President Snowflake's Unicorn Hunt
President Snowflake's Unicorn Hunt
Trump's voter fraud commission chases myths to soothe his ego – and advance a pernicious agenda.
By Robert Schlesinger | Managing Editor for Opinion
July 7, 2017, at 6:00 a.m.
President Donald Trump has achieved that rare feat in these polarized times, something approaching national consensus. Specifically, 44 of the 50 states are at least to some extent declining to cooperate with a sweeping request for voter information from Trump's spurious voter fraud commission.
Some have responded quite colorfully: "My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great State to launch from," the Magnolia State's secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann said in a statement last week. This one's good too: There's "not enough bourbon here in Kentucky to make this request seem sensible," Alison Lundergan Grimes, that state's secretary of state, told MSNBC last week. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla was no less unimpressed: "The President's Commission is a waste of taxpayer money and a distraction from the real threats to the integrity of our elections today: aging voting systems and documented Russian interference in our elections."
Leave it to Team Trump to unite officials from California to Mississippi in common cause. But the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, is such an obvious artifact of toxic Trumpian rubbish that it can have that effect. Actually the panel, which the president announced May, is so very Trump: a noxious mix of the bumbling dysfunction and malicious partisanship that marks this administration. And that, ironically, might be what saves us from real harm from this malignant farce.
Start with the commission's fundamental premise. The whole thing stems from Trump's baseless assertion that he lost the popular vote last year because of 3 to 5 million illegally-cast votes. This is nonsense. The Brennan Center for Justice (whose scholars contribute opinion articles to U.S. News on a regular basis) canvassed election officials in 42 jurisdictions in a dozen states and found that they had referred a whopping total of 30 suspected noncitizen voting cases out of 23.5 million votes cast in those areas. I'll save you the math: That's 1/100th of 1 percent of the votes cast in those jurisdictions. That's in keeping with findings from other studies of the issue: Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles who has closely studied allegations of in-person voter fraud, has found 45 credible such incidents out of well more than a billion votes cast across the country since 2000. And as PolitiFact relayed last month: "North Carolina's 2016 post-election audit showed a few dozen noncitizen voters out of 4.8 million votes cast. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted announced in February that since he took office in 2011, he has identified 126 noncitizens who cast ballots." And for those who suggest that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, recall that in the last decade ferreting out voter fraud was a major priority of the Bush administration. "After years of trying, (the Justice Department) had charged more people with violating migratory bird laws than voting statutes," the Brennan Center's Michael Waldman recalled in The New York Times earlier this year; that particular goose chase ended in scandal when federal prosecutors were fired for failing to find what wasn't there.
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https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2017-07-07/trumps-voter-fraud-commission-a-malicious-bumbling-unicorn-hunt
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