Opponents of President Donald Trump’s voting integrity commission are seeking to hamstring the effort in court, filing three lawsuits Monday that say the panel is running afoul of federal laws — and introducing Trump’s heated rhetoric against him in court. The new lawsuits add to the legal challenges against the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which recently sent a letter to all 50 states that included a request for voter roll information, including parts of Social Security numbers, that alarmed states and voters. The letter asked for all “publicly available” data, but the long list of pieces of information sought, including the last four digits of Social Security numbers, included several elements that very few states, if any, say they can legally comply with. One lawsuit targets on the request for voter information as a violation of privacy, while the other two focus more generally on whether the commission has been violating government transparency laws.
Just as with the lawsuits against Trump’s travel bans, the challengers are using Trump’s own words and tweets to fight his administration’s actions, saying the commission was created to back up a spurious theory in the first place — that voter fraud is a massive problem in the US.
“President Trump has a long history of propagating baseless conspiracy theories about voter fraud, ostensibly in order to suppress the right to vote,” states a lawsuit from the ACLU of Florida and voters filed in a Florida federal court.
The lawsuits join an ongoing privacy case filed by advocates that sought to stop the commission’s effort to collect information on voters all across America.
Full Article: New lawsuits cite Trump comments, tweets to challenge voting panel.