New challenge to voter fraud panel
Agency opens inquiry after Democrats on White House panel urge transparency.
President Trump’s voter fraud commission, launched by executive order in May with the stated goal of restoring confidence and integrity in the electoral process, is now under fire on multiple fronts.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, announced Thursday that it would investigate the commission at the request of Senate Democrats who questioned its motives.
Last week, two Democrats on the bipartisan commission released letters they recently sent to leaders of the panel condemning a lack of transparency.
“I honestly do not know what’s going on with the commission,” said commission member Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state and the author of one of the letters. “This very much concerns me.”
The commission is already facing several lawsuits over privacy concerns as it has requested voter names, addresses and other data from all 50 states — 15 of which have reportedly denied the requests.
The new developments add to criticism that the panel is both a sham created by a president unable to accept his loss in last year’s popular vote and a tool to justify measures that would suppress turnout by voters who tend to favor Democrats.
Trump has alleged — without evidence — that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes were cast in last year’s presidential election, in which he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots. Studies have consistently shown that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.
The president tapped Vice President Mike Pence to serve as chairman, with the job of vice chairman going to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who helped create voter ID laws that critics say disproportionately affect minorities. Of the 13 original members, eight were Republicans and five were Democrats.
The commission has convened twice — in Washington, D.C., in July and New Hampshire last month — and heard testimony about how to better improve the voting process and registration.
Besides those meetings, Dunlap said he’s received little information pertinent to the commission’s overall goal — no written debriefs from the gatherings, no guidance about future meetings.
One of the only notes he received from the panel leaders came this month, acknowledging the unexpected death of former Arkansas state Rep. David Dunn, another Democrat on the committee.
It did not say whether the commission would replace Dunn or Maryland Deputy Secretary of State Luis Borunda, a Republican who resigned in July without explanation.
The commission has issued some statements to the public, including clarifications about its mission.
But Dunlap said he’s grown increasingly concerned that those releases were not vetted by all of the members.
He said he was also caught off guard by recent reports that a researcher for the commission was arrested on child pornography charges.
“This is stuff we should not read about in the news; we should hear from leaders of the commission,” he said. “We should be up to date.”
Dunlap said last week that constituents in his heavily Democratic state routinely ask him whether he plans to resign from the commission — and that, at least for now, the answer is no.
“If people like me are not on the commission, then tough questions and pushback is unlikely,” he said.
Dunlap and Alabama probate judge Alan King, the other commission member who wrote a letter, sent their concerns to Andrew Kossack, executive director of the commission. Both said they had received only terse replies.
“We have busy schedules. I have questions that I want answered,” King said in a telephone interview. “When are the next meetings? Who is lining up witnesses? What should be the end conclusion of all this?”
Kossack, a former commissioner of the Indiana Department of Revenue, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Republicans on the commission have pushed back against the notion of a lack of transparency.
“It’s not accurate that some members are being left out,” J. Christian Adams, a panel member and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an Indianapolis-based conservative legal organization, said in an email. “Once upon a time, election integrity was a bipartisan issue. Maybe not anymore, and that’s a shame.”
Danielle Lang, senior legal counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which focuses on election law, said she was not surprised by the complaints.
“The troubling statements from Democratic members of the PenceKobach Commission that they are being shut out of the commission’s work are just evidence of more of the same from this transparent effort to make it harder to vote,” Lang said.
“Given the voter-suppression goals of the PenceKobach Commission, reports that they feel the need to conduct their business in secret is unsurprising,” she said.
Those concerns were echoed in the request from three Senate Democrats to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
In an Oct. 18 letter, Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota wrote that the manner in which the commission is conducting its work “will prevent the public from a full and transparent understanding of the Commission’s conclusions and unnecessarily diminish confidence in our democratic process.”
While the agency accepted the request, it did not appear to regard the review as an urgent matter, saying that its experts would not be available to start for about five months.