A member of President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was pushing fake news before its second meeting was even able to kick off on Tuesday afternoon. In an op-ed published by Breitbart just ahead of the meeting, Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman, again asserted a debunked claim that more than 5,000 people in New Hampshire cast illegal votes during last year’s election. His suggestion that there was rampant voter fraud in the region was swiftly rebuked by the state’s secretary of state, Bill Gardner, who said New Hampshire’s election results were “real and valid.” By the end of the day, though, it became clear that several of the group’s members have a common goal: to publicize every known case of voter fraud from before and during the 2016 election and to clamp down on anything that made them possible ahead of the 2020 vote.
Ken Block, a researcher for ex–White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s watchdog group, the Government Accountability Institute, shared with the commission a study he conducted that claims there were nearly 40,000 instances of double-voting in last year’s election. His report, criticized by leading election security experts as being “rife with inaccuracies,” was a primary topic of conversation among the commission members Tuesday, after Block spoke on a panel titled “Current Election Integrity Issues Affecting Public Confidence.”
The facts and figures presented at Tuesday’s meeting by Kobach, Block and others were rejected by viewers like Wendy Weiser, director of the voting rights research group Brennan Center, who tweeted Tuesday, “Most of the fraud commission’s evidence of fraud seems to come from the commissioners themselves. Hmm.”
Full Article: Donald Trump May Restrict Voting Rights Ahead of 2020.