President Trump’s vote fraud commission launched on May 11 by executive order has generated an avalanche of hysterical outrage from the left and lawsuits by the ACLU and several leftist groups seeking to declare its very existence illegitimate. Listening to the allegations hurled against the commission and its vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, you would think it is plotting to repeal the Voting Rights Act or the 15th Amendment.
However, there are plenty of reliable data to justify a closer look at the problem. For instance, Just Facts, using election data and computer modeling, concluded that as many as 5.7 million non-citizens may have voted in 2008.
A 2014 study of non-citizen voting in 2012 by three professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia found lower estimates of non-citizen voters than claimed by President Trump but nonetheless concluded our elections are highly vulnerable to fraud. The summary of the report states:
We find that some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections. Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.
A Pew Center report in 2012 found several million dead people on voter rolls, millions more registered in more than one state, and 24 million voter records with serious deficiencies.
And only this past week, it was revealed that eleven California counties have more voters on their rolls than residents over the age of eighteen. In San Diego, that figure was 138 percent.
I personally recall that a few years ago, Scott Gessler, formerly Colorado’s secretary of state, told me that under current voter registration laws and practices, there is no way anyone can guarantee that non-citizens are not voting in our elections.
Yet, non-citizen voting is only one area of potential vote fraud that needs an independent analysis, and most state election officials are in fact supporting the new commission’s efforts.
Despite misleading early reports of mushrooming state-level resistance, only eleven states, all with Democrat governors or Democrat election officials, have refused all cooperation with the commission.
Minnesota, of course, home of the notorious 2008 election recount that sent Al Franken to the U.S. Senate, is among the states refusing to cooperate. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said in a statement, “I will not hand over Minnesota voters’ sensitive personal information to the commission.” He failed to mention that the commission has requested only information that under state law is already in the public domain.
Predictably, the most extreme criticism and sky-is-falling rhetoric have come from leftist organizations and the ACLU. The ACLU lawsuit even challenges the motives behind the presidents’ executive order, alleging it’s designed to support Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over him is explained entirely by illegal voting by non-citizens. The lawsuit claims some of Trump appointees to the commission “have a record of supporting policies that have unlawfully disenfranchised voters.”
The bottom line is that the extreme misrepresentations and the overheated “voter suppression” scaremongering that characterizes most media coverage of President Trump’s election integrity commission offers ironic reassurance that the commission is on the right road. The more the established election bureaucracies whine and complain, the more likely it is they have something to hide.
To paraphrase Hamlet, “Methinks the left doth protest too much.”