Answer to voter fraud question already available

THE JOURNAL’S recent editorial concerning voting data shows a deeply flawed analysis . ... The Journal chastised Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver for refusing to give over our voter rolls to the president’s so-called “election integrity” commission.

The Russians hacked the election in 2016. Our entire national intelligence community agrees about this. The lesson from this series of events is that our data systems are nowhere near secure enough. What saved us from possibly much greater damage was the very separateness of our voter databases and our state-by-state election processes. Had the data been held in one national database, it would have been a much more tempting and easy target for hacking.

Also, no evidence has been found of the widespread voter fraud the president has alleged. There is no reason to do a nationwide database search for a problem that does not exist.

The Journal’s editorial was published at the same time President Trump was meeting with Vladimir Putin inviting the Russians to join us in some sort of cybersecurity coalition, which even Republican members of the U. S. Senate characterized as inviting the fox to guard the hen house. Gathering all our voter data in one place is the most dangerous thing we could do to expose (it) to further hacking and manipulation.

There already exists a multistate organization called Interstate Crosscheck, which reportedly has reviewed the voter data from a number of its member states. This organization should be required to make its findings from 2016 public, especially all names that were purged before the 2016 election, to see what it found and whether it was finding actual duplication of registrations — and whether those were deliberate or accidental — or whether it was targeting some classes of voters to be illegally purged. MERILEE DANNEMANN-KAMERMAN Albuquerque