperwork held by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who heads Trump’s panel, was captured after a November interview at then presidentelect Trump’s Bedminster golf course. It appears to propose changes to the U.S. National Voter Registration Act.
The document may soon become public after Kobach was fined two weeks ago by a federal magistrate for “patently misleading representations” about its contents and was ordered to hand it over to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU filed a lawsuit Monday, accusing the committee of failing to adhere to federal transparency rules, part of a flurry of recent legal challenges.
The document, Kobach’s record of furthering strict voting rules in Kansas — and the fact that the publicly available voter data the commission is using precludes a reliable study — has several U.S. elections scholars interviewed by USA TODAY worried.
“There will be a report, and Secretary Kobach has already told us what’s going to be in it. The issue is how seriously people will treat it,” said Justin Levitt, a constitutional and election law scholar who served as the National Voter Protection Counsel in 2008.
The scattered voter registration information available to Trump’s panel is likely to create a misleading report that fuels debates over voter restrictions bubbling in at least 31 states if GOP-led state legislatures and Republican leaders in Congress rely on its work, experts say.
If policy changes are recommended based on bad data, it could inflame partisan tensions far more than allegations by Democrats that Trump created the commission simply to produce evidence supporting his claim that millions voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. At least 99 bills to “restrict access to registration and voting ” have been introduced, and 35 of them are progressing, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Most are laws requiring photo I.D., but they extend to shortened early-voting periods, among other changes.
“I fully expect wildly exaggerated claims of wrongdoing that feed directly into policy recommendations Secretary Kobach and others have been dying to make for a long time,” Levitt said. “Count me as least surprised when they say ‘ Hey, we ought to have an amendment to the Na- tional Voter Registration Act.”
Secretaries of state in at least 14 states are outright refusing to provide the more comprehensive data the commission is requesting, including partial voter Social Security numbers, out of privacy and federal government abuse concerns. Mississippi’s Republican secretary of state said his response will be to tell Kobach to “jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”
The deadline for submissions is Friday.
Without such granular detail, the panel is left with practically meaningless data that inflate the number of “false positives,” or people who may be double-registered, among other voter roll errors, the experts say.
“Ironically, the states resisting is actually going to empower the commission to make even wilder claims about fraud and double voting in the system,” said Michael McDonald, a professor who runs the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. “An explosive report will be put out to give cover to Republicans in Congress to move forward. That’s where this is going.”
To be sure, matching voter data can be useful in maintaining voter rolls, but only if it’s done through an exhaustive and highly technical process. Yet the panel made its data request to the states before consulting such outside experts.
The commission is simply seeking publicly available data to weed out potentially fraudulent registrations while also looking at voter suppression and cybersecurity, with the ultimate goal being to “recommend best practices to states,” said White House spokesman Marc Lotter.
“This commission does not have the power to remove anyone from a voter roll,” Lotter said. He also said it will produce a report regardless of whether states comply, without ruling out changes to the voter registration act. “They’re going to go where the data leads them,” he said, referring questions about the file to Kobach’s personal office.
Hans von Spakovsky, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation and one of the panel members, said the goal is to clean up U.S. voting rolls, including removing dead people; to delete non-U.S. citizens who may be registered; and to find people who may be doubleregistered in different states. He also said the panel may recommend changes to the voter registration act.
“I just don’t see why this is a big deal. I’ve been recommending changes to the NVRA for more than a decade to fix some of the problems in it,” von Spakovsky said. He also agreed that the panel can’t be effective without more precise data, including at least partial Social Security numbers to positively I.D. voters. “It’s hard to work without the kind of data the commission is asking for,” he said.
The U.S. Justice Department could ultimately force states to provide the data, said von Spakovsky, a move civil rights groups worry will have a chilling effect on registration.
The Justice Department has said it is reviewing voter registration list maintenance procedures in each state covered by the voter registration act and asking states how they plan to remove voters from the rolls.
According to Brennan, Kobach, who is running for governor next year, is “a key architect behind many of the nation’s anti-voter and anti-immigration policies,” including strict photo ID requirements requiring a birth certificate or passport to register. Since then, one of every seven Kansans who have tried to register have been blocked, according to the ACLU.
The U.S. Appeals Court Judge Jerome Holmes found Kobach had engaged in “mass denial of a fundamental right” by blocking 18,000 motor voter applicants from registering in Kansas.
Motor voter is the process by which anyone who interacts with the Department of Motor Vehicles has a chance to register. According to Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s voting rights project, changes Kobach may seek would “be devastating ” to voting rights, including making voter registration drives nearly impossible since many Americans don’t carry birth certificates or passports on them.
Experts raise a number of initial concerns, starting with flawed data.
“If they proceed down this path, I know what the results of the data analysis are going to be,” said David Becker, who heads the Center for Election for Election Innovation and Research and has been working with voter files for a decade. “They’re going to be worthless.”
“This commission does not have the power to remove anyone from a voter roll. They’re going to go where the data leads them.” White House spokesman Marc Lotter